by Phil Patton
At Wright-Pat they find all this exasperating. They receive inquiries daily. When Frank Kuznik, reporter for Air & Space magazine, visited the base for a story, he found irritated scientists tired of dealing with the inquiries. No, there was no Hangar 18 or any vaults full of bodies. But if there were, “Do you think we’d tell you? Don’t you think we’d be able to hide it?” Another scientist declared that he wished they did have something alien to put on display, because at just a dollar a head they would certainly make enough money to solve his budget problems.
Long before Area 51 meant anything, Hangar 18 had seeped in to popular consciousness. Now Area 51 was becoming a larger version of Hangar 18. But around Dreamland, deeper, darker vaults were suspected.
John Lear held that the Skunk Works had moved from Burbank to Tejon Canyon, the Northrop radar cross-section (RCS) range west of Palmdale, the better to hide sinister projects. To him and to others, that facility was “the Anthill,” where aliens ruled, incubating hybrid humans, gathering abductees for their vital enzymes. Deep in the night, these watchers say, the portals open to emit flying saucers from structures beneath, extending five, ten, even fifty stories below the ground. According to Gary Schultz of Secret Saucer Base Expeditions, the erstwhile self-appointed expert on Area 51 and the leader of regular trips to the perimeter, “We have found out with incontrovertible proof” that the RCS is only a cover, that the Anthill has forty-two levels underground. Things come streaming out of there at night, the tales went. There are reports of mysterious blue beams and “surveillance orbs the size of basketballs.”
Schultz had flown over it in September 1991. He had seen evidence of concrete being poured twenty-four hours a day for weeks—a million cubic yards of concrete. The skeptic will ask, Where were all the cement mixers lined up? And where was all the dirt?
Those who believed in the underground bases suspected not only the Anthill but all the RCS facilities. These strange installations look like Dreamland should look but doesn’t: They have mysterious concrete tilting walls, diamond-shaped pads and panels, shadowed overhangs, James Bond–like facilities of the sort that leap to the imagination at the very utterance of the phrase “Area 51.” They are the radar cross-section facilities of the western deserts, the local chapels of stealth, landmarks of the Greater Dreamland: Gray Butte, Tejon Canyon, Helendale, China Lake, White Sands. Hey kids, collect ’em all! And the Interceptors did—they would make trips to each of the facilities. Tom Mahood even tracked down their ownership in real estate registers and public records.
From the air, they are especially sinister, their runways painted with the warning, RESTRICTED RUNWAY DO NOT LAND.
There is a similar facility—perhaps the largest—inside Dreamland, behind the base itself.
RCS facilities test how difficult it will be for new aircraft to be seen by radar. Each major aerospace contractor has one. In such facilities, models of new aircraft or missiles are set on pylons and test radars are beamed at them. Other aircraft might fly overhead, testing their onboard radars. The tilted walls contain and control the deployment of the radar waves. Engineers measure the way aircraft reflect radar beams, how much and in what direction.
To protect against overflights by nosy satellites, some of the models can easily be moved inside walls with sliding doors or have covers quickly placed over them. Such is the most practical and banal explanation of the facilities. To those less trusting, the RCS sites are openings to underground bases, portals to an underworld of secret treaties and alien takeovers.
To the two leading underground theorists, Richard Sauder, author of the aggressively titled tract Underground Bases and Tunnels—What Is the Government Trying to Hide?, and William Hamilton, even Plant 42 in Palmdale had secret floors beneath it. In his book Cosmic Top Secret and in the video Underground Bases, Hamilton claims that the first saucer wreckage came to Area 51 in the late forties and the first underground labs were built at that time. They have expanded ever since. Hamilton describes baseball diamonds and swimming pools that exist beneath the surface.
Hamilton is not alone in this conviction. Even such a fairly sober youfer as Stanton Friedman was intrigued by the idea of levels beneath the runway. “I have been informed that a secret underground base was built under the runway at Groom Lake in the early 1950s, well before the U-2 program,” he wrote in an Internet posting. “I expect to dig into this one soon.”
Hamilton is disarmingly nonfanatical. He could be lecturing a class on post-Keynesian developments in macroeconomics when he discusses secret tunnels. Hamilton cites sources describing a network of tunnels linking bases, a virtual underground interstate system.
For proof, Hamilton and Sauder offer plans for underground command posts and living quarters and diagrams of tunnel-boring machines from a 1959 RAND report or via the Army Corps of Engineers, organizations that, at the height of the Cold War, were ordered to figure out how to put practically everything underground. The fallout shelter fad was about to begin. Living underground was not considered far-fetched or sinister.
Underground is, of course, rich with metaphor, as the place of the unseen, the realm of death, of organized crime, and of defiant resistance. The idea of the underground base as hive or anthill is common—areas are “honeycombed” with tunnels. In Them!, the classic fifties science-fiction film and a parable of the Red menace, a little girl who has been terrified by giant ants (the offspring of radiation) is examined by doctors and a scientist. When the scientist gives her a sniff of formic acid, the poison from ant stings, she begins screaming uncontrollably: “Them! Them! Them!”
Thinking of Them!, I drove west from Edwards toward the place known as the Anthill, cleverly disguised as Northrop’s radar cross-section testing facility, west of Willow Springs. From Trader I learned how to get there, driving past shopping centers and the Willow Springs racetrack, bright with painted ads. The trip was a wonderful excuse to go badassing along primitive roads in a 4-by-4, playing rough road rock-and-roll. Once out of civilization, I followed a dirt road named, perhaps ironically, Broken Arrow. Broken Arrow, of course, is the military code name for an incident involving the loss or theft of a nuclear weapon.
Someone had painted a bright blue warning skull on the rock at the turnoff for Broken Arrow Road, beneath the metal sign with its cincture of welded letters. Broken Arrow was a western Mojave road as hard as the iron of the sign. Here and there were ugly ruts and cracks where the road had dried and split open. At other places, gray clay creeks appeared. At one turn, a false trail, I came to a barbed-wire gate and a jackrabbit flattened on the road, in the pose of a leap, as if captured in midair by a strobe flash.
At last the odometer showed I was close. I parked and scrambled up a hill. Over the horizon I could see all there was to see: a couple of buildings, a radio antenna or two, a water tower. No evidence of underground structures. No air vents, no strange doors. All I saw were signs of new water management facilities—canals and culverts. Nothing suspicious, although it was through the sewer system that the ants in Them! had raced most dramatically. To the suspicious, such innocent stuff was the whole point: The underground was a version of that oldest of menaces, the unseen.
The underground can also be understood as the unconscious—the source of dreams and psychoses. To those who believe in the underground bases, this analogy is more specific. To them, physical levels are indications of levels of information and security, and also perhaps of psychic levels: The deeper the facility is dug, the deeper the conspiracy. If a vision of things below the surface represented the “cover-up” in literal form, connections among them represented the extent of hidden links. Tunnels, the theorists argued, tied the sites together—sinister hidden connections made manifest. The accounts included stories of workers who had ridden the rails from the beach in Los Angeles to Area 51, with connections available to Los Alamos and Sandia. Were Amtrak so well run, it would put the Japanese bullet train and the French TGV to shame.
Thus Area 51 connects with Edwar
ds and Sandia and Los Alamos, and even with the most terrifying of the projected underground facilities, Dulce, on the Archuleta Mesa in New Mexico. Level 4 is concerned with telepathy and dream control. Level 6 or 7 holds the vats with the embryos of half-breed human-aliens and other grotesque genetic experiments. It is known in the Lore as Nightmare Hall.
The underground conspiracy buffs tend to equate security levels with physical levels. Twenty-four or thirty-eight levels of underground installations correspond to the same number of levels of “clearance.” But in the actual black world, it’s not just a matter of higher or lower clearance from sensitive to secret to top secret to “Q” but of separation on the same level: of different rooms on the same floor. In reality, there is not only distinction among levels but distinction among rooms, so to speak, at the same level.
In their descriptions, the Lorists seem especially concerned with doors. As if they were film production designers, they describe in detail access panels, sliding cards, retinal readers, weight-triggered access doors. Many door controllers or speakers are in the shape of an inverted triangle. The inverted triangle is linked in other parts of the tales to the trilateralists and, more implicitly, to the existence of layers below the surface: It’s the inversion of the pyramid on the dollar bill and the great seal of the United States.
The end of underground theories is to see the earth itself as hollow, to imagine not just a hell beneath our feet but the world as a mere shell. In this ultimate version of conspiracist theory, Nazis fly the saucers they have developed into the center of the earth through hidden portals at the poles. “Commander X”—former “Military Intelligence Operative” and author of Underground Alien Bases—has the Nazis colonizing the center of the earth in cooperation with “Serpent People” aliens. He believes that “in reality, many of the craft seen over Area 51 in Nevada are not constructed by aliens. They are instead experimental vehicles derived from the secret plans of German scientists, many of whom were brought to the U.S. and given political asylum, even though they may have taken part in vicious war crimes.” The Nazis perfected anti-gravity and time-warp transportation, X also tells us, and landed on the moon before 1945.
Hollow-earth theories are as old as the Egyptians, of course, but as recently as the nineteenth century they were taken with some seriousness in the United States. The hollow-earthers populated the center of the earth with all the features and creatures later theorists and science fiction would transfer to other planets. Before there was an expectation of space travel, the interior of the planet was the most distant region imaginable. So A Journey to the Center of the Earth would give way to A Trip to the Moon.
In 1819, John Cleves Symmes propounded his theory that our hollow earth contains five concentric lands. James McBride explained it all in the following decade in The Symmes Theory of Concentric Spheres, “demonstrating that the earth is hollow, habitable and widely open about the poles.” One writer of the time imagined the land inside as “a white land,” full of the whitest of humans. In the 1830s an odd character named Jeremiah Reynolds began promoting a South Pole expedition to prove Symmes’s theory. Amazingly, he prevailed upon the U.S. government to fund not one but two such expeditions. One result was the production of very useful marine charts of the southern waters. Another was to inspire Edgar Allan Poe to write such stories of possibly hollow worlds as “MS. Found in a Bottle,” “Descent into the Maelstrom,” and The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym.
To see the earth as hollow was ultimately a vision of profound despair. It meant we literally could not trust the ground upon which we stood. It meant life itself was empty. Edward Shils wrote of “the torment of secrecy,” the pain of those who believed that all history took place behind a veil of some kind of conspiracy, that the real motivational forces in the world are unseen, perhaps undiscoverable. This is a hard philosophy to live with.
Helendale, in California, the largest of the RCS sites, is the newest such facility. It is huge, with its own runway, near which Aurora was thought to have been spotted. Its main radar area, called, sinisterly enough, the Upper Chamber, seems to cover acres of concrete.
To reach it, I cut through from the highway that ran east of Edwards AFB, then drove over the white sandy bed of the erstwhile Mojave River, past trailers and little houses. I could see the distant hangar—Lockheed yellow—and turning up the road, I came to the fence and gate that barred the way.
To the left of the gate, shoved up practically against that fence, there was a place called Exotic World, a sort of museum celebrating burlesque culture, the home of an old stripper who has collected the G-strings of the great strippers of the past.
Months later, as I sat watching one of those offbeat local-color features TV news loves so much, I thought I recognized a beat-up little trailer and nearby fence. It was indeed Exotic World. There was a nice sound bite from the owner, herself a former stripper: “Striptease was not invented,” she said, it just happened, when someone caught a glimpse of a dancer pushed out onto the stage too soon. “Striptease,” she said, “is a phenomenon, and phenomenons are not made, they just happen.”
I thought of the Air Force general who declared that a secret aircraft should reveal itself only gradually and seductively. Striptease was about imagination more than revelation, and so were the RCS sites: Phenomena just happened there, too. I wondered if a visit to Exotic World didn’t say more about the workings of secret aircraft than standing on the concrete of Helendale’s Upper Chamber.
21. Space Aliens from the Pentagon and Other Conspiracies
On his way to the Oklahoma City federal building, the bomber Timothy McVeigh slept in room 25 of a motel in Kansas named Dreamland. I took this information as a token of just how closely the fascination with a New World Order, a new political view of the world, was taking hold of the views of Dreamland.
The New World Order theorists had rapidly developed their own lore, decrying the influences of the United Nations and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Black helicopters and white (UN) personnel carriers were making furtive appearances. They were UFOs of the militias.1
On the Internet, the theorists reached such filigreed detail of conspiracy that one story even claimed the NWO would abolish all but a single chain of fast-food restaurants: Taco Bell. Believing this, who would not take up arms against the menace?
NWO lore was overlapping UFO lore. On Long Island, in 1996, Ed Zabo, an aerospace electrician, and John Ford, head of the Long Island UFO Network, were charged with attempting to poison a county Republican chairman by slipping radium into his food. Zabo, a government inspector at the local Northrop-Grumman plant, believed that the county government was conspiring to cover up evidence of UFO landings, which among other things had resulted in extensive forest fires on Long Island the previous summer. The district attorney shook his head and opined that “this all convinces me that there is a side to humanity that defies definition.”
George Bush and the speechwriters who popularized the glib but murky phrase “New World Order” to label the era that succeeded the Cold War could hardly have imagined that it would come to denote so readily such a malignant mythology. The phrase became a cipher, a placeholder, a linguistic Groom Lake waiting to be filled with speculations. I took it as a sign of the end of the Cold War, which left a yawning vacuum of uncertainty. We missed the Cold War. And I regarded the NWO’s most fervent adherents as victims of a kind of post-traumatic stress disorder. It’s not easy to take away an enemy you’ve lived with for nearly half a century. How much easier to deal with an invented enemy than with none at all; how important to the conspiracist for the world to possess an order, even if that order is dark and hidden.
The Interceptor known as the Minister of Words believed that the appeal of this dark mythology was a sign of economic distress. “The uneducated shitkicker class in this country is dead,” he argued. However prosperous America seemed in the nineties, life had gotten tougher for the guy with a trailer and a pickup truck.
&n
bsp; But some of the early believers in the UFO cover-up were converting to a still darker view: that an even more sinister conspiracy was behind the use of flying saucers in order to drive us into the arms of the New World Order.
In the summer of 1996, I visited the national convention of MUFON, the Mutual UFO Network. It was held at a North Carolina Holiday Inn, with the same tone of seriousness and self-fascination as a regional gathering of insurance salesmen or plumbing supply vendors. I noticed that no one smiled.
In one room, on acres of tables, every stripe of UFO thinking was laid out in books and videos. I felt compelled to browse something called From Elsewhere: Being E.T. in America, about the experiences of a man who felt he was an alien on Earth. You could also buy mugs and T-shirts and glow-in-the-dark alien sculptures. But my eye was caught by the cover of a book that pictured a strange pentagon and star device and the title Space Aliens from the Pentagon. It bore the subtitle “Flying Saucers are Man-made Electrical Machines. Revised and expanded Second Edition Creatopia Productions™, by William R. Lyne.” Cover lines: “Does the CIA write Movie and TV scripts about ‘aliens’? Have you been brainwashed: Does the CIA control Hollywood and TV? Did you know the flying saucer is the best-kept energy secret on earth?” The cover art showed the Pentagon as a maze. Inside it was set a swastika and an all-seeing eye, like that on the seal of the United States or a Jungian eyeball in the sky.
Lyne argues that the saucers were faked by the Pentagon or some secret group beyond and behind the Pentagon. He writes that “my ‘space aliens’ are actually people, whose philosophy and bizarre masquerade are alien to the American way of life, since they believe in government by anti-democratic hoax, to maintain the secret power of the Trilateral Commission elite, to whom our lives are very cheap. I am striking back against an ‘alien system’ which has attached itself to the nation which our ancestors strove to create, which would be invulnerable to the ‘aliens’ … I have concluded that a Secret Government has watched me, attempted to control me …”