by Phil Patton
It was a startling and unprecedented claim, far beyond anything Nixon had made at the time of Watergate, for instance. The implications were huge: Would the same national security defense have placed the officials beyond the reach of prosecution for murder? (Two of the plaintiffs had died, after all.) But no one had ever sued a black facility before.
At first the Air Force lawyers denied the existence of the facility, but Turley came up with three hundred pages of references to Area 51 and Project 51 in Air Force and DOE documents, and finally the officials acknowledged the memorandum of agreement that charged them with running it.1 Claiming that Area 51 did not exist, the Air Force had apparently begun to avoid all references to it, using “Groom Lake” instead.
Area 51, after all, was an obsolete designation bestowed more than thirty years ago by the NTS and the AEC. The Air Force claimed the place was run by the Department of Energy (formerly the AEC), which in turn claimed it had given up authority years ago. The overlapping colors on the map of Dreamland became a means for passing the buck.
By 1994 the Air Force issued a grudging statement of acknowledgment that carefully avoided using the term “Area 51”: “There are a variety of facilities throughout the Nellis Range Complex. We do have facilities within the complex near the dry lake bed of Groom Lake. The facilities of the Nellis Range Complex are used for testing and training technologies, operations, and systems critical to the effectiveness of U.S. military forces. Specific activities conducted at Nellis cannot be discussed any further than that.”
In an attempt to blunt the claims of the suit, the Air Force allowed Environmental Protection Agency inspectors into the base, but did not release any information about what they had found. It simply promised to abide by the environmental laws.
As part of the case materials, Turley obtained a copy of a Groom Lake security manual, and before long Glenn Campbell had posted it on the Internet. The government responded absurdly, by retroactively classifying the document.
The thirty-page booklet, of which there were several copies in multiple revisions, bore on its front cover the words “Det 3 SP Job Knowledge.” “Detachment 3 Special Police” was the assumed meaning of the initials.
It appeared to be the security manual for Dreamland and included a list of radio code names, procedures, and even maps of the base and insides of some buildings. The maps showed the Scoot-N-Hide sheds—Is this an official trademark?, I wondered—used for concealing equipment from satellites, and the Quik Kill radars and surface-to-air missiles that had long been rumored. There were radio code words for areas and structures. In keeping with the best military tradition, everything had to be renamed. The test site was “Over the Hill,” and Rachel was “North town.”
For years, there was talk of high living at Groom Lake, and the manual’s maps seemed to confirm the legends of Sam’s Place, the long-rumored base casino and bar, as finely carpeted and outfitted, the Lore had it, as any in Las Vegas. The manual also offered some confirmation of the tales of fine food at the base, of grapefruits flown in from Israel, of lobsters and other delicacies, of huge spring water bills. It suggested a fleet of Auroras flying in odd delicacies, tucked in the corner of a cockpit, from the antipodes.
Was it real? The manual was crude and klutzy. It seemed unlikely that the Air Force would have put the words “Liberty and Justice for All” on the badges that appeared on its first page. The tone of the code names was unconvincing. “Dutch Apple” for the headquarters seemed inappropriately imaginative—unless it reflected some kind of inside joke. Procedures were outlined for moving test articles. When back in the civilian world, the “special police” were instructed to say that they “worked for EG&G at the test site.” There was quite detailed and accurate information on the operation of the road sensors, facts known to the outside world.
But just who was the manual written for? For the deputized guards, working for Wackenhut or EG&G or other contractors? It seemed to be written just awkwardly enough to be real. It made me wonder again about the MJ-12 documents, which shared some of the same crude explanatory quality. And if the manual was not real, why then had the government sought to classify it?
The government had never before tried such a thing, and by definition information already public cannot be made secret. Did the impossibility of such an effort suggest it was merely a ruse to make the document seem genuine? If so, why?
The case came before federal judge Philip Pro. But Judge Pro had previously found the government not liable for damages to some 216 workers who had been exposed to radiation at the NTS between 1951 and 1981—workers like Joe Bacco—many of whom had been assigned at times to Area 51 itself. Pro seemed to believe in keeping security. All he wanted was a letter from the president of the United States swearing that we needed to keep Dreamland in the dark. And he got it. In September 1995, Bill Clinton signed a statement affirming that to reveal what Turley and his clients wanted to know about Groom Lake “could reasonably be expected” to damage the national security.
The government pressed for the names of the John Doe clients, a request Turley felt sure was meant to intimidate the workers. Then Judge Pro ordered the documents in the case sealed. What that meant became clear all of a sudden. In the summer of 1995, Turley was in Chicago at the bedside of his ill father when he got a call: OSI agents were on their way over to the George Washington University Law Center to seal his office. He immediately called his secretary back in Washington and asked her to alert campus security. He had a vision of the bicycle-mounted campus cops in hand-to-hand combat with OSI commandos infiltrating through the ventilation system. Turley’s office was officially sealed, but the files relating to the case had been placed in a safe to which only he and one associate had the combination. It was like an embassy of Dreamland inside the District of Columbia.
In 1995, the case against the EPA was dismissed, and, the following year, so was the case against the Air Force. In the fall of 1997, the Ninth Federal Circuit Court took up Turley’s appeal. The following year, the Supreme Court would reject his final appeal.
If the case had come to trial, Turley said, he planned to call the secretary of defense, the secretary of the Air Force, and the president’s national security adviser. If none of them was willing to admit to the existence of the base, then he said he would call representatives of the Russian embassy. The Soviets, after all, had photographed the base from their satellites.
Turley had the government caught in a post–Cold War half nelson: “While the United States government refuses to acknowledge the existence of this base to the American public,” he was able to argue, “the Russian government recently declassified much of its intelligence information as part of a new openness policy following the fall of the Communist regime and the adoption of democratic process.” And since the 1993 signing of the Open Skies treaty, the Russians and all other signatory nations had a right to do so.
In other words, it was legal for foreigners to photograph the base, but not for the Americans who had paid for it.
24. Rave
If sinister forces were manipulating the mass media, they were doing it quite effectively. Area 51 was infiltrating television as stealthily as any Hollywood extraterrestrials had ever invaded the planet. It kept popping up, like the Area 51 video game itself, in the oddest places. And the media had their own strange and mythologizing view of Dreamland.
In Las Vegas, which presented subcultures as casino themes, the Area 51 club opened, its big signs in red-and-white warning stripes and stencil letters visible from the freeway. X-TREME PARTY, ESCAPE REALITY, they read. A few months later the club closed, with appropriate mystery.
A whole range of cable shows dealing with the mysterious came to Rachel and talked to Interceptors. Agent X showed up on MTV! And PsychoSpy could be counted on to give good soundbite. His sentences were ambiguous enough to be useful; he seemed to know where the editing would happen.
There was a familiar pattern to most of the programs: some lights over th
e Jumbled Hills—Janet aircraft or flares, typically—the standard photos of the base, sometimes an establishing shot of Las Vegas neon, talking heads saying there were “mysterious things flying.” The key to all the segments was to leave open the question of whether or not there were real saucers hovering over the area like one of those magnesium flares.
After the image of the Manta appeared in magazines, Steve Douglass was flooded with calls from television and print reporters, and even Hollywood producers. Within a few days, the major networks had paid calls on him, and Unsolved Mysteries, the tabloid TV series, dispatched two trucks and camera crews to his quiet Amarillo street.
Robert Stack, the host and erstwhile battery pitchman, didn’t like the antigovernment tone he saw creeping in to the piece, so they added a line to the script to the effect that “the Air Force denies the planes are theirs. So the question remains, Whose are they?” It was important for the general format of Unsolved Mysteries, as in the others, that the “question should remain.” The truth had to stay out there.
In April 1994, ABC-TV, while on a shoot, clumsily bumped into the camou dudes, who stopped the crew and confiscated its film, perhaps irritated by the fact that CNN had shortly before set up a camera atop Freedom Ridge and broadcast views of the base.
By May, the press safaris to Freedom Ridge had become so frequent, the viewing points so crowded, that PsychoSpy described a fistfight between two reporters. It amazed the Interceptors, who remembered when few knew the way up at all. In October, Larry King and entourage descended on Rachel. They set up on the side of the road, with the wrong set of hills in the background. No saucer landing in the desert could have looked stranger than Larry’s stage set—desk, chairs, lights, and coffee mugs—glowing amid the trampled sage.
Someone mailed Steve a videotape shot by two Las Vegas cops who had read about the TR3A and headed north to Dreamland. Perhaps inspired by beer, they caught sight of something in the sky that danced wildly on the tape, a sign of a camera held by uncertain hands. Their voices were audible, screaming, “It’s the fuckin’ Manta! It’s the fuckin’ Manta!” Steve concluded that the craft was probably a B-1.
All of a sudden you could find references to Area 51 everywhere. There were scenery files for the popular Microsoft game Flight Simulator that one could download from the Internet to “fly over” Groom Lake. The Marvel company latched on to Area 51, producing a comic or two, and television had embraced it.
An NBC-TV program called Dark Skies, set in the mid-sixties, featured aliens digging an underground base beneath Area 51 and Howard Hughes catching on to their plans. “We’ve got to get to Dreamland” was the most memorable line. A CD-ROM came out with the old cartoon character Jonny Quest delving first into the mysteries of Roswell and then into Area 51.
The story of Area 51 had long held special appeal to technogeeks. One of the Apple Newton software group, for instance, took an interest in it after a trip to Rachel in 1994. He hid a secret feature in one version of the software: If you knew where to click, you could picture Area 51 on the Newton’s map. If the user picked Area 51 from the map, the icons in the date book application took on an alien theme—alien faces, flying saucers, robots, and so on.
Then, in August 1995, as the story goes—and we are strictly amid the Lore here—a cryptographer at the CIA was one of the beta testers for the new program. When he saw Area 51, he went to his bosses, who demanded Apple remove the reference. Management “caved in,” the sources say, but the feature was covered over rather than removed and there is yet a trick for retrieving it.
Then the notion of overlapping the Generation X demographic and the UFO one began to swarm in the minds of marketing types—the Gen X files, that was the concept. In the second episode of The X Files, the popular show that twists the weirdness of Twin Peaks into all sorts of conspiracy lores, Dreamland was transferred from Nevada to Utah, where it became “Ellens Air Force Base.” “A mecca for UFO buffs,” like Groom Lake, it is omitted from USGS maps, and the hills above Dreamland became tall reeds—equally good hiding places.
In this version of the story, the base is rumored to be “one of six sites” to which the Roswell wreckage was shipped. There the round craft built using alien technology became triangular; the Little A“Le”Inn is transformed into a diner with a fat lady who took UFO snapshots off her back porch. Agents Mulder and Scully see dancing lights and encounter hovering craft. They are menaced by men in black with the requisite sunglasses, and a black helicopter dives at them. There is a reference to “the Aurora project,” and dabblings with mental reprogramming. “That’s unreal,” they conclude, then, “I’ve never seen anything like that,” leaving hanging the suggestion of a causal link between the two statements.
The redoubtable engine of American marketing, as simultaneously wondrous and horrific as the military machine, had quickly moved to sell teen alienation back to Gen-X. Soon I noticed alien faces, with the almond eyes and big head, everywhere—alien jewelry, alien T-shirts, alien temporary tattoos in the malls, in the hip shops in the East Village of New York. The alien face had become a wry nineties equivalent of the seventies-era smiley face.
The image of the big-eyed “gray” alien was set in the early eighties by authors Budd Hopkins and Whitley Strieber, and it superseded earlier images of extraterrestrials. If earlier aliens had represented Communist invaders (Invasion of the Body Snatchers) or disease (Alien) or been depicted as friendly babylike creatures (Close Encounters and E.T.), this new one was a huge fetus or hungry child, with big Keane kid eyes. It was also an echo of Munch’s Scream—the very face of modern angst.
This alien face had long been familiar, but had never been so graphically standardized before. It summed up a growing American subculture devoted to ideas of abduction and implantation that paralleled a fascination with recovering childhood experiences—commonly those of abuse—via hypnosis. In 1995, Testor released a plastic model kit of a standing gray alien, proof that it had become the iconic image of the extraterrestrial, just as the flying saucer was of the UFO.
The new image of the alien was as much ironic as iconic. It was significant that we had begun calling creatures from other planets “alien” again in the eighties, after the previous decade had popularized “extraterrestrial.” Much of the new alien material turned on the puns associated with “alien”—the joke was that the grays figured as immigrants. The face had become as much a graphic cliché, an ethnic cartoon, as Sambo or Uncle Tom. Was America’s latest favorite ethnic group from Zeta Reticuli? “Do we call them Astro Americans?” a friend asked.
Tropes of the alien often serve as parables for dealing with issues such as immigration. Note, for instance, the differing degrees of irony evidenced in Coneheads (“We are … from France,” and their nemesis in the film is an INS agent) and Alien Nation, where the aliens exhibit the irritating traits of various earthly minority groups: They are ex-slaves with strange music; they threaten to take jobs and resources from Earth natives; they eat bizarre food and score intimidatingly high on math tests. Men in Black continued the theme, tossing off jokes about immigrant New York taxi drivers.
My favorite T-shirt on this theme depicts a cliché alien wearing a sombrero and bandoleers, bearing the legend: “We don’t want no stinkin green cards.”
The alien face’s iconism was accomplished when it became subject to manipulation of context and ironic reference. Thus T-shirts picture the Beatles with alien heads, or the “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” trio rendered in alien faces, and a whole host of alien-face pop artifacts—earrings, Schwa artifacts, Alien Factory skateboard graphics.
The alien theme is strong in music. The band Foo Fighters recorded on its own Roswell Records label, and an album by the group Spacehog is called Resident Alien, its cover art bearing an extraterrestrial “green card.”
Television could handle the pop-alien theme with equal facility as drama or comedy. “Aliens are all around us,” intones the narrator at the beginning of Third Rock
from the Sun, a sitcom in the tradition of My Favorite Martian, Mork and Mindy, and ALF—a view of the outsider as observer as old as Montesquieu’s Persian Letters.
In the series Dark Skies, the alien invasion turns out to have been so subtle and surreptitious that it has touched every major event of the last fifty years, from the shooting down of the U-2 to Project Mercury to the Kennedy assassination. Conspiracy theorists are alienated by mainstream explanations, of course. Concealment and conspiracy is another theme behind the image—it was the logo of the Big Cover-up, the “Cosmic Watergate.” “The government is lying,” T-shirts told us.
In time, the alien face came to appear to me as the face of suspicion of government—and the projection, perhaps, of the new generation’s alienation. “We are not alone,” the slogan that often captions the gray face, may be as much an expression of hope as an assertion of belief. Someone once said, “Aliens are alien because we alienate them.” That was ALF, the sitcom alien.
By the spring of 1996, Hollywood was turning the Lore from folktale to fodder for commerce. The Interceptors were at once amused, irked, and perhaps a bit sad, resentful that the Hollywood dream machine was taking over their base, dismayed at a crass mercenary effort to cash in on the Black Mailbox.
The idea behind renaming Nevada Highway 375 the Extraterrestrial Highway was to bring tourists to the area. When the Nevada legislature held hearings on the idea, the only witnesses to appear—and they were in favor—were Joe and Pat Travis, the largest likely economic beneficiaries of the idea, and Ambassador Merlyn Merlin, himself an avowed extraterrestrial.
PsychoSpy took a hard line against the renaming, more, one suspects, out of an instinct to oppose government than for his stated reason that no thought had been given to the consequences of bringing tourists to the area and possibly into contact with the camou dudes. If anything, he felt his own bailiwick was being invaded—he was after all the first to produce a tourist guide, the first to lead groups to the perimeter, the first to pioneer four-wheel drive to the top of Freedom Ridge. Now it was all about selling souvenirs. Yet PsychoSpy himself had set this all in motion when he printed up his first T-shirt bearing the invented Dreamland patch.