by Phil Patton
Stealth makes airplanes almost invisible to radar but not to light, so they fly only in the dark. “We rule the night,” Lockheed’s ads bragged. But not the day. The next step was to do for vision what stealth did for radar: create high-tech camouflage.
There was pretty good evidence that some of the planes flying in Dreamland were already making themselves invisible by day. They wore electronic skins. They used a technology that was like wrapping the whole airplane in the liquid crystal display of some laptop-computer screen, turning it into a fabric that could be laid on, bent, or built up like tile, or mosaic. It was something called Polyaniline Radar Absorbent composite, “optically transparent” except when charged with a 24-volt current that triggers the camouflage receptors. They read the ambient light—its brightness but also its hue—and are adapted to match. These are chameleon airplanes.
One such program had been around for a while, called Ivy. I.V? For invisible?
I asked Steve about it: Did this mean that the reason people hadn’t been seeing any planes flying above Dreamland recently was because they couldn’t be seen? If you didn’t see them, must they be invisible? “Have there been,” I asked before realizing what I was saying, “any confirmed sightings of these aircraft?”
But sure enough, Agent X had recorded one such “sighting” near Warm Springs. He heard the whistling of a passing airframe first, then it was flying so low he felt the pressure of the air change. But he saw it, too, and he explained how: You observe an invisible airplane by seeing its invisibility—its interruption of the stars in the sky above it, and of the faint glow of Las Vegas behind it.
Ford’s photographs were confirmed sightings all right, proof that you had to believe to see. When she was taking pictures, Ford explained, “I go into alpha beta.” I looked baffled.
“You know, dream state, alpha beta. And these images are very dreamy.”
In other pictures, Ford pointed out a different sort of blob. “These here may be interdimensional entities,” she explained. They might, in other words, signify creatures from other realms of space-time.
“People told me there are interdimensionals. Aliens that can move in and out. John Lear talked about the government having EBEs—‘extra-biological entities’—and the government is having a hard time with them. They keep them in an electromagnetic field but they just drift in and out.”
At the Inn, Chuck Clark talked about interdimensionals, too. Far out as it sounded, the idea struck me as one of the most provocative areas of UFO-related thinking. What we had once taken for aliens from another star system, this theory went, might instead be time travelers or visitors from parallel universes. These concepts, it seemed to me, were more worthy of consideration, at least on intellectual terms, than the saucers themselves.
Increasingly physicists, both popular and academic, were writing and talking about such ideas, born of the paradoxes of quantum theory. Aspects of quantum theory seemed to require the postulation of parallel or multiple universes. Space-time “wormholes” made time travel a theoretical possibility. String theory projected scenarios wherein an original universe of twenty-one or thirty-four dimensions might have collapsed into the present four.
According to quantum theory, subatomic particles could apparently be in several places at once. From those bits of quantum doubt, theories of parallel, alternate universes had arisen, like conspiracy theories from Eisenhower’s toothache. An alternate universe might be identical to this one, except that I have brown instead of blue eyes. Or, more to the point, a subatomic particle that is here in one universe might be there in its neighbor.
Quite respectable efforts to solve the quantum uncertainty principle had resulted in scientific experiments postulating a theory of parallel universes. In the late fifties, the respected physicist Bryce DeWitt proposed such a solution. It wouldn’t take so many universes, he had calculated, only about ten to the hundredth power. Soon physicists were using the term “multiverse” for the totality of possibilities.
All the little bits of quantum uncertainty, all that black matter, made the universe a kind of sponge of uncertainty. Just as Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and Schrödinger’s cat helped translate hard-core science into vaguely understood popular lore ratifying wider feelings about how uncertain knowledge had become, the physics of the multiverse became attached to popular ideas of parallel modes of existence—“other dimensions,” in the crudest vocabulary of Hollywood, or interdimensionals.
The youfers were always talking about how the recognition of other intelligences in the universe would produce a change in thinking, such as the one brought about by the discovery that the sun was at the center of the solar system and not the earth, or the European discovery of America. I could understand this: Nobody wants to be part of the crowd jeering Galileo, nobody wants to be the last flat-earther. This was, after all, the Greatest Story in Human History.
But spacecraft bearing almond-eyed aliens from Zeta Reticuli was far less convincing as a scientific revolution than parallel universe theory. With roots in mainstream physics, its ideas seemed both wondrous and possible. In his modestly titled book The Fabric of Reality, the brilliant physicist David Deutsch discussed how all of twentieth-century physics pointed to parallel universes. The facts were there, he argued, only bold imagination was lacking for their acceptance. For me, photographs like Ford’s came to suggest this element of imagination: I was as seduced by the images as by the ideas. The odd hovering shapes, the soft spray of flash on desert plants and pavement edges, the mere hint of landscape beyond, were like diagrams of the darker, sketchier implications of the new physics.
Another physicist, Fred Alan Wolf, in The Dreaming Universe, believed that parallel universes might be the source of schizophrenia, visions, even dreams. UFO sightings, he noted, seemed to many viewers to possess a dreamlike quality. Could UFOs have an existence that was half in, half out of this universe? This was taking Jung’s idea of manifesting archetypes into a more literal plane. It was awfully close to the Borderlands folk or the contactees and their “ether.” The things that were seen in the sky, this new way of thinking went, might inhabit some realm halfway between the state of being a thought and the state of its material existence. The key question, Wolf said, was how matter gave rise to thought, “How does meat dream?”
Are these visions created by psychic disturbances? How literally are we to take the idea of objects in the sky being manifestations of cultural unease? The idea of one universe as the dream of another gave Dreamland a whole new meaning.
“Now, this one I took on the border,” Ford told me.
It showed one of the familiar round metal sensors, those strange mirrored spheres, that mark the perimeter of Dreamland. But there was something else in one corner. “See this?” she said, pointing to what looked like a boulder or a blob. “I think this is a remote viewing blob.” The camou dudes, she suspected, could carry out remote viewing of the border from their guardhouses. I did not ask why they bothered to head out in Jeeps and Blackhawks if they could do this.
But remote viewing at “the remote location” seemed eminently appropriate. Hadn’t the Army taken the technique seriously enough to spend tax dollars on it?
Remote viewing—the ability to see at a distance—is a paranormal technique on which the CIA and the Pentagon had spent about $20 million and twenty years. Also known by the wonderful phrase “anomalous cognition,” the idea was developed by Dr. Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ at the Stanford Research Institute in the 1970s. Their first and prime viewer was an artist named Ingo Swann (Hollywood could never come up with names like these), who directed the effort to turn remote viewing into a useful military intelligence tool. Fearing an emerging “psi spy” gap with the Soviets, the CIA began funding remote viewing and, later, handed the research off to the Army.
It began with some degree of scientific rigor, with the finding that some people did a better job of, say, picking cards facedown on a table several rooms away than they should
have by chance alone. “Psi-hitting,” it was called. Then in Project Grille Flame, later Scannate and Stargate, it was applied to such tasks as discovering the locations of Soviet submarines or finding hostages in the Middle East. But results kept turning up that embarrassed the Army. When the viewers were directed to search for secret Soviet aircraft, they came back with reports of UFOs.
Viewers were sometimes led through brainwave feedback and other techniques in order to become more sensitive receptors. Two of the early remote viewers were Ed Dames and Joseph McMoneagle. Dames claimed that “we employed people who used altered states to take a look at the radio station in Tehran, Iran, prior to our aborted rescue attempt.” Strategic locations in Iraq were another target. The lack of success of those efforts makes one skeptical about remote viewing.
I tried to think of remote viewing, perhaps charitably, as equivalent to frustrated police turning to a medium to locate a body. The program was operated in a series of shedlike buildings at Fort Meade, in Maryland. After the military program ended, remote viewing moved into the private sector. Ed Dames established a firm called Psi-Tech that did “business research,” or, less politely, industrial espionage. For an auto company client, for instance, his viewers “go into this library in the sky, if you will, what we call the matrix, the collective unconscious, [and] pull out designs that were Japanese and German.”
Other alumni of the program were less positive. Joseph McMoneagle disparaged Dames. Another veteran, David Morehouse, wrote a book titled Psychic Warrior (1996), in which he declared that the feds had recruited him as a remote viewer and then made his life miserable.
An associate professor of political science at Emory University named Courtney Brown, whom Ed Dames had taught RV, had established an outfit he called the Far Sight Foundation, and claimed to be able to view inside the Oval Office and to visit secret bases on the moon and Mars. He envisioned our Mars probe being destroyed by a defending alien craft. When he appeared on Art Bell’s Coast to Coast radio show, he suggested that the comet Hale-Bopp provided cover for an extraterrestrial spaceship that was heading for our planet.
The Heaven’s Gate cult latched on to Brown’s idea and stuck out their figurative thumbs to hitch a ride. Before their mass suicide, they visited Las Vegas and played the slots; some members may have attended a conference on Area 51.
Ford’s notion that the camou dudes could remote-view, however, was a new one on me. So was the idea that the presence of these remote viewers might take the form of glowing balls.
“Does it really work?” I asked her.
“Sure, I’ve been taught how to do it. First, you have to give yourself permission to let yourself invent. And when you understand it’s okay to make it up, then they start to appear and you say to yourself, ‘Hey, I didn’t make that up.’ ”
“Can you remotely look over the hills here and see what’s on the other side?” I ventured gingerly—over there, into the base at Groom Lake, into Area 51, into Dreamland.
“Sure,” she said, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. “I’ve been there. It’s empty.”
26. The White Mailbox
Maybe Kathleen Ford was right, maybe the place was “empty” (whatever she meant by that). Maybe the secret warriors had folded their tents under cover of night and crept away. Maybe the cuts of the post–Cold War years had reduced the role of the base. Maybe the glare of publicity had made operations untenable.
I remembered the statements a congressman made at the time Whitesides Mountain was annexed to the restricted area. The watchers, he said, were a tremendous inconvenience to the men at the base. They had to shut things down when the watchers appeared. “It’s not fair,” he reported, almost petulantly. Bill Sweetman thought that the cost of doing business in Dreamland had priced it out of the market, that in the new, austere Pentagon, all the security and expense of moving things in and out was too much. He thought the projects had moved elsewhere.1
In another sense, of course, it had always been empty, and that was its attraction. We needed it empty to function as a container for speculation. You could fill it up with whatever you wanted. Or maybe we had all emptied it, squeezed out every bit of speculation, overtaxed that humble collection of Butler metal buildings and big hangars and military-issue dorms, demanded too much meaning from it. Perhaps Dreamland was full now and could hold no more of our speculations or fantasies.
On the Internet, you could find this sentiment: “I hope we never find out what’s in there,” a buff wrote rather wistfully. “I’d just like to observe something about us Area 51 freaks. As much as we talk about wanting to know what goes on in there, I think that’s all just posturing. What would happen if the U.S. government opened its doors to us and let us see all that was going on? Depending on what is there, we’d be either vindicated or disappointed, but we would also rapidly lose interest. What would we focus our attentions on? Where would we go next? … The greatest thing about Area 51 is its mystery, otherwise nobody would care.”
To push suspicion to the limit, some speculated that Groom had long been a kind of Potemkin village, designed to draw attention away from somewhere else, to hold down the armies of watchers the way the plywood tanks and fake maneuvers of Operation Fortitude held down Panzer divisions before D-day.
Maybe the real projects were going on at some long-rumored “new Groom,” or “baby Groom,” in Utah, in New Mexico, in Alaska, in Australia. “The new Groom” became nearly as fabled among the stealth watchers as the original, or as El Dorado among the conquistadores. Was it at Eielson Air Force Base, in Alaska, where Agent X kept his eye out but whose vastness made Groom look like a golf course? Or Pine Gap in Australia, perhaps—rumor had it that several Northrop aerodynamicists, including the legendary John Cashen, had moved to Australia. To Utah, near Dugway and the dreaded storage area for chemical and germ warfare weapons? One top aviation journalist, who told me everything had been moved from Groom, said, “We’ve heard the pulser jet in the Southeast, out in the swamps.” Or was it all moved, as Steve Douglass had heard, to a new secret base over the hill from White Sands in New Mexico? Steve Douglass and I went to look.
I had driven across the lava plains north of the White Sands Missile Range, a few miles north of the Trinity site, where the first atomic bomb was detonated. I had passed the northern entrance to the range, called Stallion Gate, when a white Blazer with official plates fell in behind me. The driver was speaking into a mike, its corkscrew of cord trailing behind. I imagined him checking up on me and grew nervous for no reason.
I passed through the Valley of Fire, a landscape of rough stones that resembled coral, as if a whole beach of lava had been laid bare by a receding tide. There was a rolling quality to the depressions and outcrop-pings, and you could almost imagine that the rock was still liquid. Driving across it, I could understand how looking at the relentless distance day after day could inspire despair—the despair early settlers felt and tried to treat with whiskey and patent medicines.
Steve and I parked across from the fence at Holloman Air Force Base, where the Aquarius briefings said the saucers had landed for treaty negotiations, and Stealth fighters transferred from Tonopah trained in daylight now. Traffic whizzed by with a heavy rush. Binoculars offered a terrorist’s-eye view of a base that was like a movie set of an airbase: tower, water tank, palm trees. The F-117s kept taking off over our heads, along with black T-38s. The shadows slid across the pavement, which itself shimmered in cheap mirages.
The next day we stopped by the local BLM office, located in a modern sandstone structure trying to look like WPA Moderne and failing. Three empty government-issue office chairs held a conference in the lobby. I noticed that they were the same kind of chairs as in the photographs of the Roswell wreckage, in Gen. Roger Ramey’s office. I suspected I was overconnecting again.
We looked through the big maps, flipping page after page until we found the right ones. Steve focused on the valley west of the mountains that sheltered Holloman an
d the space harbor.
We stopped at a Dairy Queen to study the maps. A Mexican man with a black Mephistophelian beard but contradictorily patient and gentle eyes walked in. On his shoulder was a tattoo unlike any I had ever seen. I tried not to stare at the tattoo, but it was irresistible. It showed a shapely woman wearing nothing but a gauzy blouse and bandoliers of cartridges. The more I looked, the more the image seemed to deepen and become solid. It shimmered like a printed reproduction of a photo—stand far enough back and the dots merge, the image comes to life. Depth establishes itself behind surface, signal overwhelms noise. I wanted the message of the maps to become that clear, to tell us openly whether there was a new base, and where behind the mountains it was hidden.
We focused our search on the Oscura Mountains. There was a new restricted airspace, number R5107, and we first studied the aeronautical charts, the spaces marked mostly purple and brown, then looked at the more variegated palette of the BLM maps, indicating the usage and ownership of land with its melons, blues, and yellows.
We trudged across White Sands, aiming at the tower of the old Northrup Strip. Now they called the old strip “Space Harbor.” All we could see were the top of its antennas and water tower, which barely peeked above the white dunes in a thousand advertisements, when it had stood in for the Sahara, and for Mars.
Steve had been here before at night. Creeping over the brow of the last dune, whiter than white by moonlight, he had seen the base unfold, crisscrossed by huge laser beams and dotted with multicolored lights. Word had it they’d put in the most powerful runway lighting system on the planet. The shuttle astronauts could see it from space. They’d landed here once when bad weather spoiled the usual landing strips at Edwards or the Cape, and for the first time the TV crews were kept away from the landing.