by Phil Patton
Now in the daytime we crawled across the sand. The more we looked at the maps, the more we drove and wandered through the rippled dunes, the more hopeless and foolish we felt. You would have to have up-to-date satellite photos, an airplane, and free access to the airspace to have even a prayer of finding anything.
Yet there was always a Dreamland somewhere down the road. Its very name kept turning up in the oddest places. I learned of a barbecue place in Alabama and a spiritualist outfit in California called Dreamland. One Area 51 buff recorded with excitement, “So, I’m driving back from Costco, listening to the rockabilly show on KCMU and, I am not making this up, this song comes on about a rockabilly cat who meets up with a space alien.” The alien asks to be taken to some place called “the Dreamland Bar and Grill.”
“This New World Order is quite fucking real,” Joe Travis said from behind the bar. A few minutes later he launched into an informal karaoke version of “Little Red Riding Hood,” by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs, which had come on the radio. It lent a nice air of menace to his warning. But Joe’s act was wearing thin. There was a new mood around the Inn. Tourism in Rachel had become a tired joke—“Area 51” was the punch-line—and some of the Interceptors were becoming embarrassed by the whole thing. The Minister had had enough of the Interceptor gatherings, and Mahood issued a “final report” decrying Lazar as a liar and went off to graduate school to study physics.
Campbell, for his part, was growing both more distant from and more possessive of the place. When a magazine report, riddled with errors, charged that Area 51 had been shut down and its activities moved elsewhere, he reacted not just with derision but with something resembling personal affront. He saw himself as webmaster and moderator now, and something like superintendent, too.
When it seemed interest might be waning and new material about the base growing scarce, he even manifested an interest in stories of black aircraft that he had previously shunned. He recounted, with uncharacteristic credulity, a tale of seeing aircraft land on the base and then disappear, as if taxiing underground.
At the same time, he was tiring. In the summer of 1997, he married Sharon Singer, his former assistant in the Rachel Research Center, and began to spend more time in Las Vegas with her and her children.
Much as they might denounce the abuses of government secrecy, the watchers had been drawn there by the mystery, and it seemed to me mystery was a thing in short supply in the contemporary world. That was why so many TV shows and movies worked so hard to provide it. Just as wilderness feeds and nurtures a society that is overcivilized, mystery nurtures a society that is overinformed. The unknown and unpredictable were rarer and rarer qualities in a world of vast information storage and retrieval systems, of sophisticated planning, scheduling, and prediction. We had a fundamental need for uncertainty (as much as we do for order), but not necessarily the kind government secrecy provided. In the spring of 1997, a report from a congressional committee that brought together such odd bedfellows as Jesse Helms, Pat Moynihan, and Lee Hamilton proposed declassifying anything older than ten years, with, of course, the usual “special exceptions.” The committee estimated that there were some one and a half billion pages of classified documents more than a quarter of a century old. It was a huge time capsule, requiring expensive maintenance.
The usual talk of means of “penetrating” the perimeter continued: a model airplane, a balloon, even a radio-controlled model car. Norio Hayakawa had his own scheme. He began talking of a “Million Man March” to the perimeter on June 6, 1998, the date he had said provided a conglomeration of multiple sixes, when something dark and dangerous would happen.
One Saturday in late April 1997, four SUVs pulled out of Rachel and drove north on Highway 375. About twenty miles north of town, they turned left on a gravel road, rambled toward Dreamland, and pulled up to the new perimeter line of the restricted area.
Some twenty kids emerged and began setting up easels and canvases in a neat line, about six feet apart and at a 45-degree angle to the vista. Led by a man named Joel Slayton, who taught at San Jose State University, these young art students were collaborating on what Slayton called “a site-specific conceptual artwork involving landscape painting as countersurveillance of Area 51.”
Painting the landscape in old-fashioned oils and acrylics, they were members of “the CADRE institute” (Computers in Art and Design/Research and Education), who thought deep thoughts about the nature of art and information and how computers figured in to it.
As camou dudes trained their binoculars, Slayton felt a little creepy. What the dudes made of it all, one can only imagine.
The group hauled their finished paintings back to Alamo, where they drew a curious crowd at the local gas station, just around the corner from the first ET Highway sign.
Slayton’s official manifesto declared, “The social banality of landscape painting and painters was strategized to be used as a means of countersurveillance by the surveyed, serving as a no-threat typology of threat. In this context the artists demonstrate a perception of art as safe and innocuous, permissible and lacking in relevant information content. The need to surveil such activity is both necessary and unnecessary simultaneously.” Now Dreamland drew artists, who drew it.
The camou dudes, Slayton thought, were “serving as a critical agent to assess the significance of the event and resulting information liability.” The whole exercise, he proclaimed, constituted “critical discourse on the nature of information culture and information systems.” It also seemed a pretty good parody of us serious watchers of the area.
Slayton kept calling the place “a simulacrum.” No longer a real place, I understood, but “a reality constituted from media folklore, super secrecy, and the government’s denial of its very existence.” It existed “only as pure simulation, constructed from the voluminous decentralized and publicly assessable [sic] information that surrounds what might be there.” It was a “composited identity formed of electronic networks, e-mail correspondence, and media folklore. Area 51’s notoriety as a physical and virtual tourist attraction provides a cultural experience as information simulation ripe with conspiracy theory, Hollywood-style potentialities, and the guarantee of being surveilled.”
At PsychoSpy’s Research Center, the paintings were placed on sale for $51.51 each with a 51 percent commission going to the Center. Buyers were asked to document the location in which each painting would be hung and to “engage in dialogue” about the whole experience via e-mail.
One frequent visitor to the perimeter happened to see the group and grew suspicious. He was sure they were some sort of security force. They had short hair, he noted, and looked like camou dudes. If they were painters, he said, then he was a B-1 pilot.
CADRE’s project made my line of inquiry seem positively casual and unpretentious. Its members weren’t interested in aircraft or saucers or holographic experiments; they were interested in philosophical “dialogue.” They were among the most abstract visitors yet to the perimeter, highbrow, high-thinking but, from my perspective, jesters still. If I had once naïvely thought that by identifying the physical craft in the airspace of Dreamland we could then solve its riddles, satisfy the conspiratorial and the curious, I now understood that no rational explanations would satisfy CADRE.
Still, the military soon began to take CADRE seriously as a threat. While some observers on the perimeter were sure that CADRE’s painters were cleverly disguised government agents, some government agents apparently suspected that they were spies or infiltrators. It happened like this: One of the CADRE members had inquired of the Nellis base historian—who had shown me big, locked file cabinets and had so little to offer about UAVs—if Nellis had received any e-mails inquiring about Area 51. This was purely an exercise, since he assumed none would be released. Not long afterward, he was sent, by anonymous e-mail, a list of e-mail addresses at Nellis. Whether this was a prank or a piece of mischief remained unclear, but Nellis authorities were not amused when CADRE forwarded
reports of its activity to those on the list. Nellis had been spammed.
In June, a few months after an April “paint-in,” Slayton saw a van trailing him. The FBI looked into his activities, and the IRS suddenly manifested an interest in the finances of CADRE.
Then the group sent a party to the land, about forty miles away, owned by Michael Heizer, the artist who lived on a huge tract of land near Complex One, his largest work to date. When several CADRE members, young enough to view Heizer as a legend, tried to enter his compound and pay a visit, he proved highly unappreciative. Slayton told me that Heizer threatened to charge them with trespassing. So Heizer’s place, I hazarded, had become a kind of little Area 51? Exactly, Slayton said.
Incorporating Dreamland into a high-concept work of art, as Heizer had, made me speculate again about just how artful were Area 51’s own deceptions. Consider that faceted camouflage, the essential form of military deception, of visual disinformation, had been born in art. During World War I, Picasso and Braque stood watching tanks and other camouflaged vehicles roll through the streets of Paris. “Look,” Picasso said, “we are the ones who did that.”
The principles at work in this most basic form of deception were the same as those of secrecy. Camouflage, like Cubism, offered bits and pieces, shards and facets. Multiple viewpoints, multiple possibilities—that was all that was needed to create noise, to disguise the real signal. Breaking up the shape into parts was the equivalent of compartmentalization, the most valued intelligence strategy.
When I had begun spending more time on the Net tracking stealth chasers and youfers, one day, on impulse, I did a search and typed in one word: “dreamland.” The Internet, I knew, was well dotted with UFO and black-plane links and sites, but only one reference came back: to Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “Dreamland,” stashed away in a university collection of great works of literature.
By a route obscure and lonely,
Haunted by ill angels only,
Where an Eidolon, named Night,
On a black throne reigns upright,
I have reached these lands but newly
From an ultimate dim Thule—
From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime,
Out of Space—out of Time.
Bottomless vales and boundless floods,
And chasms, and caves, and Titan woods,
With forms that no man can discover
…
For the spirit that walks in shadow
’Tis—oh, ’tis an Eldorado!
But the traveller, travelling through it,
May not—dare not openly view it;
Never its mysteries are exposed
To the weak human eyes unclosed;
So wills its King, who hath forbid
The uplifting of the fringed lid;
And thus the sad Soul that here passes
Beholds it but through darkened glasses.
…
Poe is the patron poet of Dreamland. In The Power of Blackness, my old professor Harry Levin had written, “Poe seemed at home only in Dreamland.” He dreamed, another critic has written, quoting a famous phrase of the poet’s, of “a happier star.” Poe is considered among the “Southern Gothic” writers, those authors W. J. Cash described as “romantics of the appalling.” Romantic and appalling—which describes what has happened in Dreamland very well.
Read just right, squinting under the Nevada sun, the poem anticipated Nevada’s own Dreamland. “Eldorado” turned into a big old Caddy like those parked at the cathouses west of the restricted area, and “the weak human eyes unclosed” or “darkened glasses” evokes long camera lenses or night-vision devices. “Haunted by ill angels,” well, there was the U-2, Kelly’s Angel, and whatever other strange winged objects you wished to invoke. “Out of Space—out of Time” recalled Lazar’s description of the saucer propulsion system, stretching the space-time continuum, warping gravity, like a hammock’s net. The “black throne” stood, of course, for the rule of the black budget.
There was the dry lake itself, I began to fantasize, in the poet’s “Lakes that thus outspread / Their lone waters, lone and dead.” Warming now to the job like a conspiracist making connections, I latched on to his “fringed lid.” A playful look at the security lid, to be sure, and the “fringe” groups who visited there.
There were even stories that the Poe poem had been the inspiration for the control tower name—suggesting that sitting out in an isolated base leads to more reading than might otherwise be expected of military types.
Thinking about Poe carried me back to Freedom Ridge, and what I once saw flying in the airspace of Dreamland: ravens, Poe’s totemic bird. My mind then leapt to the raven I had seen in another place, which was closed off but visible, another black box: Poe’s own room at the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville.
Young Poe had lived there in 1826, before he was expelled from the university for failing to pay his gambling debts. The wooden door has been replaced with glass, as in a bank or department store. Visitors push a button and a dim light comes on. You can see a crude rope bed with Jacquard coverlet, a desk, a pen, and—some historical license—a stuffed raven. A black bird in an almost black room.
The preservation of such a room as a viewable but unreachable space, part memorial, part exhibit, strikes me as very like the Groom Box. It was like the black world itself—a special exception, a dark chamber in the white and stately colonnade of American life and polity. Thinking about Poe’s room, I believe I better understood where the dark visions of the black world fit into the ideal of American order. In the secret vaults in the capital where SAR programs are reviewed, a heart of darkness behind the bright classical façade. In the Black Mailbox itself.
One summer day in 1996, I headed back up the road toward Rachel, catching a glimpse from Hancock Summit of the hazy, hovering white stick of road that led to the base. As the road curled around and began its long subtle dip—the Mailbox Road stretch—I settled back into the familiar unfolding of the landscape, the Joshua trees, the range of Jumbled Hills to the west. Coming down the big dip, I nearly drove off the road as something caught my eye: The Black Mailbox was white!
No longer the standard arched rural route job approved by the U.S. Postal Service, it was now a big box of heavy steel, whose door swung on two heavy hinges, with a grab handle from a workshop cabinet and locked with a bright brass padlock. Steve Medlin had stenciled on it his name and route in black.
I walked all around it and noticed that someone had stenciled a tiny black skunk on its back end—a wry comment, perhaps, that this thing was built like the Skunk Works would build it. But it was white now, white as the camou dudes’ Jeeps, white as Darkstar, white as the celebrated whale.
At the Little A“Le”Inn, I asked about it. “He got tired of people shooting at it,” Joe Travis said of Medlin. “Shooting up his mail and all. Made a new one out of quarter-inch steel plate. Now it would take a thirty-ought-six.” He snorted a little laugh.
The steel might resist, but the white paint couldn’t. Soon after it went up, someone spray-painted the new box black. Medlin repainted it white. I got the idea this might go back and forth for a while.
There was a black mailbox out in front of the Inn now, but Joe said it was just a replica. I asked what had happened to the original. A man on the stool beside me said that it had been sent to be auctioned off a while ago to raise money for town recreation, but a producer from Hollywood had preempted the sale with an offer of fifteen hundred bucks. This seemed appropriate, but as with so much in Dreamland, it proved impossible to determine conclusively.
For my father
Acknowledgments
Many people helped along the way, sometimes in a manner appropriate to Dreamland—without being conscious of it. Steve Douglass and Stuart Brown were vital as sources, inspirations, and friends. Paul McGinnis deserves special mention for help and patience in teaching me all sorts of things. Glenn Campbell deserves commendation, not just here, for his h
elp, but from the public, for his advocacy. The late Ben Rich of the Skunk Works was articulate and honest.
I owe debts of instruction and direction to: John Andrews, Michael Antonoff, Eric Baker, Jim Bakos, Wally Bison, Peter Black, Dale Brown, Lowell Cunningham, R. C. “Chappy” Czapiewski, Mike Dornheim, Mark Farmer, Bob Gilliland, Peter Goin, Joshua Good, Jim Goodall, Norio Hayakawa, Steve Heller, Steve Hofer, Gene Huff, Dean Kanipe, Jon Katz, Frank Kuznik, John Lear, Preston Lerner, Tom Mahood, Mary Manning, Dave Menard, Peter Merlin, Randy Rothenberg, Barry Sonnenfeld, Bill Sweetman, Jonathan Turley, Tim Weiner.
John Pike and Steve Aftergood at the Federation of American Scientists, Derek Scammell at the Nevada Nuclear Test Site, Matthew Coolidge at the Center for Land Use Interpretation have all been helpful in this and many other projects. Special appreciation to Randy Harrison at Boeing, Doug Fouquet at General Atomics, Jim Ragsdale at Lockheed Martin, the estimable Drs. Young and Puffer at the Edwards Air Force Base Flight Test Center history office, and Sgt. James Brooks at the Nellis Air Force Base public affairs office.
For support in work whose subject matter abutted and whose investigations abetted this project: Kevin Kelly, John Battelle, Amy Howarth, John Plunkett, and Louis Rosetto at Wired; Anita Leclerc at Esquire; Connie Rosenblum and Fletcher Roberts at The New York Times; Katie Calhoun, Richard Snow, and Fred Allen at American Heritage; Chee Pearlman at ID; and Richard Story at Vogue.
Thanks to Tom for a vital clip on military monitoring and to Ben for a vital tip on the New World Order. To Steve Guanarccia: I really am going to return your copy of In Advance of the Landing, soon and gratefully.
Thanks to excellent book editors along the way: Walt Bode, Bill Strachan, Trevor Dolby, but especially to David Rosenthal, for his vision and confidence, Ruth Fecych, for her care and patience, and the eagle-eyed Benjamin Dreyer and Evan Stone. I am grateful for years of help and advice from my agent Melanie Jackson.