What was I going to encounter in Rachel and Groom Lake? According
to George Friedman, director of research at Baton Rouge's Strategic
Forecasting LLC and author of The Future of War (Crown), I was heading to
a strange place. The fractured hall of mirrors you find in the UFO field
may have more to do with the Cold War than close encounters. In fact,
says Friedman, it can be traced back to a single starting point, a single
moment in time: the morning of December 7, 1941, when the Japanese bombed
Pearl Harbor:
"They planned it in secret end they smashed us. From that moment on
we've been obsessed with secrecy. And then our scientists invented the
atomic bomb and won World War II. [We had] all these soldiers fighting,
and some pencil-necked geeks came up with a weapon that made the soldiers
irrelevant. America decided it had to stockpile scientists. Spend what
you want, but give us weapons in secrecy." Thus the marriage of science,
industry, and the military at sites like Area 51.
But secrecy tends to blast away accountability (see "Secret Science
& Criminal Acts," at right). And it's the perfect foil for conspiracy
theories. In one sense, UFOs fit into that good old American conspiracy
tradition that would have Martin Luther King Jr. and JFK shot by aliens
paid by Congress under orders from the CIA.
Is it any coincidence that flying saucers first appeared shortly
after the Cold War began--in dune of 1947, when pilot Kenneth Arnold saw
nine bright discs in the sky near Mount Rainier in Washington? Says
Friedman, "There's no limit on our imaginations. We already know what
amazing things have come out of secret projects. These scientists seem
like magicians working black magic in the desert.
They already seem to playing with the very substance of nature and
producing these terrible weapons. Go back to the very ancient myth of the
Faustian pact. We've decided that scientists and the government are in
league with the devil, in order to gain knowledge of the entire universe.
And there you have Roswell. Aliens landed. Scientists made a
deal."
Did scientists make a deal? Conspiracy theorists reason that the
government kept ETs a secret to prevent the kind of mass hysteria once
generated by Orson Welles's War of the Worlds. "This is a land of 30-year
mortgages," says Dean Radin, Ph.D., chair of the Vegas conference,
director of the Consciousness Research Laboratory at the University of
Nevada, and author of The Conscious Universe (HarperCollins). "People
want security."
"It may turn out there is a devil and they did make a pact," says
Friedman. "But from what I know of the Air Force they would shriek at the
top of their lungs, `Aliens have landed, we need $50 billion to build
anti-alien ships.' It would be a budgetary coup of mammoth
proportions."
Friedman isn't the only one concerned about government secrecy. In
March of this year, New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan gave a
speech at Georgetown University noting that excess government secrecy had
accelerated conspiracy theories involving the government. And Congress
announced that it will hold a hearing to review America's system of
government secrecy in the post-Cold War period. No wonder: The federal
Information Security Oversight Office has estimated that the government
created about 6.8 million official secrets last year.
OFFSHORE ISLAND OF THE SOUL
At last I arrive in Rachel--though I only know because 40 tin
mailboxes mounted on wooden posts suddenly pop out of the emptiness. An
American flag flies near one of the two houses in "town." The other
residents live in trailers like the banana-colored one that boasts a
sign, Area 51 Research Center, and a garden of debris recovered from
crashed stealth bombers.
The Area 51 Research Center is run by 37-year-old Glenn Campbell,
who is wired to the Web and known for his witty news items about UFOs and
local lore. Inside I find Steve Phipps, a 39-year-old military buff who
has lived here for the last year. He confirms the local legends: People
from all over America gather at a certain black mailbox to watch for
UFOs, although the rancher who owns the mailbox has since painted it
white and plated it with armor. Sightings are frequent, but who can say
what is seen? After all, war games are played in the air nearby, says
Phipps: "You see the planes and then there's this sonic boom, a wall of
sound hitting you."
I thumb through a book on stealth aircraft. They're lethal steel
moths, gorgeous, shining, and flat. "These could easily be mistaken for
flying saucers."
"And they often are."
We go for a Coke a hundred yards away, at the only restaurant for
about 50 miles: the Little A'Le'Inn. It's a converted trailer, operated
by Pat and Joe Travis--she overweight with short, cropped hair, he slim
and wizened by drink and sun.
"People come here to escape and live by their own rules," says
Steve. "But nobody can get along. Glenn is feuding with Pat and Joe. The
town patriarch is suffering from Alzheimer's and the matriarch is a
southern belle who's as mean as they come. There's a 57-year-old former
secretary from Ohio who married a 27-year-old. She killed a man and wants
to die in a shoot-out. You should write a piece on the psychology of
Rachel."
Tags:
alien,
area 51,
dumping ground,
extraterrestrial,
flying saucers,
government,
government conspiracies,
nevada desert,
UFO,
ups,
war games
