Somebody introduces me to Chuck Clark, an amateur astronomer who
moved here in 1994. Clean shaven, with blue eyes and an ebulliently
vacant smile, Chuck tells me he saw nine UFOs in California in 1957. He
watches stars and spaceships. "I like to go out and chase the guys with
guns at Area 51. They have quite an extensive file on me."
Outside the inn, crafting a garden of marigolds, I find Bill, a
40-something Californian. "I'm just an underwater photographer and a
garden guy," he says, but then goes on to explain the physics behind
alien craft: "See this trowel? It's made of electrons moving at huge
speeds. Slow those electrons down, the trowel will become lighter and
lighter. Until it levitates." He starts to cough. "I've been coughing for
four days. Yesterday some joker said they put plutonium in my mashed
potatoes, and I'm starting to wonder."
Finally, I meet Glenn Campbell. He seems both smart and sane (and
is only a part-time resident). "I can confirm or deny nothing," he greets
me with a laugh. I ask him about a local who supposedly works at Area 51
and leaks secrets. "I don't think so," Glenn says. "He's always walking
around in an Air Force uniform. No ex-Air Force guy would ever do
that."
That night, at 2 a.m., there is supposed to be a war game in the
sky Bill has put a scanning gizmo on top of his car. "Nothing's
happening," he says, restless. "I think I'll go down to the border and
see what I can pick up." The border is the where the base begins. Cross
it, and you'll be fined.
"I've got my beamer," says Chuck. "I could shine it on these guys
right on the forehead where a bullet would go."
And so we sit in the cool desert night, on a makeshift wooden
stoop. One could say that Rachel is just Nevada's twist on any
godforsaken outpost, but this particular one is mirroring the culture at
large. The emptiness here may not be much different from the emptiness
the rest of America fills with the X-Files every Sunday night: It's just
heavier and brighter in Dreamland. Still, there's a relentless
immortality to the UFO myth, and no story can be immortal if it doesn't
sink deep roots in our psyches.
UFOS AS MODERN MYTH
"I view the entire UFO field as an archetype in the making," Dean
Radin says. "We're seeing a modern myth here that has roots in the
beginning of history." Consider the reports of alien kidnappings that are
a hallmark of UFO lore. According to folklorist Peter M. Rojcewicz,
chairman of interdivisional liberal arts at the Julliard School,
abduction tales are archetypes running through most cultures. The devil
and werewolf lure, abduct, and murder children; fairies snatch youngsters
and leave behind changelings, sometimes taking blood samples; Haitian
voodoo tradition tells of sorcerers known as "zobop" that travel in
"tiger cars" flashing bluish beams while kidnapping humans. Black
helicopters have been sighted in conjunction with modern-day UFOs, but
15th-century art depicts black whirling objects as well. Even the early
gnostics described whirling globes of light.
"If aliens were objectively real," says Dennis Stillings, editor of
Healing Island magazine, "then they could only be explained as
joy-riding, bumbling oats of limited intelligence who have stolen the
sophisticated craft of another civilization, because nothing they do
makes sense. They seem unable to perform the simplest procedures without
creating severe pain and anxiety. They should be capable of teleporting
tissue samples, at the very least. They have no style. They don't dress
well." Aliens, Stillings believes, are merely religious archetypes:
"There are great similarities between religious images and UFOs."
As archetypes, UFOs' power and persistence--and their current
popularity--makes sense. "These kinds of archetypes come to the surface
at times of great cultural transition," explains Boulder psychologist
Bernice Hill, Ph.D. "It's a movement in the collective unconscious." Just
what kind of movement? "I take the flying saucer to be an image of the
future state of humanity," says Terrance McKenna, author of Food for the
Gods (Bantam). "The soul, exteriorized in three-dimensional
space."
Or if not the soul itself, then a hunger for it. UFOs are
post-modern folklore cloaked in technology, mirroring our hubris, our wax
wings, and Faustian pact. They come trailing meaning like a comet. At any
time, they might arrive, just come at us out of empty space. And isn't
that what those scientists dancing with the devil promised? Science says
that space looks empty but is really full, that on a subatomic level it
is rushing and frothing like a waterfall. A cup of coffee contains enough
stored energy to evaporate the world's oceans.
I think back to Bill, turning to me at 2 in the morning. "Do you
like crystals?" he asked wistfully "I like to go into the mountains and
find stones. They're prehistoric. It feels neat to hold them. I don't
know if they have powers or anything." Search for it in stones, coffee
cups, flying saucers--the impulse to hold and behold magic is the
same.
Tags:
alien,
area 51,
dumping ground,
extraterrestrial,
flying saucers,
government,
government conspiracies,
nevada desert,
UFO,
ups,
war games
