Dispatch from dreamland

Out in the middle of the Nevada desert, America's secrets -- from UFOs tomilitary war games and cover-ups -- and our perennial longing for mystery and redemption all come together.

They call it the loneliest road in America, and I'd been driving it most of the morning down through the undulating desert blue of Nevada's Great Basin, Dust cactus flowers, and the stillness of the mountains put me in a contemplative mood. They are brutal, those rocks, but you can see ancient oceans moving in them, carved in waves of stone.

I'm on my way to the town of Rachel, a forlorn hive of dusty trailers parked at the side of the Extra-terrestrial Highway--which may be the second loneliest road in America--to investigate our country's obsession du jour, UFOs.

Rachel borders the government's infamous military base, Area 51--also known as Groom Lake or Dreamland--a sprawling compound of lakes and buildings that don't officially exist. It's the site of the blackest of "deep black" weapons secrets, a place rumored to house aliens in underground tunnels (where a nutritive pate made of humans is supposedly spread on their skin in exchange for advice on intergalactic travel), to be a dumping ground for nuclear waste and a facility for plutonium research, as well as the home of stealth aircraft that may fly at Mach 5--five times the speed of sound. The sonic boom from these planes has been known to lift cars off the ground and shatter glass. No wonder flying saucers have been sighted so frequency in these skies, and Rachel has become a kind of desert Lourdes for ET seekers from around the world.

It is dreamland out here, in the immeasurable desert--and it's an uncanny crossroads of our culture, from aliens to government conspiracies, the noisy money of Vegas (half Hades, half Disney), itinerants living in trailers yet wired to the Web, real estate moguls who buy university chairs and then get in bed with scientists and weapons researchers and the CIA, supposedly in order to study life after death and...aliens? And all along the way you find the fossils of our past--mining ghost towns, salt flats, and Indian artifacts--somehow mixed in with the promise of our future, the unearthly beauty of those stealth bombers and the technology that made them.

And below and above it, emptiness. I've come to the dead center of nowhere, to see why we've filled it with aliens.

ALIEN AMERICA, CIRCA 1997

You probably don't need reminding, but the last few years could have been nicknamed Invasion of the ETs. We've had Heaven's Gate and Hale-Bopp, the 50th anniversary of the Roswell crash--where, in early July, about 100,000 Americans gathered after the release of the third, revised official Air Force explanation of what really happened back in 1947--Independence Day, Contact, Men in Black, and the ever-hardy X-Files. There's also been international speculation about life on Mars, the recent Pathfinder mission to the red planet, and the ongoing research of SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) with its small band of scientists tuning their 8-million channel radio wave detectors to the skies.

Aliens have landed, even if they haven't. A 1996 Newsweek poll confirmed that nearly half of Americans believe UFOs are real and that the government has covered up the evidence, and 29 percent of the population is convinced we've already made contact with ETs. Is this a cultural spasm in response to the approaching millennium? Or is our relentless fascination with UFOs more deeply rooted?

I thought the scientists who'd been studying the phenomenon might know, and some of them were convening in Las Vegas at the annual conference of the Society for Scientific Exploration, a haven for researchers with respectable credentials and wild ideas. My plan: Spend a few days at the conference, then visit Dreamland.

The day before I left New York, I had two interviews that almost prepared me for the utter weirdness I was about to encounter. The first was with an eminence grise of the field, who refused to be interviewed on the record. I said I wanted to get the "real" story and he burst into laughter. "If you can do that, darling, you'll have accomplished something not one of us has been able to do in the last 40 years. Back in the late '50s it was relatively clear that ETs in nuts-and-bolts ships that defied the laws of gravity were scanning nuclear development plants and that they [had] crashed. But the field has since turned into one big snarl. Nobody knows anything for sure, and if they do, the minute they say it about 10 others say it's bullshit." His favorite UFO pastime these days, he commented, was to take a long hot bath while reading a hilarious 'zine called Saucer Smear.