TORONTO STAR AREA 51 ARTICLE

Saturday, November 16, 1996
Source: The Toronto Star

Travel Section, page H1
The Star goes looking for UFOs around Nevada's top-secret Area 51
By Mitchell Smyth - Toronto Star Travel Editor

RACHEL, Nev. - IT WAS, I THOUGHT, a Close Encounter of the First Kind. There in the night sky over Area 51 - a place that officially doesn't exist - a bright, round light appeared. It hovered for a while, then suddenly went out.

"A flying saucer?" I asked my companion, UFO "expert" Chuck Clark.

"Naw. Just a flare, dropped to light the way for a bombing run," said Clark. "Look, there's another one. Now wait for the flash, like lightning, when they drop the bomb."

Sure enough, the flash came from over the horizon a couple of seconds later. But no sound. "That's because they're 50 or 60 miles away," said Clark.

A Close Encounter of the First Kind, you should know, means a sighting of a UFO. The Second Kind means seeing physical evidence, maybe tracks or burn marks where a saucer landed, or experiencing interference with power sources such as a car's ignition.

But it was the Third Kind I was most interested in, and Area 51 is the place to be to investigate it.

A Close Encounter of the Third Kind is where you actually meet the aliens and/or see their space ship up close. And I'd heard that Area 51, a huge, top-secret installation in the wilderness of central Nevada, is where the U.S. military is re-creating flying saucers from wreckage of crashed extraterrestrial craft.

Not only that, there are those who say that the bodies of space aliens, little gray men recovered from the crash of a flying saucer in Roswell, N.M., in 1947, are preserved in a morgue in a tunnel-city - like something out of a James Bond movie - deep in the earth below Area 51.

Pentagon officials, predictably, deny all this, even deny that Area 51 exists, although they admit there's a bomb and gunnery range around here. Maybe, I thought, I should go in and have a look.

So, the morning after my non-close encounter saw me driving up a gravel road - it's not signed so you have to ask the locals how to get breaks about here to Area 51 - to the perimeter. "Warning. Restricted Area," says the sign on the gate.

I could see the surveillance cameras swivelling this way and that on their stilts; I'd been told motion sensors were concealed in the Joshua trees and pressure detectors in the sand. But what really worried me was the line, in red paint in case I missed it, saying "Use of deadly force authorized."

Good James Bond stuff, I thought. But how do I get to speak to a guard? Should I boldly go where few men have gone before?

Still, the "deadly force" thing bothered me. So I decided the obvious answer, since I couldn't get to them, was to get them to come to me. "Photography in this area is prohibited," said another sign, so I began taking pictures, walking about as the video cameras followed me. "That'll bring a response from the security men," I thought.

I was wrong. No one appeared. But I didn't venture across the line.

"They wouldn't have shot you," said Clark when I rejoined him later. "But they'd certainly have arrested you if you'd gone in. Your film would have been confiscated, maybe your camera as well, and you'd have been fined $600. It's an expensive lesson; no one strays in twice."

Clark and the other residents of Rachel, the closest town to Area 51, know that "something" is going on in the wasteland of scrub, cactus and sagebrush to the west. They've all seen enough strange sights through the years.

Many of these can be explained rationally. For instance, there are the flares, which visitors - the ones from this planet, that is - mistake for UFOs. And this is probably one of the areas where top-secret craft, such as the U-2 spy plane in the 1950s and the B-2 Stealth bomber in the '80s, were tested.

DEFY RATIONAL EXPLANATION
"In silhouette, or coming straight at you, the Stealth could easily be mistaken for a flying saucer," Clark concedes.

Still, there have been other sightings that defy rational explanation. And the tight security and the government's veil of silence only serve to fuel the rumors.

People claim they have spotted craft moving at tremendous speeds. One theory is that the so-called NASP is being tried out. NASP stands for National Aerospace Plane, a craft that, if it exists, is able to take off like a bullet from a super-long runway, fly into space and return to earth. (The main runway in Area 51 is said to be about 8 km long.)

But the most prevalent story - and one that was used in the blockbuster movie Independence Day, about an invasion of Earth by, that's right, creatures from space - is that the military is testing captured flying saucers here.

Clark, 50, who moved here from California to write a book on astronomy, spends long nights out in the desert around Area 51 and he has seen some strange sights. "The most spectacular sighting occurred in February, 1995 when I saw a yellowish, pulsating disc in the sky. I thought at first it was a flare.

"It hovered about 30 ft. from the ground, then suddenly shot to the right at tremendous speed for about one and a half seconds, stopped cold for five seconds, then vanished.

"Next day, I measured the distance it had gone in that 1.5 seconds. It must have been traveling at 9,000 miles an hour!"

That means, he says, that it must have been a space ship, a craft piloted not by aliens but by earthlings. Clark, and many others, believe that - just like in Independence Day - the military is rebuilding crashed space ships. Clark calls it "reverse engineering": studying an advanced technology to convert it to current needs.

Adds Clark: "I'm a regular guy; I'm not a nut." And, for what it's worth, I have to put it on the record that he is a rational man, not one to "see" spacemen at every turn. In his 30-plus years of UFO-watching, he says he has experienced only six sightings "that I could not identify."

The theory that what is happening at Area 51 - or "Dreamland," as the locals call it - involves human attempts to fly alien ships, fits in with the claims made by Bob Lazar, who worked there as a physicist in the 1980s.

"I worked on a disc about 15 ft. high and 52 ft. in diameter," he said in a television interview. "It had the appearance of brushed stainless steel or brushed aluminum. Inside there were tiny seats - much too small to handle comfortably an average-size human. The craft's reactor was fueled by an element not found on Earth. It was a copper orange color and extremely heavy."

Lazar, who has passed lie detector tests over his claims, also said he knew of nine UFOs that had come into America's hands.

Clark, for one, believes him. But he's more cynical on the question of reported alien abductions, the stuff of a thousand tabloid headlines. Says Clark: "Until I speak to someone who has seen an alien I won't believe it."

A much less rational UFO-logist, for my money, is Merlin Merlin,3 the self-styled "ambassador from the planet Draconis," who turns up every now and then at the Little A'Le'Inn ("little alien," get it?), the bar/restaurant in Rachel just 15 km from the edge of the base.

STARFLEET COMMUNICATOR
Gadfly Merlin, 6 ft. 4 in. and bearded, claims to have been born on a flying saucer and you'll find him regularly talking into his starfleet communicator - which looks a lot like a cell phone - calling, he says, his emperor on the Mother Ship. (Cynics say he's really a guy called David Solomon, from California.)

The goings on around Area 51 have drawn UFO-watchers to Rachel for years and this year the state decided to cash in on the extraterrestrial interest and give the region a boost. It designated Route 375, the road that runs past the eastern boundary of the installation, "The Extraterrestrial Highway."

Rachel (population 100) is the only town on the 150-km long stretch of two-lane blacktop and the Little A'Le'Inn is the gathering place for locals and people who come here hoping to see things that go whoosh in the night.

The day I arrived, owners Joe and Pat Travis were getting ready to put up a new sign, especially for the hoped-for ET visitors. "Self Parking," it said, beneath a picture of a flying saucer.

Joe and Pat have got fully into the alien game. A sign at the door says "Welcome UFOs and Crews" and inside you can drink a "Beam me up, Scotty" cocktail (Jim Beam bourbon, Scotch whisky and 7-Up) or munch on an "alien burger."

The visitors love it. You could say that with this and the lights in the sky, things are looking up in Rachel.

As well as the inn, the Travises run a seven-room motel and an RV park. The bar is decorated with all sorts of alien doo-dads - pennants, posters, a papier mâché head of a hollow-eyed being - and you can buy videos, T-shirts, books (including the Area 51 Handbook, by the aforementioned Chuck Clark) and other knick-knacks by the dozen. Photos of discs and other strange objects in the sky, many taken in this area, fill the walls.

CAR IGNITION FAILED
For Joe and Pat, this isn't just a gimmick. They are believers. Says Joe: "It's conceited to think we're the only ones in the universe. I have always kept an open mind about these things. We're a small grain of sand on a very large beach."

Pat became a convert one cold night in 1989. She was in the bar "when suddenly a 4-inch wide beam of light shot into the room through the centre of the back door. I felt there was something here, an energy, a presence."

Pat added: "I called out, 'Make yourself at home. You're welcome here. If you can come through that door you can open a can of beer. Help yourself.' "

Adds Rachel resident Pauline Croft: "This is a weird place."

She could be right. The second evening I was in the Inn bar a visitor came in and announced that his car ignition had failed on the hill coming down the ET Highway from the Queen City summit. "My lights went on and off and the engine sputtered," he said.

"It happens all the time. Something sucks the energy right out of the battery," said a local. "You've just had a Close Encounter of the Second Kind."

Most of the civilian workers in Dreamland - about 1,500, according to Clark and other close observers - are flown in every day from Las Vegas in a fleet of Boeing 737s and sometimes some of them stay over in the area. A man drinking in the little A'Le'Inn one night admitted that he worked in the tunnel city. "Can you tell me what goes on there?" a local asked him.

"I could tell you," said the worker.

"But then I'd have to kill you."

He was just kidding. Wasn't he?


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