The Groom Lake Desert Rat: Issue 23

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The Groom Lake Desert Rat

 · 9 months ago

Issue #23. March 17, 1995

In this issue...

• Tales Of The Test Site, Part 2: The Story of Alfred
• Campbell Convicted... And Appeals
• Campbell Enemy List Grows
• Flame Of The Month
• Mt. Sterling Hike April 8
• Aviation Week On Black Projects
• Intel Bitties
• Area 51 Maps Seen On KLAS-TV

Tales Of The Test Site, Part 2

The Story Of "Alfred"

In this and future issues of the Desert Rat, we may withhold the names of former workers at the "Test Site" and refer to them instead by clever pseudonyms. We were thinking of using the names of birds--"Falcon," "Condor," "Hawk," etc.--but that's been done already. Perhaps we could name our sources after fish--"Shark," "Barracuda," "Flounder"--or maybe flowers or baked goods. In the end, we have decided to forget about such themes and let each person choose his own pseudonym or follow the one that has already been used in the press.You may think we are hiding the identities of these former workers to protect them from retribution by the government. There is some concern in this regard but not much. Most of our sources are either retired or possess only secondhand evidence that isn't much of a threat in itself. None of these sources can supply any "proof" of a government UFO cover-up; they can only contribute pieces to the hypothetical model we are constructing of how a cover-up might work if there was one. Threatening or otherwise suppressing these witnesses would probably be more trouble to the government than it is worth and could backfire if the press found out.

The main reason we are withholding the names of these witnesses is to protect them from ufologists. Credulous UFO believers and the charlatans and tabloid TV shows that pander to them have done more to discredit the UFO field and discourage witnesses than any government threats or disinformation. Once a UFO witness's name becomes widely publicized, the bloodsucking believers descend. Nominally, they come to seek information and "ask questions" of the witness, but most believers are not prepared to listen to the answers. Some show up unannounced on the witness's doorstep, while an unlisted phone number is no barrier to their late-night phone calls. The believers lecture the witness and try to get him to confirm their own view of UFOs. A witness with a really good story can become tabloid fodder overnight. If he refuses to talk to the tabloid shows, they can track him down anyway--like Encounters did with mystery source "Guardian" in its premier. "What is he trying to hide?" the correspondent asks, as the witness runs from the camera.

(Here at the Research Center, our phone number is listed, and we get our share of strange late-night calls. Still, we don't have the same problem as the witnesses because we claim no UFO experiences, while our carefully cultivated reputation as a government agent keeps most of the wackos away.)

The media circus that defines ufology today is a shallow melodrama that can deal only in stereotypes and cartoon conspiracies. It cannot handle the subtleties of a really good witness, who is either eaten alive, like Bob Lazar was, or appears on the screen only in shadow and is quickly forgotten. Tabloid TV shows stomp through the witness's story like a ballerina in army boots. That's not to blame the people who make such shows, many of whom are our friends, but it is the nature of television that it can only convey pictures and sound bites. The subtle connections of a complex story are always lost in translation to the tube, and without rigorous adherence to journalistic ethics, good witnesses become indistinguishable from blatant frauds.

"Alfred" In The Shadows

The most credible witnesses don't claim to know the whole story, only a limited piece of it, so they can't compete on TV with the photogenic UFO "experts" like Sean Morton who can offer sweeping conclusions on just about everything. One such limited source, voice and face disguised, was shown on the July 1994 segment of Encounters on Area 51 [DR#10]. Labeled on the screen as "Alfred," he was allocated only two brief sound bites:On alien craft...

Alfred: "They were saucer shaped, kind of rounded on the bottom. They were pretty prevalent at the Test Site during those years."

On alien bodies...

Narrator: "A physicist who worked at Area 51 allegedly told his former assistant an even more bizarre story."Alfred: "He said there had been an alien--or he didn't call it an alien, but he said a small bodied creature is the term he used--that had survived the Roswell crash. And I said where is he, what happened to him? He said, well, as far as he knew back then, they took him out to Area 51."

The evil UFO skeptic Phil Klass, who receives this newsletter in exchange for his, would quickly point out that at the time of the alleged Roswell crash, 1947, there was no Area 51. The Nevada Test Site was founded only in 1951, while the Groom Lake Base was established in the mid 1950s as a testing ground for the U-2 spy plane. Klass would thus dismiss Alfred's anonymous testimony as fantasy or fraud, and we wouldn't blame him.In the shadows, Alfred was forgettable and easily upstaged by the flamboyant "Agent X" and ubiquitous Glenn Campbell. However, we know more about Alfred than the show even hinted at. We consider him the only part of the Encounters broadcast that wasn't glossy packaging. He first contacted us after reading our earliest Rats on Compuserve, and we and a colleague interviewed him at length. We mentioned him to George Knapp who then filmed an interview with him for his latest Best Evidence series. Encounters got the clips from Knapp. Alfred's sound bites, as shown, are indeed meaningless. Learning the story behind Alfred's statements makes them much more interesting.

Alfred At The Test Site

The following is based on Alfred's recollections after three decades. Alfred himself has reviewed this edition of the Rat and finds the account to be accurate.Alfred came to work at the Atomic Test Site in 1961 and left about 1964. He was a technical photographer for the atomic bomb tests-- or "shots" as they were known. Although he was only in his early 20s at the time, he obtained a "High Q" clearance, and his photography work gave him fairly wide access to the Test Site. However, many areas, like Groom Lake, were still off limits to him except under special circumstances.

Alfred was assigned to Otto Krause, one of the brilliant German scientists that came to the U.S. after the Second World War. Needless to say, Krause is now deceased and can't be interviewed. Krause worked for Lawrence Livermore Laboratories and was Project Physicist for some of the blasts at the Test Site. Much of both Alfred's job and Krause's involved sitting around and waiting for the shots. Many long nights were spent playing cards, and a range of topics, both shallow and profound, were discussed across the table.

Alfred had grown up in Farmington, in northwestern New Mexico, which was a UFO hotbed in the late 1940s. Around 1949, when he was 8 or 9, Alfred had a daylight sighting from his school yard of a formation of flying disks. Many others in Farmington also saw the disks, and Alfred remembers Air Force officers coming to his house to ask him and his father about what they had seen. Also about this time, there were reports of a UFO crash at nearby Aztec, New Mexico. The Farmington Daily News reported the event in one of its issues. There had been a pinhole leak in the craft, the story said, and three small bodies had been recovered, three-to-four feet in stature, charred to a crisp. The craft itself was reported in good condition. The next day, the News recanted its report and called the crash a hoax.

Some dozen years later, probably in the summer of 1962, Alfred and two others were playing Hearts with Krause at the Project Physicist's trailer in Area 9. The following is from an interview with Alfred by our colleague...

Alfred: So we got to talking one night at a card game and I was telling Otto about growing up in Farmington and seeing those UFOs when I was a kid and about the one that crashed at Aztec and was in the paper, and he laughed and said 'Yeah,' that he was at White Sands at that time. He had been assigned down there and he was telling us about the one that crashed at Roswell. Now this was in the early 60s that he was telling me this.

Alfred says this was the first time he had heard of Roswell, and he did not hear of it again until Stanton Friedman resurrected the topic in the 1970s.

But anyway, Otto said that one had crashed in Roswell and one had crashed at Aztec. He said they were both brought to White Sands and put in a hangar there. The aliens he never saw. He talked to people that had seen the bodies and evidently one supposedly lived, and they took him out to Area 51. But Otto never saw the alien, at least at the time I was working for him.Interviewer: But he said they took the guy out to Area 51?

Alfred: Well he said they eventually brought him out to the Test Site, I mean we all knew where... I don't recall he said exactly Area 51, that's the only area they would have brought him, being the military, because the military controls Area 51.

Alfred's Encounters sound bite about Area 51 now makes more sense. Krause said only that the aliens were eventually brought to the Test Site; Area 51 was Alfred's assumption. Since Area 51 was a place you didn't talk about, Alfred couldn't have known its history at the time. Krause also didn't say when the alien had been brought to the Test Site; it could have been after 1951.

Otto said it took them a long time to get into the thing and figure out how it worked. That was what was the classified part of the UFO, the mechanism that powered it. That was more classified than the atomic bomb. But the UFO itself was never classified. And I guess that's what Project Bluebook and all that stuff was about, to make a big hoax out of it all so people would be embarrassed to report that stuff or feel like they were nuts if they did.

The propulsion or navigation of the craft was based on magnetic principals, which Krause tried to explain to Alfred in highly simplified terms, apparently because of its highly secret nature. The vessels that crashed were only capable of traveling within the atmosphere, because their operation depended in some way on the earth's magnetic field. Alfred recalls Krause using the word "plasma" in connection with the operation of the craft, but Alfred doesn't recall the exact reference. According to Krause, the human understanding of these alien craft was sufficient that government had, by 1962, been able to reproduce them. The human- built versions were big enough to carry an atomic weapon.

But Otto was laughing. What they had done they had made a flying nuclear warhead out of the UFO technology. The only problem was they couldn't go to outer space with it, because evidently these devices went to and from a mother ship around a planet and therefore had no interplanetary travel capability. They run off of a magnetic energy, the way he explained it, and I asked, "How do they go east and west then?" He said, "Well, you know what happens when you take a magnet and reverse it? It flips sideways." Well, that's how they can control where they go.

What Otto said then made a great impression on Alfred at the time....

Otto laughed and he said, 'You know all these rockets that are in these silos (back in the early 60s), you wait. In a few years, they won't be there.' And we said 'why is that?' And he said, 'Because, we won't need the technology. All we're doing is the public thinks we need the technology for defense, but we only want the technology to go to outer space. As soon as we develop the rocket technology we'll pull them out of [the silos].' Sure enough, the biggest majority of those [have been pulled out]... they still have some, the ICBMs, I guess, but for what reason, I still never understood that. I mean when you have the UFO, why do you need rockets? But maybe they can't always rely on UFOs. There's some problems with them. Some atmospheric type things affect it, there's some magnetic things that affect it in certain parts of the world, stuff like that.

In other words, as Alfred explained it to us (on the phone just now), the whole notion of using rockets for defense was, according to Krause, a sham. We didn't need rockets for defense, because we had human-built flying saucers, capable of fantastic moves, to carry nuclear warheads to any target on earth. However, since the saucers could not leave the earth's atmosphere, we still needed rockets to get into space. Making the public think we needed rockets for defense assured that Congress would continue to fund rocket research.And if any of our readers are having any trouble with this, we suggest they repeat to themselves, "It's only a model. Myth. Folklore. It's only a model."

West Texas Sightings

While working at the Test Site, around 1963, Alfred said he read articles in the newspapers about UFO sightings and unusual events in West Texas. Alfred's in-laws, who lived near Lubbock, Texas, had sent him an article from a local paper (perhaps the "Avalanche Journal"), and there was also mention of the sightings in the Las Vegas papers.At another late-night card game with Krause, this time at the test control center "CP-1," Alfred asked him about the West Texas sightings. Krause spoke as though he had some inside information. The events he said, were caused by the testing of a three-person craft.

Alfred: Now they did build [a manned craft] when I was working at the Test Site, because it was a big joke we were all laughing about one night playing cards. Evidently they built one that three guys rode in. They took it down to West Texas because of the magnetic lines being true and accurate over in that West Texas area, and it being so flat. They tested it over there one night, or a couple nights or whatever, and the problem was it couldn't maneuver nearly as well as the other one and the magnetic energy it generated was so great that anything it came close to was temporarily magnetized. All the newspaper reports said that people saw it, their cars stalled, their lights went dim, it knocked out the power of two little towns, and I think they must have abandoned that idea shortly after that, because nothing else was ever said or heard about it. I do know that the one that everybody saw in West Texas was the manned one that couldn't maneuver like the little one could.Interviewer: Would that have been in the mid 60s or late 60s?

Alfred: It would have been 62 or 63, probably 63, that it was seen over West Texas. I forget the towns... seems like it was like, oh, southwest of Levelland, in that area. I recognized at the time some of the towns, but I've forgotten now what towns it was they saw it. Even the Sheriff of one town reported seeing it.

Alfred's Own Sightings

Alfred had no trouble believing the stories told by Krause, because he himself had seen flying saucers operating around the Test Site. While on a mesa at the north end of the Atomic Test Site, he could look down and see them flying above the Groom lake bed. Other times, he saw them operating over Yucca Flat, the main nuclear testing area.

Interviewer: Did you ever see more than one at a time?Alfred: Yes, two or three. I think I saw four one time, manuevering over Groom Lake. Everytime I ever saw them, there was at least two or three.

Interviewer: Did they have a shape to them or were you too far away to see any shape?

Alfred: No, they had a shape. It was kind of like what you see in the pictures people have taken.

Interviewer: Like a flat saucer? Or a really tall type saucer?

Alfred: No, not real tall. Like a bubble, a little dome thing in the center on the top, it sloped up and made this little dome and then sloped back down. And the bottom kind of came... let's see, what angle would that have been... it would have been about a 65 degree slope....

Interviewer: Coming up from the bottom?

Alfred: Well, 65 if you... let's see... more up towards the bottom of it, so it was about a 65 degree slope for a little ways, then it kind of curved down a little and made kind of an arc type thing at the very bottom of it. At least that's the way it looked in the distance the different times I saw them. I never saw one super, super close. I've seen them in Yucca Flats at night a couple of times, when I was driving back into Mercury....

Interviewer: When you saw these things out there, did you get a good look at them in the air? Or were they just lights at night?

Alfred: Mostly at night. One time I saw some in the afternoon when it was still daylight.

Interviewer: Maneuvering in the air, or on the ground?

Alfred: Above the ground, just out above the lake bed. I mean, they would maneuver in the air, too. You'd see them every once in a while in the air. It was incredible what they could do. They could be out of sight going straight up in about three or four seconds. I mean totally out of sight, where with binoculars you couldn't see them. It was amazing the thrust that thing had.

(Binoculars are normally banned at the Test Site, but Alfred says that the photographers were allowed to carry them.)

Interviewer: Did you ever hear a sonic boom when they were moving around real fast? Any noise off in the distance?Alfred: Yeah, to a degree. I don't think they ever really ran them in a straight line, like that fast out there. Now I've seen them go out of sight going up. I don't know how fast that was, but it had to be awful damn fast. A lot faster than anything I'd ever seen move. You had to be really quick to keep them in the binoculars.

And then again, I never understood the purpose of that, what they were doing, going up and down. Maybe those were something else? Who knows? I just don't know. I was a naive, young kid at that time. A lot of things I saw out there overwhelmed me at first, then you get used to it and it's like 'Big deal.'...

Alfred describes the glow of the craft at night as "like a fluorescent light but maybe a touch more green than that."

Alfred: A little green added to it, maybe. Just a touch. There again, colors and things fool you in the desert. Especially in the summer. I don't know that we ever sat up there and watched them or observed them in the winter time.Interviewer: These were all one color? They didn't have like a color on the top and a color on the bottom?

Alfred: Oh, no... no. I mean, they weren't multiple colors, if that's what you're asking. I mean the ones I saw in the daytime looked kind of like the skin of an airplane.

Interviewer: Kind of a lustrous sheen?

Alfred: Yeah, like a jet, a military jet, an aluminum color. Now I don't know whether they had some lights that shined on that at night and made that glow or if the glow was just a manifestation of friction. I used to assume that's what it was, that it was just a friction thing, but I could have been wrong....

The thing with the UFOs out there, the funny thing about them, is they were never classified. So we got to talking about this one night [with Otto Krause], because even Red badge people, non- cleared people, would see UFOs on the Test Site at times. Especially if you worked at night much out there, you couldn't help but see them....

Interviewer: So the discussion [with Krause] was just a one time discussion?

Alfred: Yes, the one thing about all of what I discussed [about Kraus's description of the craft] happened at one night playing cards.

Interviewer: It made quite an impression though.

Alfred: Oh yeah, I mean because I was already interested in it. There were other times we talked about it, but not to the detail we talked about it that night. It probably was a two hour conversation or longer. It was from one dry run to another, other than a period of time we got something to eat, so it was probably three hours. We had to break the game up to do a dry run. That's when the conversation ended. Then we talked about it a couple times after that, different things about it, but not to the point Otto discussed it that night, because there happened to be another physicist in that card game that was interested in all that, too, that had evidently done some side work or something to do with that.

Alfred said that he had kept his story secret for many years.

Alfred: Once I left the Test Site, for one thing, I had to sign stuff when I left. I couldn't leave the country for ten years. I couldn't go to Mexico or Canada. I couldn't have got a visa or passport to go anywhere for ten years. I eventually did go on a trip to Rome and Israel, but that was like twenty years later.You know, I would never talk about this, for years and years after I left the Test Site. I told VERY few people. My wife knew about it, of course she knew about it at the time. A couple of really close friends I had shared it with, but to share it with anybody else, no I wouldn't have done that. I wouldn't have done that until after I had seen a couple of those TV things on UFO cover-ups.

The one I saw was amazing. I just sat there amazed because they had two guys on there in disguise...

Interviewer: This was the one a few years ago, UFO Cover-Up Live.

Alfred: Condor and someone else... and they were talking about the Roswell thing and Area 51, and I was amazed that these guys had the guts to come on there and do that. Because what they were saying was basically the same thing Otto had said, only he'd said it twenty years earlier. They had more information... about what the alien had done, making a deal with the aliens to come and go from out there, which wouldn't surprise me.

Alfred said he later tried to contact some of the people he remembered at the card game. Alfred also tried to locate Otto Krause, who he found had died in 1990.

I knew there was another photographer, but I couldn't remember who it was. When I got a hold of Vern [a former co-worker], I asked him, 'Were you at that card game when Otto was telling us all that stuff that night?' He said 'Yeah.' Of course Vern was one of these guys that all the different stuff he saw going on out there, he took it with a grain of salt. He was really into his own thing. He wanted to be a master photographer and all this stuff. His head was in a different area. He told me when I talked to him out in Vegas when I finally found him, that he probably should have paid more attention to a lot of the stuff going out there. Over the years, he just kind of pushed it to the back of his mind, because he was always interested in other stuff. He did his work, went home, and forgot about it.Interviewer: Do you know if Otto ever went over to Area 51, or was he always at the Test Site?

Alfred: All I ever saw him was at the Test Site, but several of those guys, some of the electronickers I worked for, that set up the traces, they were support from EG&G;, some of them were. They would occasionally go to Area 51, but we really never discussed... I mean discussing Area 51 out there, back in those days, was kind of something you didn't discuss. If you had to go over there, you went over there. Other than that, it was like a different world.

Analysis

Prosecutor Phil Klass could make easy work of Alfred's testimony. He would object to Krause's stories: "Hearsay, your honor." And he could come up with his usual repertoire of responses to Alfred's own reported sightings. We don't expect anyone to believe Alfred's tale as reported herein or take it as proof of the UFO cover-up. As we said in DR#22, we are not seeking proof at present. We are only seeking to build a model--to understand the myth, if you prefer-- of what this cover-up is supposed to consist of.What we get from Alfred's testimony are certain elements of the story which emerge again and again in the folklore: First, there were multiple crashes of alien craft in the late 40s. (Presumably because this was when we first started experimenting with very powerful radar capable of frying birds in mid-air and screwing up delicate machinery.) At least one live alien was recovered. The craft were successfully reproduced by the government (a remarkable feat for the early 1960s). Magnetic principals play a role in the operation of the craft. The "Test Site" was used for saucer testing and was where the alien was eventually housed. UFO technology was highly classified, but in a peculiar way different from other secrets.

Alfred's story is consistent with Knapp's account [DR#22] of what a "member of a prominent Nevada family" told him: that there was a live "Ross Perot" alien held at the Test Site since 1953. Alfred's story also connects to the alleged Roswell and Aztec crashes, which have been widely reported in the UFO literature.

However, there are some apparent inconsistencies between Alfred's story and Bob Lazar's. (Lazar is the technician who claims to have worked with alien craft at "Area S-4" south of Groom Lake in 1988 and 1989.) Alfred says the propulsion system was magnetic; Lazar's was based on gravity waves. Alfred says he was told that the government had built working reproductions of alien craft before 1962; Lazar believes that the government was nowhere near reproducing the craft that he worked with in 1989. We could reconcile these stories by saying that Alfred and Lazar were talking about two different types of alien craft in government possession--the Model T and the DeLorean--but this greatly complicates our model.

Alas, life itself is complicated, and it is rare that any one model perfectly fits. The story of the blind men and the elephant applies: One of them grasps the trunk and says the elephant is like a snake; the other feels the leg and says it is like a tree.... If our target model is a rich and interesting one, and we are looking at it only through the few distorted pinholes available to us, then we would expect some apparent inconsistencies at first, but they may evaporate when we see more of the big picture.

There are three UFO propulsion mechanisms we have heard of that are substantial enough to be debated by physicists (i.e. not powered by love or psychic energy): (1) the gravity wave model proposed by Lazar which warps space around the craft; (2) the magnetic model suggested by Alfred, in which the magnetic field of the earth is somehow involved; and (3) microwave energy, which is used to generate a plasma field around the craft, allowing it to slip through the air without friction. It is conceivable that all three systems could be employed in your modern flying saucer, just like in a modern car where it takes more than just the engine to make the vehicle go. Perhaps gravity waves levitate the craft; microwaves eliminate friction and magnetic fields move the craft around.

Anyway, the technical parts of our UFO cover-up model deserve some leniency, because obviously the alien technology is going to be many years in advance of our own and we may not have the tools and prerequisite knowledge to understand it. Many times in our human history, establishment scientists have called something "impossible" only to be proven wrong. A round earth, air flight, space flight and plate tectonics were all dismissed as fraud or fantasy once, and another century or two of scientific development will probably yield even greater surprises.

[To be continued...]

Campbell Convicted... And Appeals

To no one's great surprise, Glenn Campbell was convicted at his trial on March 3 on misdemeanor obstruction charges [DR#12,19,21]. He was sentenced to a $315 fine plus five days community service at the Rachel Senior Center. Campbell's neighbor Miss Edith, the Senior Center director and its only active member, was tickled when she heard the news. She plans to put Campbell to work painting the Senior Center building, which doubles as a thrift store and community center. Alas, Campbell has now initiated an appeal, so the work probably won't get done for at least a year, if at all.Campbell was brilliant in his defense, occupying the court for four hours. He strutted and gesticulated before the judge and empty jury box, looking like a scene out of L.A. Law with his laptop computer and smart business suit (purchased at the Mormon thrift store in Vegas, $38 including shoes). He looked so good in fact that it was fortunate that Justice of the Peace Nola Holton had excused herself from the trial: In a repressed, Freudian sort of way, she would have had to destroy him.

Justice of the Peace Ronald Niman, imported from Ely for the occasion, ruled in favor of the prosecution on nearly all issues of contention and disallowed most of Campbell's defenses, but he acknowledged upon sentencing that Campbell was not a bad person, just that he had done a bad thing. The message conveyed was that if a officer of the law tells you to do something, you have to do it, regardless of the circumstances.

The highlight of the trial was the showing of a thirteen minute video tape of Campbell's arrest and the encounter between the news crew and the deputy leading up to it. One of our legal advisors described the tape as "Rodney King all over again." While the security forces at the Groom Lake base continue to withhold most of KNBC's video tapes, they did release just enough of it to be used against Campbell at his trial. Campbell is proud of those thirteen minutes, and the Research Center will now sell anyone a copy of the tape for $8 plus the usual postage.

Barred from discussing his prior lost film cases, the use of a warrant in the ABC case or the policy of the Sheriff's Department of turning over tapes and film to the Cammo Dudes without any paper trail, Campbell was limited to arguments concerning obstruction and warrantless search and seizure. He presented several important constitutional case precedents indicating that the test for "willfulness" was much more rigorous in obstruction charges than it was in other crimes. The prosecution had to prove not just that Campbell pushed down the door locks intentionally, but that he did it with "evil intent," an act done in deliberate bad faith and not just an assertion of perceived rights or a misunderstanding of the law. Prosecutor Steve Dobrescu argued that Campbell had demonstrated evil intent by pushing down the door locks at all.

The Groom Lake base was never mentioned by the prosecution. Deputy Lamoreaux's definition of "probable cause" in seizing the KNBC tapes was that he saw the camera pointed toward the Nellis Bombing and Gunnery Range, which occupies an area the size of Connecticut. Since this area includes many mountain ranges visible for miles, by Lamoreaux's definition nearly any picture taken within a vast swath of Southern Nevada--including several towns and four major highways--would have been subject to warrantless seizure.

Such arguments, of course, were lost to the judge, who has no legal training. The one and only qualification that a Justice of the Peace needs in Nevada is that he be elected by the people--not always the best test of ability. On appeal, the case will be reviewed by a "real judge" with a law degree.

For those who are unfamiliar with the law, an appeal is not a re- trial. The defense and prosecution present no new arguments and generally do not appear again in court. An appeal is based solely on the written record of what was presented at the original trial. Thus, part of Campbell's job in court, even when fighting a losing battle, was to put the issues on the record for the invisible appeals judge who would eventually read the case. Campbell did a fairly good job of that. He overlooked some items, but he left more than enough issues on the record to form the basis for appeal.

An appeal is a long and, for most people, costly process, and few have the resources to pursue it. This is why Lincoln County officials can continue to behave as a law unto themselves. Although Campbell is pursuing an appeal, he is doing it mainly for his own education--because a gadfly like himself is bound to face legal conflicts again and again in his career, and it is important to understand the process. Campbell has no illusions about reforming Lincoln County. Lincoln County government is a reflection of its voters: poor, isolationist and with limited education. Face it, this is not a place where any talented young person or ambitious professional wants to hang around. The D.A., for example, only earns about $39,000 a year, which in the legal profession is not a salary to attract the best and brightest (hence the D.A. ran unopposed in the latest elections).

Law is a powerful tool, but there are many things it can't do. Success in any legal case, or even a dozen cases, won't create competence or morality where there isn't any. Lincoln County, like any underdeveloped planet in the Star Trek universe, needs be left alone to seek its own level.

Campbell Enemy List Grows

Long simmering hostilities between Rachel gadfly Glenn Campbell and Little A'Le'Inn owners Pat and Joe Travis just down the road have finally erupted into the open. Campbell has accused the Travis's of producing a cheap rip-off of the copyrighted Area 51 cloth patch designed by himself and aviation journalist James Goodall. On the Little A'Le'Inn patch, some of the wording has been rearranged and a flying saucer has been added in the sky, but the scene of a plane taking off from the Groom Lake runway is unmistakably identical. The patch is produced on flimsy material and sold for $4.50, which is at least a $3.50 profit for the Travis's. Campbell equates it to a small business taking Mickey Mouse, changing his name and selling his likeness for profit. The Disney people wouldn't stand for that, and neither will Campbell.

Upon hearing of the infringement, Campbell immediately withdrew the Inn's best-selling item and the last bit of sanity in the place, his Area 51 Viewer's Guide. It will now be sold only in Downtown Rachel: at the Research Center and the gas station next door. In the latest edition of the Viewer's Guide--version 3.00, just published--Campbell finally released a report about the Little A'Le'Inn that he had previously withheld in the interests of community relations. Following is Campbell's latest review of the Inn, at milepoint LN 9.7 in the "Highway 375 Milepost Log" in the Viewer's Guide...

LITTLE A'LE'INN. (Pronounced "Little Alien.") A tiny restaurant/bar/motel featured in the Weekly World News: "Space Aliens Hang Out at Nevada Bar" (See appendix.) A special part of the world where all the UFO and conspiracy stories are real and every alien is accepted for who he claims to be. I rarely go there myself, having long ago parted ways with the management, Pat and Joe Travis. It is a fun stop for newcomers, but you wouldn't want to live there. (I did for a few months until thrown out by Joe in a drunken rage.) It is also the only food and lodging on Highway 375, and a good deal on both counts.SERVICES. The Inn (or "Bar" as it is known locally) is open 7 days from 8 am to 10 pm. Food is "the best in town": Alien Burgers, etc. Breakfasts and full dinners available all day (until the kitchen closes at 9 pm). Full dinners range from $5.00 to $8.00. Lodging: about 12 motel rooms in mobile homes out back at $25 single, $30 double. Rooms are very simple: Each mobile home contains 2 or 3 rooms sharing a bathroom and a refrigerator. There is a VCR in each room (or building) and the Inn has a collection of entertainment tapes that can be borrowed by guests for free. Also has some RV hookups at $8 per night. There are pay phones both inside and out. Rest rooms. Laundry facilities. Visa/MasterCard accepted. Phone: (702) 729-2515. Mail Address: HCR Box 45, Rachel, NV 89001. (The "HCR" stands for "Highway Contract Route.")

ON DISPLAY. UFO memorabilia and photos are prominently displayed on the walls, a sort of mini-museum but without much explanation. Includes shots of reported UFOs taken in the vicinity of the Black Mailbox. Most can be explained as military flares, internal lens reflections or routine aerial lights taken with a shaking camera. On one wall are autographed photos of UFO luminaries and hangers-on. (The photos of the hangers-on are usually bigger and prettier.) Bob Lazar, George Knapp and John Lear are represented here alongside TWO publicity photos of a charlatan named Sean Morton, one with him sitting under a pyramid below the caption "World's Foremost UFO Researcher." A few UFO photos on the wall are interesting, but they were not taken in Nevada and do not include sufficient info to find out more.

AMBIANCE. At the Inn, Pat Travis does the work, aided by a growing army of locals. Joe Travis tends bar and provides political commentary and analysis. Any discussion of UFOs eventually turns to the secret "One World Government" that is plotting to take away our guns. The Inn is generally not the place to pick up reliable information about UFOs or the local area. Joe and Pat rarely leave the inn except to go to Vegas and have never visited the viewpoints overlooking Groom Lake. Some visitors, following Joe's instructions, have wandered across the military border and been arrested.

PERSONAL NOTES. Prior to the UFO craze, the place was called the "Rachel Bar and Grill," and it had a series of owners, none of whom could make it work. When the Travis's bought it around 1988, it was a failing establishment in a dying town. The Travis's should have failed, too, but like a miracle from the skies the UFO watchers started arriving. When the Lazar story hit in late 1989, the inn was flooded with city slickers with fat wallets looking for flying saucers, but the boom gradually faded when the Lazar story faltered and the UFO community began to lose interest.

When I first arrived in town in Feb. 1993, the Inn was again dying. I wrote the first editions of the Viewer's Guide and began to apply the science of public relations to the secret Groom Lake base, which I felt cried out for attention. Soon, the Inn was booming again, and I felt good about it. For seven months, I lived in a camper in an RV site behind the Inn, paid my rent and got along fine with Pat and Joe, referring to them as "Ma and Pa." I felt that we were serving a mutual interest. Then, on Aug. 28, 1993, at 10:30 pm, I was awakened by someone pounding on the door of my camper. It was Joe, very drunk.

"Glenn Campbell, you get the fuck out of here."

I jumped out of bed, knowing the score immediately. Joe was a man with a lot of guns and was probably carrying one, so he was not to be taken lightly. "I'm going, I'm going," I said through the door. "Any particular reason?"

"Because I hate you, you bald faced fucker."

I couldn't argue with that logic. Joe graciously gave me fifteen minutes to leave the compound. I quickly threw on some clothes and got away from the Inn as quickly as possible. After several days in the desert, making cautious forays to town, I realized that the situation was terminal, and I decided to move into a mobile home at the other end of Rachel. This became the Area 51 Research Center. I knew that Joe's blow-up was a short- lived occurrence, triggered by whatever trivial incident sets drunks off. What sealed my expulsion was the change in Pat. After Joe's explosion, Pat came to Joe's defense and over the next weeks assembled the retroactive reasoning for her husband's actions. "Glenn was trying to take over our business," she said over and over to anyone within earshot. My own explanation is different: I had become part of the family and thus became subject to the self-destructive impulses that some families have.

I very rarely visit the Inn any more, and people often ask me why I don't patch things up with Pat and Joe. I had learned, from prior personal experiences, that the only way to deal with an abusive situation was to remove myself from it, but my absence in turn seemed to generate even more rage from the Inn--about my alleged sexual preferences (running the gamut of children and beasts), alleged employment as a government agent and whatever other insinuations could be offered without proof. These reports, in turn, were passed immediately to me by residents and visitors. The Travis's are simple people who do not understand marketing or diplomacy and have no comprehension that the publicity I have cultivated has played any role in their current success. As reported in the Weekly World News--accurately it seems--the Inn is protected by an alien named Archibald who only Pat can sense. Any good fortune the Inn experiences must be the result of Archibald's intervention or the Travis's own native charm and therefore must have nothing to do with Campbell. In this situation, as in any other dysfunctional relationship, I feel that the best thing I can do is get out and stay out.

My separation from the Inn was sealed when the Travis's reproduced, for their own profit, the copyrighted Groom Lake patch that Jim Goodall and myself had designed. (They also pirated the "Area 51 Visitor's Permit" designed by the International UFO Center that I helped them first obtain.) Henceforth, the Area 51 Viewer's Guide and any other products of the Research Center will not be available at the Inn.

And Still Another Enemy

Also added to the Campbell enemy list is daffy astronomer Chuck Clark, who now hangs out at the Inn and is presented by the Travis's as their Area 51 expert. At the slightest suggestion, he proudly shows visitors his snapshots of the secret base, recounts tales of being buzzed by the helicopter and insists that the aliens are time travellers from our future. To his credit, he does know where the border is and does not appear to charge anything to show people around, but we still regard him as the scum of the earth: It was Clark who designed the pirated patch that the Inn is now selling--that is, he rearranged the words, added the saucer and directed the Travis's to a manufacturer. Word around town says that Clark is now working on a rip-off of the Viewer's Guide for sale at the Inn. [Promised in DR#24, unveiled in DR#26]With the above additions and a couple more, we can now publish a cumulative list of Top Ten Declared Enemies of the Research Center (greatest evil first):

1. Sean Morton [DR#15,16,18,20]
2. Gary Schultz [DR#5]
3. Pat & Joe Travis
4. Erik Beckjord [DR#16]
5. Michael Hesemann [DR#18]
6. District Attorney Thomas Dill [DR#19,21]
7. Sheriff Dahl Bradfield [DR#17,18]
8. Chuck Clark
9. radio talk show host Billy Goodman (who invited Campbell on his show only to abuse him)
10. mp%mpa15c@mpa15ab.mv-oc.unisys.com (a nasty on-line dude).

If we had more space, this could be an opportunity for a philosophical essay on the banality of evil, because these people are no doubt loved by their mothers and might be seen as merely incompetent by many observers. Evil is incompetence imposed upon others and inner insecurity expressed by cutting someone else down. In any case, having open, declared enemies can sometimes be a pleasant release. It means you don't have to pretend to be nice. (And there are still six billion people on earth and probably many other souls off-world who are not our declared enemies... yet.)

Flame Of The Month

Email to Glenn Campbell...

"Glen, you are spreading disinformation freely. You are a pawn of the aliens or a secret government agency, something many have suspected for some time. Your purpose is to keep people from finding out too much about UFOs, the government, and the aliens, while appearing to be interested in finding out the truth."-- steve@linex.com
Citizen's Intelligence Access BBS
"UFOs, Alternative Science, Free Energy!"

Editor: This is very disturbing news that we have often heard repeated in Rachel (after people visit the Little A'Le'Inn). If anyone else has further information in this regard, please pass it along to us so we can keep track of Campbell's activities.

Mt. Sterling Hike April 8

The second of our free monthly hikes to viewpoints around the "Test Site" will be a side peak of Mt. Sterling, about 15 miles southeast Mercury, where on a clear day you can see Papoose Dry Lake from the south. The distance is nearly 45 miles, so the view may be less than revealing, but at least you can say you've seen it, and the view all around is spectacular.Papoose Lake is the location where Bob Lazar claims to have worked with alien spacecraft. (Or at least he thinks it was Papoose Lake because he says he traveled in a bus with blacked out windows from Groom Lake and could only determine the location by the clues available to him.) For five years after the Lazar story broke, Papoose Lake was assumed to be unseeable, but tmahood@netcom.com and secret source "C" analyzed maps to locate this exception. tmahood@netcom.com will be present in person to lead the expedition and sign autographs.

The hike will take place on Saturday, April 8, 1995, starting at 11am (PT). The meeting place is about one hour northwest of Las Vegas on US-95 (not US-93). From I-15 in Las Vegas, take the US- 95 freeway west (in the Reno direction). Go about 55 miles west on US-95 to milepost CL 131.1, which is about 1 mile east of the Clark/Nye county line. We will meet here on the highway in the middle of nowhere, at a point where a minor dirt road heads south toward Mt. Sterling. The hike is only moderately difficult and won't be more than two hours of walking total. You'll need to bring a lunch, binoculars or telescope, plenty of liquids and a full tank of gas from Vegas. A four-wheel drive is useful but not essential, since we will ferry people up the road who do not have one. You should be prepared for both hot and cold weather, since we will be hiking near the snow line at about 8000 feet. If you are not at the meeting point at 11am sharp, you are on your own, but we will try to leave notes to tell you where we are. The area where we are hiking is in Forest Service land, well outside any military area, so there is little chance of any conflicts with authorities. We have been told that the April 8 date happens to coincide with the National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas, which begins April 9, so attendees are welcome to come. On this and any other hike we sponsor or recommend, you are responsible for your own safety, and the organizers accept no liability whatsoever for any injury or loss.

If you plan to come on this hike, it is a good idea to confirm the date and time with us a couple of days prior to the event. Either call the Research Center at 702-729-2648 or consult alt.conspiracy.area51 for confirmation.

A brief guide to Mt. Sterling is available by email from tmahood@netcom.com. (The internet impaired can send an SASE to the Research Center for a copy, and it is also included in the appendix of the Area 51 Viewer's Guide.

Aviation Week On Black Projects

A Feb. 6 cover story in Aviation Week reports on the current state of the military's black projects. Groom is mentioned numerous times, both by the authors and by official sources speaking on condition of anonymity. The many quotes by official sources appear to indicate a high level of cooperation in this article, as though the military realized that it had to say something to respond to the ongoing media blitz.The cover story and articles accompanying it focused on two types of secret aircraft: a quiet and stealthy helicopter, which is confirmed to be flying in "the Nellis ranges," and various unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which have also flown at Groom Some interesting quotes....

Defense Dept. and industry officials confirm that there are classified aircraft on the large, restricted Nellis ranges, but they make that assertion with a number of caveats."The aircraft being tested are either not manned, not flying or not Air Force," the third [anonymous] official said. "There are one-half and three-quarter scale mockup aircraft that have been loaded in Air Force aircraft and transported that people might have seen."

Of course, that leaves room for many other kinds of craft that are "not Air Force."

"There were numerous private [companies] designing aircraft and they may have flown something," [the source] said.

Another tidbit...

A Pentagon Advanced Concept Technology Demonstrator (ACTD) is flying a manned aircraft at the classified Groom Lake, Nev., facility. A project, code named "Ivy," involves an aircraft coating that changes hues and brightness when subjected to an electrical charge.

No further explanation is given as to what this means.[Further synopsis of Aviation Week article]

A Feb. 26 article in the Las Vegas Review-Journal expands on the stealth helicopter stories by quoting a former Groom Lake worker who claims to have seen the helicopter tested at the base.

Intel Bitties

NELLIS CHARTS EXHAUSTED? Some readers recently making FOIA requests to the Defense Mapping Agency for copies of the Nellis Range chart [DR#21], have received a letter claiming that the map is out of stock--at least at the FOIA office. Requesters are offered reproductions of the Nellis map for $15 for color and $3 for black-and-white. These may be reasonable prices if the reproduction offers the same detail as the maps themselves, but we haven't seen the reproductions. You could also try sending a FOIA to Nellis AFB instead of DMA at: FOIA Office, 554th Support Group, 4430 Grissom Ave., Nellis AFB, NV 89191-6520. (It would be much easier for both the public and the military if this map was offered for sale through NOAA like other military charts. We don't understand why this unclassified map is treated differently.)LATEST AREA 51 VIEWER'S GUIDE EDITION is 3.00, published 2/6/95. There have been a lot of incremental changes in the new edition, including new references, new advice and updated info on Tikaboo Peak. Owners of previous editions of the Viewer's Guide can upgrade to the new one for $9 plus $4 postage. Since there will always be another new edition down the pike, we suggest upgrading only when you actually plan to come here.

The Viewer's Guide is the most complete reference book to the publicly known facts about Groom Lake (at least until Chuck Clark releases his version). It is useful to anyone interested in Area 51, even if you don't plan to come here. If you do plan to visit, we urge you to order the guide before you leave home so that you can be adequately prepared. (Remember: Tourists without the Viewer's Guide tend to wander where they shouldn't and suffer a $600 fine.) The price for new orders is $15 plus $4 postage in the USA. (Inquire for overseas postage.)

THE CNN REPORT ON AREA 51 and the hazardous waste case [DR#21] is now expected to air first on TBS on Apr. 2 at 11pm ET (8pm PT) as part of Network Earth. It will air in the subsequent week on Earth Matters on CNN and CNN Intl. Dates are subject to change.

GROOM TOWER FREQUENCIES CHANGED. Several visitors to Freedom Ridge have noted that the Groom Lake tower frequencies reported in DR#15 have been changed. The recent publication of these freqs in the March issue of Popular Communications magazine may have had something to do with it. Some visitors say they found the new frequencies again without much difficulty. It seems a futile exercise on the AF's part. Think of all the expense involved in changing the freqs, and then the Freedom Fighters collect them again immediately. Voice encryption generally isn't used on air control frequencies, presumably because it would require new radio equipment in every aircraft and might jeopardize the safety of flight control by reducing range and clarity. We have not yet decided whether we should play the game and publish the freqs or call a truce. It has also been reported to us that the name "Dreamland" is no longer being used on the air, at least on the Janet handoff frequencies.

GENE HUFF, LONG-TIME ASSOCIATE OF BOB LAZAR, has appeared on the internet and posted a thoughtful and well-written synopsis of the Lazar story on alt.conspiracy.area51. The document is highly recommended for anyone who is (or once was) interested in the Lazar story. Most of the information conveyed has been published before, but the perspective is unique and may shed some light on personalities and motives. In particular, Huff's account of Lazar's pandering case is interesting. Of course, it makes him out to be victim rather than a pimp, but the scenario comes across as reasonable. Huff was once on our enemies list [DR#16], but we later recanted [DR#18], and his synopsis renews our respect for his intelligence. While Lazar himself remains a cipher, we believe Huff is sincere.

THE NEW PSYCHOSPY WWW STRUCTURE is now available for inspection. (For the internet impaired, World Wide Web is a method for accessing text files. This feature is currently available on Prodigy, and it is promised for the other major on-line services in the near future.) Psychospy's Guide to Knowledge is the sort of web project that will never be finished, and there are many unresolved references in it at present, but we've already collected enough data here to make the visit worthwhile. The present location has been established in conjunction with webster@asu.edu. This may be a temporary location and subject to change as our structure expands.

CAMPBELL INTERVIEW. Glenn Campbell gives us his best in a lengthy interview in the current issue of Steamshovel Press (#12), a relatively coherent conspiracy 'zine. That issue is available for $4 plus $1 postage from Steamshovel Press, PO Box 23715, St. Louis, MO 63112.

THE EVIL PHIL KLASS'S delightfully dismissive and eminently entertaining Skeptics UFO Newsletter can be ordered for $15/year from:

Philip J. Klass
Nefarious UFO Skeptic (NUFOS)
404 "N" St. SW
Washington, DC 20024

(Sorry, Phil... Looks like Psychospy is being seduced by the dark side of the Force.)ALIEN HIGHWAY. A Nevada legislator has introduced a draft resolution in the State Assembly to designate State Route 375 "The Extraterrestrial Alien Highway." [See article and text of the draft.] According to the draft, Ambassador Merlyn Merlin II of the Capitol Embassy Saucerian Consulate was consulted in the preparation of this legislation. [See Merlin in DR#2]

SOME NEW PRODUCTS now in stock at the Research Center have nothing much to do with Area 51 but suit our eclectic tastes: Mind Trek, a rational book on remote viewing by Joseph Moneagle, $10.95. The Holographic Universe, a book expressing a theory that might help explain remote viewing, by Michael Talbot, $12.00. Curmudgeon's Garden of Love, a keepsake book of vicious and cynical quotes about romance, $8.00. A white baseball cap with an imprint on the front--"Antimatter-- Nothing Else Matters Anymore"--$10.00. The "Alien Deck," a poker deck with little grays replacing the King, Queen, Jack and Joker, $5.00. Priority mail postage is $4 for the first two items and $1 for each additional item beyond two. [See Catalog.]

ONE OF OUR INTERNET SERVICE PROVIDERS appears to have gone belly up (another roadkill on the information highway). As of Mar. 15, the email address we previously sent the Rat from-- psychospy@ping.com--is no longer valid. We are now looking for another reasonably priced 800 dialup PPP service. Suggestions would be appreciated. We can still be reached at campbell@ufomind.com (messages) or psychoserv@aol.com (subscriptions).

GEORGE KNAPP RETURNS AS NEWS ANCHOR. Las Vegas TV newsman George Knapp [DR#22], who first reported the Lazar story in a local 1989 broadcast and who later left TV to produce a series of UFO videos, has now returned to KLAS-TV full time as the anchor of the 6:30 pm local news. "George is a nice break from the normal blow-dried meat puppet," said one television industry source.

IT CANNOT BE COINCIDENCE that the TV station's call letters JUST HAPPEN to match the name of that NEFARIOUS UFO SKEPTIC. Note also the KLAS-TV was owned for many years by Howard Hughes, who bought it so he could watch the Westerns he wanted in his stripped-down penthouse of the Desert Inn next door to the station. (Germs, GERMS!) Whatever the government conspiracy may be, Hughes was definitely party to it, so if anything appears on KLAS, it must be a part of the government "plan."

Area 51 Maps Seen On KLAS-TV

Prior to his return to the anchor position last week, Knapp produced an occasional series of commentaries for KLAS called "Street Talk." On his Feb. 23 segment, Knapp showed a set of three highly detailed maps of the not-too-secret Groom Lake base. As seen on the screen, the maps were produced by "Shadowhawk Research Associates" for the Area 51 Research Center. One map was so detailed that it included building numbers and a long list of building functions keyed to those numbers. The maps carry the imprint "UNCLASSIFIED" and a statement, "Assembled from satellite imagery and other available sources."These maps were published by the Research Center as a public service to assist in future court cases and as an aid to journalists reporting on the base, to whom we have provided copies free of charge. However, the KLAS report has generated many inquiries as to whether these maps might be available to the public. In response to these requests, we have made a limited quantity of these maps available for sale, intending only to defer the enormous costs of producing them. The price is $20 (plus $4 postage) for the set of three maps. Each map is 19"x25" in a pseudo-blueline format, printed on high-quality chart stock. Each has the Groom Lake base in the center, but at different scales: 1"=1.6 miles, 1"=0.5 mile and 1"=400'.