The Groom Lake Desert Rat: Issue 31
Issue #31. October 30, 1995
In this issue...
- Flying Saucer Crash-O-Rama
- Kingman Landing Site
- Kingman Points of Interest
- Socorro/Zamora Landing Site
- Presidential Exemption Granted
- KLAS Revealed
- Intel Bitties
- Our Readers Respond
Flying Saucer Crash-O-Rama
Report #1 on Psychospy's
1995 UFO Crash Site/Underground Bases Tour
Introduction
Life on earth could not possibly happen. The chances are too remote. You could easier make gold out of lead than find the right mix of chemicals and atomic bondings to entice inert molecules to reproduce. Proposing that this life might later become intelligent--capable at least of changing TV channels and nuking up dinner in the microwave--far exceeds the bounds of credulity. You have to laugh at those alleged scientists who claim it is so. Living in Vegas, we know for sure you can't beat the odds because we never have. Therefore, it cannot be true: There is no life on earth, and none of this is real.Psychospy is not afraid of the implausible, however. If it looks, smells, tastes and feels real, then what the heck, we'll give it a shot. For want of a better theory, we take our sensory world at face value, but never with complete confidence. We are always on the lookout for the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain or any subtle inconsistencies in the structure of life that might show us the seams. Life is a soundstage, we suspect, and sooner or later we will open a door and find only scaffolding. Sometimes we despair and cry out to the heavens, "What does it all mean, dear God--if you exist which you probably don't so why are we trying to reason with you?" Then we go to a casino and eat a buffet, which makes us feel at least a little better.
Such were the nihilistic thoughts that burdened our hypothetical mind as we screamed down a desert highway at a million miles an hour (given the rotation of the earth around the sun and the sun around the galaxy and the universe's expansion since the Big Bang, which probably never happened either). We were hunting flying saucers, which are almost as elusive to us as Bugs Bunny to Elmer Fudd. ("Shhhhh, be vewy, vewy quiet....") They are, in fact, implausible, if not impossible, and we wouldn't give them the slightest attention if we didn't know that none of this was real to begin with.
Specifically we were hunting flying saucer crash and landing sites--places where alien craft are not now but might have once been. The locations come from various claims in our growing body of folklore. To qualify as a "crash site" to us, someone just has to point there and say so. One such location is near the corner of Charleston and Jones Boulevards in Las Vegas. This is the alleged site of the UFO-themed Area 51 Nightclub and Dreamland Lounge [DR#26 | #27], which never existed. A flying saucer was supposed to crash on the roof but never did--which is almost as good as a one crashing 45 years ago and not being there now. The only difference, in theory, is that there are no traces of the former, while the latter ought to have displaced at least a Joshua tree or two. Such talk, however, digresses into the realm of physical evidence, which Psychospy abhors.
Proof? You want Proof? Where is that going to get you? We don't care what kind of physical evidence you have--photos, videos, soil samples, unidentified compounds, broken Joshua trees. Like with the alien autopsy film [DR#30], there will always be one group of experts who say, "It can't be faked," while another group says, "Sure it can." At best, the results can only be inconclusive--all the experts saying they can't explain the phenomenon--but that does not necessarily lead us any closer to the truth.
We go against the grain of modern ufology by saying that physical evidence is worthless without human testimony to vouch for it, and since all humans are unreliable, nothing is real at all, and we can only muddle along as best we can based on how the illusion appears. Even in court there is no such thing as purely physical evidence. Fingerprints, DNA analysis, bloody gloves and every other kind of empirical data is completely inadmissible without a witness to swear to its origins and methodology, so the verdict almost always comes down to the jury looking into the witnesses' eyes and making an emotional decision about whether they are telling the truth. When the physical evidence suggests an uncomfortable conclusion, then every witness will be doubted by the jury and the physical evidence they offer will therefore be judged unreliable.
What does make a case, over time, is overwhelming social and economic force--evidence that comes from so many different directions, is so internally consistent and works so well in practical implementation that there isn't even a trial. For example, the earth being round versus it being flat: Haven't we put that one to rest? (It is flat of course, but we have learned to control the falling-off-the-edge problem.) There was never any trial or popular vote on the shape of the earth: The old folks and their emotional investments simply died off while young people got rich with their ships and planes learning how to import camcorders from Japan.
In the matter of UFOs, we know we are not going to prove anything to anybody no matter what we find on our crash site tour. A lack of physical evidence does not prove the negative conclusion, while the jury can always find an alternative explanation for anything supporting the positive. Many people say they believe in UFOs, but the leap from a vague and general belief that contradicts nothing to a single specific reality with texture and odor remains a terrifying emotional transition. It is like the difference between believing in ideal romantic love--knights on white horses meeting virginal princesses--and having to live with a real human mate who belches and farts and isn't anywhere near that ideal. Fragile personal delusions must always come crashing down when a dream becomes reality, so each of us, no matter how "open minded," usually seeks subconsciously to avoid that moment of epiphany.
Can Psychospy be accused of the same for neglecting to collect soil samples or failing to scan the air for telltale radiation at the crash sites visited? We have learned through contact with aviation enthusiasts that if any aircraft crashes there will always be substantial remnants and physical traces left at the site, no matter how well the government attempts to clean up the area or how much time has passed. This was true of the F-117A stealth program and every secret aircraft that went before. Inevitably, some of the prototypes would crash while the plane was still "black." The government had great incentive to clean up the mess, especially with the F-117A, because the coating materials were highly classified and even tiny pieces could be helpful to the Soviets. However, at every airplane crash site that ever was, you can still return today and find remnants. (To prove this, aviation archeologist Xelex@aol.com has a key ring holding tabs of metal from each of at least a dozen such crashes, all top secret at the time but still findable today.) If a craft actually breaks apart, many of the pieces become embedded in the ground, and they cannot be effectively removed without, say, excavating a couple feet of topsoil all around the impact site. This, in turn, leaves a permanent scar which in the desert is easily visible and might remain obvious for a century or more.
It is a sacred tenet of the UFO faith that whenever a saucer crashes, a crack government "Black Beret" recovery team swoops in and completely sanitizes the area so no traces remain today and there is no sense in trying to find any. If you are talking about a substantial "debris field" as was supposedly found at the Brazel Ranch in the Roswell case, this view is highly implausible. Either some small pieces of debris must remain on site to this day, or the government has completely excavated the site, hauled away the dirt, replaced it with new fill and left behind a noticeable scar. Every effort by man or machine creates its own traces and these can hardly be erased without involving still more men and machines.
Added to this is the implausibility of a saucer crashing at all. If this civilization is so advanced, why can't they keep their craft in the air? It would be just our luck that the aliens visiting earth are the drunk drivers of the universe, sent here to complete a 12-step program but taking the wheel again while still in denial. And why do they crash in such convenient locations, preferring the American Southwest, just far enough out of town that only a rancher notices but not so remote as to inhibit discreet military recovery? Whoever the aliens are, they must be deeply Freudian, crashing by convenience only where it serves their repressed sexual desires.
Or their lust for boron. This brings us back to the first stop on our 1995 Flying Saucer Crash Site/Underground Bases Tour.
"I can't get no... satisfaction!"
Kingman, Arizona, May 1953
Jarod 2 has provided more details on the Arizona contact and offered his own theory about what may motivate our Space Brothers to crash the way they do. Although he says he was never briefed on the full alien agenda, he was told that the aliens take two elements from earth: boron and arsenic. Suppose they needed boron to get their clothes whiter than white, and Earth is the most convenient place to get it--the local boron Seven-Eleven for this part of the galaxy. For centuries the aliens harvest what they need in relative obscurity, but then human civilization starts closing in on the boron fields. Smuggling the stuff out undetected becomes harder and harder, so it is resolved by the Galactic High Council that contact must be made with the local barbarians.But how should this be done? Do the aliens really want to land on the White House lawn? That seems too big a production for a little boron, and it would place the aliens in a Messiah-like position that no one in the universe would envy. ("Save us, oh great ones!") Better to choose a more subtle form of contact, sufficient to obtain the needed elements but not triggering a planetary stampede. J-2 thinks the Arizona crash, and maybe even Roswell, were staged events. The craft in Arizona was in perfect condition as were the occupants, so there would have been no debris left behind except that of the recovery team.
According to the testimony of "Fritz Werner," an anonymous government worker who claims in a statement to have been assigned to the crash, it took place on or about May 20, 1953 (since he was called late that day and arrived on May 21). Jarod says he was briefed on the crash some years later, and what information he has is strictly from his memory of these briefings. The saucer, a standard 10-meter model, came down around 3 am. The military seemed to have some warning that it would happen, but Jarod is not sure what that was: Perhaps UFO sightings in the area or tracking on radar. The location as told to him was 10 to 15 miles northwest or north-northwest of the Kingman airport. This would place it in the Cerbat Mountains, a range which runs south-to-north starting on the northern outskirts of Kingman.
Red Lake has been cited by UFO buffs as the site of the crash, although we do not know the source of that rumor. This is a five mile wide dry lake about 25 miles north of the Kingman airport and just to the east of the Cerbats. Fritz Werner says the saucer crashed in a sandy area which might have been consistent with a desert valley like this, but Jarod says the site was in a hilly or mountainous area, which in this region implies a rocky terrain. Jarod says it happened on the east side of the Cerbats, not the west side, because a diagram of the area had been drawn for him on a chalkboard.
With these instructions, we set out to locate at least the general vicinity. The northwest corner of Arizona is a vast empty area similar to the Rachel vicinity: Wide desert valleys separated by barren mountain ranges. Almost none of it is off-limits, however. There is a network of fairly good roads in the vicinity. Most are dirt but many are well maintained and accessible to any vehicle if you can tolerate the dust. From US-93 about 40 miles south of Hoover Dam, we turned east on the Pierce Ferry road through the town of Dolan Springs, just northwest of the Cerbats and about 30 miles from Kingman.
This town of mobile homes and self-built houses is known for its own current UFO lore, including lights seen in the sky by residents and reported by George Knapp in a 8/23 Las Vegas television news story. "It's the weirdest thing I've ever seen," said one local resident. "It was big, really big," said another. In the TV report (which we only have a transcript for and have not seen), there was mention of yet another secret base...
Knapp: "Fred Jaimie has the town's best known UFO story. Over three nights last September, he, his wife, son, daughter and two friends witnessed a huge UFO that shook their remote house and danced above their heads."Jaimie: "It was like a big gyro...It was tumbling, like a big disc with lights On it."Knapp: "The day after his first sighting, Jaimie says a contingent of military types in trucks and helicopters scoured the mountain behind his home, as if looking for something. Locals are convinced there's an underground base in these mountains. A few claim to have had run-ins with security forces."
Gary Raduenz: "We were looking for an old mine, got run off by marines guarding the base..."
Knapp: "Officially there is no military base in the area mentioned by Dolan Springs residents. They suspect it is underground, somewhere to the north between their town and Lake Mead but no records of such a base can be found. We also talked to the FAA which says it can think of no reason why there would be so much aerial activity in the region. So what we've got on our hands is a real life mystery."
The mountains being referred to could be the Cerbats or the nearby White Hills. It is hard to imagine any secret military facility here, though, since these mountains are mostly public land that can be freely explored by anyone. This is also an area of fairly dense commercial air traffic. The area between Dolan Springs and Lake Mead is the general approach zone for jets from the east landing in Las Vegas. We camped near here several months ago and watched routine traffic pass overhead all night.It seems that every remote desert town we set foot in has its own UFOs and secret bases. Still it is an intriguing coincidence: We are looking for a relatively obscure and forgotten crash site at the south end of the Cerbats, while residents near the north end who apparently know nothing about this crash are seeing inexplicable lights in the sky. Could it be a nostalgic return by sentimental aliens--or is there boron in them thar hills? Presumably residents know the difference between the jets that pass overhead nightly and something more exotic.
Had this been an earlier era, Dolan Springs might have become Psychospy's worldwide headquarters instead of Rachel, but that phase of our youth has passed, and we had to press onward. Dolan Springs is on a rare paved road that leads northwest to Lake Mead. About 20 miles from US-93, we turned south on Stockton Hill Rd., a good dirt road leading past Red Lake and the eastern side of the Cerbats eventually to Kingman. It turns out this is not the most convenient means of access, though, since we found that Stockton Hill Road is paved from the south--right to the vicinity of the purported landing site. To get here, take the Stockton Hill Rd. exit from I-40 in Kingman and go northeast for about 15 miles until the road turns to dirt (GPS: approx. 35° 28', 114° 03').
Alas, from that point we do not have the slightest idea where to go. According to Jarod's descriptions, the site ought to be within about five miles of this point in the hills somewhere to the west. The area is now fairly well populated with recently built houses--hence the paved road--and it could be considered the suburbs of Kingman. The Cerbats are peppered with mines, so there are a lot of four wheel drive roads to be explored. Much of the land and some of those roads are private, but the area is still empty enough, especially in the hills, that you can probably hike wherever you want without complaint. [Another view of area (50k)]
[The Cerbats may be a reasonable area to conduct one of our monthly public hikes. A casual outing in November or December may be possible. Watch the Area 51 web page or alt.conspiracy.area51 for a possible announcement.]
We drove some of the back roads and visited a couple of mines in the area while trying to imagine a secret military operation in the vicinity, then we drifted back to the end of the pavement on Stockton Hill Road. Sensing within us an existential angst and now staring down the great black void of "What do we do now?" we suddenly felt an overwhelming urge to buffet. Onward we fled toward Kingman proper to address this concern.
Kingman Points of Interest
Our buffet needs were adequately satiated at the Golden Corral restaurant on Stockton Hill near the freeway. Quality and variety were mediocre compared to Vegas, but the important thing was, it was All You Can Eat, and no one was going to serve us any foodstuff sight unseen. What a buffet comes down to is freedom--the absolute freedom to choose from all the available options without anyone telling you what you can and cannot eat. Of course, freedom is never really free. With it usually comes responsibility, including the obligation to live with your choices once you have made them. A buffet is slightly different, though. It is one of the rare environments where you are free to choose but you do not necessarily have to bear the consequences. If it looks good you take it, but if it doesn't taste good you can just leave it on your plate and go back for seconds of something better. If there is a God, then buffet is what He intended the earth to be before Adam and Eve screwed it up.(And do not lay that motherly guilt trip on us about all those millions of starving children in the Third World who would die for our leftovers, because what we do not eat at the Golden Corral in Kingman, Arizona, has no bearing whatsoever on foreign economic conditions or social inequities, period, case closed.)
Returning to the pursuit of anything relevant to the saucer landing, we visited the Kingman airport. This would have been a reasonable point of reference for the military in 1953, since it had been a important base during the war. The Kingman Army Air Field was decommissioned in 1946, leaving the town with a huge but sleepy municipal airfield. We wondered why Fritz Warner would fly to Phoenix instead of directly here, but it could have been to avoid unnecessary air traffic, which might tip off the locals. Near the flightline, we found some hangars and a control tower from the WWII era. The airfield reminded us of Roswell's: once a center of secret military activity but now the home of a local industrial park and probably many ghosts. To reach the airport from I-40, take the Andy Devine Blvd. exit and go east about 5 miles to the airport entrance. GPS: N35° 16', W113° 57'.
We also visited the Mohave County Museum, on the western end of Andy Devine near downtown. Here we met our local operative, R. Chilcoat, who is the unofficial historian for the Kingman Army Air Field. He says he is following leads on the saucer crash with some longtime residents but as yet has nothing substantial. He says he has heard the name "Foos Tank" associated with the crash. This would be a cattle reservoir, but there happen to be a lot of them in the Kingman vicinity, and we have not yet found that name on any map. (Could it be "Fools Tank" instead?)
[Late Flash! Oct. 26: R. Chilcoat has just found it: "Foo Tank" on the Long Mountain 7-1/2 Minute USGS topo map. Approximate location: N35° 25', W114° 00'. The investigation continues.]
Another potential source of information is a local extraterrestrial entity: the Space Universal Life Church (SULC). This is a highly diverse UFO group/religious cult/real estate promotion/telemarketing scam ("Discover a New Happiness!!") that claims to be trying to build a million-dollar "rehabilitation center" at Dolan Springs. Who would be rehabilitated and from what disorder are not quite clear, but the group's confusing literature offers a clue...
Dolan Springs A HavenThe explosion in chemicals in the latter part of the twentieth century has given birth to a new disease entity which many call the Twentieth Century Disease. A more descriptive name is usually used--Multiple Chemical Sensitivity. The people who suffer from this malady are exquisitely sensitive to volatile organic compounds--such as gasoline, propane, perfumes, pesticides, petrochemicals, tobacco smoke and residues, plastic, mold, auto exhaust, synthetic fabrics, etc., etc. Symptoms can range from a mild headache to convulsions and even death.Those who have this ailment have great difficulty locating an acceptable place to live. The four foul follies of modern day civilization--Pesticides, Mold, Wood Smoke and Urban Contamination--can cause them to inhabit a literal hell on earth.... During the last year at least one location with minimal pollution from these causes has been found. Dolan Springs, Arizona--a small desert town in a beautiful Joshua tree forest.... Not only are the four foul follies minimally present but the spectacularly clean air, pure well water, mild climate and sparse population make this a haven for the chemically ill. The current residents universally report "getting better every day."
The church happens to have the same name as one shut down by authorities in Las Vegas a couple of years ago for telemarketing fraud, but we can't say for certain that this is the same group. The Great Guru of the Kingman church is A. Able, pictured here [from a local news article]. We have never met the Great One in person, but we did visit the group's headquarters in a storefront on Andy Devine near downtown [photo (50k)]. The sign out front promised "UFO Center--Tourists Welcome," but inside we found only a dismal thrift shop selling kitchen utensils, used books and chintzy jewelry with little relating to UFOs. The place was definitely not free of the Foul Four. The gentleman manning the store-cum-church was apparently looking after the place while the Guru was out. He claimed to be a reformed alcoholic, and he told us more about his tragic life than we really wanted know. He seemed vague about the saucer crash, however. He thought it happened on Andy Devine somewhere past the airport.The attendant may having been confusing the crash site with the Mohave County Fairgrounds, which are also located near the airport. This was the site in August of the "Far West Regional Conference of UFO and New Age Devotees" organized by SULC. The advanced literature promised 1500 attendees, prominent speakers and "the latest information releases on UFOs and the May 23, 1953 crash near Kingman." R. Chilcoat reports that actual attendance was less than a hundred, with the featured speakers being the not-yet-vanished D. Schmitt (formerly of the band Randle and Schmitt), overbearing illustrator W. McDonald and 50s-era con man F. Stranges. It sounded like the sort of epic debacle Psychospy would have loved to report on, but sadly we could not make it and have only the advanced literature to cherish. This 12-page tabloid newspaper is entirely incoherent in editorial content but includes ads from many prominent Kingman businesses. We suspect that they did not know what they were signing up for. A neighbor of the thrift shop expressed to us the opinion that SULC was a telemarketing fraud soliciting donations from local suckers for a vaguely defined charity project that would never happen. Indeed, the literature promised that the August conference would be the "kickoff for the library, theatre and museum on the SULC land in Dolan Springs," but our pass through the town in September found only the empty land and a SULC sign with no sign of any broken ground or work in progress. [Photo (50k)]
SULC also sells "Retirement Housing" in Dolan Springs. According to an illustrated ad in their conference literature, $29,900 get you a cabin in the woods. The illustration shows a majestic forest surrounding an attractive lakeside home. Hey, wait a minute! Forest? Lakeside? We thought this was desert. The guru must indeed be powerful to work such miracles.
Kingman is most widely known today as the one-time residence of Oklahoma City bombing suspect Timothy McVeigh. The local newspaper reports that McVeigh's abode was a mobile home park on Oatman Road, on the other side of the railroad tracks (literally and figuratively) from downtown Kingman. We climbed to the top of a nearby hill and took a picture [50k] of the only scene that seem to fit the description.
More fodder for conspiracies: Research Center Regional Director G. Campbell also once lived in Kingman, in a run-down trailer not unlike McVeigh's but at the other end of town. Campbell's residence was in a shabby cluster of mobile homes at the south end of Emerson Road, across the street from the Foursquare Gospel Church. The rent was $110 a month or thereabouts for a 30 foot travel trailer of 1950s vintage. The trailers are still there, although we don't know which one it was exactly, since this was about 15 years ago and the unemployed Campbell was there for only a couple of months. Between feeble attempts to find work in a jobless town, he rode freight trains east to Winslow and west to Barstow until his money ran out and he was forced to hitchhike back east to Momma.
It is unknown whether the disillusioned Campbell purchased any fertilizer in bulk or was a member of Kingman's far-right paramilitary groups like McVeigh, but we wouldn't discount it.
Socorro, New Mexico: Zamora Incident
As reported in DR#30, our latest tour included a visit to the Socorro, NM, area where we located the "Roswell" crash site supposedly described by the cameraman of the alien autopsy film. We produced a report on this site with photos.Socorro was also the site of a UFO landing on April 24, 1964 reported by patrolman Lonnie Zamora. Zamora claimed to to have been chasing a speeder on the highway when he heard a roar and saw flames in a nearby area. He cut off the chase and drove up a dirt road to find it: an egg-shaped craft standing on girderlike legs in a gully. While the incident itself may be subject to debate, the location is highly specific and can easily be visited. According to research by T. Mahood, it is within sight of the Motel 6 at the south end of town.
Getting there: Starting from Motel 6 (near Exit 147 on I-25), go south and bear right on NM Route 1, where signs say "Airport" and "Fairgrounds." Then take the first right, before the RV park. Continue up the hill on the dirt road, just to the left of the Raychester Jewelry outlet, between the two houses on the hill (which we not there at the time). This is the hill Zamora spun his wheels on when driving up. Continue past a third house on the right, and about 100 yards beyond that, stop the car. (GPS: N34° 02.597, W106° 53.801.) The landing site is somewhere in the arroyo to the left. Continue on the dirt road and you may find some old debris that could be connected to the "dynamite shack" reported as a reference point in the Zamora story. [See T. Good'sAbove Top Secret, page 343-345.]
More To Come
Once again, we have insufficient space and time in this issue to report on other sites in our recent Crash Site/Underground Bases tour, so we may describe them in installments in future Rats.In the meantime, we have prepared a preliminary Farmington/Aztec UFO page, with the help of our local operatives there, S. Wilcox and S. Belt.
Jarod Portrait
Below is a sketch made by the human engineer Jarod 2 of his namesake alien Jarod 1, who he says is a technical advisor to the U.S. government project to reproduce flying saucers. This is the same sketch described in DR#24. This drawing was made from memory based on first-hand encounters. [The picture may be copyrighted so please do not copy it, although other web pages may refer to it here.]
While we are at it, here are a couple of tidbits from J-2, supplementing his report on the Kingman landing in DR#24: As previously reported, the four living aliens obtained at the landing site were kept in quarantine in New Mexico before being transferred to the Nevada Test Site. J-2 now says that the duration of their stay in New Mexico was about nine months. During this time they did a lot of reading and were kept supplied with books about our technology by their hosts. (Obviously, these were gentlemen-and-scholar type aliens, not the maiden-stealing, planet-threatening, "resistance is futile" kind we ought to worry more about.)Regarding the disc simulators he worked on, Jarod says he was recruited for the program around the end of 1953, but he did not know the project involved alien technology until about 1955. The first simulator was completed in 1968. (It is not clear to us yet how this reflects on the completion of the operational craft.) This is what he calls the "start-up" version of the simulator--the first to be tested. He continued work on improved models for the rest of his career.
Presidential Exemption Granted
In DR#30, we reported that the judge in the hazardous waste suit had ruled that the government must either make its Groom Lake environmental reports public or seek a specific exemption from the President. Now the government has answered: The Air Force has obtained an exemption signed by William Clinton himself. [See Oct. 3 news article | Oct. 6 Editorial Cartoon (90k)]It is hard to say what this means. Although it sounds like the government has won another round, the plaintiff's lawyer Jonathan Turley seems to be spinning it as a victory for his side. In legal matters, victories and defeats can be subtle, requiring a full understanding of the law before they become obvious. Perhaps the presidential exemption itself will create a legal vulnerability. Maybe in forcing this action Turley is drawing the Groom base more into the open, making it an easier target for future legal processes.
In related news, Las Vegas TV station KLAS-TV has petitioned the judge in the hazardous waste case to open the pre-trial hearings to the media and public. KLAS Channel 8--aka "People You Can Count On"--is the employer of George Knapp and the station that first brought us Bob Lazar in 1989. It is also reputed (by us) to be the central node of the New World Order in Las Vegas [DR#23]. The lack of an obvious self-serving motive in their current legal action has provoked our suspicion and prompted yet another muckraking Psychospy media expose....
KLAS Revealed
Under the pretext of seeking documentation on the above legal action, we recently penetrated the KLAS facility on Channel 8 Drive, just off the Las Vegas Strip. There we were met by the still-innocent executive producer J. Johansson, who seems unaware of the sinister cabal of Rockefellers and UN officials who are shaping the news to suit their Machiavellian purposes. Johansson was even naive enough to let us visit the control room during an evening newscast. This is a fascinating ballet of a hundred things happening at once, the choreography of which makes an air traffic controller seem like a funeral director. Nightly crises are overcome and a dozen nonchalant employees somehow get where they need to be at the right precise second to generate the smooth-looking product you see on TV.The content of the product? It is people and feelings, mostly. You can't squeeze in much real debate or any high intellectual concepts in the few dozen words allowed for each story. Thirty seconds to two minutes are given to issues that each deserve an hour (except for weather and sports, which are more than adequately covered). If you don't have a crime scene to show or a face to say something, then it is hard to run a story at all. Television is pictures at the expense of ideas. It can provide some useful visual supplements for the well-read mind--because some events like war cannot be adequately described in words--but it is disturbing to know that some people, the majority of the population in fact, subsist on this diet and have no other window into the outside world.
We sense that no one is more acutely aware of the limitations of their medium than the people who work in it. The majority of the local population sees the TV station as a sort of sacred temple, the subject of pickets and bomb threats, where the well-coifed priests and priestesses at six and eleven convey to the impressionable masses what is and is not worthy of attention. Inside the studio, though, it is job like any other. The primary concern of the staff is just feeding the monster day after day, where they know darn well what it can and cannot digest.
The priesthood in the newsroom sees itself as nothing sacred. Their world, for the most part, is the studio itself, a relaxed but well-structured society of camaraderie and conflict not unlike any other office. It is easy forget here that every word spoken on the air could be conveyed to fifty or a hundred thousand minds and might easily provoke a few to kill. The staff produces the work, cranks out the product, then goes home and gets ready to do it all again tomorrow. They don't control the news as much as the news controls them. Typically, at least half of the newscast comes to the station via satellite feeds directly from the New World Order. The station is not told explicitly that they must cover, say, the O.J. trial, but news directors know perfectly well that if they do not they will be punished through the ratings services. The system is fiendishly clever that way, since the local journalists don't even know they are being manipulated. All of the directives from above are unspoken and thus cannot be traced back to the ruling elite.
The well-coifed priests and priestesses, or "talent" as they are known in the trade, appear profound and business-like only on-camera. Off the set, they dwell among fast food wrappers in tiny cubicles like everyone else in the newsroom/fishbowl. The newsroom itself is a lot smaller than it appears in those "reporting live from the newsroom" segments, with a population density equivalent to Hong Kong. We're talking TINY cubicles about 8 by 8 feet for two people with partitions that are no more than chest high. On the inside of each are posted snapshots of loved ones and cartoons clipped from the newspaper about dealing with one or another of life's frustrations. This not a place of privacy or reflection; this is the land of the slam-rush deadline where everyone needs to be accessible to everyone else and the clock is the master of all.
At one end of the newsroom is the assignment desk, where the local news is generated. Someone in the government conveys to the assignment chief what the news of the day will be, and he or she dispatches reporters to the scene. The reporters then take their instructions from local NWO representatives, usually the police. On camera, the reporter stands in front of the place where the crime supposedly happened and quotes the official line. Although the aim of this manipulation is not always clear, it evidently serves the secret government plan of creating just the right mixture of emotions in the susceptible public so they can be easily lead down the rosy path to total government control.
For greater fine-tuning of the public mind, the station also conducts "investigations," which require longer consultations with the government, as well as occasional groveling in dumpsters and wearing of hidden cameras into places you really shouldn't go. In Cubicle #1, we met the head of the "I Team," T. Warden, who we had escorted to Freedom Ridge almost two years ago. (His was the first TV crew there, in fact.) He seemed sincere enough, and he probably believes in what he is doing, but we couldn't help but notice that he had wires coming out of the back of his head. Everyone at the station who appears live on camera has these wires, which are plugged in to the control system just before the broadcast. (Look very carefully at any evening news and you'll see them if the talent turns his head.) The wires are used to deliver electric shocks to the journalist if he tries to deviate from the script on the teleprompter.
It is always a startling experience to have known somebody for years only by their polished, two-dimensional image and then meet them in real life in full 3-D. They seem so human then, not at all like gods and even a little vulnerable in their messy cubicles with pictures of loved ones pinned to the walls. In a corner hutch, we met G. Knapp, also of the I Team, who was talking on the telephone to a viewer. More precisely, the caller was talking to Knapp, on and on without respite, so that Knapp could dangle the handset by its cord and conduct a full conversation with us while waiting for the man to finish. We were impressed that Knapp took the call at all, since he must get a lot of them, UFO crackpots mostly. It is a little known fact that you can call up almost any local priest or priestess directly and they will usually answer the phone themselves. They will patiently listen to what you have to say and hang up on you only after you have breached the bounds of normal courtesy.
As part of our impromptu tour, the unsuspecting J. Johansson took us into the studio itself while the live evening newscast was going on. It was then when we saw our opportunity. Security here was virtually nonexistent. In fact, the studio contained just the two news anchors, P. Francis and M. Bradshaw, two or three camera operators and the teleprompter operator--who is probably the most powerful person in the room. Considering the vast audience, things seemed suspiciously casual, with the off-camera staff dressed like tourists and the talent radiating authority only when the red light on the camera came on.
The weather lady, S. Swensk, walked in the door without a second to spare and did a dance for a couple of minutes in front of a fluorescent green wall. She pointed with concern to various parts of the wall that looked as green to us as all the rest. We were only about fifteen feet away from her then, and it occurred to us that it was now or never: We had to jump in front of the camera and expose the conspiracy to all of Las Vegas: "It's a plot!" The heroic G. Stollman had tried the same at KNBC in Los Angeles in 1987, holding a toy gun to the head of an anchor and forcing him to read a statement about the involuntary cloning of Stollman's family [DR#18]. Unfortunately, we did not have Stollman's courage. We remembered the NWO had acted fast in Stollman's case, cutting the broadcast off the air before the statement had been read. We figured the same would happen to us. Our message would never reach the people; the Rockefellers and UN functionaries would get the last laugh, and we would be the one hauled off for "psychiatric evaluation." Thus, we walked out of the studio in private disgrace, never seizing a moment that might not happen again.
We did not want to make a pain of ourselves anyway. Everyone at the station had been nice to us, and J. Johansson had trusted us in the inner sanctum without even a background check. These were basically decent people, just responding to the electric shocks like the rest of us. You could say we are all in this together, victims of the same world-wide economic conspiracy to make us go to work in the morning and follows orders we would rather not if we could live in luxury instead. None of us regular folk have any control over history. Somebody above us must have a plan--maybe the aliens, the satellite government, God Almighty or even O.J. The rest of us remain in the dark, forced to generate the product day after day without a clue about what it all really means.
Which brings us back to the mystery of what KLAS is really up to in its latest legal action, asking the court to open the record in the hazardous waste case. This appears to be an altruistic act seeking only to promote press freedom and government accountability. Altruism? That's implausible, if not impossible. The author A. Rand in her book The Virtue of Selfishness (the favorite of paranoiacs everywhere) proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that people can think of no one except themselves. Greed, greed, greed is all that motivates humanity. That and electric shocks administered to the back of the head. Although we have considered the possibility of human kindness and unrewarded adherence to principle, we would have to agree with Rand and her spiritual colleague P. Klass that such baseless theories would only open a Pandora's box of irrational thought. People may be nice, but you just can't trust 'em.
Howard and KLAS
KLAS was once owned by Howard Hughes who used it as his personal VCR when he was living in the penthouse of the Desert Inn next door. On the grounds of the station is the bungalow he once owned and occasionally visited in his early years to privately audition aspiring starlets. (Such are the privileges of a billionaire movie mogul.) That was before he let his fingernails grow, fled from the germs of public life and found his own private Dolan Springs in the stripped-down hotel penthouse. Only then did he buy the TV station so it would play the late-night westerns he wanted to see. (The station later built its new studio on the grounds of the bungalow.) As the story goes--coming from former KLAS executive M. Smith via Johansson--Hughes had the bungalow sealed when he moved into the Desert Inn, and it remained so for 17 years. When he died, the house was opened in the desperate search for his nonexistent will. Almost everything inside was found untouched; even the old refrigerator was supposedly still running. Also found, though, was a more recent newspaper from the morning after an atomic test at the Nevada Test Site. This reinforces a theory that Hughes once secretly took refuge there for fear that the penthouse was too exposed to the blast.Hughes was well connected to the defense establishment, and it is hard to imagine him not being a part of any global conspiracy. He must have known the truth about the aliens and New World Order, and that could be what drove him mad.
Intel Bitties
Randle Visit. Roswell UFO researcher K. Randle appeared LIVE in our Las Vegas annex on Sept. 30, broadcasting his weekly radio show [DR#30]. He arrived at our facility in the company of two colleagues: reputed UFO skeptic R. Estes (who is skeptical mainly of UFO researchers) and clinical psychologist W. Cone. Taken as a team, these three stuck us as the dourest, most relentlessly cynical characters since P. Klass. No researcher or witness can possibly be trusted without a thorough background check and spotless resume, they seemed to tell us, and the truth about UFOs will probably never be known anyway. Oh, well. The radio show broadcasts internationally, that is, directly from El Paso, Texas, to millions of Mexicans and a few Anglos. Unlike some other UFO talk show hosts, Randle goes out into the field, conducts first-hand research and reports his findings by telephone from wherever he happens to be. In Las Vegas, the three did most of their research in casinos on the Strip and downtown. They even visited a facility not acknowledged by the government. It is called Glitter Gulch, a tavern that charges about $12 for two beers. Here they encountered a lot of alien activity, most if it dancing naked on the bar.Hawthorne Sighting. On the air, Randle expressed skepticism that there was ever anything alien on the Nevada Test Site or Nellis Range. However, he does say that Roswell witnesses claim that some wreckage from the crash was taken to another base in central Nevada that was not Area 51, Nellis or the Test Site. The only military bases we know that might fit this description are Fallon Naval Air Station, the Hawthorne Army Ammunition Depot and possibly the Wendover Range. We regard Hawthorne as a very interesting place that we haven't had much time to investigate. Hawthorne does not appear on our comprehensive DOD facility list, and our repeated requests for official information on the base have gone unanswered. This reservation offers one of the most startling landscapes in military America: a desert valley covered by hundreds of earthen bunkers as far as the eye can see. This would be a fine place to store saucer debris or pickled aliens, while a mountain on the reservation is apparently riddled with storage tunnels and would probably satisfy conspiracy buffs in need of underground bases. As a matter of fact, one of our readers, D. Allen, reports a clear saucer sighting at Hawthorne. The craft was hovering, just hovering--as craft like to do--near that same mysterious mountain. [Full report] Hawthorne is virgin ground for UFO buffs. If any of our readers want to check it out, take some snaps and compile data on the area, we will gladly provide web space for dissemination.
Nevada Insurgents in Time Magazine. The Oct. 23 issue of Time Magazine offers a cover story on the new "Sagebrush Rebellion" in the West. The article focuses on movement leaders in Nye County, but similar sentiments are shared by many residents of adjoining Lincoln County. The rebels say the federal government has no right to control public lands, which happen to comprise most of Nevada and many other western states. They say all such lands legally belong to the states and should be managed locally. The theory of local control is that ranchers and miners who are the primary users of public land will take better care of it than the distant Feds. This is rubbish in our opinion. Turning the land over to say, the voters of Lincoln County, will only assure the ultimate destruction and privatization of it as the mining, ranching and forestry industries run themselves into extinction. Nothing matters more to local politics than preserving jobs, and local voters will always sacrifice their long-term future in favor of keeping their friends and relatives in business. You may ask, How do you waste a wasteland? The desert, in fact, is very delicate. It may take centuries to recover from overgrazing and eons to heal the mining scars left by boom-and-bust operations. It is a unique resource to have so much land open to everyone. Texas is an example of local control, where most of the land is private and thus is fenced off and guarded by shotguns. In comparison, Nevada's wasteland is still pristine, interrupted only by brothels and casinos, which are very clean industries.
In the 21st Century, we predict that beef will be replaced by high tech tofu burgers; efficient wood substitutes will be made by microbes, and all mines will be mega operations located wherever in the world the minerals are the richest. (We also predict that Michael Jackson will marry Hillary Clinton and New York City will be destroyed by giant locusts, but that's not important now.) As the inevitable approaches, rural residents will strike any deal with the devil to preserve their way of life for just one more year, including stripping the land of anything marginally valuable. Giving the rebels everything they want would turn the West into the American equivalent of the rain forests in Brazil--slash and burn. We know the character on the cover of Time, rancher R. Carver, and have heard his emotional appeal to a roomful of grizzled cowboys who seemed angry enough to take up arms. We regard the movement as a well-meaning con, playing to the pain of people in dying industries and based on flawed legal theories. Although the bureaucracy may need reform, we still support the Feds on this one. Long live the Bureau of Land Management!
Webmaster Introduced. The Area 51 Research Center welcomes its new "webmaster"--an on-line archivist and programmer hired to restore order to the chaos of our burgeoning World Wide Web site. He is D. Kanipe ("can-NIPE"), based in Durham, North Carolina. Kanipe comes to the position with an impressive portfolio of existing UFO web pages, including a Lazar page. We trust also that, like Psychospy, he has no life away from the computer and that he will not be distracted from his duties by the need for sleep or any pretense of a healthy social life. All corrections, comments or submissions regarding our web pages should now be sent directly to Kanipe at webmaster@ufomind.com. (The old address, PsychoWWW, is being phased out.)
Our Readers Respond
Sentimental Sweetness from P. Klass
Philip J. Klass 404 "N" St. Southwest Washington D.C. 10024
TOP COSMIC SHHHHHH Oct. 6, 1995Dear SGE Director:I regret that I must caution you that Desert Rat #30 comes dangerously close to revealing not only the SGE strategy, but that you are the current SGE Director, following my retirement from that position.Don't ever forget that I recommended you for the top SGE job rather than Jarod because he is too "fantasy prone," and also suffers from "loose lips."
Also I must remind you that the penalty for violating SGE security is to have your penis and testicles removed by pulling, followed by removal of fingernails, toe-nails and eye-lashes by the same means.
P
[Burn BEFORE and AFTER reading]BOTTOM COSMIC SHHHHHH
We can always count on arch-skeptic Klass to hold the high moral ground and encourage a thoughtful intellectual debate. We also love his visual imagery, which succeeds in turning subtle differences of opinion into glaring concrete entities that demand recognition. Clearly Klass is an artist on a par with Warhol and the soup cans. We especially like the part about the testicles. It is so... raw.
What is MUD?
I underestimated you. I thought you were seeking some line of truth, but I now believe you to be a fraud. I feel sorry for the people that don't question what you distribute; if they had, perhaps they too would see your MUD. It is often times those most involved that spread the most disinformation. Please do not misconstrue this as hate mail, and rest assured I will no longer bother you, but I will be damned before I let you get the best of me or the general public.
--HouseOfAnu@aol.com [full message]
A Classic Abduction
I am just back after the Ancient Astronaut conference in Switzerland, at which I met John E. Mack, Prof. of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, who has been conducting a professional study of persons who claim to have been abducted by UFOs. At the conference he showed a video of an interview with a Zulu witch doctor who had been abducted in the usual way and made to have sex with a boneless woman. He showed up several days later covered in grey dust and stinking of fish. This man cannot possibly have been familiar with the UFO literature, and yet the experiences he described were of a copybook abduction. Genuine phenomenon or mass hallucination?
--G.S.
Indeed, this is a terrifying cross-cultural phenomenon. So many abductees have had sex with boneless women and come back smelling like fish that it just isn't funny anymore.
Supplements after publication
- W. McDonald reponds to the "overbearing illustrator" label given to him above.
