Message in a Black Box: Alien Encounters at Area 51

Belle considers the two story metal alien outside the Alien Research Center in Hiko, NV.

The black mailbox was white. Or more precisely it was a black mailbox locked inside a white outer box, a mystery locked inside an enigma, a fitting symbol. Among all the graffiti, stenciled in large black letters, was the name Medlin. He still lived here. He still collected his mail here at the end of this remote dirt road in the middle of the Nevada desert just a few miles outside of Area 51.

But Steve Medlin, the ranch owner whose property adjoins Area 51 and whose grazing cattle are the only living creatures permitted to cross the perimeter without authorization is not the one who made the black mailbox famous, not the one who drew the curious and cuckoo here from all over the world to see what could be seen by standing at the end of this remote desert road beside this mundane object, a mailbox, and looking up at the sky. It was Bob Lazar who did that.

The Little “A” Lee Inn is the unofficial tourist center for the UFO crowd that makes regular pilgrimages to Area 51.

Earthlings Welcome

On the wall of Little“A” Le Inn, a dusty diner in the tiny town of Rachel, Nevada, population 54, a photograph of Bob Lazar is mixed in with dozens of photos of UFO’s taken by residents and visitors. The Little “A” Lee Inn is the unofficial tourist center for the fanatical UFO crowd that makes regular pilgrimages to the Nevada desert, visions of the X-Files dancing in their heads.

The Little “A” Le Inn celebrates what visitors prize about the area but with a slightly jaded, tongue-in-cheek air that lets you know they don’t take themselves too seriously.  The sign outside the door says, “Earthlings Welcome” and the interior is a crazy mélange of alien dummies, souvenir T-shirts, movie posters, books and videos on the subject of extraterrestrials. Here you can tuck into an Alien Burger and quaff a beer while chatting with the staff about the best viewpoints for peeping into the restricted area, and the precise meaning of “deadly force”.

Closer viewpoints to the dry lake bed at Area 51 used to be available but the government expanded the perimeter to make them inaccessible.

What’s Going on at Area 51?

These days Tikaboo Peak is generally considered to be the best viewpoint to peek into Area 51 although it is 26 miles away and requires a high-powered telescope to see anything worthwhile on the ground there. Yet that doesn’t keep people from camping at the point and writing breathless reports about rotating balls of light and menacing visits from the camou dudes, the base security guards tasked with keeping the tourists away.

Closer viewpoints were once available at Freedom Ridge and Whitesides Mountain but the government expanded the perimeter to make them inaccessible, which ought to tell you something. The government does have something mysterious and secretive going on at Area 51. Yet what it is is up for debate.

Erstwhile physicist Bob Lazar. His reports about what he’d seen while working at Area 51 touched off wild speculation about UFO’s and alien abductions.

All kinds of theories abound. As a visitor to Area 51 you can take your choice. My daughter Cambelle who joined me on this trip prefers the theory of crashed extraterrestrials, a version of things backed up by Bob Lazar, the former MIT physicist, who claims to have worked on alien spacecraft at Area 51 in 1989, the same year Cambelle was born.

According to Lazar, the government is trying to reverse engineer alien spacecraft by picking apart the wreckage of crashed UFO’s, including the famous one that supposedly crashed near Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. Lazar has been adamant about what he has seen inside the restricted area and offers as proof sightings of alien spacecraft criss-crossing the sky, easily viewed from the end of the dirt road next to Steve Medlin’s mailbox.

Standing beside the black mailbox near Area 51. The black mailbox is actually inside this white outer box, a mystery wrapped in an enigma.

Stealth

As Cambelle and I stood next to the black mailbox some weird things began to happen. The sky above us was traced with contrails, but no planes were visible. Out of the silence of the desert came the low rumbling boom of jets shattering the sound barrier, but no jets could be seen. Spooky, yes, but all of this makes perfect sense if you subscribe to a different, less sensational theory of what is going on at Area 51.

It is thought by some that Area 51 is an outgrowth of the Skunk Works. “Skunk Works” is an official alias for Lockheed Martin’s Advance Development Programs, which is tasked with building experimental aircraft for the CIA and the US Air Force. During the Cold War it built the U2 spy plane and the SR-71 Blackbird and tested them in the Nevada desert.

Near Area 51 the sky is traced with weird looping contrails. But where are the planes?

Those planes were designed for stealth. In other words, they were designed not to be seen. Back in the 1950’s that meant not being picked up by radar. But today the meaning has clearly evolved. Today’s stealth aircraft are designed not to be seen at all.

Standing by the black mailbox, looking up at the empty sky the evidence was right before my eyes – or wasn’t, I should say, which was all the proof I needed.

The Alien Research Center

Somewhere down Groom Lake Road lies a vast underground facility run by aliens who have enslaved the human race and are secretly running the government – or so the story goes.

At Area 51 not seeing is believing. The number of things you cannot see outnumber the things you can, which makes it all the more fascinating. In addition to not being able to see Area 51 from the summit of Tikaboo Peak, you cannot see it on your GPS either. I found it sort of fun to move my cursor down Groom Lake Road toward Area 51 until the details dissolved into gray. I showed Belle, and she had fun doing it too.

Another thing we did not see was the inside of the Alien Research Center at Hiko, Nevada. It’s a Quonset hut with a two story alien standing outside. The windows are papered over with posters so you cannot peek in. It’s closed and, as far as I can tell, it has always been closed. Apparently no one has ever been inside.

Who’s researching who?

It occurred to me that the name “Alien Research Center” might not refer to a place to research aliens, but rather a place for aliens to research us. Farfetched? Not if you buy into the most outlandish theories about Area 51.

The story goes that they have bodies in there, alien bodies. The seminal story about UFO’s is the Roswell story, and in that story not only did a UFO crash in the New Mexican desert, but alien bodies were recovered.  The government took the bodies to Area 51 and autopsied them. (Look, if you can believe they’ve been reverse engineering alien spacecraft, you can believe they’re reverse engineering aliens.)  But it gets better.

The aliens, miffed about being experimented on by humans, attacked the researchers and took over the base. In this telling the aliens are running Area 51 and the humans inside are enslaved by them. Some even go as far as to speculate that the entire US government is being run by aliens from Area 51, which would explain Mitch McConnell. It would also explain why the Alien Research Center is closed to human beings.

The Back Gates

The back gates of Area 51. We got as close as we could without being taken into custody.

Another thing we did not see while visiting Area 51 was Area 51 itself, although we got as close as we dared. We took the dirt road off Hwy 375 between miles markers 11 and 12 and traveled west eight miles till we were within site of the back gates.

We got within 50 feet and took some pictures. Any closer and we risked being arrested or killed. Signs around the perimeter warn of the use of deadly force. Rumor has it that if you get within 20 feet you are immediately taken into custody and (A.) shunted off to a government detention facility to be questioned; (B.) removed to an offshore rendition site to be tortured; or (C.) taken to an underground operating theater to be dissected by aliens. We didn’t want any of those things to happen to us, so we decided not to press the issue. Besides, there was one more thing we wanted to not see in the Nevada desert.

By 1968 nuclear weapons had grown so powerful that they were tested underground, not always to good outcomes.

Project Faultless

I always find it interesting that people go to such lengths to construct elaborate conspiracy theories when the truth is just as surprising. Our government’s experimentation with thermonuclear weapons in the twentieth century is just as appalling as anything you can dream up about aliens, and the evidence can be found by taking a leisurely drive deep into the Nevada desert about 130 miles north of Area 51.

Now 130 miles might seem like a long way if you’re driving around Rhode Island, but in the Nevada desert it’s not far. The distances between gas stations out here are routinely more than 100 miles, and the roadways are utterly devoid of traffic. In less time than it takes me to commute home on Friday night, Belle and I hotfooted it up to the Project Faultless Site where in 1968 the Department of Energy tried a little experiment.

By the late 1960’s the megaton yield of nuclear weapons had grown so large it became impractical to test them above ground. The fallout from such a bomb would drift over Las Vegas or Salt Lake City and kill everyone in it.

As I stood beside the pipe, the sky was filled with long ragged streaks of mysterious contrails. A couple of hundred yards away the earth was cracked like a spidered windshield.

So they decided to test it underground. Nothing unique in that; they had tested nuclear weapons underground before, but the size of the bomb in Project Faultless was huge, 1.0 megatons, about 67 times the size of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. To contain it they drilled a steel pipe with a diameter of 7.4 feet 3,2oo feet into the ground, held their breaths, and dropped the bomb.

You Want Creepy?

The affect of the blast was so devastating it caused the ground to collapse nine feet for a radius of five miles. Fault lines like those caused by an earthquake fissured the earth. A huge cylindrical underground cavity was formed and filled up with radioactive rubble.

130 miles might seem like a long way but in the Nevada desert where the distances between gas stations are routinely more than 100 miles and the roads are utterly devoid of traffic, it’s not so far.

The DOE was so shocked by what had happened they cancelled the entire project and sealed the area off.
Today, more than 50 years later, the area is considered clean enough to visit, although you are cautioned against picking up any rocks, which may still be radioactive. You can approach the steel pipe, which is plugged with concrete and stands 9 feet above the ground. It boggles the mind to think that in 1968 the ground was up at the rim of the pipe and what caused it to fall was not an act of God, but an act of man.

You want creepy?  As I stood beside the pipe, the sky behind me was filled with long ragged streaks of mysterious contrails, put there by invisible aircraft.  A couple of hundred yards to my left, behind a security fence, the earth was cracked like a spidered windshield, and out of it seeped deadly vapors. Or so I imagined.

A trip down the Extraterrestrial Highway to Area 51 is more fascinating for what you don’t see than what you do.

I didn’t really see the cracks. I didn’t want to. The thought was unsettling enough, and I didn’t need aliens to spice it up. What’s more, we were in the middle of the Nevada desert, 17 miles from the nearest highway, 100 miles from the nearest town, where a flat tire or a mechanical breakdown could spell our doom.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said to Belle and she agreed.
I was sort of creeped out. At that moment a conspiracy theory was the last thing I needed to heighten the drama.

The Not Knowing

UFOs and aliens derive their power from their mystery. We want to believe in them for reasons that are only too human.

Still it’s fun to speculate about aliens. For some they are a proxy for God.  If you lack faith in a deity, aliens are another way of hoping something more powerful than us can rescue us from our folly. For others they are deeply frightening, testimony to the possibility that no matter how advanced we are something out there can still destroy us on a whim. In this sense they are a proxy for nature, I suppose.

In either case, they derive their power from their mystery. It’s the not knowing that enlarges them in our imaginations. In the same way, Area 51 derives its power, and the secrecy around it feeds wild speculation. What is hidden from us grows ever more elaborate and wild.

Area 51 is fascinating even though there’s not much to see there.  The coolest thing about it is how the absence of solid evidence lends emotional force to the most mundane of objects, like a mailbox at the end of a dirt road, contrails in the sky, or a blank spot on a map.

I’ve never had so much fun looking at nothing.

Driving Tour Map of the Area 51 Sites

Click to Enter Interactive Map

Previous stop on the odyssey:  Silicon Valley, CA //
Next stop on the odyssey:  Moab, UT

Image credits:
All images by Malcolm Logan except, Aerial view of Area 51, Doc Searls; Bob Lazar, Little“A” Le Inn; Grey alien, Public domain;   Nuclear test, Public domain; Flying saucer, Public domain