Boston GlobeAlex Beam
MY DATE WITH AN ALIEN
By Alex Beam Globe Columnist | Wednesday, March 2, 1994
RACHEL, Nev. -- We are standing next to the mysterious Black Mailbox, waiting for the aliens to land.
A frisson of expectancy animates the pristine desert air on this mile-high plateau. It is a Wednesday, and the UFOs land on Wednesdays. It is after noon, and that is when they usually appear. My children are apprehensive; my wife is skeptical. I am, as always, open to new experiences.
We have traveled through 150 miles of desert to see the storied mailbox, and to meet our guide, Somerville's own Glenn Campbell. This stretch of Nevada's Route 375, which is also known as "America's UFO Highway," has hosted more confirmed UFO sightings than anywhere else in the country. And Campbell, a former software engineer who as recently as last January was slogging through the slush of Davis Square, is the leading authority on the extraterrestrial shenanigans that have quite literally put tiny Rachel (pop. 100) on the map.
Rachel's notoriety dates to 1989, when scientist Robert Lazar told a Las Vegas TV station of his job at a secret military base 50 miles from Rachel, reverse-engineering the propulsion systems of flying saucers captured by the Air Force. Lazar's story had the charm of irrefutability; the purported base lay deep within Area 51, the bombing and gunnery range for Nellis Air Force Base, which had been off-limits to civilians. The airspace, called ''Dreamland" by air controllers, is closed to nonmilitary aviation.
Unchecked by countervailing evidence, the UFO myth blossomed to unworldly proportions. Ufologists by the dozens found their way to Route 375, and set up headquarters at the Little A' Le' Inn (pronounced Alien) in Rachel, which serves deluxe "Alien Burgers" for a mere $2.75. As the tourist trade swelled, so did the close encounters. Last year, William Hamilton and his wife were spirited away by "an object the size of a bus with square light panels lifting off from the ground." (They returned unharmed.) Flying saucer landings at the mysterious mailbox were becoming almost commonplace.
Enter Campbell, a brilliant 34-year-old autodidact who has dropped out of several of the nation's finest universities. An empiricist, a drifter and a skeptic, Campbell was ineluctably drawn to the mailbox. "There was this claim that you could come to this one place on Wednesday evenings," he says. "So I came to the mailbox on a Wednesday, and I still haven't seen anything. But I do enjoy fishing in this ocean of nonsense to see if anything makes sense."
As Campbell's "Viewer's Guide to Area 51" makes clear, there are many rational explanations for the UFO sightings near Rachel. The unpolluted skies are literally alive at night, bristling not only with stars, meteorites and radiant planets, but also with jet fighters, bombers blasting away at the saguaro and, yes, top-secret reconnaissance planes taking off and landing from the Groom Lake air base. The SR-71 Blackbird, with its distinctive spoon nose, and the flat, boxy F-117 Stealth fighter were often test-flown at night; when viewed from certain angles, they look a lot like you-know-what.
Campbell notes that magnesium flares dropped from the sky to illuminate night bombing runs could easily be mistaken for UFOs, and some "sightings" have coincided with a laser show in faraway Las Vegas. Says Campbell: "It's a challenge to figure out what's going on here because there are so many lights in the sky."
Not surprisingly, Campbell's skepticism isn't very popular in a town that hosts an annual UFO convention and sells bumper stickers that read: ''Earthlings Welcome!" So he has quietly moved on to another cause: legally snooping on the top-secret Groom Lake Air Force base, which employs a small army of high-tech security goons to shoo away curiosity seekers. Campbell publishes a hiking map that leads visitors through public lands to a mountain ridge overlooking Groom Lake.
Although Campbell and fellow members of his "Secrecy Oversight Council" have been chastised for spying on the base, they have never been arrested. Why? Because the name Groom Lake appears on no Air Force documents; it does not officially exist. Now the Air Force wants to put the entire mountain ridge off-limits to Campbell & Co., a land grab that has stirred up formidable opposition in free-spirited Nevada.
Stay tuned, on whatever frequency you deem suitable.