Unidentified Fueling Object

 

 

Unidentified Fueling Object

 

            There are no good places to run out of gas but some are worse than others. In the middle of a desert, for example. Or the middle of a desert frequented by extraterrestrials.

            On a recent summer road trip my wife and I took to the Southwest, we made a decision to turn off U.S. Highway 6 and onto Nevada State Highway 375 toward the town of Rachel. Our original destination, Tonopah, fifty miles away, could wait. We decided instead to investigate the eponymous "Extraterrestrial Highway" that passes within a milli-parsec of notorious Area 51, the landing site of choice in the United States for Unidentified Flying Objects. Curious about what we'd find, we gave not so much as a glance at the gas gauge in our spiffy black late-model Ford Ranger pickup as it reliably purred along on six happy cylinders.

#

            Nevada, it's been said, is more than a state: It's a state of mind. Take gambling, for instance. Or prostitution. We'd spent the night before in Winnemucca, famous in my college days as the Whorehouse Capital of the U.S. (Not via personal experience, I hasten to add!) Even today, prostitution is legal throughout the state by local option.

            And there is gambling everywhere, real gambling where actual coins still jingle and clang into the receptacle, rather than a piece of script issuing from a machine, to be redeemed at a cashier's booth. Gambling pretty much defines Nevada. The allure of jackpots and overnight fortunes is a major public relations exercise. Back in the day, gambling was illegal everywhere else. There wasn't even a highway speed limit in Nevada.

            My misspent youth included periodic trips from Sacramento to Reno, "The Biggest Little City in the World." At dawn, lifting my achy self up out of a seat at a blackjack table where I'd put down roots, I'd wander outside to watch the big Union Pacific locomotive rumble through the middle of town. I'd yawn and stretch, then go back in to protect my whopping forty-dollar stake.

            This trip, I learned that to my lovely bride of many years, walking into a Nevada casino was like a nun entering a brothel. It wasn't even the moral question: "gambling is evil." She simply failed to comprehend that people would choose to futilely fritter away hard-earned money. But there we were, pulling up in front of a signature castle of neon and glitz. Over protests, I parked the truck and cajoled her into going in. She stood just inside the door, ready to bolt, staring disbelieving out over the endless sea of slot machines, blackjack tables, keno rooms, roulette croupiers, poker nooks, excited craps players, off-track-betting displays, lightly-clad cocktail waitresses, and change booths flashing bright dollar signs.

            She shook her head and started to leave. "Let's just go get dinner." Her mind simply couldn't get around all that disturbed humanity.

            Of course, she was right. It is an unnatural act to wager on losing propositions, knowingly, even eagerly and the odds always favor the house. Over there was the archetypal cleaning lady who rode the Greyhound up from San Francisco, guarding the three slots she was playing like a mother bear with her cubs. Nearby was the brooding automaton (smoking!) punching button after button of his slot machine and not even looking up when he won. He just listened for the bell. (I decided not to mention a certain college-age blackjack player who, instead of studying for class, studied instead Mr. Thorp's Beat the Dealer, committing strategy to memory, drove all the way to Reno more than once, sat at the table for hours, and managed to stay within his puny, self-imposed $100 limit so that when the sun came up he still hadn't lost it all. Must have slipped my mind.)

            I tactically conceded that I was hungry. But after a surprisingly good meal at the casino restaurant, I whined a bit and we went back to the Den of Sin. Maybe it was the glass of beer on top of her exhaustion, but lo and behold, my spousal unit bravely took the plunge at the "Bonanza Casino."

            Five-dollar roll of quarters in hand, she approached a 25-cent slot machine with the wariness of a mongoose approaching a cobra. She took a seat as if she expected the sky to split open and lightning incinerate us both. Into the slot went the coin and she pulled down on the gleaming silver lever. No pushing the little plastic button that said Spin for this girl.

            Breathlessly, she ... okay, we watched the bells and bars and oranges and stars and cherries tumble and whirl. Then it happened! After a miserly three coins, as if by magic, bars of the same colorful fruit lined up in the window and my sweetie's bounty began clinking and clanking into the coin tray. On it went for an eternity until eventually there spilled out forty shiny portraits of the Father of Our Country embossed on round metal discs.

            I won't say the earth moved. The owners of the Bonanza Casino didn't need to get hold of their money guys back east. Nor would my wife be eighty-sixed the next time she crossed the state line into Nevada. That wouldn't happen because, good Congregational stock that she is, she walked away pocketing her winnings. Ten dollars! She'd beaten the house. She'd won the price of her dinner.

            Yours truly? How'd I do? I plugged my last three nickels into a slot machine when I exited a restroom at a gas station we stopped at. They stayed there.

#

            After Winnemucca, we left the interstate at Battle Mountain and began the long drive south. The highway bisecting Nevada north to south travels from one far-off landform to another. The sheer space took getting used to -- beautiful country beneath an enormous sky, elegant in its emptiness.

            Nevada is in the heart of The Great Basin. From central Oregon south to the Mojave Desert, from the Sierras in California east to the Wasatch Range in Utah, lie two hundred thousand square miles of emptiness, once an enormous inland lake the only remnant of which is the Great Salt Lake. The desolation in this huge expanse in the West is hard to describe to folks who've never been there. The word "desolation" has a salutary meaning: vast distances, sparse population, monumental vistas, endless quiet. The very bleakness is staggering, particularly if you stop, turn off the engine, and get out of the car, and listen.

            It's “fault and block” country, formed by the tipping of massive sections of the earth’s crust into ranges miles long and thousands of feet high, just as an iceberg tilts if its center of gravity changes. Inconceivable to humans trapped in minuscule lifetimes measured in decades, the planet’s mantle moved and roiled and faulted for thousands of millennia. The lower section of an immense block of the Earth was displaced by magma eating away at it from below until the whole thing tipped, leaving an abrupt slope on one side, a more gradual one on the other.

            So detour to Area 51 on Nevada 375 we did. Nothing but time to kill. Nice weather, in the high 80s.

            Our highway crested one ridge, then descended. The next ridge was miles away. The splendid panorama went on as far as the eye could see. We raced through open tableland spotted with dusty green sagebrush and passed tan bluffs, once ancient seamounts planed smooth by mile-thick Ice Age glaciers, with russet and black boulders at their base. Distant, silent hilltops in muted grays and blacks and browns were mottled by passing cloud shadows. Kestrels and Cooper's hawks patrolled verges of the highway, magpies with long prehistoric tails swooped, meadowlarks yelled after us, and turkey vultures surfed updrafts scanning the clumps of waving bunch grass and mesquite below for something dead to eat.

            Maybe it was the hungry vultures, but something made me glance at the gas gauge. EMPTY!

            We looked at each other like frightened teenagers in the woods. Consistent with the requirements of an internal combustion engine, the gas gauge needle rested on the red "Empty" hash mark. The bottom side of the red hash mark. What had been going through our minds all those miles after we'd turned off toward Rachel and raced past a sign that said "Next gas 90 miles"? Somewhere in our respective crania it may have registered, but now we were in the middle of nowhere. A strange and different nowhere.

#

            Travelers familiar with the American West, certainly those familiar with the Great Basin, know that the area in the pointy southern corner of Nevada is different. A previous Nevada experience of mine included passing a group of nude bicyclists, one after another single-file, straining and sweaty. Let that sink in. Suffice it to say, it was less titillating than it was an ectomorphic anatomy lesson. 

            Area 51 is a remote Nevada outpost of California's Edwards Air Force Base. It has been used for many years as a facility for testing experimental aircraft (the U-2, for example, in 1955) and weapons systems (aka "Black Projects"). The real name of the site, variously Homey Airport or Groom Lake, was dubbed "Area 51" in a CIA document once upon a time and the name stuck. And its mystery grew, as has its conflation with UFOs.

            It comes by the mystique honestly: the result of a flurry of UFO "sightings" that picked up speed after the "Roswell Incident" in 1947, clumsy responses by the U.S. Air Force afterward, and hyper security at the Area 51 site to this day.

             Famously, for years there have been numerous reports of a superior race of outer space aliens space checking up on innocent earthlings. Probably the most famous and persistent event occurred near Roswell, New Mexico, where crash debris of an alien spacecraft was supposedly discovered and taken to Area 51 for analysis. Scientists purportedly reverse-engineered the craft to study its makeup. Alien bodies were also recovered and their corpses dissected to, among other things, "clone alien viruses." Later, film footage showed an alien autopsy that was claimed to have been made by a U.S. military official shortly after Roswell. Ultimately, the producer (a London businessman named Ray Santilli) admitted that instead it was a "reconstruction" from original footage "now lost."

            Conspiracy theorists went to work. People from nearby Nevada towns reported sightings of strange lights seen hovering over the alleged "alien investigation camp" at Area 51. Other sightings and landings and crashes went unexplained, and in July 1952, there was an uptick. A number of phone calls around Washington, D.C. reported a group of unidentified objects hovering over the White House and the Capitol. One of them, bright orange in color, "took off at a tremendous rate of speed" according to a radar operator at Andrews Air Force Base. About the same time, a DC-4 pilot at Washington's then-National Airport waiting to take off spotted a mysterious object that made an abrupt change in direction and altitude before disappearing. "This happened several times," the pilot said.

            A week later another pilot and a flight attendant on approach into National Airport reported "strange lights above the plane." Later that night, an Air Force F-94 Starfire jet fighter wingman saw "four white globes." When his leader reported this to National's control tower, he was met with "stunned silence." In these and other cases, reporters were denied permission to photograph radar screens.

            There were other sightings that summer, prompting President Harry Truman, it was alleged and later denied, to place "jet pilots on a 24-hour nationwide 'alert against the flying saucers' with orders to 'shoot them down' if they ignore orders to land." An Air Force public information officer, Lt. Col. Moncel Monte, confirmed the directive stating, "The jet pilots are, and have been, under orders to investigate unidentified objects and to shoot them down if they can't talk them down."

            Ultimately, the Air Force publicly stated that there'd been no UFOs, blaming such things as temperature inversions or atmospheric disturbances or mirages resulting in dimming and brightening stars of planets. The Weather Bureau debunked the inversion explanation and reports continued. An Army artillery officer, sitting on the front porch of his home in Alexandria, Virginia, across the Potomac River from Washington, claimed to have seen "a red cigar-shaped object" that sailed slowly over his house.

            The federal government didn't take the reports lightly, but its contradictory or obtuse responses have fueled debate. In late summer of 1948, the Air Force created "Project Sign." It concluded that "flying saucers were real craft, were not made by either the Russians or the U.S., and were likely extraterrestrial in origin." This evaluation was forwarded to the Pentagon but subsequently ordered destroyed by Air Force hierarchy, citing a lack of physical proof.

            Then there was "Project Blue Book" (1952 - 1970), the Air Force's most detailed study of UFOs. All the "evidence" was debunked and the public was advised "to strip the Unidentified Flying Objects of the special status they have been given and the aura of mystery they have unfortunately acquired." To no avail.   Sightings continue, such as the "Lubbock Lights" which, after a scare, turned out to be flocks of plovers flying in the evening reflecting street lights. No oddly shaped light in the night sky, no mysterious apparition in the wilderness, no unexplained aircraft mishap goes unreported; and all have ramped up "UFOlogists'" theories in a giant feedback loop that now embraces the media, the film industry, and the Internet: UFO sightings are fact; they're coming; they've landed. And there is no better center of intrigue than Area 51 with its own mystery and secrecy. It's become code for extraterrestrials.

            Anthropologists tell us that the more people who claim to have witnessed something, the more truthful it appears. And the government's decision to hide behind national security hasn't helped. To this day, U.S. military sentries in civilian clothes guard base entrances, if you can find one, and "deadly force is authorized." There are surveillance cameras and buried motion sensors. Pilots and workers may be required to sign lifetime secrecy agreements. Everything remains top Top Secret -- though these days, Area 51 must be the most well-known "Top Unsecret" in the United States. 

            However, though one likes to marvel and laugh at the workings of the human brain and chalk up UFO nonsense to rumor, could it just be that Cherie and I had been too quick to judge? Truth or myth, as we drove along -- A/C turned off despite the now oppressive heat, and fully tuned in to our dangerous petroleum folly -- our jittery minds conjured up all kinds of scenarios. Reality versus invention danced around in our imaginations. The complete absence of any other vehicular traffic on the highway, not a glimpse of a town or building for miles, nonexistent road signs didn't help.

            If, or when, we were captured, what was it going to be like living on a planet with maybe three suns? Would there even be oxygen? Or a Starbucks?

            "How about creatures with all heads but no bodies?" my wife asked.

            "Or bodies but no heads," I suggested.

            "Republicans," she gasped.

            We pulled over and assayed the map.

            "What do you suppose is at Warm Springs up ahead? It’s a junction at least.” I pointed to a faint dot on the map.

            She said, “There has to be a gas station there.”

            Warm Springs was a junction all right -- as in, where two roads converge. There was not a building or the skeleton of one, rare desolation even by Nevada standards. Another look at the map told us we were still literally miles from anywhere.

            "How much does the tank hold?" My wife pulled out the owner’s manual. I started up a mild grade; I’d coast down the other side. The needle edged below the red mark, taunting us.

            I had the answer. "Nineteen gallons, and I've never filled it with more than sixteen-point-five.” This was a lie. The Ford Ranger specs said seventeen and I'd never pushed it.

            We mounted one grade then another, crossing each summit in silence, only to see yet another stretch of road across a distant valley of desert ahead. Down one hill, we plunged into a dust storm. We rolled up the windows and for maybe twenty miles, panicked. We emerged and stared at the still-empty wasteland ahead. By now it was more arid, flatter desert, mountains fewer and more distant. We looked at each other. This had gotten serious. We'd long since lost the cell phone signal. We still hadn't seen another car or truck.

            An eternity later, the needle clearly below the red, I nursed us up another grade. "The town of `Rachel' is next," I offered encouragingly.

            We each thought back to the "junction" at Warm Springs, but said nothing. The view from this pass -- like the others, over six thousand feet -- was every bit as hopeless as the last ones, replete with yet another mid-range dust storm.

            We were not going to make it. I abandoned the fantasy that, breaking out of patches of dust, I'd see tall, shimmering standards of national gasoline brands,

coasting into Rachel on fumes but espying a glorious, fully equipped Chevron or Texaco nestled beneath a grove of piñon trees, well-stocked beverage cooler on the porch. Maybe that was on the other road, the fork we hadn't taken out of Warm Springs.

            Then, to our immense relief, through shimmering heat waves rising from baking asphalt, there appeared in the distance a tiny collection of structures. Rachel might have people! People who, for reasons one can only speculate about, had chosen to live where the relentless wind blows with gale force carrying tiny particles of dry soil from one end of Nevada to the other.

#

            So intent was I on our salvation that I didn't at first register my wife's alarmed cry. "A flying saucer!" We both leaned forward over the dash and gaped at the unmistakable disc shape, windowless and scruffy gray, not hovering but suspended from the hook of a tow truck and parked in front of ...

            ... The Little A'le'Inn!

            No joke. The Little A'le'Inn was the only building in Rachel, Nevada, which is the self-proclaimed "UFO Capital of the United States." My aching leg and foot depressed the clutch pedal one more time and we coasted into the parking lot. I pulled forward and parked beside a pole about twenty feet in the air and turned off the truck. Perched on top of the pole was yet another flying saucer. A sign next to it said "Aliens park here." There was a small ladder descending the pole.

            The entry door to the establishment featured a replica of E.T.'s pasty, google-eyed visage staring back at us.  A sign next to that advised, "Flying saucers and their crews, Welcome." We saw no gas pumps, but surely there'd be humans who could help us out. After all, the Little A'le'Inn had to be a well-known gathering spot for travelers from throughout the known Universe, situated as it is less than a phaser shot from the secret heart of Area 51.

            I said, "Let's go in."

            "No way," said my co-pilot.

            "What? We came all this way ..."

            "I'm staying in the truck. Look at that place! It creeps me out."

            I couldn't argue. The structure had all the charm of a deserted double-wide, with plain off-white corrugated siding trimmed in what was once a blue, peaked metal roof. To me, however, it looked like an exotic flower in the middle of a wasteland. It might as well have been the Taj Mahal.

             "Suit yourself," said I. "We do need to find a gas pump, and I don't see one."

            I got out, hiked up my jeans, and walked past a pair of dinged-up pickup trucks, a faded maroon Oldsmobile sedan, vintage 1960s, a rusting Camaro, and a WWII Jeep in badly repainted camo. All fairly typical, I thought. Usual desert ambience. I pulled open the door and went inside. The bell over the door tinkled, and wind and dust blew in, whereupon my jaunty self skidded to a stop. I was wrong about "usual." I was at the bar in Star Wars!

            George Lucas had nothing on this place. I beheld a wonderland of intergalactic idiosyncrasy. The brief shaft of sunlight I'd let in lit up a handful of faces turned toward me, the intruder. There was the obligatory weather-beaten desert weasel at the counter guarding a beer. He was missing a couple of digits, but his fingers outnumbered his teeth. Next to him was another geezer, a torn straw hat tipped back on his head and his long arms hanging loosely at his side. Down from him sat a bald man wearing overalls and no shirt, with his wife or girlfriend beside him, a large woman with stringy hair and rimless glasses, possibly wearing her companion's absent shirt. Closer to me, hunched over the bar like a bookie working a racing form, was a man or woman (I couldn't tell which) with the roundest, most outsized head I'd ever seen, and tiny eyes behind tiny spectacles. Speaking of spectacles, a short, round man stood too close to me with a volleyball tucked under his arm, though where he expected to play was not evident.

            The door behind me opened and slammed shut, scaring the daylights out of me. In walked a painfully thin, leather-faced woman of indeterminate age who proudly announced out of the blue that she'd drunk whatever was in her house and was back for more. It was two in the afternoon.

            Above the bar, it got stranger, if that was possible. When my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I squinted and made out an array of thousands of sheets of paper currency, a veritable sea made up of every denomination stuck to the ceiling. It was the "sign a dollar bill and stick it up there" schtick on steroids. It was like the flotsam and jetsam of a bank heist gone terribly wrong, money scattered everywhere -- maybe ten by thirty feet of it hanging overhead the length of the counter.

            And then there was the bartender. His forehead was unusually shiny even in the gloom. His eyes were set just a tad too far apart and he kept flicking his tongue around the corners of his mouth like a reptile.

            "Are you here to come with me to my home world and meet my people?" he asked. At least that's what I thought he said.

            I said, "No thank you. No, wait. What did you say?"

            He said, "Would you like me to help you find something?"

            "Not yet. I think I'll just look around."

            I tried some small talk: "Does the wind always blow here?"

            "No, only during the day and at night."

         He went back to conversing with one of the patrons, all of whom showed no further interest in me. I had other questions -- "Ever had AAA come out this far?" "Where's the pay phone?" "Does someone maybe have a five-gallon can of gas? We'll pay well." "Can cars run on buzzard shit?" -- but I didn't waste my breath.          

            Still unnerved but trying to settle down, I wandered around and took it all in. This was a truly impressive museum of sci-fi kitsch. Geegaws and dust catchers on every flat surface throughout -- counters, tables, cabinets, the floor -- and hanging suspended from the ceiling and light fixtures. R2-D2s and C-3POs (batteries not included), Millennium Falcon plastic model kits and desktop pen holders, lightsabers that might really work, a Princess Leia hair bun set (a metal band held it on like earmuffs), a statue of Chewbacca and next to it a full-size Wookie costume for Halloween or the next office party or when your mother-in-law visits.

            There were E.T.s everywhere, large and small -- hand puppets, stuffed toys, full-size inflatable mannequins, dashboard statuettes, bobble- heads, baby dolls for cuddling (?), and action figures; and the freaky little guy's indelible image on drink coasters and shot glasses and mugs, on ashtrays, on knit caps and baseball caps, golf club covers, bed covers, pillowcases, T-shirts, and sweatshirts. I took a step backward and bumped into the creep himself, seated in a wicker chair smack-dab in the middle of an entire E.T. family: papa, momma with little E.T. on her lap, and more offspring, all wearing straw hats, pendants on necklaces, and wristbands.

            E.T., Star Trek, Star Wars. If Alec Guinness had walked over and offered to show me around, I wouldn't have been surprised.

            Casual as could be, I wandered back up front. A rubber Yoda squatted on the bar like a dyspeptic frog with air sickness. Next to a rack of postcards, posters, and bumper stickers was a framed and autographed photo of Teri Garr having a strikingly close encounter with Richard Dreyfuss.

            The barkeep came my way, with his hands ominously behind his back. Alien or not, he had the home-court advantage.

            I swallowed and said, "We really need some gasoline. We're below empty."

            The answer shot back like it ricocheted off his chest. "Three-tenths of a mile up the frontage road."

            "Make it so." I tried a little humor. His expression didn't change.

            Before beating a hasty exit, I did a double-take at the wall behind the bar. The faddish accouterments of UFO-dom in the A'le'Inn were almost outdone by the proprietor's apparent hysterical need to excoriate a recent U.S. president. An impressive array of twenty or more bumper stickers covered the mirrors and walls behind the counter, to wit: "Roosevelt, a chicken in every pot; Clinton, a fag in every pup tent," "Bring back Ron and Nancy; Hell, bring back Jimmy and Rosalyn" (sic), "Dual Airbags (picture of Bill and Hillary)," and "Clinton, for a change," the "C" of Clinton being a hammer and sickle. Arch-conservatives in deep rural Nevada were not a surprise, but the extent of the vitriol was alarming. The Clintons seem to have become outsized targets of political venom. Sign of the times, I suppose.

#

            It turned out that the only thing truly other-worldly in Rachel, Nevada, that day was the price of gas. But I gladly paid the equivalent of $5 a gallon (the street price back in civilization at the time was $2.30) for low test gasoline of uncertain provenance. The tab came to $86.50. Never had the tank required 17.3 gallons of gas! (Yes, I later confessed to fudging the capacity.)

            Neither did I mind dropping another $10 on a mug that said "Area 51 -- Rachel, Nevada" and a bumper sticker that glimmers with the word "Alien" inscribed inside a Darwin fish with antennae. I was happy to see, as I pumped my own gas, that dust and dirt had mostly obscured our "Clinton-Gore" bumper sticker.

            Moral of this story: Never again will I gaze up at the Andromeda Galaxy and do anything but smile and wave encouragingly. Just in case.