There's more, of course, much more beyond your basic alien exchange programs, underground bases, and H-PACs at S-4, including the 80 or more extraterrestrial races currently visiting our planet, the some 40 crashed flying saucers over the years, et cetera, all nicely rounded out with color slides and videos.

Someone described only as "Captain Eric" follows Lear and gives an interesting illustrated talk based on Paul Bennewitz's assertion of an underground UFO base on the Navaho Indian Reservation near Dulce, New Mexico. Other researchers have had a hard time locating and confirming the base according to Captain Eric, presumably because they've concentrated their searches on Archuleta Mesa. The real base, if there is one, is suspected to be under Archuleta Peak, a few miles to the west, and accessible only in the presence of a paid Indian guide. Captain Eric offers several aerial photographs of the area, including the site of a jet crash a few years back. The saucers are said to fly in and out of the peak via a hangar door in a limestone ledge, although ground expeditions have reportedly failed to turn up any concrete evidence of same.

Video presentations continue after midnight, but for us it has already been an extremely long day. So shortly after 2:30 a.m. Texas time we turn in, scrunched together in sleeping bags on the floor of the van, a half-moon lighting up the parking lot like a searchlight and washing out the stars overhead. At 4 a.m., cramped and cold, we step outside for a stretch. The moon is down now and the stars above blaze like icy diamonds, barely twinkling in the clear, still air. In the east Venus looms as bright as any flying saucer's landing lights.

Rachel resident Glenn Campbell/Photo by Dennis Stacy

Several of Saturday's scheduled speakers cancel at the last minute, including George Knapp, former anchorman at KLAS-TV, Las Vegas, the CBS affiliate that first aired Lazar's claims, and journalist Tony Pelham, leaving a slight scent of fizzled firecrackers. More and more the ultimate UFO seminar, with its jury-rigged auditorium, sound system and video screen, assumes the irrepressible atmosphere of an edge-of-town revival meeting. Blue noses and highbrows might have been appalled, but as the weekend wears on I find myself appreciating an almost perfect blend of form and function. If you're going to throw an evangelical flying saucer camp meeting, do it in the middle of the desert outside a "secret" Air Force base ‹inside a tent‹and do it right, snobbery, creature comforts, the loyal opposition and other considerations be damned.

To say the prevailing attire is casual dealer's choice would be an understatement; a three-piece suit would have looked as out of place here as a white bridal veil on a Man in Black. Both would have been dirt-brown in a matter of minutes, anyway, thanks to the powder-like dust thrown up by passing cars and a stiff breeze that keeps the Ale-Inn's American flag at full attention for most of the weekend. (Incidentally, if you're ever out this way, the Ale-Inn may have the best little UFO library in the state of Nevada.)

Lazar is a slight, youngish man with thick lips and glasses and a somewhat stylish swept-back Hollywood hair-do who seems genuinely uncomfortable at being surrounded by a curious crowd, as I would, too, were I to be mobbed everytime I stepped outside of my car or opened my mouth. If he's hawking his story he's definitely adopted a low-key marketing approach, although rumors are also rife of a large pending advance for a movie treatment of "The Bob Lazar Story." Scuttlebutt is that Lazar doesn't hold much truck with most UFO researchers these days, rarely makes public appearances of this nature, and agreed to only on this occasion in order to help raise funds for the Travises. Certainly there was no accompanying entourage selling his somewhat stilted homemade video tape. What he does do for the next two and one-half hours between sips of water is field questions from an eager audience, which tosses up its share of softball floaters and only a few curves.

Lazar's story can only be summarized here. A more detailed account can be found in several places, including Timothy Good's Alien Contact (a revised, updated version of the author's earlier Alien Liaison), which has just been published in this country this month by William Morrow and will be reviewed either in this same issue of the Journal or the next, space permitting.

Briefly, Lazar claims to have graduated from Cal Tech with a master's in electronics and from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with a similar degree in physics. Unfortunately, confirmation of his academic career seems hard, if not virtually impossible, to come by. He says that shortly after graduation from MIT, "I believe in 1982," he went to work for the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico. A few years later, now living in Las Vegas, Lazar is reportedly hired to help in the reverse engineering of nine alien flying saucers sequestered in high secrecy at an area called S4, situated near Papoose Lake, some 10 to 15 miles south of Groom Lake, i.e., Dreamland, the whole encompassed within the Nellis Air Force Range and Nevada Testing Site, the latter presumably under the auspices of the Department of Energy. From December of 1988 until April of the following year, Lazar spends only six or seven days actually on the job, that is, being flown out of Las Vegas on a 737 to Dreamland, loaded aboard a bus with blacked-out windows, and then transported to Area S-4. But what a week it was for ufology, giving rise to gushing fountains of unsubstantiated allegations about H-PACs, gravity waves, anti-matter generators and alien interventions on this planet dating back at least to the time of Christ, who may Himself have been but an extraterrestrial exercise in crowd control on a massive planetary and temporal scale.

As UFO stories go, Lazar's certainly ranks tops. Gary Schultz obviously has no trouble accepting it whole, and neither for that matter does John Lear. Both have been to the mountaintop and returned home believers. But it's also worth mentioning that the Las Vegas area sprouts high-stakes stories year-round in much the same way that bluebonnets blossom in Texas in the spring. My blackjack dealer at the Barbary Coast hit 21 on five cards, too. Does that mean I get to draw down on the dealer, that the entire state and federal governments of Nevada and the United States and all their employees somehow conspired to scoop up my measly $2 minimum wager? I suppose anything is possible, which is not necessarily the same as likely. For the record, Lazar's most credible piece of evidence is a single W-2 tax form from the "United States Department of Naval Intelligence" authorizing the withholding of $71.94 in social security from total wages of $958.11. Someone is getting off cheap.

That said, Lazar definitely comes across better in person than on video. Asked a question outside his expertise or experience, he simply responds "I don't know." Even an objective observer like Glenn Campbell remains reluctant to make a definitive pronouncement. "I've got a private opinion about Lazar," he admits, "but I think it's premature to express it. At the moment it's simply another UFO story and stories have a tendency of sorting themselves out one way or the other over time as data accumulates. They either get substantiated or discredited. A lie is a different matter altogether because you have to invent an entire world or complex scenario in order to back it up and maintain its viability. The more you lie the better you're chances of eventually being caught out. What impresses me about Lazar's story is that it remains so consistent and constant over time. I would have thought that he would have blown it big time by now if it were only a personal fabrication and nothing more."

I don't say it aloud, but the thought occurs to me: does ufology give rise to paranoia or is it a case of vice versa?

One also expects Lazar to be an enthusiastic supporter of every UFO case around; surprisingly, that doesn't prove to be the case. Asked about the darting lights shown on video tape taken by the space shuttle mission SST-48, Lazar answers clearly and unequivocally that he thinks the images are those of "dust particles close to the camera lens." What the Lord giveth the Lord taketh away, and for a moment it appears as if Lazar might be stripped of his special status. It's the only time the audience turns against him and seems openly skeptical.

DARK SIDE OF WHITE SIDES

I don't say it, but the thought definitely occurs to me: does ufology give rise to paranoia, or vice versa?

At one point someone asks what Waco and David Koresh have to do with flying saucers, and at another someone demands their money back. Meanwhile, to scattered applause, we leave for White Sides, the sole remaining overview‹following an 86,000-acre, 1986 government land grab‹overlooking Groom Lake and environs. Rumor has it that White Sides will be seized next and conceivably at any time, perhaps this very weekend! How long can we risk waiting?

The drive out from Rachel is uneventful; we encounter neither the dread Broncos nor the County Sheriff. We do find a new sign, however, at the White Sides turnoff, informing us that there is a highly restricted military installation to the west, and that photography of same from outside the area is strictly prohibited. (See cover.) Campbell tells us it hadn't been there a week before, when a video crew from WFAA-TV in Dallas went out to White Sides; the crew hadn't been in search of saucers, but the Aurora airplane. All they got was a few shots of a curious black, unmarked helicopter and a grand hassle. True to reported form, Wackenhut called the Sheriff, who drove up and demanded the crew's cameras and film, which they refused to hand over. Taken into nearby Alamo, they were allowed to call the station's lawyers, who argued that there was no sign prohibiting such photography at the time. In fact, the existing signs are a couple of miles on down the road, just prior to an occupied guard shack, but they hadn't driven that far. Sometime within the past week, the new sign had gone up, effectively eliminating that excuse for the moment. In the meantime, the video crew were allowed to keep their cameras and video cassettes.

We intend to start the climb before sunset and come down in the dark, but it's now nearly dark before we even set out walking. Fortunately, there is a half-moon overhead, eliminating the need for flashlights. The first third of the hike is easy going enough: simply follow the dirt road‹ignoring any yellow bricks‹until it dies out in a dry gully. But from there it's all uphill, probably a thousand feet or more, and at a grade that only gets steeper the higher we go. The clean-living Campbell and companion make it look fairly routine. Foster and I, both of whom have spent too much time in too many smoke-filled rooms, most of our own making, have a harder go of it and are soon huffing and puffing to keep up. It occurs to me more than once that chasing UFOs might be a younger man's game. I don't really expect to see any H-PACs cavorting in the night sky over Groom Lake, but I am determined to glimpse the base itself. Isn't this one of the reasons why we came to Rachel in the first place?

Well, to make a long climb short (be prepared to spend at least an hour and a half on the way up alone), we settle for a saddle ridge a few hundred feet below the secondary peak. The view from here isn't as panoramic as from the very top of White Sides, but we can still see the yellow and red lights of Groom Lake and one of the world's longest runway twinkling in the distance. Area S-4, the "secret saucer base," lies somewhere to the south.

We break out binoculars for a closer peek. "It's shut down for the weekend," Campbell says. "Usually there are a lot more lights." Campbell also points out the guard shack in the dark below us, noting that it's the first time he's ever seen it blacked out. The dirt road snakes past it and down to Groom Lake like a giant white worm. Maybe the guards have night scopes trained on us, even as we spy back at them? If so, they don't bother to call the Sheriff.

There is at least one landed flying saucer in Rachel - or will be shortly after this frame is rounded out with plywood/Photo by Dennis Stacy

We sit hunched on hard rocks in silence. The sweat exerted on our upward climb now coalesces in our arm pits like a cold wet sponge. A breeze blows up from the desert floor below, crests the ridge, and cools us to an extraordinary degree, urging us back downhill, to any activity that will burn calories. We resist as long as we can, beyond the realization that Dreamland is indeed dead for the weekend. It's a little disappointing to think that any self-respecting flying saucers are keeping to a 40-hour work week and not running up overtime on their shadow government salary. Eventually, we start back down, revealing the one indisputable truth about White Sides: it's cold on top at night, and a heckuva lot easier going down than it is coming up.

Other truths about the area are harder to come by even if you're the kind that likes to challenge hired government agents up close, which we weren't. We did talk to another weekend warrior who had "innocently" driven right up to the guard shack in his 4-wheel-drive vehicle, expecting polite directions to a nearby ghost town. Instead, he was promptly apprehended outside his car, frisked, and not allowed to retrieve his jacket from inside. For the next hour he was forced to stand in the freezing cold until a Wackenhut Bronco drove up from Groom Lake and finally escorted him back to the restricted line where he was turned over to the County Sheriff. Taken to Alamo, he was summarily fined $600 for violating the restricted area, a fine the judge later reduced to $35 for administrative costs.

You may or may not be so "lucky"; certainly the judge could probably make the fine stick if he wanted to, depending on what hour of the night he or she is rousted out of bed by the authorities. We also hear stories of people who claim that they were actually shot at by the guards, hassled by low-flying helicopters, or suffered mysterious flat tires in the proximity of the former. All said and done, this is not an area in which you want to break down.

Are you likely to see anything anyway? "It's a crap shoot," says Campbell, who admits he's seen a few strange lights in the night sky and may have once heard the Aurora crank up. "I've been living here for over three months now, and I still haven't seen anything that I could honestly and indisputably say was a human-piloted alien craft and nothing but." Campbell's own sightings can be found in his Area 51 Viewer's Guide, along with illustrations of the different kinds of aerial phenomena you can expect to possibly encounter, from the occasional "red darter" to floating "golden orbs." Photos of these and other objects can also be found on the walls of the Little Ale-Inn. The Guide itself can be purchased directly from Campbell for $15 plus $3.50 priority postage. (Glenn Campbell, HCR Box 45, Rachel, NV 89001.)

"To a large extent," Campbell adds, "what you see depends on what you anticipate seeing." There are at least three subcultures now descending on Rachel, he notes, "ufologists, aviation buffs and the military frequency freaks. They all set up in separate places, rarely interact with one another, and pretty much see what they came to see. If you hear from a ufologist that he saw an H-PAC last night, you can ask the aviation buff on the next hill what he saw and he might tell you Aurora, the TR-3A or some other Stealth platform. The radio freak won't care what he saw, he'll just tell you what frequency it was tuned to. Ideally, they ought to get together and share data more often."

Tomorrow the tent will be taken down and Rachel will pretty much return to normal. The sun will shine and set, and visitors from around the world will step up to the bar of the Little Ale-Inn and ask for a cold beer, Alien Burger, fries and directions to the Black Mailbox. White Sides will still be accessible to the public or it won't. Pictures will be taken and stories told. And maybe next year the ultimate UFO seminar to end all UFO seminars will be held once again, hopefully in a bigger tent with room for everyone.