Dreamland: Roswell and Area 51
📖 Dreamland
Dreamland is journalist Phil Patton’s account of a road trip deep into the low desert and dry lake beds of southern Nevada in search of the truth (presumably, “the truth is out there”). It is at once a cultural history of the Cold War, an anatomy of the military mind, and a steady look at our obsession with the UFO phenomenon. What really happened at Roswell in the 1940s? And what is the Air Force doing at Area 51? Whether you join the “UFO buffs,” convinced that aliens are here doing things they will not name, or become an “Interceptor,” doggedly hunting stealth aircraft or “black aircraft,” you have to station yourself on the edge of the vast desert wilderness—the zones marked off-limits for classified research—to carry out your search.
With a slightly puzzled, half-objective attitude, Patton explores the edges of these strange, lonely places (and sometimes their interiors), just as he examines the minds and motives of the people who live there. He seems to suggest that human oddity itself is room enough for everything, from UFOs to top-secret military aircraft to global atomic annihilation. He describes Dreamland this way: “I came to believe that its legends and knowledge, its language and paradoxes, form a strange yet fitting time capsule of half a century of the Cold War and black secrecy. Here the culture of nuclear energy and air power merges with the folklore of aliens and earthly conspiracies; their interference pattern forms a weird moiré. This is a place from which to look at our own planet with an outsider’s eye.” —Therese Littleton (This passage is quoted from an edition that is out of print or unavailable.)
“Dreamland,” “Area 51,” and “Groom Lake” refer to a military base in Nevada about which the government has stayed silent. Built in the early 1950s, this test range saw the first flights of the U-2, the SR-71 Blackbird, and the F-111 stealth aircraft, and it is the subject of wide speculation among UFO researchers. This thorough work by Patton (author of Made in the USA and Voyager) follows last year’s Area 51 by David Darlington. Combining solid research with first-person reflection, Patton explores a loose community of technology-obsessed sky-watchers known as the “Interceptors,” devoted to unlocking the secrets of Area 51. Unlike Darlington’s sincere but somewhat green book, Patton supplies enough intellectual depth to make the subject safe reading for Esquire’s audience (he is a contributing editor there). (For example, he compares military hardware left in the desert to “a sculpture by Anthony Caro.”) When he visits the Interceptors who live in trailer parks (and subgroups such as “stealth buffs” and “UFO buffs”), he invokes Freud, Jung, and even “the Dreamtime of the Australian Aboriginal people,” turning the Interceptors’ enthusiasm into a clear insight into millennial anxiety. On the other hand, Patton is often quite successful at explaining military aviation and secrecy, even though he cannot offer any substantial revelation about what is or is not inside the base—whether an aircraft that can fly at Mach 15 or hidden spacecraft wreckage. Security remains airtight. The book contains 16 pages of black-and-white photographs and was not reviewed in advance by Publishers Weekly.
Thomas Pynchon meets Hunter S. Thompson (stylistically)—in this novelistic account of the U.S. government’s secret air base, “Area 51.” Area 51 is a stretch of desert in the American Southwest the size of Belgium. Beside it lies a nuclear test site. Both are products of the Cold War, when…
📚 Source:UFO Evidence Bookstore
