"The Naked Truth from Open Sources."
Area 51/Nellis Range/TTR/NTS/S-4?/Weird Stuff/Desert Lore
An on-line newsletter.
Issue #28. July 28, 1995
Written, published, copyrighted and totally disavowed by
Psychospy.
Direct from , the Center of Human
Civilization.
We are like children playing along the shore of the great unknown. What is reality anyway? And while we are at it, What is the meaning of life? Psychospy has pondered these questions at length, and we can finally reveal the results of our research: Life just is, and reality is whatever it seems to be. This truth is self-evident to us, but you earthlings are always trying to make things more complicated than they need to be; therefore, it might be a good idea to digress for a while to explain to our readers, in simplest terms, the nature of life on earth and what we can expect the aliens to do for us. This might help us put Lazar, Jarod, Merlin and Travis into perspective and keep us all from going bonkers as we further contemplate the Outer Limits.
Psychospy came into this world in a most peculiar manner, and we can only assume that it happened about the same for our readers. Through no will of our own, we just appeared. Our consciousness was sporadic at first. We can recall isolated images of the bars of our crib and of crawling on hands and knees on the floor of the house where we grew up. Eventually, these disconnected scenes seemed to merge together into one continuous stream, like a long-running British drama on PBS, lacking ads or background music, about lords, ladies and the domestic staff suffering quiet angst and subtle conflict without any car chases or significant bloodshed. To say that we are confused by the process is an understatement. We haven't a clue as to how we got here or who is running the show, but we are forced to live out the drama anyway.
There does not have to be any "meaning of life" for us to live it. Life just is, and like it or not we are caught up in it. From the moment we appeared on earth, we were faced with problems--how to feed ourselves, for example, or how to stave off boredom or depression. The only obvious purpose of life is to solve the challenges that have befallen us. We didn't ask for our problems, just like we didn't choose our parents or the less-than-perfect bodies we occupy. If born in America, we are forced to learn English, drive cars, eat hamburgers and support ourselves in U.S. dollars. We can do these things well or do them poorly. There is no excuse for incompetence in the tasks of life because they are all we are certain of and all we have reasonable control over.
It makes little difference to the problems at hand whether aliens are circulating in our atmosphere. Until they blow us out of the Solar System, we have to live on this planet by this planet's rules. This is one of our difficulties with Ambassador Merlin. We can only take him at his word that he is a Being of Light, residing simultaneously on Draconis and Venus as well as Earth. What bothers us is that he makes a lousy ambassador. He does not grasp the human niceties like regular bathing and respect for the privacy of others. Any member of the diplomatic corps--we don't care from which planet--has the obligation to understand and adapt to the protocols and sensitivities of the culture in which he is serving. This is something we all have to learn: While on Earth in human form we have to adapt to our circumstances as they are. Nothing in the skies absolves us from doing our best in the mortal realm.
Aliens are probably not going to rescue us from our own personal and social messes. Don't get excited, for example, about driving a flying saucer to work as a product of Lazar's and Jarod's reverse engineering program. It might happen someday, but history has shown that every technological advance has a human cost, sometimes equal or greater than the benefit. Do the aliens have the technology to solve our energy needs, wipe out human disease, let us live forever and give us the means to roam the universe without bounds? If so, they should probably keep these sciences to themselves because we humans are bound to take these gifts and screw them up. Everything golden we touch becomes "humanized"--that is, beat-up and barely functional, used for evil as well as good and so comfortable in our hands that we hardly know it is there.
To us humans, the aliens are bound to be, well, alien, something far outside our needs and experience. We do not know how to deal with them, except maybe to exploit their technology to make better video games and microwave ovens. Because they reside outside our laws, we have no right to demand that the aliens reveal themselves or cooperate in our earthly undertakings. It is not their role to educate us, save us from ourselves or tell us what we are doing wrong--even if, perchance, they created us. If there are any aliens not in human form currently visiting this planet, it seems self-evident they are keeping a low profile and are pursuing their own agenda with little interest in our daily affairs. This is probably the way things should be.
Aliens are relevant and understandable to us only in how they reflect on human issues. As the only known intelligent life on Earth we have long lacked a mirror, some channel by which we can see ourselves in perspective. This is perhaps what is most frightening to mankind about the alien presence--not that the aliens are any threat in themselves, but that they might reveal upsetting aspects of our own psyche. They could expose us, for example, to our greatest human fear: that we are indeed mortal and alone and have wasted most of our lives pursuing futile goals. No one wants to hear that message, and some people may be willing to annihilate the aliens to avoid it.
OK, that's it, I've had enough. I was getting pretty sick of all the UFO crap anyway, but your admission in GLDR 27 that you're only interested in entertaining stories and couldn't give a flying fuck about accuracy was the last straw. I'd be obliged if you'd forget I exist.We assume he means, in his peculiar New Zealand dialect, "Would you kindly unsubscribe me from the Desert Rat mailing list." Mr. Alien may have misinterpreted our statements in DR#27. Nowhere did we say we "couldn't give a flying fuck about accuracy." (We know so because we did a text search for "flying fuck" and did not find it in any back issue.) We do care about accuracy, we just define it differently--in terms of internal and external consistency. We also tend to let a story unfold on its own; we assume the inconsistencies will shake out on their own if a story is carefully recorded and cataloged.-- Alien@meanmach.actrix.gen.nz [Original Msg | More Sweetness ]
In a world of unknowns like ours, there is no such thing as absolute accuracy. What we have instead are theories. Any quest for "truth" is really just an effort to find the most consistent theory to explain a phenomenon based on the data currently available. No theory is permanent. Sooner or later, each will be replaced by another, but for now we have to build the best theory we can with the data we have, then conduct our lives accordingly.
In DR#27, we offered some skeptical theories to explain the stories told by Lazar and Jarod 2. Perhaps Lazar invented his S-4 saucer tale first, based on the aliens-eating-humans-at-Area-51 stories told by John Lear; Jarod then concocted his own scenario based on Lazar's. We would be happy to accept this theory as pragmatic truth if it is the best way to explain the data. On the other hand, we are not going to shy away from the more exotic theory--that they are both telling the truth--simply because it is "too weird" and pushes us into uncomfortable areas.
It is not our role to choose "true" or "false." We have simply laid out some theories, and now we are collecting data to find out which is best. This is the essence of the scientific method. Our personal beliefs and public declarations are irrelevant because the data, when collected and adequately organized, ought to eventually speak for itself.
Other readers were more gentle in their criticism....
I tremendously respect the work that you are doing out there--takes a lotta guts to put up with the shit that folks in that neck of the woods have been feeding you. But, having said that, I have to balk a bit at what I've been seeing in the "Rat" lately. It seems to have really gone "way out" into Lazar-ish assumptions (AKA, Jarod) that are dubious, at best.This reader has also misinterpreted Psychospy's intentions. The truth is, we have never been interested in airplanes: They're just trucks with wings. To us, black budget aircraft seem little more than billion dollar procurement programs for our country's aviation museums, who need funny looking planes for static display. Psychospy is a philosophical road warrior, and airplanes just don't challenge the paradigms the way UFOs do.While I enjoy reading your rather dry humor and I get a good snicker out of you poking fun of people who desperately need it, all of this UFO/alien stuff seems to be occupying a larger and larger part of the "Rat". I find less and less useful information for the more serious "black aircraft" buff, which is what I would like to be reading from out there.
While you railed on your detractors and imitators (and rightly so) in that special way you have, it almost seems like what you're sending out is becoming more *like* them. I'd like to ask that you keep the "Rat" *unique*, and don't lower it to the point of becoming just another version of the National Enquirer.
-- DM
In DR#20, we tried to come out of the closet, but perhaps we were too limp-wristed about it. We should say it again, proudly: WE LIKE UFOS! While many alien claims are human confabulations and most others are simply untraceable, we think a few deserve our attention. In spite of the problems of human perception that can certainly create "flying saucers" where there are none, we believe there is a reality hidden behind the noise that is at least richer than the flat and joyless world of the confirmed skeptics. Just what the reality is we won't declare. We proclaim only that UFOs are worthy of our time and are far more educational, in human terms, than any piece of military hardware.
Ufology seems to be marked by a complete lack of available physical evidence. Glorious! There could be no better condition in which to test the human animal. All of us can think logically in well-defined circumstances, like solving math problems or reading a map. If you take away the reference points, though, and let people choose their own truth in a field where anything is possible, that's when you see what humans are really made of. In ancient Africa, we threw spears at the moon during an eclipse to chase away that rapist god--and it always worked! Things today are not much different in, say, Lower Rachel, where the primitives of our culture engage in all forms of useless but satisfying ritual triggered by the claim of UFOs.
In the absence of physical evidence, the question is whether any useful data can be derived from human testimony. If a person tells a fantastic-sounding story but has no physical proof, does this mean the story is false? Honesty in humans is never guaranteed, and human memory and perception are notoriously inaccurate. If a hundred people witness a car crash, there will be a hundred different interpretations of the details. One thing is certain, though: The crash did happen; everyone agrees on that.
If someone you trust tells you they saw the collision, you can feel confident of the primal fact; although you have to be cautious about the peripheral circumstances. The car crash took place, but was the car tan or green? Was there a screech before the impact? Humans tend to record the entire gestalt of the scene noticing only a few remarkable details; the rest they fill in later by interpretation based largely on their emotions and experience. Perception and memory are such personal processes that a witness's testimony cannot be separated from the person himself. You have to know him and the particular rose-colored glasses he is looking through, but once you do you may be able to rely on his reported perceptions as much as you trust what you see with your own eyes.
At the Research Center, we are bombarded by fantastic reports and theories, but most of them we do not know what do with. About alien ambassadors, lights in the sky, mutilated cattle and abducted citizens, Psychospy can only shrug and say, "It's an unsolved mystery." In a universe of mysteries, we have to concentrate on the few that match our skills and have enough connections to our known reality to make them accessible. To draw us away from other pursuits, a fantastic story must be internally and externally connected, elegant in its form but not so pure and sterile as to steal its humanity.
And thus we move on to Hungarian....
"Hungarian," said someone in the back.
Jarod was impressed. "Who said that? Right, Hungarian. They speak a higher form of Hungarian." Jarod said this is what his supervisor had told him, and his supervisor had never lied. Jarod then moved on to other topics in his talk without us having a chance to grill him.
Oooh-la-la! This is something we never expected. The aliens can talk to Zsa Zsa Gabor! But it's a HIGHER FORM of Hungarian, so maybe they can talk to Eva Gabor now that she has passed on.
With all due respects, THAT'S THE STUPIDEST THING WE'VE EVER HEARD. We can't think of any reason extraterrestrials arriving on earth would step off the ship speaking Hungarian, but we can imagine the headline in the Weekly World News: "Zsa Zsa Consults with Space Aliens." If the aliens were to speak an earth language you'd think it would be English, the dominant tongue of the boron trade, or maybe Esperanto, a highly rational language invented by academics and rejected by rest of humanity.
As our readers will recall, these are the aliens who are advising the U.S. government on how to reproduce their flying saucers. Jarod 1 (pronounced "JAY-rod") is one of those consultant-aliens. Jarod 2 is the pseudonym of a retired human engineer who claims to have worked on the design of earthbound flight simulators for the human-built reproductions [DR#27]. Jarod 3 is a gray adolescent cat [DR#25], who is doing just fine at our Rachel headquarters--which reminds us, we have to get her fixed pretty soon so we don't have a Jarod 4, 5 and 6.
Jarod 2 releases information to us in installments when he feels comfortable about what he is saying and after he has supposedly cleared it with his boss. At 70, Jarod's mind is still perfectly fit, but most of his life has been concerned with technical projects, so he is not the best public speaker. He is not very "P.C." in his political opinions, asserting, for example, that the "benign dictatorship" he worked for was not a bad thing and perhaps the whole world will be run by the satellite government someday. (We shake our head and say to ourselves, "No, Jarod, no, that's not an opinion for the masses!") He tends to ramble sometimes into technical areas that are fascinating only to engineers. As he speaks, he drops occasional bombshells about the alien presence without appreciating their effect on the audience and then moves on without further explanation. When you bring him back to the subject, though, there is always a detailed story behind anything he says, and you can usually pin him down as to whether the information is from something he experienced directly or is based on his own speculation.
According to his story, Jarod worked in a highly compartmentalized program in which he was told only what he needed to know to do his job--mechanical design for various assemblies within the flying disc simulator. Jarod and his group knew their place. If they did not have a need to know something, they did not ask. If they went into the simulator and a certain assembly was covered with a drop cloth, they did not lift it up and look underneath. This was something ingrained in them that they did not have to be told. There are apparently many things Jarod is still not allowed to talk about, but many other facts--obvious questions that any UFO buff would ask--he simply never knew. Thus, he is now looking for answers as much as anyone, and like the rest of us he is prone to speculation about the unknown based on sometimes-tenuous pieces of data. Whenever Bob Lazar spoke about his own alleged experiences at "Area S-4," he was always careful to distinguish what he knew for sure from what he had gleaned from secondhand sources and his own speculation. Jarod is somewhat less clear in making this distinction, at least on first presentation, and our challenge is to try to pin him down on the origin of his claims.
Hungarian conspiracies filled our head as we dropped in on Jarod 2 to have him set us straight. "That's just the way it is," he said with some annoyance. He emphasized that the aliens speak not Hungarian, but a higher form of Hungarian. We asked him why the aliens needed to speak any language at all if they can communicate telepathically. We reminded him of his previous statement, "When they speak to you, you hear it in your own voice."
Jarod confirmed that, yes, you do hear the aliens in your own voice, but he was more specific this time. Sound apparently does comes out of the alien's mouth, and you hear it with your own ears. Jarod knows this to be true because an alien had spoken to him in response to some routine technical question. This surprised us, because we had already reported in DR#24 that Jarod 2 had never communicated with his namesake Jarod 1. This is essentially correct, J-2 said, because no substantial communication took place, just a couple of words in response to a question. J-2 was always with a group of his colleagues when he encountered the alien, and the meeting was always in response to a specific technical problem. The alien who spoke to him was probably Jarod 1, but it could have also been one of his Space Brothers because J-2 did not have enough experience to tell the aliens apart.
It seems that these aliens are regular Rich Littles who can mimic any human voice, and they use this ability as a mode of communication in itself. Imagine the problems of an impassive looking gray trying to express himself in a group of humans. The alien is already wearing human clothing to put the audience at ease, but without the familiar facial expressions how do the earthlings know which member of the group he is talking to? Elementary! The problem is solved by the alien speaking in the voice of the person he is addressing.
J-2 thinks that telepathy plays a role in alien communication, but he says he has no direct evidence. He says that when you ask an alien a question, they respond immediately, often before you finish speaking, but J-2 concedes that this could be a sign only of a quick-witted alien, not a telepathic one. J-2 thinks the aliens can read everything about a person just by being in the same room with them, but he does not have enough experience to know if this happened in his case. J-2 says that he saw an alien only rarely, never for more than five or ten minutes and not more than a half-dozen times over the course of his career. These meetings were strictly business, with no idle chat unrelated to the technical problem at hand.
J-2 remarks that, although the aliens respond in English in the voice of the person being addressed, they seem to "think backwards." By this he means that their syntax is reversed. For example, one of the few questions J-2 asked the alien is when something would be ready. The alien's immediate reply in J-2's voice was, "Two about." This confused J-2 at the time, until he realized the alien meant, "About two o'clock." In other words, as we interpret it now, this alien could be speaking perfectly pronounced English words arranged in Hungarian syntax.
J-2 knows the aliens speak a higher form of Hungarian only because his supervisor told him so. In the course of his work, Jarod came upon a document written in a language he did not recognize. It was printed in our roman alphabet and was part of a technical specification. Jarod asked his supervisor about it, and the supervisor called the rest of the design group together to explain. This language was a higher form of Hungarian, he said, transcribed from the speech of an alien by one of the staff linguists. That the aliens should speak Hungarian struck Jarod as amusing at the time, and that's why he remembered it.
Jarod says that there were a lot of linguists in the project, presumably among the best in their field, but they were still trying to decipher this higher form of Hungarian. The science of verbal languages was apparently a key skill in understanding the aliens, but maybe it wasn't the only skill. We recall from Jarod's account in DR#24 that a linguist was part of the original interface team that studied the live aliens retrieved in the Arizona crash, but it wasn't the linguist who first made contact; it was the young bioastrophysicist, who went on to lead the technical side of the program.
Learning a foreign language is more than just translating one word into another. You have to understand the common experience of the people who created that language--the Hungarians, as it were. For example, the Desert Rat would probably be a strange and confusing document to any foreign linguist who does not have a basic understanding of American culture, since Psychospy has muddied up the language with many metaphors and references that do not appear in your Funk and Wagnall's. "Funk and Wagnall's," in fact, is one of those terms. With all the idioms now in use, no alien is going to fully comprehend our modern English language--and certainly not our stand-up comics--unless they live in our society and are watching the O.J. trial.
The same applies in the other direction. Even if the aliens speak Hungarian, the words will be redefined by their own experience, which undoubtedly is very different from ours. Although it may start as the language of Zsa Zsa, it will soon become a different form of Hungarian filled with complex nuances and references to other worlds that an earthbound linguist will always be guessing at.
But what is to account for the aliens choosing Hungarian at all? Do these gray
aliens have a fondness for goulash or rotund Bolshevik women in polka dots?
Perhaps their first encounter with earthlings happened in Hungary, and they
assumed this language was what most humans spoke. We remember a similar
scenario in a movie, Earth Girls Are Easy, about three lustful male
aliens who crash land in a swimming pool in the San Fernando Valley. They
adopt "Valley Girl" talk, accept the local culture as their own and go cruising
for babes. We have an alternative theory, however. Remember that this is a thrice-told tale. Someone told the supervisor, the supervisor told Jarod, and Jarod told us. This is enough steps for many of the details of the message to be lost or garbled, even if the gist is accurate. The original conclusion of the staff linguists might have been that the language of the aliens was LIKE Hungarian. Hungarian is a member of the Ural-Altaic language group. Members of this family follow certain rules of syntax independent of the words themselves. If we allow that life could evolve on a distant planet to walk on two feet in bodies functionally similar to ours, then we would also expect this race to develop spoken languages. It seems unlikely that any of their specific words would match ours, but their syntax could. Nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are probably primal elements of any oral language anywhere in the universe, and there are only a limited number of ways to put these things together.
A human linguist attempting to analyze an alien language will try to correlate it with things he already knows. He could look at the word order and say, "I know this. It is structured like Hungarian." The fact that Jarod saw the language printed in our roman alphabet does not mean it is a human language; it means only that the linguists have found a way to transcribe the sounds uttered by the aliens into character codes. To J-2, who knew no foreign language, the words were meaningless, and they might have also been meaningless to an earthly Hungarian, but a linguist specializing in the structure of languages might not be interested in meaning. He would see only a pattern in the order of words that tells him how to classify that language. "This is a higher form of Hungarian," he might say, with technical accuracy. Only non-linguists might interpret this to mean the aliens can talk with Zsa-Zsa, which isn't true. Once you know the structure resembles Hungarian, you still need an army of linguists and others studying the alien culture to understand the meaning of individual words and idioms.
That is one theory. There could be others. Maybe some historical fluke indeed created a special connection to Hungary which lead the aliens to learn this human language first. It may not have been Zsa Zsa the aliens wanted to kiss up to but black world figurehead Edward Teller, who Bob Lazar suggests may have helped him get his job at Area S-4. Our colleague M.F. drew our attention to this passage in Teller's War, a book profiling the physicist and his Star Wars projects
[Budapest Guide | Hungary in City Net | Hungary Home Page | Fermi/Szilard quote | Today's weather forecast (in Hungarian)]Budapest at the turn of the century had a thriving Jewish community and a series of celebrated schools that produced no less than seven of the twentieth century's great scientists. In order of birth, they were Theodor von Karman, George de Hevesy, Micheal Polanyi, Leo Szilard, Eugene P. Wigner, John von Neumann and Edward Teller. The city pulsated intellectually, rich in commerce, architecture and opera. As Richard Rhodes has noted, the first subway system on the European continent was dug, not in Paris or Berlin, but in Budapest.
The Hungarian scientists were to have a remarkable impact on science in the United States and were universally seen as visionaries. Szilard, Wigner and Teller played important roles in the push for the atom bomb. Von Neumann was a mathematical genius who helped build giant computers used for H-bomb calculations. Fermi, the Italian physicist, once mused over the number of stars in the universe and its age, saying that if aliens existed they should already have visited earth. Indeed, Szilard joked, "They call themselves Hungarians." Teller also delighted in this notion, applying it to himself with relish. Late in life, after getting to know someone he liked, he would sometimes give the person permission to call him "E.T.," after the movie about a friendly extraterrestrial who visits Earth.
J-2 himself has no explanation for the
alien use of Higher Hungarian, but he reminds us about the Native American Code
Talkers of World War II who spoke a "higher form of Navajo" as a radio code
that was never broken by the Axis. Did the aliens deliberately choose a
difficult human language to talk to Teller and his cronies and no one else? As
usual, this question remains an Unsolved Mystery, but one that Psychospy can
live with. We expect reality to have its surreal moments. First Nixon, then boron, and now we have aliens conferring with Zsa
Zsa. What could be more real?
Most earthlings have no difficulty accepting the theoretical possibility of alien life. Psychospy will personally strangle the next moron who tells us, "With all those million, million stars in a million, million galaxies, I have to believe there is intelligent life out there somewhere." It is only when it gets down to specifics that humans become uncomfortable. The gray aliens, like Jarod 1, could not possibly be real, some say, because they look too much like us. You want they should look like crabs? In that case, people would say the aliens look too much like their B-movie counterparts. Lifeforms that evolved on separate planets are likely to be very different in detail but not necessarily in functional form. Just as certain plants in the African and Mexican deserts have evolved separately to look alike, a body with two legs, two arms and four-to-six fingers per hand may be the norm for intelligent life throughout the universe. Likewise, any such life might also be expected to develop a system of crude communication by sounds emitted through the breathing orifice. Maybe they also hiccup, cough and belch. This is not the sort of thing we expect of angels or the idealized aliens of our imagination, but real lifeforms cannot live up to those expectations. When we meet them, they will be as earthy, smelly, specific and repulsive as we are.
J-2 never saw the apparatus in use. (We do not know how personally the aliens take their bathing.) He knew it was an alien shower only because he was told so. He concedes it is possible that the shower also performed a nutritional function. In the public UFO literature, it is often stated that the gray aliens have no alimentary system, so they have to absorb nutrients through their skin.
Jarod says he has never seen an alien eat but has seen one drink. It was while an alien was sitting at a conference table during a technical briefing. He brought a cup to his lips and appeared to drink from it. J-2 does not know what the liquid was in the cup, but he assumes it was water.
Since personal security was extremely thorough and intrusive and the rules of secrecy had become a way of life, Jarod and his colleagues were not tempted to smuggle any documents out of the design room. At night the documents were locked up in a vault. If someone cleaned the office, it must have been at night, because Jarod never saw them.
Under an earlier stipulation agreed upon by Campbell and his very own Special Prosecutor, the opposition now has 30 days to file a counter-brief, then Campbell has 20 days to file a reply. At that point, the appeal will be scheduled for hearing before a real judge, who will then have to mow through all this paperwork, including a massive trial transcript that must have cost a thousand dollars to prepare. Campbell researched and wrote the brief entirely on his own, with final proofreading by lawyers AP, SH and PL, who offered only a few suggestions. Campbell managed to squeeze in 34 different legal references, including the Pentagon Papers case (U.S. vs. New York Times, 403 US 713) and Julius & Ethel Rosenberg (U.S. vs. Rosenberg, et al, 103 FS 808).
Campbell seems to be having a fine ol' time, but one wonders how many thousands of dollars the county and court have spent on this case. The tally includes....
In compensation, Lincoln county law enforcement gets nothing but the bad publicity it deserves, while the court is rewarded with only the $315 Campbell has already paid. On his side, in addition to the fine and possible Senior Center servitude, Campbell has spent only $50 for a copy card at the Clark County Law Library, plus printing and postage costs for the motions he has submitted and copying costs at the County Courthouse. We think it is a fair price to pay for education and entertainment. There are other legal actions in the works, but we cannot discuss them until they become a matter of public record. Win or lose, we are beginning to like this game.
"Ergo," said Campbell, "I must show the world that the government has made a terrible mistake." If this was indeed the same document, then it was already in the public domain. U.S. vs. Heine, 151 F2d 813, and U.S. vs. New York Times told Campbell that any attempt by the government to restrict a document was legally moot if the document was already public. To emphasize this prior fact (and not at all to make it so), Campbell scanned the document into his computer and posted it immediately on the Research Center's WWW page.
Although we cannot vouch that it is authentic or the same document submitted by Turley, it certainly is a fascinating piece of work. It includes floor plans of the base headquarters and security buildings, radio code names, schematics of road sensors and how to disable them and this cover story for the Cammo Dudes....
YOU ARE A MEMBER OF THE SECURITY FORCE PATROLLING THE NELLIS BOMBING RANGE. [ADVISE PERSONNEL TO DEPART] BECAUSE OF UNEXPLODED ORDINANCE, LOW FLYING AIRCRAFT AND STRAFING RUNS CONDUCTED HERE.The whole concept of cover stories fascinates us. It is institutionalized lying, and it means that you can never trust what the military tells you.
Government attorney Russell Young told Pro that in recent weeks "incidents have occured that demonstrate the necessity of terminating this action quickly in order to prevent further damage to national security. Because those matters are under seal, they cannot be discussed... but they are well known to the court. This case must be dismissed now."Turley and Department of Justice spokesman Jim Sweeney said they could not speculate on what the language meant.
LINCOLN COUNTY COMMISSIONER Eve "Mad as Hell" Culverwell [DR#2 | DR#27], one of the few local officials we respect, has survived a recall election sponsored by the Forces of Darkness. At issue was Culverwell's support of an initiative that would allow a temporary nuclear waste storage facility to be constructed in a remote part of the county. Say the word "nuclear" and many citizens go ballistic. Culverwell was saved, we suspect, because the word "environmentalist" has even more vile connotations in these parts, and those meddling outsiders were all over this one. The Forces of Darkness, based in Panaca, Nevada, automatically seek to unseat any competent official who takes an unpopular stand. Since this power block seems to have enough signatures to force a recall election anytime, Lincoln County seems to hold one every other week. We are fond of "Maddie" but have mixed sentiments about her victory. Had she lost, she would have been free to blow this rotten little county and return to human civilization, like Campbell. Because she won, thanks to the loyalty of fellow citizens, she feels compelled to remain to serve out her term. Now, she and her co-conspirators face a lawsuit against them by the state Attorney General, seeking to remove them from office. It appears to have little hope of success, only interim harassment value. Maddie and her co-conspirators may appear sometime in August or September in a segment on nuclear waste on Sixty Minutes. (She was interviewed by Morley, but wasn't put on the hot seat.)
VERSION 4.00 of the Area 51 Viewer's Guide is now available. As usual, there were a lot of incremental changes and a few larger additions. Freedom Ridge and White Sides are now history, while we have added more details and a couple of new maps for Tikaboo Peak. On the cover, the Campbell has proudly stamped: "BANNED AT THE LITTLE A'LE'INN." The Viewer's Guide is available for $15 for new customers or $9 for people who have bought a previous version (send copy number and place purchased). [Ordering info.] Add priority/airmail postage: $4 U.S./$4.50 Canada/$8 Europe/$10 Asia-Pacific. Within the next week, selected portions of the Viewer's Guide will be made available free on WWW.
THE QUIK PICK GAS STATION AND CONVENIENCE STORE in Upper Rachel is the only place on Earth that sells both Campbell's Viewer's Guide and Chuck Clark's Area 51/S-4 Handbook [DR#26] There, the Viewer's Guide outsells the Handbook by about 9 to 1--which shows you that there IS a place for Chuckie's work in this diverse world of ours.
NEW CAR FOR CHUCKIE. Meanwhile, Chuckie has moved up in the world: He has
been seen driving around Rachel in a brand new four wheel drive Jeep Cherokee. This poor fellow who has never had an original idea can't
even buy a car without ripping someone off--in this case the Cammo Dudes who he
is obviously trying to emulate. He should have consulted a C.D. first, as a friend of ours did when he had one cornered. "What do you think of the Cherokee," our friend asked. "Piece of shit," said the Dude. He complained that the car was not made for desert abuse and the engine mounts did not last. However, other friends of ours own Cherokees and are satisfied, while a Popular Science car reviewer says the new model is much improved over the lemons of the past. We regard it as a fine American-made vehicle that is perfectly adequate for runs to the mall and occasional off-road use, but our personal choice is the Jap-made Toyota 4Runner for regular romps where there ain't no roads. 
After owning ours for over 30,000 miles, the only thing that has ever gone wrong is running through a half-dozen tires sliced up by rocks and cacti. (We torture tires without remorse because we buy them from Big-O with their unconditional replacement guarantee.)... By the way, how can Chuckie, with no visible means of support and no obvious talent afford to lay down at least
$15,000 for a new car? Is he on the government payroll as an intelligence agent? (If so, we are outraged, as a taxpayer, at the appalling waste of funds.)
POP CULTURE ADDENDUM [to DR#27]: "Dreamland" according to the group's WWW page is "a Bay-Area acid folk band with roots in British Invasion, Bulgarian folk and `New Music.'" No mention of Hungarian.
ONE OF THE "JOHN DOE" PLAINTIFFS in the Groom Lake hazardous waste lawsuit has died. It is unclear whether it was the result of his claimed injuries. [L.V. Review-Journal, June 14]
THE OPEN SKIES PROGRAM, wherein our former Communist enemies are permitted to overfly and photograph any U.S. military installation, including Area 51, has quietly begun operation. [news article]
THE FORMER COMMANDER OF NELLIS AFB, Lt. Gen. Thomas Griffith, has been fired by a bigger general from his position as commander of the 12th Air Force and U.S. Southern Command Air Forces. [press release | news article] His crime? Griffith, a married man, had a consensual affair with a civilian woman. Dear Lord, give the man an "A" for his chest! Does this firing sound puritanical? Hypocritical? Disregarding of all human rights and privacy? That's the Air Force we know and love.
THE LAZAR S-4 FLYING SAUCER plastic model from Testors [DR#16] has been seen prominently displayed in the Nellis Air Force Base Post Exchange. It must be a hot seller there. [Thanks to M.F.]
CAMPBELL ON ART BELL. Our Regional Director Glenn Campbell will be a guest on Art Bell's Dreamland radio talk show on Sunday, Aug. 6. He will be speaking live from our Las Vegas annex overlooking the Janet terminal. Dreamland is a nationally syndicated radio show broadcast on some 140 stations in the U.S. and Canada, 7pm-10pm Pacific Time on Sunday. (Repeated in some areas the following Saturday, 5pm-8pm Pacific Time.) See Art Bell Page for a station in your local area.
OTHER CAMPBELL APPEARANCES. Also on Aug. 6, Campbell will speak at DefCon III, the totally paranoid computer hacker's convention held at the Tropicana Hotel in Las Vegas. As reported previously, Campbell is also speaking at The Science and Politics of UFO Research, the only UFO-fest endorsed by the Area 51 Research Center. It is Oct. 28-29, 1995, in St. Paul, MN. Latest speaker list also includes: Dr. Richard Haines, Jeffrey Sainio, Dr. Bruce Maccabee, George Knapp, Dr. Michael Swords and Dr. David Jacobs. (So many doctors, but never an aspirin.) For latest details, see WWW document, email penson@geom.umn.edu or call the Science Museum of Minnesota at 612-221-4511.
CALL FOR AREA 51 MAP. "Area 51," in its most specific interpretation, refers to a 6 by 10 mile block of land adjacent to the northeast corner of the Nevada Test Site. The designation is plainly shown on old maps of the Test Site, available for inspection in the DOE reading room in Las Vegas. However, these maps usually show only the periphery of '51 along the border of the NTS. We have not yet seen an official government map that includes both the printed "Area 51" designation and its full extent. We have heard many rumors of such maps being public in the 50s, but have not year seen one with our own eyes. Can any of our readers help?
AN ACCOUNT OF A UFO CRASH IN ARIZONA is provided by Raymond Fowler in his book, Diary of a UFO Investigator. The information comes from the written statement of "Fritz Warner," a pseudonym for a former AF worker assigned to the Nevada Test Site. On May 21, 1953, he says he was flown from Indian Springs to Phoenix, then was taken in a bus with blacked-out windows to another location, assumed to have been near Kingman, where he investigated the crash of a flying saucer. The craft was perfectly intact, Fritz said, and he saw only one occupant, deceased.
THE LATEST TIKABOO HIKE on July 22 [expired promo] enjoyed fine weather and suffered no disasters. The Minister of Words and Agent X brought all the toys--including a Humvee, fist-sized night vision scopes and a military-grade non-cryogenic thermal viewer. Watch for their report on this hardware in an upcoming issue of a major magazine (you guess which). Naturally, nothing of consequence was seen at the base with this fantastic equipment, although some members of the party say they saw a "astronomical anomaly" in the perfect skies on Friday night. (Not a "UFO" mind you.) This was a pulsing star-like object that moved in unusual ways against the background of stars directly overhead: not a star, satellite, meteor or planet, the witnesses say, although all these things were also seen in the moonless sky. This was a rare TV-free excursion: NBC's Dateline had threatened to send two camera crews, but it never materialized. About 30 people attended the hike with a dozen staying the night: four on the peak and the rest at the trailhead. Those below were entertained by the Minister of Words late into the night. He is the patron saint of the Desert Rat with verbal agility and inventiveness far beyond that of Psychospy, who has stolen many a ministerism for these pages. The Minister is better than television when seated in front of the campfire, recounting tales both clever and profound, the only occasional drawback being the absence of an off switch.
THE MT CURY HIKE on June 24 [DR#27], went pretty much as expected, offering a wide view of the atomic testing grounds of the Nevada Test Site, but the desert gave us a scare. The weather was hot--in the 90s--but not uncomfortable, as long as your personal air conditioning was working. We had recommended a gallon of water per person, but that wasn't enough. The six of us stumbled back to the car without a drop of liquid among us. Since this was a seven-hour hike, we should have each brought at least a gallon and a half (one quart per hour) and probably more. Deaths in the desert due to "heat exhausion" almost always come down to a lack of water. As long as you keep up the liquid intake, the body can take any dry heat, but when the water runs out, the natural air conditioning shuts off, and you could be dead within hours. In our case, there was no serious danger, because in an emergency we could have easily walked to the nearby support facilities at Mercury, perhaps suffering a trespassing charge but living to tell about it. Still, it was humbling to realize that the desert can be as cruel and unyielding as the sea or outer space. If you are unprepared for its demands, you could pass away almost painlessly. [Upon request, we will post a hiking guide to Mt. Cury here.]
LEVIATHAN CAVE HIKE? The destination we are considering for the August hike is Leviathan Cave, about 15 miles north of Rachel. This cavern, complete with stalagtites/-mites, is near the top of an 9000 foot mountain. The cave system is said to be about 1/4 mile long. This a specialty hike that is recommended only for hard-core adventurers. Unless we find a guide, this will also be a first-time visit for the two of us planning the hike. The hike to the mouth of the cave is said to be long and strenuous, probably 4+ hours, mostly on a steep slope, so we will have to start at the crack of dawn from Rachel to allow exploring of the cave. The date has not been set, but it is likely to be a Saturday late in the month. Those interested should contact Psychospy. [This event has already passed.]
APOLLO 13 REVIEW. We recently attended a screening of the movie Apollo 13 in the company of a former Apollo project engineer (not J-2 but a contemporary of his). Our companion had been concerned with quality assurance for Rockwell in the manufacture of, among other things, the service module that suffered the explosion. He remembered rushing to work to immediately begin analyses and simulations to find what went wrong and what could be done
to get out of it. Aside from some whining about technical oversimplifications
in the movie and all the heartrending "mushy stuff" from the earthbound wives,
our companion did not have too much bad to say about the film. We thought it
was great, though, and recommend it to everyone.
The movie emphasizes the importance of simulators to the operation of any actual spacecraft. Without an accurate functional reproduction of the command and lunar modules on earth, Apollo engineers might not have figured out the actions the crew had to take to save their lives. Of course, the whole space program could have been a simulation, too, just like the movie itself. "We never went to the Moon," some conspiracy theorists say, and Psychospy cannot prove them wrong. It must have been a hoax perpetrated by the media-government-industrial complex: The photographs, moon rocks and TV images were all fakes, cleverly concocted by government laboratories and Hollywood studios. The only evidence we have that it really happened is the word of the people who participated, like this Rockwell guy. Our friend could be lying, though, or he could have been tricked, so we will have to dismiss his testimony. To take a rocket to the Moon is Too Weird, especially when the government has flying saucers in stock; therefore, it could not have happened.
VICTIM OF SPACE AND TIME. There is so much more we wanted to cover in this issue of the Rat: (1) Campbell is evicted from his Las Vegas apartment and subsequently arrested for espionage (according to reports from the Little A'Le'Inn). (2) Campbell also confesses he is an operative of a little known government agency, the USGS. (3) Ambassador Merlin pays the piper in the Nevada Legislature for his seminal indiscretions.... Plus MUCH, MUCH MORE. However, time and space have defeated us in this issue. We will try to pick up these threads in DR#29, which we hope to put out soon.
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