Detour #106: Extraterrestrial Highway, Area 51, Nevada, USA
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With a highly anticipated Pentagon report on the possible existence of alien life raising eyebrows in the global ufologist community, Luke Ponsford recounts his journey to Area 51 on the extraterrestrial highway.
It may have been Beatty, or possibly Goldfield, or maybe somewhere in between. I can’t quite remember. When you’re slap bang in the middle of nowhere on an arrow straight, featureless Nevada highway, it’s difficult to tell one desolate, sun-bleached town from the next. Wherever we were, it was hot. Baking hot. Running short of dollars, we’d stopped at a dog-eared gas station to see if I could cash a traveller’s check. There was no cooling aircon as I went inside, just a couple of rusty fans blowing warm air around the room. The cashier’s desk was down the end, flanked by dusty glass display cases full of luminous grey snakeskins – the kind you’d find by the side of the road in these parts, I figured. There wasn’t a lot else for sale. The guy behind the till looked at me blankly as I approached. He was huge, maybe 400lbs, sporting a wispy beard and Dame Edna-style diamanté-encrusted spectacles that were far too small for his colossal head. A bit strange. Anyway, yes, he could cash a traveller’s cheque no problem, but he’d need some ID. I handed him my UK driver’s licence, which he glanced at briefly before passing it back to me. “Wow,” he exclaimed. “All the way from Uck.”
This was always going to be a weird trip. My colleague Geoff and I, fresh from covering a film festival in LA for a movie magazine, had decided, after taking in a screening of the classic extra-terrestrial caper Close Encounters of the Third Kind, to drive to Area 51 – the beyond-top-secret airforce base in the middle of the Nevada desert. While rumoured to be the testing site for numerous deeply covert experimental aircraft and weapons systems, Area 51 is best-known for being the world capital of alien conspiracy theories, the biggest of which was the claim that the site hosted the wreckage of an alien spacecraft that crashed at Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. They allegedly had the bodies of its pilots too. All very sinister. The US government, however, had repeatedly stated that the downed craft was a weather balloon and there were never any alien corpses in the first place. Hmm.
Filled with intrigue and a taste for adventure, Geoff and I had departed Los Angeles the previous day in a rented Mitsubishi Eclipse Spyder and headed 250 miles north-east, passing through LA’s far-flung suburbs and industrial hinterlands, out to the desert and beyond. After spending the night in Stovepipe Wells, a windswept way-station in the middle of Death Valley National Park, we’d set off in the direction of Area 51 the next morning.
It was somewhere along US Route 95 that we stopped at that gas station. After delivering a brief British geography lesson to our curiously bespectacled new friend, he began to fill us in on the local area. There were dozens of dead junkie hookers buried in the desert, he told us. “Who’s going to find them out there?” he winked at me conspiratorially, gesturing to the boundless scrubland just outside the window. Rogue Mexican cartel runners were a problem as well. But when we asked him about Area 51 and UFO sightings, he fell silent. “I don’t know about any of that,” he muttered, before shuffling off into a back room.
Undeterred, Geoff and I pressed on, heading north to the old mining town of Tonopah before bearing east onto US Route 6. For the next 50 miles we didn’t pass a single vehicle, apart from a few long-ago discarded jalopies rusting away by the side of the road. The distant mountains and valleys of the Monitor Range were making us feel a little insignificant in our stylish little roadster, while the endless swathes of Sagebrush scrub, stretching out interminably into the haze, were eerily still and silent. Breaking down out here would not be good.
On passing the abandoned settlement of Warm Springs we pointed the Mitsubishi onto State Route 375, also known as the Extra Terrestrial Highway, and gingerly headed south towards Area 51. Officially given its spooky name in 1996, SR 375 had been the location of numerous UFO sightings and other strange and mysteriously unspecified alien activity over the years. As we traversed mile after mile of unoccupied desert terrain, skirting the northern edges of the vast USAF Nellis Air Force Range, my mind was spinning. Were we about to be abducted, whisked away to another galaxy and used for a series of bizarre medical experiments? Would we be pulled over by clandestine US military operatives and force-fed mind control drugs by the CIA? Fortunately, none of those things happened, and an hour later we arrived totally unscathed at Rachel, the closest town to Area 51.
With a population of 54, a tourist shop, a 12-room motel and an alien themed restaurant, Rachel felt like midtown Manhattan out here in the middle of nothingness. Geoff and I booked into the motel and went over our plan of attack. We’d have an early dinner, wait until dusk, then venture out towards Area 51’s entrance. Then we’d drive around a bit looking for UFOs and alien activity. If we didn’t find any then we’d call it a night. But if we did? Well, there wasn’t really a plan for that, so we decided to play it by ear.
Area 51, we were told by the motel manager, was officially called the Groom Lake Airfield and was part of a massive complex of military installations, all with strictly classified activities. There had long been rumours of experimental stealth aircraft being tested in the restricted airspace above. Did the manager think that these mysterious planes could possibly be mistaken for UFOs by conspiracy-minded folk? “You just can’t be sure,” he said hesitantly, looking around at the stuffed aliens and souvenir spaceships for sale in the lobby.
As night fell, we decided to get a closer look at our foreboding destination. Getting directions from our host, we set off from the motel to the unmarked, unpaved road leading to Groom Lake’s entrance. After 20 minutes of driving, our headlights picked out a squat grey bunker in the distance. Although the checkpoint was unmanned, the perimeter’s high gates, razor wire and array of menacing signs warning us of ‘authorized deadly force’ made turning back seem like a sensible decision. So, we turned back. Speeding towards Rachel through the inky blackness, we had little time to think about UFOs or aliens. This was plenty scary enough. On arriving back at the motel, we took a little time to scan the night skies. Beautiful indeed, but no signs of any alien space craft. We decided to call it a night.
After an uneventful, extra-terrestrial-free sleep, Geoff and I met at the town’s restaurant for an early lunch before embarking on the 400-mile trip back to LA. We never really expected to see a UFO, or get abducted on a dark desert highway, but for sheer weirdness, our kooky jaunt to the alien conspiracy capital of the world had been well worth a couple of sun-baked days on the road. We both ordered ‘saucer’ burgers and I bought a green alien head cookie jar as a memento of the journey. I’ve still got it on a shelf in my kitchen, and when I look at that hideous faded jar now, many years after my trip to Area 51, I still think of alien spacecraft and shady government agencies and classified weapons systems. And then I think, “I’d quite like a biscuit”.
Words Luke Ponsford
