Sunday, Dec. 14, 1997
UNKNOWN SITE REMAINS SO
Linda Watanabe McFerrin
SPECIAL TO THE EXAMINER
Darlington’s informants – desert denizens, road warriors, con artists, and self-proclaimed extraterrestrials – are a colorful lot, and their stories about alien abductions, government conspiracies, and interstellar travel rival the best from the Twilight Zone.
Darlington walks among them with heroic impartiality on his sober and ultimately sobering prowl of Dreamland‘s dramatic periphery. When he digs deeper, the stories get wilder. Witnesses report on aliens called “little grays,” saucers propelled by elements that do not exist in this solar system, the use of humans as guinea pigs, and New World Order conspiracies.
There are tales about back-engineering captive flying saucers, interactions with aliens, neighbors from Alpha Reticuli and Invisible Government Obedient Robotons (IGORS) created in clandestine government Frankenstein works.
On the other hand, the summary withdrawal of 89,000 acres of public land from public access, the untold billions spent yearly on Black Budget (secretly funded) intelligence and defense projects, the spy planes, stealth fighters, secret shuttles, security oaths and workers exposed to toxic waste without recourse – all verifiable fact – read a great deal like science fiction.
There are so much deceit and misrepresentation around Area 51 that the line between myth and reality is a blur. In this frighteningly distorted world even Darlington seems to occasionally lose perspective.
At one point, lured to the Luxor casino in Las Vegas and confronted with the spectacle of Americans smoking, drinking, eating and gambling to excess, he wonders irritably if visitors to this planet might not find that earthly society at the end of the century was nothing more than a mass migration of oversized but pea-brained organisms, waddling about in T-shirts and shorts.
The only regrettable thing about his chronicle is that Darlington never really penetrates Area 51’s covert operations. The electric fences, the false trails, the “cammo” dudes, the smoke screens, and very real fears keep him forever circling about the installation’s perimeter. This leaves the reader longing, in the midst of all of this data, for the one thing that Darlington is unable to unearth – a truly believable witness.