Area 51

I remember the first time I heard about Area 51. I was watching a show on PBS, part of a series on "Great Drives." It was hosted by the actor Graham Greene. This episode was about Route 93, which runs from Las Vegas to Montana. He starts in Vegas (it was also the first time I heard the absolutely gorgeous cover of "Viva Las Vegas" by Shawn Colvin), and then made a side trip to the small town of Rachel, which is just a collection of mobile homes and a mailbox, belong to a rancher, which has come to be known as "The Black Mailbox." Nearby is the Nellis Air Force base, which includes the mysterious "Area 51." The whole thing grabbed my imagination like a dog grabs a shank of meat.

What is Area 51? It's a section of the base that is highly classified. Likely it is a testing ground for aircraft that are being developed, such as the Stealth or Blackbird. But over the years a lore has been created that one of two things are going on: alien spaceships are being reverse-engineered, and/or aliens themselves, or their remains, are kept there.

When you don't know what's inside a box, it's easy to imagine all sorts of things that are in it, and none of these can be disproved. Therefore an entire cottage industry has revolved around Area 51 (in addition to Roswell, New Mexico, where a craft supposedly crash landed in 1947). I'm not one of those types that believes in things like this--I certainly think there is life on other planets, the odds are too great, but I don't think there's sufficient proof to assume that any of these life forms have visited Earth.

But, as the poster in Fox Mulder's office read, "I Want to Believe." Thus I did a lot of research on Area 51 and ufology in general; the culmination was a script I wrote called The Black Mailbox. It is still unproduced, of course, but did get to the top 250 in the first Project Greenlight contest.

I was immersed in facts and lore about the place some ten to twelve years ago, to the extent of having survey maps of the area tacked to my wall. I still have a few bookshelves lined with volumes on the subject, from Jacques Vallee's books (he was the model for the Francois Truffaut character in Close Encounters of the Third Kind) to sensational books from the '50s with titles like The Coming of the Saucers and Flying Saucers on the Attack. I knew about Project Blue Book, the Majestic 12, black helicopters and the Men in Black (long before the movie of the same name).

I even visited the place, or got as close as I could. On my first visit to Las Vegas in 2002 I took a tour, which visited the black mailbox (now painted white). We went to the edge of the base, which has a sign that says photography is prohibited (of course I took a picture of the sign) and one could see a parked black SUV in the distance, waiting for someone to dare cross in. We had lunch in the Little Ale'Inn, a restaurant with a UFO theme. I loved it.

I also went to a UFO conference held in nearby Hamilton, New Jersey. It was fascinating, as I listened to a woman, with a completely straight face, talk about her multiple abductions by aliens, and listened to people argue about the niceties of the Roswell crash. Part of me called bullshit many times (one of the alien races mentioned by the woman was on Star Trek, for example) but you have to kind of admire the dedication and purity of these people. It's kind of like visiting a prayer meeting of evangelicals.

Much of this information has faded, but I was reminded of all this by watching a film the other day called 51, a Syfy Channel original. It's a crummy and shoddy film, and reminds me that there really hasn't been a good movie about the concept of Area 51. This one was bogus from the opening shot, which had a newswoman standing in front of a fence around the area--there is no fence (and it was an obvious green screen projection).

The plot concerns newspeople who are allowed to tour the facility. A colonel (Bruce Boxleitner) shows them the first level, but at the same time, an alien called Patient Zero escapes, freeing other, more deadly aliens (one of whom is a rip-off of the creature from Alien). It would seem that there only about a dozen soldiers on the base, as the aliens kill all but a few. Patient Zero is able to morph into replicas of those he touches, which saves on special effects.

Until my movie is made, the definitive Area 51 has yet to be made.