Product Description
A journey into the most secret place in America
A story of secrecy, suspicion, and conspiracy
A history of a place that does not legally exist
Dreamland zooms in on Area 51--the nearly four million acres of Nevada airspace that has been a base for experimental military aircraft, the fount of UFO rumors, and the alleged site of alien insurrection.
How this real-life legend came to exist is Phil Patton's tale. He explores the mystery and fantasy surrounding the place, peeks over the edge of paranoia, and tracks strange objects in the air above this country of the mind. He visits spies and counterspies, test pilots and secret agents, and tunnels into the subcultures of true believers and conspiracy buffs.
Reviewers have applauded Dreamland as "brilliant," "fascinating," "weird, wonderful, sometimes spooky," "curiously epic, frequently humorous, and always entertaining." Dreamland is a novelistic tour de force that makes us all rethink our convictions about American know-how--and alien inventiveness.
Amazon.com
Dreamland is journalist Phil Patton's chronicle of his road trip into the low deserts and dry lakes of southern Nevada in search of the truth (which, presumably, is Out There). It's a cultural history of the cold war, a psychoanalysis of the military, and an unswerving look at our fascination for UFOs. What happened at Roswell in the 1940s? What is the Air Force doing out at Area 51? Whether you join the "youfers," and decide that genuine aliens are here, doing their inexplicable thing, or the "Interceptors," who desperately seek sightings of stealth planes, or "black aircraft," you'll need to camp at the perimeters of the vast desert wildernesses set aside for secrecy to do your research. Patton explores the edges (and sometimes the insides) of these strange, lonely places in the same way he examines the psyches and motives of the people who inhabit them--with bemused semiobjectivity. Patton seems to be saying that human weirdness is roomy enough to encompass everything, from UFOs to top-secret military planes to global atomic destruction. He writes of Dreamland: "I came to believe that its legend and lore, its language and paradoxes, provided a strange and yet appropriate time capsule of a half century of cold war and black secrecy. Here, the cultures of nuclear power and airpower merged with the folklores of extraterrestrials and earthly conspiracies; their interference patterns formed a moiré of the weird. It was a place from which to see our own planet with the eyes of an outsider." --Therese Littleton
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