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's 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.