A powerful Web search engine did the rest. It turned up a 1990 NASA résumé for an Air Force astronaut candidate called Captain Carl Walz who was employed at "Pittman Station, Nevada," which in reality, Campbell knew, was nothing more than an abandoned electricity substation on the Boulder Highway. Another biography, found by a Net sleuth colleague of his, ascertained that Walz had served as a flight-test program manager at "Detachment 3 of the Air Force Flight Test Center at Edwards." Because there was no Det. 3 at Edwards itself, Campbell deduced that it had to be Area 51 and that Pittman Station was the mail drop.
Edwards, then, was the white world mirror image of Area 51, the super-classified facility at Groom Lake.
Both the "pulser" and the aircraft tracked by the U.S. Government Survey's seismic equipment (more than likely one and the same aircraft type) were viewed on a heading that either led into or out of Groom Lake.
Twenty miles to the west, somewhere behind the palms surrounding the Desert Inn's swimming pool, lay the "Tejon Ranch," Northrop's RCS range, a remote facility buried in a gulley on the southern end of the Tehachapi Mountains. People who found themselves in the vicinity of this place in the dead of night had reported seeing orbs of light within the confines of the range and, inevitably, stories that Northrop was testing recovered alien spacecraft began to circulate among UFO buffs. Based on Northrop's highly classified work applying electrostatics to the B-2, these pieces of eyewitness testimony now perhaps had a more plausible explanation.
UFO stories had grown up around the two other radar test ranges in the area — Lockheed Martin's and McDonnell Douglas' (now Boeing's)— a score of miles to the east. Closer still, was Plant 42, the site on the airfield at Palmdale where the Skunk Works' huge manufacturing facility was located. It was there that I was due to meet with and interview Jack Gordon, bright and early after breakfast.
It was sometime in the dead hours that I heard the sound of scratching coming from the lock. I turned toward the handle, no more than four feet from the head of the bed, and saw it move, fractionally, but perceptibly, in the thin sliver of light spilling from a crack in the bathroom door. In my head, I knew exactly what was happening even before the action started. Someone was about to hard-key the front door lock and there was nothing I could do about it. As I braced for the bang from the hammer that would drive the platinum tool into the barrel of the lock and core it out in a split instant, it happened, but so fast, all I could do was lie there, paralyzed, as the door flew in and the bolt cutters took down the chain. Then, I saw them: three shapes silhouetted momentarily in the doorway — black jumpsuits, body armor, kevlar helmets and semiautomatic weapons. A glint of reflected moonlight on the barrel of the gun as it moved and then it was hard against my forehead, grinding against the thin skin between my eyebrows. More pressure, killing pressure, as the snub-barreled Ml6 was pushed down harder and harder, the force driving my head deep into the mattress. And above it all, the double click of the bolt being cocked and locked, a shock of white teeth in a face otherwise hidden by the shadows as he braced to take the shot.
It was then that I came up for air, sucking it down in great gulps, my hands outstretched, pushing against bodies I could still see but weren't there and never had been.
Slowly, the ropey, '70s charm of my motel room at the Desert Inn pulled into focus. I was bathed in sweat and my hands were shaking. I lay there motionless until the sweat dried on my skin and then I tried to get back to sleep, but against the rattle of the air-conditioning unit, I knew I was righting a losing battle. Around four-thirty, I gave up, got out of bed and stepped outside, a bottle of Coke in hand, into the enveloping warmth of the tinder-dry Mojave night air.
The liquid shimmer of the night sky had been diluted by the first traces of dawn light, dimming the intensity of the stars a little, but not the overall effect. I lay back on the hood of my car and tried to lose myself in thoughts of the cosmos and Garry Lyles' dreams of a "50-year fast trip" to Alpha Centauri in a craft whose modus operandi was beyond the comprehension of the best brain talent in NASA.
After six months of sniffing around the black world, even longer reporting on its periphery, I had found nothing within the Air Force or its attendant industry to suggest the remotest link with any of the five methodologies espoused by NASA for cracking the gravity code. All I had found was a possible link to T. T. Brown and, significant though this was, it left too many gaps in the overall picture.
While Brown's early work might conceivably have explained how an aircraft with the performance characteristics of a UFO had come to be "within the present U.S. knowledge" in 1947—the footnote to the memo I'd found between USAAF generals Twining and and Schulgen (now stained with the coffee I'd spilled across it) — it begged other questions: why NASA had studiously chosen to ignore his work, for example, as a pathway to antigravity.
The official reason, according to Valone, LaViolette and others, was that the Air Force had carried out its own investigation into the Brown effect as recently as 1990 and had found no cause to believe it was real. In a report on "Twenty-first Century Propulsion Concepts," prepared for the Air Force Systems Command Propulsion Directorate, the author, Robert Talley, had concluded from his experiments that "no detectable propulsive force was electrostatically induced." This failure to replicate Brown's work was cited by both NASA officials and Dr. Hal Puthoff as a valid reason for excluding the Brown effect in their search for exotic propulsion technologies.
But what the Air Force report did not make clear was that Brown had consistently advocated using very high voltage to induce an electrogravitic effect—50 kilovolts in the case of the 2-foot diameter discs and 150 kV in the follow-up experiment that had supposedly exhibited results "so impressive as to be highly classified." In Winterhaven, Brown had urged further tests using a 10-foot diameter disc charged at 500 kV— the Air Force, by contrast, had not raised the voltage in its tests above 19 kV.
During two out of dozens of readings, it conceded that it had recorded some "anomalous" results, but it then made no attempt to explain these anomalies in any subsequent analysis. I tried to figure why this should be. Was the Air Force afraid of the truth — or merely trying to suppress it? In the clarity of thought that can come in the aftermath of dreams, the other notion I latched onto was this: Ever since I'd stepped into the black world I'd not been moving forward, as I'd hoped, but backward; to a period of research I'd already covered, rooted in work that had gone on a half century earlier.
I was trying to find answers in high-tech hot spots like the Skunk Works, when something told me I was looking in the wrong place; the wrong time, even.
And Marckus, I felt sure of it, had known about this from the beginning. He'd been in possession of the facts surrounding the B-2 and for all I knew he was bang up to date on NASA's advanced propulsion activities as well. For the past God knows how long all I'd done was duplicate his vast knowledge in a couple of key areas. I'd been set some kind of practical exam and gone along with it.
After breakfast, I set off for my appointment with Gordon, keeping the railway on my left and the sun behind me. In the distance, through the early morning haze, a giant hangar pulled into view. It had been built in the '70s as a final assembly hall for Lockheed L1011 airliners, but subsumed since the early '90s by the Skunk Works for the only official work on its stocks: a bunch of "onesie-twosie" upgrade programs associated with the U-2 and F-117A. The hangar dominated the desert scrubland for miles. I pulled into the parking lot across the road from the main facility and was met by Ron Lindeke, a seasoned veteran of Lockheed's PR machine. Since the interview was to take place on the main site itself — a rare sanction, Lindeke reminded me — I was reminded to leave my camera and tape recorder in the PR building. This functioned as an air lock between the outside world and the organization's highly secure operations on the other side of the road.