The Dreamland Chronicles: The Strange and Continuing Saga of Area 51 by David Darlington - Feb 1999

Time Warner Paperbacks, Feb 1999. New edition. Paperback. Book Review: The Dreamland Chronicles - the strange and continuing saga of Area 51 \r\n\r\nThe Dreamland Chronicles is a study of the whole Area 51 phenomenon from the stance of the author David Darlington, a somewhat wry and talented journalistic observer. Darlington predictably covers the military history of the top secret Nevada military area, and then launches into a personal quest - he hangs out with the Rachel, Nevada set to watch tortured and hostile male egos manipulate each other and the media for every buck they can get.\r\n\r\nFew of the whacko UFO set emerge with any credibility, including Nevada politicians who hop on the media-squeezing 'Independence Day' launch fracas. Along the way, almost everyone who touches the Area 51 story comes away with their minds infected, their hackles raised and a need for egotistical opinionated vengeance, be that against other equally nerdy conspiratorialists, the 'Gubbermint' or fellow paranoics.\r\n\r\nThere are of course, no facts presented by the protagonists, and the only evidence coming out of Area 51 is the manipulative 'UFO-logists' wringing commissions out of the media, and dollar bills out of people who mainly drink beer while the sun is still up.\r\n\r\nWhat Darlington does achieve, or rather allows the real life personas of Bob Lazar, Agent X, Ambassador Merlyn Merlin II and all the other head-cases to achieve, is to allow the nut-jobs to display the utter truth that the only abnormal beings in Rachel Nevada are firmly on Earth, and many of them live in trailers and drive obsolete convertibles. The convertible, you'll note, is needed so they 'can see the sky' at all times. \r\n\r\nHalfway through the book the reader will already have decided that Area 51 carries contagious properties which drive sane men mad.\r\n\r\nThen, the already mad become more loopy; witness the re-naming of the local road as 'The Extraterrestrial Highway', in a cynical bid to slurp off more tourist dollars.\r\n\r\nFew emerge unscathed by their own foibles. Activist Glenn Campbell (not the singer) emerges as an erudite though skewed evangelist for logic and common sense, and thus spends most of the book portrayed as the only human with a mind of his own, other than Tom Mahood, an otherwise sober individual who gets himself a physics Masters so he might finally poo-poo the hokum sold to the media by 'I reverse-engineered alien spacecraft at Area 51, me' discredited evangelist Bob Lazar.\r\n\r\nSaucerdom, for reasons as yet unexplained by geneticists, seems only to affect the male of the species but wives and girlfriends occasionally display side-effects. Darlington speaks highly of 'Intercepter' Tom Mahood's wife Jeri - but The Madness has touched her too. Darlington tells of how he's at Mahood's home one day and Jeri - a quilt maker of some renown - is working on a design which appears to portray traditional Native American symbology. But on closer inspection, Darlington tells us, the dark symbols turn out to be Stealth Fighters.\r\n\r\nEven the once-fearless 'Intercepter' Campbell fades by the end of the book, giving up everything to have his crumpets buttered by a lady whose previous three marriages and four children entices him away from baiting the 'cammo-dudes' (perimeter guards) on Freedom Ridge, overlooking Area 51. Eventually, Campell will divorce, get a job as a baggage handler at at Las Vegas airport, be laid off, and go sleep in the desert again with a web site entitled 'Homeless by Choice'.\r\n\r\n It's the final sad irony in a well written 280 page chronicle of liars, cheats, quarter-wits and conspirationalists, set in the boonies of a state, '87% of which is Federally controlled' and the rest, apparently, an intellectual desert. \r\n\r\nThe conclusion by the reader must be that the gullible are force-feed drivel by compulsive liars and the media, and that Rachel Nevada is a place where wise men rarely tread.\r\n\r\nThe Dreamland Chronicles does us a finely observed service in allowing the protagonists to hang themselves with their own rope. No-one in the book, including the masses who prostitute their intellects in Las Vegas, portrays themselves in a favourable light.\r\n\r\nIf Area 51 didn't exist, you're left thinking, horrified, somebody would have to invent it. Which is just what they have done.\r\n\r\nRecommended