By Timothy R. Gaffney
Cox News Service
from the Austin (TX) American Statesman
Sunday, April 3, 1994, page C4
RACHEL, Nev.--About the only people you would expect to meet in this tiny desert hamlet are ranchers, miners and maybe some military-type people who work at the secret Groom Lake base called Dreamland across the mountains.
Glenn Campbell fits none of these molds.
Campbell, 34, is a New England transplant who has settled here to publish a guidebook for UFO believers and Dreamland watchers. In less than two years, he has become the local Dreamland guru, tour guide and a pain in the neck to the Air Force.
Campbell lives in a mobile home crammed with computers, fax machines, printers and videocassette recorders. Outside, next to a white compact car plastered with bumper stickers from all over the world, stands a large sign that declares his tiny lot the "Area 51 Research Center." (Area 51, reportedly taken from oId government maps, is another nickname for the Groom Lake area.)
In just one year, Campbell's Area 51 Viewer's Guide has become the
authoritative source for anyone traveling to this part of Nevada. It's hardly likely to make him rich, but Campbell does not seem to need the money. He lives modestly on investments he made as a software designer and major stockholder at a small Boston firm.
This gives him time to polish his guide and indulge a passion against government secrecy.
Since October, Campbell has been campaigning against the Air Force's effort to withdraw 3,972 acres of federal land near here from public use. Using a computer and modem, Campbell's newsletters and bulletins reach the world.
Campbell said he was drawn here by weird stories that the government has recovered spacecraft from other worlds, keeps them at its secret base and test-flies them around the area.
"There was this claim that you could come to this distant location on this vacant desert highway and on Wednesday night the sky would just rip open with UFOs," he said. In October 1992, he spent three nights on the desert near Groom Lake and, indeed, "I did see the sky rip open with fantastic things."
He soon realized that what he was seeing were airplanes doing night combat maneuvers.
But he noticed that inquiries about the Groom Lake base and secret U.S.
aircraft met the same stony government silence that greeted questions about UFO reports.
"The problem I faced is, how do you make sense of it all? This is all focused on the issue of government secrecy," he said. "You clear up the government secrecy and you clear up (questions about) UFOs."
The government invites and even encourages conjecture and rumor by
pretending Dreamland doesn't exist and attempting to increase its secrecy, Campbell said.
At a public meeting last month in Las Vegas, opponents of the land
withdrawal accused the government of carrying out a broad range of di- abolical programs at the secret base--every--thing from making secret deals with evil aliens to conducting sinister genetic experiments on missing children.
The claims hardly sound credible, but the Air Force's push for greater secrecy has only reinforced suspicions.
The Air Force says it needs the land to close off viewpoints because too many people are climbing ridges to watch. That creates a safety problem, the service claims, and it forces secret operations to be rerouted or canceled for security reasons.
Some support the Air Force's position -- even some UFO researchers.
Skip Folden, a longtime UFO investigator from Las Vegas, said the search for proof of extraterrestrials shouldn't ignore national security needs.
"I don't appreciate people who laugh at the risks of lives over secret information being given out," he told the crowd. "This is a serious world we're in."
Campbell doesn't buy the argument. "The military is always going to push for more secrecy," he said. "I'm just pushing in the other direction."
He is the Air Force's leading antagonist on this issue. He organizes
"inspection visits" to White Sides mountain and Freedom Ridge, the very lookouts the Air Force wants closed.
The day after the public meeting, Campbell sporting desert camouflage clothes and acting like a safari guide, led a small caravan of four- wheel-drive vehicles up Freedom Ridge for a sunny day of viewing Dreamland and thumbing noses at the government.
Does he wonder whether his visits are hindering whatever schedule
Dreamland follows?
"I'm sure I am," he said.
