For UFO Buffs, the Truth Is Out There on Highway 375 : Aliens: In Nevada desert, hunt is on for extraterrestrials. Or are the strange sightings linked to a ‘secret’ military site?

Kathleen Ford peers over the steering wheel of her van and points a manicured fingernail toward the dusky golden sky. “Perfect weather to pick up saucers,” she says approvingly.

Many a cold lonely evening, the 45-year-old former Las Vegas blackjack dealer and beauty school graduate has pointed her camera hopefully at the desert sky and taken pictures of what looked like nothing--only to have the film reveal dark landscapes punctuated by odd squiggles of light or ghostly blobs.

UFOs, she muses.

“When there are just enough clouds in the sky, things fall into place,” Ford explains. “And I pick up things.”

Which is why she was acting as tour guide to a group hoping for similar luck. This is alien territory--extraterrestrial aliens, that is.

In fact, this desolate Nevada desert is so famous for UFO sightings that a Nevada state assemblyman and some locals want Nevada State Highway 375 designated the “Alien and Extraterrestrial Highway.”

For Ford’s 10 passengers, all attending the weeklong International UFO Congress convention in Mesquite, 80 miles north of Las Vegas, this ride was a long field trip. It began with sky watching and ended with a respite here at the Little A’Le’Inn, a diner that caters to the hunger pangs of UFO tourists.

In between would be a trip down white sand roads to the edge of Area 51, a highly secret military installation--the location of which is one of the military’s worst-kept secrets.

Some say this is where the military tests its state-of-the-art planes. Legend among UFO buffs has it that the military holds captured spaceships there and attempts to “reverse-engineer” them. In public, the Air Force doesn’t even call it Area 51. (The name is nothing more than its grid location on maps of the Nevada atomic testing site.)

The Air Force calls it the operating location near Groom Dry Lake--a part of the huge Nellis Range Complex. They won’t say what goes on there.

“We don’t discuss that,” said Maj. Mary Feltault, an Air Force spokeswoman at the Pentagon. “On certain areas of the Nellis Range Complex, the mission is classified.”

The secrecy of Area 51 and the mystery of UFOs are inextricably linked in this remote Nevada high desert. This group would just have to see for themselves.

A Van Full of Seekers

As the van trundles up U.S. 93, the flattops of mesas spread across the horizon. In the golden light of dusk, their rocky faces are ribboned in colors of red and brown. Who could blame extraterrestrial aliens for wanting to land in such starkly beautiful surroundings?

Graham Birdsall, who hails from Leeds in England, fires up his video camera to catch the terrestrial scenery he is taking in for the first time. Birdsall, who runs a UFO magazine, has made himself into an expert on aviation--”so when something doesn’t correlate, I can justifiably say that’s nothing I’m aware of that can be explained.”

And he has had that happen. “There are five occasions where I was absolutely lost for an answer,” he says.

Behind him sits Alfred Gilch, 46, a Munich travel agent who has been interested in UFOs since he was 15. Next to Ford sits Greg Leeper, 30, of San Diego, the owner of a vintage clothing store. He sports curly hair to his shoulders and striped pants with a T-shirt that reads “Peace Bomb.”

“I’ve seen some strange things,” Leeper confides. “But I wouldn’t be comfortable saying they were UFOs.”

As the sun sets, three peach and gray clouds appear in the sky bearing an uncanny resemblance to flying saucers as Salvador Dali might have painted them. Everyone looks and chuckles in delight. It is their first shared sighting.

Night falls by the time Ford turns onto Highway 375 and heads west, not passing another car for miles. She scans the highway for Mailbox Road--a parting in the blackness of the night, marked only by a mailbox. She once camped here alone for three weeks with little more than a sleeping bag, a camera and a rifle for protection.

From this remote swatch of land people have seen light shows they can’t explain. It also happens to be a mere 20 miles from Area 51.

The air is chilly, and the only light is the moon. Chuck Clark, wearing a warm jacket and a hat with earflaps, is waiting for the group, his telescope mounted and pointed at the moon. A self-described amateur astronomer, he has devoted himself to studying UFOs and scrutinizing the perimeter of Area 51. He has even become familiar with the security guards.

“I aggravate them a lot,” says Clark, a soft-spoken, serious man. “I’ll sit out there for an hour and then hit them with a strobe light.”

He points across the horizon toward the west and some mountains in the distance. All you can see is a lot of sky and Venus sitting low and bright. “Area 51 is to the left of Venus,” Clark explains. “Quite often at this time, they’ll fly stuff.”

The UFO-seeking tourists stare into the distance.

“So when was the last time you saw something?” Birdsall asks.

“About two and a half months ago,” Clark answers, but it was a minor sighting.

Back in February, though, he was on this road, peering into the distance, when he saw what looked--at first--like a flare from a mortar launch. “All of a sudden it streaked over there to that mountain,” he says, pointing. “It went about 4.8 miles in one and a half seconds.” The object, he says, made nary a sound.

Wow, someone says softly.

“If it were a military vehicle--and I’m not saying it was at all--” Birdsall says graciously, “it would have been accompanied by a noise.”

Looking at Area 351

But why would alien beings, from millions of miles away, keep picking this tiny sliver of Nevada--so desolate that Clark himself laughingly says “at 5 in the evening you can put a sleeping bag out there on the middle line of the highway and not be disturbed until 5 the next morning?” Why would this stretch of Highway 375 turn into a kind of cult favorite landing spot for extraterrestrials?

“I never said they were extraterrestrial,” Clark corrects. “They very likely may be inter-dimensional. Quantum physicists believe there are maybe as many as 23 dimensions. We are only aware of four. There may be other realities we don’t realize.”

Tonight there are no flares from any dimension or world. With the exception of a few satellites gliding by in the heavens, it’s an uneventful if majestic sky. People take turns peering through the telescope while others look up unaided--content to have a night of stargazing.

But it’s cold, and a closer look at Area 51 awaits. Ford plans a bold drive up to one perimeter. She scans her assembled charges. Patrick Bailey, a UFO enthusiast who planned to rendezvous with the group in his own car at Mailbox Road, is an hour late. “Where is Pat?” Ford wonders out loud.

“They took him,” deadpans a voice as people giggle.

But soon Bailey arrives, and the caravan heads across miles of sandy road, seemingly toward nowhere.

The cars stop 30 feet shy of half a dozen signposts stuck in the road and painted red and white with the words RESTRICTED AREA. Scrub-covered hillsides flank the road, and a camera mounted on top of one ridge spies on all who drive up.

With Ford’s headlights the only illumination, the group gingerly wanders up to the signposts like cats approaching a big sleeping dog.

“Don’t go within 10 feet of the signs,” warns Ford, “or you’ll be arrested.”

Sure enough, within 10 minutes, headlights begin snaking toward the visitors from beyond the warning signs.

“OK, that’s it! Let’s go!” cries Ford, and everyone scrambles back into the cars to beat a hasty retreat. Out the back window of the van, the only strange lights from Area 51 are the headlights of the security patrol.

Pentagon spokeswoman Feltault is philosophical about the attention Area 51 attracts. “Everybody loves a secret,” she said.

But if Area 51 is forbidding, the last stop on the journey is inviting. The blinking sign of the Little A’Le’Inn, the centerpiece of the block-long town of Rachel, beckons like a beacon on the dark highway. Next to the door is a picture of an alien character with bulbous head and huge almond-shaped eyes and a sign that proclaims: “EARTHLINGS WELCOME.”

Part Bar, Part Library

The Little A’Le’Inn is part bar, part library and part UFO souvenir shop. You can browse through shelves of books on UFOs, study photographs of purported UFOs plastered on the walls (some of Kathleen Ford’s photos are displayed), and buy T-shirts and mugs bearing the likeness of the inn’s mascot alien.

Bailey walks in and dons his rubber alien mask, preening for the crowd.

“If you were serious all the time, it wouldn’t be fun,” says Bailey, 50, who declines to name the San Jose aerospace engineering firm that he works for.

Bailey is a believer--in UFOs, in the possibility of alien abductions, in the feasibility of aliens constantly returning to Nevada.

“Let’s say ETs exist, let’s say they’re of a higher consciousness, and they’re treating us like puppy dogs,” Bailey postulates. “Then they’re looking for people who are willing to learn. So they come back to the place where people are willing to learn.”

On this night, diners just want to scarf down Alien Burgers, the house specialty, and try to coax the 63-year-old waitress to tell the story of her UFO sighting a few weeks ago. “When things slow down,” she promises as she bustles from table to table, coffeepot in hand.

She is the only waitress this night and when most of her patrons are settled, she finally obliges. “OK, want to hear my story?”

She stands over the table and sighs. “I was going west on 375. All of a sudden, there was the biggest, hugest light I had ever seen. It’s in the shape of a cigar. There are portholes like a ship. It was doing jumping jacks in the sky. . . . It was a good three to four miles down the road at eye level.”

“Did it go into Area 51?” a listener quizzes her.

“Honey, I don’t know where Area 51 is,” says the waitress, who has lived in Rachel since 1975. She declines to give her name. “Well, there’re a lot of people who think I’m nuts,” she explains.

Joe Travis, co-owner of the diner with his wife, Pat, milks the mystique of extraterrestrials for all the souvenirs and burgers he can sell.

“I can’t say I’ve ever seen a UFO,” confesses Travis, who nevertheless endorses the state of Nevada putting up signs that proclaim the road out front as the highway of the extraterrestrials.

The Travises changed the name of the diner from the Rachel Bar and Grill and rent out five rooms behind the restaurant to tourists. It’s no Planet Hollywood, but they have made enough to remodel the inn and live comfortably beside a scantly traveled highway.

There was a time when the Travises considered selling. Then one night a broken light on the sign outside suddenly, inexplicably, came back on. They decided to stay.

“I told Joe that the beings didn’t want us to leave,” Pat Travis laughs, watching her earthling patrons stock up on postcards.

Nevada Highway 375 rolls out near Nellis Air Force base.

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Alien Highway

Nevada State Highway 375 has long been prime territory for UFO buffs. They stake out positions about 20 miles north of Groom Dry Lake, where the Air Force runs secret military operations, then repair to the Little A’Le’ Inn in Rachel for Alien Burgers and souvenirs.