Op-Ed: Little Green Men in the West Desert

Little Green Men in the West Desert.

Recently I was reading an article in a local entertainment magazine which had an eye-catching front cover design and featured the phrase "Utah's Area 51."  OK, so it wasn't too recently, as I had not updated my blog in some time when I read that, and this was back while I was still attending college.  So at least a couple years have passed.  But in interstellar time, that's nothing at all!  Therefore, I'll stick with my "recently" claim and go from there. 

The article in question spoke of how there are off-limits areas in the Utah West Desert, out past the city of Tooele (pronounced 'too-ill-uh,' and not 'tool-ee'), where secret things take place.  For those of you not in the know, the region being discussed is a fairly vast and sparsely populated piece of real estate that stretches from the shores of the Great Salt Lake outward into the state of Nevada.  My own personal experience with it is limited to the occasional excursion out to central California via US Interstate 80, heading west for a fourteen-ish hour drive.  Now I am given to understand that some folk go this stretch of highway out to Wendover Nevada in order to gamble.  From my few forays through that town, I'd never have known that it held anything more exciting than a gas station and a burger joint or two (and just to make you aware, thinly-veiled sarcasm dripped from my typing fingers as I entered that last, as anyone who travels through the Nevada side of Wendover between dusk and dawn can't miss the casino lights glaring across the wide expanse of alkaline desert landscape - you'd have to be either sound-asleep or stone dead to miss them).

The Bonneville Salt Flats, on the way to Wendover.  It's a pretty desolate view for an hour or more.  Then you get to Wendover and the view is only minuscule improved. / Source: Utah.com

There has been a military presence in the West Desert for more than a few years now, probably stretching back at least to when the closest air force base, Hill Field (near Ogden, Utah) was first established to support B-24 Liberator bombers during the second world war.  After all, pilots have to have some place to drop both practice and occasional live bombs, and the western Utah landscape is so barren as to almost resemble the surface of the moon.  Even today, it is a regular sight for northern Utahns to see military aircraft flying overhead on their way to what is locally known as "the range." 

And so to find myself reading an article that proclaims unabashedly that the West Desert contains "little green men"... well, my eyebrows most certainly must have raised in amusement.  Most local know that there are highly sensitive facilities out that way, including Dugway Proving Grounds, where biological and chemical weapons have been tested and stored - and most recently disposed of - for many years.  And yes, between Dugway and the aforementioned Range, there is a lot of territory that civilians are not welcome to visit.  In fact, according to Wikipedia (not the most reliable source of info, I know), between the Utah Training and Test Range and Dugway Proving Grounds, there is more contiguously off-limits U.S. real estate than any other place in the United States.  Dugway Proving Grounds alone is the size of Rhode Island, and it is the smaller of the two areas (1252 sq. miles, vs. 2675 sq. for the Test and Training Range).  But to claim there are aliens out there?

The little green guys from the Pixar film Toy Story. / Source: Pixar.wikia.com

Yes, it seems there are people who actually believe that we are not only "Not Alone" here on Earth, but that the U.S. government is hiding alien spacecraft, along with the obligatory alien spacemen corpses to go with them, in these off-limits parts of our country.  And in fact, Utah's West Desert is just the latest spot to keep them and study their stuff.  Now let me backtrack ever so slightly and say that if you haven't heard about the supposed cover-up and the conspiracy to use alien technology to further our government's ends and such (and what rock have you been living under, may I ask?), I won't be giving an adequate summary of such things here.  Google it, if you want to know more.  I am certain there are plenty of resources, both factual and down-right fanciful, to read more about it. 

Where was I?  Oh yes, the relevance of Utah and the whole "Area 51 housing aliens/and their do-dads"-thing.  Well according to the article I read in the aforementioned magazine - and this came as quite a shock to me when I first read it; perhaps it shows my both my naive-ness and also proves I don't get out too often - Utah is now the place if you want to try and see alien spacecraft and alien technology-based hardware being tested.  Seems the powers-that-be went and closed Area 51 in Nevada, and moved it lock, stock and barrel up yonder.  In fact, according to a website run by someone who goes by the moniker of "Alien Dave" (his website is AlienDave.com, no less), there are plenty of spooky things afoot in Utah.  Particularly, one article points to a supposedly crashed UFO in the West Desert that was photographed via aerial reconnaissance back in 1953.  And there is also a reprinted 2003 story sourced from local news channel KSL, which mentions the possibility of Utah housing a new Area 51. 

The Salt Lake City rag "City Weekly" did a piece on Alien Dave in its December 2002 edition. / Source:aliendave.com

But AlienDave.com was only one of several sites that came up when the Google search string "Utah new Area 51" was used.  Another article, this one from a blog called "Area 51 Loose Ends," shows actual up close photos of another suspected off-the-books locale, this one around Green River in eastern Utah.  Between that first magazine story I read, and the little bit of investigation I did to write this Op-Ed piece, you'd think that a soul couldn't swing the proverbial probe without hitting something not-of-this-world around here.

Now I'm going to zigzag away from E.T. for a moment and direct your attention to what some of the hype points out, as this will be highly relevant to my following remarks.  That is, among the speculation as to what is being hidden in Utah's far-out spaces is quite a bit of discussion about special aircraft being developed, housed and even tested out there.  We're talking air vehicles that make what occasionally flies out of Hill Field (I mean B-2's and F-22 Raptors, here to use our lovely training range and repair facilities, I am told) look like the Wright Brothers pieced them together with bailing wire and good intentions.  No, the West Desert is now the alleged home to space planes, hypersonic vehicles (that's Mach five and higher, or five times the speed of sound for you non-technical types), and flying saucer-type stuff.  Real next-gen, 'mind-blown-and-got-the-shirt-to-prove-it' sort of technology.

But having said that, I'm not going to delve deeper into what human-made weird flying tech may be in our local Utah skies.  Sure, there are re-touched photos of some highly classified stuff out there if you care to look for it.  But to my mind, it is purely speculative to do so, in most instances.  To the people who spend their time sky-watching for such things...  well I tip my hat to you, in your determination.  Hey, everybody needs a hobby, ya know?  What's worse about sky-watching than stamp collecting, I say.  To each his or her own.

You have to remember that in the early to mid 1980s, only a small group of those "in-the-know" knew what the B-2 looked like.  But that didn't stop scale modeling company Revel from doing a speculative version and charging twenty bucks for it.  Ah, the old days when something with this much plastic would have cost only twenty dollars. / Source: fantastic-plastic.com

Instead of doing my own speculating on the skies, I will simply point the reader to what flew out of the Groom Lake/Tonopah and Nellis Air Force Base region - all being affiliated more or less with Area 51 - during the Cold War (again, working off the assumption that Utah does house the new Area 51, that is).  We're talking the U-2 spy plane, the SR-71 and its variants, the F-117 Stealth, and the B-2 Bomber.  All of these were beyond ordinary people's imagination when they first were spotted in the skies over southern Nevada.  Blurry, telephoto lens-shot photos of these things in flight could easily lead people to believe that the government was testing flying saucers.  It took years for each to become declassified to the point that we are able to talk about them as every-day sort of things.

And so in turn, whatever the Air Force, the CIA, the NRO (National Reconnaissance Office, one of those secret government entities that wasn't even supposed to exist until finally outed after the Cold War ended), or any other branch of the U.S. government may be testing in our day is probably only imaginable in the minds of people who have spent years either working on such highly complicated technology, or pseudo-religiously chasing stories of them.  After all, a person who spends a lot of time speculating on a subject is bound to figure a few things out on their own, if they are motivated enough.  Hey, even the most dismally clueless amateur gets it right, every now and then. 

You got this far, and I think it's high time for me to lay it out.  Here it goes.  My official take on "Area 51," whether it be in Nevada, Utah, or Palm Beach, is: Yes, the government is doing things that it doesn't want to talk about or be eves-dropped on, and No, there aren't  extraterrestrials involved. 

 Sadly, this is probably a lot like what a real UFO close encounter would be like.  Planes zipping by overhead, a helicopter hovering nearby, some guy yelling in a Spanish, and a lot of footage of somebody's feet.

Am I just another disbeliever?  Quite the contrary.  I wouldn't totally discount the possibility of aliens visiting Earth, but I find it very-much lacking in plausibility.  I'll explain why in a second.  Let me first say that I believe the United States government likes this UFO stuff, to a certain degree.  It makes great cover for what is really going on at highly secure facilities.  I won't bother to speculate on what that actually happens to be though, as it can be easily conjectured by any rational person who thinks about ways and means.  The government/military is doing whatever it can at its secure sites.  With little or even no oversight (i.e.: no one in authority looking over anyone on site's shoulder and deciding if it is really worth all the money being spent, or even anywhere in the neighborhood of realistic or ethical), there is no telling what is going on.  And based on what I have read myself (I point to my review of Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base as only one example - embrace or dismiss that particular text as you will), some of it might be considered down-right spooky by your average U.S. taxpayer.

But as I said earlier, I don't think this includes working with UFOs or alien technology or other things not specifically of this world.  My reasoning is fairly simple.  Said reasoning has to be, as I lack the higher math skills to explain it as a true astrophysicist would.  But let me see if I can explain anyway.  I must explain by saying that I recently was listening on my headphones (again, this "recently" is relatively speaking) to an MP3 of a  lecture series regarding the universe.  A big concept, I know.  The instructor for the course, a guy at UC-Berkeley, talked about everything.  Or at least it felt that way sometimes.  Quantum physics, astronomy, the history of science, the lifespan of the universe from beginning to end, the possibility of other universes, super-string theory (is that related to silly string theory?), the grand unified theory and the even better 'Theory of Everything'...  It all made my head hurt at times, but just the same, I did enjoy the material presented immensely. 

Amidst all this high-falooting science, this UC-Berkley guy covered the subject of life on other planets.  Now I gotta say that before he even got to that part of the lecture, I had already come up with some thoughts of my own, based on the principles surrounding light/electromagnetic radiation and its properties relating to interstellar distances.  And wouldn't you know it - his lecture specifics on extraterrestrials did not dissuade my thoughts one bit!

The A-12, a precursor to the SR-71 Blackbird reconnaissance plane, would have looked an awful lot like a UFO, and did things planes weren't expected to do when it was first sighted in the skies over Nevada in the 1960s. / Source: educatinghumanity.com

In a nutshell, these thoughts - crossed with what I learned, mind you - are that unless an alien civilization is nearby, in a galactic sense, then they will be next to impossible to see or seek out with our current technology and level of investment.  The guy (gotta look up his name, instead of calling him "the guy" over and over) talked about how our planet is only looking at a very minuscule part of the sky at any given period of time.  Why?  Because it is economically infeasible to be actively looking at such a vast thing as the sky.  It's a big sky, if you think about it.  And governments don't invest much in things they don't value as highly as others.   Like health care, national defense, and even local space travel (such as satellites, which are infinitely helpful in our age; and yes, possibly even human travel to planets in our neighborhood of the solar system, like Mars).

So we're not looking very hard at that sky.  And if "E.T." isn't looking for us very hard, or doesn't know specifically where we are in the sheer utter vastness of the cosmos, and thereby isn't actively trying to get our attention, it would be way easier than we'd like to think - or Hollywood would like us to believe, based on the number of alien encounter-type movies we see on a yearly basis alone - to miss each other completely.  "Missed it by a mile" doesn't even come close to how it would be, if you take my meaning.

But I think I'm a reasonable fellow, so let's play devil's advocate for a moment and consider an alternate view.  What if the conspiracy theories are true and "THEY" already have contacted us, and are actually here at this moment?  Yes, I'm skeptical, but let's just assume they (the aliens) are here.  I say that would be a tough thing to keep under wraps.  But it isn't kept well, you may point out.  Well "the guy" - you know the one I mean, from the lecture series - specifically said that there have not been enough provable occurrences that can't be plausibly credited to some other rational phenomena so as to rule them as being beyond a shadow of a doubt as "Close Encounters."  And honestly... well it's a matter of faith to say they've been here vs. more realistic answers, and in this case...  I just don't buy it.  Sorry.

It's all in your mind.  It's all in your mind.  It's all in your mind. / Source: universetoday.com

Now let me tell you, I actually think that life in the universe is really fairly common.  It's a very BIG place, after all.  But intelligent life, if we can measure ourselves as a standard (and that's not saying much sometimes), is probably quite a bit rarer.  Not to be egotistical, but even though I do happen to believe in a Grand Design and a Grand Designer, I think the vastness of space and the time it takes for light  - and thus information - to travel so far is a good indicator of how far apart we are.  We're not just worlds apart from other intelligent beings who could be looking up in the sky and wondering the questions that we are also wondering.  We're literally galaxies apart!

You see, the light we are seeing from those distant places is so slow in reaching us that even if there is a civilization out there in - say the Andromeda galaxy, our closest neighbor - we are both seeing each other's home star system at an age when we are both still primitive.  The speed of light may seem fast in a terrestrial sense, but did you know the light from our sun takes eight minutes to reach us once it escapes the sun's surface, and worse yet, it takes that same light hundreds, if not thousands of years - I forget the figure given in the lecture - to get from its point of origin inside the sun to the sun's own surface?  



That hurts my head just to think about it.  52,000 years spent traveling at the speed of light, which as far as we know right now (right now being the first half of the year 2015) is the fastest anything travels in the known universe.  That is a LONG time! / Source: ooshutup.com

I mean, we're talking about time lengths going back to before humans walked the earth.  For places more distant than Andromeda, then we could easily be talking about time before the dinosaurs.  Pre-history sort of time.  Geological history sort of time.  In fact as silly as it may sound, if my understanding is correct, the aforementioned Andromeda galaxy might have completely exploded and been gone - the whole galaxy wiped out, crazy as that is to imagine - and still take a very long time before the light from that event would even reach us.  If there were beings like us on some distant world in that galaxy, they might all have been dead for millions of years, from a truly cosmic disaster, and we wouldn't have the slightest clue until the light from the event reached us here on Earth.

So yes, there could be a civilization out there, and they are listening for signals themselves and sending out a big "Grigrak!" (that's alien-speak for "Hello," if you didn't know) right this second, and we won't get the message for a really long time.  And they in turn won't get what we've send out, in our relatively short period of time of searching, for a long time either.  Yes, I know you can argue that they may have sent their "Grigrak" message out a long time ago, so why haven't we picked it up yet?  Again, think WAY out there.  It could still be coming our way, but like I tried to point out, that message would have to have gone out when Earth was still just a molten ball of rock.  Depending again on how far they are from us.  We'll perhaps get a signal one day, but don't expect it to be a personalized greeting card-sort of thing.  More like: "Is there anybody out there?"

This is very illustrative of my point, I think.  It would take over eight years for the light from a hypothetical explosion of the star Sirius to even reach us.  And that's at the speed of light.  If E.T. is out there and flashing a proverbial neon sign at us, the farther away he/she/it is, the longer it takes for us to even get the message, let alone realize, "Hey, somebody is talking to us!" And they'd have to have some way to know we were even here to talk at, because in interstellar time, we've been wearing our "grown-up pants" for only a moment or two, so to speak.  / Source: heimhenge.com

So to sum it up, yes, I believe here are "little green men" out there.  If we ever hear from them, it will most probably be a very one-sided conversation, and all we'll really do is mark off the spot in the book that asks the question "is there intelligent life out there?" and then go on with our lives.   Albeit with an effort made to at least send back some sort of message to the enquirer, however long that will take.  But based on what I've said, if we do hear from them, I'd say that we probably will either call that a really great day, or a really bad one.  You see, what if they are so advanced that they can send us a message in some way that gets around the laws of physics as we know them?  And if they can do that, and it's a BIG IF - then what if they can actually come and visit us, despite the vast distances involved and the power it would take (mind-boggling amounts to travel at velocities approaching the speed of light, or unimaginable means of bending physics to suit their will)?  Then in this case, they will either be like beneficent gods to our primitiveness, or like the big shoe that stomps the roach flat without so much as a second thought by the wearer.  Like I said, either a good day... or a not-so-good day.

The parting comment:

And if aliens came to Earth and didn't either immediately give us "da business," or preferably, just a meet and greet, it might be something like the guy who directed this short film, the precursor to 2009's District 9, envisioned.