That must have been a nice relief. Beyond the surroundings, did you get any sense of "other-worldliness?" I'm not that new-agey of a guy, but was there any sort of, I don't know... "vibe?" Beyond what I've gathered from the X-Files, I don't know much about the history of Area 51 but I'll study up before I buy your book, just so I can hold it to an unrealistic standard :)
Something you need to know: I'm not big on X-files bullshit. Here's the reality about Area 51: the US needed a place they could test aircraft without anyone knowing about it. They set up a base in the middle of nowhere Nevada to do it. You have to be a special kind of weird to care more than that, and I am. I'm the kind of loser who drives twelve hours out of my way to see a speck on the horizon that happens to be Hangar 18, or who ventures four hours up the coast to be one of a couple dozen people watching a spy satellite get launched into orbit. The hope, the goal, the fervent dream is that I've managed to create something that's interesting to people who AREN'T that kind of loser, because there aren't nearly enough of us to make the book worthwhile. Don't study up. There aren't any good books. TD Barnes' is the closest to useful but it's in dire need of an edit.
Thanks, that comment was full of great links. Don't you hate it when someone interviews you for what you think is a historical piece on your time at area 51 and instead you get cloned babies in jello? Wow.Unknown to us, the gauthor,h to whom we were telling our life histories, somewhere along the way became an gInvestigative Journalisth credulously seeking to associate our time at Area 51 with the so-called Roswell flying saucer crash in 1947. Unknown to us, she located an elderly former employee of the Atomic Energy Commission whose mind now recalls seeing a Russian-made flying saucer constructed by Stalin that reportedly crashed at Roswell packed with medically and genetically altered children as pilots. According to Jacobsen writing in first person and stating as facts, Nazi Dr. Josef Mengele worked with Stalin to create these alien-looking children and this unidentified witness, a nuclear engineer, was given the job of caring for the comatose child pilots incased in vertical tubular tanks filled with Jell-O-like substance and life support systems.
It's an amazing book. It starts out with all these crazy gonzo facts, talks about government disinformation, lists some interesting historical stuff (that's readily available elsewhere) and then dives into a second set of crazy gonzo facts that make the first set of crazy gonzo facts read like the police report of Joe Friday. I can't recommend it. The chick is opportunistically credulous in a way that's terrible to behold.