Forget Route 66. This is America’s most fascinating road trip
This drive through the desolate Nevada Desert is a journey filled with boom-to-bust ghost towns, conspiracy theories and tales of UFO sightings.
“That’s where they probe you,” the shop assistant says when I ask her what really goes on at Area 51. She follows this up with a raising of the eyebrows and a waggle of her extended finger. I get the message. I’m at the Alien Research Centre, my first stop on a 965km road trip in rural southern Nevada, making a loop around the huge slab of desert that’s home to a US air force base shrouded in mystery. Built in the 1950s, the base has become a beacon for conspiracy theorists who believe the government uses it to store broken-down spaceships and little green men (with their apparently invasive interrogation techniques). The official line is that Area 51 is a training facility for military aircraft … but they would say that, wouldn’t they?
The Alien Research Centre is really just a petrol station with your standard diner, gift shop and brothel attached. But since I’ve been on Route 95 for a couple of hours after leaving Las Vegas, it seems a good place to take a breather. I scan the shelves of intergalactic tat (shot glasses reading “I believe!”; flying-saucer pilot licences) and buy a cold drink. Melting in the 40C June heat outside and watched over by extraterrestrial murals on the shopfront, I gaze out across the Amargosa Desert as it stretches west towards the Funeral Mountains and Death Valley National Park, which mark the border with California.
The road north to Beatty, a town of about 600 where I’ll be spending the night, offers a stark panorama of flat, scrubby desert hemmed in by barren hills. This is widescreen America: simple, vivid, hypnotic. I pass the occasional truck or campervan, but otherwise it is just me, a dead-straight road and a country music radio station that I can’t work out how to change.
When Shorty Harris and his pal found gold in 1904, in the Bullfrog hills a few kilometres west of Beatty, word spread quickly. The rush was on. Mining communities began to spring up, with Rhyolite the largest. Before long it had a population approaching 10,000, as well as newspapers, saloons, three railway lines and an opera house. One of the banks on Golden Street even had imported-marble stairs and stained-glass windows. However, by 1909 the gold had run out and soon after that the last train left the station. Rhyolite was left to the desert. Today it’s one of the best preserved of more than 600 ghost towns in Nevada. Few are more than a pile of bricks in the dirt, but Rhyolite is the real deal, with shells of several buildings lining the hillside, including the once splendid bank and the railway station.
I am completely alone as I walk along Golden Street, apart from the wild burros up in the hills, descendants of the donkeys brought here by miners then set loose once the work dried up. I note the signs that warn of rattlesnakes and peer through some fencing at a house one miner built out of 50,000 discarded bottles.
It is hard to believe that Rhyolite once bubbled with avarice and ambition; that determined, desperate people battled here through the desert in the hope of making their fortune; that in some ways it was a prototype Las Vegas. Now it is a desiccated husk of a place, the atmosphere one of melancholy and isolation. At the nearby Goldwell Open Air Museum, sculptures of ghosts add to the spooky ambience.
The next morning I check out of Beatty’s cheap, functional Motel 6 and carry on north to Goldfield, another town that went through a rapid boom and bust at the start of the last century. Unlike in Rhyolite, some people stuck around and the place limped on. Today a couple of hundred people call this “living ghost town” home and there’s an active historical society that works to preserve spots such as the impressive fire station and the apparently haunted Goldfield Hotel. If any ghosts are reading this, I’d certainly recommend Goldfield over Rhyolite. There’s much more going on here, including a couple of good bars that could become regular haunts, such as the Mozart Tavern, where Wyatt Earp used to sip his whiskey.
Religion has its place here too. Up a dirt track to the south of town a couple of artists have created the International Car Forest of the Last Church, where graffiti-covered cars and buses are stacked on top of each other or half-buried in the dirt, pointing to the heavens. It’s unclear what churchgoers are meant to be worshipping here, but there’s something strangely primal about walking among these great hunks of metal that have been cast on rocky ground. And to the north of town there’s the local cemetery, where hundreds of gravestones tell grim tales from the gold-rush era. Such as that of the hungry drifter who died after eating sweet-tasting library adhesive out of a bin, and the elderly gravedigger who fell into the hole he’d just dug and couldn’t get out.
With a population of almost 2000, Tonopah, about 50km north of Goldfield, is very much the biggest kid among the infants round here. This old silver-mining camp has supermarkets, a few good hotels and a pair of excellent free museums. It also lays claim to “America’s scariest motel”, a garish pitstop decorated with peculiar clowns and bargain-basement horror-movie imagery. Christopher Alefeld, a native of New Jersey who blew into town three years ago and works at the motel, shows me the collection of 5000 unsettling clown figurines and tries to convince me to join the ghost tour that evening.
“Come out tonight and I’ll show you the haunted rooms,” he says.
And what about that cemetery next door, I ask. (Because of course there’s a cemetery next door.) Has he ever seen anything … unusual?
“Well, sometimes people see a boy, just from the waist down, running between the graves.”
I politely decline. Not only do I already have a room at the rather comfortable, clown-free Belvada Hotel, but I have to go and inspect Russ Gartz’s globular cluster.
After a dinner of chicken wings and damn fine IPA at the Tonopah Brewing Co, I head for the outskirts of town and the stargazing park. One of the benefits of southern Nevada’s wide-open spaces and tiny population is the lack of light pollution, which means endless dark skies. When I arrive Gartz, a local photographer and astronomer who runs stargazing parties, has his enormous telescope trained on a collection of thousands of stars in the Milky Way, bound together by gravity: a globular cluster. We pick out constellations and talk about how mining shaped the rural Nevadan communities we see today.
“This is where the Wild West had its swan song,” he says. “Where it hit up against industrialisation.”
And what about that sky, I ask. Has he ever seen anything … unusual?
“Just the other week I saw something from my backyard,” he says, “something moving quickly. I don’t know what it was, but it wasn’t a star or a plane.”
Obviously it was a flying saucer.
Bob Lazar would probably agree. He was the guy in the late ’80s who claimed to have worked for the government, reverse-engineering extraterrestrial technology, and said he knew what was really going on in Area 51: alien stuff. Suddenly Rachel, a settlement of about 50 near an unmarked road to the secretive base, became an intergalactic hotspot.
Pat Travis and her late husband, Joe, were running the local diner when all the excitement started and the crowds began turning up. They hadn’t given much thought to aliens and the like but, hey, business is business. So they changed the name to the Little A’Le’Inn, hung a flying-saucer model outside and put up a sign saying “Earthlings welcome”. Now you can tuck into an alien burger before buying an Area 51 coffee mug, playing a game of Pac-Man and admiring all the pictures from celebrities who have filmed round here.
“I’ve had enough of the movie people,” says Pat, 80, while taking a break from the kitchen. “All these people come here filming, Independence Day and so on, and I never get a dime. They should have bought me a truck.” And what about aliens, I ask. Has she ever seen anything … unusual?
“I’ve had encounters,” she says. “Sometimes I sense Joe sitting at the bar. And once something made me slow down on the road out there, just before a cow walked in front of the car.” That road is State Route 375, better known as the Extraterrestrial Highway, a nod to all the UFO sightings that have been reported along its 160km.
A few minutes later a group of excited guys come in and sit down, announcing to the room that they’ve “just been”. After checking which turn-off to take, I jump in the car.
Now, I would never suggest that you drive 16km down a dirt track into the desert, to a top-secret, heavily guarded military base where there’s absolutely nothing to see except gates, security cameras and warning signs. But if you’re asking whether I personally drove up to the back gates of Area 51. And whether I personally saw little green men and broken-down spaceships. Well, I’m afraid the answer is no, I did not. But I would say that, wouldn’t I?
Three more alien-spotting hotspots in the US
Joshua Tree National Park, California
UFO sightings have been reported since the 1950s inside Joshua Tree’s bounds at Giant Rock, North America’s largest freestanding boulder. It was also back then that one George Van Tassel erected the nearby Integratron – a 12m-high spaceship imitation – following instructions he claimed were provided by visitors from Venus. Its present owners offer sound-bath experiences; you might combine those with a visit to summer’s Contact in the Desert UFO convention in Indian Wells while staying at the allegedly haunted Joshua Tree Inn.
San Luis Valley, Colorado
Known as the “Bermuda Triangle of the West”, San Luis has been the scene of mysterious airborne vessels, dancing lights and inexplicable cattle mutilations for centuries. Its 3m-high UFO Watchtower was built in 2000 for believers to better scour the clear, vast skies above the Great Sand Dunes National Park and Sangre de Cristo mountains. You can also do that just south down the so-called Cosmic Highway, towards a town called Hooper, outside the Rustic Rook Resort’s glamping tents.
Roswell, New Mexico
This hitherto anonymous city was never the same after a 1947 storm supposedly forced a flying saucer to crash. As much a hub for conspiracy theories as alien lore (that saucer was said to have been whisked off to Area 51), Roswell nevertheless attracts thousands of fanatics annually for July’s speaker-packed UFO Festival and its International UFO Museum & Research Centre.
Mike Atkins was a guest of Travel Nevada.
THE TIMES
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