Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History (7 page)

MY THIRD SELF-IMPOSED
rule while planning the itinerary was: No weird stuff.

I’ll plead agnostic about the existence of haunted mansions, alien abductions, demonic possessions, and other extraterrestrial or supernatural manifestations, but regardless of how entrenched these tales might be in a community’s local lore, they’re not verifiable or consequential and therefore wouldn’t be relevant to my trip.

Much to my own astonishment, I had to break rule number three while doing last-minute research on Niihau and Pearl Harbor, which led me to a bizarre but historically significant site at Fort Meade, Maryland, along with other top-secret places I hadn’t otherwise considered.

The route to Fort Meade, figuratively speaking, was a winding one but strangely enlightening. Before arriving in Hawaii, I read about a UFO sighting over Los Angeles in February 1942 that startled a nation still jittery from the attack on Pearl Harbor. I would have dismissed this incident out of hand if it weren’t for the fact that, whether or not an actual flying saucer appeared over L.A., seven people were killed or seriously injured due to the late-night scare.
ANTI-AIRCRAFT GUNS BLAST AT L.A. MYSTERY INVADER
the Associated Press exclaimed the morning of February 25, 1942. Under a banner headline,
ARMY SAYS ALARM REAL
, the
Los Angeles Times
breathlessly reported: “Powerful searchlights from countless stations stabbed the sky with brilliant probing fingers while anti-aircraft batteries dotted the heavens with beautiful, if sinister, orange bursts of shrapnel.”

Those gorgeous shell bursts sent jagged chunks of metal plummeting back to earth, critically wounding civilians scurrying to safety as air-raid sirens wailed and all electricity was cut off, plunging the city into darkness. Five people also died, two from heart attacks and three in traffic accidents caused by panicked motorists. “The spectacular anti-aircraft barrage came after the 4th Interceptor Command ordered the blackout when strange craft were reported over the coast line,” the
Los Angeles Times
also noted.

Initially, the military couldn’t explain with certainty what had
set off “the Battle of Los Angeles,” and forty-two years passed before an official report blamed weather balloons for being the most likely cause.

For understandable reasons, government agencies tend not to go on the record about UFO sightings, but those who believe that aliens have visited planet Earth frequently roll out two “official” documents to buttress their case. The first dates back to the seventeenth century. “In this year one James Everell, a sober, discreet man, and two others, saw a great light in the night at Muddy River,” Massachusetts Bay Colony governor John Winthrop wrote in his journal in 1639. “When it stood still, it flamed up, and was about three yards square; when it ran, it was contracted into the figure of a swine: it ran as swift as an arrow towards Charlton, and so up and down about two or three hours.… Divers[e] other credible persons saw the same light, after, about the same place.”

Some 330 years later, Jimmy Carter spotted a UFO minutes before attending a Lions Club meeting in Leary, Georgia. The Jimmy Carter Library was surprisingly helpful when I called to verify the October 1969 story, and staff members even sent me a photocopy of the questionnaire that Carter, by that time Georgia’s governor, dutifully filled out from the International UFO Bureau. “Seemed to moved [
sic
] toward us, stop, move partially away, return, then depart,” Carter handwrote on the form. He described the object as “bluish at first—then reddish—Luminous—not solid.” In the spirit of bipartisanship, I contacted the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library to confirm that Reagan also claimed to have once seen a UFO. The staff there, alas, did not respond.

Intriguing as Carter’s account was, the sighting didn’t cause much of a stir at the time or impact his presidential campaign, although questions about it have dogged him over the years. “I never knew of any instance where it was proven that any sort of vehicle had come from outer space to our country and either lived here or left,” he stated in a September 1995 speech at Emory University, apparently trying to shake off rumors that as commander-in-chief he’d been shown evidence of recovered alien aircraft.

At this same presentation, however, the Q&A period took a peculiar turn when Carter began talking about a “special” Soviet military plane that went down in Zaire during his presidency. After U.S. satellites scanned the area and found nothing, the CIA conferred with a clairvoyant who, Carter told the Emory students, “went into a trance and gave some latitude and longitude figures. We focused our satellite cameras on that point, and the plane was there.”

Hello? Here was a former president of the United States openly discussing government-sponsored paranormal operations. Now,
this
had potential.

Sure enough, intelligence agencies had been utilizing psychic espionage for years. “There are legitimate laboratory projects that may eventually unlock the mysteries of the human mind,” Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist Jack Anderson reported in the
Washington Post
on April 23, 1984. “One of the most promising is the testing of ‘remote viewing’—the claimed ability of some psychics to describe scenes thousands of miles away.”

Anderson went on to describe a remote-viewing operation, code-named Project Grill Flame, that was producing “astonishing results.” In one test, a psychic was given latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates and, based solely on those numbers, stated that the site was a Soviet nuclear-testing area, a fact that U.S. satellites verified. Grill Flame and its variously named offshoots, including Sun Streak, Center Lane, and Star Gate (also Stargate), focused not only on espionage but also on predicting terrorist attacks and locating hostages, POWs, and kidnapped government officials.

In a follow-up piece on remote viewing, Jack Anderson claimed that former CIA director Stansfield Turner and General William Odom, the Army’s intelligence chief, were concerned that the Soviets might surpass the United States in psychic research. “Inside the Pentagon, [Odom] has raised the question of whether the Soviets could use psychics to penetrate our secret vaults,” Anderson stated in a sober tone. “This has led to talk in the backrooms about raising a ‘psychic shield’ to block this sort of remote viewing.” Anderson recognized how crack-potty
this all seemed but still defended it: “At the risk of being ridiculed over a ‘voodoo gap,’ advocates like Rep. Charlie Rose (D-N.C.), support continued research into the more promising areas of this mysterious field. After all, the atomic bomb was once thought to be a harebrained idea.”

And Grill Flame was an idea with consequences. Whether the program led to actionable intelligence (and there’s debate about this) or was really just a major disinformation campaign to spook the Soviets, it consumed tens of millions of federal tax dollars and thousands of manpower hours that critics argue could have been used more productively.

By the mid-1990s remote-viewing operations were shut down and declassified. After reading through hundreds of pages of documents and autobiographical material by former “viewers,” I learned that Fort Meade was where Grill Flame was hatched. Buildings 2650 and 2651, to be exact. I contacted Meade’s public affairs office several times to ask where the buildings were and if I could come by to photograph them. The staff members were always courteous but never gave me a definitive reply. Running short on time, I decided to drive there and, without doing anything illegal or unethical, explore the base myself.

Located twenty-five miles northeast of Washington, D.C., Fort George G. Meade is named after the U.S. general who was wounded five times during the Civil War and unexpectedly given command of Union forces at Gettysburg right before the battle. Meade prevailed, and the victory was a turning point in the war. (His post-Gettysburg record was spottier. Lincoln rebuked him for not aggressively pursuing and destroying Lee’s army, and Meade’s luster dimmed as Ulysses S. Grant’s star began to rise.) Access to Fort Meade is generally restricted, but the public is allowed inside under certain circumstances.

A guard at the main gate asks me why I’m here.

“I’m going to the museum,” I say. This is true. I’m curious to see if they have any exhibits about remote viewing. The guard notices my camera in the front seat.

“No pictures, okay?”

“It’s for the museum,” I say. This is mostly true.

Photography isn’t exactly encouraged on any military base, but there’s particular reason for sensitivity here: Fort Meade is home to the NSA—the National Security Agency or, as Washington insiders joke, “No Such Agency” because its cryptological operations are so secretive. I place the camera inside my backpack, and after the guard completes a security check of my car, he tells me where to go. I follow his directions to the letter, and as much as I’d hoped to catch a glimpse of Buildings 2650 and 2651 along the way, there’s no sign of them.

Inside the museum, I start with the Meade Room, which features a plaster bust, portrait, and photographs of the general, along with numerous pictures of his beloved but battered horse Old Baldy. During the First Battle of Bull Run an artillery fragment bloodied Old Baldy’s nose; at Antietam his neck was gashed; a bullet ripped into his stomach at Gettysburg; and at Petersburg he got punched in the ribs by another shell, prompting Meade to retire him for the duration of the war. Old Baldy made his last ceremonial appearance as the “riderless horse” at Meade’s own funeral, and he outlived his owner by ten years. Euthanized and buried, Old Baldy was later disinterred and decapitated so a taxidermist could mount his head for public display.

There’s nothing in the museum about remote viewing anywhere. Machine guns, howitzers, and captured enemy uniforms, including a German
Pickelhaube
helmet with the little spiky thing on top, fill the glass cases, and the exhibit culminates with the prized “big toys,” as one docent calls them, in the last room—three full-sized tanks, the Mark VIII Liberty, the M3-A1, and a Renault FT-17. With such impressive weaponry on display, I suppose a bunch of guys sitting behind a desk squeezing their brows to envision Soviet sub bases overseas wouldn’t fit in.

Bob Johnson, the museum’s director, has agreed to meet with me, and he’s familiar with the remote-viewing program.

“Do you know where Buildings 2560 and 2561 are?” I ask.

“I’m pretty sure they’ve been torn down,” he says. “They were over near Kimbrough, the hospital. Those are all empty fields now.” I have a map of the base, and he indicates where he thinks they would have been.

Even broaching the subject makes me feel a little silly, and I emphasize to Bob that my overall trip is a serious enterprise. But researching Fort Meade’s psychic warriors did open up a whole category of historic sites that are unmarked for reasons of national security. Many a hair-raising moment has occurred in these tourist-unfriendly places—be they military bases, radar installations, nuclear-missile silos, or “undisclosed locations” where senior government officials are secreted away in public emergencies—and the relevant stories are barricaded behind steel-reinforced walls and razor-topped electric fences guarded by armed sentries. Stopping by to photograph them isn’t a question of bad manners, like visiting a private home uninvited. It’s grounds for arrest.

But as with private homes, for every great story that remains hidden for now, new ones crop up over time. Before leaving Fort Meade, I show Bob a memoir I’ve brought along by a former World War II soldier who did basic training here and then joined the 603rd Camouflage Battalion. Their main assignment, something of a ghost story in itself, was classified for decades. “The 603rd was one of four noncombat units that were part of a phantom division called the Twenty-third Headquarters Special Troops,” the seventy-eight-year-old veteran, William Ralph Blass, reminisced.

Hundreds of artists, many with theater and design backgrounds, served in the so-called Ghost Army painting inflatable rubber “tanks” to make them look real, constructing fake ammunition dumps and troop cantonments to dupe German air reconnaissance, and coloring and arranging camouflage netting to appear as if rows of warplanes and assorted military equipment lay hidden underneath, all to convince the Wehrmacht that Allied forces were more formidable than their actual numbers. This turned out to be handy training for Bill Blass, who after the war built a fashion empire worth half a billion dollars. Among his most cherished possessions were the notebooks he sketched in while at Fort Meade.