I don't believe this. I'm praying to the aliens.

Don't show up. Take a pass. I'll write whatever you want. Don't choose ME.

I haven't even found the goldurn Extraterrestrial Highway yet, and I'm already obsessing. I'm charging up the Great Basin Highway, clocking 85 in the Nissan Altima I rented at the Vegas airport, and I've pre-freaked myself. I've read about a thousand pages worth of material on the UFO sightings along Nevada Highway 375, and suddenly it's not the cute little feature story anymore. Whatever happens, I just don't wanna witness anything. As soon as you witness anything, it becomes your identity. Your landlady puts you on a short-term lease and you start wearing cargo pants and muttering under your breath at the all-night Kinko's Copy Center. It's a permanent state. You become a UFO Witness for the rest of your life.

I push it up to 95 but it still seems like the car is standing still, like a cosmic speck lost in the vastness of endlessly repeating space. I hit the "seek" button on the radio, but the digital dial races endlessly like the timer on a bomb because there aren't any radio stations out here. These are the flattest straightest moonscape highways I've ever seen in my life, with nothing but scrub desert and yucca plants and the occasional yellow caution sign with the black outline of a cow on it. The cow appears to be dancing or leaping. It's a joyous cow. The cow is stoned.

Cattle mutilations! No thank ya.

It would wreck my career for sure. How can you be saucy and cynical after you've turned up on the Channel 8 news going, "Uh, it was this cigar-shaped cylinder with orange lights." Plus there's the whole Professional UFO-Watching Internet Press Corps, which proceeds to unearth your juvenile arrest record, your divorce settlement, and every employment application you ever trumped up, in an effort to show that you're a pathological liar.

You don't want me. Really. Who chases aliens in a Nissan Altima?

Somewhere off to my left is the legendary Area 51, the place that doesn't officially exist but has been occupied since 1953 by government employees who take a lifetime secrecy oath and give up all civil rights once they go inside. It's the size of Switzerland and is saturated with 70 jillion roentgens of radioactive fairy dust. I've seen the pictures of the unmarked Boeing 737's that ferry the workers from Vegas to Dreamland twice a day. I've studied the Russian satellite photo that shows a six- mile-long runway crossing a dry lake bed (you only need a three-mile runway to land the Space Shuttle!) next to a jumble of warehouse-y buildings and hangars and water towers. I know the difference between Groom Lake, where the top-secret Aurora hypersonic spy plane takes off in the middle of the night, and Papoose Lake, where the flying saucers and the little gray people from Zeta Reticuli live in hillside tunnels. I've heard about the "shoot on sight" security patrols around the perimeter. It strikes me that any reasonable person would at least have rented a Hummer. With mudflaps.

I'm just a tourist. Really. Klaatu barada nikto!

Surely they've all seen "The Day the Earth Stood Still." They've watched every movie and read every book in the whole history of mankind, right? I'll just say "Klaatu barada nikto" and they'll recognize it as the same words Patricia Neal got the seven-foot robot to say to save the world. It will be my symbolic gesture to ask them to please not destroy the Earth, or, more to the immediate point, me.

You're losing it.

And now the weather is turning freaky. I'm coasting through the little trailer-park town of Alamo and decide to stop for gas, because every guerrilla UFO field manual tells me there is no gas on the ET Highway. But as soon as I step out of the car, an icy blast hits me, and I'm thinking, "Didn't I just see bikinis at the Stardust pool?" As I purchase nerve-steadying caffeine products, I remember that there are 18 employees of Area 51 who live in Alamo. (See Chuck Clark, "The Area 51 & S-4 Handbook, 2001 Edition.") Maybe this wasn't such a good idea. The guy in the hunting jacket--is he eyeing me? Does he know that I'm a tourist? Of course he does. He made me. Pretty soon the Camouflage Dudes will ram me from behind with a white Jeep Cherokee and I'll pitch off into a ravine full of prickly pear and six years from now a government spokesman will be saying, "We have no knowledge of the journalist in question." They'll be holding UFO seminars in Los Alamos where guys in bad beards and wire rims will chuckle knowingly that, "He claimed to be working for a golf magazine! An example of just how lame a government disinformation cover story can be."

Act normal. It's just a convenience store!

Okay. Better. The heater is on now and I find the turn-off for Highway 375. There's a car about a mile ahead of me--so I won't be alone. Of course, the way the light is out here, it might be ten miles ahead of me. And there, right by the turn, is . . . an abandoned casino.

They don't abandon casinos in Nevada!

Okay, it's weird, it's bizarre, but it's explainable. It was a bad location, and it was mismanaged by rural businessmen.

Or they fled from the aliens!

Continue. Forward. Suddenly the sign looms: "Extraterrestrial Highway." It's an official sign, plastered with bumper stickers and graffiti and strangely warped, like somebody took a baseball bat to it. I know from my studies that the sign went up in 1996, thanks to the efforts of Ambassador Merlyn Merlin II, who lobbied the Nevada legislature on behalf of his home planet, the ancient north star Alpha Draconis. The former David Solomon of Silver City, Nevada, had his name legally changed to Merlyn Merlin II when he realized that his body contained a Seraphim angel and that his job on Earth was to gain a seat in the United Nations for all saucer people. Apparently Nevada lawmakers agreed, although they manipulated 20th Century- Fox into paying for the highway's dedication by scheduling it to coincide with the release of "Independence Day." Some days you don't even have to go into Area 51 to find the pod people.

And now is it my imagination or has the road changed? I'm seeing Joshua trees everywhere. A Joshua tree looks like a twisted midget stick-man with fungus growing on his limbs. I'm climbing up through this Mutant Chia-Pet Munchkinland past rocky outcrops toward what must be Hancock Summit, and suddenly wet furry darts are pelting my windshield. What is it? Atomic dust? Joshua Tree fuzzballs? What? It looks like snow, but it . . . it's snow. I'm in a goldang snowstorm, and off to my left, where the famous Jumbled Hills are concealing whatever spook mission the CIA is planning for tonight, I'm looking at a mini-blizzard that will no doubt obscure all warning signs, motion detectors and orange metal posts of the "forbidden zone." I won't be able to see the silver sensors, the shotgun microphones, the optical detectors, the vibration detectors. The ammonia detectors--the ones that can sense the difference between humans and animals by the amount of ammonia in their perspiration--will start malfunctioning, or the heat sensors will go off, and some itchy sharpshooter dangling out of a Blackhawk helicopter will poke through the clouds and crease me through the forehead with one well-placed sniper bullet.

Ammonia is dripping off my forehead as I fight through the snowburst. Thank God the sun starts coming back after about ten minutes, and as I ease down out of the winding hills, I see, on the left, The Mailbox!

There's no question about it, it's the Black Mailbox. The same mailbox where Area 51 defector Bob Lazar--the most famous witness in all UFO lore--brought his friends on Wednesday nights in the late eighties to watch scheduled UFO test runs from Papoose Lake. It was there that, as recently as 1996, two guys from California saw an orange glowing disc hover over their car, shine a light on them, and then move away slowly like a boat on a choppy sea. It was there that Chuck Clark himself saw an object hover 40 feet above the ground and travel at an estimated 14,000 miles an hour from dead stop to dead stop. It was there that, since the late eighties, hundreds of people have seen jitterbugging light shows and strange silver mother ships doing the hokey pokey over the Groom Lake area to the south.

But there's something wrong. The Black Mailbox . . . is white!

I'll later learn that Steve Medlin, the rancher who owns the mailbox, got so sick of having his mail stolen that he put up a new, sturdier mailbox with a padlock on it, and he sold the original one at auction for a thousand bucks. Steve has never been interviewed, however, because he's one of them. Since he's the only rancher for miles, his cows sometimes stray over into Area 51. In order to retrieve them, he had to sign a lifetime secrecy agreement and reportedly wear a bag over his head if ordered to do so while on Area 51 property. I want to stop at the mailbox, but I can't because Joe and Pat Travis, proprietors of the Little A-Le-Inn (yes, that's what I said), are waiting for me a few miles down the road. I say goodbye to the White Mailbox, which will always be the Black Mailbox to me.

Thank you, Little People. See, I'm harmless.

As I pull into the gravel lot ("Earthlings welcome!" the sign says), a giant rubber alien doll stares at me from one of the windows of the restaurant/bar/inn/gift shop, which is pretty much the only place to stop for a hundred miles. When I walk into the white pre-fab building, none other than Joe Travis himself, looking like an Old Testament prophet with his long white whiskers and Kentucky drawl, greets me from the bar while Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard sing in the background and a couple of locals feed the video poker machines against one wall. Among the 30 or so signs behind the bar, my favorites are "Thank You For Holding Your Breath While I Smoke" and a large poster-board scratched with the entries for the local Chickenshit Pool. (You pay a dollar and write your name on a square. When all the squares are filled, a chicken is released on the board. If she relieves herself on your name, you win the pool.) The beer cooler is plastered with the world's largest collection of anti-Clinton bumper stickers. ("Roosevelt: A Chicken in Every Pot. Clinton: A Fag in Every Pup Tent.") The only publications for sale are a guide to Area 51, a guide to ghost towns, and a right-wing conspiracy-theory newspaper. Finally, a place where I can feel at home.

I order the Alien Burger, of course, and the bartender says "With or without secretion?" I take it with and wolf it down while waiting for Joe's chatty wife Pat to pad out from the kitchen and gave me the history of the place. It turns out that I have landed in Rachel, population 65, which is not so much a town as a collection of house trailers and farm buildings and one teepee. ("That's where Teepee Bob lives," explains the bartender. "He's in Costa Rica doing research.") To say that the place is eccentric is to say that Michael Jackson likes show tunes.

"We feel that we were called here," says Pat, after showing me her world-class array of alien and UFO souvenirs. "This is our thirteenth year. Before we bought it, when the Union Carbide mine was still open, this place was the Rachel Bar & Grill, and it had ten owners in ten years. We knew we needed a new name. We kicked around a lot of them. We considered the Orbit Inn, like the one in Las Vegas. And then this one just came to us while we were starting up Hancock Summit one day. You know, 'ale' means a bar, and 'inn' means we have rooms. Little A-Le-Inn."

While we're talking, two British backpackers come in and start sifting through the postcards and T-shirts. "Whereabouts in Australia you from?" asks the bartender.

"Not Australia. London!" one says, almost indignantly.

"Oh, sorry, we just had some Australian Air Force guys in here for Operation Red Flag."

Meanwhile, Pat is running through the whole history of the Little A-Le-Inn, which has gradually emerged as the most famous UFO hangout west of Roswell, and the site of several conferences where "ufologists" camp out, make raving speeches, and insult one another's research. I finally decide to just be a tourist and ask it straight out: "Do you know of any, uh, sightings?"

"Sure, there have been many sightings," says Pat, directing me to a spiral-bound notebook by the wall where tourists are encouraged to record their alien experiences. "There was a lady coming home from Alamo one night and she saw a large craft the size of two hay trucks. Do you know how big hay trucks are? Four people saw it. This was about four years ago, near the mailbox. The propulsion system didn't work on it. We've had six psychics come in, and all of them say there are aliens here."

For a while the conversation drifts toward Joe's interests, which run to gun-owners' rights and a fear of what he calls the "New World Order." As far as I can make out, the New World Order is some sort of international cabal involving the Federal Reserve, the United Nations, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, the Masons, and the Luxor Hotel in Vegas. But when Joe goes out to warm up the truck, Pat's tone turns conspiratorial.

"The first year we were here," she says, "there was a beam of light about six inches around that came through that metal door behind you. We were the only two people to see it, and we waited two years to tell anybody. We thought no one would believe us because we were the people with the business interest. It lasted about twenty minutes, and Joe was talking to the visitors the whole time, telling them they had nothing to fear, to come on in and make themselves comfortable. He offered them a beer. We still put milk and cookies out, like for Santa."

Soon the Travises have to leave for their weekly two-day trip into Vegas for supplies, and I wander a few hundred yards down the highway to a a trailer painted like a ghetto grocery store with the words "Area 51 Research Center" displayed prominently. This is the domain of Glenn Campbell, the Boston native who moved to Rachel in 1992 and became the Internet's famous "psychospy" as he probed the boundaries of Area 51, daring the Cammo Dudes to chase him, publishing their secret radio frequencies, mapping every single dirt road and hiking trail that offered the chance to view the dry bed of Groom Lake and the secret operations carried on there by the CIA, or the Air Force, or the Department of Defense--hell, nobody is sure to this day who runs it. What IS known about the place is that it's where the U-2, the original spy plane, was developed, and where every top- secret Air Force project since then has been tested. Campbell is banned from the Little A-Le-Inn, because of what the Travises say was his attempt to freeload off their business, but what he says was caused by Joe Travis going into an "Alpha Male drunken rage" in 1993 and kicking him out of his trailer at gunpoint. I ask several people if the story is true, and they all say some version of, "Oh yeah, everybody knows that."

Campbell abandoned Rachel for Las Vegas in 1996, after his two favorite viewing areas, White Sands Mountain and Freedom Ridge, were claimed by the government and closed to the public, largely because Campbell had made them into such geek meccas that one military guard was heard to say "It's a goddamn drive-in movie out here." Campbell actively opposed the state's designation of the "Extraterrestrial Highway," saying that it trivialized the very serious work of himself and his fellow watchdogs, but the bookstore is still open, run by an intense red-bearded guy named Don. Don shows me some Russian satellite photos of the secret base ("American citizens aren't allowed to take photos of it," he says sarcastically, "but of course dozens of countries can fly over it twice a year and take all the pictures they want.") He also shows me a model of the latest spy plane in development there. "This is another design that's secret. Of course, you can get it from China."

"Of course you can," says a 12-year-old boy from West Virginia who is avidly studying the UFO shelves. "We're the only people who don't know." The boy's father nods knowingly, then asks where they can go to get a good look at the Operation Red Flag exercises. Don explains that we'll be able to see as many as 30 planes from several countries, including Russian MIGs, fighting in the skies over Rachel the next afternoon, and the father and son immediately make plans to stay the night at the Little A-Le-Inn.

This is a brave move, as it turns out, because I happen to be bunking at the inn myself, and we're talking flimsy rooms in trailer houses with shared bathrooms and electric space heaters. There are exactly seven rooms for rent on the whole ET Highway, and they're all right here. The sole nod to amenities is a few eerie Kodachrome photos on the walls, showing authenticated flying-saucer sightings. (Mine included two discs sighted over Yungay, Peru, in 1967, and a saucer photographed by Dave and Hannah Roberts on Vancouver Island in 1987, but, oddly enough, published in a UFO journal in 1982.) Since there's no TV reception, you're welcome to load up on free videos in the bar--I chose "Galaxy Quest" and "A Few Dollars More," with the disturbing result of nightmares about a gun-toting Klaus Kinski fighting an outer-space mutant--and all through the night there are red, green and blue lights flashing through louvered blinds, the pulse of a model flying saucer with neon trim that was donated to the inn by the producers of "Independence Day." The silence is deafening, but the bartender has warned me not to be frightened if I hear gunfire in the night. "We're just out there shooting coyotes," he says.

The next morning, with the help of resident Area 51 expert Chuck Clark, I'm ready to go flush some mutants out of the sage. Chuck is a likeable round-faced guy, the most boyish 55-year-old I've ever met, an amateur astronomer who's been poking around the area for eight years now. Unfortunately, he proceeds to tell me that the only good places to watch Groom Lake are Tikaboo Peak, which is 25.8 miles from Area 51, and Badger Mountain, which is even farther away, and that you have to do it in freezing cold weather, to cut down on atmospheric distortion, and that the absolutely best conditions are in the dead of winter when the temperature is zero or below but that you'll probably need to hike up the mountain and camp there for four days so you don't miss anything. And oh yeah, one more thing--you'll need forty pounds of photographic equipment.

This is what Chuck does for a living, though, an expensive pastime that has occasionally gotten him harassed by unmarked Blackhawk helicopters that hover ten feet off the ground, trying to drive him off the mountains with the turbulent backwash from their rotors.

"That's gotta be noisy," I tell him.

"Once I considered throwing a rock at the copter," he said, "because I thought a dent in the copter would be hard to explain when they got back to base. But then I thought, well, what if it hit the blades and we all died? So I just pointed my camera directly at the pilot--I could see his face--and they immediately took off. By the time I came down the mountain, the sheriff was waiting for me, and he said he wanted my film. I told him I'd be happy to give it to him if he showed me a search warrant. And he reconsidered and let me go, and that's the last trouble I've had."

"Okay, Chuck, I think I'll skip the four-day Arctic mountaineering trek, so what would you recommend as Plan B?"

He shows me a few roads on the map where I can skirt the edges of Area 51, then asks me whether I'm primarily interested in military stuff or flying saucers. I guess I look like a saucer man, because without stopping he says, "If they do have discs at Papoose Lake, they're not necessarily from another planet."

"No?"

"They could be downed saucers that have been recovered and reconstructed, and we're flying them ourselves to learn new means of propulsion and anti-gravity principles. Or they could be piloted by beings from our own time, but not from our own dimension."

Let's not even go there, Chuck. We say our goodbyes and I can't resist gunning the engine on my lean mean Nissan as I set out for the dirt road where, on January 29, 1999, a British Harrier crashed into the desert. "Whatever happened was so secret," said Chuck, "that investigators lived on the site until it was cleaned up. But as soon as they left, I went out there and was still able to pick up a whole box of stuff."

Sure enough, after bumping down a rutted slippery road and starting to wonder whether a Nissan Altima is really the proper vehicle for a highway that gets maybe two cars a week, I do find the crash site, but actually wandering out with a Geiger counter, searching for cockpit fasteners, doesn't strike me as the best way to spend the morning, so I continue on down the road and find a dry lake bed--I later learn the name of it is Sand Springs Lake--and all of a sudden I'm shooting across the lake like a jet-fueled racer on the Bonneville Salt Flats. In fact, the lake is so big that I start cutting donuts, going into massive sideways slides, and writing my name so that it can be read clearly by the Russian Migs and F-16s that will be dogfighting overhead this afternoon. This reminds me of one more Chuck Clark warning. Because cars are so rare in the Rachel area, they sometimes become "targets of opportunity" for "low level mock strafing."

"It can be quit unnerving if you're not accustomed to it," says Chuck.

I'm not accustomed to it. I fishtail my way back up the rutted road and spend the rest of the day seeking out every back gate and access road I can find. Once I stumble on a "ghost ranch"--six ramshackle old farm buildings that haven't been occupied for decades--and while I'm poking around a military Jeep drives up and three men in camouflage get out carrying M-16s. The M-16s don't scare me, but the soldiers are speaking Italian, and that scares me for some reason. One of them throws a backpack on the ground and says "Hello there."

"Hey," I say sheepishly and start walking nonchalantly toward Nissan safety. A few minutes later the dogfights have started--they're kind of ghostly and silent, with airplanes dancing around overhead making smoke trails and the occasional sonic boom long after they've disappeared, and I guess they're "locking on" and playing kaboom-you're-dead, but my question is: how do the three Italians camping out in the barn fit into this picture? I'm sure the answer is classified.

I drive through remote ranches, up and down desert summits, past a secret airstrip in the ghost town of Basecamp where F-117 Stealth fighters supposedly practice touch-and-go landings. I stop at a hot sulphur spring that scalds my hand when I touch it. I drive up onto a snowy mountain where there are some old abandoned buildings--maybe a bank and a school--and the shaft of a derelict gold mine. But I know that before the day is over, I'm going to end up on Groom Lake Road.

Groom Lake Road is the main land route to the heart of Area 51, an arrow-straight dirt-and-gravel country highway that's got so many secret cameras and electronic gizmos on it that, according to Chuck, "they can see a blemish at 30 miles." The rush you get from turning off Highway 375 onto Groom Lake Road is that almost instantly you know you're being watched, and the only question is how quickly you'll find your watchers. There are lots of legends about the camouflaged security officers who ride in pairs in the white Jeep Cherokees, brandishing their weapons, but if directly questioned they rarely answer, and once they've headed off an unwanted visitor, they'll generally vanish without identifying themselves. Their uniforms aren't military, so some believe they work for the Wackenhut security company, which has a lot of military contracts, but they could just as easily be some form of Pentagon spook soldier. I haven't had my moment with the Cammo Dudes yet and I'm ready.

It's 13.8 miles from the highway to the border of the restricted area, and I stop a couple of times to amble out into the brush at dusk and thump a few motion sensors and strange little tubs and orange poles that are scattered here and there. Two miles from the gate I pull off near a little rocky ridge called Campfire Hill--famous as a base camp for ufologists--and climb thirty feet to get a good look at all of Area 51 anyone is ever gonna let me see. It's a clear night and there are a lot of lights off to the south, but I wouldn't know whether they were stars, flares, planes, satellites, or the xenon ray that shoots out the top of the Luxor Hotel in Vegas. If I could see past just one more ridge perhaps I could know whether it's true. Is this the headquarters of the One World Government? Is this where they're doing genetic engineering on captured aliens? Is this where they take the missing children for medical experiments and stick them in antigravitational discs we've stolen from other planets? Is this where cannibalistic extraterrestrials are held in underground tunnels and alien abductees are controlled by remote-control brain implants? Is a race of Reptilians headquartered here? Is this where a team of government linguists figured out that most aliens speak Hungarian because it's the most complex language on Earth? I squint. I strain. I see headlights. I see taillights. I see lights in the sky and lights close to the ground. There's only one thing to do. Let's go ask the Cammo Dudes.