Nevada is so desolate that there isn’t even much of a highway between Reno in the north near Lake Tahoe, and Las Vegas, far to the south near the mammoth Hoover Dam.  You drive mostly two-lane U.S. 95, amid low brown hills, scrub bushes, Joshua trees, and rattlesnakes along the 715 kilometers (445 miles) between the dusty western state’s two big gambling centers.

And if you’re really into scorpions and free-ranging cattle and more than 160 km without a drop of available gasoline, you can make part of the lonely journey on an even more remote — and spookier — alternate route to Vegas.  Carol and I took it, and in three hours of meandering passed exactly four cars and one truck.

I got this birthday card soon after Carol and I got home. When it was delivered, I could have sworn I heard a whirring noise outside, and a faint metallicky voice calling, “Take me to your leader.” (Carol M. Highsmith)

This is Nevada Route 375, a place so far out, metaphorically as well as physically, that the state itself calls it “The Extraterrestrial Highway.”  When Nevada gave this long stretch of nothing that catchy name in 1996 — capitalizing on publicity surrounding the alien-invasion movie “Independence Day,” which involves a secret “Area 51” government installation nearby — it erected a marker at each end and at least one additional sign reading, “Speed Limit Warp 7.”

The Extraterrestrial Highway name had first been used informally in 1959, after a physicist, Robert Lazar, who claimed to have worked on “reverse engineering” of alien spacecraft at a “secret flying saucer base” in the valley through which State Route 375 runs, gave a memorable interview to a Las Vegas radio station.

Radio, and thus no pictures of these disassembled outer-spacecraft.

This saucer is from the area that Robert Lazar described. It hasn’t done much flying and doesn’t look very threatening, however. (Carol M. Highsmith)

In the interview, recorded and later transcribed by Glenn Campbell, whom I’ll identify later, Lazar told the audience, matter-of-factly, “The craft have three gravity amplifiers on the bottom of ’em.  What they do is, assuming that they’re in space — it’s just easier to get this across that way — they will focus the three gravity amplifiers on the point that they want to go to.

“Now, to give you an analogy, if you take a thin rubber sheet, say, lay it on a table and put thumb tacks in each corner. You take a big stone and set it on one end of the rubber sheet and say that that’s your UFO or that’s your spacecraft.  You pick out a point that you want to go to, which could be anywhere on the rubber sheet, pinch that point with your fingers and pull that all the way up to the craft.  That’s how it focuses and pulls that point actually to it.

Hmm. Maybe there are more UFOs hereabouts than we realized. (Carol M. Highsmith)

“When you then shut off the gravity generators, the stone or your spacecraft follows that stretched rubber back to its point.  There’s no linear travel through space. It actually bends space and time, and follows space as it retracts.”

Got it?

That sounds pretty kooky.  After all, no one could find any record of a Robert Lazar at any of the schools he claimed to have attended.  But to people half a century ago, before anyone admitted there was anything but sand and salamanders and the remnants of the military’s atomic testing in the Nevada desert, this was juicy stuff. Read the rest of this entry »