‘Monitoring Area 51 Since 1999‘. That’s the tagline of Dreamland Resort, a website devoted to keen-eyed observation and grounded discussion of some of the most secret military and black budget research sites on the planet. Far from wild-eyed speculation, Dreamland’s reports are so factual that one wonders how long before the reporter gets themselves shot by an overzealous security patrol.
The truth is that Area 51 was never exactly a secret. It’s a no-go area for the public dating back to the post-WW2 era and the testing of both early nuclear weapons – they thought it remote enough and were about as wrong as science can get, spreading nuclear fallout across nearly the whole the United States – and the cutting edge stealth aircraft of the Cold War which needed a proving ground that was big, flat, and private.
If you’re up for some really rugged hiking and camping, competent using radio scanners and monitoring flightpath data, and comfortable with the prospect of getting shot by those security patrols, it’s possible to keep a very close eye and ear on what flies in and out of UFOlogy’s most notorious R&D installation while observing what’s on the ground. That’s what Dreamland Resort documents, leaving the writer well placed to speculate about the ongong development of Area 51 and the nature of the more secretive flights in and out of the facility.
Unsurprisingly, the US military-industral complex would prefer that people didn’t do this. The military bought up vast areas of public land around the huge base an testing grounds to give it more privacy. Photography may be more of a grey area, with signage on the fences of such sights making it clear that authorities will take a dim view of anyone overlooking these sites with a long lens and a keen eye.
As well as focusing on the notorious Area 51, the website covers the equally secretive sites at RAF Boscombe Down near Porton Down in England (still active) and RAF Machrihanish in Scotland (now decomissioned). For my money, the history of that last base is of special interest to anyone trying to understand how much of the documented weirdness in the sky was caused by secretly developed aircraft, and how much is of interest to “I want to believe” UFO seekers.
I recommend a good armchair browse of Dreamland Resort and its good-humoured, classic-style message boards. I don’t recommend following in the site owner’s footsteps and overlooking secure sites unless you really and truly know what you’re doing and exactly what your rights are when you get accosted by security staff with big guns and zero sense of humour. Nobody on the outside is getting close to what really happens inside Area 51, and if we ever did it would quickly get swamped with disinformation, but Dreamland Resort proves that, thanks to a few hardcore sky watchers, we can get some great clues on the fringes.
As a sidenote of nostalgia, Dreamland is what most hobbyist websites were like back before search engine optimisation and depthless clickbait swamped the world wide web and pushed most small, informative, privately-run and non-commercial websites out of the game, and most discussion into the echo chambers of social media. To those old school webmasters that hang on: I salute and thank you.