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Newspaper: Minneapolis Star Tribune, 28 Jul 1996, pg. 09G.
Residents of this hint of a town, which materializes like a mirage in the Nevada desert, don't need a movie to get them thinking about aliens from outer space.
"I guess just about everybody here has seen something unusual flashing or blinking or flying up in the clouds, and most have seen things a lot," said Bernadine Day, owner of the Quik Pik convenience store. "So we know something's going on, because we can't all just be a bunch of fruit loops out here going nuts."
Whether the airborne activity over this town relates to spacecraft - or has more to do with research at Area 51, the ultra-top-secret U.S. military facility in the mountains nearby - is a matter of heated debate among locals, UFO researchers and the hundreds of believers in space travel who make periodic pilgrimages to gaze into the skies above Rachel, population 105.
Renaming the Highway
Whatever the reality, so many mysterious objects have been reported roaming overhead that state officials recently made it official: The narrow, two-lane stretch of road that runs 100 miles through the desert here has been designated the Extraterrestrial Highway.
This is no declaration of belief in visitors from other worlds, however. It's an earthly attempt to lure tourists from our own planet by cashing in on a craze that seems to be captivating America. Indeed, lest the point be lost on anyone, Gov. Bob Miller invited cast and crew members from the new science-fiction film "Independence Day" to the dedication ceremony in April.
As the movie breaks box-office records, the Nevada Commission on Tourism is beginning a nationwide promotion designed to add a small second industry - call it intergalactic curiosity fulfillment - to the state's thriving gambling business. Above a caption reading, "This highway's really out there," magazine ads show a looming spaceship beaming up a cow.
"We're very serious about this," said Tom Tait, the tourism group's executive director. "We want to develop a region that has very little going on right now . . . by showing people, whether they're believers or not, that there's something worth driving into the wilderness to see."
The ploy appears to be working.
Folks in Rachel, a community made up mostly of trailer-homes 150 miles northwest of Las Vegas, say the number of sightseers making the trek here has nearly doubled since Hwy. 375 became the E.T. Highway. .
At the Quik Pik, the increased traffic flow has led owner Day to hire her first employee. She's also stocked up on E.T. Highway and Area 51 memorabilia, from $15 T-shirts to $25 necklaces to locally produced ostrich eggs painted with spaceships for $35.
Business also has picked up at the other hot spot in Rachel, the Little A'Le' Inn, where a roadside billboard shows the face of an extraterrestrial and proclaims, "Earthlings Welcome."
The walls inside are plastered with fuzzy photos of purported flying saucers and unidentifiable lights, schematics of spaceships and the like. The menu contains such items as "alien burgers.
"I wanted to come right here to have a hamburger," said Paul Serka, a high school principal from Santa Barbara, Calif. His wife, Dianne, added: "It had to be here."
Some are not thrilled
While most people seem thrilled with Rachel's newfound notoriety, there are dissenters - presumably including the folks at Area 51, a facility so top-secret that Pentagon officials routinely deny it exists.
Signs along Area 51's perimeter warn unauthorized personnel to stay out.
It is known that some military aircraft, including the Stealth bomber, were tested here. UFO skeptics, and even some believers, assume at least some of the activity in the skies above Rachel is the product of such research.
Others think that if the U.S. government is involved in activities such as contacting aliens or studying technology from crashed spaceships, it is doing so at Area 51. Much of the movie "Independence Day" is based on that notion, and some of the scenes were filmed in a mock-up of the clandestine facility.
The most public critic of the E.T. Highway idea is Glenn Campbell, a self-proclaimed government-secrecy investigator who left his job as a computer programmer in Cambridge, Mass., two years ago to start the Area 51 Research Center. Campbell, who works out of a small trailer in Rachel, says he fears swarms of tourists will not only endanger the government's ability to conduct secret research, but also expose themselves to arrest if they inadvertently cross into restricted territory.
Campbell, 36, dismisses most UFO sightings as sincere but mistaken.
52 Percent Believe
Many Americans evidently don't share Campbell's skepticism. A survey in the current Newsweek magazine showed that 52 percent of the people believe in UFOs, 29 percent think the government has been in touch with aliens, and 48 percent believe there's a plot to cover up that contact.
"I'm not some kind of nut . . . I'm just keeping my eyes and ears open," said Bill Clark, an electrical engineer and airplane pilot from California who was having lunch with his family at the Little A'Le' Inn. He's returned to Rachel several times over the years, after seeing a giant "superbrilliant" light shooting over his car and then a bright orange glow in the sky on a visit in 1979.
"I'll tell you this much," Clark said, pointing toward the miles and miles of emptiness outside. "If there were aliens and the US government had anything to do with it, they'd pick a place like this to do it."
