Secret Bases and Ranges of the Antelope Valley
October 9, 2004

With sixteen people in four cars (including a red Mustang), we eschewed stealth for flair on our recent expedition to the secret bases and ranges of the Antelope Valley. The Antelope Valley is the western edge of the Mojave Desert, about 100 miles northeast of Los Angeles. From the moment you pass through the San Andreas Fault and look at it, the whole valley looks like a giant military base, because, in a sense, it is. This is the home of Edwards Air Force Base, the famous flight test center where the first American jet aircraft was tested, where Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier, and where the Space Shuttle lands when times are good for NASA. But the Antelope Valley is also home to a huge amount of Air Force and defense contractors. Lockheed’s Skunk Works hangar towers over Palmdale. There’s the Air Force Plant 42, a colossal complex of hangars and contractors where aircraft companies build experimental planes and add the latest upgrades to existing aircraft. If the secret bases in Nevada like Groom Lake and the TTR are where the latest flying war machines are tested, then the Antelope Valley is where they’re built.

The first stop on our expedition was the Tejon Radar Cross Section (RCS) Range in the foothills of the Tehapachi Mountains, about 40 miles northwest of Edwards AFB. Four cars turned onto the long dirt road at the outer extremities of Rosamond and continued up through the foothills to reach our destination – a strange looking gate with a collection of dilapidated toys outside, as if a group of children had simply disappeared behind these gates. These sorts of details make you paranoid – it makes you think that there might be, perhaps, something to the conspiracy theory associated with this place. The “lore” describes this range as an underground repository of missing children, on whom the government is perpetuating all sorts of cruel experiments.

We hiked the last ½-mile or so up to the viewpoint, where we mounted a spotting scope in order to observe the activities at the facility. It was a Saturday, so the range seemed fairly calm. Convection waves from the desert heat blurred the image of the range through the spotting scope – a small debate ensued among our group over whether we could see any “cammo dudes” watching our party from behind the borders of the facility. After we had all looked at the giant radar dishes and pylons on the range, where much of the radar testing for Northrop designs (including the B-2 stealth bomber, and ‘Global Hawk’ UAV), we trudged through the sand back to our cars and plotted the route to our next stop - over a hundred miles away.

Even though the Antelope Valley represents only a small part of the Mojave Desert, it still seems huge and empty. The drive took us past the aircraft graveyards at the Mojave Airport, and east on highway 58 driving along the northern border of the massive Edwards Air Force Base. Driving past chunks of dead aircraft, past ‘rocket hill,’ and past the surreal solar concentrator facility, we turned onto the second long dirt road of the day – a sign that we were on the home stretch to our second secret base.

The Lockheed Helendale Facility was built in the early 1980s to support and test the most secretive military program since the Manhattan Project: stealth. For years, the “owner” of the site was a Los Angeles-based lawyer, acting as a one-man front company for Lockheed. It is a huge facility, with giant hangar-like buildings and enormous radar dishes at the base of an isolated desert valley. We pulled off the “road” and walked to the fence-line. People began to take pictures. We started to set up the elaborate spotting scope to get a closer look at the buildings on the horizon. We’ve long suspected that Lockheed uses ground sensors on the land around the facility to monitor any traffic that might be on the road, and that suspicion seemed to be confirmed this time. Only a few minutes after getting out of the cars, an unmarked truck pulled up on the Lockheed side of the fence. Oh, shit…

“What’re ya’ll doing?” came the voice from the “cammo-dude” in the truck.
“Ummm, just looking around?”
“Well, there’s nothing to see here.”
“Ummm, does that mean we have to leave?”
“Yup.”
(thought: ‘if there’s nothing to see here then why do we have to leave?’)
Someone on our expedition made what seemed like a disastrous remark…
“He must be an alien…”
Surprisingly, something must have clicked in the cammo-dude’s head. He immediately warmed up:
“Ha, ha. Yea, a lot of people think that we have UFOs here and that they fly ‘em from here to ‘Area 51’” he said. “I’ve been working here for ten years and I’ve never seen ‘em. And I would have. If we had UFOs here, I’d like to know about it. But I’ve never seen ‘em…”

But the message was clear. We still had to leave, and the cammo-dude would sit there and watch us in the meantime to make sure that we actually did. We dismantled the spotting scope before we got to use it, the Mustang got stuck in the sand (tires revving while the cammo-dude must have been totally annoyed or totally entertained), and we got back on the road. Our next stop was to the southwest.

From the east, the road to El Mirage takes you past weird suburban housing complexes in the nowhere, signs extolling the U.S. to get out of the U.N., and strange hints of military activity at every turn.

We pulled off El Mirage road at a clump of trees, suggesting a weird desert oasis and drove through an alley filled with dead airplanes. This is the “Aviation Warehouse” – a giant boneyard for civilian and military aircraft. They make movies here. But at the end of the road was a guard station, and beyond it was one of the familiar giant hangar-like buildings in the distance. It’s one of the General Atomics homes of the Predator drones – unmanned aircraft used by the CIA for remote reconnaissance and assassination missions, the Air Force for the same, and by the Department of Homeland Security for patrolling the border. We pulled out the cameras and started taking pictures.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa!!! That’s a secret military base, and they DO NOT like people taking pictures of it!!”
Someone had pulled up alongside our cars and was now telling us to stop what we were doing immediately.
Sixteen people caravanning through the desert is pretty easy to spot, and we’d attracted attention the second we’d turned down this road. The guy’s name was “Red” and it turns out that he works for the aircraft boneyard.

After a while, Red got the idea that we were a film crew out looking for locations to shoot. An independent production, from the motley looks of our group. It wasn’t entirely untrue – we were filming the event and several members of the group do work in the “industry.” Red proceeded to sell us on the boneyard as a possible location to shoot, promising cheap rates and great service. They could even build us a mockup of any kind of plane we wanted, he said. Red was hustling, but he was friendly enough. After Red was at ease, we turned the conversation back to the “secret base.” He said that they flew Predators there every day on the weekends and that they crashed all the time. It was all very secret stuff, he said. We got Red’s card in case we wanted to return for a full tour of the boneyard for our “production,” and headed back towards Los Angeles.

The final stop was outside the Blackbird Air Park, where we actually got to see some of the planes that were manufactured in this area – the U-2, the CIA’s A-12, and the Air Force’s SR-71. We stood along the fence of the closed museum (it was late in the evening) and looked at the planes. From there, everyone got directions back to Los Angeles and our cars split up for the ride back to L.A.

Total time: about 8.5 hours. Total driving time: about 7 hours. Total number of miles driven: we don’t know, but a lot.