Led by Kelly Johnson, the boy wonder who designed the P-38 Lightning fighter in World War II, the Skunk Works created the planes that won the Cold War. These aircraft, and others only rumored, have been tested and flown out of the ultrasecret Area 51 since the 1950s. Patton's contention is that UFOs exist, all right, but they're flown by civilian and military test pilots, not little green men. Patton knows this in his bones. His book is as much a bestiary of authentic American originals as it is a chronicle of how technology and politics entwine like mating snakes.
Dreamland is ground zero for a new folklore.
Patton's research was prodigious. Fascinating anecdotes bubble from this stew. By the 1990s, they were even flying an Su-27 Flanker, Russian's most advanced aircraft. Pentagon honchos leery about whether the Stealth aircraft's radar-deflecting shape would actually work were reassured when maintenance workers in the planes' hangers reported that each morning dead bats littered the concrete pads around the craft. Such was the plane's glide ratio that the pilot flew it on a dead stick to an Air Force base in Albuquerque.