Area 51 is where Dreamland is allegedly located. Area 51, we know, is a real and not a fictional place. The northwestern corner of the vast Nevada Test Range near Nellis Air Force Base, Area 51 is encircled by the austere majesty of the Groom Mountains and unpopulated stretches of surrounding desert Area 51 is a perfect place for the military-industrial complex to tinker with Space Age toys. In fact, experimental aircraft have streaked across the skies of Area 51 for decades. In the 1950s, Area 51 was where the U-2 spy plane was tested. Here, U-2 pilot Frances Gary Powers, who was shot down and captured in May 1960 while on a spy flight deep inside the USSR, was trained. Area 51 was a testing ground for the spy plane, the SR-71, which allowed the Central Intelligence Agency [CIA] to detect Soviet nuclear missile installations in Cuba in 1962. In recent years, Area 51 was where the Stealth bomber was developed and perfected. Area 51 is secured terrain. Displayed on aeronautical maps, it cannot be overflown by civilian planes. Nor can it be trespassed by unauthorized individuals on the ground.

Charges by UFO proponents that the government is engaged in an active program to direct downed extraterrestrial craft Area 51 for research and development purposes are as important as they are provocative. If Area 51 has been commissioned as a UFO laboratory, then the government is engaged in a conspiracy that denies the existence of UFOs while researching their very design. The allegations of a young engineer, Robert Lazar, in 1989, that he witnessed flying saucers being test flown at Area 51, were compelling and believable. What the UFO community has lacked is a factual nexus linking Area 51 to the agencies that have, as revealed in government documents declassified under the Freedom of Information Act [FOIA], shown keen interest in UFOs-the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency. Missing from the story of Area 51 has been a "Deep Throat" from the intelligence community whose story confirms the existence of Dreamland.

A good candidate for the role of "Deep Throat" of the Cosmic Watergate is Marion Leo Williams-a voice UFO researchers will not hear. Leo Williams died in 1989. But his untold story is a story that should be told, for it links Dreamland to the CIA and provides additional evidence of a UFO study effort.

Williams first made his allegations about government concealment of extraterrestrial visitations to Earth to a relative in 1976. In 1981, years before similar claims were made by such individuals as Stanton Friedman, William Moore, Jaime Shandera, John Lear and William Cooper, figures on the UFO-circuit, Williams' relative shared his secrets with this reporter. Before succumbing to cancer in 1989, a cancer he linked to the radioactive materials he handled during a long career with the CIA, Williams recounted his career as a government operative, and later, as a Lockheed consultant who visited the "Top Secret" UFO research Area 51.

The allegations by Williams' relative about his career are worth reporting at some length:

Williams entered the clandestine service with the Office of Strategic Services, the CIA's precursor, during World War II. Stationed in Burma, he participated in the operation that flooded the Japanese empire with counterfeit yen in order to cause inflation and foil Japan's dreams of conquest. After graduating from the University of Kansas at Wichita in 1953 with degrees in engineering and history, Williams joined the CIA. Williams worked for the CIA on numerous "jumps" for 30 years. As a CIA agent, Williams returned to Burma, where he organized Burmese tribesmen to recover downed low-flying satellites completed reconnaissance missions over China. In another assignment for the agency, he was a member of a secret team that brought pieces of the Chinese atomic bomb out of the People's Republic of China. His assignments for the intelligence agency took Williams to China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam and Thailand.

During the late 1960s and 1970s, Williams returned to the United States, where he was active in counter-intelligence, primarily in securing United States defense intelligence bases from being penetrated by KGB agents and their lackeys. This work afforded Williams a security clearance that allowed him access to numerous defense intelligence facilities around the world. Such bases can only be entered after the person seeking access places a thumb against a finger print identification system or an eye before the lens of a retinal scanner. But even Williams was impressed by what he described as the "top, top, top, top, top secret" UFO research lab that he visited and that has since come to be known as Dreamland.

According to Williams' relative, a stable and successful professional who is deemed highly credible by this writer, Williams developed cataracts in the 1970s, and left the CIA to go to work for the aerospace firm Lockheed. Williams was told that Lockheed was supplying equipment to a supersecret laboratory in Nevada dedicated to exploiting the technologies of crashed UFOs and studying the biologies of their occupants. Williams' job for Lockheed was to acquire parts from foreign manufacturers to secure and outfit the base.

Williams recalled that he had been flown to the lab several times as part of his assignment for Lockheed. He reported being transported to Dreamland in planes and buses with blacked-out windows so that he remained ignorant of the base's location. Much of Dreamland was underground or recessed into the surrounding desert terrain. The largely underground elevators and security locks were built with so many advanced control systems that it was common knowledge among those who had visited Dreamland that it formed the basis for the virus-control fortress featured in the film The Andromeda Strain. Williams' relative claims that Williams sometimes called Dreamland "The Ranch," which parallels aspects of the MJ-12 literature.

The theme of the ailing CIA agent's revelations to his relative was that because he was dying and had no reason to fear retaliation for breaking his secrecy oath, he wanted his relative to know that the Earth is being visited by a non- human intelligent species, that American government re- searchers are busy conducting genetic studies of intact alien corpses recovered from crashed alien spacecraft and that design principles deduced from the saucers have been utilized in the Stealth bomber.

Williams' story closely mirrors that of the young physicist Lazar. In May 1989, Lazar agreed to be interviewed on a confidential basis by reporter George Knapp of Las Vegas television station KLAS. At that time, Lazar, interviewed in shadows so that his identity would not be revealed, reported that there are nine flying saucers at Dreamland, all of extraterrestrial origin. After his life was threatened by his supervisor at Dreamland, Lazar stepped forward to reveal his identity, and in November 1989 he spoke at length with Knapp on camera, asserting that the publicity would protect him from retaliation.

Lazar told Knapp that he was hired to work at Dreamland by the United States Navy, following an interview at the high technology firm E.G.&G. According to Lazar, he was assigned to work in a region of Area 51 described as "S-4" on government maps. Lazar would report for work at a meeting place near E.G.&G. and fly to Groom Lake. There, only a few individuals would board a bus for the final journey to S-4. The windows of the bus were blacked-out so that the passengers could not learn the precise location of Dreamland.

The exterior of Dreamland, Lazar said, has a slope of about 30 degrees. The structure in which Dreamland is housed consists of two hangar doors textured to look like sand to disguise it from Soviet satellites passing overhead.

On his first day at Dreamland, Lazar said, he was informed that he would be conducting research into advanced propulsion systems, and was asked to read various briefing documents. Rather quickly, as the young physicist read the documents and was introduced to the working of the lab, Lazar was astonished by the level of technological inquiry under- taken at Dreamland. According to Lazar, the propulsion systems he was assigned to study used as their power source anti-matter reactors. The propulsion system consisted of a two-part mechanism that used gravity as a wave with "wave guides" almost like microwaves. The craft at Dreamland, Lazar claimed, were propelled by way of gravity amplification. By tremendously amplifying gravitational energy, they bend time and space around them, so that when the gravity amplifier is switched off, the craft has moved a tremendous distance in space, but with virtually no passage of time.

The fuel source for this propulsion system, Lazar told Knapp, was Element 115, which cannot be made on Earth, but which the government he said has 500 pounds of. By bombarding Element 115, anti-matter is produced, which propels the saucers. A kilo of anti-matter would be the most powerful fuel source ever to be held in human hands, for it represents the energy equivalent of 46 10-megaton bombs. Lazar said that Element 115 could never be manufactured on Earth, where it would have to be assembled by bombarding it one proton at a time, which would take an infinite amount of time and energy to accomplish. Instead, Element 115 has to come from a place where superheavy elements have been produced naturally-such as a binary star system, a supernova or some other cosmic environment where there is an almost in- estimable release of energy. The presence of Element 115 in government stockpiles, Lazar posited, points logically to the conclusion that the government has either colluded with aliens to receive it, or has gathered it from downed alien craft.

As days passed at Dreamland, Lazar was introduced to the entire facility. He learned that the nine different disks being studied occupy a series of nine connected hangars separated by huge bay doors. One saucer had apparently been pierced by a projectile. In one demonstration, Lazar was permitted to watch a disk rise some 30 feet from the ground.

Initially, Lazar chose not to believe that he had been admitted into the inner sanctum of a secret military base where recovered alien spacecraft are being stored, studied and flight- tested. Rather, he chose to entertain the notion that the Dreamland research team was just another group of advanced government scientists exploiting "flying wing" technology that emerged after World War II. Then, one day, Lazar told Knapp, he was permitted to look inside one of the craft. If these are being designed for human pilots, he wondered, why do they have such tiny seats? Soon, it clicked. The little furniture had been fashioned for the diminutive bodies of nonhuman extraterrestrials. Dreamland was a place not of original research but a place where alien flight technology was reverse-engineered.

Note the similarity between Williams' story and that of Lazar.

• Both Williams and Lazar reported having been employed in advanced military research-Williams as a CIA liaison to Lockheed procuring vital defense parts from around the world, Lazar as a research physicist for another defense con tractor, E.G.&G.

• Both men reported having been transported to a base in the Nevada Desert in vehicles with blacked-out windows.

• Both reported that the base was partially or substantially underground.

• Both reported a supersecret level of security at the base. In addition, Lazar claimed that guards pointed guns at him and threatened his life to make him comply with the secrecy regime.

• Both reported having been told that recovered craft of extraterrestrial origin were located at the facility.

• Both reported that the base was dedicated to an ongoing investigation to ascertain how the craft worked.

• Both reported that their expertise was needed by the UFO study effort. Williams sourced parts from around the world on behalf of the base, whereas Lazar studied the craft's propulsion systems.

• Williams claimed to have been told only that the craft were at the facility, whereas Lazar claimed to have actually seen the craft. It is logical, therefore, that Lazar, but not Williams, would be intimidated at gunpoint, for he was allowed to see the UFOs and work on the saucer investigation, whereas Williams was only informed of the base's mission.

These similarities establish that the confessions of retired CIA agent Williams substantially foretold Lazar's disputed 1989 allegations. What kind of base these men visited remains open to speculation.

On the one hand, the base Williams and Lazar visited may be dedicated to military research into recovered UFOs of extraterrestrial origin. But that explanation is susceptible to criticism. It is doubtful that the military would provocatively down extraterrestrial craft with hostile fire, or even has the technology to do so, given the wealth of data describing UFOs as impervious to human weapon systems. Furthermore it is doubtful that, somehow, visitors from "out there" would be capable of getting "here" across the vast reaches of space, only to crash when they got here.

On the other hand, the base Williams and Lazar visited may be dedicated to advanced military research of entirely terrestrial origin. Perhaps their military supervisors convinced them the craft were not of this world to achieve some secrecy objective. Reasons an "extraterrestrial cover story" would have been placed over a Pentagon research project into alternative flight technologies might include a desire to keep such technology out of the hand of other nations, tort liability associated with flying experimental craft over populated areas or the sensitive origins of such technology (e.g., perhaps the UFOs were developed by some of the 1,500 Nazi scientists the CIA secreted into this country after World War II in "Operation Paperclip.") These explanations, of course, are, in turn, susceptible to the criticism that UFO sightings have for decades been a global phenomenon and that the fact that some UFOs are of intelligent extraterrestrial origin is suggested by a growing body of close encounter and abduction evidence.

In any case, Williams' story provides more tantalizing evidence of a cosmic Watergate. A variety of individuals are reporting that a reality of high strangeness has emerged on a secreted expanse of the Nevada desert. Dreamland may be a real and not a chimerical place. If it is-if the government has evidence proving the existence of life beyond this planet, such information must be disclosed in order that human knowledge of the nature of the universe be advanced. Why such a laboratory of cosmic inquiry has apparently remained only an imaginary Dreamland for humanity at large is a topic to be pursued with diligence and vigor on behalf of the world community that would be enlightened by such information.

###