Two Personal Milestones

On a visit to Area 51 with Agent Chameleon on May 27, I passed two personal milestones.

One is shown above. I saw my first rattlesnake in the Tikaboo Valley! I photographed this fellow just a few feet from Groom Lake Road about a mile before the border. Here's two more shots...


He was about 3-4 feet long and did us the honor of coiling and rattling when followed.

It's funny that for all the time I spent in this valley in the 1990s, I never saw a live rattler here. (I once saw a baby one at the north end of the Groom Range near Rachel and a dead one from the highway near Rachel. Also a huge one crossing the road near the HOLLYWOOD sign in Los Angeles.)

My other milestone may or may not be related to rattlesnakes: At Chameleon's urging, I stepped into the Little A'Le'Inn for the first time in 13 years. Here's the proof...
Those are the same anti-Clinton bumper stickers I remember during the 6 months I stayed at the inn in 1993.

Readers may recall that I got ejected from the inn by a drunken Joe Travis in the Summer of 1993, for reasons that were only in his mind. I then went to the other end of town and started my own Area 51 Research Center. Things could have been patched up between us years ago, but I decided that I liked the idea of being "Banned at the Little A'Le'Inn" and I passively kept the feud alive.

I was half expecting to be ejected from the Inn when I walked in this time, but Pat and Connie weren't around, so the opportunity never arose. I didn't recognize anyone there, and no one recognized me.

Walking into the Inn was a little like walking into a time capsule. I have been through many adventures in the past 13 years, but the Inn was almost unchanged. The bar had been moved, but most of the same displays were on the walls.

The most traumatic part of the experience was deciding what beer to order! In all of my life, I had hardly ever ordered a beer at a bar before. In consultation with Chameleon, I settled on a Bud Light. What I received for my order was a naked can stuck in front of me, after the bartender took it out of a cooler and pulled the tab for me. It took a while, but I drank the whole thing!

Talk about your alien experiences! I will never understand this "bar" concept.

Interceptor Nominee: Chameleon

A new member seems to have mysteriously appeared in the ranks of the Groom Lake Interceptors. She is Chameleon, a shape-shifter.

Chameleon's special Interceptor superpower is that she can turn into almost anyone at will. This is accomplished through a combination of method acting, voice control and secret holographic technology that changes her facial features. Chameleon's unique skills are best illustrated by her very, um, interesting day job, show in the posters below.

That's right: She's a professional Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera impersonator! She makes good money at it touring the U.K., Europe and the Middle East. She also does a killer Marilyn Monroe and can even sing up a storm in her own voice.

You may also notice that she has another unique superpower: When she's in character, SHE CAN COMPLETELY FRY THE BRAIN OF ANY MALE WHO LOOKS AT HER! The body you see above has not been retouched in Photoshop. It is the product of 1000 sit-ups a day and an intense on-stage work-out whenever she puts on a show.

Imagine the use we can put her to at Area 51! She could paralyze the Cammo Dudes by singing a Britney Spears number while we sneak in the other way.

You may ask: How do we, the male Interceptors, look at her and not get our brains fried? This is accomplished with a set of special sunglasses available from me for $20. She's also not lethal when she's not in character. Off stage she has a fantastic mind and an ageless wisdom that seems quite inconsistent with her various bimbo personas. Hopefully, she will add some much needed balance (or better yet, imbalance) to our group.

One thing you need to know about Chameleon: No one knows what she really looks like. "White chick" is about all that any of us can nail down. Her real identity is a closely held secret, and the rest of us are only beginning to fathom it. The whole shape-shifting thing apparently started as the result of an accident in a government lab, but we haven't learned all the details yet.

Ms. Chameleon fits into my own nefarious plans to revive the Interceptor franchise. No longer are we going to be held down by OLD PEOPLE who hardly do anything, as though their TV series has been cancelled. We're going to build a whole new "Next Generation" of Interceptors who go boldly where no Interceptors have gone before.

(Cue music and warp-drive whooshing sound!)

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