The extraterrestrial highway

A moment before the sonic boom hit his trailer, Joerg Arnu’s UHF radio scanner crackled to life. “Cylon 1, got you on radar,” said a voice just barely perceptible through the static.And then — badamm-booom! — the whole trailer shook in a shockwave, and Mr. Arnu jumped, a big plexiglass window reverberating as a jet streaked overhead and through the sky.“That was probably an F-16,” Mr. Arnu said, peering out the window and squinting into the sun. A telephoto lens sat on a countertop nearby.“They’re testing a new weapon lately, and a laser system to shoot down missiles,” he said.From his trailer in the town of Rachel, Nev., Mr. Arnu is less than 10 miles from an unmarked military boundary, beyond which the top-secret Air Force base known as Area 51 sits on a dry salt flat guarded by big arid mountains and bleak desert on all sides. To the east, tracking past Rachel in two asphalt lanes, Nevada State Route 375 bisects a wide basin, coursing northbound before disappearing into a haze of nothingness beyond.

This is Alien Country, where more U.F.O.’s are sighted each year than at any other place on the planet, at least according to Larry Friedman of the Nevada Commission on Tourism.A sign outside Rachel declares Nevada State Route 375 to be the Extraterrestrial Highway, the name given to the road in 1996. Renaming the road, the tourism commission had hoped at the time, would draw travelers to the austere and remote reaches of south-central Nevada, where old atomic bomb test sites, secret Defense Department airstrips and huge, sequestered tracts of military land create a marketable mystique.