OK, this title is a little misleading, mostly because I don't know if it really was Area 51. This happened a long time before the CIA acknowledged its existence in 2013. It's supposedly 83 miles from Vegas, and I'm not sure we drove all that distance. I have a kid's memory of this, so it might not be fully accurate. And by kid, I mean, I was in sixth grade at the time, placing this in the early 'Nineties.
Here's what happened to the best of my memory. I was visiting my dad in Las Vegas, and he decided to take me out to the desert to shoot guns, since I'd never done that before. He brought along his hetero life mate (who is still alive, so I'm not going to name him). And off to the middle of nowhere we went!
It took a lot of driving. Not sure if it was 83 miles worth. Probably not. But one way or the other we got lost looking for a perfect place where we'd be all alone. My dad drove while his friend consulted a map. We weren't on any roads at this point, so I'm not sure how good a map would have helped, and this was long before GPS was readily available. My dad was a tech freak, and if any citizen had access to it, it would have been him, but not even he had that at the time.
The next thing we know we're coming up on a military base that wasn't on the map. Even if we had a vague idea of where we were, the base shouldn't have been anywhere near us. Dad decided to ask the guard at the checkpoint for directions. We pulled up to the gate, and the guard was on us immediately, a crazed look in his eyes, his hand on his weapon. It had not been pulled yet, but he looked ready for action. He demanded that we turn around immediately.
Dad explained the situation, telling him we weren't spies or terrorists without actually saying those words, and the guard eventually relaxed enough to give us directions to a place where we could fire off guns without risking shooting anyone (or having anyone else shoot us). Dad thanked him, turned around and we found a place for target practice. He had a .38 for me to try, and I was an OK shot. Fast forward to a few years ago, and I determined that as an adult, I'm positively a lousy shot.
But I remember Dad's friend joking about how we might have accidentally stumbled on Area 51. And for many years I wondered about that . . .
No comments:
Post a Comment