AUSTIN, NEVADA: CONSPIRACY, U.S.A.

In Austin, Nev., a rickety mining town whose gold ore was exhausted years ago, junk-shop proprietor Leo Wolfers is sweeping up a pile of window glass shattered by a mysterious sonic boom. Wolfers is used to the screaming fighter jets that take off from nearby Fallon Naval Air Station, but he says the plane that smashed his windows was no ordinary craft. "It was diamond shaped. It could rise straight up and hover. One of those planes they aren't allowed to talk about. Their pilots crash into mountains all the time, but the Navy just covers it up. It's all hush-hush." A hundred miles east in ("The Loneliest Town on the Loneliest Road in America"), Walter Cuchine heard news of the loud booms and set out a coffee can to collect donations for an antiaircraft gun. "Last year one concussion knocked a Senator off his podium here, but whenever you call the commanders to complain, they say, 'Did you get a tail number?' Of course not. Maybe if we were able to shoot one down, though..."

Mapped here under the big bold sky is America's Geography of Conspiracy. If Disney were to create a theme park celebrating American paranoia (Suspicionland U.S.A.), it might want to base the design on central Nevada. Tumbleweed stretches of empty highway roller-coaster over mountain ranges and down into salt flats, past ghost towns, federal prisons and legal brothels surrounded by barbed wire. In the sky, fighter-bombers execute mock dogfights and shoot laser-guided munitions at dummy air bases built from bales of hay. Gold mines--some old and haunted, some new and bustling--dominate corroded mountainsides, and the land in between is sagebrush open range populated by scrawny cattle and dotted with eerie bunkerlike structures with names like "U.S. Navy Centroid Facility." From the south, near the infamous secret air base known as Area 51, talk-radio guru Art Bell spreads news of UFOs and sunken continents. To the northwest, in the Black Rock Desert, hippies and cyberpunks gather by the thousands for their annual Burning Man Festival, an orgy of punk rock, spontaneous gunplay and off-road motor sports.

Nevada's Great Basin is a paranoid Holy Land, and no place is better suited for the job. Topography is destiny out here. It is the only region in North America where falling water has no outlet to the ocean (it lies trapped, then evaporates back into the atmosphere). The thin, spreading crust of the valley floors is notoriously unstable, agitated. Hot springs steam up through faults and fissures. Whirling dust devils dance across the flats. The mountain ranges are new, still rising, alive; perched on top of this tectonic tumult, the structures of civilization seem to teeter. The schools and supermarkets are surrounded, as often as not, by fresh-dug earth, and what's not being built is being shored up or razed. Just off Highway 50 the settlement of Frenchman--once home to a diner, a gas station and a motel--was purchased by the Navy several years ago and leveled to make a bombing range.