"What's the best thing you've shot?" I asked.

"Well, it's really what I saw. Back in 1992, when I started getting interested in the Groom Lake stories, I came out and watched from Tikaboo Peak. I saw these black-winged craft flying at night. I didn't get the shot, but I told everybody about it back in Jersey. Nobody believed me. We all know that they're declassified F-117's now. You gotta learn to only tell people what they want to believe."

That was my cue. I'd heard it before. The UFO crowd approaches their beliefs much like somebody with an unusual religious belief - shy when faced with potential mockery, but explosively chatty when faced with an ounce of interest. I said that I thought the government was coming up with a way to make everybody the middle child.

A few minutes later, Bill was explaining, "it was a mile wide. I just saw it for a second. It was amazing, the way it hovered there for a second before disappearing over the mountains."

Bob was listening. He said that he liked science fiction movies. "I really like Forbidden Planet."

Two middle-aged brothers from Las Vegas walked through the door and took a seat at my table. Pat, who was serving coffee, asked if they wanted the regular. "No," said the younger. "Got any blueberry pie?"

"Just one left for you."
"I'll take the cherry," said the older.
I asked them what they were doing in Rachel.
"Minding our own business."
"Hunting?"
"No hunting for us. We bought a place out here."
"Why?"

"Get away from Vegas," the older one said, already digging into his Little Ale'inn cherry pie.
"Speaking of hunting," he added, addressing the entire table, "why are there dead coyotes hung up everywhere?"

"I think its to attract the coyotes," Bill said, "to snare 'em."
Bob added slowly, "No, that's how you mark your territory. You string up them coy-otes on your fence posts, keeps them away. One gets too close, you kill'im. You hang him on your fence. The coyote smell his own death. He knows not to come after your dogs or your chickens."

What I found most peculiar about the patrons of the Little A'Le'Inn was their common appreciation for Southern Nevada. "Most gorgeous country in America," Bill had said. Passing through, here for the aliens, or just here to live, the miserable Nevada Desert emptiness seems to compel, if not unite an eclectic crowd of loners.

Rachel has none of the usual attractions of Nevada. Its attraction is road sign kitsch. The posted speed limit is Warp 7. Rachel is now a major tourist destination. But the strangely compelling emptiness - the long, upward curving scrub-flats, the distant ranges are passed up by regular visitors to the Southwest.

Back in 1996, the Governor of Nevada changed the name of Nevada's route 375 - which curves with broad berth around Area 51, to 'the Extraterrestrial Highway.' It was good business, he reckoned, considering he promoted the affair in tandem with the opening of a movie about flying saucers attacking the Earth and killing billions of people.

The folks from Rachel don't spend a lot of time talking about the UFO's, except, perhaps, when outsiders ask them, or they are thinking up a new tourist UFO scheme. Besides the recent attention, not much has ever happened in Rachel, Nevada. Until July 12, 1986, that is, when a smooth, metallic flying craft came blaring from the heavens.

It wasn't quite an alien that crash-landed in Rachel, but close enough. Leif was a Norwegian F-16 pilot, and he crashed just between the trailer park and the playground while on a training mission with the U.S. Air Force.