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Journalism of Courage
The only landmark for about 40 miles on a barren stretch of highway is a mailbox battered by time and desert gusts. It’s known as the Black Mailbox, though it’s actually a faded white.
Over the years, hundreds of people have converged here in south-central Nevada to photograph the box — the size of a small television, held up by a chipped metal pole. They camp next to it. They try to break into it. They debate its significance, or simply huddle by it for hours, staring into the night.
Some think the mailbox is linked to nearby Area 51, a military installation and purported hotbed of extraterrestrial activity. At the very least, they consider the box a prime magnet for flying saucers.
A few visitors have claimed they saw celestial oddities. But most enjoy even uneventful nights at the mailbox, about midway between the towns of Alamo and Rachel.
Alien hunters here are surrounded by like-minded — meaning open-minded — company. In a place where the welcome sign to Rachel reads, Humans: 98, Aliens: ?, few roll their eyes at tales of spaceships, military conspiracies and extraterrestrials that abduct and impregnate tourists.
Tonight, Lester Arnold, a 59-year-old industrial mechanic, is in Rachel offering to show visitors Mailbox Road. He traveled from Declo, Idaho, for the annual UFO Friendship Conference Camp Out. A few years ago at the mailbox, Arnold says, he saw a fireball-like object shoot over the mountains, stop and shrink until it vanished.
He meets Steve Crosby at a double-wide named the Little A’Le’Inn, a Rachel restaurant, bar and tourist stop. Crosby, 57, is debating whether the “Earthlings Always Welcome” T-shirt looks better in purple or black. He lives in Bedford, Texas, and hopes to spot his second spacecraft here.
The guys and three others caravan to the mailbox on the state-christened Extraterrestrial Highway, a two-lane road that tumbleweeds cross more frequently than cars. The cows grazing alongside it are mounted with spy cameras. The men park near the mailbox and a bullet-dinged stop sign, and open their doors to silence.
The box is made of quarter-inch-thick bulletproof metal, and its door is clamped shut with a Master Lock. Its owner, say the black letters printed on its side, is STEVE MEDLIN, HC 61, BOX 80. Visitors have added bumper stickers and their own musings.
The owners of the mailbox, Steve and Glenda Medlin, moved in 1973 to a cattle ranch in Tikaboo Valley, about 80 miles north of Las Vegas. There was no talk of aliens, and no home mail delivery.
A few years later, a local tungsten quarry reopened. Some miners moved to a trailer park near the Medlins; it grew into the town of Rachel. Postal carriers began delivery, and the couple put up a common black rural mailbox about six miles from their home, near Highway 375.
In 1989, according to a history of Rachel, a man named Bob Lazar told a Las Vegas television station that he had worked with alien spacecraft at nearby Nellis Air Force Range. He and his buddies, Lazar claimed, also watched saucer test flights in Tikaboo Valley.
So many tourists soon descended on Rachel — on the edge of the valley — that the Rachel Bar & Grill was renamed the Little A’Le’Inn. People would down Alien Burgers and beer there before making their way to the mailbox, the only landmark in Tikaboo Valley. The mailbox acquired a cult-like following.
