Aberration in the Heartland of the Real: The Secret Lives of Timothy McVeigh

by Wendy S. Painting

Leaving aside Calspan’s housing of Operation Northstar, an initiative spun off of Operation Alliance and closely related to PATCON and its relation to McVeigh’s real or imagined secret mission, Calspan intersects with McVeigh’s fears of societies’ imperceptibly binding chains and legends about Dr. Jolly West and mind control in general, in a number of important and interrelated ways. The Buffalo Calspan facility McVeigh guarded was itself brain deep in the same militaristic cybernetic “total information” (total control) Brave New waters as Drs. West, Sweet, Delgado, and friends. Stories about Calspan, like West, allow for the formation of linkages between various episodes in American history.