WHO WOULD LIVE IN A HOUSE LIKE THIS...?
Lookout Mountain Laboratory finally closed its doors as a US government facility in 1969. There was interest in turning the studio into a civilian facility as early as 1967. Gregory Peck – who’d worked on films at Lookout Mountain – approached the Air Force about taking over the facility for the American Film Institute, but this came to nothing.
In the 1970s, the now private property was owned by Chiricuhua Apache actor Dehl Berti, best known for playing Native Americans in television Westerns like Bonanza and Gunsmoke. Berti was understood to be the second private owner of Lookout Mountain, having paid just $50,000 for the property. He reportedly discovered material left behind by the military, including maps of atomic bomb target sites painted on the floor of the sound stage. Berti also alleged that the site had been used to film “backup” material for the 1969 US Moon landing to be used if the television transmission of the real thing failed. Berti lost the property when he went broke in the early
1980s.
Lookout Mountain passed through the hands of various owners in the 1980s, including a real estate developer and a computer software developer. The latter managed to revamp much of the property into a habitable home. In 1994, the site was sold at auction to attorney and former judge John Lardner and his partner artist Mark Lipscomb for $750,000. Lipscomb used the soundstage as an artist’s studio and converted many of the larger rooms into galleries to display his work. The pair occupied the expansive homegallery until 2010, when they put it on the market. The asking price was $6 million, but the property failed to sell.
In 2012, the building was rented to celebrity rehab facility One80 Centre, which aimed to house up to 18 residents at a cost of $50,000 each per month. Known as a highend rehab facility for Hollywood stars and the wealthy, the One80 story ended in tragedy when two residents died – one a drugs overdose, the other a drowning, neither at Lookout Mountain.
According to the Hollywood Reporter investigation:
“There had been big plans to renovate [Lookout Mountain] into a chic, loft-like refuge, boasting a top-tier gym and a stateof-the-art recording studio.” The deaths put the kibosh on those plans, and the entire One80 operation was shut down shortly thereafter.
In 2015, Lookout Mountain was declared a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument, and it was bought (again as a private residence) by actor and musician Jared Leto (the Joker in Suicide Squad, 2018) for $5 million. “It is a former top-secret Air Force facility,” Leto told Live with Kelly and Ryan of his unusual Laurel Canyon home. “It’s a really fun place, it’s a piece of history… there were 300 soldiers that all had Top Secret clearance that worked up there.”
Recognition of the site as a cultural monument meant that Leto (and any future owners) would be limited in what renovations, demolition, or further development they could carry out at the property. In 2017, Leto sold his previous Cahuenga Pass house for over $2 million, suggesting he’s intent on staying at Lookout Mountain for a while.
THE SHOOT TOOK PLACE IMMEDIATELY BEFORE A THERMONUCLEAR TEST
Ralf M Walker, went down in history as the Houdini Estate when it was no such thing.
After 1935 various people rented the property, including evangelist Joe Jeffers, who established the Temple of Yahweh, and poet Lee Alden (known as the Green Virgin). In 1954, Fania Pearson obtained the property, planning to establish a girls’ school there. The 1959 fire wiped out both buildings and caused an estimated $2 million in damage. The scorched remains of the ‘Houdini Mansion’ were finally demolished in 1970. All that remained were the underground tunnels (originally accessible via elevator from the guest house) that linked both buildings under the road, the stone walkways and various caves. In the 1960s and 1970s the area became a squat for hippies, dropouts, and the homeless including one resident who styled himself ‘Robin Hood’ and believed Laurel Canyon to be Sherwood Forest. Would-be magicians stopped off at the Houdini ruins to practise their craft, and there were claims that the site was haunted by Houdini’s ghost.
Between 1989, when the then 70-year-old Pearson sold up, and 2012, the property went through several owners, including a Georgia antique dealer who rapidly sold off anything he found that might – however remotely – be connected to Houdini. In 2012, the property was bought and restored. It is now an opulent guest house that can be rented for $2,000 per night and is often booked for corporate or media events. Now officially named “The Houdini Estate”, the five acres are littered with statues and busts of the magician, stone walkways (some of them the originals that survived the 1959 blaze), and hidden grottos, while the interiors feature many portraits of Houdini. The underground tunnels linking the properties associated with Houdini are far from the only ones beneath Laurel Canyon. Due to the labyrinthine nature of the winding hillside lanes and the fact the area was packed with tunnels and caves, the canyon was home to brothels and speakeasies during Prohibition and long after. The grounds of Tom Mix’s ‘log cabin’ (later home to both Frank Zappa and Charles Manson and his Family) was also home to secret tunnels and an extensive cave system that stretched into the mountainside. Much of Lookout Mountain Laboratory was itself located underground; the surface buildings are all low-level one or two-storey structures, but the majority of the base facilities were deep in the caverns. In fact, the entire area of Los Angeles is reputedly riddled with interconnecting tunnel systems, stretching from Santa Monica Bay as far inland as Laurel Canyon and beyond. There were also rumours of ‘lizard people’ patrolling or living in these tunnels. Could such fantasy figures be misdirection to disguise guards in the secret tunnel system or deliberate misinformation seeded to discredit anyone who came across the subterranean routes?
MARILYN’S MOVIE MYSTERY
If there is one Hollywood star who features in conspiracy theories, it is Marilyn Monroe. There’s long been a mystery surrounding footage of Monroe lounging by a pool repeatedly saying the phrase “I hate a careless man” in a sultry tone. These clips did not come from any known Monroe movie. As she was also seen drinking Coca Cola, it was long assumed to have been a shoot for an abandoned advert. Alternatively, as Monroe was wearing the same red swimsuit she sported in How To Marry A Millionaire (1953), it was thought the clip might be from promotional material related to that film. For the conspiracy-minded, however, photographs of the making of this strange film revealed something else entirely: camera equipment boxes clearly labelled “Lookout Mt. Laboratory”.
This notorious shoot took place at silent comedian Harold Lloyd’s opulent Greenacres estate in the Hollywood Hills. Lloyd was a keen amateur photographer who captured images of movie stars and models (some of them nude) as a sideline after the end of his filmmaking career. The shoot took place immediately before Operation Castle, a 1954 thermonuclear test that was larger than expected and dosed the Marshall Islanders, test personnel, and Japanese fishermen with heavy radiation. To reinforce the secrecy of these tests, the Motion Picture Squadron based at Lookout Mountain produced a series of propaganda films for the servicemen involved, modelled after WWII campaigns like “Careless Talk Costs Lives” and “Loose Lips Sink Ships”. Slogans on posters were no longer enough, hence the short films. Around 10 were produced, featuring Monroe urging servicemen to keep their atomic secrets close to their chests, hence the “I hate a careless man” line.
None of the Monroe propaganda films has survived, although clips are featured in other works produced at Lookout Mountain. Prominent Republican Lloyd was one of the film industry figures involved in projects there (his name appears in the visitor logs; his son Harold Lloyd Jr., was also stationed there), so the use of his isolated private estate for the propaganda film shoot makes sense. It seems that Lloyd took advantage of Monroe’s presence to snap his saucy cheesecake shots, some of them in 3D. The inclusion of the Lookout Mountain Laboratory equipment boxes in some of the candid behind-the-scenes snaps of filming confirmed the connections between Lloyd, Monroe, and the secret film studio.
AN ALIEN WAVELENGTH
Of even greater interest is writer-director Mike Gray’s low budget 1983 science fiction movie Wavelength, shot in and around the abandoned Lookout Mountain Laboratory in 1981. Gray was a writer, political activist, and documentary filmmaker who tackled America’s drug policies, race relations, and nuclear safety record. He was Oscarnominated for scripting 1979’s The China Syndrome prior to writing and directing Wavelength. The film stars Robert Carradine as a dropout musician who hooks up with Cherie Currie’s psychic (Currie was one of The Runaways alongside Joan Jett, of “Cherry Bomb” fame); when she detects strange psychic emanations close to his Laurel Canyon home, the pair are drawn to the abandoned Lookout Mountain Laboratory. Breaking in, they discover the base is still active and scientists are studying a quartet of captured child-like aliens. One is seen being dissected, anticipating 1995’s controversial “Alien Autopsy” film (see FT395:32-36). The pair free the three remaining aliens and get them to a reunion with their spherical mothership out in the
desert. Wavelength, boasting an atmospheric soundtrack by Tangerine Dream, is hard to see; it was released on VHS but has since vanished without a trace. Gray died in 2013, aged 77.
Gray shot footage for Wavelength in and around the abandoned base, apparently without any official permission. That Lookout Mountain was co-opted as a secret facility by the US military in 1947, the same year as the alleged Roswell UFO crash, caught his attention. It provided a readymade location, and it appears from the footage early in the movie that Gray and his stars found their way into the facility, where they were able to film within its corridors undisturbed. While the bulk of the movie was shot on a soundstage and on location, Gray’s use of the Lookout Mountain buildings, inside and out, gives the film’s alien conspiracy tale an eerie authenticity. His later involvement in such television shows as Starman and Star Trek: The Next Generation suggested to some that he may have been part of a ‘disclosure’ movement about an alien presence on Earth.
Was there some truth behind Wavelength? That was the claim made by an anonymous source (he went by the cover name of ‘Henry Deacon’, a character from the science fiction F TV series Eureka), who said he was a physicist based at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. In 2009 he responded to an interviewer with by saying: “Look up the movie Wavelength. It’s based on a totally true story... an incident that took place at Hunter Liggett. This is a hot one.” Fort Hunter Liggett was a military base in Monterey, California (400 miles/650km north of LA) that was a hotspot for UFO sightings from the 1970s to the 1990s and saw “flying ghost” sightings by Native Americans as far back as the early 1700s. ‘Deacon’ went on to claim he’d been part of a group who shot down and captured a “flying disc”, whose pilots were “small child-like humanoids with no hair” – as seen in Wavelength. A cover-up saw “most of the other witnesses [end up] in Vietnam and many were killed. I may be the only living witness to what happened.” He went on to compare Gray’s film to this ‘real-life’ incident: “The beginning of the film clearly and accurately describes the incident, and the film is very close to the rest of the story, including the use of an abandoned base in Southern California to store them. It’s all basically true. I was just amazed when I saw it. The person who wrote it must have been there, or knew someone who was there.”
The opening of Wavelength focuses on uncovering the mysterious goings on at Lookout Mountain. The story revealed would go on to fuel similar pop culture tales covering crashed saucers and captured occupants, including the popular 1990s TV show The X-Files. If Wavelength were made today, its captured ‘children’ held in an underground military facility would no doubt be grist to the conspiracy theory mill. These tales are easily re-interpreted through whatever is the zeitgeist: UFOs in the 1970s and 1980s, or child trafficking narratives in the 21st century. Yet another reading of Gray’s take on Lookout Mountain is that it was a continuation of his politically motivated documentary work, being a fictional examination of MK-ULTRA.
There’s a final connection between Lookout Mountain and flying saucers. Back in the early 1940s when Lookout Mountain was established as the wartime Los Angeles Flight Control Centre it may have had a part to play in the notorious Battle of LA in early 1942. Supposedly an attack on the US by Japan shortly after Pearl Harbor, the incident provoked an aerial barrage from Air Force facilities around Los Angeles, including Lookout Mountain. Retroactively reinterpreted as the shooting down of an alien craft, the incident was explained away in 1949 in familiar terms: a weather balloon had accidentally provoked a defensive response from trigger-happy Air Force personnel (according to the United States Coast Artillery Association). In 1983, the US Office of Air Force History reinforced this interpretation, calling the incident a case of “war nerves” triggered by a lost weather balloon. Those weather balloons do get around, with another stray blamed for the much documented and much debated Roswell incident of 1947. If Lookout Mountain had been involved in a ‘battle’ with an alien craft above Los Angeles back in 1942, it could add even more credence to Mike Gray’s idiosyncratic take on the true nature of the Top Secret facility in Wavelength.
The American military have no one to blame but themselves for the speculation and stories that surround Lookout Mountain. The necessary secrecy of the war years continued on into the decades of the Cold War. The location of the site, slap bang in the middle of a growing residential area of Los Angeles, was bound to attract attention eventually. Although the site was officially closed in 1969, the legends of Lookout Mountain only grew, taking in the countercultural and musical revolution of the 1960s, the documented MK-ULTRA programme, the use of movie stars like Marilyn Monroe in military propaganda, and flying saucer myths. As the stories grew, they became part of the general weirdness of Laurel Canyon, making the once rustic Los Angeles outpost an area of high strangeness. Where there is an information vacuum, stories – invented or otherwise – will emerge to fill it.
For the Archives of the 1352nd Motion Picture Squadron, visit: www.lookoutamerica.org/
IT WAS CO-OPTED AS A TOP SECRET FACILITY THE SAME YEAR AS ROSWELL