By Lee Davidson
Deseret Morning News

UFO hunters said a rumored expansion of Dugway Proving Ground aimed to chase them away from watching whether it works on alien spacecraft as a "new Area 51." Others said the Army merely sought land that it had contaminated but refused to clean.

Maybe both were partially right. It turns out that rumors that the Army is pushing an expansion are true. And it wants to annex the nearby Dugway mountains to the south — including some heavily contaminated lands there — because of their view.

"The mountains have a great view of the base below. . . . They (Army officials) don't like the idea of prying eyes" at the secretive installation, says Steve Petersen, counsel to Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah.

He said Tuesday that Bishop is working on a bill, as suggested to him by the Army, to expand the base by annexing the Dugway Mountains (which include a mix of public and private land). He said Bishop hopes to introduce it later this year if concerns can be worked out among major groups involved.

"It's a security issue with Dugway," Petersen said.

For example, he said the Army and Bishop had discussed trying to attract extra missions to the Rhode Island-sized base, which could create more Utah jobs. That included possibly attracting special operations training to its vast ranges, or new "Homeland Security" training for defenses against chemical and biological arms.

"Especially for special ops, so much of it is tactics and depends on surprise. So they don't like the idea of someone with prying eyes sitting on the Dugway mountains and posting what they see on the Internet," he said.

Some UFO hunting groups recently have been doing that in their search about whether, as they suspect, Dugway might be working with aliens and their spacecraft.

The Army in recent months had acknowledged that it discussed internally whether to pursue an expansion, but declined to give reasons behind that or to disclose exactly what land it sought — or how seriously it was pushing the expansion.

It also refused to release documents about that discussion, as requested through the Freedom of Information Act, saying they were exempt from release because they were "predecisional and deliberative in nature." The Deseret Morning News has appealed that decision to the secretary of the Army.

The Army in 1988 also made a failed proposal to expand into the same area. At that time, it said it sought to take over lands to protect the public from contamination there with chemical and conventional arms. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management, which owns much of the land, opposed it and argued that the Army should clean up the public lands instead.

Petersen said Bishop intends to work with the BLM, the Army, private landowners and others — from deer hunters to campers and rock hounds who use the area — to address concerns before a bill is introduced. He said the bill now is in the early stages of drafting, and no precise boundaries have been drawn.

Among those with the biggest concerns are siblings Louise, Douglas and Allan Cannon — who jointly own key land in the Dugway mountains and hold many mining claims there. They have sued the Army seeking to have it clean up chemical and other arms they say have made their land useless. Their suits were dismissed because the family did not file the suits soon enough after they could have learned about contamination.

Court documents from Cannon lawsuits disclosed that the Army attacked their family land with 3,000 rounds of chemical rounds at the end of World War II. It also bombed the surface of 1,425 acres of Cannon land with more than 23 tons of chemical arms.

Louise Cannon says she can support the idea of an expansion — if her family is fairly compensated. "If they are working on counterterrorism there, they shouldn't have any surveillance. It's our patriotic duty to help that happen . . . but they should pay us for what they did to our land," she said.

"We're in a Catch-22. They contaminated it. They won't clean it up. So we can't use it, and they say it isn't worth anything," she said. "The way this should have happened is they should have come to us and offered to buy it. But they have never offered to pay us a dime. . . . This (legislation) may be the only way to solve it now."

Douglas Cannon said he believes the Army is in violation of laws calling for cleanup of contamination outside of its test ranges, and "they want this property to cover up their mess. . . . A land grab is what it amounts to."

E-mail: lee@desnews.com