Also, siblings Louise, Douglas and Allan Cannon — who jointly own land in the area and hold numerous mining claims there — have questioned publicly whether the military is pushing a new expansion to forcibly obtain their lands, where contamination occurred but the military has refused to clean.

Court documents from Cannon lawsuits disclose that the Army attacked the Cannon's old family mines with 3,000 rounds of chemical arms for tests at the end of World War II. It also bombed the surface of 1,425 acres of Cannon family-owned land above the mines with more than 23 tons of chemical arms, including deadly mustard agent, hydrogen cyanide and choking agent Phosgene.

The Army says it had permission from the Cannons' grandfather for that testing. But the younger Cannons say contracts only recently found required cleaning of the land — and failure to do that has prevented working potentially lucrative gold mines. Courts dismissed their claims saying they were filed too late.

"They bombed the heck out of it and contaminated our lands — and the surrounding (public) lands. And they won't clean it up," Louise Cannon complained last year.

Meanwhile, hunters for aliens also said they suspect Dugway is trying to expand to keep them farther away. Several of them report seeing from afar mysterious Army convoys with trucks carrying under tarps some oval or circular objects they conjecture could be alien flying saucers.

Dave Rosenfeld, president of Utah UFO Hunters, has said hunters of aliens have been watching Dugway closely. Many groups operate Web sites contending that secret work on aliens and their spacecraft that they say once occurred at Nevada's Area 51 have been transferred to Dugway.

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E-mail: lee@desnews.com