Area 51: The Reality Behind

Area 51 is a military base, and a remote detachment of Edwards Air Force Base. It is located in the southern portion of Nevada in the western United States, 83 miles (133 km) north-northwest of downtown Las Vegas. Situated at its center, on the southern shore of Groom Lake, is a large military airfield. The base's primary purpose is to support development and testing of experimental aircraft and weapons systems. The base lies within the United States Air Force's vast Nevada Test and Training Range (NTTR), formerly called the Nellis Air Force Range (NAFR). The facility is not a conventional airbase, as frontline operational units are not normally deployed there. It instead appears to be used for highly classified military/defense Special Access Programs (SAP), which are unacknowledged publicly by the government, military personnel, and defense contractors. Its mission may be to support the development, testing, and training phases for new aircraft weapons systems or research projects. Once these projects have been approved by the United States Air Force or other agencies such as the CIA, and are ready to be announced to the public, operations of the aircraft are then moved to a normal air force base. The intense secrecy surrounding the base, the very existence of which the U.S. government did not [12] even acknowledge until July 14, 2003, has made it the frequent subject of conspiracy theories and a central component to unidentified flying object (UFO) folklore.

U.S. government's positions on Area 51

The federal government explicitly concedes (in various court filings and government directives) that the USAF has an "operating location" near Groom Lake, but does not provide any further information. The base does not appear on public U.S. government maps;the USGS topographic map for the area only shows the long-disused Groom Mine.A civil aviation chart published by the Nevada Department [19] of Transportation shows a large restricted area, but defines it as part of the Nellis restricted airspace. Although federal property within the base is exempt from state and local taxes, facilities owned by private contractors are not. When documents that mention the NTS and operations at Groom are declassified, mentions of Area 51 and Groom Lake are routinely redacted.

U-2 program
The Groom Lake test facility was established by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for Project Aquatone, the development of the Lockheed U-2 strategic reconnaissance aircraft in April 1955. As part of the project, the director, Richard M. Bissell Jr., understood that the extreme secrecy enveloping the project, the flight test and pilot training programs could not be conducted at Edwards Air Force Base or Lockheed's Palmdale facility. A search for a suitable testing site for the U-2 was conducted under the same extreme security as the rest of the project.Bissell recalled "a little Xshaped field" in southern Nevada that he had flown over many times during his involvement with the nuclear weapons test program. The airfield was the abandoned Indian Springs Airfield Auxiliary No. 1 field, which by 1955 had reverted to sand and was unusable, but the adjacent Groom Dry Lake to the northwest met the requirements for a site that was "remote, but not too remote".The lakebed made an ideal strip from which they could operate the troublesome test aircraft, and the Emigrant Valley's mountain ranges and the NTS perimeter protected the test site from prying eyes and outside interference about 100 miles north of Las Vegas. The CIA facilities at Groom Lake were always considered by the agency as a temporary facility, to accommodate the U-2 testing. As the project began to wind down, and CIA pilot classes finished their training, Watertown became a virtual ghost

town. For two years following the departure of the U-2s from Groom Lake, the base was fairly quiet, although it remained under CIA jurisdiction.

X-15 program
In July 1959 USAF personnel from Edwards AFB embarked on a two-day survey trip to investigate potential emergency landing sites for the North American X-15 rocket plane. The survey crew received permission to land on the then unused CIA facility at Groom Lake. The crew tested the hardness of the lakebed surface by dropping a 10-pound steel ball from a height of six feet and measuring the diameter of the resulting imprint. The result was that the Groom Lake surface was considered excellent for emergency use.In September 1960, NASA and Air Force Flight Test Center personnel at Edwards reviewed the results of the survey trip to Groom Lake, as well as other sites visited by the survey crew. The use of Groom Lake meant a reduction in support requirements as there was an airfield with emergency equipment and personnel at the site. Ultimately, they agreed to remove Groom from consideration as an emergency landing site due to difficulty obtaining clearance into the area.

The OXCART program

Even before U-2 development was complete, Lockheed began work on its successor as part of the CIA's OXCART project, involving the A-12, a Mach-3 high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft a later variant of which became the famed USAF SR-71 Blackbird. As with the previous U-2 program, security requirements of the Oxcart project necessitated an obscure, secret location for A-12 testing. Despite the success of the U-2 flight tests and the OXCART mock-up radar tests, Groom Lake was not initially considered. It was a "Wild West" outpost, with primitive facilities for only 150 people. The A-12 test program would require more than ten times that number. Groom Lake's five-thousand foot asphalt runway was both too short and unable to support the weight of the Oxcart. The fuel supply, hangar space, and shop space were all inadequate.

UFO and other conspiracy theories

Its secretive nature and undoubted connection to classified aircraft research, together with reports of unusual phenomena, have led Area 51 to become a focus of modern UFO and conspiracy theories. Some of the activities mentioned in such theories at Area 51 include: The storage, examination, and reverse engineering of crashed alien spacecraft (including material supposedly recovered at Roswell), the study of their occupants (living and dead), and the manufacture of aircraft based on alien technology. Meetings or joint undertakings with extraterrestrials. The development of exotic energy weapons for the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) or other weapons programs. The development of means of weather control. The development of time travel and teleportation technology. The development of unusual and exotic propulsion systems related to the Aurora Program. Activities related to a supposed shadowy one world government or the Majestic 12 organization.

Many of the hypotheses concern underground facilities at Groom or at Papoose Lake (AKA "S-4 location"), 8.5 miles (13.7 km) south, and include claims of a transcontinental underground railroad system, a disappearing airstrip (nicknamed the "Cheshire Airstrip", after Lewis Carroll's Cheshire cat)

which briefly appears when water is sprayed onto its camouflaged asphalt,and engineering based on alien technology. Publicly available satellite imagery, however, reveals clearly visible landing strips at Groom Dry Lake, but not at Papoose Lake. Veterans of experimental projects such as OXCART and NERVA at Area 51 agree that their work (including 2,850 OXCART test flights alone) inadvertently prompted many of the UFO sightings and other rumors: The shape of OXCART was unprecedented, with its wide, disk-like fuselage designed to carry vast quantities of fuel. Commercial pilots cruising over Nevada at dusk would look up and see the bottom of OXCART whiz by at 2,000-plus mph. The aircraft's titanium body, moving as fast as a bullet, would reflect the sun's rays in a way that could make anyone think, UFO. They believe that the rumors helped maintain secrecy over Area 51's actual operations. While the veterans deny the existence of a vast underground railroad system, many of Area 51's operations did (and presumably still do) occur underground.