Jacobsen - Area 51: An Uncensored History of Americas Top Secret

For Kevin

Time will bring to light whatever is hidden; it will cover up and conceal what is now shining in splendor.

Horace

T his book is a work of nonfiction. The stories I tell in this narrative are real. None of the people are invented. Of the seventy-four individuals interviewed for this book with rare firsthand knowledge of the secret base, thirty-two of them lived and worked at Area 51.

Area 51 is the nations most secret domestic military facility. It is located in the high desert of southern Nevada, seventy-five miles north of Las Vegas. Its facilities have been constructed over the past sixty years around a flat, dry lake bed called Groom Lake. The U.S. government has never admitted it exists.

Key to understanding Area 51 is knowing that it sits inside the largest government-controlled land parcel in the United States, the in the United States not secured inside a nuclear laboratory.

Area 51 sits just outside the Nevada Test Site, approximately five miles to the northeast of the northernmost corner, which places it inside the Nevada Test and Training Range. Because everything that goes on at Area 51, and most of what goes on at the Nevada Test and Training Range, is classified when it is happening, this is a book about secrets. Two early projects at Groom Lake have been declassified by the Central Intelligence Agency: the U-2 spy plane, declassified in 1998, and the A-12 Oxcart spy plane, declassified in 2007. And yet in thousands of pages of declassified memos and reports, the name Area 51 is always redacted, or blacked out. There are only , most likely mistakes.

This is a book about government projects and operations that have been hidden for decades, some for good reasons, others for arguably terrible ones, and one that should never have happened at all. These operations took place in the name of national security and they all involved cutting-edge science. The last published words of Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb, were Science is not everything. But science is very beautiful. After reading this book, readers can decide what they think about what Oppenheimer said.

This is a book about black operations, government projects that are secret from Congress and secret from the people who make up the United States. To understand how black projects began, and how they continue to function today, one must start with the creation of the atomic bomb. The men who ran the Manhattan Project wrote the rules about black operations. The atomic bomb was the mother of all black projects and it is the parent from which all black operations have sprung.

: Vannevar Bush, the presidents science adviser, and Henry L. Stimson, the nations secretary of war. Bush was in charge of the Manhattan Project, and Stimson was in charge of the war.

The Manhattan Project employed two hundred thousand people. It had eighty offices and dozens of production plants spread out all over the country, including a sixty-thousand-acre facility in rural Tennessee that pulled more power off the nations electrical grid than New York City did on any given night. And . That is how powerful a black operation can be.

After the war ended, Congressthe legislators who had been so easily kept in the dark for two and a half yearswas given stewardship of the bomb. It was now up to Congress to decide a fact previously undisclosedand it did so with terrifying and unprecedented power. One simply cannot consider Area 51s uncensored history without addressing this cold, hard, and ultimately devastating truth.

The Atomic Energy Commissions Restricted Data classification was an even more terrifying anomaly, something that could originate outside the government through the thinking and research of private parties. In other words, the Atomic Energy Commission could hire a private company to conduct research for the commission knowing that the companys thinking and research would be born classified and that even the president of the United States would not necessarily have a need-to-know about it. In 1994, for instance, . Two of these programs, still classified, are revealed publicly for the first time in this book.

One of the Atomic Energy Commissions former classifications officers, Donald Woodbridge, characterized the term born classified as something that . These areas are where the most secret projects were set up. No one had a need-to-know about them.

And for decades, until this book was published, no one would.

A rea 51 is a riddle. Very few people comprehend what goes on there, and millions want to know. To many, Area 51 represents the Shangri-la of advanced espionage and war fighting systems. To others it is the underworld of aliens and captured UFOs. The truth is that Americas most famous secret federal facility was set up in order to advance military science and technology faster and further than any other foreign powers in the world. Why it is hidden from the world in southern Nevadas high desert within a ring of mountain ranges is the nexus of the riddle of Area 51.

To enter Area 51 requires a top secret security clearance and an invitation from the uppermost echelons of U.S. military or intelligence-agency elite. The secrecy oath that is taken by every individual who visits the base before arriving there is both sacred and legally binding. For those without an invitation, to get even the slimmest glimpse of Area 51 requires extraordinary commitment, including a ten-hour block of time, a four-wheel-drive vehicle, and a pair of good hiking boots. Through binoculars, from the top of a mountain called Tikaboo Peak, located twenty-six miles to witness the advanced technology that defines Area 51. Historically, it has been under the cover of darkness that secret airplanes and drones are flight-tested before they are sent off on missions around the world. If you stand on Tikaboo Peak in the dead of night and look out across the darkened valley for hours, suddenly, the Area 51 runway lights may flash on. An aircraft slides out from inside a hangar and rolls up to its temporarily illuminated runway. After a brief moment, it takes off, but by the time the wheels leave the ground, the lights have cut out and the valley has been plunged back into darkness. This is the black world.

According to most members of the black world who are familiar with the history of Area 51, the base opened its doors in 1955 after two CIA officers, Richard Bissell and Herbert Miller, chose the place to be the test facility for the Agencys first spy plane, the U-2. Part of Area 51s secret history is that the so-called Area 51 zone had been in existence for four years by the time the CIA identified it as a perfect clandestine test facility. Never before disclosed is the fact that Area 51s first customer was not the CIA but the Atomic Energy Commission. Beginning in 1951, the Atomic Energy Commission used its parallel system of secret-keeping to conduct radical and controversial research, development, and engineering not just on aircraft but also on pilot-related projectsentirely without oversight or ethical controls.

That the Atomic Energy Commission was not an agency that characteristically had any manner of jurisdiction over aircraft and pilot projects (their business was nuclear bombs and atomic energy) speaks to the shadowy, shell-game aspect of black-world operations at Area 51. If you move a clandestine, highly controversial project into a classified agency that does not logically have anything to do with such a program, the chances of anyone looking for it there are slim. For more than sixty years, no one has thought of looking at the Atomic Energy Commission to solve the riddle of Area 51.