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

Copyright 2011 by Anne M. Jacobsen

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Little, Brown and Company

Hachette Book Group

237 Park Avenue

New York, NY 10017

Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.

www.twitter.com/littlebrown.

First eBook Edition: May 2011

Little, Brown and Company is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Little, Brown name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

ISBN: 978-0-316-19385-6

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.

Groom Lake, Nevada, in 1917. Once little more than a dry lake bed in the southern Nevada desert, what is now known as Area 51 has become the most secretive military facility in the world. (Special Collections, University of NevadaReno)

From up on top of the old Groom Mine in 1917, looking down. Not until the 1950s would the federal government take over the dry lake bed and adjacent land. (Special Collections, University of NevadaReno)

Vannevar Bush, age eighty, receives the Atomic Pioneer Award from President Nixon at a White House ceremony in 1970. Other recipients are (from left to right) Glenn T. Seaborg, the man who co-discovered plutonium; James B. Conant of the National Defense Research Committee; and General Leslie R. Groves, who was the commander of the Manhattan Project but took orders from Vannevar Bush. (U.S. Department of Energy)

Colonel Richard S. Leghorn during Operation Crossroads, at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, July 1946. Leghorn led the mission to photograph the nuclear explosions from the air, and he is credited with the concept of overhead, which led to spy planes and satellites. (Collection of Richard S. Leghorn/Army Air Forces)

The Baker bomb at Operation Crossroads, July 25, 1946, was 21 kilotons, one and a half times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Bakers underwater fireball produced a chimney of radioactive water 6,000 feet tall and 2,000 feet wide. Stalin had spies at the event.