Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base

by Annie Jacobsen

Beginning in 1951, on the orders of President Harry Truman, 105 nuclear weapons were exploded aboveground at the site and another 828 were exploded underground in tunnel chambers and deep, vertical shafts.

Nevada Test Site on September 23, 1992.

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.

Area 12, Area 19, and Area 20, inside the test site’s legal boundaries, are just some of the parcels of land that bear Dr. Teller’s handprint: charred earth, atomic craters, underground tunnels contaminated with plutonium.*

Hayakawa took them out to Las Vegas, where he’d arranged for an interview with Bob Lazar. That was in February of 1990.

He was transferred to a small engineering company named for the three MIT professors who ran it: Edgerton, Germeshausen, and Grier. Later, the company shortened its name to EG&

Hood was a thermonuclear bomb test. At seventy-four kilotons, it was six times bigger than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima and remains in 2011 the largest bomb ever exploded over the continental United States. The flash from the Hood bomb was visible from Canada to Mexico and from eight hundred miles out at

Archangel-12, or A-12

Area 51 pylon, or radar test pole.

Two thermonuclear devices, called Teak and Orange, each an astonishingly powerful 3.8 megatons, were exploded in the Earth’s upper atmosphere at Johnston Atoll,

Designated the RS-71 Blackbird, this now-famous aircraft had its letter designation accidentally inverted by President Lyndon B. Johnson in a public speech. Since the president is rarely ever “corrected,” the Air Force changed its letter designation, which is how the SR-71 Blackbird got its name. (Originally, the letters stood for “Reconnaissance/Strike.”)

according to Ockham, when man is presented with a riddle, the answer to the riddle should be simpler, not more complicated, than the riddle itself.

Rear Admiral Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter,

Between September 1961 and December 1964, a record-breaking 162 bombs were exploded at the Nevada Test Site inside underground tunnels and shafts. Nearly half of these explosions resulted in the “accidental release of radioactivity” into the atmosphere.

(In 2005 NSA released a detailed confession admitting that its intelligence had been “deliberately skewed to support the notion that there had been an attack.”)

In 2008, a U.S. federal judge determined that North Korea should pay sixty-five million dollars in damages to several of the Pueblo’s crew, but North Korea has yet to respond.