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

by Annie Jacobsen

began in 1942, and by the time the bomb was tested, inside the White Sands Proving Ground in the New Mexico high desert on July 16, 1945, the bomb’s price tag, adjusted for inflation, was $28,000,000,000. The degree of secrecy maintained while building the bomb is almost inconceivable.

In 1994, for instance, when President Clinton created by executive order the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments to look into secrets kept by the Atomic Energy Commission, certain records involving certain programs inside and around Area 51 were kept from the president on the grounds that he did not have a need-to-know. Two of these programs, still classified, are revealed publicly for the first time in this book.

Couple their power with the total lack of oversight they enjoyed, and it was the president’s scientists who paved the road for the U.S. militarization of space. “It was agreed that I would be protected from congressional inquisition,” Killian wrote in his memoirs, adding, “I think now this was the wrong decision. It would have been of help to Congress to have been more fully informed about the work of PSAC [President’s Science Advisory Committee], and help me to have a better feeling for congressional opinion.”

What an ass hat.

The drive into the countryside was beautiful and relaxing, with its tropical bamboo forests and small ponds. Camellias and Japanese apricot trees were in bloom. There were beautiful sunsets to watch over the East China Sea. “We had a different rapport, Jack and I, than the other pilots, I think. We did more than just get along. Jack Weeks and I became friends,” Collins says. When the two pilots weren’t at the beach, Collins and Weeks would take the 1129th Special Activities Squadron staff car, “an old clunker of a station wagon,” and head into Koza, a sprawling little city of cement-block high-rises and crooked telephone poles. “Jack and I had kids who were about the same age. We’d head into Koza and buy these little plastic airplanes and remote-control tank models which we intended to bring home to our kids. But sometimes we’d get bored back in Morgan Manor and open up the toy packages and end up making the little tank models for ourselves,” Collins recalls. “We had a lot of fun doing that.” Life’s simple pleasures during the Vietnam War.

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