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

by Annie Jacobsen

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 nation’s electrical grid than New York City did on any given night. And no one knew the Manhattan Project was there. That is how powerful a black operation can be.

But the newly created Atomic Energy Commission, formerly known as the Manhattan Project, was now in charge of regulating the classification of all nuclear weapons information in a system that was totally separate from the president’s system.

November of 1989. That is when a soft-spoken, bespectacled, thirty-year-old native Floridian named Robert Scott Lazar appeared on Eyewitness News in Las Vegas with an investigative reporter named George Knapp and revealed Area 51 to the world. Out of the tens of thousands of people who had worked at Area 51 over the years, Lazar was the only individual who broke the oath of silence in such a public way.

Whether one worked as a scientist or a security guard, an engineer or an engine cleaner, serving at Area 51 was both an honor and a privilege. The secrecy oath was sacred, and the veiled threats of incarceration no doubt helped people keep it. With Bob Lazar, more than four decades of Area 51’s secrecy came to a dramatic end.

In 1980, a book based on Friedman and Moore’s research was published. It was called The Roswell Incident. The lid was off Roswell, and the floodgates opened. “By 1986 a total of ninety-two people had come forward with eyewitness accounts of what really had happened back in 1947,” Friedman asserts. Ufologists elevated the Roswell incident to sacred status; that is how it became the holy grail of UFOs.

“Bob Lazar is a total fraud,” Friedman contends. “He has no credibility as a scientist. He said he went to MIT. He did not. He called himself a nuclear physicist and he is not. I resent that. I got in to MIT and could not afford to go there. You can’t make something like that up and expect to be taken seriously.”

submarines had been tethered to anchors on the ocean floor. There were over one million tons of battle-weary steel floating on the ocean without a single human on board. Instead, thousands of pigs, sheep, and rats had been set out in the South Pacific sunshine, in cages or in leg irons, and they would face the coming atomic blast. Some of the animals had metal tags around their necks; others had Geiger counters clipped to their ears. The Navy wanted to determine how living things fared against nuclear bombs.

Most alarming was a fact kept secret until now— inside the disc, there was a very earthly hallmark: Russian writing. Block letters from the Cyrillic alphabet had been stamped, or embossed, in a ring running around the inside of the craft. In a critical moment, the American military had its worst fears realized. The Russian army must have gotten its hands on German aerospace engineers more capable than Ernst Steinhoff and Wer-nher Von Braun—engineers who must have developed this flying craft years before for the German air force, or Luftwaffe.

Whatever else officially exists on the Horten brothers and their advanced flying saucer continues to be classified as of 2011, and the crash remains from Roswell quickly fell into the blackest regions of government. They would stay at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base for approximately four years. From there, they would quietly be shipped out west to become intertwined with a secret facility out in the middle of the Nevada desert. No one but a handful of people would have any idea they were there.

Richard Bissell agreed to siphon money from the Marshall Plan and divert it to the CIA’s Office of Policy Coordination. Largely unknown until now, this was how a significant portion of the CIA’s earliest covert black budgets came to be. Richard Bissell was the hidden hand.

The U-2 was the Agency’s best chance to get hard intelligence on the Soviet Union, considering that one photograph could provide the Agency with as much information as approximately ten thousand spies on the ground.

As soon as the U-2s started flying out of Area 51, reports of UFO sightings by commercial airline pilots and air traffic controllers began to inundate CIA headquarters. Later painted black to blend in with the sky, the U-2s at that time were silver, which meant their long, shiny wings reflected light down from the upper atmosphere in a way that led citizens all over California, Nevada, and Utah to think the planes were UFOs.

The altitude of the U-2 alone was enough to bewilder people. Commercial airplanes flew at between ten thousand and twenty thousand feet in the mid-1950s, whereas the U-2 flew at around seventy thousand feet. Then there was the radical shape of the airplane to consider. Its wings were nearly twice as long as the fuselage, which made the U-2 look like a fiery flying cross.

work was performed under top secret security protocols with the caveat that under no circumstances was the public to know that the Air Force was investigating UFOs. As the files for Project Twinkle and Project Blue Book got fatter by the month, Air Force officials repeatedly told curious members of Congress that no such files existed.

determined many of the sightings were observations of V-2 rocket contrails. Other sightings were determined to be shooting stars, cosmic rays, and planets visible in the sky. Another study group concluded that some responsibility fell on birds, most commonly “flocks of seagulls or geese.”

But for every one or two hundred sightings that could be explained, there were always a few that could not be explained — certainly not by Air Force data-collection supervisors who had a very limited need-to-know. Seeds of suspicion were being sown among these Air Force investigators and in some cases among their superiors, a number of whom would later famously leave government service to go join the efforts of the ufologists on the other side of the aisle.

Ultimately, the Air Force concluded for the National Security Council that “almost all sightings stemmed from one or more of three causes: mass hysteria and hallucination; misinterpretation of known objects; or hoax.”

But no matter how many sightings were explained as benign, there was still the unexplained mother of all unidentified flying objects—the nefarious crashed craft from Roswell. Everything about that flying disc had to remain hidden from absolutely everyone but a select few. If Americans found out about it, or about what the government had been doing in response, there would be outrage.

Like Area 51, NII-88 did not exist on the map. Before the Communist Revolution, NII-88 had been a small village called Podlipki, same as the Groom Lake area had once been a little mining enclave called Groom Mine.

Ten years earlier, in 1946, the U.S. nuclear stockpile had totaled two. In 1955, that stockpile had risen to 2,280 nuclear bombs.

From thirteen and a half miles up, the U-2’s cameras were able to take clear photographs of Eisenhower’s cows as they drank water from troughs.

Richard Mingus had no idea that he was about to become one of the first Federal Services security guards assigned to Area 51. Or that the very first nuclear test he would be asked to stand guard over would be Project 57 — America’s first dirty bomb.

balloon shot was far more cost-effective and also produced a lot less radioactivity than vaporizing metal did. For the public, however, the safety and security of hanging nuclear bombs from balloons raised an obvious question: What if one of the balloons were to get away?

Following Project 57, the first nuclear explosion in the series to form a mushroom cloud was called Boltzmann, detonated on May 28, 1957. At twelve kilotons, it was approximately the same size as the Hiroshima bomb and caused Area 51 personnel located eleven miles over the hill to be temporarily evacuated from the base.

There was only one place equipped to handle a spy plane that needed to be hidden from the world, including members of Congress, and that was Area 51.

“For six months, his head was clamped into a vise and shot through with a current sufficient to fire a hundred-watt light bulb.” Frank Wisner emerged from the insane asylum zombielike and went on to serve as the CIA’s London station chief.

In total, 2,850 Oxcart flights would be flown out of Area 51 over a period of six years. Exactly how many of these flights generated UFO reports is not known, but the ones that prompted UFO sightings created the same kinds of problems for the CIA as they had in the previous decade with the U-2, only with elements that were seemingly more inexplicable.

When the Oxcart flew at 2,300 miles per hour, it was going approximately five times faster than a commercial airplane—aircraft speeds that were unheard-of in those days.

Or was an elite group with a need-to-know allowing— perhaps even fostering—exactly this kind of conjecture among analysts because it was better to have insiders on a wild-goose chase than to have them on the trail leading to the original enigma of Area 51?

A second Black Cat pilot named Major Jack Chang would also get shot down in a U-2, in 1965, and was imprisoned alongside Yeh Changti. After their release, the two pilots shared their arduous stories with fellow Black Cat pilot, Hsichun Hua, who had become a general in the Taiwanese air force while the men were in captivity. Neither Yeh Changti nor Major Jack Chang was ever given a medal by the CIA. The

Elugelab was not an island anymore. The thermonuclear bomb had vaporized the entire landmass, sending eighty million tons of pulverized coral into the upper atmosphere to float around and rain down.

In a roomful of 303 Committee members, Slater was told the Oxcart would be terminated effective January 1, 1968. There was no room for debate. The Oxcart’s fate had been decided. The case was closed. Slater was instructed to return to Area 51 and keep his squadron operations ready while the Air Force’s SR-71 Blackbird passed its final flight tests.

President Johnson was outraged. Within hours of the Pueblo’s capture, the Pentagon began secretly preparing for war against North Korea.

But by then, the Pueblo was on its way to Pyongyang, where it remains today—the only American naval vessel held in captivity by a foreign power.

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.

But for all the success of the CIA’s Oxcart program, the reality was that the Air Force’s Blackbird, the SR-71, was finally ready to deploy. The CIA could no longer compete with the Pentagon for Mach 3 missions, and the Oxcart program reached its inevitable end.

As the war on terror expanded, budgets for drone programs went from thin to virtually limitless almost overnight.

As far as developing weapons using cutting-edge science and technology was concerned, it was 1957 post-Sputnik all over again.

Eyes in the sky, dreamed up in the 1940s, had become swords in the sky in the new millennium. Reconnaissance and retaliation had merged into one.

Area 51 is named as such not because it was a randomly chosen quadrant, as has often been presumed, but because the 1947 crash remains from Roswell, New Mexico, were sent from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base out to a secret spot in the Nevada desert — in 1951.

The gypsies have a saying: You’re not really dead until the last person who knows you dies.

And responders from the Roswell Army Air Field found not only a crashed craft, but also two crash sites, and they found bodies alongside the crashed craft. These were not aliens. Nor were they consenting airmen. They were human guinea pigs.

Unusually petite for pilots, they appeared to be children. Each was under five feet tall. Physically, the bodies of the aviators revealed anatomical conundrums. They were grotesquely deformed, but each in the same manner as the others. They had unusually large heads and abnormally shaped oversize eyes. One fact was clear: these children, if that’s what they were, were not healthy humans. A second fact was shocking. Two of the child-size aviators were comatose but still alive.

There was the crashed craft that had been sent by Stalin — with its Russian writing stamped, or embossed, in a ring around the inside of the craft. So far, the EG&G engineers were told, no one working on the project when it had been headquartered at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base had been able to discern what made Stalin’s craft hover and fly. Not even the German Paperclip scientists who had been assigned to assist. So the crashed craft was job number one. Reverse engineer it, Vannevar Bush said. Take it apart and put it back together again. Figure out what made it fly.

Because two of the aviators were comatose but still alive, the men would have to transfer them into a Jell-O-like substance and stand them upright in two tubular tanks, attached to a life-support system. Sometimes, their mouths opened, and this gave the appearance of their trying to speak.

The EG&G engineers were told that part of Joseph Stalin’s offer to Josef Mengele stated that if he could create a crew of grotesque, child-size aviators for Stalin, he would be given a laboratory in which to continue his work.

According to what the engineers were told, Mengele held up his side of the Faustian bargain and provided Stalin with the child-size crew. Joseph Stalin did not. Mengele never took up residence in the Soviet Union. Instead, he lived for four years in Germany under an assumed name

“You do what you do because you love your country, and you are told what you are doing is for the good of the country,” the engineer said. Meaning out at the original Area 51, starting in 1951, the EG&G engineers worked in secret on a nefarious Nazi-inspired black project that would remain entirely hidden from the public because Vannevar Bush told them it was the correct thing to do.

Walter Haut died in December 2005 and left a sworn affidavit to be opened only after his death. In the text, Haut said the second press release was fraudulent, meant to cover up the first statement, which was true. Haut also said that in addition to recovering a flying craft, the military recovered bodies from a second crash site — small, child-size bodies with disproportionately large heads. “I am convinced that what I personally observed was some kind of craft and its crew from outer space,” Haut wrote.

According to the EG&G engineer, the aviators were not aliens but were created to look like them, by Josef Mengele, “shortly before or immediately after the end of the war.”