Area 51 Quotes

“Building the bomb was the single most expensive engineering project in the history of the United States. It 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.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base

“Everyone knows that a gorilla can’t fly an airplane. Whether or not the psychiatrist really did get involved—and if he did, whether he was aware of the gorilla masks—remains ambiguous to Dr. Craig Luther, a contemporary historian at Edwards Air Force Base. But for the purposes of a strategic deception campaign, the point is clear: no one wants to be mistaken for a fool.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base

“Not only the yield size of Hood was classified; so was the fact that despite the Atomic Energy Commission’s assurance that it was not testing thermonuclear bombs, 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 sea. “So powerful was the blast that it was felt and seen over most of the Western United States as it lighted up the pre-dawn darkness,” reported the United Press International. It took twenty-five minutes for the nuclear blast wave to reach Los Angeles, 350 miles to the west.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base

“The warships below were tossed up into the air like bathtub toys. The Japanese battleship Nagato, formerly the flagship of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the man responsible for planning the attack on Pearl Harbor, was thrown four hundred yards.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base

“One of the first things Colonel Slater did after taking command of the base was to hang a sign over the House-Six bar that listed Slip Slater’s Basic Rules of Flying at Groom Lake. There were only three rules. Try to stay in the middle of the air. Do not go near the edges of it. The edges of the air can be recognized by the appearance of ground, buildings, sea, trees and interstellar space. It is much more difficult to fly there.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base

“On October 30, 1961, the Soviet Union detonated the largest, most powerful nuclear weapon the world had ever known. Called the Tsar Bomba, the hydrogen bomb had an unbelievable yield of fifty megatons, roughly ten times the amount of all the explosives used in seven years of war during World War II, including both nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base

“The Operation Hardtack II nuclear test series would prove even bigger than Plumbbob, in terms of the number of tests. From September 12 to October 30, 1958, an astonishing thirty-seven nuclear bombs were exploded—from tops of tall towers, in tunnels and shafts, on the surface of the earth, and hanging from balloons. Areas 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 12, and 15 served as ground zero for the detonations, all within eighteen miles of Area 51.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base

“Try to stay in the middle of the air. Do not go near the edges of it. The edges of the air can be recognized by the appearance of ground, buildings, sea, trees and interstellar space. It is much more difficult to fly there.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base

“Nikola Tesla mastered wireless communication in 1893,”
― Annie Jacobsen, Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base

“Reconnaissance and retaliation had merged into one.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base

“Before joining Skunk Works, Ben Rich had only one claim to fame: being awarded a patent for designing a nickel-chromium heating system that prevented a pilot’s penis from freezing to his urine elimination pipe.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base

“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.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base