The Base That Was Not There: What Area 51 Was Actually Hiding

In June 2019 a twenty-year-old in Bakersfield named Matty Roberts made a Facebook event called "Storm Area 51: They Can't Stop All Of Us" and set it for 20 September. Two million people clicked going. Another million and a half clicked interested. On the night, about 150 people turned up at the gates in the Nevada desert, none of them got in, and the whole thing was written up as the year the internet drove out to the alien base for a laugh.

The base had been declassified for six years by then.

In August 2013 the CIA released a four-hundred-page history of its spy plane programmes in which the facility at Groom Lake is named, described, and drawn on a map. Jeffrey Richelson of the National Security Archive at George Washington University had asked for it under freedom of information law in 2005, having already read an earlier copy in which every mention of the place was blacked out. This one came back with the blacking out removed. It was the first time the United States government had conceded in writing that Area 51 is a real place.

What the place was hiding is now thoroughly documented, fairly boring in the way that only very expensive engineering can be, and directly responsible for the flying saucers.

A ranch that was not a ranch

On 12 April 1955 a Beechcraft flew over southern Nevada with four men aboard. Richard Bissell of the CIA, an Air Force colonel called Osmund Ritland, Lockheed's chief designer Kelly Johnson, and Tony LeVier, Lockheed's chief test pilot, who was flying it. They were looking for somewhere to test an aircraft that did not officially exist. They found a dry salt flat called Groom Lake, at the north-eastern corner of the Atomic Energy Commission's Nevada Proving Ground.

The attraction was the neighbours. The land next door was already being used for nuclear testing, which meant it was already closed, already guarded, and already the sort of place where nobody local asked what the trucks were carrying. The site was given the name Paradise Ranch, on the reasoning that men would be easier to recruit to a ranch than to a waterless salt pan.

A survey team arrived on 4 May and laid out five thousand feet of runway. They paved it, because runoff from the mountains flooded the lake bed often enough to earn the base another name, Watertown Strip. By July there were three hangars, a control tower and enough rough accommodation to move people in.

On 1 August 1955, during a high-speed taxi test, LeVier got the first U-2 into the air without meaning to. He noted afterwards that it left him in utter amazement, as he had no intentions whatsoever of flying. The first intended flight was three days later.

The lights people saw

The U-2 was built to fly above 70,000 feet. In 1955 airliners cruised at around 20,000, and the working assumption among pilots and air traffic controllers was that nothing much flew above about 40,000. That gap produced a specific effect in the early evening.

As the sun went below the horizon, it went below the horizon for the airliner. It did not go below the horizon for the U-2, twelve miles higher up and still in daylight. Its silver wings caught the light. From underneath, in a darkening sky, it looked like something burning.

Pilots called it in. Controllers logged it.

The reports went to Project Blue Book, the Air Force programme set up in 1952 to investigate unidentified objects and, more importantly, to give the public an answer about them.

Blue Book could check a sighting against the flight schedules, and very often found a U-2 in exactly that place at exactly that time. It did not say so. Writing in the CIA's in-house journal Studies in Intelligence in 1997, the historian Gerald Haines recorded that Blue Book staff would put the sightings down to "natural phenomena such as ice crystals and temperature inversions", and that they were careful not to reveal the real cause to the public.

The CIA's own history of the programme puts a number on the scale of it. Blue Book investigators found that U-2 and later Oxcart flights accounted for more than half of all UFO reports from the late 1950s through most of the 1960s.

Do the arithmetic on that. For roughly fifteen years, the largest single source of unidentified objects in American skies was the American government, and the largest single source of false explanations for them was the same government. Haines, writing for the agency and not against it, concedes the consequence in a single clause: the deception "added fuel to the later conspiracy theories and the coverup controversy of the 1970s".

Nobody in 1958 sat down and decided to invent aliens. What they decided was that a truthful answer was impossible and a blank one was unacceptable, so they gave a false one, thousands of times, for fifteen years, to the only people who were ever going to be misled by it.

What the secrecy actually bought

None of which means the secrecy was pointless. The programme it protected was real, and it worked.

On 25 April 1962 Louis Schalk got the first A-12 Oxcart into the air off the Groom Lake runway without intending to, which by then was becoming a tradition, and set it down on the lake bed about two miles further on. He flew it properly the next day, for forty minutes, with the landing gear left down. That is the aircraft at the top of this article, built to cruise above 80,000 feet at more than three times the speed of sound, photographed on 26 April 1962 climbing away over the Nevada hills.

At five past six on the morning of 18 June 1981, a Lockheed test pilot called Hal Farley lifted the nose of the first F-117 off the same runway. Its existence was not publicly confirmed until 1988.

Those aircraft mattered. The reason a secret test site exists at all is that a new airframe is at its most vulnerable in the two or three years between first flight and first operational use, and a rival that sees it early gets those years to build a counter. That is a defensible argument and it does not require anybody to lie to an airline pilot about ice crystals.

What happened at Groom Lake is that the two things were run together. The aircraft were classified, which was the point, and then the existence of the runway, the name of the place, the acreage, the payroll and eventually the contents of the burn pits were classified as well, because it was administratively simpler to put a fence around all of it than to keep drawing a line.

The men who worked there

Robert Frost was a sheet-metal foreman at the base. Around 1987 he became ill enough to miss work, developed scales and red welts over his face and body, wrapped himself in blankets to keep the sunlight off his skin, and lost the use of his legs. He filed a claim for lost wages. His employer, a government contractor, disputed it, and at a hearing in 1990 a company superintendent testified that no burning took place at the site. The claim was denied.

Frost was dead of liver disease by then.

His widow Helen could not get a Las Vegas firm to take a wrongful death case. She found the Project On Government Oversight, a Washington watchdog, and through it other workers and other widows with the same story: that roughly twice a week for more than a decade, drums of resins, paints and solvents left over from classified aircraft coatings were tipped into trenches the length of a football pitch, soaked in jet fuel and set alight with road flares, and that they had worked downwind of it.

In 1994 five serving contractors and the widows of Walter Kasza and Robert Frost sued the Air Force and the Environmental Protection Agency. They were represented by Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University. Biopsies from the living plaintiffs went to biochemists at Rutgers, who reported high levels of dioxin, dibenzofuran and trichloroethylene in their body fat.

They never got a trial.

The Air Force invoked the state secrets privilege, which is a common law doctrine allowing the government to withhold evidence whose disclosure would harm national security. In 1998 the Ninth Circuit held that once the privilege is properly invoked it is absolute, and that it covers even material that looks harmless, because harmless fragments can be assembled. The Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal. The workers were not entitled to learn which chemicals they had been standing in the smoke of.

The exemption that gets signed every autumn

While the litigation was running, the other half of the problem was dealt with directly.

On 29 September 1995 President Clinton signed Presidential Determination 95-45, which exempts "the United States Air Force's operating location near Groom Lake, Nevada" from any federal, state or local law on solid or hazardous waste disposal that would require the disclosure of classified information. The stated grounds are that it is in the paramount interest of the United States. The exemption runs for the full one-year statutory period, which is to say it expires and has to be signed again.

It was signed again. Clinton signed it in 1996 and 1997 and 2000. George W. Bush signed it in 2002 and again in September 2003. The notices sit in the Federal Register, one a year, each one a short paragraph, each one renewing the position that the environmental record of a working American facility is a matter that cannot be shown to the people who worked in it.

The same instinct had already been applied to the land. In 1984 the Air Force closed 89,600 acres of public land around the Groom range, cutting off access to water rights, mining claims and hunting ground, and posted guards to enforce it. An Air Force official later told a House panel that the closure had been made without legal authority. Congress withdrew the land properly in 1987, three years after the fact, which is the usual order of events here.

The story that filled the space

In May and November 1989, a Las Vegas television reporter called George Knapp broadcast interviews with a man who said he had worked at a site called S-4, near Papoose Lake, just south of Groom. He said there were nine hangars built into a hillside and disguised as desert, and inside them were nine craft of non-human manufacture, and his job had been to work out how the propulsion system functioned. His name was Bob Lazar.

Almost every specific claim Lazar made about his own background has been contested since. The institutions where he said he studied have no record of him, and the physics has gone nowhere in thirty-seven years. What matters here is the position a reasonable person was in during 1989, which is that there was no way to check any of it, because the official line on the base he was describing was that there was no base.

A government that will not confirm a runway exists has no way of denying what is parked on it. Every fact about the place had the same status, which is to say none, so a documented aircraft programme and nine flying saucers in a hillside arrived in the public mind at exactly the same weight. The vacuum was not accidental. It had been maintained at considerable expense for thirty-four years, and something was always going to grow in it.

By 2019 the growth was complete enough that two million people signed up for a joke about it, six years after the answer had been published.

What is left

The map in the 2013 release is not a dramatic document. It is a line drawing of a lake bed with a runway on it and a label naming the place, the sort of thing that would take an afternoon to produce, and it had been sitting in a file since 1992.

Twenty-one years is not very long against the seventy the base has been there. But it covers the whole period in which a widow in Nevada was told by a federal court that she could not be shown what had been burning upwind of her husband, and in which several million people came to believe that the interesting thing about that stretch of desert was the thing that was never in it.

Sources

• National Security Archive, George Washington University, "The Secret History of the U-2 and Area 51" (Jeffrey Richelson's 2005 FOIA request, the earlier redacted copy, and the August 2013 release that named Area 51 and mapped it).
• Central Intelligence Agency, "The CIA and the U-2 Program, 1954-1974" (the Pedlow and Welzenbach history, the selection of Groom Lake, and the finding that U-2 and Oxcart flights accounted for more than half of all UFO reports).
• Gerald K. Haines, "CIA's Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947-90", Studies in Intelligence, 1997 (Blue Book attributing sightings to ice crystals and temperature inversions while avoiding the true cause, and the effect on later conspiracy theories).
• Central Intelligence Agency, "Area 51 and the Accidental Test Flight" (LeVier reaching 70 knots and becoming airborne on 1 August 1955, his quoted account of it, and the first planned flight on 4 August).
• Wikipedia, "Area 51" (the survey team laying out a 5,000 foot runway on 4 May 1955, the three hangars and control tower, and Hal Farley flying the first F-117 from the base on 18 June 1981).
• Federal Register, "Presidential Determination on Classified Information Concerning the Air Force's Operating Location Near Groom Lake, Nevada" (the text of Determination 95-45 of 29 September 1995, what it exempts, the paramount interest finding, and the one-year term).
• Federal Register, "Classified Information Concerning the Air Force's Operating Location Near Groom Lake, Nevada" (the 2003 renewal of the exemption, one of the run of annual notices).
• The Spokesman-Review, "The Secrets At Area 51 Deadly, Real" (Robert Frost's job and symptoms, the 1990 hearing at which a superintendent denied any burning, his death from liver disease, and Helen Frost taking the case to the Project On Government Oversight).
• Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, "High court won't review 'state secrets' privilege in 'Area 51' case" (the open burning allegations, the Ninth Circuit holding that the privilege is absolute once invoked, and the Supreme Court's refusal to hear the appeal).
• Las Vegas Review-Journal, "Trump impeachment witness Turley once represented Area 51 workers" (the 1994 suit by five contractors and the widows of Kasza and Frost, Turley acting for them, and the Rutgers biopsies finding dioxin, dibenzofuran and trichloroethylene).
• UPI, "Air Force: 'We had no legal authority'" (the 1984 closure of the Groom range to public access and the admission to a House panel that it was done without legal authority).
• Wikipedia, "Storm Area 51" (Matty Roberts creating the event in June 2019, the two million going and 1.5 million interested, the 20 September date, and roughly 150 people at the gates).
• Wikipedia, "Bob Lazar" (the May 1989 KLAS interview under the name Dennis and the November one under his own name, the S-4 site, the nine craft and the reverse engineering claim, and the absence of any record of his education at the institutions he named).