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

by Annie M. Jacobsen

  Lockheed was confident the speed element was possible, but it wasn’t in charge of building the jet engines; the Pratt and Whitney corporation was. Height was achievable; Lockheed had mastered flying at seventy thousand feet with the U-2. Stealth was the feature that would be the most challenging, and it was also the single most important feature of the spy plane to the CIA. To create stealth, Lovick and his team had to master minutiae involving radar returns. Eventually, they’d need a wide-open space and a full-size airplane, which is how Ed Lovick and the Lockheed radar cross-section team became the first group of men after the atomic blast to set up shop at Area 51. But first, they did this inside a room within a hangar at Lockheed.

  “Radar works analogous to a bat,” Lovick explains. “The bat squeaks and the sound hits a bug. The squeak gets sent back to the bat and the bat measures time and distance to the bug through the echo it receives.” So how does one get the bug to absorb the squeak? “The way in which to solve the radar problem for us at Lockheed was to create a surface that would redirect radar returns. We needed to send them off in a direction other than back at the Soviet radars. We could also do this by absorbing radar returns, like a diaper absorbs liquid. In theory it was simple. But it turned out to be quite a complicated problem to solve.”

  Lovick had been solving problems ever since he was a child growing up in Falls City, Nebraska, during the Depression — for instance, the time he wanted to learn to play the piano but did not want to disturb his family while he practiced. “I took the piano apart and reconfigured its parts to suppress the sound. Then I sent the vibrations from the strings electronically through a small amplifier to a headset I wore.” This was hardly something most fourteen-year-old children were doing in 1933. Four years later, at the age of eighteen, Lovick published his first article on radar, for Radio-Craft magazine. Inspired to think he might have a career in radar technology, he wrote to Lockheed Corporation in faraway California asking for a job.

  Lockheed turned him down. So he took a minimum-wage job as a radio repairman at a local Montgomery Ward, something that, at the age of ninety-one, he still considers a serendipitous career move. “What I learned at Montgomery Ward, in an employment capacity that today some might perceive as a dead-end job, would later play an important role in my future spy plane career.” Namely, that there is as much to learn from what doesn’t work as from what does.

  To learn how to outfox radar, Lovick returned to the trial-and-error principles he’d first cultivated as a child. He set about designing and overseeing the building of Lockheed’s first anechoic chamber to test scale models of Skunk Works’ proposed new spy plane. “An anechoic chamber is an enclosed space covered in energy-absorbing materials, the by-product of which is noiselessness,” Lovick explains. It is so quiet inside the chamber that if a person stands alone inside its four walls, he can hear the blood flowing inside his body. “Particularly loud is the blood in one’s head,” Lovick notes. Only in such a strictly controlled environment could the physicist and his team accurately test how a one-twentieth-scale model would react to radar beams aimed at it. Lockheed’s wood shop built tiny airplane models for the physicists, not unlike the models kids play with. Lovick and the team painstakingly applied radar-absorbing material to the models then strung them up in the anechoic chamber to test. Based on the radar echo results, the shape and design of the spy plane would change. So would its name. Over the next several months, the design numbers for the Archangel-1 went up incrementally, through eleven major changes. This is why the final and official Agency designation for the airplane was Archangel12, or A-12 for short.

  While imaging and then designing Lockheed’s new spy plane, Edward Lovick accompanied Kelly Johnson on trips to Washington, DC. There, the men met with Richard Bissell and President Eisenhower’s science advisers to deliver progress reports and attend briefings on the aircraft. President Eisenhower called it “the Big One.” On these trips to DC, Bissell, whom Lovick knew only as Mr. B., would pepper Kelly Johnson with technical questions about stealth, or “low observables,” which Lovick was responsible for answering. “We shared test data from the chamber work, which was going along fine,” Lovick recalls. “But the Customer always wanted better. No matter how low we felt our observables were, the Customer always wanted them to be lower.” This meant more work. In a final design stage, Skunk Works aerodynamicists and the radar team added downward slopes, called chines, on either side of the body of the aircraft, making the airplane look like a cobra with wings. With the plane’s underbelly now flat, its radar cross section was reduced by an astonishing 90 percent. Still, Richard Bissell wanted a spy plane closer to invisible. Lovick needed a full-scale laboratory. Johnson got an idea: return to Area 51.

  Johnson had met privately with an unnamed official to try to convince the CIA to allow a small cadre of Lockheed scientists and engineers to return to Area 51 for proof-of-concept tests. There and only there, Johnson argued, could his group do what needed to be done to meet the CIA’s grueling radar-evasion demands. During this intense design phase, and despite the secrecy of the project, Lockheed was not the only contractor bidding on the job. Who exactly would land the CIA’s contract to build the U-2’s replacement airplane was still up in the air. The federal government liked to foster competition between defense contractors, which meant aerospace contractor Convair was also in play, hoping to secure the CIA’s hundred-million-dollar contract for itself. Johnson knew reducing the aircraft’s observables was his best shot at getting the contract. Permission was granted, and in the late summer of 1959, fifty Skunk Works employees returned to Area 51.

  The days of measuring child-size airplane models in a tiny chamber in Burbank were over. The time had come to put a full-scale model of the world’s first stealth airplane to the test. “On 31 March we started to build a full scale mockup and elevation device to raise the mockup 50 feet in the air for radar tests,” Johnson wrote in documents declassified in July 2007. What Johnson was imagining in this “elevation device” would eventually become the legendary Area 51 pylon, or radar test pole.

  Lockheed engineers brought with them a mock-up of the aircraft so detailed that it could easily be mistaken for the real thing. For accurate radar results, the model had to represent everything the real aircraft would be, from the size of the rivets to the slope on the chines. It had taken more than four months to build. When it was done, the wooden airplane, with its 102-foot-long fuselage and 55-foot-long wooden wings, was packed up in a wooden crate in preparation for its journey out to Area 51. Getting it there was a daunting task, and the road from Burbank to Area 51 needed to be prepared in advance. The transport crate had been disguised to look like a generic wide load, but the size made it considerably wider than wide. Crews were dispatched before the trip to remove obstructing road signs and to trim overhanging trees. In a few places along the highway, the road had to be made level.

  What kind of cleanup went on at Area 51 before the arrival of Lockheed’s radar cross-section crew remains unknown. Twelve months had passed since the last atomic bomb had been exploded next door; it was code-named Titania, like the mischievous queen of the fairies from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. If there was a formal decontamination of Area 51 or a summation of what the radiation levels were and whether it was safe to return, those details remain classified. As it was, the radar test system Lockheed set up was only temporary. The CIA did not yet have presidential approval to proceed with the A-12. “I had no more than 50 people on the project,” Johnson wrote in a document called History of the Oxcart by the Builder, declassified in 2007. The small group of Skunk Workers bunked down in the Quonset huts where the U-2 pilots and engineers had once lived.

  Beginning in the fall of 1959, a Lockheed C-47 shuttled engineers and mechanics from Burbank to Area 51 on Monday mornings and returned them home to their families late Friday afternoons. It was Ed Lovick’s first experience working at what he’d been told was Paradise Ranch. Because of Lovick’s key role in this
phase of the project, he was transported in a Lockheed twin-engine Cessna, usually alone with the pilot. He disliked the commute because the fumes from the Cessna made him queasy. But once he arrived and deplaned he would lose himself in the intensity of the radar work going on. In Burbank, in the silence of the anechoic chamber, Lovick had been testing airplane models the size of his shoe. This full-size mock-up would reveal the results of two years’ worth of chamber work. “The only way to get accurate information of how a full-size aircraft would perform in radar testing was to subject the full size mock-up of the A12 to radar beams,” Lovick explains.

  At the edge of the dry lake bed, scientists mounted the airplane on the fifty-five-foot-high pole, centered in a concrete pad that would rise up and down from an underground chamber in the desert floor. “A control room was located underground to one side of the pad. An anemometer and a wind-direction weather vane were located near the edge of the pad, away from the line of sight,” Lovick recalls. The radar antennas, manned and monitored by EG&G, were located a mile away from the pole. “The nose of the mock-up would be tipped down so the radar would see the airplane’s belly, the same way that Soviet radar would see it. It was an elaborate and time-consuming process,” Lovick recalls. “The mock-up that was tested on the pole had to be housed in a hangar on the base at least a mile away. It was carried out and back on special carts.”

  In late 1959, the CIA did not know how far the Soviets had advanced their satellite technology — whether they were capable of taking photographs from space yet. The CIA’s espionage concerns further complicated the radar work at Area 51. Each member of Lovick’s crew carried in his pocket a small chart indicating Soviet satellite schedules. This often meant working odd hours, including at night. “It also made for a lot of technicians running around,” Lovick explains. “Satellites passed overhead often. Getting an aircraft up on the radar test pole took eighteen minutes. It took another eighteen minutes to get it back down. That left only a set amount of time to shoot radar at it and take data recordings.” As soon as technicians were done, they took the aircraft down and whisked it away into its hangar.

  What Lovick remembered most about life on the Ranch during this period, besides the work going on around the pole, was how intense the weather was. At night, workers needed to bundle up in heavy coats and wool hats. But during the day, temperatures could reach 120 degrees. “Once, I saw a coyote chasing a rabbit and they were both walking,” Lovick recalls.

  In December of 1959, the president was briefed on the status of the A-12. Eager to move ahead, Eisenhower was also aware of the hundred-million-dollar check he would be writing to Lockheed from his discretionary funds for a fleet of twelve spy planes. Eisenhower told Bissell he had decided to request that Lockheed deliver results on a last proof-of-concept test, one that focused specifically on radarevasion technology. Bissell had been informed that Lockheed’s A-12 would appear on enemy radar as bigger than a bird but smaller than a man. But he had not yet been told about a problem in the aircraft’s low observables that Lovick and the team had been unable to remedy while testing the mock-up out at Area 51. Lovick explains: “The exhaust ducts from the two huge jet engines that powered the aircraft were proving impossible to make stealthy. Obviously, we couldn’t cover the openings with camouflage coating. During testing, the radar waves would go into the spaces where the engines would be, echo around, and come out like water being sprayed into a can. We’d tried screens and metallic grating. Nothing worked.” Kelly Johnson believed the CIA would accept this design weakness. “Ike wants an airplane from Mandrake the magician,” Johnson told the team and added that the president would settle for something less. Johnson was wrong.

  With the president’s final request on the table, settling for something less was no longer an option. On a final trip to Washington, DC, Kelly Johnson was going to have to explain to Bissell the exact nature of the design problem. “The meeting took place at an old ramshackle building in Washington, DC, inside a conference room with a mirrored wall,” Lovick remembers. “Killian and [Edwin] Din Land were there, so was ‘Mr. B.’” Kelly Johnson told the CIA about the problem with camouflaging the A-12’s engine exhaust, how it was a weakness in the airplane’s overall concept of stealth. “Bissell became furious. Throughout the process, I felt so comfortable working for Kelly, I don’t think I realized how serious the situation was until that meeting. Bissell threatened to cancel the entire contract if someone didn’t come up with a solution.” It was a tense moment. “I knew that more than a hundred men had been lost trying to look over the fence. Shot down over Russia, killed, or listed as missing in training missions. I became aware there was a serious problem of information gathering. Before that, most of my concerns were as a scientist in a lab. [In that moment] I realized how poorly things were going in the world outside the lab. How important this airplane was, and that problem with the engine exhaust needed to be solved.”

  There in the conference room, Edward Lovick decided to speak up about an idea he had been considering for decades, “and that was how to ionize gas,” he says, referring to the scientific process by which the electrical charge of an atom is fundamentally changed. “I suggested that by adding the chemical compound cesium to the fuel, the exhaust would be ionized, likely masking it from radar. I had suggested cesium would be the best source of free electrons because, in the gaseous state, it would be the easiest to ionize.” If this complicated ionization worked — and Lovick believed it would — the results would be like putting a sponge in a can and running a hose into it. Instead of being bounced back, the radar return from the engines would be absorbed. “Bissell loved the idea,” says Lovick, adding that the suggestion was endorsed heartily by several of the customer’s consultants. An enthusiastic discussion ensued among the president’s science advisers, whom Lovick sensed had very little understanding of what it was he was proposing. In the end, the results would be up to Lovick to determine; later, his theory indeed proved correct. Those results remain a key component of stealth and are still classified as of 2011.

  Lockheed kept the contract. Lovick got a huge Christmas bonus, and the A-12 got a code name, Oxcart. It was ironic, an oxcart being one of the slowest vehicles on Earth and the Oxcart being the fastest. On January 26, 1960, Bissell notified Johnson that the CIA was authorizing the delivery of twelve airplanes. The specs were laid out: Mach, 3.2 (2,064 knots, or.57 miles per second); range, 4,120 nautical miles; altitude, 84,500-97,600 feet. The aircraft was going to be five times faster than the U-2 and would fly a full three miles higher than the U-2. Skunk Works would move into production, and a facility needed to be readied for flight tests. 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.

  It was January of 1960, and for the first time since the atomic bombs had shuttered the place, in the summer of 1957, Area 51 was back in business. Only this time, the CIA and the Air Force were comanaging an aircraft that was bigger, faster, and budgeted at nearly five times the cost of the U-2. The program would involve more than ten times as many people, and, as it had with the U-2, the CIA hired work crews from next door at the Nevada Test Site, men with top secret security clearances already in place. There were two immediate requirements for the new airplane: a much longer runway and a 1.32-million-gallon fuel farm. The construction of a new runway and the fuel farm began first. Millions of gallons of cement had to be hauled in, along with enough building materials to construct a small city. Trucking this kind of volume through the test site would draw too much attention to the project, so a new road was built, allowing access to Groom Lake from the north. Contractors worked under cover of night, resurfacing eighteen miles of highway through the tiny town of Rachel, Nevada, so fuel trucks carrying five hundred thousand gallons of specially modified fuel each month would not crack the roadbed with their heavy loads.

  The A-12 Oxcart was a flying fuel tank. It held eleven thousand gallons, which made the tanks
the largest portion of the airplane. The fuel had requirements the likes of which were previously unknown. During the refueling process, which would happen in the air, at lower altitudes and lower airspeeds, the temperature of the fuel would drop to −90 degrees Fahrenheit. At Mach 3, it would heat up to 285 degrees Fahrenheit, a temperature at which conventional fuels boil and explode. To allow for this kind of fluctuation, JP-7 was designed to maintain such a low vapor pressure that a person could not light it with a match. This made for many practical jokes, with those in the know dropping lit matches into a barrel of JP-7 to make those not in the know duck and run for cover. It also required extreme precision of the man who was chosen to be in charge of the fuels team, Air Force sergeant Harry Martin.