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

by Annie M. Jacobsen

  To get into the air, the X-15 was jettisoned off a B-52 mother ship, after which its rocket engine would launch it into the atmosphere like a missile until it reached the edge of space. Touching the tip of space, the X-15 would then turn around and “fly” home, getting up to speeds of Mach 6. That kind of speed made for an incredibly bumpy ride. In a matter of months, Barnes became a hypersonic-flight-support expert. He monitored many things, including telemetry, and was always amazed watching how each of the pilots responded differently to physical stress. “We knew more about what was going on with the pilots’ bodies than the pilots knew themselves. From Beatty, we monitored everything. Their heart rates, their pulse, and also everything going on with the pilot and the plane.” In case of an accident, NASA had emergency crews set up across California, Nevada, and Utah on various dry lake beds where the X-15 could land if need be. One of those lake beds was Groom Lake. Barnes says, “From watching my radars, I knew something was going on over there at Groom. I could see things on my radar I wasn’t supposed to see. One of those ‘things’ went really, really fast. Later, when I was briefed on Oxcart, I figured out what I had been watching. But at the time, I didn’t have a need-to-know so I didn’t say anything about what I saw at Groom Lake and nobody asked.”

  The X-15 was an exciting and fast-paced project to work on, with groundbreaking missions happening twice a week. As it was with so many of the early projects involving high-speed and high-altitude flight, many different agencies were involved in the program, not just NASA. The Air Force funded a large part of the program. The CIA didn’t care about space travel but they were very interested in the ram-jet technology on the X-15, something they had wanted to use on their own D-21 drone. “Everyone monitored each other, technology-wise,” Barnes says. To keep the various parties in the loop, there was a designated radio network set up for everyone involved in the project. “There were people from Vandenberg Air Force Base, White Sands Missile Range, Dryden, and CIA monitoring what was going on all day long.”

  Even though he was only twenty-seven years old, Barnes was the most senior radar specialist in Beatty. And almost immediately he noticed there seemed to be a major problem with the radar. “We tracked the X-15 with radar stations at Edwards, in California, and at Ely, in Nevada. My radar in Beatty was fine but I noticed there was a problem at Edwards and Ely. When the X-15 was parked on the tarmac at either place, the radars there read that it was at an altitude of two thousand feet instead of being on the ground.”

  Barnes got on the radio channel and told mission control at the Dryden Flight Research Center about the problem. Dryden blamed it on the radar at Beatty, even though Barnes’s radar agreed with the airplane’s. Over the radio network, Barnes argued his point. The site manager in Beatty was horrified that Barnes dared to challenge his superiors and shot Barnes a dirty look. Back down, he mouthed silently. Barnes complied. But just a few weeks later, when he learned that the X-15 was going through a fitting and there weren’t going to be any flights for three weeks, Barnes seized the moment. “Now would be a good time to fix your radar problem,” Barnes said into the radio network. There were dozens of senior officials listening in. “There was silence on the channel,” Barnes remembers. “My site manager whirled around on his chair and glared at me. ‘You’re on your own, Barnes,’ he said. Another one of the other guys, Bill Houck, leaned over to my station, gave me a big old grin and a thumbs-up. But Dryden still wouldn’t listen to me. They said the problem was inherent to the radar. That it couldn’t be fixed.”

  By now, Barnes had gotten friendly with the X-15 pilots. Even though they had never met in person, a great rapport had developed between them; understandable, given how much time they spent communicating on headset during flights. Barnes cared about the pilots’ safety more than he cared about what his site manager perceived to be insubordination on his part. So Barnes told Dryden exactly what he believed was true. “I’ve been in radar long enough to know there’s no such thing as an inherent problem in radar,” Barnes said. “I agree with the airplane. If you don’t fix your radar, you’re gonna kill one of the pilots one of these days.”

  There was a deathly silence on the network. Back at Dryden, the communication had been overheard by the pilots who were in the pilots’ lounge. X-15 pilot “Joe Walker got on a headset and said, ‘Effective immediately, there will be no X-15 flights until the radar problem is fixed.’” Now Dryden had no choice but to get on it. First, they flew up to the Beatty tracking station in a T-33, where they flew calibration flights to compare radar data with the airplane’s altimeter. At Ely, they did the same thing. Barnes was right. The radar at Beatty was correct. Though both agreed with their data, the Dryden Flight Research Center and the Ely tracking station were off by two thousand feet. The radars were torn down and reassembled, to no avail. It was finally discovered that they were vintage radars, left over from World War II, and they had never been retrofitted with the field modification the way the radar at Beatty had. Unitech got a huge Christmas bonus, and no one got killed.

  Of major significance for Barnes was that somewhere off in the black operations ether a man named John Grace had been listening as the whole scenario went down. John Grace worked for the CIA, and Barnes’s name rang a bell. Grace asked his staff to look into this Barnes character, the man whose unique confidence in radar had wound up saving the day. Grace wanted to get Barnes hired for a project that would be coming to Groom Lake — something that even Barnes had been in the dark on back then.

  Working at Beatty meant running multiple jobs, and there was a second aircraft Barnes was in charge of tracking — the XB-70. This experimental program was all that remained of General LeMay’s oncebeloved B-70 bomber now that it had been canceled by Congress, despite four billion dollars invested. The X in front of B-70 indicated that the bomber was now an experimental test bed for supersonic transport. It was a behemoth of an airplane, the fastest-flying sixengined aircraft in the world. On June 8, 1966, the mission for the day was a photo op with the XB-70 as the centerpiece. An F-4, an F-5, a T-38, and an F-104 would fly in formation alongside. Barnes was in charge of monitoring telemetry, radar, and communications from the Beatty tracking station. “General Electrics had built the engines on all six airplanes flying that day,” Barnes says. “They wanted a photograph of all their aircraft flying in a tight formation for the cover of their shareholders’ meeting manual that year.”

  It was a clear day, with very little natural turbulence in the air. The six aircraft took off from Dryden and headed west. About thirty minutes later, the pilots began getting into formation over the Mojave Desert. Barnes was monitoring data and listening on headphones. Using his personal Fischer recording system, Barnes was also taping the pilot transmissions. For this particular photo op, the X-15 pilot, Joe Walker, whom Barnes had gotten to know well, was flying in the F-104. Walker was on the right wing of the aircraft and was trying to hold his position when turbulence by the XB-70’s six engines made him uncomfortable. “Walker came on the radio and spoke very clearly,” Barnes recalls. “He said, ‘I’m opposing this mission. It is too turbulent and it has no scientific value.’”

  Only a few seconds later, a catastrophic midair collision occurred. “We heard the pilots screaming, ‘Midair! Midair! And I realized at first the XB-70 didn’t know it had been hit,” Barnes remembers. Joe Walker’s F-104 had slammed into the much larger airplane, caught fire, and exploded. On the XB-70, both vertical stabilizers had been shorn off, and the airplane began to crash. Continuing to pick up speed, the XB-70 whirled uncontrollably into a flat spin. As it headed toward the ground, parts of the aircraft tore loose. One of the XB-70 pilots, Al White, ejected. The other, Major Carl Cross, was trapped inside the airplane as it slammed into the desert floor. There, just a few miles from Barstow, California, it exploded into flames.

  “It was so damn senseless,” Barnes says. “A damn photograph.” The worst was yet to come. “A lot of people blamed Joe Walker. Easy, because he was dead. There
was, of course, the tape of him saying he was opposing the mission. That the vortex on the damn XB-70 was sucking him in. Bill Houck, the NASA monitor at our station, asked me to give him the tape recording to send to Dryden. Once NASA got a hold of it,” Barnes says, “someone there quietly disposed of it.”

  The XB-70 tragedy more or less closed down the program, and the X-15 rocket plane program was finishing up as well. For Barnes, life in Beatty was nearing an end, but one afternoon, Barnes received a phone call. A man identifying himself as John Grace wanted to know if he’d like to come work on an “interesting project” not far away. “Grace said it would be a commute from Las Vegas,” Barnes says. Grace told Barnes he would have to get a top secret clearance first. Whatever it was, it sounded exciting. Barnes told Grace, “Sign me up.” T. D. Barnes was officially on his way to Groom Lake.

  In March of 1968, his top secret clearance finally in place, Barnes learned his new employer was going to be EG&G. He was instructed by a “handler” to arrive at a remote, unmarked hangar at McCarran Airport for his first day at work. There, Barnes was met by a man who shook his hand and escorted him into a small Constellation airplane. “They didn’t say anything to me about where we were going and I knew enough about black operations not to ask. It was a nice, quiet ride in the airplane. Just before we landed at Area 51, I heard the pilot say to the copilot, ‘They’ve got the doughnut out.’ Then the pilots quickly closed all the curtains on the airplane so when we landed I couldn’t see a thing. I wondered what the doughnut was. I didn’t ask. I was taken to the EG&G Special Projects building and introduced to our group. The boss said, ‘What’s your first name?’ I said, ‘T.D.’ He said, ‘Not anymore. You’re Thunder out here.’” Later that first day, Barnes was taken inside one of the hangars at Area 51. “They opened the door. There sat a Russian MiG. They said, ‘This here’s the doughnut.’ I got a chuckle about that. The pilots who’d brought me to the area had no idea that the whole reason I’d been brought in was because of the doughnut.”

  Munir Redfa’s MiG had been nicknamed the doughnut because the jet fighter’s nose had a round opening in it, like a doughnut’s. It was the first advanced Soviet fighter jet ever to set its wheels down on U.S. soil. Colonel Slater, overseeing Black Shield in Kadena at the time, remembers getting a call in the middle of the night from one of his staff, Jim Simon. “Simon called me up all excited and said, ‘Slater, you are not going to believe this!’ He told me about the MiG. How it landed at [Area] 51 in the middle of the night, hidden inside a cargo plane. How it was accompanied by someone from a foreign government. Simon couldn’t get over it and I couldn’t wait to see it,” Slater remembers. Oxcart pilot Frank Murray remembers the excitement of seeing it as well. During Operation Black Shield Murray was on rotation between Area 51 and Kadena when he was taken into the secret hangar to have a look at the MiG. “It was a tiny little sucker, considering how deadly it was,” Murray says. “We couldn’t believe we had a captured one up there at the Ranch.”

  T. D. Barnes and the EG&G Special Projects Group at Area 51 got to work reverse engineering Colonel Redfa’s MiG — taking it apart and putting it back together again. All the engineers knew that this was the best way to really understand how something had been built. The EG&G Special Projects Group appeared to have advance expertise in this technical process of reverse engineering aircraft. At the time, no one knew why, and Barnes, new to the EG&G engineering team, knew better than to ask. He was excited to get to work. “We broke the MiG down into each of its individual pieces. Pieces of the cockpit, the gyros, oscillograph, fuel flow meter, radio… everything. Then we put it back together. The MiG didn’t have computers or fancy navigation equipment.” Still, Barnes and his crew were stumped. How was it that this Soviet plane was beating the supposedly more capable U.S. fighters in air-to-air engagements? No one could explain why. So a second program was conceived, the MiG’s Have Doughnut tactical phase. During the Have Doughnut, the MiG would begin flying tactical missions against U.S. airplanes in the skies over Groom Lake. The Air Force said it wasn’t interested but the Navy leaped at the chance.

  “Breaking it down was the first step in understanding the aircraft. But it was by sending the MiG flying that we really figured out how it maneuvered so damn fast,” Barnes says. Test pilots flew a total of 102 MiG missions over Groom Lake. Mock air battles between the MiG and American fighter jets were a daily event for a period of six weeks during the spring of 1968. The program (not including its Area 51 locale) was declassified by the U.S. Air Force Foreign Technology Division in October of 1997 and by the Defense Intelligence Agency in March of 2000. “We learned that you had to sneak right up on it and shoot it down before it had a chance to maneuver. That was the key. Get it on the first chance you get. There were no second chances with a MiG,” Barnes explains. Constant flying takes a toll on any aircraft, but with a captured enemy airplane this proved especially challenging. “Since no spare parts were available, ground crews had to reverse engineer the components and make new ones from raw materials,” Barnes says. “But when both phases were over, the technical and the tactical ones, we’d unlocked the secrets of the MiG.”

  There were repercussions from the Soviets. “The fact that we had a MiG at Area 51 infuriated the Russians,” explains Barnes. “They retaliated by sending more spy satellites overhead at Area 51, sometimes as often as every forty-five minutes.” Up to this point, the Soviets had gotten used to monitoring the routine activity at the base, which consisted primarily of takeoffs and landings of the Oxcart and a few drones. But once the MiG showed up, the U.S. Air Force Foreign Technology Division appeared on the scene too, and with them came various models of Soviet-built radar systems captured in the Middle East. And once the Soviets discovered engineers at Groom Lake were testing these foreign radar systems, they again decided to monitor the situation more closely from overhead.

  The newly acquired Soviet radar systems started cropping up around the western edges of the Groom dry lake bed and also around Slater Lake, which was about a mile northwest of the main hangars. Technical evaluation of the radar was quickly assigned to Barnes. He requested a Nike missile system and was surprised at just how quickly his request was filled. “I think the CIA went and got a Nike missile system at my old stomping ground, Fort Bliss, just about the very next day,” Barnes says. With radars scattered all over the range, including acquisition radar that rotated and searched for incoming targets, a geek like Barnes had a field day. “We used the Nike to track the MiGs and other airplanes to evaluate their ECM against X-band radar.” What Barnes did not know was that these radar systems were being acquired for the upcoming radar cross-section analysis of an Air Force plane in the works. The Russians had no idea what the Air Force was dreaming up either, but they were duly angry about the captured radars that were now sitting in the hills overlooking Groom Lake.

  “We were pinned down,” says Barnes. For weeks on end, the Special Projects Group couldn’t turn on a single radar system; the Russians were monitoring the area that intensely. Barnes and his group passed the time by playing mind games with the Soviets. They painted strange shapes on the tarmac, “funny-looking impossible aircraft,” which they then heated up with portable heaters to confuse the Soviets who were shooting infrared satellite pictures of the work going on there. “We got a kick out of imagining what the Russians thought of our new airplanes,” Barnes says. With all the time on their hands, Barnes and his group of twenty-three electronics specialists began dreaming up other ways to entertain themselves. They made up riddles. They placed bets. They played with mixed chemicals that made their tennis sneakers glow in the dark. They rewired the Special Projects motor pool car so it would give the first guy to drive it a series of low-voltage shocks. They rigged up a tall TV antenna on top of their living quarters, hoping to draw reception from Las Vegas. Instead, they tapped into an international channel broadcast out of Spain. “For many months, all we watched were bullfights in Madrid,” Barnes recalls.

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sp; This was a group of highly trained specialists gathered to pioneer radar technology, so when they finally ran out of practical jokes and bullfights, their attention turned back to problem solving. They started to occupy themselves by examining minutiae on printouts from radar returns. In a serendipitous way, this led to a technological breakthrough at Groom Lake. The EG&G Special Projects Group figured out they could identify specific types of aircraft by the tiniest nuances in the patterns their radar signatures left on various radar systems. This was made possible by the group’s unusual advantage of having two things at their disposal: several bands of radar, which allowed them to compare results, and an entire fleet of military aircraft, which were to be used in the tactical phase of the exploitation of the MiG.

  What would normally have been a technical endeavor to determine electronic countermeasures against enemy aircraft became a major breakthrough in the further development of stealth technology. From studying the minutiae, Barnes and his fellow radar experts identified what the enemy could and could not see on their radars back home. This information would eventually be shared with Lockheed during radar testing at Area 51, as Lockheed further developed stealth. Technology was doing for humans what humans had forever been trying to do for themselves; to spy on the enemy means to learn as much about him as he knows about himself. That was the technical breakthrough. There was a tactical breakthrough as well. The ultrasecret MiG program at Area 51 gave birth to the Top Gun fighterpilot school, a fact that would remain secret for decades. Officially called the United States Navy Fighter Weapons School, the program was established a year after the first MiG arrived, in March of 1969, and based out of Miramar, California. Instructor pilots who had fought mock air battles over Groom Lake against Munir Redfa’s MiG began training Navy pilots for sorties against Russian MiGs over Vietnam. When these Top Gun-trained Navy pilots resumed flying in Southeast Asia, the results were radically different than the deadly nine-to-one ratio from before. The scales had tipped. Now, American pilots would begin shooting down North Vietnamese pilots at a ratio of thirteen to one. The captured Soviet-made MiG-21 Fishbed proved to be an aerial warfare coup for the United States. And what followed was a quid pro quo. To thank the Israelis for supplying the United States with the most prized and unknowable aircraft in the arsenal of its archnemesis, America began to supply Israel with jet fighters to assist Israel in keeping its rivals at bay.