“Hitler invented stealth,” says Gene Poteat, the first CIA officer in the Agency’s history to be assigned to the National Reconnaissance Office, or NRO. Gene Poteat’s job was to assess Soviet radar threats, and to do this, he observed many spy plane tests at Area 51. “Hitler’s stealth bomber was called the Horten Ho 229,” Poteat says, “which is also called the Horten flying wing. It was covered with radar-absorbing paint, carbon embedded in glue. The high graphic content produced a result called ‘ghosting,’ which made it difficult for radar to see.”
The Horten Ho 229 to which Poteat refers was the brainchild of two young aircraft designers who worked for Hitler’s Luftwaffe, Walter and Reimar Horten. These are the same two brothers who, in the fall of 1947, became the subject of the U.S. Army Intelligence’s massive European manhunt called “Operation Harass”—the search for a flyingsaucer-type aircraft that could allegedly hover and fly.
Whatever happened to the Horten brothers? Unlike so many Nazi scientists and engineers who were recruited under Operation Paperclip, Walter and Reimar Horten were originally overlooked. After being captured by the U.S. Ninth Army on April 7, 1945, at their workshop in Gцttingen, they were set up in a guarded London high-rise near Hyde Park. There, they were interrogated by the famous American physicist and rocket scientist Theodore Von Kбrmбn, who decided the Horten brothers did not have much to offer the U.S. Army Air Forces by way of aircraft technology — at least not with their flying wing. After being returned to Germany, Reimar escaped to Argentina, where he was set up in a beautiful house on the shores of Villa Carlos Paz Lake, thanks to Argentinean president and ardent Nazi supporter Juan Perуn. Walter lived out his life in Baden-Baden, Germany, hiding in plain sight.
The information about the Horten brothers comes from the aircraft historian David Myhra, who, in his search to understand all-wing aircraft, industriously tracked down both Horten brothers, visited them in their respective countries in the 1980s, and recorded hundreds of hours of interviews with them on audiotape. These tapes can be found in the archives of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum.
“Reimar had me agree to two restrictions before I went to South America to interview him,” Myhra explains. “One was that I couldn’t ask questions about Hitler or the Third Reich.” And the second was that “he said he didn’t want to talk about the CIA. Reimar said there was this crazy idea that he’d designed some kind of a flying saucer and that the CIA had [supposedly] been looking for him.” Myhra says Reimar Horten was adamant in his refusal to discuss anything related to the CIA. “The subject was off-limits for him,” Myhra says. The conversation with Reimar Horten that Myhra refers to took place in the decade before Army Intelligence released to the public its three-hundred-page file on Operation Harass. This is the file that discusses the U.S. manhunt for the Horten brothers and their so-called flying disc. The Operation Harass file makes clear that someone from an American intelligence organization made contact with Reimar in the late 1940s to interrogate him about the flying disc. More than forty years later, Reimar Horten still refused to talk about what was said. A 2010 Freedom of Information Act request to the Department of the Army, Office of the General Counsel, Army Pentagon, issued a “no records response.” A secondary appeal was also “denied.”
If Stalin really did get the Horten brothers’ flying disc, either from the brothers themselves or from blueprints they had drawn, how did Stalin get their flying disc to hover and fly on like that? What became of the craft’s hover technology, powered by some mysterious power plant, which was also so fervently sought by Counter Intelligence Corps agents during Operation Harass? The EG&G engineer says that while he does not know what research was conducted on the “equipment” when it was at Wright-Patterson, beginning in 1947, he does know about the research conducted on the “power plant” after he received the “equipment,” in Nevada in 1951.
“There was another [important] EG&G engineer,” he explains. That engineer was assigned the task of learning about Stalin’s hover technology, “which was called electromagnetic frequency, or EMF.” This engineer “spent an entire year in a windowless room” inside an EG&G building in downtown Las Vegas trying to understand how EMF worked. “We figured it out,” the EG&G engineer says. “We’ve had hover and fly technology all this time.”
I asked the EG&G engineer to take me to the place where hover and fly technology was allegedly solved, and he did. Archival photographs and Atomic Energy Commission video footage confirm that the site once contained several buildings that were operated by EG&G. Not anymore. Instead, the facility inside of which an EG&G engineer unlocked one of Area 51’s original secrets in the early 1950s is now nothing but an empty lot of asphalt and weeds ringed by a chain-link fence. Is this what will become of Area 51 in sixty years? Will it too be moved? Will it go underground? Has it already?
What about flying saucers from a physicist’s point of view? Edward Lovick, the grandfather of America’s stealth technology, says that in the late 1950s, Kelly Johnson had him spend many months in Lockheed’s anechoic chamber radar testing small-scale models of flying saucers. “Little wooden discs built in the Skunk Works wood shop,” Lovick recalls. According to Lovick, Kelly Johnson eventually decided that round-shaped aircraft — flying discs without wings — were aerodynamically unstable and therefore too dangerous for pilots to fly. This was before the widespread use of pilotless aircraft, or drones.
What about the child-size pilots inside the flying disc? Shortly after the Roswell crash in July 1947, a press officer from the Roswell Army Air Field, a man named Walter Haut, was dispatched to the radio station KGFL in Roswell with a press release saying the Roswell Army Air Force was in possession of a flying disc. Haut was the emissary of the original Roswell Statement, which, in addition to being broadcast over the airwaves, was famously printed in the San Francisco Chronicle the following day. It was Walter Haut who, three hours later, was sent back to KGFL by the commander of the Army Air Field with a second press release, one that said that the first press release was actually incorrect.
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.
The EG&G engineer’s explanation about the child pilots inside the flying disc answers the riddle of the so-called Roswell aliens, certainly in a manner that would satisfy the fourteenth-century English friar and philosopher William of Ockham. It is an answer that is not more complicated than the riddle itself. 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.” Children would have had great difficulty piloting an aircraft. The engineer says he was told the flying disc was piloted remotely, but offered almost no information about what would have had to have been the larger aircraft from which this early “drone” was launched. “It came down over Alaska,” he says.
What about Bob Lazar? In the course of interviewing thirty-two individuals who lived and worked at Area 51, I asked the majority what they thought of Lazar’s 1989 revelation about Area 51. Most made highly skeptical comments about Bob Lazar; none claimed ever to have met him. While it appears that Lazar lied about his education, his statements about S-4 should not be summarily dismissed as fraud.
The EG&G engineer says that the S-4 facility that housed the original Roswell “equipment” continued on for decades, which fits with Bob Lazar’s time line. Lazar says he worked at Area 51 from 1988 to 1989. Lazar told newsman George Knapp that at S-4, he saw something through a window, inside an unmarked room, that could have been an alien. Was what happened to Lazar just like what happ
ened to the P-38 Lightning pilot who, flying over the California desert during the dawn of the jet age, thought he saw a gorilla flying an airplane when really he saw Bell Aircraft chief test pilot Jack Woolams wearing a gorilla mask? Perhaps Lazar drew the only conclusion he could have drawn based on the information he had. And perhaps the Atomic Energy Commission had taken a page out of the CIA’s playbook on deception campaigns: it needed to produce the belief that something false was something true. Perhaps scientists and engineers who were brought to S-4 in the later years were told that they were working on alien beings and alien spacecraft. Try going public with that story and you will wind up disgraced like Bob Lazar. As it was with the P-38 Lightning pilots in 1942, it remains today. No one likes being mistaken for a fool.
“It’s difficult to be taken seriously in the scientific community when you’re known as ‘the UFO guy,’” Bob Lazar stated on the record in 2010 for this book.
For decades, hundreds of serious people — civilians, lawmakers, and military personnel — have made considerable efforts to locate the records for the Roswell crash remains. And yet no such record group has ever been located, despite formal investigations by senators, congressmen, the governor of New Mexico, and the federal government’s Government Accountability Office. This is because no one has known where to look. Until now, the world has been knocking on the wrong door. The information has been protected from declassification by draconian Atomic Energy Commission classification rules, hidden inside secret Restricted Data files that were originally created for the Atomic Energy Commission by EG&G.
So now it is known.
How did Vannevar Bush get so much power? He was once the most important scientist in America. President Truman awarded him the Medal for Merit in a White House ceremony, President Johnson presented him with the National Medal of Science, and the queen of England dubbed him a knight. The statements made by the EG&G engineer about what Vannevar Bush authorized engineers and scientists to do at Area 51’s S-4 facility are truly shocking and almost unbelievable. Except a clear historical precedent exists for Vannevar Bush having exactly this kind of power, secrecy, and control.
Vannevar Bush lorded over the mother of all black operations — the engineering of the world’s first nuclear bomb. And as director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, which controlled the Manhattan Project, Vannevar Bush was also in charge of human experiments to study the effects of the bioweapons lewisite and mustard gas on man. Some of those human guinea pigs were soldiers and others were conscientious objectors to the war, but a 1993 study of these programs by the National Academy of Sciences made clear that the test subjects were not consenting adults. “Although the human subjects were called ‘volunteers,’ it was clear from the official reports that recruitment of the World War II human subjects, as well as those in the later experiments, was accomplished through lies and half-truths,” wrote the Institute of Medicine.
The “later experiments” to which the committee refers were conducted by a group also under Vannevar Bush’s direction, this one called the Committee on Medical Research. As discovered by President Clinton’s advisory committee on human experiments, this so-called medical research involved using as guinea pigs individuals living at the Dixon Institution for the Retarded, in Illinois, and at the New Jersey State Colony for the Feeble-Minded. The doctors were testing vaccines for malaria, influenza, and sexually transmitted diseases. Some programs continued until 1973.
Even more troubling is this: buried in Atomic Energy Commission archives is the fact that the first incarnation of the Manhattan Project had a letter-number designation of S-1. Were there two other programs that transpired between S-1 and S-4? And if so, what were they? What else might have been done to push science in a way that the ends could justify the means?
In this book, many pieces of the Area 51 puzzle are put into place, but many questions remain. What goes on at Area 51 now? We don’t know. We won’t know for decades. Airplanes have gotten faster and stealthier. Remote-controlled spy planes fire missiles. Classified delivery systems drop bombs. The players are mostly the same: CIA, Air Force, Department of Energy, Lockheed, North American, General Atomics, and Hughes. These are but a few.
The biggest players tend to remain, as always, behind the veil. Almost a century ago, in 1922, Vannevar Bush cofounded a company that contracted first with the military and later with the Atomic Energy Commission. He called his company Raytheon because it meant “light from the gods.” Raytheon has always maintained a considerable presence at the Nevada Test Site, the Nevada Test and Training Range, and Area 51. Currently, it is the fifth-biggest defense contractor in the world. It is the world’s largest producer of guided missiles and the leader in developing radar technology for America’s early-warning defense system. This is the same system that, in the 1950s, CIA director General Walter Bedell Smith feared the Soviets might overrun with a UFO hoax, leaving the nation vulnerable to an air attack.
As for EG&G, they were eventually acquired by the powerful Carlyle Group at the end of the twentieth century but later resold, in 2002, to another corporate giant called URS. Currently, EG&G remains partnered with Raytheon in a joint venture at the Nevada Test and Training Range and at Area 51. The program, called JT3—Joint Test, Tactics, and Training, LLC — provides “engineering and technical support for the Nevada Test and Training Range,” according to corporate brochures. When asked what exactly that means, EG&G’s parent company, URS, declined to comment. This is corporate America’s way of saying, “You don’t have a need-to-know.”
The veil has been lifted. The curtain has been pulled back on Area 51. But what has been revealed in this book is like a single bread crumb in a trail. There is so much more that remains unknown. Where does the trail lead? How far does it go? Will it ever end?
Acknowledgments
Many have asked me how this book came to be. In 2007, I was at a Christmas Eve dinner when my husband’s uncle’s wife’s sister’s husband — a spry physicist named Edward Lovick, who was eightyeight years old at the time — leaned over to me and said, “Have I got a good story for you.” As a national security reporter, I hear this line frequently — my work depends on it — but what Lovick told me ranked among the most surprising and tantalizing things I’d heard in a long time. Until then, I was under the impression that Lovick had spent his life designing airplane parts. Over dinner I learned that he was actually a physicist and that he’d played a major role in the development of aerial espionage for the CIA. The reason Lovick could suddenly divulge information that had been kept secret for fifty years was because the CIA had just declassified it. When I learned that much of Lovick’s clandestine work took place at that mysterious and mythic location Area 51, also called Groom Lake, I smiled. So, the place was real after all. Immediately, I wrote to the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense requesting an official tour of the Groom Lake Area — Lovick also told me that the CIA had given up control of the place decades earlier. My request was formally denied, on Department of Defense letterhead, but oddly with the words “the Groom Lake Area” separated out in quotes attributed to me, so as to make clear the Pentagon’s official position regarding their Nevada base: That locale may be part of your lexicon, they seemed to be saying, but it is most definitely not officially part of ours. As an investigative journalist I sought to know why.
Since then, more individuals than I could have ever imagined have generously shared their Area 51 stories with me. I am indebted to each and every one of them. The list I thank includes everyone in this book: the legendary soldiers, spies, scientists, and engineers— professionals who, for the most part, are not known for sharing their inner lives. That so many individuals opened up with me — relaying their triumphs and tragedies, their sorrows and joys — so that others may make sense of it all has been an experience of a lifetime. Why I was given access to information that countless others have been denied remains a great mystery to me. A reporter is dependent on primary sources. From t
heir stories, and using keywords such as operational cover names, I was then able to locate corroborating documents, often found deeply buried in U.S. government archives. I wouldn’t have had a clue where to look without their aid. Specific examples are sourced in the Notes section.
T. D. Barnes is one of the most generous people I have met. He introduced me to many people, who in turn introduced me to their colleagues and friends. Barnes took me to Creech Air Force Base, at Indian Springs, Nevada, as part of a very private tour. There I was allowed to watch U.S. Air Force pilots fly drones halfway across the world, in Afghanistan and Iraq. Barnes also arranged for my tours of Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas, where I sat inside a Russian MiG fighter jet and examined the Hawk missile system and the F-117 Nighthawk up close. And it was Barnes who, in the fall of 2010, advocated tirelessly on my behalf to allow me to join a group of pilots and engineers at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and at the Defense Intelligence Agency Headquarters in Washington, DC, as part of a week-long symposium on overhead espionage. I met many people during this trip who were extraordinarily helpful to me, on background, and I thank them all.
Ken Collins lives in the same city as I do, which meant that for a year and a half I got to interview him regularly over lunch. He is a remarkable pilot and an even more extraordinary person. Thank you, Colonel Slater, Frank Murray, Roger Andersen, Tony Bevacqua, and Ray Goudey, for sharing so many unique flying stories with me. Thank you, Buzz Aldrin, for explaining to me what it feels like up there on the moon.
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