Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base
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22. the president did not have a need-to-know: Interview with EG&G engineer.
23. one-line reference: Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments Final Report, 506–507.
24. If Area 51 had a doppelgдnger: At Groom Lake, for a thirteenyear period beginning in 1955, the CIA and the U.S. Air Force comanaged spy plane programs using science and technology to advance the art of aerial espionage. Forty miles to the southwest, at Jackass Flats, beginning around 1955 and for a period of seventeen years, the Atomic Energy Commission, NASA, and the Department of Defense comanaged nuclear rocket programs using science and technology to try to get man to Mars. There is an interesting paradox. At Area 51, the spy plane programs were funded by black budgets, meaning their existence was hidden from Congress and the public. Not until they were declassified by the CIA — the U-2 program in 1998 and the A-12 Oxcart program in 2007—were their existences confirmed. The term Area 51 has remained redacted, or blacked out, from declassified documents. When Air Force and CIA officials are
asked to comment on Area 51, they have no comment, because technically the facility does not exist. At Area 25, the nuclear rocket ship programs have been funded with public awareness. No one at the Air Force, the Atomic Energy Commission, or NASA will deny that nuclear rocket development went on there. But what was really going on behind the facade at Jackass Flats has always been labeled Restricted Data, which is classified.
25. piloted by one hundred and fifty men: McPhee, The Curve of Binding Energy, 168.
26. Taylor designed nuclear bombs for the Pentagon: According to Taylor’s colleague the legendary Freeman Dyson, Ted Taylor made “the smallest, the most elegant and the most efficient bombs… freehand without elaborate calculation. When they were built and tested they worked.” Dyson left Princeton University’s Institute for Advanced Study to work on the Mars spaceship with Taylor.
27. “Everyone seems to be making plans”: McPhee, The Curve of Binding Energy, 170.
28. same as a Coke machine: Ibid., 174.
29. “It would have been the most sensational thing anyone ever saw”: Ibid.
30. “Whoever builds Orion will control the Earth”: Ibid., 184. 31. Space Nuclear Propulsion Office, or SNPO: Dewar, To the
End of the Solar System, xix.
32. built into the side of a mountain: Interview with Barnes; see photographs. On Nevada Test Site official maps, these mountains, in Area 25, are called Calico Hills.
33. the underground tunnel was 1,150 feet long: “Corrective Investigation Plan For Corrective Action Unit 165: Areas 25 and 26 Dry Well and Washdown Areas, Nevada Test Site, Nevada.” DOE/NV788, Environmental Restoration Division, National Nuclear Security Administration, January 2002, 12.
34. 34 million to 249 million miles to Mars: According to NASA, “the distance between Earth and Mars depends on the positions of the two planets in their orbits. It can be as small as about 33,900,000 miles (54,500,000 kilometers) or as large as about 249,000,000 miles (401,300,000 kilometers).”
35. a remote-controlled locomotive: DOE/NV #1150, “Last Stop for the Jackass & Western.”
36. “One hundredth of what one might receive”: Ibid., 287.
37. Soviet satellites spying: Dewar, To the End of the Solar System, appendix F, “The Russian Nuclear Rocket Program.” Dewar wrote, “The Soviets built a test complex vaguely similar to Jackass Flats.”
38. 2,300 Kelvin: Finger and Robbins, “An Historical Perspective,”
7.
39. “The Pentagon released information after I filed a Freedom of Information Act”: Interview with Lee Davidson. Davidson’s original 1990s story is from the Deseret News, where he was the Washington bureau reporter for twenty-eight years. During this time, Davidson reported on a number of secret AEC radiation tests in Utah, at Dugway Proving Grounds. “They had a lot of money to play with,” Davidson says of the AEC. “Here in Utah, they were trying to figure out what a meltdown would look like from a number of different angles. The AEC released more radiation in Utah than was released during the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island.”
40. “Los Alamos wanted a run-away reactor”: Dewar, To the End of the Solar System, 280.
41. “data on the most devastating accident possible”: Ibid. Notably, Dewar lays blame for the original idea of exploding the reactor on Los Alamos. The nuclear laboratory may have come up with the idea but Los Alamos takes marching orders from the Atomic Energy Commission, and in the end, the two entities agreed to go ahead and
explode the nuclear reactor on the grounds that it was a safety test. “It was critical to know the total energy release in the explosion and the amount and pattern of radioactive distribution,” Dewar wrote.
42. “over 4000 °C until it burst”: Ibid., 281.
43. chunks as large as 148 pounds: Ibid., 282.
44. “equipped with samplers mounted on its wings”: Ibid., 281. 45. “blew over Los Angeles”: Ibid., 280.
46. “accurate data from which to base calculations”: Ibid., 285. 47. “I don’t recall that exact test”: Interview with Harold Finger.
48. code-named Phoebus: Barth, Delbert, Final Report of the OffSite Surveillance for the Phoebus 1-A Experiment, SWRHL-19r, January 17, 1966. “The data collected indicate that radioactivity levels did not exceed the safety criteria established by the Atomic Energy Commission for the off-site population.”
49. “suddenly it ran out of LH2”: Dewar, To the End of the Solar System, 129.
50. cleanup crews in full protective gear could not enter the area for six weeks: “Decontamination of Test Cell ‘C’ at the Nuclear Rocket Development Station After a Reactor Accident,” January 18, 1967, LA3633; Dewar, To the End of the Solar System, 129-31.
51. long metal tongs: The workers dropped the radioactive chunks into one-gallon paint cans, which were driven out of Area 25 on a lead dolly.
52. officially ended on January 5, 1973: Dewar, To the End of the Solar System, 203.
53. no such final test: Interview with Darwin Morgan. 54. records are “well organized and complete”: Ibid., 323. 55. “Due to the destruction of two nuclear reactors”: Rollins,
“Nevada Test Site — Site Description,” 25 of 99.
56. Milton Klein might know: Interview with Harold Finger; interview with Milton Klein. Klein also says he “takes issue with the use of the word meltdown because that’s not exactly what happens to a reactor when it’s deprived of coolant.”
57. radioactive elements were still present: Table 3–2, “Corrective Investigation Plan For Corrective Action Unit 165: Areas 25 and 26 Dry Well and Washdown Areas, Nevada Test Site, Nevada,” 32.
312 “may have percolated into underlying soil.” Ibid. Certainly, Barnes’s eyewitness testimony suggests as much. “When we would run the reactor, we had to clear out forty miles of the canyon around Calico Hills, it would emit that much radiation,” Barnes explained. “And every time we ran the reactor, giant dewars of water would flood the whole area, which would help cool everything down. Enough water to make a temporary pond of water several feet deep.”
58. Area 25 began serving a new purpose: Interview with T. D. Barnes.
59. “It’s a PhD experience for first responders”: Film shown on a loop at the Atomic Energy Museum in Las Vegas. Also in this section of the museum was a photograph of Area 25, which depicted desert terrain interrupted by a bright blue sign on a post that read: “EG&G Training 295-6820”—an indication that the federal partner in WMD training at Area 25 was EG&G. Morgan denies this partnership existed and insists EG&G stopped working as an “official contractor” at the test site in the 1990s. The photograph at the Atomic Testing Museum has since been taken down, but as of December 30, 2010, the telephone number remained in service (using the local area code) with a voice mail stating: “You have reached [name redacted] in the training department. Please leave a message and I will return your call as soon as possible.”
60. one day a nuclear facility could very well melt down: For an und
erstanding of nuclear reactor physics, how a power reactor differs
from a nuclear rocket reactor, and how both differ from a nuclear bomb, see Dewar, To the End of the Solar System, xvii.
61. five “boom year(s)”: Rogovin, Three Mile Island Report, 182-
83.
62. nuclear reactor “units”: Ibid., 182.
63. dispatched an EG&G remote sensing aircraft: EG&G, Inc., Las Vegas Operations, “An Aerial Radiological Survey of the Three Mile Island Station Nuclear Power Plant,” U.S. Department of Energy, 1977. The cover page of the president’s commission on the accident at Three Mile Island features a thermal photo accredited to EG&G.
64. “may be the best insurance that it will not reoccur”: Rogovin, Three Mile Island Report, 5.
65. nuclear-powered Russian spy satellite crashed: Gates, Mahlon, Operation Morning Light, Northwest Territories, Canada 1978, A Non-Technical Summary of U.S. Participation; “The Soviet Space Nuclear Power Program,” Directorate of Intelligence, CIA.
66. a decision was made not to inform the public: Weiss, “The Life and Death of Cosmos 954.” Marked Secret, Not to be Released to Foreign Nationals, 7 pages, no date. Declassified 10/24/97.
67. “playing night baseball with the lights out”: Ibid., 2. 68. “It was extremely tense”: Interview with Richard Mingus.
69. NEST: Secret, United States Atomic Energy Commission, No. 234505, Responsibility for Search and Rescue Operations, to M.E. Gates, Manager, Nevada Operations. November 19, 1974; see also Gates, “Nuclear Emergency Search Team,” 2, www.nci.org.
70. “established within EG&G”: Gates, “Nuclear Emergency Search Team,” 2.
71. “space age difficulty”: “Cosmos 954: An Ugly Death,” Time magazine, February 6, 1978.
316 would be panic like in The War of the Worlds: Interview with Richard Mingus.
72. meant to look like bakery vans: Interview with Troy Wade.
73. Troy Wade was the lead federal official: Note that Mahlon Gates, who authored Operation Morning Light and put together NEST, was the senior U.S. government representative on the project and also the head of DOE Nevada Operations but did not have an active role in the boots-on-the-ground operation.
74. high above was an Air Force U-2: Weiss, “The Life and Death of Cosmos 954,” 3.
75. somewhere on America’s East Coast: Time magazine reported, “The craft crashed into the atmosphere over a remote Canadian wilderness area last week, apparently emitting strong radiation. American space scientists admitted that if the satellite had failed one pass later in its decaying orbit, it would have plunged toward Earth near New York City — at the height of the morning rush hour.”
Chapter Nineteen: The Lunar-Landing Conspiracy and Other Legends of Area 51
Interviews: Buzz Aldrin, Colonel Slater, Ernie Williams, Richard Mingus, Michael Schratt, Bill Irvine, James Oberg
1. July 20, 1969: For details regarding Apollo 11, “Humankind’s first steps on the lunar surface,” http://nasa.gov; for transcripts of the first lunar landing, visit “Apollo 11 Lunar Surface Journal,” by Eric M. Jones, http://history.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/a11.landing.html.
2. Armstrong’s hundreds of hours flying: Jenkins, Hypersonics before the Shuttle, appendix 9.
3. astronauts visited the Nevada Test Site: NASA, Appendix E. Geology Field Exercises: Early Training, Field Training Schedule for the first 3 Groups of Astronauts (29), 3, Feb 17–18 & 24–25, 1965 & March 3–4, 1965. “The trip provided an opportunity to examine in detail the craters and ejecta formed by detonation of subsurface nuclear devices in lavas and unconsolidated sediments”; USGS OpenFile Report 2005–1190, Table 1, “Geologic field-training of NASA Astronauts between January 1963 and November 1972.”
4. Ernie Williams was their guide: Interview with Ernie Williams.
5. first water well: Interviews with T. D. Barnes, Colonel Slater, Ernie Williams.
6. astronauts arrived with a lunar rover vehicle: Gerald G. Schaber, “A Chronology of Activities from Conception through the End of Project Apollo (1960–1973),” U.S. Geological Survey, Branch of Astrogeology.
7. by-products of underground bomb tests: “The Containment of Underground Nuclear Explosions,” #69043 Congress of the United States, Office of Technology Assessment, 32.
8. astronauts twice referred to: DOE/NV 772 REV 1, “Apollo Astronauts Train at the Nevada Test Site,” 2. The mission commentary
voice transmissions can be downloaded at
http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/history/mission_trans/apollo17.htm.
9. hearing this comparison was a beautiful moment: Interview with Ernie Williams.
10. Just two months after Armstrong and Aldrin returned: Author interview with James Oberg, and from a chapter in his book UFOs and Outer Space Mysteries. In addition to being an aerospace historian and leading debunker of lunar-landing and UFO-on-the-moon conspiracies, Oberg spent his career as a rocket scientist working for NASA contractors, including at Mission Control in Houston, Texas.
11. moon being a base for aliens and UFOs: Interview with James Oberg.
12. Spielberg said in a 1978 interview: Matthew Alford, “Steven Spielberg,” Cinema Papers, 1978.
13. With these three questions: The answers, presented by a popular Web site dedicated to debunking the moon-hoax theory, are: Q: How can the American flag flutter when there is no wind on the moon? A: The movement comes from the twisting motion of the pole. Q: Why can’t the stars be seen in the moon photographs? A: There are plenty of Apollo photos released by NASA in which you can see stars. Q: Why is there no blast crater where Apollo’s landing vehicle landed? A: The moon’s surface is covered by a rocky material called lunar regolith, which responds to blast pressure similar to solid rock; http://www.braeunig.us/space/hoax.htm.
14. he experienced “an intuitive feeling”: Fox Television broadcast, “Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?” February 15, 2001.
15. the Today show: A transcript of Kaysing’s interview with Katie Couric, cohost of the Today show, which aired on NBC, August 8, 2001, can be read online at Global Security.
16. canceled the book: Dr. David Whitehouse, “NASA Pulls Moon Hoax Book,” BBC News, November 8, 2002.
17. CIA admitted it had been running mind-control programs: Marks, The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate,” 211. During the 1977 Senate hearings, CIA director Stansfield Turner summed up some of MKULTRA’s eleven-year legacy: “The program contracted out work to 80 institutions, which included 44 colleges of universities, 15 research facilities or private companies, 12 hospitals or clinics, and 3 penal institutions.”
18. 58,193 Americans were killed trying: The National Archives, Statistical information about casualties of the Vietnam War, ARC ID: 306742.
19. Great Moon Hoax: Goodman, The Sun and the Moon, 12.
20. Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the moon: This section is based on my interview with Buzz Aldrin, and also from chapter 20 in his book Magnificent Desolation, which addresses the event and is called “A Blow Heard Around the World,” 332-46 (galley copy).
21. 25 percent of the people interviewed: Brandon Griggs, “Could Moon Landings Have Been Faked? Some Still Think So,” CNN, July 17, 2009. Griggs noted that a “Google search this week for ‘Apollo moon landing hoax’ yielded more than 1.5 billion results.”
22. involve captured aliens and UFOs: AboveTopSecret.com.
23. “The tunnels were dug by a nuclear-powered drill”: Interview with Michael Schratt.
24. N-tunnels, P-tunnels, and T-tunnels: U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, The Containment of Underground Nuclear Explosions.
25. “deactivated,” according to the Department of Energy: Michael R. Williams, “Ground Test Facility for Propulsion and Power Modes of Nuclear Engine Operation,” 4.
26. the revelation of the Greenbrier bunker: Ted Gup, “The Ultimate Congressional Hideaway,” Washington Post, May 31, 1992.
27. “Secrecy, denying knowledge of the existence”: KCET American Experienc
e, “Race for the Superbomb,” interview with Paul Fritz Bugas, former on-site superintendent, the Greenbrier bunker.
28. on average, twelve months: U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, The Containment of Underground Nuclear Explosions, 18.
29. at least sixty-seven nuclear bombs: U.S. Department of Energy, United States Nuclear Tests, July 1945 through September 1992, 15.
30. Piledriver experiments studied survivability: Cherry and Rabb, “Piledriver Drilling,” UCRL–ID-126150, August 9, 1967.
31. “to destroy enemy targets [such as] missile silos”: Operation Hardtack II, Defense Nuclear Agency, 3 December 1982; interview with DOE officials during my tour of the Nevada Test Site, October 7, 2009.
32. guarding many of the nuclear bombs: Interview with Richard Mingus.
33. After the test ban, the Pentagon reversed its policy: U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, The Containment of Underground Nuclear Explosions, 21.
34. has changed its name four times: See NNSA Timeline, http://www.nnsa.energy.gov/aboutus/ourhistory/timeline. Notably, there is another agency that has changed its name four times, the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project (AFSWP), which, like the Atomic Energy Commission, also began as the Manhattan Project. On May 6, 1959, it changed its name to the Defense Atomic Support Agency (DASA); on July 1, 1971, it changed its name to the Defense Nuclear Agency; on June 26, 1996, it changed its name to the Defense Special Weapons Agency. Schwartz, Atomic Audit, 61.