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

by Annie M. Jacobsen

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  Oral Histories

  Oral history interview with Richard M. Bissell Jr. by Theodore A. Wilson and Richard D. McKinzie, East Hartford, Connecticut, July 9, 1971 (Harry S. Truman Library and Museum).

  Oral history interview with Robert Thomas, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Headquarters DOE, 09/22/81. Box No. JNSOO36 I-3. National Radiobiology Archives Project.

  Oral history interview with Air Force Colonel John Pickering, for the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, by John Harbett and Gil Whittemore, New Mexico, November 2, 1994.

  Oral history interview with Al O’Donnell, by Colleen M. Beck and Hilary L. Green. Desert Research Institute, University of Nevada, 2004.

  Oral history interview with Roger Andersen by Mary Palevsky. Nevada Test Site Oral History Project, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, September 20, 2005.

  Oral history interview with T. D. Barnes by Mary Palevsky. Nevada Test Site Oral History Project, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, January 12, 2007.

  Oral history: Conversations with Colonel Hervey Stockman, by Ann Paden and Earl Haney, 2004–2005.

  Web Sites

  • Central Intelligence Agency archives (http://www.foia.cia.gov/)

  Central Intelligence Agency archives

  • Department of Energy archives

  (http://www.osti.gov/opennet/index.jsp)

  • U.S. Air Force Archives (http://www.archives.gov/research/guide

  fed-records/groups/342.html)

  • G-2 Intelligence Archives (http://www.dami.army.pentagon.mil/)

  • Office of the Deputy Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for

  Nuclear Matters

  (http://www.acq.osd.mil/ncbdp/nm/nuclearchronology1.html)

  • The National Security Archive (http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/) • Federation of American Scientists (http://www.fas.org/) • GlobalSecurity.org (http://www.globalsecurity.org/)

  • Roadrunners Internationale

  (http://roadrunnersinternationale.com/)

  • The Long War Journal (http://www.longwarjournal.org/)

  • JT3 NTTR — Nevada Test and Training Range

  (http://www.jt3.com/ne_range.asp)

  Documentary Films and Television

  The Day After Trinity, 1981.

  Return with Honor: American Experience, 1999. Forgiving Dr. Mengele, 2006.

  The Search for Dr. Mengele, 1985. Vietnam: A Television History, PBS, 1983. America’s Atomic Bomb Tests, 1997. Hearts and Minds, 1974.

  The Nuremberg Trials: American Experience, 2005. Radio Bikini, 1987.

  Atomic Journeys: Welcome to Ground Zero, 2000. Modern Marvels: The Manhattan Project, History Channel, 2002.

  The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, 2003.

  The Living Weapon: American Experience, 2006.

  “Peter Jennings Reporting: UFOs in American History.” ABC, February 24, 2005.

  Walter Cronkite. “UFO: Friend, Foe or Fantasy?” CBS News, May

  List of Illustrations

  Groom Lake, Nevada, in 1917. Once little more than a dry lake bed in the southern Nevada desert, what is now known as Area 51 has become the most secretive military facility in the world. (Special Collections, University of Nevada-Reno)

  From up on top of the old Groom Mine in 1917, looking down. Not until the 1950s would the federal government take over the dry lake bed and adjacent land. (Special Collections, University of Nevada-Reno)

  Vannevar Bush, age eighty, receives the A
tomic Pioneer Award from President Nixon at a White House ceremony in 1970. Other recipients are (from left to right) Glenn T. Seaborg, the man who co-discovered plutonium; James B. Conant of the National Defense Research Committee; and General Leslie R. Groves, who was the commander of the Manhattan Project but took orders from Vannevar Bush. (U.S. Department of Energy)

  Colonel Richard S. Leghorn during Operation Crossroads, at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, July 1946. Leghorn led the mission to photograph the nuclear explosions from the air, and he is credited with the concept of “overhead,” which led to spy planes and satellites. (Collection of Richard S. Leghorn/Army Air Forces)

  The Baker bomb at Operation Crossroads, July 25, 1946, was 21 kilotons, one and a half times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Baker’s underwater fireball produced a “chimney” of radioactive water 6,000 feet tall and 2,000 feet wide. Stalin had spies at the event. (Library of Congress)

  The black device attached to this balloon in Area 9 of the Nevada Test Site is a 74-kiloton atomic bomb code-named Hood, the largest atmospheric nuclear weapon ever exploded in the United States. Standing on a ladder minutes before this photograph was taken on July 5, 1957, Al O’Donnell put the final touches on the bomb’s firing system. Area 51 is over the hill to the right of the device. (Collection of Alfred O’Donnell/National Nuclear Security Administration)

  A column of radioactive smoke rises from the Hood bomb. To the right of the mushroom stem the landscape can be seen on fire. Approximately one hour after the bomb went off, security guard Richard Mingus drove through ground zero to set up a guard post at the Area 51 guard gate, directly over the burning hills. (National Nuclear Security Administration)

  In Area 12 of the Nevada Test Site, workmen enter an underground atomic bomb tunnel through its mouth, summer 1957. (National Nuclear Security Administration)

  Operation Paperclip scientists at Fort Bliss, Texas, in 1946. Until 1945, these men worked for Adolf Hitler, but as soon as the war ended these “rare minds” began working for the American military and various intelligence organizations, the details of which remain largely classified. Rocket scientist Wernher von Braun is in the front row, seventh from the right with his hand in his pocket. (National Aeronautics and Space Administration)

  Nazi Dr. Walther Riedel after his capture by the U.S. Army in 1945. Unsmiling in this never-before-published file photograph, Riedel is missing teeth, which had been knocked out by U.S. soldiers while questioning him about his role in Hitler’s “bacteria bomb.” (National Archives)

  Alleged to be Stalin’s secret UFO study team are (standing left to right) Sergei Korolev, chief missile designer and inventor of Sputnik; Igor Kurchatov, father of Russia’s atomic bomb; and Mstislav Keldysh, mathematician, theoretician, and space pioneer. (Collection of Museum of M. V. Keldysh, Russia)

  This photograph of the all-wing Horten V appeared in the Secret G-2 Combined Intelligence Objective Sub-Committee report “Horten Tailless Aircraft,” dated May 1945. (National Archives)

  The 1945 G-2 report on the Horten brothers airplanes included this photograph of the unusually shaped Parabola. Two years later, after the crash of a foreign disc-shaped aircraft in New Mexico, in July 1947, the Counter Intelligence Corps embarked on a manhunt across Western Europe to locate the Horten brothers and their so-called flying disc. (National Archives)

  A German-designed V-2 rocket is hoisted up onto a U.S. Army test stand at the White Sands Proving Ground, in New Mexico, on January 1, 1947. Five months later one of the V-2s went off course. No one was killed, but the German Paperclip scientists in charge of the rocket launch were put under investigation. (NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center)

  Part of a U-2 coming out of a transport airplane at Area 51 in 1955. The CIA’s first spy plane was so secret that Air Force pilots transporting it to Area 51, in pieces inside larger airplanes, would fly to a set of coordinates over the Mojave Desert and contact a UHF frequency called Sage Control for orders. Only when the aircraft was a few hundred feet off the ground would runway lights flash on. (Laughlin Heritage Foundation/CIA)

  Early U-2s on the flight line at Area 51 in 1956, a worker standing on a wing. (Laughlin Heritage Foundation/CIA)

  Trailers at Area 51 where U-2 pilots like Hervey Stockman and Tony Bevacqua slept while learning how to fly the CIA’s first spy plane. (Laughlin Heritage Foundation/CIA)

  A rare perspective on Area 51 looking northeast in 1955. The triangular mountain peak (just right of center in the far distance) is Tikaboo Peak, the single remaining location from where the curious can catch a faraway glimpse of Area 51. (Laughlin Heritage Foundation/CIA)

  Hervey Stockman left Princeton University to fly with the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II. In 1956, he was the first man to fly over the Soviet Union in a U-2. He flew 310 combat missions in three wars. In June 1967 he was involved in a midair crash over North Vietnam and became a POW for nearly six years. (Collection of Colonel Hervey S. Stockman)

  After the tragic death of U-2 pilot Robert Sieker on April 4, 1957, the flag at Area 51 was flown at half-mast. (Laughlin Heritage Foundation/CIA)

  The U-2 aloft, circa 1965. All indicators of ownership, including its former NACA designation, have been removed. (Collection of Lockheed Martin)

  A rare look at Building 82, inside the fabled Lockheed Skunk Works, circa 1957. The world’s first anechoic chamber can be seen at the far rear of the room. Shoe-sized models of the CIA’s spy planes would be hung from the ceiling and tested. (Collection of Lockheed Martin)

  Area 13 sits inside Area 51 and was contaminated with plutonium in a 1957 “dirty bomb” test. This photograph, part of a set never released publicly before, was taken during a 1960 Atomic Energy Commission investigation into theft of a “hot” item stored there. After the dirty bomb test, someone had cut the fence, ignored the “Warning Alpha Contamination” hazard signs, and stolen a 1952 model pickup truck that was contaminated with plutonium and scheduled for burial in a hazardous waste pit. (National Nuclear Security Administration)

  President Kennedy touring the NERVA nuclear facility at Area 25. The plan was to build a nuclear-powered rocket ship to take men to Mars in the astonishingly short time frame of 124 days. (Department of Energy)

  While working on the nuclear space ship program, T. D. Barnes walked to work each day through this 1,150-foot-long underground tunnel below Area 25. (Department of Energy)

  The Nuclear Rocket Test Facility at Jackass Flats, located in Area 25, seen here from above sometime in the 1960s. Three test cells (ETS-1, E-MAD, and R-MAD) were connected by a remote-controlled railroad that transported the highly radioactive reactor between them. (Department of Energy)

  The engine for the Mars rocket can be seen at the center of the Engine Test Stand-1, positioned upside down to prevent it from taking off during testing. Operating at 3680.6 degrees Fahrenheit meant the nuclear reactor inside the engine needed to be cooled down by liquid hydrogen, contained in white industrial dewars seen at right. (Department of Energy)

  Moving the first A-12 to Area 51, over the Cajon Pass in California. The transport crate had been disguised to look like a generic wide load. (CIA)

  A full-scale mock-up of the Oxcart being assembled at Area 51 in 1959, even before the CIA contract was officially secured. The facility had been deserted after nuclear fallout shuttered the place in the summer of 1957. These Lockheed Skunk Workers were among the earliest returnees. (Collection of Roadrunners Internationale/CIA)

  Setting up the legendary Area 51 pylon, or radar test pole. The radar antennas, manned and monitored by EG&G, were located a mile away from the pole. (Collection of Roadrunners Internationale/CIA)

  Less than eight feet of the fifty-five-foot-long pole is visible here. The rest of the pole is underground, below a concrete pad, and rises up from an underground chamber built inside the desert floor. (Collection of Roadrunners Internationale/CIA)

  Working at night meant less of a chance of being surveilled by Soviet spy satel
lites. “Getting an aircraft up on the radar test pole took eighteen minutes. It took another eighteen minutes to get it back down,” says Ed Lovick. “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. (Collection of Roadrunners Internationale/CIA)

  Area 51 as seen from the air, circa 1964. This rare photograph has never been published before. (Collection of Roadrunners Internationale)

  Yucca Flat, which spans several Areas at the Nevada Test Site, is one of the most bombed-out places on earth. In this photo taken during the winter months from a helicopter above Area 10, the Sedan Crater can be seen in the forefront. A 104-kiloton bomb was buried at a depth of 635 feet, and its detonation produced a crater 1,280 feet wide and 320 feet deep, moving 12 million tons of radioactive dirt in an instant and creating a hole that can be seen from space. (National Nuclear Security Administration)

  Ed Lovick, at Skunk Works in the mid-1960s, with the waveguide, as he works to reduce the radar cross section for the A-12 to meet the CIA’s demands. (Collection of Edward Lovick/Lockheed Martin)

  A-12 ejection-seat test on Groom Lake’s dry lake bed. (Collection of Roadrunners Internationale/CIA)

  The A-12 Oxcart hidden behind a barrier at Area 51. It took 2,400 Lockheed Skunk Works machinists and mechanics to get a fleet of fifteen ready for the CIA. Visible on either side of the aircraft are the uniquely adjustable inlet cones that regulated airflow and allowed the CIA spy plane to cruise in afterburner and reach peak speeds of Mach 3.29 by May 1965. (Lockheed Martin)