Area 51: Nevada's Groom Lake Mystery, Facts vs Legend

Right then. Picture a dry lakebed in southern Nevada, flat and white as a dinner plate, shimmering in heat that would embarrass a pizza oven. At the edge of it sits a runway, some hangars and a great deal of nothing else, because the nothing is the point. This is Groom Lake, better known as Area 51, and for decades the United States government would not so much as say its name. What's lost here isn't gold. It's the answer to a simple question: what exactly goes on out there?

The short version is that something very real and very secret did go on, just not (as far as any record shows) little green men. The long version is a proper mystery, with spy planes, stealth jets, a lawsuit that went nowhere, a TV interview that launched a thousand documentaries and an internet joke that nearly brought two million people to the front gate. Fancy a look?

Area 51 and Groom Lake: how a mining valley became a secret

The story of Area 51 in Nevada starts with rocks, not rockets. Lead and silver were found in the Groom Range in 1864, and miners worked the area on and off until the early 1950s. A dry lake gives you a free, enormous, perfectly flat landing surface, which is exactly what a certain kind of person is looking for.

That person turned up in April 1955. According to the CIA's own declassified history of the U-2 spy plane, Richard Bissell, the man running the program, spotted the site on an aerial scouting trip over Nevada. The party judged that Groom Lake would "make an ideal site for testing the U-2 and training its pilots," and President Eisenhower approved adding the strip of wasteland to the neighbouring Nevada Test Site. The first U-2 arrived on 24 July 1955. Lockheed's designer Kelly Johnson reportedly nicknamed the place "Paradise Ranch," which tells you what a few weeks in a hot, dusty hangar does to a sense of humour.

The airfield's official name today is Homey Airport, which sounds like a retirement village and is not.

What was actually tested at Area 51

This is the documented part, and it is better than most legends.

• The U-2 (Project AQUATONE), from 1955: a high-altitude reconnaissance plane built to fly above anything the Soviets could shoot at. It did not stay out of reach forever; Gary Powers was shot down over the USSR in 1960.
• The A-12 (Project OXCART), from 1959: a titanium, Mach-3 spy plane. Its first test flight from Groom was on 26 April 1962.
• The D-21 drone: a high-speed reconnaissance drone flown from 1964, cancelled in 1971.
• Captured foreign aircraft: in 1966 an Iraqi pilot defected with a MiG-21, and from 1968 the site evaluated it in Project HAVE DOUGHNUT. Later "HAVE" programs studied more Soviet-built aircraft, and crews known as the Red Hats and Red Eagles flew them against American pilots.
• Stealth: the Have Blue demonstrator first flew in December 1977, and the first F-117 prototype flew on 18 June 1981. Production F-117 operations later moved to Tonopah.

Now consider what all that looked like from the ground in the 1950s. A shiny, silver-skinned aircraft cruising at heights where airliners never went, catching the low sun at dusk and dawn, while most people had never seen anything fly that high. Commercial pilots reported glowing objects. The Air Force's Project Blue Book, which investigated UFO reports, checked with the CIA's U-2 staff and attributed many sightings to the spy plane. A later CIA study, published in 1997, quotes estimates from officials on the U-2 and OXCART programs that over half of the UFO reports in the late 1950s and 1960s were really their aircraft. That figure is an estimate from memory, not a counted total, so treat it with a raised eyebrow. But the same study says the Air Force gave out misleading explanations at the time to protect the secret. The government hiding something and the public concluding it was aliens: that is the whole mystery in one sentence.

The legend: Bob Lazar and "S-4"

In 1989 a man calling himself "Dennis" appeared in shadow on a Las Vegas TV station, KLAS, talking to reporter George Knapp. He later gave his real name as Bob Lazar. His story: he had been hired to work at a site called "S-4," near Papoose Lake south of Groom, where he said the government kept recovered flying saucers and he helped study how they flew. He said the craft ran on a stable, super-heavy "Element 115."

The story spread, helped enormously by the fact that the real Area 51 really was secret. But here is what the checking turned up. MIT and Caltech, where Lazar said he held degrees, had no record of him. The defence contractor he named, EG&G, said it had no records of him either. Los Alamos had no record of him as an employee, though a 1982 phone directory did list him as a subcontractor technician, so some of his history is real. And the element? Scientists created Element 115 in 2003; it is now called moscovium, and it decays in a few hundred milliseconds rather than powering anything. Lazar has presented no physical evidence of alien technology. As legends go, it is a gripping one. As a record, it does not hold up.

The lawsuit and the day the government said "Groom Lake"

Secrecy has consequences. In the 1990s, civilian contractors and the widows of two workers, Walter Kasza and Robert Frost, sued over alleged exposure to toxic waste at the site. The government invoked state secrets. President Clinton issued a 1995 determination exempting the Groom Lake operating location from environmental disclosure, the judge dismissed the case, the appeals court rejected the appeal, and the Supreme Court declined to hear it in 1998. The same year, the Air Force officially acknowledged the base exists. A small win for plain English.

Federal land around it kept growing, too. In 1995 an exclusion zone covering about 3,972 acres of former public land was added. The restricted airspace and "Groom box" are larger still.

Then came the paperwork. Researcher Jeffrey Richelson asked the CIA for its U-2 history under the Freedom of Information Act in 2005, after earlier copies had Area 51 blacked out. In August 2013 the National Security Archive published the roughly 400-page history, and the name Area 51 finally appeared in an official CIA document. It said nothing about crashed saucers. It did describe, in cheerful detail, a secret airfield in the desert. The CBS News write-up of the release noted drily that earlier presidents, including Clinton and George W. Bush, had already referred to "a location near Groom Lake."

Storm Area 51: the joke that got out of hand

On 27 June 2019 a Facebook event appeared, created as a comedy bit, inviting people to "storm Area 51" at dawn on 20 September to "see them aliens." By late August about 2 million people had clicked "going." The Air Force's reply, from spokeswoman Laura McAndrews, was polite and firm: it is an open training range for the armed forces, and the Air Force would discourage anyone from coming into the area.

The reality was gentler. Two festivals sprang up, Alienstock in Rachel and a basecamp in Hiko, drawing around 1,500 people between them, far fewer than the 30,000 expected. About 150 people made it to the two entrances. None got inside. Law enforcement reported a handful of arrests for things like public urination and alcohol offences, plus one person who tried to enter and got a warning. Not quite the invasion of the century.

Where Area 51 stands today

The base is real, active and closed to the public. It sits on restricted military land inside the Nevada Test and Training Range; the Air Force says plainly that it discourages anyone from entering. Everything inside is classified. That is, in the end, why the legends survive: when you cannot check, you can imagine anything.

What you can visit is the neighbourhood. Nevada State Route 375, about 98 miles long, was named the Extraterrestrial Highway in 1996. It runs past the tiny town of Rachel (around 50 residents), home to the Little A'Le'Inn motel, restaurant and bar, and past the spot once marked by the Black Mailbox. Stay on the public road, take water and a full tank, and enjoy the view of a lot of Nevada.

Fact versus legend

• Documented: Groom Lake was chosen in April 1955; the U-2, A-12, D-21 and F-117 programs all flew from or around it; foreign aircraft were evaluated there; the government kept it secret for decades; the Air Force acknowledged it in 1998 and the CIA's history named it in 2013.
• Documented, but only an estimate: that more than half of the UFO reports in the late 1950s and 1960s came from spy plane flights.
• Legend: alien craft stored at the site, "S-4," Element 115 as a saucer fuel. No physical evidence has been shown.
• Nobody outside knows: what is being tested there now.

...and if you find it, remember who encouraged your questionable life choices.

The short version of this story is on YouTube at @TenToeExpress.