It could have been to the center of the Earth (Part 1)

For all he knew, John said, it could have been to the center of the Earth. With all the strange security going on, it would hardly have surprised him

The Revealing Truth of Ufos, Secret Aircraft, Cover-Ups & Conspiracies: Area 51

Things ran smoothly: John spent his days off in Las Vegas, playing the slots and getting to know the ladies of Sin City. Then, when his time away from the base was over, he would be flown aboard a Cessna aircraft to Area 51—with the window blinds permanently down. On each occasion, the other passengers were always the same: three men who he got to know over the course of the following year. Indeed, they all became good friends and looked forward to their time off in the big city.

Weirdest of all, on each occasion that the team arrived at the base —which was only a short flight from Las Vegas—they were all ordered to put on pairs of goggles. These were not ordinary goggles, however. Far from it.

They had split lenses, the top part being so thick and distorted that it was only possible to see anything out of the lower part. A method to this seeming madness was clear. By preventing the men from seeing out of the top portion of the goggles, they were forced to look down—pretty much at their feet. This was obviously orchestrated to ensure that the men would not be able to get a good look at the surface portions of Area 51. In single-file, awkward, shuffling fashion, they would follow their supervisor to a bus with blacked-out windows.

As they exited the bus—after about a three-minute drive—they would always enter a small, square building made of concrete. At that point, they were permitted to remove the goggles. The room comprised only a staircase and an elevator. How far down both went, John never found out. For all he knew, John said, it could have been to the center of the Earth. With all the strange security going on, it would hardly have surprised him. John worked two floors down. The security there was beyond stringent: armed guards were constantly patrolling and prowling around, and ID cards had to be shown all of the time. Incredibly long corridors extended all across the facility, suggesting that the below-surface portions of Area 51 were gigantic.

On John’s first experience of life in the heart of Area 51, he was taken to one particular office—known, in slang terms, as the History Department—and received a briefing from a trio of Men in Black suits, who all flashed NASA ID cards. They may have been dressed in black, but they weren’t the deadly Men in Black of UFO lore. The greeting and meeting went well, and John was formally introduced to his fellow workers. It would be John’s task to ensure that certain highly classified files were carefully looked after and kept under lock and key— except for when they might be needed by the employees of the facility. Two other men and one woman worked in the same area, all with broadly the same jobs as John. In simple terms, John was being groomed as an archivist.

The documentation that John and his colleagues were to oversee dealt with four different issues: the history of advanced-weapons systems, chemical and biological warfare, secret aircraft test-flown at the base, and what was initially— and intriguingly—referred to as “something else.” That something else, John learned to his complete and utter amazement and shock, was directly linked to extraterrestrial life and UFOs. John was about to be exposed to Area 51’s greatest and biggest secret of all.

Before John got the briefing of a lifetime, however, he was given the lowdown on the process of how the documentation he was to look after could be handled. If base employees needed to review any of the historical documents, that review had to be done in the room, with John there at all times overseeing the handling of the files. It was okay for employees to take notes from the files provided that they were made on what was always—rather curiously—bright orange paper, using a pencil and a pencil only. John wondered—but admittedly had no proof—if perhaps the paper could have been detected if anyone had tried to smuggle it out of the base. Of all the four areas of historical files that the group had access to, those that fell under the “something else” category were the most interesting—which is surely putting things mildly.

John said that the vast amounts of documentation ran from 1943 to 1968 and were focused on the history of the U.S. government’s knowledge of—and even interaction with—alien entities who were not just visiting us but clandestinely living on Earth among us. John had heard of the Air Force’s Project Blue Book, a low-level operation established by the Air Force to investigate UFO sightings, but clearly, this was something far more significant than anything that Project Blue Book was involved in. John read—with his jaw practically dropping to the floor—numerous documents that revealed that the remains of a number of crashed UFOs were stored at the base, as were a handful of bodies of dead aliens—some were in good condition, but two were in very poor states, as if they had been in a violent accident, which John soon learned was the case. John was keen and careful to explain to me that although he read an endless amount of material, he never personally saw a UFO or an alien—dead or alive—nor did he ever see a space vehicle from another world. All of his knowledge came from the classified records. That is an important issue we will return to shortly.