Area 51 The Revealing Truth of Ufos, Secret Aircraft, Cover-Ups & Conspiracies
As we have seen, most agencies of the government are extremely loath to even mention the words “Area 51,” never mind comment on its existence, but that’s certainly not the case with the CIA—not today, at least. Yes, at one time—for decades, even—the agency was in accord with other official bodies not to talk about Area 51. That has all changed now, particularly so with regard to the issues of Area 51 and the history and development of the legendary U-2 spy plane, which was secretly tested out of the base. In fact, the CIA has seen fit to place into the public domain a wealth of material prepared by CIA employees and for the benefit of the media, the public, and aviation historians. Precisely what other agencies might think of all this is anyone’s guess.
The CIA states: “On August 1, 1955, during a high-speed-taxi test in the first U-2, Lockheed’s chief test pilot, Tony LeVier, inadvertently became airborne at a remote test site in the desert of western Nevada called the Nevada Test and Training Range at Groom Lake. You may know it as Area 51. LeVier who had conducted the first taxi-test a few days prior, accelerated the U-2 to 70 knots when he suddenly realized he was airborne, leaving him in ‘utter amazement.’”
In “The CIA and Overhead Reconnaissance—the U-2 and OXCART Program, 1954–1974,” a document that was written by CIA historians, LeVier later recalled: “I immediately started back toward the ground, but had difficulty determining my height because the lakebed had no markings to judge distance or height. I made contact with the ground in a left bank of approximately 10 degrees.”
The CIA notes that LeVier was “unable to land the U-2 on his first attempt, and it bounced back into the air, but he managed to successfully bring it down on a second try. Damage to the prototype U-2 was very minor. This test would later be considered the first unofficial flight of the U-2. LeVier piloted the U-2’s first official test flight a few days later on August 4th, and the first official flight with visiting dignitaries present was on August 8th.” As further evidence of the way in which the CIA is opening up on the work undertaken at Area 51 (even though other agencies are not), the agency now openly states: “Much of the testing took place at the facility at Groom Lake, a dry lakebed near Las Vegas, Nevada, in an isolated area that came to be known as Area 51 and Watertown.
The area was chosen by top officials of the U-2’s Development Projects Staff who flew to Nevada in search of a site where the U- 2 could be tested safely and secretly. “They spotted what appeared to be an airstrip by a salt flat—Groom Lake— near the northeast corner of the Atomic Energy Commission’s (AEC) Nevada Proving Ground, which had been used during World War II as an aerial gunnery range for Army pilots. The site was perfect for testing the U-2 and training its pilots; however, upon further discovery, the U-2 Project Staff learned Groom Lake was not actually part of the AEC proving ground.
They asked the AEC to add the Groom Lake strip to its real estate holdings in Nevada, to which the AEC readily agreed, and the deal was approved by President Eisenhower.” The CIA has revealed more, too, much of it relative to the early years of Area 51, its origins, and how it became a hotbed for secret, aircraft-based testing and technology: “To make the new facility sound more attractive to the pilots and workers who would reside there, Lockheed’s famous aeronautical engineer, Clarence ‘Kelly’ Johnson, called it ‘Paradise Ranch,’ which was soon shortened to just ‘the Ranch.’ Many of the workers even referred to themselves as ‘ranch hands.’ Area 51 is also known by the nickname ‘Watertown,’ which was rumored to have been inspired by the name of CIA Director Allen Dulles’s birthplace of Watertown, New York. Records show that the name was a reference to when rainwater would runoff the nearby mountains and flood the dry lakebed of Groom Lake. Whenever the lakebed flooded, project managers would refer to the facility as ‘Watertown Strip.’
“The name ‘Dreamland’ was also commonly associated with the Groom Lake facility. According to Thornton D. (TD) Barnes, president of Roadrunners Internationale, an association of former Air Force, CIA, and contract personnel serving at Area 51 during the Cold War, Dreamland was a radio call sign for the base, introduced in the late 1960s. It replaced the previous name, Yuletide, and referred specifically to the large block of airspace (called a Special Operations Area) surrounding Area 51 and parts of the Nevada Test Site and Nellis Air Force Range (now known as the Nevada Test and Training Range). “While the commonly preferred official name for the facility today is the Nevada Test and Training Range at Groom Lake, both the names Watertown and Area 51 were used as official names for the facility.
According to Barnes, Area 51 may be found on official Nevada Test Site (NTS) maps and other documentation, while some Department of Energy documents indicate that Watertown is legally listed as a member of Alamo Township in Lincoln County, Nevada.
“For security reasons, primary access to Area 51 was by aircraft. A C-124 would transport the components of a U-2, which were constructed in Burbank, California, then disassembled and transported to Watertown for reassembly and testing. A daily air shuttle also transported personnel and other cargo between Watertown and the ‘Skunk Works,’ the Lockheed production facility in Burbank.”
The CIA notes something very important: “The U-2, however, wasn’t the only Agency aircraft transported, tested, and flown out of Area 51. The first flight test of the CIA’s A-12 OXCART took place at the Groom Lake facility on April 25, 1962; the remaining operational aircraft arrived for flight tests through mid-1964. By the fall of 1965, the eleven pilots selected to fly A-12 missions and their aircraft were ready for deployment. CIA, Air Force, and private industry personnel from many specialties helped make the U-2 a reality and several lost their lives in the process.
Four of those were pilots who had known the risks of handling an aircraft that was difficult to fly, even in the best of circumstances. Fourteen members involved in the U-2 project also lost their lives when their transport plane en route from Burbank to Watertown crashed during bad weather into Mount Charleston, a few miles outside of Las Vegas. “The sacrifice these pilots and U-2 project personnel made for their country helped the US win the Cold War. Along with thousands of Americans who worked at Area 51, their patriotism, ingenuity, and willingness to take on a project critics believed was impossible at the time—the creation of the U-2— allowed the US to penetrate the Iron Curtain and gain an unparalleled advantage over the Soviets in intelligence gathering.”
As for the A-12 OXCART program, again, the CIA is now extremely open on the matter of those early years at Area 51—which is most refreshing. From CIA documents, we have the following: “The CIA developed the highly secret A-12 OXCART as the U-2 spy plane’s successor, intended to meet the nation’s need for a very fast, very high-flying reconnaissance aircraft that could avoid Soviet air defenses. It became operational on November 12, 1965. Not only did the A-12 prove its worth during its short operational life, but the overall OXCART project produced the second-longest-lasting aerial reconnaissance platform in US intelligence history: the SR-71.”
Let’s see what the CIA says about the SR-71: “The SR-71 Blackbird was the Air Force’s two-seat follow-on version of the OXCART. In fact, the A-12 OXCART’s unique design and characteristics became the foundation for three other versions of supersonic aircraft that Lockheed built for CIA and the Air Force: the YF-12A, the M-21, and of course, the SR-71.” In the end, says the CIA: “The OXCART’s engineering innovations produced the two fastest, highest-flying, piloted jet aircraft ever (the A-12 and SR-71) and pioneered stealth technology that would later be adapted for use in subsequent aircraft. Clarence Leonard ‘Kelly’ Johnson, Lockheed’s aviation genius, is credited with creating the OXCART and Blackbird.
He was a groundbreaking aeronautical engineer who worked for Lockheed Aircraft for over four decades. Born in Ishpeming, Michigan, on 27 February 1910, he joined Lockheed in 1933, where his contributions to advanced aircraft design were extraordinary. Johnson designed or contributed significantly to the development of at least 40 well-known and important military and civilian aircraft, including the U-2, the A-12, and the SR-71.” In 1959, files reveal, the “CIA awarded the OXCART contract to Lockheed, where Johnson’s team had to overcome several daunting technical challenges to create the new high speed, high altitude reconnaissance aircraft that was capable of avoiding interceptors and missiles. The engineers used cutting-edge innovations in titanium fabrication, lubricants, jet engines, fuel, navigation, flight control, electronic countermeasures, radar stealthiness, and pilot life-support systems to meet these challenging requirements.
The A-12 was America’s first stealth plane, though it was never completely stealth because the amount of fuel it had to carry to fly so fast for so long required changes in the design of the airframe that made it easier to track on radar. The innovative design and technologies developed for the A-12 were used for years after and helped lay the foundation for future stealth research.” More is to come in this arena of welcome openness on the part of the CIA: “In 1965, after hundreds of hours flown at high personal risk by an elite team of CIA and Lockheed test pilots, the A12 was declared fully operational, attaining a sustained speed of Mach 3.2 (just over 2,200 miles per hour) at 90,000 feet altitude—an unbroken record for piloted jet aircraft.
The only A-12 reconnaissance operation, codenamed BLACK SHIELD, took place from May 1967 to May 1968, initially over Southeast Asia and then North Korea. A detachment of six pilots and three A-12s based at Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, Japan flew 29 missions over East Asia.” Flown by Mele Vojvodich, says the CIA, “the first BLACK SHIELD flight took off in a torrential downpour just before 1100 local Okinawa time on May 31, 1967. The A-12 had never operated in heavy rain before, but weather over Vietnam was forecast as satisfactory, so the flight went ahead.
Vojvodich flew the planned route at 80,000 feet and Mach 3.1, refueled immediately after taking off and during each of two loops over Thailand, and safely touched down at Kadena with a total flight time of three hours and 39 minutes. The intelligence mission was a resounding success: after detailed examination of nearly a mile of film that was collected, photo interpreters found no surface-to-surface missiles that might threaten US and allied military forces in the South and assessed the status of 70 of the 190 known surface-to-air missile sites and nine other priority targets.”
Regardless of what people may have heard, says the CIA, “Chinese or North Vietnamese radar did not track the aircraft during the Vojvodich flight, nor did North Vietnam fire any missiles at it. On subsequent missions in October 1967 and January 1968, North Vietnam fired SAMs at BLACK SHIELD A-12s three times but caused damage only once. In December 1962, the Air Force ordered six ‘reconnaissance/strike’ or SR aircraft for high-speed, high-altitude flights over hostile territory: the SR-71 Blackbird.” Let’s see what the CIA has to say about the SR-71 and its important role in protecting the United States and its connections to Area 51. Agency records note the following: “The SR-71 got the name ‘Blackbird’ because of the special black paint that covered the aircraft.
Although the Blackbird’s stealthiness resulted from radar absorbent structures along the chines, wing edges, vertical tails, and inlet spikes, the paint helped to release some of the heat generated by air friction and to camouflage the aircraft against the dark sky at high altitudes. “As a modified version of the A-12 OXCART, the SR-71 Blackbird was about six feet longer, weighed an additional 15,000 pounds fully loaded, had a more prominent nose and body chines, had a two-seat cockpit, and carried additional optical and radar imagery systems.” The CIA expands and states: “After an initial contract for six Blackbirds, the Air Force ordered 25 more in August 1963. The first SR-71 flew on December 22, 1964.
Throughout its operational career, the SR-71’s primary operation base was also out of Kadena Air Base in Japan, although other bases also hosted Blackbird operations, including Beale AFB in California, and RAF Mildenhall, England. Because the Air Force was developing the Blackbird, there was little value in maintaining both the overt SR-71 and covert A-12 fleets with similar capabilities. President Johnson ordered retirement of the A12 OXCART by 1968.”
The retirement went ahead for a logical reason—even though not everyone in the Department of Defense, the CIA, and the U.S. Air Force was happy with it —as the CIA has been careful to demonstrate: “By then, CORONA satellites were regularly launched to collect thousands of images worldwide each year, and although its imagery was less timely and of poorer resolution than that from the A-12 and SR-71, CORONA was safe from anti-aircraft missiles and much less provocative than aircraft overflights. Besides, the A-12’s original mission to monitor the Soviet Bloc had been halted years prior, after the U-2 piloted by Francis Gary Powers was shot down over the Soviet Union in May 1960.” The CIA notes something important: “Although the A-12 was officially retired, the SR-71 continued to fly and remained a vital tool for intelligence gathering, providing information that was vital in formulating successful US foreign policy.”
They reveal the following with regard to what became of the SR-71: “In the late 1980s, enthusiasm for the expensive SR-71 program waned as the performance of space-based systems grew, and in November 1989, the Air Force deactivated the Blackbird. On January 21, the last SR-71 Blackbird left Kadena Air Base, and the SR-71 was decommissioned at Beale Air Force Base in California on January 26, 1990. Then, in September 1994, Congress allocated funds to reactivate three SR-71s, and two aircraft became operational for a brief period during 1995 and 1996. In October 1997, President Bill Clinton vetoed further funding, and in June 1999 the SR71 program was officially terminated.
Inevitably, any comparison of the two aircraft will lead to the question: which one is faster? There is lot of controversy among airplane enthusiasts as to which aircraft holds that title. There’s no simple answer.” The OXCART, the CIA has revealed, “has a documented maximum speed and altitude of 2,208 MPH at 90,000 feet, set during a test in 1965, while the SR- 71 holds the official speed record for a piloted operational jet aircraft of 2,193 MPH, set on July 28, 1976. On the same date the Blackbird set an official world altitude record of 85,069 feet. Unofficially, of course, pilots of both aircraft have anecdotal stories indicating the numbers of both aircraft may be higher, and some SR-71 test reports show that the aircraft surpassed the official records for speed and altitude.
Nevertheless, both the A-12 OXCART and the SR-71 Blackbird are regarded as pioneering achievements in aeronautical engineering and the pinnacle of aviation technology during the Cold War. In 2007, the US Air Force transferred one of the nine remaining A-12s to CIA for display, just in time for CIA’s 60th anniversary celebration. This A-12 was the first of the operational fleet to be certified to fly at Mach 3, and during its lifetime, it logged 453 hours on 232 test and training flights before its retirement on May 28, 1968.”
CIA historians note: “The A-12 arrived at CIA Headquarters aboard five wide-load trucks, and it required two enormous cranes to lift the 39,000-pound airframe onto its three-pylon mount to be assembled in 10 days. The pylons hold the airframe in an operational flight attitude at 85,000-90,000 feet—its nose up 8 degrees and airframe rolled 9 degrees to the left. Engineering specifications insure that the airframe as mounted could withstand winds of up to 130 mph.