Area 51: What the Government Admits

For decades the United States government would not say the name. Area 51, a base beside a dry lake bed in the Nevada desert, became the most famous secret in the world precisely because nobody official would talk about it, and the silence filled up with flying saucers, alien bodies and tunnels.

The real history has been coming out in pieces since the 1990s, much of it in declassified documents. It is a story of spy planes, captured Soviet fighters and stealth aircraft, and it explains a good part of the UFO legend without any visitors from elsewhere.

A dry lake and a spy plane

In April 1955 a small group including Richard Bissell, who led the CIA's new reconnaissance project, and Kelly Johnson, the Lockheed engineer who designed the U-2, flew over southern Nevada looking for a hidden place to test the aircraft. On 12 April they spotted an old airstrip near Groom Lake, a salt flat, and agreed it would make an ideal site for testing the U-2 and training its pilots.

The land was added to the Atomic Energy Commission's Nevada Test Site with President Eisenhower's approval, and the base was ready by July. The first U-2 was delivered on 24 July 1955. Johnson nicknamed the place Paradise Ranch, later just the Ranch; Area 51 was simply its designation on the map.

From the U-2 to the A-12

About a year after the programme began, U-2s were flying over Eastern Europe and then the Soviet Union. Bissell expected Soviet air defences to catch up with the aircraft, and by late 1958 the search for a successor had begun. It became OXCART, the Lockheed A-12, built to fly faster and higher. The programme was set up in August 1959, and the first A-12 flew from the base on 26 April 1962.

The base grew with every project. A reconnaissance drone, the D-21, was launched for the first time in March 1966; the programme was cancelled in July 1971.

Soviet fighters over the Nevada desert

From the late 1960s, Area 51 hosted some of the most sensitive work of the Cold War: flying Soviet-built fighters to learn how they performed. One programme, HAVE DOUGHNUT, evaluated an Iraqi MiG-21 whose pilot had defected in 1968, and MiG-17s that Syrian pilots had landed in Israel that year were tested too. More than 60 declassified documents published by the National Security Archive in October 2013 describe this work.

Stealth

In December 1977 Have Blue, a small test aircraft built to prove radar-evading design, flew for the first time at Groom. Its successor, the F-117, first flew from Area 51 as the YF-117A on 18 June 1981, before its operations moved to Tonopah from May 1982. An angular aircraft built to be hard to see, flying at night, was bound to produce strange sightings.

Why it became a UFO story

Two things made Area 51 a magnet for UFO stories: what flew there, and the silence around it. U-2 and A-12 flights at altitudes no ordinary aircraft reached were seen by airline pilots, and they likely prompted many UFO reports. The Air Force's Project Blue Book checked flight records to rule out sightings it could not explain in public. Veterans of the programmes have said their work fuelled UFO rumours without their meaning it to.

In 1989 Bob Lazar said he had worked at a site called S-4, near Area 51, on recovered alien spacecraft. None of his claims has been verified, but they put the base at the centre of UFO lore. The same mix of secret projects and a silent government shaped the Roswell story of 1947, where a classified balloon programme hid behind a weather balloon.

Saying the name

The Air Force acknowledged the base's existence only in 1998. On 25 June 2013, after a freedom of information request filed in 2005 by the researcher Jeffrey T. Richelson, the CIA released its history of the U-2 and OXCART programmes: the first official acknowledgement of specific activity at the site. Much of the record is still classified, which keeps the theories coming; see why redacted files fuel conspiracy theories.

Secrecy in court

The secrecy has had real costs. In 1994, five civilian contractors and the widows of two others sued the Air Force and the Environmental Protection Agency, saying toxic chemicals had been burned in open pits at Groom and had made workers ill. The government invoked state secrets, and in 1995 President Clinton exempted the Groom Lake location from environmental disclosure laws. The suit was dismissed, the Ninth Circuit rejected the appeal brought by the workers' lawyer, Jonathan Turley, and the Supreme Court declined to hear the case.

The base today

Area 51, officially Homey Airport, lies inside the Nevada Test and Training Range about 83 miles north-northwest of Las Vegas. Its workers still commute on unmarked "Janet" flights from Harry Reid International Airport. In July 2019 more than 2 million people signed up to a joke Facebook event to "storm" the base on 20 September; on the day, two festivals in rural Nevada drew about 1,500 to 3,000 people, more than 150 reached the gates and seven were reportedly arrested.

What the documents show is a test site for the most secret aircraft of their time. What they do not show, after decades of searching, is anything from another world. For other sightings and what investigators found, see our guide to famous UFO cases.