Area 51: What the Government Admits
The base the government denied
Area 51 sits in a dry lakebed in the Nevada desert, about 83 miles northwest of Las Vegas. For decades, the CIA denied its existence. In 2013, declassified documents acknowledged it for the first time.
The base was established in 1955 for testing the U-2, a high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft that flew above the range of Soviet air defences. Its existence had to be kept secret because the U-2 programme was secret.
What the declassified documents show
The 2013 CIA history confirmed that the U-2 programme generated a large number of UFO reports during the 1950s and 1960s. The aircraft flew at altitudes then considered impossible for conventional planes; pilots of commercial and military aircraft who spotted them had no reference point for what they were seeing.
Subsequent programmes tested at Groom Lake include the A-12, the predecessor to the SR-71 Blackbird, and various classified unmanned vehicles. The common element is extreme performance that would look anomalous to civilian observers.
The congressional hearings
In 2022 and 2023, Congress held open hearings on UAP, Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, the term now used by the Department of Defense. Military pilots testified about encounters with objects that appeared to violate known aerodynamic principles.
In 2024, the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office published a historical review of government UAP investigations going back to 1945. It found no evidence of extraterrestrial technology or biological material, and noted that most reported UAP were attributable to foreign surveillance platforms, atmospheric phenomena, or sensor artefacts.
Some encounters remained unexplained.
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