Michael Hainsworth

Declassification of certain U.S. military projects sheds light on the Groom Lake facility popularized by 40 years of tin foil hat-wearing conspiracy theorists. I want to believe.

Nothing to see here

The Los Angeles Times has interviewed five men who worked on the base in the 1960s. They weren’t reverse-engineering components from the Roswell crash of 1947, but they were working on an aircraft frequently mistaken for a UFO — and a crashed one, at that. Investigative reporter Annie Jacobsen quotes Kenneth Collins, a CIA test pilot who, on May 24, 1963, crashed a top-secret spy plane code-named OXCART in the weeds of a Utah field:

Three guys came driving toward me in a pickup. I saw they had the aircraft canopy in the back. They offered to take me to my plane. I told them not to go near the aircraft. I said it had a nuclear weapon on-board. - Kenneth Collins, CIA test pilot

There was no nuke onboard, but it was enough to scare off the trio who were later visited by Men in Black to tell them to keep quiet.

The unusual shape of the A12, its reflective coating, and its propensity to race above commercial airliners at Mach 3 led to a flood of UFO reports in the 1960s. (click to enlarge)

Today you know it as the Lockheed A-12, a spy plane used to keep an eye on the Soviets and Chinese during the cold war and used during Vietnam to photograph Surface-to-Air missile sites while flying 80,000 feet above the ground.

But until the crash, no one without clearance had seen OXCART — at least not up close. At least 2,850 test flights were flown out of Area 51, and commercial airline pilots would occassionally spot the underbelly of the plane as it tore by at 3 times the speed of sound. The reflection of the all-black fuelselage would glimmer, leading to reports of UFO sightings. When pilots would radio what they saw, the Men in Black would meet them on the ground to sign non-disclosure agreements.

The sightings raised alarm bells within the U.S. military itself — since the CIA wouldn’t reveal what it was doing, even to the Air Force. The flyboys started Project BLUE BOOK to log sightings by Nevada residents and others. 74,000 pages of records are on file in the U.S. National Archives, but searching for “OXCART” or “Area 51″ reveals zero search results. But the U.S. military wasn’t so convinced it was being watched by little green men: The General “Buck” Turgidsons of the Army and Air Force figured it was the Ruskies trying to incite panic amongst the populace.

It wasn’t until July 2003 that the U.S. Government admitted the facility even existed, though they didn’t call it by its popular name, and only conceded it was an “operating location” near Groom Lake. Maps produced by the American government block-out the Nevada Test Site associated with Area 51 but it’s clearly visible on Google Maps.

View Larger Map

It’s about 100 kilometres northwest of downtown Las Vegas. The site is off-limits to both the public and even regular military air traffic.

While “shoot on sight” orders apparently exist, no known violent encounters have been reported. Usually the worst a nosy X-Files fan will endure is a few hours of heebie-jeebies at the hands of unnamed men, a hand-off to the Lincoln County Sherriff’s department, and a $600 fine.

Source: The Road to Area 51, Los Angeles Times
Source: OXCART/Lockheed A-12, Wikipedia
Source: Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), IMDB
Source: Area 51, Google Maps