Area 51

TRANSCRIPT

In August of two thousand thirteen, the Central Intelligence Agency did something it had never done before: it admitted that Area fifty-one exists.

The admission came buried inside a four-hundred-page official history of the U-two and Oxcart spy-plane programs, nineteen fifty-four to nineteen seventy-four — written by two of the Agency's own historians, Gregory Pedlow and Donald Welzenbach, published in classified channels in nineteen ninety-two, and released in a less-redacted form after a Freedom of Information request the National Security Archive filed in two thousand five.

And here is what the file says the base was for. Spy planes. Not visitors. Not saucers. Spy planes. The entire flying-saucer half of the story — the crash, the hangars, the bodies, the reverse-engineering — appears in the government's own files exactly zero times.

This is the story of the most famous secret base on Earth, and the most under-read government document of the decade.

First, the base itself. DOCUMENTED.

The spine of this episode is the document itself: 'The Central Intelligence Agency and Overhead Reconnaissance: The U-two and Oxcart Programs, nineteen fifty-four to nineteen seventy-four.' Four hundred pages. Written in nineteen ninety-two with a Secret, No Foreign Dissemination classification. A heavily censored version of the U-two portion appeared in nineteen ninety-eight. In two thousand five, the National Security Archive filed a Freedom of Information request for a review of the redactions. The review was approved for release on June twenty-fifth, two thousand thirteen — and the Archive posted it that August, with the old classification stamps struck through.

The file is genuine. Everything that follows from its pages is DOCUMENTED.

Chapter two tells the base's origin story, and it reads like a real-estate trip. As the U-two was being built in California, the Agency needed somewhere secret to test it. On April twelfth, nineteen fifty-five, Richard Bissell and Colonel Osmund Ritland — the senior Air Force officer on the project staff — flew over Nevada with Kelly Johnson of Lockheed in a small Beechcraft, flown by Lockheed's chief test pilot, Tony LeVier. They spotted what the history calls 'an airstrip by a salt flat known as Groom Lake, near the northeast corner of the Atomic Energy Commission's Nevada Proving Ground.'

LeVier landed on the lakebed — the strip itself was ankle-deep dust — and all four walked it over. The facility had been a World War Two aerial gunnery range. Bissell and his colleagues agreed: ideal. One problem: Groom Lake wasn't actually part of the atomic proving ground. So the Agency asked the Atomic Energy Commission to add it to its Nevada holdings. The Commission's chairman readily agreed. And then, the history says — quote — 'President Eisenhower also approved the addition of this strip of wasteland, known by its map designation as Area fifty-one, to the Nevada Test Site.'

That is the first time the government's own pen writes the words 'Area fifty-one.' And the file gives the site a nickname: Kelly Johnson called it Paradise Ranch — the history says, 'to make the new facility in the middle of nowhere sound more attractive to his workers' — soon shortened to the Ranch. By July of nineteen fifty-five, the base was ready, and the Agency, the Air Force, and Lockheed moved in.

A secret test site with a cheery name, in the Nevada desert. DOCUMENTED — the file's own pages.

Now the planes. What was actually being tested at the Ranch.

First, the U-two: a glider with a jet engine, built to photograph the Soviet Union from above sixty thousand feet — higher than anyone believed a manned aircraft could fly. The history walks through its missions over the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba.

Then the successor: the A-twelve, codenamed Oxcart — the Agency's attempt to build something that could outrun what eventually brought the U-two down. It was tested at the same lakebed, under the same secrecy, by the same Agency.

Spy planes, tested in the desert, at altitudes no one was supposed to be able to reach. That altitude is about to matter.

Now the centerpiece. The finding that makes this episode.

As the U-two started flying above sixty thousand feet, air-traffic controllers began receiving increasing numbers of UFO reports. At the time, no one believed manned flight was possible above sixty thousand feet — so nothing that high was supposed to be there. The reports came mostly in the early evening, from airline pilots flying east to west. The sun had dropped below their horizon; their cockpits were dark. But a U-two cruising far above them still caught the sunlight — its silver wings reflecting the rays down, looking, to the pilots below, like a fiery object.

So pilots and people on the ground wrote letters to the Air Force unit in Dayton, Ohio — the unit charged with investigating such things. This, the history says, led to the Air Force's Operation Blue Book, based at Wright-Patterson. And here the file confesses the trick: Blue Book investigators regularly called the Agency's project staff in Washington to check reported sightings against U-two flight logs — eliminating the majority of the reports, while unable to tell the letter writers the true cause. The Air Force, the contemporary press noted, was anxious to avoid exposing the ultra-secret U-two program, so it blamed natural phenomena. It knew better.

And then the sentence. The Agency's own history, in the Agency's own words. Quote:

'U-two and later Oxcart flights accounted for more than one-half of all UFO reports during the late nineteen fifties and most of the nineteen sixties.'

More than half. Of all of them. The government's most famous secret base wasn't hiding flying saucers — it was manufacturing flying-saucer reports, by accident, as a byproduct of doing its actual job: flying spy planes higher than anyone thought possible.

And the 'later Oxcart flights' kept the reports coming into the sixties. The Oxcart line's Air Force descendant became the S R seventy-one — the Blackbird — flying even higher, even faster, out of the same desert.

Picture the room, then: reports landing on desks, investigators calling Washington, Washington checking the logs against the flight schedules — and the truth, silver wings at sixty thousand feet, filed under 'natural phenomena.' DOCUMENTED. All of it — the file's own pages.

Now the other half of the story — the half the file never mentions.

Here is the DOCUMENTED column: a secret test site at Groom Lake, scouted in April of nineteen fifty-five, approved by Eisenhower, nicknamed Paradise Ranch, testing U-twos by that July and Oxcarts after — generating UFO reports the government knowingly misattributed. And here is the UNVERIFIED column: everything else.

The lore says a craft crashed at Roswell, New Mexico, in nineteen forty-seven — eight years before Bissell's Beechcraft ever flew over Groom Lake — and that the wreckage, and its occupants, were taken to Area fifty-one, where the government has been reverse-engineering alien technology ever since, at a sub-facility called S-four.

Search the four-hundred-page history for any of it. Zero results. No crash. No hangars. No S-four. The lore is a story told about the base; the file is a story told by the base's owners. They share nothing but the name.

In the gray zone sits one name: Bob Lazar. In nineteen eighty-nine, he claimed on television that he had worked at S-four, reverse-engineering flying saucers. His credentials never checked out; his claims rest on testimony, not documents. That puts him exactly where this channel puts reported-but-unproven claims: CLAIMED. Text only — the man is real, even if the story isn't proven.

Now the labels, applied with care.

The base: DOCUMENTED. Scouted April twelfth, nineteen fifty-five, from a Beechcraft; approved by Eisenhower as 'this strip of wasteland, known by its map designation as Area fifty-one'; nicknamed Paradise Ranch to attract workers; testing U-twos by July nineteen fifty-five and Oxcarts after. All of it from the Agency's own nineteen ninety-two history, released in less-redacted form in two thousand thirteen after a two thousand five Freedom of Information request.

The UFO finding: DOCUMENTED. 'U-two and later Oxcart flights accounted for more than one-half of all UFO reports during the late nineteen fifties and most of the nineteen sixties' — the history's own sentence, footnoted to information supplied by James Cunningham.

The lore: UNVERIFIED. Roswell debris, reverse-engineering, S-four, occupants in hangars — none of it appears in the file, and no declassified document has ever corroborated any of it. The absence is the evidence: a four-hundred-page history of the base's actual programs never once mentions a crashed craft.

And Bob Lazar's account: CLAIMED — stated on television in nineteen eighty-nine, never documented.

The deadpan truth of Area fifty-one is the gap between the two columns.

DOCUMENTED: a dry lakebed in Nevada. A Beechcraft in April of nineteen fifty-five. A president's signature on a strip of wasteland. A ranch that wasn't a ranch. And one sentence that explains more than half the UFO reports of a decade: U-twos and later Oxcarts, flying above sixty thousand feet, catching the evening sun.

CLAIMED: one man's television story, nineteen eighty-nine.

UNVERIFIED: everything else — the crash, the hangars, the S-four, the visitors.

The most famous secret base on Earth. The government's own files explain exactly what it was for. The rest is a story the desert tells about itself — and the files have never once repeated it.