EG&G

EG&G began as a partnership, Edgerton, Germeshausen & Grier, formed on November 13, 1947 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Harold Edgerton and his former students Kenneth Germeshausen and Herbert Grier, and quickly collected contracts to advise the government on nuclear tests in Nevada and the South Pacific. One of its first employees was Bernard J. O'Keefe, who served with the 21st Bomber Command in the Mariana Islands and was sent to Japan after the surrender to investigate its nuclear work; O'Keefe later led the company and wrote a book, Nuclear Hostages.¹ EG&G was a Massachusetts company of 1947 with annual sales of $2.7 billion in 1993, providing "systems engineering and test site operating and management services to government agencies and laboratories" and instruments and components for government and commercial customers.²

Nevada Test Site contracts

In 1994 the company held five Department of Energy contracts, two of them relating to the Nevada Test Site: Energy Measurements, under which the company "provides scientific and engineering services for the DOE's underground nuclear weapons test program" in cooperation with the Sandia, Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore laboratories, principally by measuring energy from underground detonations; and Reynolds Electrical and Engineering Company, for support and maintenance, construction at the Tonopah Test Range and surface testing and drilling at the Yucca Mountain Project; the other three were at Rocky Flats, near Golden, Colorado, the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory and the Mound facility in Miamisburg, Ohio. Both Nevada contracts were to expire at the end of December 1995, and the company's subsidiaries included "EG&G Special Projects, Inc." (Nevada) and "EG&G Energy Measurements, Inc."² In 1994 the company determined that it would not seek renewal of its four Department of Energy contracts and reclassified the segment as discontinued operations; the Rocky Flats contract ended in June 1995, and the Reynolds and Energy Measurements contracts expired on December 31, 1995.³ The registrant was known as EG&G Inc until July 26, 1999 and as PerkinElmer Inc from November 5, 1999.³ The Nevada Test Site contracts, the 1999 transfer of the technical services business out of PerkinElmer and its acquisition in August 2002 by URS Corporation with Carlyle-EG&G Holdings Corp. are treated on the page for Area 51; URS's "EG&G Division" specialized in "the operations and maintenance of military and federal installations, flight training, emergency preparedness and homeland security, weapons systems engineering and modernization," under George R. Melton, who had been president and chief executive of EG&G Technical Services, Inc. from November 2000 to August 2002.⁴

Radar ranges at Indian Springs and Groom Lake

Research on masking the aircraft's radar image under Project RAINBOW, done by the Scientific Engineering Institute, was tested by "Edgerton, Germeshausen & Grier (EG&G), which was also composed of MIT faculty members," which "under an Air Force contract to evaluate radars" operated "a small testing facility at Indian Springs, Nevada, not far from Area 51"; a Lockheed test pilot flew the modified U-2 over what the history calls "little more than a series of radar sets and a trailer" of instrumentation, so that EG&G technicians could record the returns.⁵ In spring 1959 Kelly Johnson's Lockheed Skunk Works began building a full-scale A-12 mockup to be tested for radar cross section by EG&G with the Scientific Engineering Institute at Indian Springs; Lockheed objected to the site because the pylon would not support the mockup and the facilities were in full view of a nearby highway; and "On 10 September 1959, EG&G agreed to move its radar test facility to the former U-2 testing site at Area 51 of the Atomic Energy Commission's Nevada Proving Grounds," the mockup being carried by trailer truck from Burbank, California and placed on the pylon by 18 November.⁶

The McCarran building and the Janet flights

Aviation writers state that the passenger shuttle known by the radio call sign Janet, which carries government and contractor employees from a private terminal at Las Vegas to sites in the Nevada Test and Training Range, was long operated by EG&G; one such account dates the first Janet flights to 1972 and traces the contract through URS (which acquired EG&G Technical Services in 2002) and AECOM (which acquired URS in 2014) on the basis of URS's history of providing the service and its job postings, including a 2010 notice for Boeing 737 flight attendants requiring a Single Scope Background Investigation.⁷ An Air Force request for information of November 7, 2023 for a ten-year contract to operate six Boeing 737-600 aircraft and five Beechcraft King Airs from Las Vegas, described as "transportation operations out of a variety of locations, including both open commercial airfields and restricted access, highly secure, government-controlled sites," was reported by the trade press, which lists the current contractor as a successor to the same chain.⁷ The annual reports of EG&G and URS opened for this page do not mention Janet or Groom Lake.²⁴

Bob Lazar said on Las Vegas television that the Navy was his employer, that "it was EG&G where I got the job," that when he was told to go to work he "drove there parked my car there and got in a plane" at McCarran International Airport, "there was special projects EG&G building," flew to Groom Lake, and was taken by bus to the S-4 site near Papoose Lake. A transcript of a KLAS-TV report by George Knapp states that Los Alamos officials said they had no records of Lazar, that "EG&G which is where Lazar says he was interviewed for the job at s4 also has no records," and that a 1982 Los Alamos telephone directory and newspaper clipping listed Lazar there.⁸ Notes attributed to the physicist Eric Davis, dated October 16, 2002, begin "Rich says to go to EG&G Special Projects building at Grice and Paradise. 'Meet at 10 A.M.'" and record that Vice Admiral Thomas R. Wilson, the former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, arrived at 10:10 and that the two sat in his car behind the EG&G building until 11:20; Wilson told the Sarasota Herald-Tribune reporter Billy Cox in 2020 "It's all fiction" and that he "definitely did not sit with him in a car for an hour in Las Vegas." The "Rich" in the notes who gives Davis the meeting place is a contact of Davis and Wilson whom the notes tie to the Association of Former Intelligence Officers and the National Nuclear Security Administration, and who is named in the notes together with a "Doug"; the notes do not identify him further.⁹ The Wilson-Davis notes are discussed further on the page for the Wilson-Davis Memo.

Frost v. Perry and Kasza v. Browner

The reported decisions in the Groom Lake waste cases, Frost v. Perry and Kasza v. Browner, do not name EG&G. The Ninth Circuit's opinion of January 8, 1998 describes the plaintiffs as "Former workers at a classified facility operated by the United States Air Force," lists the defendants in Frost v. Perry as William Perry, then Secretary of Defense, Anthony Lake, then National Security Advisor, and Sheila Widnall, Secretary of the Air Force, and the defendant in Kasza v. Browner as Carol Browner, Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, and records the appearances of Jonathan Turley and Joan Manley of George Washington University for the plaintiffs and of the Department of Justice for the government.¹⁰ The district court's order of May 4, 1995 on a motion to compel concerned an interrogatory asking the Air Force to identify the names used for "the operating location near Groom Lake" and quotes Secretary Widnall's unclassified declaration that the location "has no official name."¹¹ The Las Vegas Sun reported on October 14, 1996 that the workers alleged "the Air Force and its contractors" filled 55-gallon drums with toxic waste in the 1980s and burned them in trenches, and on March 7, 1996 that Helen Frost, a plaintiff who had unsuccessfully sued over her husband's death in 1993, said that Robert Frost had worked as a sheet-metal worker at Groom Lake in the 1980s; The Village Voice described Wally Kasza as a 69-year-old sheet metal worker from the base who replaced Frost as an industrial supervisor there after Frost died. No opinion, order or news report opened for this page names the employer of Robert Frost or Wally Kasza.¹² Cox News Service reported on August 16, 1994, in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, that Jonathan Turley had sued the Environmental Protection Agency for failing to enforce environmental laws at a secret air base in Nevada, that he said he represented unidentified current and former workers at "Area 51," and that the suit alleged that the burning of hazardous and toxic wastes at the base caused serious injuries to employees and at least one death; the report described the base as also known as "Dreamland," on the edge of Groom Dry Lake, and the portion read does not mention EG&G.¹³