Area 51

Area 51 is the map designation, used in the Central Intelligence Agency's history of the U-2 and OXCART programs, of the strip at Groom Lake in Lincoln County, Nevada. The government's own phrase in court and in presidential determinations is "the Air Force's operating location near Groom Lake."¹² The CIA's history of the program was released in a less redacted form in 2013.³

Selection of the site, 1955

On November 26, 1954 Allen Dulles told his special assistant Richard Bissell that President Dwight D. Eisenhower had just approved a very secret program, and Bissell was put in charge of the aircraft that became the Lockheed Aircraft Company U-2.⁴ The National Security Archive reported that on February 21, 1955 Bissell wrote a check for $1.25 million on an Agency account and mailed it to the home of Lockheed's chief engineer Kelly Johnson, ahead of a $22.5 million contract for twenty aircraft; the CIA history records that Lockheed delivered the twenty for $17,025,542 plus a profit of $1,952,055, a total of $18,977,597, and that Public Law 110 of 1949 made the Director of Central Intelligence the only government employee who can obligate federal money without vouchers.³⁵

On April 12, 1955 Bissell and Colonel Osmund Ritland, the senior Air Force officer on the project staff, flew over Nevada with Johnson and Lockheed's chief test pilot Tony LeVier and spotted what appeared to be an airstrip beside 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 had been used in the Second World War as an aerial gunnery range. Back in Washington Bissell discovered that Groom Lake was not part of the AEC proving ground; after consulting Dulles, Bissell and Miller asked the Atomic Energy Commission to add the Groom Lake area to its real estate holdings in Nevada. The AEC's chairman, Admiral Lewis Strauss, readily agreed, and President Eisenhower also approved the addition of the strip, known by its map designation as Area 51, to the Nevada Test Site. Johnson called the site the Paradise Ranch, shortened to the Ranch; when rainwater runoff filled the lake the base acquired another unofficial name, Watertown Strip. By July 1955 Agency, Air Force and Lockheed personnel were moving in.¹

The airlift and the 1955 crash

To move Lockheed employees from Burbank to Area 51 without attracting curiosity, the project staff flew essential personnel to the site on Monday mornings and back on Friday evenings. A regularly scheduled Military Air Transport Service flight on an Air Force C-54 began on October 3, 1955; James Cunningham called it "Bissell's Narrow-Gauge Airline." On November 17, 1955 a Military Air Transport Service aircraft bound for Area 51 crashed, killing all fourteen aboard, among them the CIA's project security officer William H. Marr, four members of his staff, and personnel from Lockheed and Hycon; it was the greatest single loss of life in the U-2 program.⁶ In September 1960, when construction began for the OXCART program, a C-47 shuttle ferried work crews from Burbank to Las Vegas and from Las Vegas to the site.⁷

Security and cover stories

On April 29, 1955 Bissell signed an agreement with the Air Force and the Navy under which the CIA "assumed primary responsibility for all security" for the overhead reconnaissance project, and the CIA's Office of Security has since been responsible for keeping large numbers of contracts untraceable to the Agency. The Agency called its aircraft "articles" and its pilots "drivers."⁸ On May 7, 1956 the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics released an unclassified cover story that a Lockheed-developed aircraft would be flown by the Air Force Air Weather Service to study the jet stream, convective clouds, temperature and wind structures and cosmic-ray effects up to 55,000 feet.⁹ After the shooting down of Francis Gary Powers in 1960 the officials running the operation decided to keep to the standard cover story, approved by the President in 1956, that U-2 flights were weather flights staged by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and a revised version was prepared to show Adana, Turkey, as the base in order to conceal Pakistan's role; the space agency, which had been renamed in 1958, then decided to end its support of the weather research story.¹⁰¹¹

Release of the CIA history

The less redacted history released in 2013 was obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by Jeffrey T. Richelson, a National Security Archive senior fellow, in response to a 2005 request. The history had been written by the Agency historians Gregory Pedlow and Donald Welzenbach and published in classified channels in 1992; a heavily redacted version of its U-2 portion had been published in 1998 by the Center for the Study of Intelligence as The CIA and the U-2 Program, 1954-1974.³ The 2013 release includes a map of the California and Nevada area showing the test site.³

Nuclear tests, EG&G and the radar range

The CIA vacated the Nevada site in 1957 as a result of Atomic Energy Commission nuclear testing, and in the autumn of 1956 Area 51 was about to become the training site for Air Force pilots who would fly the 29 U-2s the Air Force bought.¹¹¹² The research results of the Scientific Engineering Institute on Project RAINBOW, which sought to mask the U-2's radar image, were tested by Edgerton, Germeshausen and Grier (EG&G), a firm 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 51.¹² OXCART was established as the codename for the A-12 at the end of August 1959. On September 10, 1959 EG&G agreed to move its radar test facility to the former U-2 testing site at Area 51 for radar cross section testing of the A-12 mockup, because Lockheed objected that the Indian Springs pylon could not support the full-scale mockup and that the facility was in full view of a highway. The mockup arrived by trailer truck from Burbank and was atop the pylon by November 18, 1959.¹³ A new 8,500-foot runway was completed by November 15, 1960, and the facilities were ready for the forecast delivery of the first A-12 on August 1, 1961.⁷

EG&G Inc., which later took the name PerkinElmer, listed "EG&G Special Projects, Inc.," incorporated in Nevada, among its subsidiaries in its annual report on Form 10-K filed April 1, 1994, and again in the report filed March 22, 1996. The 1994 report describes EG&G's contracts at the Nevada Test Site for the Department of Energy's underground nuclear weapons test program, which expired on December 31, 1995.¹⁴¹⁵ On August 20, 1999 a subsidiary of Carlyle-EG&G Holdings Corp. bought certain assets and liabilities of the EG&G Technical Services business from PerkinElmer, and on August 22, 2002 URS Corporation acquired it and a second company, Lear Siegler Services, for stock valued at $47.8 million, $175.9 million in cash and the assumption of $155.6 million in debt; affiliates of TCG Holdings, L.L.C. received shares representing about 16.46 percent of URS's common stock, and Joseph E. Lipscomb, a URS director, was a vice president of EG&G Technical Services Holdings, L.L.C.¹⁶ The filings and the proxy statement do not mention Groom Lake.¹⁴¹⁶

U-2 flights and unidentified flying object reports

High-altitude testing of the U-2 produced a large increase in reports of unidentified flying objects, because commercial airliners then flew between 10,000 and 20,000 feet and military aircraft below 40,000 feet, so that air-traffic controllers began receiving reports from pilots who saw a U-2 at 60,000 feet lit by a sun that had set for the airliner. Investigators at the Air Force's Project Blue Book regularly asked the Agency's project staff in Washington to check reported sightings against U-2 flight logs, which let them eliminate most reports although "they could not reveal to the letter writers the true cause." In a section titled "U-2s, UFOs, and Operation BLUE BOOK," the CIA's own history states: "U-2 and later OXCART flights accounted for more than one-half of all UFO reports during the late 1950s and most of the 1960s."¹⁷

Gerald K. Haines, the historian of the National Reconnaissance Office, wrote in the CIA's journal in 1997 that, according to later estimates by CIA officials who worked on the U-2 and OXCART projects, over half of UFO reports from the late 1950s through the 1960s were accounted for by manned reconnaissance flights, and that "this led the Air Force to make misleading and deceptive statements to the public in order to allay public fears and to protect an extraordinarily sensitive national security project. While perhaps justified, this deception added fuel to the later conspiracy theories and the coverup controversy of the 1970s."¹⁸ The same article records that the Robertson Panel, which met from January 14 to 17, 1953, recommended that the National Security Council debunk UFO reports and that private groups, including the Civilian Flying Saucer Investigators in Los Angeles and the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization in Wisconsin, be monitored for subversive activities.¹⁸

Land withdrawals

The Bureau of Land Management's Public Land Order 7131, effective April 7, 1995 and published April 10, 1995, withdrew 3,972.04 acres of public land in Lincoln County from surface entry, mining and mineral leasing until November 6, 2001 "to provide a safety and security buffer between public land administered by the Bureau of Land Management and withdrawn land under the jurisdiction of the Nellis Air Force Range." It was signed by Assistant Secretary of the Interior Bob Armstrong.¹⁹

Title XXX of Public Law 106-65, the Military Lands Withdrawal Act of 1999 (113 Stat. 885, October 5, 1999), withdrew the Nellis Air Force Range, described as approximately 2,919,890 acres in Clark, Lincoln and Nye Counties, for use by the Secretary of the Air Force as an armament and high hazard testing area, among other purposes, and revoked Public Land Order 1662 of June 26, 1958. Section 3012(a) directed the Secretary of the Interior "as soon as practicable" to publish in the Federal Register a notice containing the legal description of the lands withdrawn; section 3015 set the termination of the Nellis withdrawal at twenty years after November 6, 2001.²⁰ Section 2843 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021 (Public Law 116-283) extended the withdrawal. A Bureau of Land Management notice of October 18, 2021 states that "the legal land description for the Nevada Test and Training Range was not published in the Federal Register following enactment of the MLWA" and that the notice "corrects that deficiency"; it gives a termination date of November 6, 2046 and describes about 2,949,603 acres, of which 362,678 are in Clark County, 778,681 in Lincoln County and 1,808,244 in Nye County.²¹

Frost v. Perry and Kasza v. Browner

Helen Frost, the widow of a former worker, and others proceeding as Does, who had worked at a classified operating location near Groom Lake, brought a citizen suit under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act against the Air Force, Frost v. Perry; Stella Kasza and Does sued the Environmental Protection Agency for failing to inspect, inventory and disclose, Kasza v. Browner. The Air Force refused nearly all discovery as privileged, and Secretary of the Air Force Sheila Widnall invoked the military and state secrets privilege over categories of information including "security sensitive environmental data," with an unclassified declaration and a classified declaration reviewed by the court in camera; the court also reviewed a classified declaration of Air Force Vice Chief of Staff General Thomas S. Moorman Jr. The district court entered summary judgment for the Air Force because the privilege barred evidence on whether hazardous waste had been generated, stored or disposed of at the location. Frost argued on appeal, among other things, that the Secretary could not have personally reviewed all the information withheld and suggested that the privilege was used to cover up environmental crimes at the location. The EPA inspected the location from December 6, 1994 to March 10, 1995, after Kasza was filed; the court ruled that the statute contained no exception for classified information but that the President could exempt a facility, and EPA then obtained a presidential exemption. The plaintiffs were represented by Jonathan Turley and Joan Manley of George Washington University; the government by lawyers of the Department of Justice; and KLAS, Inc. appeared as amicus. The Ninth Circuit affirmed on January 8, 1998, remanding only attorney's fees and a sealing order, applying the privilege as defined in United States v. Reynolds (1953), and approved the "mosaic theory" under which seemingly innocuous information that is part of a classified mosaic may be withheld.²

President Bill Clinton signed Presidential Determination No. 95-45 on September 29, 1995: "I hereby exempt the Air Force's operating location near Groom Lake, Nevada from any Federal, State, interstate or local provision respecting control and abatement of solid waste or hazardous waste disposal that would require the disclosure of classified information concerning that operating location to any unauthorized person." It states that the exemption "shall be effective for the full one-year statutory period" and was published in the Federal Register on October 10, 1995.²²² The authorizing statute, 42 U.S.C. 6961(a), limits any such exemption to one year, and the Federal Register carries a renewal for each year from 1995 through 2003: Presidential Determination 96-54 of September 28, 1996 (published October 8, 1996), 97-35 of September 26, 1997 (October 8, 1997), a determination of September 25, 1998 reported in an Air Force notice of October 23, 1998, Presidential Determination 99-37 of September 20, 1999 (Air Force notice of October 26, 1999), 2000-30 of September 19, 2000 (October 5, 2000), 2001-27 of September 18, 2001 (October 4, 2001), 2002-30 of September 13, 2002 (Air Force notice of December 24, 2002) and 2003-39 of September 16, 2003 (October 21, 2003). Each text describes the location as the subject of litigation in Kasza v. Browner (D. Nev. CV-S-94-795-PMP) and Frost v. Perry (D. Nev. CV-S-94-714-PMP).²³ The Federal Register's index returns no further document with the phrase "Groom Lake" after October 21, 2003.²³

Statements by Richard Doty

Richard Doty wrote in 2000 that two alien spacecraft crashed in New Mexico in 1947 and that the government recovered bodies, and that "we don't have any UFOs at Area 51"; the publisher James W. Moseley reported that Doty told him he had visited Area 51, where he was told alien technology was kept but was not shown it because his clearance was not high enough.²⁴²⁵ Philip J. Klass wrote in 2000 that a manual among the Majestic-12 papers, purportedly printed in April 1954, directed crashed craft to "Area 51 S-4," a name that he wrote the Nellis range portion was not given until several years after that date.²⁶

Bob Lazar

In 1989 Bob Lazar told the Las Vegas reporter George Knapp that he had worked at a facility called S4 near Area 51, where his job was to help reverse-engineer the propulsion system of a craft "not made by human hands." On a radio program on December 20, 1989 he said he had two master's degrees, one in physics and one in electronics, had worked at Los Alamos as a technician and then as a physicist in the Polarized Proton Section, and had been hired at S-4 as a senior staff physicist; asked which school, he said he preferred not to say because he was working with it under contract.²⁷²⁸

Tom Mahood, in a series titled "The Lazar Flaws," collected the following. In a pre-sentence report dated July 27, 1990 for a pandering conviction, Lazar told the probation officer he held a bachelor's degree in physics and electronic technology from Pacifica University, a correspondence school, a master's in physics from MIT in 1982 and a master's in electronic technology from Caltech in 1985; the California agency that regulates vocational and correspondence schools had no listing for a Pacifica University. Lazar's attendance at Pierce College in Los Angeles was confirmed to Stanton Friedman, and a Pierce instructor told Friedman Lazar took a class in the late 1970s; Friedman found no trace of Lazar at MIT. A marriage certificate of July 27, 1980 gives his occupation as electronics engineer and his highest grade as 12. A Los Alamos Monitor article of June 27, 1982 reported that the Lazars had moved to Los Alamos about a month earlier, and a bankruptcy filing of July 1986 listed his occupation for the previous six years as photo processor at his residence.²⁸ An article in Skeptic in 2026 states that Lazar pleaded guilty in 1990 to a felony pandering charge in Nevada and that he has maintained that records connected to his work were altered or removed; the same article argues that a 1982 Monitor article identified him as a physicist at the Los Alamos Meson Physics Facility and that the CIA history's description of regular air shuttles to the site bears out part of the setting of his account.²⁷ A site that defends Lazar states that no documents prove he obtained either degree and cites a friend's statement that Lazar worked at Fairchild Industries and attended Caltech.²⁹