Area 51

The Story

On 12 April 1955, a small Beechcraft carrying a few men on a secret errand flew low over the Nevada desert. Aboard, according to a CIA history declassified decades later, were CIA official Richard Bissell, Air Force Col. Osmund Ritland and Lockheed's Kelly Johnson, with Lockheed test pilot Tony LeVier at the controls. They were looking for somewhere to test a new spy plane, the U-2, safely and secretly. They spotted an old airstrip 'by a salt flat known as Groom Lake, near the northeast corner of the Atomic Energy Commission's (AEC) Nevada Proving Ground.'

The history says the strip had been 'used during World War II as an aerial gunnery range.' From the air it looked paved, but up close it was compacted earth turned to 'ankle-deep dust.' LeVier set the plane down on the dry lakebed instead, and the history says that if he had tried the old runway the plane 'would probably have nosed over,' likely killing or injuring the project's key people. The site went on maps as Area 51. To make it sound more appealing to his workers, Johnson called it 'the Paradise Ranch,' soon shortened to 'the Ranch.' When runoff flooded the lakebed, it picked up another nickname, 'Watertown Strip.' 'By July 1955 the base was ready,' the history says.

U-2 and OXCART flights 'accounted for more than one-half of all UFO reports during the late 1950s and most of the 1960s,' the CIA's own history says.

Then the UFO reports began. Airliners of the mid-1950s flew between 10,000 and 20,000 feet. The U-2 cruised above 60,000. In the evening, an airliner could already be in darkness while sunlight still caught a U-2 high overhead, and pilots saw something bright where nothing should have been. The CIA history says 'air-traffic controllers began receiving increasing numbers of UFO reports.' Air Force Project Blue Book investigators 'regularly called on the Agency's Project Staff in Washington to check reported UFO sightings against U-2 flight logs.' That let them explain most of the reports, 'although they could not reveal to the letter writers the true cause.' The history concludes that 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.'

So the government really was hiding things in the sky over Nevada. They just were not alien. In 2013, after a Freedom of Information Act request by the National Security Archive, the CIA released a less-redacted version of the history with 'Numerous references to Area 51 and Groom Lake, with a map of the area.' News outlets treated it as the government finally admitting the base existed.

In 2024 the Pentagon's UAP office, AARO, reviewed decades of claims about hidden alien technology. It said it 'found no empirical evidence for claims that the USG and private companies have been reverse-engineering extraterrestrial technology.' Its review noted that UFO reports spiked when the U-2 was in flight, and described the U-2's successor, the A-12 OXCART, which 'sustained a speed of Mach 3.2 at 90,000 feet altitude.'

Area 51 is real, and its secrets were real. The documents that have come out describe spy planes, not spaceships.