In 1955 test pilot Tony LeVier was ordered
to find a
remote location to test fly the top secret U2
spy plane.
The location he chose was Groom Lake, a dry
lake bed in the Nevada Test Site. The base
itself was
constructed by the CIA and has since become
the test
facility for many top secret aircraft
including the Black
Bird, and the B2 Stealth Bomber. The Facility
now boasts
one of the longest runways in the world. Two
top secret
aircraft rumored to be currently being tested
there are the
Aurora (allegedly the fasted plane ever
constructed) and
the Black Mantra (a triangular shaped
aircraft reportedly
seen in action during the Gulf War.) The
Groom Lake
facility has
since come to be known as Area 51, Dreamland
(its airspace
code name) the box, and
Paridise Ranch (its orginal name.) Its true
name however is Detechment 3 of the Airforce
Flight Test Center.
The workers at the base are not limited to
military
personel, many civilian engeeners are flown
in to Area 51
daily from Las Vegas's McCarren airport.
These are known as
"Janet" Flights. There are as many as ten
Janet flights
coming into the facility daily. In addtion
workers are also
brought in daily on buses with tinted windows
every weekday
morning via Groom
Lake Road. A few workers also enter in there
own
vehicles.
Although rumors of extra-terrestrial craft
being stored
at Area 51 had been circulating in military
circles for
years, they didn't come into public view till
1989. In 1989
Bob Lazar, A man claiming to be a
Physisist, appeared on a Las Vegas news show
saying he had
worked on extra-terrestrial craft at Papoose
Lake, another
dry lake bed located just south of the Groom
Lake Facility.
Lazar called this facility S4. He said S4
housed nine
extra-terrestrial craft that were being back
engineered by
the U.S. government. Since then many other
workers (some
more creditable than others) have come
forward with similar
claims.
Lazars claims sparked mass pilgrimages to
the Black
Mailbox where hundreds, maybe thousands of
people claim to
have seen lights above Area 51 performing
ariel feats far
beyond our current aviational capabilities.
Lazars claims where later dismissed by
most of the UFO
community when investigations into his
background showed he
had attended niether of the universities (MIT
and Cal Tech)
he had claimed to have gone to and he held
none of the
educational credentals he claimed to have
held. Lazar
claimed that the government had erased all of
the evedence
about his past in an attempt to discredit
him. This is
unlikely however as Lazar doesn't even appear
in any year
books from these universities. Many people
believe that
Lazar was passing off stories related to him
by an actual
worker as his own, this is just pure
speculation however.
The government claimed for many years that
the Groom
Lake facility didn't exsist. In 1995 the
government seized
Freedom Ridge and White Sides mountain,
making them
government property and restricted land.
These were the two
best places to see the non-exsistant
base. When the
producers of the movie Independance Day came
to the
military to see if they would be willing to
cooperate in
the production of the film the military said
they would be
happy to help, under one condition, that they
took out all
references to Area 51. Naturally the
producers refused.
Recently the base came into public view
again when a
suit was filed on behalf of ex-workers who
had died,
alledgedly due to the illigal burning of
hazardous waste at
the facility. This suit forced the government
to admitt the
exsistance of the base openly for the first
time. The case
was later dismissed.
For a more indepth and facinating look at
the history
and characters surrounding Area 51 check out
the book Area
51 the dreamland chronicles by David
Darlington.
