Finally, the truth about Area 51
After decades of denying the facility’s existence, five former insiders speak out
by Annie Jacobsen
Area 51. It’s the most famous military
institution in the world that doesn’t officially exist. If it did, it
would be found about 100 miles outside Las Vegas in Nevada’s high
desert, tucked between an Air Force base and an abandoned nuclear
testing ground. Then again, maybe not— the U.S. government refuses to
say. You can’t drive anywhere close to it, and until recently, the
airspace overhead was restricted—all the way to outer space. Any
mention of Area 51 gets redacted from official documents, even those
that have been declassified for decades.
It has become the holy grail for conspiracy theorists, with
UFOlogists positing that the Pentagon reverse engineers flying saucers
and keeps extraterrestrial beings stored in freezers. Urban legend has
it that Area 51 is connected by underground tunnels and trains to other
secret facilities around the country. In 2001, Katie Couric told Today Show audiences that 7 percent of Americans doubt the moon landing happened—that it was staged in the Nevada desert. Millions of X-Files fans believe the truth may be “out there,” but more likely it’s concealed inside Area 51’s Strangelove-esque hangars—buildings that, though confirmed by Google Earth, the government refuses to acknowledge.
The problem is the myths of Area 51 are hard to
dispute if no one can speak on the record about what actually happened
there. Well, now, for the first time, someone is ready to talk—in fact,
five men are, and their stories rival the most outrageous of rumors.
Colonel Hugh “Slip” Slater, 87, was commander of the Area 51 base in
the 1960s. Edward Lovick, 90, featured in “What Plane?” in
LA’s
March issue, spent three decades radar testing some of the world’s most
famous aircraft (including the U-2, the A-12 OXCART and the F-117).
Kenneth Collins, 80, a CIA experimental test pilot, was given the
silver star. Thornton “T.D.” Barnes, 72, was an Area 51
special-projects engineer. And Harry Martin, 77, was one of the men in
charge of the base’s half-million-gallon monthly supply of spy-plane
fuels. Here are a few of their best stories—
for the record:
On May 24, 1963, Collins flew out of Area 51’s restricted airspace
in a top-secret spy plane code-named OXCART, built by Lockheed Aircraft
Corporation. He was flying over Utah when the aircraft pitched, flipped
and headed toward a crash. He ejected into a field of weeds.
Almost 46 years later, in late fall of 2008, sitting in a coffee
shop in the San Fernando Valley, Collins remembers that day with the
kind of clarity the threat of a national security breach evokes: “Three
guys came driving toward me in a pickup. I saw they had the aircraft
canopy in the back. They offered to take me to my plane.” Until that
moment, no civilian without a top-secret security clearance had ever
laid eyes on the airplane Collins was flying. “I told them not to go
near the aircraft. I said it had a nuclear weapon on-board.” The story
fit right into the Cold War backdrop of the day, as many atomic tests
took place in Nevada. Spooked, the men drove Collins to the local
highway patrol. The CIA disguised the accident as involving a generic
Air Force plane, the F-105, which is how the event is still listed in
official records.
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As for the guys who picked him up, they
were tracked down and told to sign national security nondisclosures. As
part of Collins’ own debriefing, the CIA asked the decorated pilot to
take truth serum. “They wanted to see if there was anything I’d
for-gotten about the events leading up to the crash.” The Sodium
Pento-thal experience went without a hitch—except for the reaction of
his wife, Jane.
“Late Sunday, three CIA agents brought me home. One drove my car;
the other two carried me inside and laid me down on the couch. I was
loopy from the drugs. They handed Jane the car keys and left without
saying a word.” The only conclusion she could draw was that her husband
had gone out and gotten drunk. “Boy, was she mad,” says Collins with a
chuckle.
At the time of Collins’ accident, CIA pilots had been flying spy
planes in and out of Area 51 for eight years, with the express mission
of providing the intelligence to prevent nuclear war. Aerial
reconnaissance was a major part of the CIA’s preemptive efforts, while
the rest of America built bomb shelters and hoped for the best.
“It wasn’t always called Area 51,” says Lovick, the physicist who
developed stealth technology. His boss, legendary aircraft designer
Clarence L. “Kelly” Johnson, called the place Paradise Ranch to entice
men to leave their families and “rough it” out in the Nevada desert in
the name of science and the fight against the evil empire. “Test pilot
Tony LeVier found the place by flying over it,” says Lovick. “It was a
lake bed called Groom Lake, selected for testing because it was flat
and far from anything. It was kept secret because the CIA tested U-2s
there.”
When Frances Gary Powers was shot down
over Sverdlovsk, Russia, in 1960, the U-2 program lost its cover. But
the CIA already had Lovick and some 200 scientists, engineers and
pilots working at Area 51 on the A-12 OXCART, which would outfox Soviet
radar using height, stealth and speed.
Col. Slater was in the outfit of six pilots who flew OXCART missions
during the Vietnam War. Over a Cuban meat and cheese sandwich at the
Bahama Breeze restaurant off the Las Vegas Strip, he says, “I was
recruited for the Area after working with the CIA’s classified Black
Cat Squadron, which flew U-2 missions over denied territory in Mainland
China. After that, I was told, ‘You should come out to Nevada and work
on something interesting we’re doing out there.’ ”
Even though Slater considers himself a fighter pilot at heart—he
flew 84 missions in World War II—the opportunity to work at Area 51 was
impossible to pass up. “When I learned about this Mach-3 aircraft
called OXCART, it was completely intriguing to me—this idea of flying
three times the speed of sound! No one knew a thing about the program.
I asked my wife, Barbara, if she wanted to move to Las Vegas, and she
said yes. And I said, ‘You won’t see me but on the weekends,’ and she
said, ‘That’s fine!’ ” At this recollection, Slater laughs heartily.
Barbara, dining with us, laughs as well. The two, married for 63 years,
are rarely apart today.
“We couldn’t have told you any of this a year ago,” Slater says.
“Now we can’t tell it to you fast enough.” That is because in 2007, the
CIA began declassifying the 50-year-old OXCART program. Today, there’s
a scramble for eyewitnesses to fill in the information gaps. Only a few
of the original players are left. Two more of them join me and the
Slaters for lunch: Barnes, formerly an Area 51 special-projects
engineer, with his wife, Doris; and Martin, one of those overseeing the
OXCART’s specially mixed jet fuel (regular fuel explodes at extreme
height, temperature and speed), with his wife, Mary. Because the men
were sworn to secrecy for so many decades, their wives still get a kick
out of hearing the secret tales.
Barnes was married at 17 (Doris was 16). To support his wife, he
became an electronics wizard, buying broken television sets, fixing
them up and reselling them for five times the original price. He went
from living in bitter poverty on a Texas Panhandle ranch with no
electricity to buying his new bride a dream home before he was old
enough to vote. As a soldier in the Korean War, Barnes demonstrated an
uncanny aptitude for radar and Nike missile systems, which made him a
prime target for recruitment by the CIA—which indeed happened when he
was 22. By 30, he was handling nuclear secrets.
“The agency located each guy at the top of a certain field and put
us together for the programs at Area 51,” says Barnes. As a security
precaution, he couldn’t reveal his birth name—he went by the moniker
Thunder. Coworkers traveled in separate cars, helicopters and
airplanes. Barnes and his group kept to themselves, even in the mess
hall. “Our special-projects group was the most classified team since
the Manhattan Project,” he says.
Harry Martin’s specialty was fuel. Handpicked by the CIA from the
Air Force, he underwent rigorous psychological and physical tests to
see if he was up for the job. When he passed, the CIA moved his family
to Nevada. Because OXCART had to refuel frequently, the CIA kept
supplies at secret facilities around the globe. Martin often traveled
to these bases for quality-control checks. He tells of preparing for a
top-secret mission from Area 51 to Thule, Greenland. “My wife took one
look at me in these arctic boots and this big hooded coat, and she knew
not to ask where I was going.”
So, what of those urban legends—the UFOs studied in secret, the
underground tunnels connecting clandestine facilities? For decades, the
men at Area 51 thought they’d take their secrets to the grave. At the
height of the Cold War, they cultivated anonymity while pursuing some
of the country’s most covert projects. Conspiracy theories were left to
popular imagination. But in talking with Collins, Lovick, Slater,
Barnes and Martin, it is clear that much of the folklore was spun from
threads of fact.
As for the myths of reverse engineering of flying saucers, Barnes
offers some insight: “We did reverse engineer a lot of foreign
technology, including the Soviet MiG fighter jet out at the Area”—even
though the MiG wasn’t shaped like a flying saucer. As for the
underground-tunnel talk, that, too, was born of truth. Barnes worked on
a nuclear-rocket program called Project NERVA, inside underground
chambers at Jackass Flats, in Area 51’s backyard. “Three test-cell
facilities were connected by railroad, but everything else was
underground,” he says.
And the quintessential Area 51 conspiracy—that the Pentagon keeps
captured alien spacecraft there, which they fly around in restricted
airspace? Turns out that one’s pretty easy to debunk. The shape of
OXCART was unprece-dented, with its wide, disk-like fuselage designed
to carry vast quantities of fuel. Commercial pilots cruising over
Nevada at dusk would look up and see the bottom of OXCART whiz by at
2,000-plus mph. The aircraft’s tita-nium body, moving as fast as a
bullet, would reflect the sun’s rays in a way that could make anyone
think, UFO.
In all, 2,850 OXCART test flights were flown out of Area 51 while
Slater was in charge. “That’s a lot of UFO sightings!” Slater adds.
Commercial pilots would report them to the FAA, and “when they’d land
in California, they’d be met by FBI agents who’d make them sign
nondisclosure forms.” But not everyone kept quiet, hence the birth of
Area 51’s UFO lore. The sightings incited uproar in Nevada and the
surrounding areas and forced the Air Force to open Project BLUE BOOK to
log each claim.
Since only a few Air Force officials were cleared for OXCART (even
though it was a joint CIA/USAF project), many UFO sightings raised
internal military alarms. Some generals believed the Russians might be
sending stealth craft over American skies to incite paranoia and create
widespread panic of alien invasion. Today, BLUE BOOK findings are
housed in 37 cubic feet of case files at the National Archives—74,000
pages of reports. A keyword search brings up no mention of the
top-secret OXCART or Area 51.
Project BLUE BOOK was shut down in 1969—more than a year after
OXCART was retired. But what continues at America’s most clandestine
military facility could take another 40 years to disclose.
ANNIE JACOBSEN is an investigative reporter who sat for more
than 500 interviews after she broke the story on terrorists probing
commercial airliners. When she isn’t digging into intelligence issues
for the likes of the National Review, she’s snapping together Legos with her two boys.
