Date: 1955–Present
Location: Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada
The Conspirators: US Air Force and other unspecified US government divisions
The Victims: Not specified
Way off in a remote corner of nowhere in the Nevada desert is a great, flat, dry lake bed with an Air Force base sprawling at its edge. As it’s inside the vast boundaries of Nellis AFB, it is off limits to civilians, and fenced off with signs warning against trespassers. No small wonder that such a facility draws the curious into suspecting a conspiracy.
The conspiracy theorists call it Area 51, and they claim that the government denies that it (most famous military facility in the world) exists. They believe that an alien spacecraft crashed at Roswell in 1947, and the wreckage was brought here and has been developed by the US government for use as a weapon. They also believe that secret Nazi weapons, including a vehicle very much like a flying saucer, were brought here and their development has continued as well. Even darker, they believe that trespassers who only want to know the truth are often seized and never heard from again. What could the government actually be doing inside this most inner sanctum, the very heart of black ops?
Area 51 is actually the National Classified Test Facility, and is used for test flying both new designs for the Air Force, and captured foreign aircraft. There are no alien flying saucers in its hangars.
Area 51 is an actual place. Formally, it is called the National Classified Test Facility inside Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, and its existence has always been public. The large, flat surface of dry Groom Lake makes it an ideal place for long runways. The test facility was founded in 1955 by Lockheed design chief Kelly Johnson, who needed a place for the Air Force to develop and test his new U-2 spy plane. He gave the remote location a nice name to attract civilian workers: Paradise Ranch. At the time it was public knowledge.
Once the highly classified, top-secret “black programs” began operating there, the veil of secrecy was pulled over Area 51, its employees, and its activities. It’s a large facility, easily visible, and yet the Air Force would say nothing about it officially. Conspiracy theorists therefore jumped on it—after all, whenever the government is up to something secret, it’s got to be something nefarious.
Much of the modern pop-culture hype about Area 51 is the result of one man who came forward, claiming to have been an employee working on captured alien technology. In 1989, a guy named Bob Lazar told a Las Vegas TV reporter that he had been a civilian engineer at Area 51 assigned to study alien field propulsion systems. He quickly became the darling of TV documentaries looking to sensationalize Area 51, and spoke very openly of his work and his background.
The problem with supporting the conspiratorial claims about Area 51 is that its actual history is pretty well documented, while its conspiratorial history is without any evidence at all, and certainly without scientific plausibility. The types of propulsion technologies described by Lazar aren’t simply nonexistent, they’re based on purely fictional misrepresentations of physics.
To start, one glaring red flag characterized Lazar’s commentary about his secret work, and it’s a common one that we see with many such people who claim some insider position. In Lazar’s version of Area 51, everything was top secret, and employees were told never to reveal their work. Yet Lazar actually spoke quite freely and openly about his alien propulsion systems. It seems unlikely for both to be true: that Lazar had actually worked there under a threat not to reveal the fact, and that he now traveled around telling his stories openly to anyone who would listen.
However, it seems only the TV producers took Lazar seriously. Amateur investigators immediately discovered that he lied about his educational credentials (he said he graduated from Cal Tech and MIT, yet he never attended either school, much less earned a degree). Actual physicists who listened to Lazar’s descriptions of some basic physics revealed that he had no idea what he was talking about, and probably had no physics education whatsoever. For example, he did not appear to understand the difference between gravity and particles; he said that gravity and the strong nuclear force were one and the same, which they’re not; and he claimed that an equivalent mass of antimatter could be created by bombarding conventional matter with protons, a flagrant violation of basic arithmetic, as well as a fundamental violation of conservation of energy. Basically, Lazar tossed together a “word salad”—language that sounds sciencey because the words are impressive to a layperson, but that mean nothing to anyone who understands them.
As far as secret projects go, in 1991, the Air Force declassified Project OXCART, and the complete development history of the A-12 and SR-71 spy planes became a matter of public record. We now know that after these programs, Area 51 was mainly the development base for the F-117A stealth fighter (project names HAVE BLUE and SENIOR TREND), as well as a test site for various new technologies. This shows us that Area 51 was quite busy on actual, earthly projects throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, and had scant time or resources for anything else.
Adding to the pile of official information about Area 51’s activities was the 2007 release of former Area 51 employees from their confidentiality agreements. They’re all now free to speak quite openly about all the work that was done there, and they often do. So far, nothing beyond the projects that we know were developed there—and that we’ve talked about in this chapter—has ever come up in conversation. (Unsurprisingly, the employees’ unofficial association, Roadrunners Internationale, does not count hoaxers like Bob Lazar among their membership.)
Despite all of this transparency about what happened at Area 51, some conspiracy theorists say that it’s still possible that advanced craft, possibly using alien technology, may still have been tested there. The problem is that this claim can’t be reconciled because both the aircraft and their budgets are eventually declassified, and the aircraft end up in museums. Plus, aviation writers and researchers are relentless. We have access to the entire global history of aviation, and although national test programs are littered with aircraft that never made it into production, very few of them differ substantially from conventional aircraft. Nothing using “field propulsion,” or anything else from the annals of science fiction, has ever materialized.
The technology currently being developed at Area 51 remains classified, of course, so we don’t know what it is. Industry speculation points to various unmanned aerial systems and possibly hypersonic vehicles. But we still have never found any reason to suspect anything unworldly.