It was a nothing place, really.
A small, flat valley in the high, dry Nevada desert, nearly a mile above sea level. A place of rattlesnakes and blowing sand.
When rare rains did fall, they had no place to flow to. The water drained intermittently into a central, brackish low spot, and evaporated to nothingness under the relentless sun, leaving a hard, baked, flat pan of accumulated sand and salt.
Without good water, the high valley was ignored as a settling place by the First Peoples, the Newe. Just one ridgeline to the east, the Pahranagat River slowly flowed towards the south, providing a more hospitable place to live. The Newe would only travel around the high, salty lakebed on hunting expeditions, pursuing pronghorn antelope and, if they were lucky, bighorn sheep or even elk, in the surrounding ridges.
The first Europeans to spend time there were mining prospectors from the English Groome Lead Mines company, and they were the ones who ironically named the barren salt flat “Groom Lake.” They sat in their gritty tent and raised unclean whisky glasses to the time-honored place-naming tradition that had given the world Greenland and the Cape of Good Hope—titles to justify being there, far from home, and to lure the unknowing.
Not much lived close to Groom Lake itself. Anything that survived had to know how to endure blistering summers, frigid winters and perpetual drought. Creosote bushes, with their tiny, waxy, water-stingy leaves and long roots, dotted the gray-brown sand. Each bush was defended by a small horned lizard, fiercely protecting its shade. Fist-sized spadefoot toads buried themselves many feet deep in the dirt after each rain, surviving the endless dryness by absorbing the soil’s water into their salty blood, directly through their skin.
Not an easy place. A nothing place. But a good place for keeping secrets.
The Central Intelligence Agency had many secrets to keep, some of them too big to easily hide. In the Cold War world of nuclear escalation, the agency had sent their officers across America, looking for good locations for clandestine activities.
On April 12, 1955, eight years after the CIA was created and six years to the day before Soviet astronaut Yuri Gagarin was the first to fly in space, CIA officer Richard Bissell, looking down from a small, V-tailed Beech Bonanza scouting plane, spotted Groom Lake. He had the pilot note the exact location and then circle it a few times as he stared out the side window, taking multiple pictures with his Kodak Pony 35-millimeter camera. He could imagine the dry lakebed as a natural runway, a place for covert experimentation and tests, far from prying eyes. He noted the surrounding hills, which further blocked the view.
“Perfect,” he said, the word drowned out in the noisy cockpit. He’d needed a home for a project he had to run, code-named AQUATONE. Now to make it happen.
The Atomic Energy Commission already controlled 1,400 square miles of the remote Nevada desert and it had been testing nuclear bombs there for the past four years. Groom Lake was situated just to the northeast of the AEC’s Nevada Proving Grounds, and Richard Bissell, photos in hand, requested the AEC acquire the extra land, an innocent-looking empty rectangle grafted onto the AEC’s territory like an afterthought. The national importance of the secret operation that Bissell was directing persuaded them. With a stroke of a pen, the 38,400 acres were his.
Bissell’s Project AQUATONE had one purpose: to develop a new airplane. One that could fly higher than surface-to-air missiles and cover long distances. A plane that could take detailed photos of secret installations deep inside Cold War enemy territory. A plane like no other.
Richard M. Bissell Jr., PhD, was in charge of the U-2. And now he had Groom Lake.
Money was plentiful, so progress was swift. Bissell gave an immediate green light for bulldozers to start carving access roads across the desert, connecting Groom Lake to Nevada State Route 25, and he partnered with the US Air Force to help build the secret base and test the airplanes. Cargo aircraft landed daily on the natural lakebed, and trucks arrived continuously on the new roads. Within three months they had dug wells, paved a runway, installed fuel storage tanks, and built three hangars, a control tower, trailer housing for test personnel and a mess hall. In true Air Force fashion, they even built a movie theater and a volleyball court, and dug a small swimming pool. Groom Lake was up and running as the U-2 test site.
But the CIA and the USAF didn’t actually build airplanes themselves; that was the job of private companies. Richard Bissell had contracted Lockheed, based in Burbank, California, to build the U-2. Its Skunk Works was renowned for building the P-38 Lightning during the war and the revolutionary P-80 Shooting Star jet-powered fighter, both unique designs completed in record time. The engineers of the Lockheed Skunk Works, under the leadership of Kelly Johnson, not only knew how to work fast, they knew how to keep a secret.
Yet even with the temptation of movies, swimming and volleyball, not many Lockheed employees wanted to move from California to Groom Lake. Kelly Johnson, subconsciously echoing the optimistic English prospectors of a hundred years previously, started calling it Paradise Ranch. It was neither, but it stuck, and quickly got shortened to “the Ranch.” And for the more poetically minded and sardonic temporary residents, sometimes even Dreamland.
Such names worked for Lockheed, but they weren’t suitable for federal government officialdom. The CIA and the USAF needed a name that was more serious, one that could be easily referenced in government documents yet wouldn’t reveal the secret nature of the project, or even the location. Bissell and his team looked at what the AEC had used for its Proving Grounds, and liked the innocuous idea of simply calling the subdivided rectangles an “Area” along with a number, starting with Area 1. They especially liked that the AEC had left many numbers out to amplify the vagueness and obfuscation. They noted that the highest number the AEC had used was for Area 30, and that Groom Lake was next to Area 15. They reversed the numbers, leaving more room for confusion.
CIA officer Richard Bissell created Area 51.
Groom Lake. Paradise Ranch. Dreamland.
A nothing place, indeed.