Facts About Area 51

Area 51 book is out of bounds

Out in a remote expanse of the Nevada desert, a few hours' drive from Las Vegas, lies a vast area of government-owned restricted land where the military and the CIA have conducted a lot of very secret tests since the end of World War II. Now, Annie Jacobsen, a contributing editor at the Los Angeles Times Magazine, has written "Area 51," a deeply flawed, amateurish and at times downright nutty book about it.

First, a little bit of geeky pedantry is called for: "Area 51" is a misleading label. It is a long-disused designation on a specific government agency map. When people hear the term, they commonly associate it with flying saucers or classified aircraft. The latter were indeed tested at a facility at Groom Lake, in the northeastern corner of the map location named "Area 51." Thus, when the government denies that it is doing anything at "Area 51," it's not a lie, because no government has used that map designation for decades.

That area of the desert was used for above and below-ground atomic tests. Groom Lake is a dry lakebed, which made it ideal for aircraft testing back when airplanes often had to make emergency landings on any available flat space. The CIA set up shop there in the mid-1950s because of the lakebed and the area's remoteness from prying eyes. The agency tested the U-2 spy plane there, and later the A-12 OXCART, the predecessor to the much more famous SR-71 Blackbird. Jacobsen recounts a lot of this history, often getting the facts wrong.

Many people, apparently including book reviewers who should know better, will look at her 80-plus pages of notes and assume that this is a "well-researched" book. But simply citing a lot of sources is not a guarantee that the author has used the right ones, or understood them. Many claims in the book are not sourced, and there is ample evidence that Jacobsen missed many key sources.

For example, she never cites Chris Pocock's authoritative 2005 history of the U-2 spy plane with its extensive discussion of Groom Lake, and misses a number of other important sources on classified aircraft development. She claims that former CIA official Albert Wheelon "has given only a few interviews," and seems unaware that he has appeared in a number of television documentaries and spoken to numerous intelligence historians over the years, including me.

A fact-checker could go through "Area 51" and find myriad errors. One common problem is the author's mixing up of dates and organization names. For instance, she claims that representatives of one organization, the National Photographic Interpretation Center, were briefed about the existence of the Groom Lake facility several years before that organization even existed. She claims that the U-2 spy plane was "finally declassified" in 1998, when it had appeared in air shows, one had been hanging in the Smithsonian for nearly two decades, and President Eisenhower had spoken about the aircraft on national television in 1960.

AREA 51: COLD RAW FACTS « Clyde Lewis's Ground Zero Media

The government has finally declassified the OXCART program at Area 51. Operation Oxcart was a secret operation to develop a supersonic jet that could reach speeds of Mach 3. This was eventually known as the SR-71 blackbird project. Those who play in the world of conspiracy theory already had reported this for many years. The novelty here is that the mainstream media has given the impression that this was the only program that Area 51 was involved in and that anything else “speculative” about reversed alien technology can be put to rest. New ideas are now emerging about what cover stories, and disinformation about UFO’s and aliens to cover up covert testing of special craft that were used for our protection in the paranoid era of the cold war.

What we are getting are table scraps from a project that was well known for years. Not that the scraps are not satisfying, they just create an even bigger appetite for more information, we get the bones and wait for raw meat. Area 51 is a huge onion with layer upon layer that will be revealed when it is necessary. OXCART is finally becoming an official program and the details are being well controlled and all other speculation or books released before the official declassification can all be discounted now right?

Not quite.

My old friend Keith called me to say that I needed to tune into NPR because there was about to be an announcement about Area 51, where a Los Angeles Times Reporter, Annie Jacobsen was about to reveal secrets never revealed about the mysterious air base in Tonopah Nevada. I told him to calm down and that I was going to try and get to her sources so that I can interview them. I had the book in the studio and everything Annie had to say seemed to be wrapped in a government memo that stated that there needed to be a half truth about Russian saucers and Joseph Mengele. While the possibility of the story being true has captured the imaginations of many, I really couldn’t help but say “been there done that—and still no full disclosure.”

Nobody is going to find out about the entire story unless the government wants us to know.

After 16 years reporting the UFO phenomena it has always been difficult to get anyone to talk about anything that goes on at Area 51. It has always been the mantra of the true believers that aliens or even alien space craft are there. The thing is it might not be that way now, and with the cold war a long memory it has now become okay to declassify some of what happened there and there has been all sorts of new so called information that still wraps itself around theories that may or may not be disinformation. However, I side with the idea that half truths and table scraps rather than raw facts are being dropped in our laps about Area 51.

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