Area 51 holds on to its secrets even as unidentified aerial phenomena debate goes mainstream

It is just after 7am and the winter sun has not long risen above Las Vegas. At a quiet corner of the airport, overlooked by a couple of the city’s famous resort hotels, a nondescript aircraft is being prepared.

It is unmarked. Its fuselage and tail are plain white, without any logo or company identification. A single red stripe runs down the side.

On a public road nearby a number of people look on. Some commercial tour operators bring customers to this spot at the perimeter of the airport, which has become a hotspot for those ranging from devotees of conspiracy theories to the mildly curious.

Many are convinced the aircraft on the tarmac viewed through a fence belongs to a mystery company known as Janet Airlines. They believe the white aircraft with the red stripe transports personnel from Las Vegas and other sites linked to the US defence industry to an even more mysterious facility deep in the Mojave desert. It is a place that until 2013 the government in Washington did not acknowledge existed – a location known as Area 51.

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About 150km north of Las Vegas there is indeed a secret US military facility with a storied history in US aviation.

It sits on a dry salt flat known as Groom Lake. Close by is the large Nellis bombing range used for training by the US military.

The name, Area 51, is believed to date back to a designation on maps drawn up by the US atomic energy commission many years ago.

After decades of denials, it was only in 2013 that US authorities finally acknowledged that a facility known as Area 51 was genuine. While public acknowledgment is one thing, controversy continues over what goes on there.

Historically the base was used to test new and cutting-edge aircraft. The famous U2 spy plane was put through its paces over the Nevada desert, as was its successor, the SR-71 Blackbird – which on its final flight in 1990 from California to the Smithsonian museum in Washington crossed the North American continent in little over an hour.

Highly classified stealth aircraft – which were designed first in the 1970s to be far less detectable on radar than conventional planes – were developed at Groom Lake.

Another base in the vicinity is believed to be the centre of US military drone operations worldwide. Pilots operate the uncrewed aircraft via satellite from, essentially, portacabins in the Nevada desert.

But whistleblowers and conspiracy theorists contend that something far more exotic has been going on in the remote American southwest. They maintain the US government has been secretly trying to reverse engineer non-human spacecraft that have been recovered after crashing on Earth.

The theory has been bandied about for decades and was popularised in films such as Independence Day. US authorities, however, strongly deny that they have been developing technology derived from off-world craft.

But something strange has, undoubtedly, been going on. People in the area have for years reported seeing strange lights and aircraft of unconventional shapes in the desert skies.

An obvious place to bring captured alien vehicles would be a location where skilled personnel were already working on futuristic next-generation technology. Is that what US authorities did?

Or was the whole story about aliens a ruse? Was it a cover orchestrated by the military or intelligence agencies to shield from the public, and America’s enemies, that the US had cracked the concept of making an aircraft virtually invisible from radar, or of flying planes of incredible speed or of highly irregular shapes and sizes?

Driving north from Las Vegas, the immediate sense of the landscape is its vastness and its remoteness. The whole area, including Las Vegas, is in a basin on the floor of the Mojave Desert. The city has exploded in size in recent decades and now nearly three million people live there.

But away from the neon lights, the slot machines and the glitzy hotels the land is rocky and arid. Hills and mountains ring the area. The main vegetation is creosote bushes, Yucca plants and Joshua trees, which can survive in the dry and inhospitable environment.

Out in the desert, beyond the large solar farm developed by the MGM entertainment group to power its casinos and hotels in Las Vegas, the population is sparse. It is the perfect place for a secret base; difficult and forbidding terrain in the middle of nowhere and far from prying eyes.

The guides warn that anyone clambering over or crawling under the yellow barrier will quickly draw on to themselves the ‘camo dudes’ in the white SUVs at the top of the hill

Satellite images taken a decade or so ago of the place known as Area 51 show a lengthy runway – estimated to extend to nearly 3.7km – as well as taxiways and associated buildings surrounded by mountains. However, the restricted area surrounding the base itself is enormous, estimated to be about 36,000 hectares (90,000 acres).

There are a number of entrances, all closely guarded. The Irish Times approached by one road that continued almost dead straight for nearly 22km, bordered by desert and, in part, a forest of Joshua trees.

Eventually, the road is blocked by a simple yellow barrier with some barbed wire fencing trailing off into the scrub. There are red warning signs advising that this is a US military installation and that the use of photography, firearms or drones is prohibited.

At first glance security arrangements seem limited. However, to the right of the barrier a dusty track runs up the hillside. Peeping over the brow of a nearby ridge, the outline of a white SUV can be seen. In the parlance of the tour guides, these are the “camo dudes” who provide perimeter security for the facility.

Beyond the yellow barrier, there are cameras on the side of the road.

The guides warn that anyone clambering over or crawling under the yellow barrier will quickly draw on to themselves the “camo dudes” in the white SUVs at the top of the hill.

The vastness of the area also provides the depth for more robust security arrangements farther down the road before any intruder can get near the runways or other facilities on the base.

Another entrance is close to the small town of Rachel. Here chain-link fences, poles with security cameras and small buildings resembling guard posts are visible. Again there are red warning signs. One says that anyone trespassing could face a $1,000 (€915) fine, a six-month jail term or both, “strictly enforced”.

Rachel is an old mining town. The mines are long closed and the current population can be counted in the dozens. There are a few houses but most people seem to live in mobile homes on patches of desert scrub land. Some families grow alfalfa or raise cattle.

The area has featured frequently in magazines and newspapers as well as on television and in films. Some local businesses have embraced the publicity. In Rachel, outside a single-storey restaurant, stand statues of grey and green figures. A sign welcomes “earthlings” to the Little A‘Le’ Inn.

***

Area 51 has been used by the US military and the CIA since the 1950s. But controversy surrounding the facility was turbocharged in 1989 when a Las Vegas television station ran an interview with a man called Bob Lazar.

Lazar claimed to be a physicist who had worked in a facility at Papoose Lake, a few kilometres to the southwest of Area 51. He said he had been involved in reverse engineering the propulsion system of alien spacecraft that the US government stored in hangars built into a hillside.

Lazar maintained that the spacecraft were powered by a substance called “element 115″. He is widely regarded as a conspiracy theorist and both his claims and purported scientific qualifications have been questioned by sceptics.

Element 115, or moscovium, is a man-made, superheavy element. It was not known at the time of Lazar’s interview and was discovered in Russia in 2003.

Mainstream scientists say it has no connection with Lazar’s claims as the atoms of element 115 would have decayed too quickly to be used as a fuel for spacecraft.

***

It is late July 2023 and the claims of Bob Lazar are essentially being re-aired for a new generation, not in a television studio but on Capitol Hill in Washington.

At the national security subcommittee of the House of Representatives’ oversight committee David Grusch, a former US intelligence official, tells politicians he is “absolutely” certain that the US government is in possession of what are now known as unidentified aerial (or anomalous) phenomena (UAP).

He says he led a defence department initiative to analyse UAP sightings, and has been informed the Pentagon has operated a programme going back decades to collect and rebuild crashed non-human aerial vehicles.

He says he has interviewed individuals who have recovered “non-human biologics” from crashed UAPs.

The Pentagon respond by saying it did not have any “verifiable information to substantiate claims that any programmes regarding the possession or reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial materials have existed in the past or exist currently”.

***

The congressional hearing in July came against a changing attitude in Washington.

From the fringes where the whole issue tended to be ridiculed, UAP have moved into the mainstream. A turning point appeared to be a landmark story published by the New York Times in December 2017. There were also reports by Politico and other outlets while the subject has also been covered by powerful media figures such as Tucker Carlson.

The New York Times revealed the US military had been running a secret programme for years to investigate unidentified objects in the sky. There was serious political muscle behind the initiative with funding largely pushed by the then Senate majority leader Harry Reid, it reported.

An accompanying article detailed how US navy pilots in 2004 encountered mystery objects – resembling large white Tic Tac sweets with no wings or exhausts. The objects appeared to move at incredible speed and without any visible means of propulsion, they said.

In April 2020 the Pentagon officially released three videos, which had previously been leaked – including to the New York Times in 2017. The grainy footage showed an object flying at high speed over the sea and another rotating against the wind. Pilots can be heard expressing bewilderment.

The revelations in December 2017 prompted a new surge of interest in UAP and led to politicians setting requirements for more information as conditions attached to defence spending legislation.

In June 2022 the space agency Nasa commissioned a study team to examine UAP. Last September, Nasa administrator Bill Nelson said the group “did not find any evidence that UAP have an extraterrestrial origin, but we don’t know what these UAP are”.

Controversy over what is flying in American skies arose again earlier this year when the US shot down a Chinese balloon which authorities maintained was spying, as well as two other undisclosed objects on subsequent days. At the White House Joe Biden’s spokeswoman said there was “no indication of aliens or extraterrestrial activity with these recent takedowns” after a top air-defence general had declined to rule out such a possibility.

US national security journalist Garrett M Graff is the author of a new book: UFO, the Inside Story of the US Government’s Search for Alien Life Here – and Out There.

He told The Irish Times that a combination of reports from credible news organisations and the declassification of military videos as well as comments by reputable politicians and believable witnesses had created the space for public discussion on the whole issue.

There had been a sea change in how people in Washington spoke about what was being seen in the skies, he said. “And you began to see sort of sustained congressional interest in the subject for the first time since the 1960s.

“And it has been bipartisan. At the Senate intelligence committee, both chairman, Democrat Mark Warner and vice-chair, Republican Marco Rubio, have been involved in pushing for UAP study and UAP transparency. And year after year, you have seen in legislation coming out of Congress, more UAP-related directions, reports, studies and the establishment of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office – to address sightings.”

The stream of revelations and reports had made clear there was “a real mystery here”, he said.

Graff added that congressional action had been backed up by comments “from people like Barack Obama and [former CIA chief] John Brennan who take this subject seriously.

“They have made clear in their comments that they don’t immediately dismiss this topic out of hand.”

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