Chapter One: The Riddle of Area 51
Area 51 is a riddle. Very few people comprehend what goes on there, and millions want to know. To many, Area 51 represents the Shangri-la of advanced espionage and war fighting systems. To others it is the underworld of aliens and captured UFOs. The truth is that America’s most famous secret federal facility was set up in order to advance military science and technology faster and further than any other foreign power’s in the world. Why it is hidden from the world in southern Nevada’s high desert within a ring of mountain ranges is the nexus of the riddle of Area 51.
To enter Area 51 requires a top secret security clearance and an invitation from the uppermost echelons of U.S. military or intelligenceagency elite. The secrecy oath that is taken by every individual who visits the base before arriving there is both sacred and legally binding. For those without an invitation, to get even the slimmest glimpse of Area 51 requires extraordinary commitment, including a ten-hour block of time, a four-wheel-drive vehicle, and a pair of good hiking boots. Through binoculars, from the top of a mountain called Tikaboo Peak, located twenty-six miles east of Area 51, one can, on occasion, see a flicker of activity. Daylight hours are bad for viewing because there is too much atmospheric heat distortion coming off the desert floor to differentiate airplane hangars from sand. Nighttime is the best time to witness the advanced technology that defines Area 51. Historically, it has been under the cover of darkness that secret airplanes and drones are flight-tested before they are sent off on missions around the world. If you stand on Tikaboo Peak in the dead of night and look out across the darkened valley for hours, suddenly, the Area 51 runway lights may flash on. An aircraft slides out from inside a hangar and rolls up to its temporarily illuminated runway. After a brief moment, it takes off, but by the time the wheels leave the ground, the lights have cut out and the valley has been plunged back into darkness. This is the black world.
According to most members of the black world who are familiar with the history of Area 51, the base opened its doors in 1955 after two CIA officers, Richard Bissell and Herbert Miller, chose the place to be the test facility for the Agency’s first spy plane, the U-2. Part of Area 51’s secret history is that the so-called Area 51 zone had been in existence for four years by the time the CIA identified it as a perfect clandestine test facility. Never before disclosed is the fact that Area 51’s first customer was not the CIA but the Atomic Energy Commission. Beginning in 1951, the Atomic Energy Commission used its parallel system of secret-keeping to conduct radical and controversial research, development, and engineering not just on aircraft but also on pilot-related projects — entirely without oversight or ethical controls.
That the Atomic Energy Commission was not an agency that characteristically had any manner of jurisdiction over aircraft and pilot projects (their business was nuclear bombs and atomic energy) speaks to the shadowy, shell-game aspect of black-world operations at Area 51. If you move a clandestine, highly controversial project into a classified agency that does not logically have anything to do with such a program, the chances of anyone looking for it there are slim. For more than sixty years, no one has thought of looking at the Atomic Energy Commission to solve the riddle of Area 51.
In 1955, when the Central Intelligence Agency arrived at Area 51, its men brought with them the U.S. Air Force as a partner in the nation’s first peacetime aerial espionage program. Several other key organizations had a vested interest in the spy plane project and were therefore briefed on Area 51’s existence and knew that the CIA and Air Force were working in partnership there. Agencies included NACA — the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NASA’s forerunner) — and the Navy, both of which provided cover stories to explain airplanes flying in and out of a military base that didn’t officially exist. The National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC), the agency that would interpret the photographs the U-2 collected on spy missions abroad, was also informed about the area. From 1955 until the late 1980s, these federal agencies as well as several other clandestine government organizations born in the interim — including the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), the National Security Agency (NSA), and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) — all worked together behind a barrier of secrecy on Area 51 programs. But very few individuals outside of an elite group of federal employees and black-world contractors with top secret clearances had confirmation that the secret base really was there until November of 1989. That is when a soft-spoken, bespectacled, thirty-year-old native Floridian named Robert Scott Lazar appeared on Eyewitness News in Las Vegas with an investigative reporter named George Knapp and revealed Area 51 to the world. Out of the tens of thousands of people who had worked at Area 51 over the years, Lazar was the only individual who broke the oath of silence in such a public way. Whether one worked as a scientist or a security guard, an engineer or an engine cleaner, serving at Area 51 was both an honor and a privilege. The secrecy oath was sacred, and the veiled threats of incarceration no doubt helped people keep it. With Bob Lazar, more than four decades of Area 51’s secrecy came to a dramatic end.
That Bob Lazar wound up at Area 51 owing to a job referral by the Hungarian-born nuclear physicist Dr. Edward Teller is perfectly ironic. Teller coinvented the world’s most powerful weapon of mass destruction, the thermonuclear bomb, and tested many incarnations of his diabolical creation just a few miles over the hill from Area 51, in the numbered sectors that make up the Nevada Test Site. The test site is America’s only domestic atomic- bomb range and is Area 51’s working partner. Area 12, Area 19, and Area 20, inside the test site’s legal boundaries, are just some of the parcels of land that bear Dr. Teller’s handprint: charred earth, atomic craters, underground tunnels contaminated with plutonium.* Area 51 sits just outside.
Bob Lazar first met Edward Teller in Los Alamos, New Mexico, in June of 1982, when Lazar only twenty-three years old. Lazar was working at the Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory in radioactive-particle detection as a contractor for the Kirk-Mayer Corporation when he arrived early for a lecture Teller was giving in the lab’s auditorium. Before the lecture, Lazar spotted Teller reading the Los Alamos Monitor, where, as coincidence would have it, there was a page-1 story featuring Bob Lazar and his new invention, the jet car. Lazar seized the opportunity. “That’s me you’re reading about,” he famously told Teller as a means of engaging him in conversation. Here was an ambitious young scientist reaching out to the jaded, glutted grandfather of mass destruction. In hindsight it makes perfect sense that the ultimate consequences of this moment were not beneficent for Lazar.
Six years later, Lazar’s life had reached an unexpected low. He’d been fired from his job at Los Alamos. Terrible financial problems set in. He and his wife, Carol Strong, who was thirteen years his senior, moved to Las Vegas and opened up a photo-processing shop. The marriage fell apart. Lazar remarried a woman named Tracy Murk, who’d worked as a clerk for the Lazars. Two days after Bob Lazar’s wedding to Tracy, his first wife, Carol, committed suicide by inhaling carbon monoxide in a shuttered garage. Lazar declared bankruptcy and sought advanced engineering work. He reached out to everyone he could think of, including Dr. Edward Teller, who was now spearheading President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, or Star Wars. In 1988, Teller found Lazar a job.
This job was far from any old advanced engineering job. Edward Teller had recommended Bob Lazar to the most powerful defenseindustry contractor at Area 51, a company called EG&G. Among the thousands of top secret and Q-cleared contractors who have worked on classified and black projects at the Nevada Test Site and Area 51, none has had as much power and access, or as little oversight, as EG&G. On Teller’s instruction, Lazar called a telephone number. A person at the other end of the line told him to go to McCarran Airport, in downtown Las Vegas, on a specific date in December — to the EG&G building there. Lazar was told he would be flown by private aircraft to Groom Lake. He was excited and followed orders. Inside the EG&G building, he was introduced to a man called Dennis Mariani who would soon become his supervisor. The two men went to the south end of the airport and into a secure hangar ringed by security fences and guarded by men with guns. There, EG&G ran a fleet of 737 airplanes that flew back and forth to Groom Lake — and still do. Because they flew with the call sign Janet, this private Area 51 commuter fleet had become known as Janet Airlines. Lazar and his supervisor passed through security and boarded a white aircraft with no markings or logo, just a long red stripe running the length of the airplane.
Fly to Area 51 on a northerly course from Las Vegas and you’ll see a Nevada landscape that is classic American Southwest: snowcapped mountains, rolling hills, and desert valley floors. Bob Lazar would not have seen any of this on his approach to Groom Lake because the window curtains on his Janet Airlines flight would have been drawn— they always are when newcomers arrive. The airspace directly over Area 51 has been restricted since the mid-1950s, which means no one peers down onto Area 51 without authorization except satellites circling the globe in outer space. By the time Lazar arrived, the 575square-mile airspace had long been nicknamed the Box, and Air
