Force pilots at nearby Nellis Air Force Base know never to enter it. Distinctly visible at the very center of Area 51’s Box sits a near-perfect six-mile-diameter endorheic basin, also known as a dry lake. It was the lake bed itself that originally appealed to the CIA; for decades it had doubled as a natural runway for Area 51’s secret spy planes.
Almost everything visible on approach to Area 51 from the air is restricted government land. There are no public highways, no shopping malls, no twentieth-century urban sprawl. Where the land is hilly, Joshua trees and yucca plants grow, their long spiky leaves extended skyward like swords. Where the land is flat, it is barren and bald. Except for creosote bushes and tumbleweed, very little grows out here on the desert floor. The physical base — its hangars, runways, dormitories, and towers — begins at the southernmost tip of Groom’s dry lake. The structures spread out in rows, heading south down the Emigrant Valley floor. The hangars’ metal rooftops catch the sunlight and reflect up as the Janet airplane enters the Box. A huge antenna tower rises up from the desert floor. The power plant’s cooling tower comes into view, as do the antennas on the radio-shop roof, located at the end of one of the two, perpendicular taxiways. Radar antennas spin. One dish is sixty feet in diameter and always faces the sky; its beams are so powerful they would instantly cook the internal organs of any living thing. The Quick Kill system, designed by Raytheon to detect incoming missile signals, sits at the edge of the dry lake bed not far from the famous pylon featured in Lockheed publicity photos but never officially identified as located at Area 51. Insiders call the pylon “the pole”—it’s where the radar cross section on prototype stealth aircraft is measured. State-of-the- art, million-dollar black aircraft are turned upside down and hoisted aloft on this pole, making each one look tiny and insignificant in the massive Groom Lake expanse, like a bug on a pin in a viewing case.
As a passenger on the Janet 737 gets closer, it becomes easier for the eye to judge distance. Groom Mountain reveals itself as a massive summit that reaches 9,348 feet. It towers over the base at its northernmost end and is rife with Area 51 history and lore. Countless Area 51 commanding officers have spent weekends on the mountain hunting deer. Hidden inside its craggy lower peaks are two old lead and silver mines named Black Metal and Sheehan Mine. In the 1950s, one ancient miner hung on to his federal mining rights with such ferocity that the government ended up giving him a security clearance and briefing him on Area 51 activities rather than continuing to fight to remove him. The miner kept the secrecy oath and took Area 51’s early secrets with him to the grave.
At the southernmost end of the base sits a gravel pit and concretemixing facilities that are used to construct temporary buildings that need to go up quick. Against the sloping hills to the west sit the old fuel-storage tanks that once housed JP-7 jet fuel, specially designed for CIA spy planes that needed to withstand temperature fluctuations from ?90 degrees to 285 degrees Fahrenheit. To the south, on a plateau of its own, is the weapons assembly and storage facility. This is recognizable from the air by a tall ring of mounded dirt meant to deflect blasts in the event of an accident. Behind the weapons depot, a single-lane dirt road runs up over the top of the hill and dumps back down into the Nevada Test Site next door, at Gate 800 (sometimes called Gate 700). Old-timers from the U-2 spy plane days called this access point Gate 385, originally the only way in to Area 51 if you were not arriving by air. On the Area 51 side of the gate, the shipping and receiving building can be found. In the height of the nuclear testing days, the 1950s and 1960s, trucks from the Atomic Energy Commission motor pool spent hours in the parking lot here while their appropriately cleared drivers enjoyed Area 51’s legendary gourmet chow.
In December of 1988, had Lazar been looking out the Janet 737 aircraft window just before landing, off to the northwest he would have seen EG&G radar sites dotting the valley floor in a diagonal line. Part of the Air Force’s foreign technology division, which began in 1968, these radar sites include coveted Soviet radar systems acquired from Eastern-bloc countries and captured during Middle East wars. Also to the north lies Slater Lake, named after Commander Slater and dug by contractors during the Vietnam War. Around the lake’s sloped banks are trees unusual for the area: tall and leafy, looking as if they belong in Europe or on the East Coast. This is the only nonindigenous plant life in all of Area 51. Move ahead to December of 1998, and five miles beyond Slater Lake, across the flat, dry valley floor, an airplane passenger would have seen a crew of men dressed in HAZMAT suits busily removing the top six inches of soil from a 269-acre parcel contaminated with plutonium. Set inside Area 51’s airspace but in a quadrant of its own, this sector was designated Area 13. What the men did was known to only a select few. Like all things at Area 51, if a person didn’t have a need-to-know, he knew not to ask.
The airplane carrying Lazar would likely have landed on the easternmost runway and then taxied up to the Janet terminal, near the security building. Lazar and his supervisor, Dennis Mariani, would have gone through security there. According to Lazar, he was taken to a cafeteria on the base. When a bus pulled up, he and Mariani climbed aboard. Lazar said he could not see exactly where he was taken because the curtains on the bus windows were drawn. If Lazar had been able to look outside he would have seen the green grass of the Area 51 baseball field, where, beginning in the mid-1960s, during the bonanza of underground nuclear testing, Area 51 workers battled Nevada Test Site workers at weekly softball games. Lazar’s bus would have also driven past the outdoor tennis courts, where Dr. Albert Wheelon, the former Mayor of Area 51, loved to play tennis matches at midnight. Lazar would have passed the swimming pool where CIA project pilots trained for ocean bailouts by jumping into the pool wearing their high-altitude flight suits. Lazar would have passed the Area 51 bar, called Sam’s Place, built by and named after the great Area 51 navigator Sam Pizzo and in which a photograph of a nearly naked Sophia Loren used to drive men wild.
In December of 1988, Lazar had no idea that he was stepping into a deep, textured, and totally secret history. He couldn’t have known it because the men described above wouldn’t tell their stories for another twenty years, not until their CIA project was declassified and they spoke on the record for this book. But Lazar’s arrival at Area 51 made its own kind of history, albeit in a radical and controversial way. In making Area 51 public, as he subsequently did, Lazar transformed the place from a clandestine research, development, and test-flight facility into a national enigma. From the moment Lazar appeared on Eyewitness News in Las Vegas making utterly shocking allegations, the public’s fascination with Area 51, already percolating for decades, took on a life of its own. Movies, television shows, record albums, and video games would spring forth, all paying homage to a secret base that no outsider could ever visit.
According to Lazar, that first day he was at Area 51 he was driven on a bumpy dirt road for approximately twenty or thirty minutes before arriving at a mysterious complex of hangars built into the side of a mountain somewhere on the outskirts of Groom Lake. There, at an outpost facility Lazar says was called S-4, he was processed through a security system far more intense than the one he’d been subjected to just a little earlier, at Area 51’s primary base. He signed one document allowing his home telephone to be monitored and another that waived his constitutional rights. Then he was shown a flying saucer and told it would be his job to reverse engineer its antigravity propulsion system. All told, there were nine saucers at S-4, Lazar says. He says he was given a manual that explained that the flying saucers had come from another planet. Lazar also said he was shown drawings of beings that looked like aliens — the pilots, he inferred, of these outer-space crafts.
According to Lazar, over the following winter, he worked at S-4, mostly during the night, for a total of approximately ten days. The work was intense but sporadic, which frustrated him. Sometimes he worked only one night a week. He longed for more. He never told anyone about what he was doing at S-4, not even his wife, Tracy, or his best friend, Gene Huff. One night in early March of 1989, Lazar was being escorted down a hallway inside S-4 by two armed guards when he was ordered to keep his eyes forward. Instead, curiosity seized Bob Lazar. He glanced sideways, through a small, nine-by-nine-inch window, and for a brief moment, he says, he saw inside an unmarked room. He thought he saw a small, gray alien with a large head standing between two men dressed in white coats. When he tried to get a better look, he was pushed by a guard who told him to keep his eyes forward and down.
For Lazar, it was a turning point. Something shifted in him and he felt he could no longer bear the secret of the flying saucers or what was maybe an alien but “could have been a million things.” Like the tragic literary figure Faust, Lazar had yearned for secret knowledge, information that other men did not possess. He got that at S-4. But unlike Faust, Bob Lazar did not hold up his end of the bargain. Instead, Lazar felt compelled to share what he had learned with his wife and his friend, meaning he broke his Area 51 secrecy oath. Lazar knew the schedule for the flying saucer test flights being conducted out at Groom Lake and he suggested to his wife, Tracy, his friend Gene Huff, and another friend named John Lear — a committed ufologist and the son of the man who invented the Learjet — that they come along with him and see for themselves.
The group made a trip down Highway 375 into the mountains behind Groom Lake. With them they brought high-powered binoculars and a video camera. They waited. Sure enough, they said, the activity began. Lazar’s wife and friends saw what appeared to be a brightly lit saucer rise up from above the mountains that hid the Area 51 base from view. They watched it hover and land. The following Wednesday they returned to the site. Then they
