staff called the Derry Memo the Atomic Energy Commission ruled: “All documents and correspondence relating to matters of policy and procedures, the given knowledge of which might compromise or cause embarrassment to the Atomic Energy Commission and/or its contractors,” should be classified secret or confidential.
Clinton’s staff also discovered a document that read: “… there are a large number of papers which do not violate security, but do cause considerable concern to the Atomic Energy Commission Insurance Branch.” In other words, the commission classified many documents because it did not want to get sued. A particular problem arose, the memo continued, “in the declassification of medical papers on human administration experiments done to date.” To find a way around the problem the commission consulted with its “Atomic Energy Commission Insurance Branch.” The conclusion was that if anything was going to be declassified it should first be “reworded or deleted” so as not to result in a legal claim.
The Internet is where conspiracy theorists share ideas, the great majority of which involve government plots. It is ironic that the Internet, originally called the DARPA Internet Program, was launched by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (originally called ARPA) in 1969 as a means for the military to communicate digitally during the Vietnam War. In 2011 there are an estimated 1.96 billion Internet users worldwide — almost one-third of the people on the planet — and the most popular conspiracy Web site based in America is AboveTopSecret.com. According to CEO Bill Irvine, the site sees five million visitors each month. AboveTopSecret.com has approximately 2.4 million pages of content, including 10.6 million individual posts. The Web site’s motto is Deny Ignorance, and its members say they are people who “rage against the mindless status-quo.”
Of 25,000 AboveTopSecret.com users polled in 2011, the second most popular discussion thread involves extraterrestrials and UFO cover-ups at Area 51. But the single most popular discussion thread at AboveTop Secret.com is something called the New World Order. According to Bill Irvine, this idea has gained momentum at an “astonishing rate” over the past two years. Irvine says it serves as a nexus conspiracy for many others, including those based at Area 51.
The premise of the New World Order conspiracy theory is that a powerful, secretive cabal of men are aspiring to take over the planet through a totalitarian, one-world government. Some believers of the New World Order call it the Fourth Reich because, they say, it will be similar to Germany’s Third Reich, including Nazi eugenics, militarism, and Orwellian monitoring of citizens’ private lives. As outlandish as this New World Order conspiracy may seem to non-conspiracy thinkers, it touches upon the original secret at Area 51—the real reason why the U.S. government cannot admit that Area 51 exists.
Chapter Twenty: From Camera Bays to Weapons Bays, the Air Force Takes Control
What happened at Area 51 during the 1980s? Most of the work remains classified and very little else is known. One of the most sensational near catastrophes to happen at Area 51 during this time has never before been revealed — notably not even hinted at in Area 51 legend or lore. It involved a mock helicopter attack at the guard station that separates the Nevada Test Site from Area 51. So serious was the situation, which included semiautomatic weapons and a nuclear bomb, that both the Pentagon and the White House stepped in.
One of the greatest potential threats to Area 51 in terms of an enemy attack would be from low-flying aircraft or helicopter. “A helicopter would be the aerial vehicle of choice,” says Barnes. “Whereas an airplane would be seen airborne long before it reached its target, a helicopter could be trucked in and then launched only a short distance from the restricted area. In that case, the helicopter would breach the security protection before defending aircraft from Area 51 could become airborne.” Which is why, to prepare against such threats, security guards like Richard Mingus would often participate in counterattack tests using large low-flying helium balloons as targets. “The balloons simulated helicopters,” Mingus explains. The tests used aging V-10 °Commando armored personnel carriers, complete with mounted machine guns, left over from the Vietnam War. With four-wheel drive, high clearance, and excellent mobility, the retired amphibious armored car would ferry Mingus and his team of heavily armed sensitive assignment specialists as far as they could get up the mountain range, until the terrain became too steep.
“We’d park the V-100, run the rest of the way up the mountain with machine guns, set up on top of the mountain, and fire at these fortyinch weather balloons. There’d always be a driver, a supervisor, and a loader on the SAS team. We each had an assignment. One guy kept score.” Scores were important because the stakes were so high. The Nevada Test Site was the single most prolific atomic bombing facility in the world. It had a three-decade- long history of impeccable security, as did Area 51. Which is what made the breach that Mingus witnessed so radical.
It was a scorching-hot day during the Ronald Reagan presidency, the kind of day at the test site when people knew not to touch metal surfaces outside or they’d wind up getting burned. Mingus believes it was 1982 but can’t say for sure, as the event was specifically kept off of his Department of Energy logbook. No longer a security guard, Mingus had been promoted to security operations coordinator for Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. At the time the near catastrophe occurred, the rank-and-file security entourage was escorting a nuclear device down Rainier Mesa Road. The bomb, one of eighteen exploded underground at the Nevada Test Site in 1982, was going to be exploded in an underground shaft. As the five-man security response team trailed behind the bomb transport vehicle (in an armored vehicle of its own), they made sure to keep a short distance behind the nuclear device, as was protocol. “There was a driver, a supervisor, a gunner operating the turret, a loader making sure the ammo feeds into the machine guns and doesn’t jam, and two riflemen,” Richard Mingus explains. There is always distance between the security team and the bomb: “One of the riflemen handles the tear gas and the other works the grenade launcher. You can shoot both weapons from either the shoulder or the hip. They’ll hit a target fifty or seventy-five yards away because if you find yourself under attack and having to shoot, you want distance. You don’t want the tear gas coming back and getting you in the nose.”
After the security response team and the nuclear bomb arrived at that day’s ground zero, a team of engineers and crane operators began the process of getting the weapon safely and securely inside an approximately eight-hundred-foot-deep hole that had been drilled into the desert floor and would house the bomb. Inserting a live nuclear weapon into a narrow, five-foot-diameter shaft required extraordinary precision by a single engineer operating a heavy metal crane. There was no room for error. The crane worked in hundred-foot increments, which in test site-speak were called picks. Only after the second pick was reached, meaning the bomb was two hundred feet down, was the security eased up. Then and only then would two of the men from the response team be released. Until that moment, the bomb was considered unsecured.
Richard Mingus had been part of dozens of ground zero teams over the past quarter of a century but on this particular morning circa 1982 Mingus was coordinating security operations for Livermore from inside a building called the control point, which was located in Area 6, ten miles from the bomb. The nuclear bomb was just about to reach the second pick when chaos entered the scene.
“I was sitting at my desk at the control point when I got the call,” Mingus says. “Dick Stock, the device systems engineer supervising the shot at ground zero, says over the phone, ‘We’re under attack over at the device assembly building!’” In the 1980s, the device assembly building was the place where the bomb components were married with the nuclear material. Because there were several nuclear weapons tests scheduled for that same week, Mingus knew there were likely additional nuclear weapons in the process of being put together at the device assembly building, in Area 27, which Mingus had good reason to believe was now under attack. “Dick Stock said he heard the information coming over the radios that the guys on the security response team were carrying” on their belts. Now it was up to Mingus to make the call about what to do next.
In the twenty-six years he had been employed at the test site, Richard Mingus had worked his way up from security guard to Livermore’s operations coordinator. He was an American success story. After his father died in 1941, Mingus dropped out of high school to work the coal mines. Eventually he went back to school, got a diploma, and joined the Air Force to serve in the Korean War. At the test site, Mingus had paid his dues. For years he stood guard over classified projects in the desert, through scorching-hot summers and cold winters, all the while guarding nuclear bombs and lethal plutoniumdispersal tests. By the mid-1960s, Mingus had saved enough overtime pay to buy a home for his family, which now included the young son he and Gloria had always dreamed about. By the mid- 1970s, Mingus had enough money to purchase a second home, a hunting cabin in the woods. By the early 1980s, he had been promoted so many times, he qualified for GS-12, which in federal service hierarchy is only three rungs
