Below is a portion of the book:
AREA 51
An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret
Military Base
ANNIE JACOBSEN
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 575-
square-mile airspace had long been nicknamed the Box, and Air
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 made a third visit, on April 5, 1989
—this time down a long road leading into the base called Groom Lake
Road—which ended in fiasco. The trespassers were discovered by
Area 51 security guards, detained, and required to show ID. They
answered questions for the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Department and
were let go.
The following day, Lazar reported to work at the EG&G building at
McCarran Airport. He was met by Dennis Mariani, who informed Lazar
that he would not be going out to Groom Lake as planned. Instead,
Lazar was driven to Indian Springs Air Force Base. The guard who
had caught him the night before was helicoptered in from the Area 51
perimeter to confirm that Bob Lazar was one of the four people found
snooping in the woods the night before. Lazar was told that he was no
longer an employee of EG&G and if he ever went anywhere near
Groom Lake again, alone or with friends, he would be arrested for
espionage.
During his questioning at Indian Springs, he was allegedly given
transcripts of his wife’s telephone conversations, which made clear to
Lazar that his wife was having an affair. Lazar became convinced he
was being followed by government agents. Someone shot out his tire
when he was driving to the airport, he said. Fearing for his life, he
decided to go public with his story and contacted Eyewitness News
anchor George Knapp. Lazar’s TV appearance in November of 1989
broke the station’s record for viewers, but the original audience was
limited to locals. It took some months for Lazar’s story to go global.
The man responsible for that happening was a Japanese American
mortician living in Los Angeles named Norio Hayakawa.
Decades later, Norio Hayakawa still recalls the moment he first
heard Lazar on the radio. “It was late at night,” Hayakawa explains. “I
was working in the mortuary and listening to talk radio. KVEG out of
Las Vegas, ‘The Happening Show,’ with host Billy Goodman.
Remember, this was in early 1990, long before Art Bell and George
Noory were doing ‘Coast to Coast,’” Hayakawa recalls. “I heard Bob
Lazar telling his story about S-Four and I became intrigued.” As
Hayakawa toiled away at the Fukui Mortuary in Little Tokyo, he listened
to Bob Lazar talk about flying saucers. Having no television
experience, Hayakawa contacted a Japanese magazine called Mu,
renowned for its popular stories about UFOs. “Mu got in touch with me
right away and said they were interested. And that Nippon TV was
interested too.” In a matter of weeks, Japan’s leading TV station had
dispatched an eight-man crew from Tokyo to Los Angeles. Hayakawa
took them out to Las Vegas, where he’d arranged for an interview with
Bob Lazar. That was in February of 1990.
“We went on a Wednesday because that was the day we’d heard
on the radio they did flying saucer tests,” Hayakawa recalls. “We
interviewed Lazar for three or four hours. He was a strange person. He
had bodyguards with him in his house who followed him around
everywhere he went. But we were satisfied with the interview. We
decided to try and film some of the saucer activity at Area 51.”
Hayakawa asked Lazar if he would take them to the lookout point on
Tikaboo Mountain off Highway 375. Lazar declined but told them
exactly where to go and at what time. “We went to the place and set up
our equipment. Lo and behold, just after sundown, a bright orangeish
light came rising up off the land near Groom Lake. We were filming. It
came up and made a fast directional change. This happened three
times. We couldn’t believe it,” Hayakawa says. At the time, he was
convinced that what he saw was a flying saucer—just like Lazar had
said. Hayakawa showed the footage to the magazine’s bosses in
Japan, who were thrilled. The TV station had paid Lazar a little over
five thousand dollars for a two-hour segment about his experience at
Area 51. Part of the deal was that Lazar was going to fly to Tokyo with
Norio Hayakawa to do a fifteen-minute interview there. Instead, just a
few days before the show, Lazar called the director of Nippon TV and
said federal agents were preventing him from leaving the country.
Lazar agreed to appear on the show via telephone and answered
questions from telephone callers instead. “The program aired in
Japan’s golden hour,” Hayakawa says, “prime time.” Thirty million
Japanese viewers tuned in. “The program introduced Japan to Area
51.”
As Lazar’s Area 51 story became known around the world, Bob
Lazar the person was scrutinized by a voracious press. Every detail of
his flawed background was aired as dirty laundry for the public to
dissect. It appeared he’d lied about where he went to school. Lazar
said he had a degree from MIT, but the university says it had no record
of him. In Las Vegas, Lazar was arrested on a pandering charge. It
didn’t take long for him to disappear from the public eye. But Bob
Lazar never changed his story about what he saw at Area 51’s S-4.
Had Lazar witnessed evidence of aliens and alien technology? Was
his discrediting part of a government plot to silence him? Or was he a
fabricator, a loose cannon who perceived what he saw as an
opportunity for money and fame? He sold the film rights to his story, to
New Line Cinema, in 1993. Lazar took two lie detector tests, and both
gave inconclusive results. The person administrating the test said it
appeared that Lazar believed what he was saying was true.
“The odd part,” says Norio Hayakawa, “is how in the years after
Lazar, the story of Area 51 merged with the story of Roswell. If you stop
anyone on the street and you ask them what they know about Area 51
they say aliens.”
Or they say Roswell.
.jpg)
