Blue Alien Network | The Hive

Stealth jets? Hypersonic bombers? What’s really being developed at the military’s most famous classified base?

Bill Sweetman

On a trip to las vegas in 2004, observing from my east-facing hotel room in the pyramidal Luxor Hotel at daybreak, I watched a fleet of six unmarked 737s make commuter flights to nowhere. These aircraft depart every weekday morning from a tidy, anonymous terminal on the western side of McCarran International Airport. A long line of cars pours into a 1,600-spot parking lot as the jets pull away from the terminal, taxi to the runways, and head out into the desert sky. At the end of the day, the shuttle flights return and the lot empties. The passengers go home and tell their families nothing about what happened at work that day.

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Peter W. Merlin

The following is a general timeline of events at the Groom Lake, Nevada, test facility. It covers half a century of history involving a unique national asset.

Early 1955

A secure test site was needed for the Central Intelligence Agency’s Project AQUATONE (Lockheed U-2). U-2 designer Clarence L. “Kelly” Johnson sent project pilot Tony LeVier and Lockheed Skunk Works chief foreman Dorsey Kammerer on a two-week survey mission to scout locations for a new base in an unmarked Beechcraft V-35 Bonanza.

Richard M. Bissell Jr., “special assistant” to CIA director Allen Dulles, and director of the AQUATONE program reviewed fifty potential sites with his Air Force liaison, Col. Osmond J. “Ozzie” Ritland. None of the sites seemed to meet the stringent security requirements of the program. They rejected Johnson’s proposed Site I (possibly Mud Lake) because it was too close to populated areas. Ritland, however, recalled “a little X-shaped field” just off the eastern side of Groom Dry Lake, about 100 miles north of Las Vegas, Nevada, just outside the Atomic Energy Commission’s (AEC) nuclear proving ground at Yucca Flat.

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As Las Vegas prepares to celebrate its centennial, another Nevada institution is marking a milestone birthday this month. The world’s best-known secret military base, Area 51, turns 50 years old this month.

Area 51, located at dry Groom Lake in Lincoln County, has been “the” location of choice for the most classified military programs in the world. For many years, the government would not admit its existence. People who worked there were sworn to secrecy. Now, they’re talking.

Area 51 wasn’t supposed to be a permanent base. It was built in 1955 for the U-2 spy plane. But when that work was finished, other so-called black projects were sent there, and today it is a multi-billion dollar facility that essentially cannot be duplicated.

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(May 7, 2005) — It’s hard to believe now, but not too many years ago, few people outside of Nevada had ever heard of Area 51, the secret military base that turns 50 years old this month.

All of that changed in 1989 when KLAS-TV aired a series of reports about alleged alien technology being tested in and around the Groom Lake facility. The UFO stories changed Area 51 forever, and spawned all sorts of spin-offs.

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