Area 51’s Existence Confirmed by CIA.
It turns out that the cultural repository for American alien conspiracies has a much more mundane history. Area 51, the secret government space in the Mojave desert, was used to test aerial programs.
While government officials have mentioned the base in passing over the years, a newly declassified history provides the first official acknowledgement that Area 51 exists and provides new details on what the space has been used for – and it is not what conspiracy theorists want to hear.
According to the seven-chapter history, Area 51 was used as an aerial testing ground for US government projects. The released documents specifically refer to the U-2 and Oxcart aerial surveillance programs.
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"High-altitude testing of the U-2 soon led to an unexpected side effect – a tremendous increase in reports of unidentified flying objects (UFOs)," according to the documents, which became public through a Freedom of Information Act request submitted by George Washington University’s National Security Archive.
The documents, first published in 1992 and posted online on Thursday, attributed these UFO "sightings" |
to the U-2s ability to fly above 60,000ft – which was considered too high for manned flight by the general public at the time.
"U-2 and later Oxcart flights accounted for more than one-half of all UFO reports during the late 1950s and most of the 1960s," according to the documents.
The U-2 reconnaissance aircraft has been used to conduct surveillance since the 1950s and was used extensively to surveil the Soviet Union, China and Cuba in the cold war.
Area 51’s location has also been easy to find with a quick internet search, but a map in the documents confirms that the longtime center of government-alien conspiracy theories is located in the Mojave desert, about 100 miles outside Las Vegas, Nevada.
Government staffers and Lockheed Martin employees discovered the site while flying over Nevada and determined the area would be a good place to test aircraft.
"President Eisenhower also approved the addition of this strip of wasteland, known by its map designation as Area 51, to the Nevada test site," according to the documents. "The outlines of Area 51 are shown on current unclassified maps as a small rectangular area adjoining the northeast corner of the much larger Nevada test site."
To make the hot, isolated expanse more attractive to workers, Lockheed Martin engineer Kelly Johnson called the area Paradise Ranch, which eventually became just the Ranch.
Jeffrey T Richelson, of the archives, was able to review the documents in 2002, but mentions of Area 51 were redacted at the time. He submitted a request for the history, The Central Intelligence Agency and Overhead Reconnaissance: the U-2 and Oxcart Programs, again in 2005 to continue his research on aerial surveillance programs.
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