The most secured place on earth

Thanks for joining me as I explore more about the extraterrestrial creatures!

I’m gonna provide most of the  information about the most secure and secret place on earth the Area 51.

ABOUT AREA 51

The United States Air Force facility commonly known as Area 51 is a highly classified remote detachment of Edwards Air Force Base, within the Nevada Test and Training Range. According to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the correct names for the facility are Homey Airport (ICAO: KXTA) and Groom Lake, though the name Area 51 was used in a CIA document from the Vietnam War. The facility has also been referred to as Dreamland and Paradise Ranch, among other nicknames. The special use airspace around the field is referred to as Restricted Area 4808 North (R-4808N).

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GEOGRAPHY OF AREA 51

The original rectangular base of 6 by 10 miles (9.7 by 16.1 km) is now part of the so-called “Groom box”, a rectangular area measuring 23 by 25 miles (37 by 40 km), of restricted airspace. The area is connected to the internal Nevada Test Site (NTS) road network, with paved roads leading south to Mercury and west to Yucca Flat. Leading northeast from the lake, the wide and well-maintained Groom Lake Road runs through a pass in the Jumbled Hills. The road formerly led to mines in the Groom basin, but has been improved since their closure. Its winding course runs past a security checkpoint, but the restricted area around the base extends further east. After leaving the restricted area, Groom Lake Road descends eastward to the floor of the Tikaboo Valley, passing the dirt-road entrances to several small ranches, before converging with State Route 375, the “Extraterrestrial Highway”, south of Rachel.

Area 51 shares a border with the Yucca Flat region of the Nevada Test Site, the location of 739 of the 928 nuclear tests conducted by the United States Department of Energy at NTS.[14][15][16] The Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository is 44 miles (71 km) southwest of Groom Lake.

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HISTORY OF AREA 51

The origin of the Area 51 name is unclear. The most accepted comes from a grid numbering system of the area by the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC); while Area 51 is not part of this system, it is adjacent to Area 15. Another explanation is that 51 was used because it was unlikely that the AEC would use the number.

The Groom Lake

Lead and silver were discovered in the southern part of the Groom Range in 1864, and the English Groome Lead Mines Limited company financed the Conception Mines in the 1870s, giving the district its name (nearby mines included Maria, Willow and White Lake). The interests in Groom were acquired by J. B. Osborne and partners and patented in 1876, and his son acquired the interests in the 1890s. Claims were incorporated as two 1916 companies with mining continuing until 1918 and resuming after World War II until the early 1950s.

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World War II

The airfield on the Groom Lake site began service in 1942 as Indian Springs Air Force Auxiliary Field,[22] and consisted of two unpaved 5000-foot runways aligned NE/SW, NW/SE 37°16′35″N 115°45′20″W.

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U-2 Program

The Groom Lake test facility was established in April 1955 by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for Project AQUATONE, the development of the Lockheed U-2 strategic reconnaissance aircraft.

As part of the project, the director, Richard M. Bissell, Jr., understood that, given the extreme secrecy enveloping the project, the flight test and pilot training programs could not be conducted at Edwards Air Force Base or Lockheed’s Palmdale facility. A search for a suitable testing site for the U-2 was conducted under the same extreme security as the rest of the project.

He notified Lockheed, who sent an inspection team out to Groom Lake. According to Lockheed’s U-2 designer Kelly Johnson:

“We flew over it and within thirty seconds, you knew that was the place … it was right by a dry lake. Man alive, we looked at that lake, and we all looked at each other. It was another Edwards, so we wheeled around, landed on that lake, taxied up to one end of it. It was a perfect natural landing field … as smooth as a billiard table without anything being done to it”. Johnson used a compass to lay out the direction of the first runway. The place was called “Groom Lake”.

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OXCART Program

Project OXCART established in August 1959 for “antiradar studies, aerodynamic structural tests, and engineering designs [and] all later work on the” Lockheed A-12 included testing at Groom Lake, which before improvements for OXCART had inadequate facilities: buildings for only 150 people, a 5,000 ft (1,500 m) asphalt runway, and limited fuel, hangar, and shop space. Selected for its seclusion and climate, Groom Lake had received a new official name “Area 51” when A-12 test facility construction began in September 1960, including a new 8,500 ft (2,600 m) runway to replace the existing runway (completed by 15 November 1960 with “expansion joints parallel to the direction of aircraft roll” to limit vibration.)

For testing of a similar aircraft with 1st flight at the Palmdale, California, Lockheed facility in December 1964, followed by Edwards AFBflights
(4200 SRW operations began at Beale AFB on 7 January 1966)
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LEGAL STATUS

U.S. government’s positions on Area 51

The amount of information the United States government has been willing to provide regarding Area 51 has generally been minimal. The area surrounding the lake is permanently off-limits to both civilian and normal military air traffic. Security clearances are checked regularly; cameras and weaponry are not allowed. Even military pilots training in the NAFR risk disciplinary action if they stray into the exclusionary “box” surrounding Groom’s airspace. Surveillance is supplemented using buried motion sensors. Area 51 is a common destination for Janet, the de facto name of a small fleet of passenger aircraft operated on behalf of the United States Air Force to transport military personnel, primarily from McCarran International Airport.

SECURITY

The perimeter of the base is marked out by orange posts and patrolled by guards in white pickup trucks and camouflage fatigues. The guards are referred to as “cammo dudes” by enthusiasts who watch the base. The guards will not answer questions about who they are employed by however as a result of leaks and the fact that they do not wear any military insignia it widely believed that the guards are private contractors not military personnel. Further speculation based on said leaked information and local job adverts indicates these guards may work for G4S or AECOM. Signage around the base perimeter advises that deadly force is authorized against trespassers.

Technology is also heavily used to maintain the border of the base; this includes CCTV cameras and motion detectors. Some of these motion detectors are placed some distance away from the base on public land to notify guards of people approaching.

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THE 1974 SKYLAB PHOTOGRAPHY

In January 2006, space historian Dwayne A. Day published an article in online aerospace magazine The Space Review titled “Astronauts and Area 51: the Skylab Incident”. The article was based on a memo written in 1974 to CIA director William Colby by an unknown CIA official. The memo reported that astronauts on board Skylab 4 had, as part of a larger program, inadvertently photographed a location of which the memo said:

There were specific instructions not to do this. <redacted> was the only location which had such an instruction.

Although the name of the location was obscured, the context led Day to believe that the subject was Groom Lake. As Day noted:

[I]n other words, the CIA considered no other spot on Earth to be as sensitive as Groom Lake.

The memo details debate between federal agencies regarding whether the images should be classified, with Department of Defense agencies arguing that it should, and NASA and the State Department arguing against classification. The memo itself questions the legality of unclassified images to be retroactively classified.

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UFO and other conspiracy theories

The base’s current primary purpose is publicly unknown; however, based on historical evidence, it most likely supports the development and testing of experimental aircraft and weapons systems (black projects). The intense secrecy surrounding the base has made it the frequent subject of conspiracy theories and a central component to unidentified flying object (UFO) folklore. Although the base has never been declared a secret base, all research and occurrences in Area 51 are Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information(TS/SCI).

Its secretive nature and undoubted connection to classified aircraft research, together with reports of unusual phenomena, have led Area 51 to become a focus of modern UFO and other conspiracy theories. Some of the activities mentioned in such theories at Area 51 include

Many of the hypotheses concern underground facilities at Groom or at Papoose Lake (also known as “S-4 location”), 8.5 miles (13.7 km) south, and include claims of a transcontinental underground railroad system, a disappearing airstrip (nicknamed the “Cheshire Airstrip”, after Lewis Carroll‘s Cheshire cat) which briefly appears when water is sprayed onto its camouflaged asphalt, and engineering based on alien technology. Publicly available satellite imagery, however, reveals clearly visible landing strips at Groom Dry Lake, but not at Papoose Lake.

Sources and References