Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base

Chapter Nineteen: The Lunar-Landing Conspiracy and Other Legends of Area 51

Two hundred and fifty thousand miles from the Nevada Test Site, on July 20, 1969, with less than ninety-four seconds of fuel remaining, Neil Armstrong and copilot Buzz Aldrin were facing almost certain death as they approached the Sea of Tranquillity on the moon. The autotargeting on their lunar landing module, famously called the Eagle, was taking them down onto a football-field-size crater laden with jagged boulders. To have crash-landed there would have meant death. The autotargeting was burning precious fuel with each passing second; the quick-thinking Neil Armstrong turned it off, took manual control of the Eagle, and, as he would tell NASA officials at Mission Control in Houston, Texas, only moments later, began “flying manually over the rock field to find a reasonably good area” to land. When Armstrong finally set the Eagle down safely on the moon, there was a mere twenty seconds’ worth of fuel left in the descent tanks.

Practice makes perfect, and no doubt Armstrong’s hundreds of hours flying experimental aircraft like the X-15 rocket ship — in dangerous and often death-defying scenarios — helped prepare him for piloting a safe landing on the moon. As with most seminal U.S. government accomplishments, particularly those involving science, it took thousands of men working hundreds of thousands of hours inside scores of research centers and test facilities — not to mention a number of chemical rockets designed by Wernher Von Braun — to get the Apollo 11 astronauts and five additional crews (Apollos 12, 14, 15, 16, and 17) to the moon and back home. A little-known fact is that to prepare for what it would actually be like to walk around on the geology of the moon, the astronauts visited the Nevada Test Site. There, they hiked inside several atomic craters, learning what kind of geology they might have to deal with on the lunar surface’s inhospitable terrain. The Atomic Energy Commission’s Ernie Williams was their guide.

“I spent three days with the astronauts in Areas 7, 9, and 10 during astronaut training, several years before they went to the moon,” Williams recalls. In the 1960s, astronauts had rock-star status, and Williams remembered the event like it was yesterday. “The astronauts had coveralls and wore field packs, mock-ups of the real thing, strapped on their backs. They had cameras mounted on their hats and they took turns walking up and down the subsidence craters. It was steep, rocky terrain,” he explains. Williams originally worked for the Atomic Energy Commission in feeding and housing, making sure the “feed wagon” got to remote areas of the atomic bombing range. “We’d get mashed potatoes and gravy to the faraway places inside the test site,” Williams says, “hot food being a key to morale.” But the multitalented Williams quickly became the test site’s jack-of-all-trades, including astronaut guide. His other jobs included being in charge of the motor pool and helping CIA engineers drill for Area 51’s first water well. But for Williams, the highlight of his career was escorting the first men on the moon inside the atomic craters.

“I was with them in 1965, and again five years later when they came back,” Williams recalls. This time the astronauts arrived with a lunar roving vehicle to test what it might be like driving on the moon. The astronauts were taken out to the Schooner crater, located on the Pahute Mesa in Area 20. “We picked them up at the Pahute airstrip and took them and the vehicle into the crater where there was pretty rough terrain,” Williams explains. “Some boulders out there were ten feet tall. One of the astronauts said, ‘If we encounter this kind of thing on the moon, we’re not going to get very far.’” Williams recalls the astronauts learning how to fix a flat tire on the moon. “They took off a steel tire and put on a rubber one” out in the field.

The lunar roving vehicle was not a fast-moving vehicle, and the astronauts took turns driving it. “NASA had built it and had driven it in a lot of flat places,” Williams explains. “But before it came to the test site and drove on the craters, the vehicle had no real experience on inhospitable terrain. The astronauts also did a lot of walking out there,” Williams adds. One of the requirements of the Apollo astronauts who would be driving during moon missions was that they had to be able to walk back to the lunar module if the rover failed.

The craters Williams was talking about are subsidence craters— geologic by-products of underground bomb tests. When a nuclear bomb is placed in a deep vertical shaft, as hundreds were at the test site (not to be confused with tunnel tests), the explosion vaporizes the surrounding earth and liquefies the rock. Once that molten rock cools, it solidifies at the bottom of the cavity, and the earth above it collapses, creating the crater. The glass-coated rock, giant boulders, and loose rubble that remain resemble the craters found on the moon. So similar in geology were the atomic craters to moon craters that in voice transcripts sent back during the Apollo 16 and Apollo 17 missions, astronauts twice referred to the craters at the Nevada Test Site. During Apollo 16, John W. Young got specific. A quarter of a million miles away from Earth, while marveling at a lunar crater laden with rocks, Young asked fellow astronaut Charles M. Duke Jr., “Remember how it was up at that crater? At Schooner.” He was referring to the atomic crater Ernie Williams took the astronauts to in Area 20. During Apollo 17, while looking at the Haemus Mountains, Harrison H. Schmitt can be heard talking about the Buckboard Mesa craters in Area 19. For Ernie Williams, hearing this comparison was a beautiful moment. For lunar-landing conspiracy theorists, of which there are millions worldwide, the feeling was one of suspicion. For these naysayers, Schmitt’s telemetry tapes, the moon photographs, the moon rocks— everything having to do with the Apollo moon missions would become grist for a number of ever-growing conspiracies that have been tied to man’s journey to the moon.

Just two months after Armstrong and Aldrin returned home, a UFOon-the-moon conspiracy was born. On September 29, 1969, in New York City, the newest installment of National Bulletin magazine rolled off the printing press with a shocking headline: “Phony Transmission Failure Hides Apollo 11 Discovery. Moon Is a UFO Base,” it read. The author of the article, Sam Pepper, said he’d been leaked a transcript of what NASA had allegedly edited out of the live broadcast back from the moon, namely, that there were UFOs there. Various UFO groups pressed their congressmen to take action, several of whom wrote to NASA requesting a response. “The incident… did not take place,” NASA’s assistant administrator for legal affairs shot back in a memo from January 1970.

As time passed the ufologists continued to write stories about the moon being a base for aliens and UFOs. For the most part, NASA ignored them. But then, in the midseventies, a newly famous film director named Steven Spielberg decided to make a film about aliens coming down to visit Earth. He sent NASA officials his script for Close Encounters of the Third Kind, expecting their endorsement. Instead, NASA sent Spielberg an angry twenty-page letter opposing his film. “I had wanted co-operation from them,” Spielberg said in a 1978 interview, “but when they read the script they got very angry and felt that it was a film that would be dangerous. I think they mainly wrote the letter because Jaws convinced so many people around the world that there were sharks in toilets and bathtubs, not just in the oceans and rivers. They were afraid the same kind of epidemic would happen with UFOs.” Fringe ufologists were one thing as far as NASA was concerned. Steven Spielberg had millions of movie fans. He was a modern-day version of Orson Welles.

Right around the same time, another moon conspiracy theorist let his idea loose on the American public, a theory that did not involve UFOs. In 1974, a man named William Kaysing self-published a book called We Never Went to the Moon: America’s Thirty-Billion-Dollar Swindle. With these three questions, Kaysing became known as the father of the lunar-landing conspiracy:

How can the American flag flutter when there is no wind on the moon?

Why can’t the stars be seen in the moon photographs? Why is there no blast crater where Apollo’s landing vehicle landed?

Kaysing, who died in 2005, often said his skepticism began when he was an analyst and engineer at Rocketdyne, the company that designed the Saturn rockets that allowed man to get to the moon. While watching the lunar landing live on television, he said he experienced “an intuitive feeling that what was being shown was not real.” Later, he began scrutinizing the moon-landing photographs for evidence of a hoax. Kaysing’s original three questions have since planted seeds in millions upon millions of people who continue to insist that NASA did not put men on the moon. The lunar-landing conspiracy ebbs and flows in popularity, but as of 2011, it shows no signs of going away.

In August 2001 Kaysing was interviewed by Katie Couric on the Today show. By then, Kaysing’s theory had morphed to involve Area 51. He was often quoted as saying that the Apollo landings were filmed at a movie studio there. “Area 51 is one of the most heavily guarded facilities in the United States,” Kaysing said, and anyone who tried to go there “could be shot and killed without any warning. With good reason… because the moon sets are still there.”

In the twenty-first century, a new generation of moon hoaxers walk in Kaysing’s footsteps to expose what they say is NASA’s fraud. Like the game of Whac-A-Mole, as soon as one element of the conspiracy appears to be disproven another allegation surfaces — from missing telemetry tapes to outright murder. So aggravated has America’s formidable space agency become over the moon hoaxers that in 2002, NASA hired aerospace historian Jim Oberg to write a book meant to challenge conspiracy theorists’ questions and claims — now numbering hundreds — in a point-by-point rebuttal. When news of the project was leaked to the media, NASA got such bad press over it they canceled the book.

The idea that the moon landing was faked was born at a time of high government mistrust. In 1974, for the first time in history, a U.S. president resigned. In 1975, the CIA admitted it had been running mind-control programs, a number of which involved human experiments with dangerous, illegal drugs. Then, in April, Saigon fell. The general antigovernment feeling was heightened by the fact that while government proved capable of many nefarious deeds it had been unable to win the war in Vietnam; 58,193 Americans were killed trying.

Kaysing was also tapping into a tradition. There had been one successful Great Moon Hoax already, over 130 years earlier, in 1835. Beginning on August 25 of that year, the New York Sun published a series of six articles claiming falsely that life and civilization had been discovered on the moon. According to the newspaper story, winged humans, beavers the size of people, and unicorns were seen through a powerful telescope belonging to Sir John Herschel, the most famous astronomer at the time. Editions of the newspapers sold out, were reprinted, and sold out again. Circulation soared, and the New York Sun made tremendous profits over the story, which readers believed to be true. On the subject of the public’s gullibility, Edgar Allan Poe, who also wrote for the paper, said, “The story’s impact reflects on the period’s infatuation with progress.” But the original Great Moon Hoax came and went without a conspiratorial bent because there was no government entity to blame. It was a publicity stunt to sell papers, not perceived as a nefarious plan by a government elite to manipulate and control the common man.

Shortly after Kaysing’s book was published (it is still in print as of 2011), a 1978 Hollywood film followed along the same lines. Peter Hyams’s Capricorn One told the story of a faked NASA landing on Mars. Even James Bond entered the act, referencing a lunar-landing conspiracy in the film Diamonds Are Forever. From there, the moonhoax theory remained a quiet staple among conspiracy theorists for decades, but with the rise of the Internet in the late 1990s, the moonhoax concept resurfaced and eventually made its way into the mainstream press. In February of 2001, Fox TV aired a documentarystyle hourlong segment called Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon? and the debate was rekindled around the world. This gave way to an unusual twenty-first-century moon-hoax twist.

In September of 2002, Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the moon, agreed to be interviewed by Far Eastern TV. This was because “they seemed like legitimate journalists,” Aldrin explains. Buzz Aldrin has the highest profile of the twelve Apollo astronauts who walked on the moon, and he regularly gives interviews. A former fighter pilot, Aldrin flew sixty-six combat missions and shot down two MiG-15s in the Korean War. He is also an MIT-trained physicist, which affords him extra fluency when discussing outer space. Sitting in a suite in the Luxe Hotel in Beverly Hills in the fall of 2002, it did not take long for Aldrin to realize something was awry when the TV interviewer began asking him questions involving conspiracy theories. “I tried redirecting the discussion back to a legitimate discussion about space,” Aldrin says. Instead the interviewer played a clip from the Fox documentary about moon hoaxes. Aldrin believes “conspiracy theories are a waste of everybody’s time and energy,” and he got up and left the interview. “I’m someone who has dealt with the exact science of space rendezvous and orbital mechanics, so to have someone approach me and seriously suggest that Neil, Mike, and I never actually went to the moon, but that the entire trip had been staged in a sound studio someplace, has to rank with one of the most ludicrous ideas I’ve ever heard,” says Aldrin.

Then, down in the hotel lobby, a large man in his midthirties approached Buzz Aldrin and tried to spark a conversation. The man, whose name was Bart Sibrel, had a film crew with him. “Hey, Buzz, how are you?” Sibrel asked, the cameras rolling. Aldrin said hello and headed out toward the street. Sibrel hurried along beside him, asking more questions. Then he pulled out a very large Bible and began shaking it in the former astronaut’s face. “Will you swear on the Bible that you really walked on the moon?” Aldrin, who was seventy-two at the time, said, “You conspiracy people don’t know what you’re talking about” and turned to walk in the other direction. The man began hurling personal insults and accusations at Aldrin. “Your life is a complete lie!” the man shouted. “And here you are making money by giving interviews about things you never did!” The conspiracy theorist ran in front of Aldrin, blocking his way across the road. Aldrin, who had his stepdaughter with him, walked back to the hotel and asked the bellman to call the police. “You’re a coward, Buzz Aldrin!” shouted the conspiracy theorist. “You’re a liar; you’re a thief!” Aldrin said he’d had enough: “Maybe it was the West Point cadet in me, or perhaps it was the Air Force fighter pilot. Or maybe I’d just had enough of his belligerent character assassination… I popped him.” The second man on the moon punched the lunar-landing conspiracy theorist squarely in the jaw, cameras catching it all on tape.

In no time, the video footage was airing on the news, on CNN, on Jay Leno and David Letterman. CNN political commentator Paul Begala gave Aldrin the thumbs-up for pushing back against conspiracy theorists. But elsewhere, all across America, many millions of people agreed with the conspiracy theorists who believed that the lunar landing was a hoax. By the fortieth anniversary of the historic Apollo 11 mission, in 2009, polls conducted in America, England, and Russia revealed that approximately 25 percent of the people interviewed believed the moon landing never happened. Many said they believed that it was faked and filmed at Area 51.

As of 2011, the lunar-landing conspiracy is one of three primary conspiracies said to have been orchestrated at Area 51. The other two that dominate conspiracy thinking involve captured aliens and UFOs, and an underground tunnel and bunker system that supposedly exists below Area 51 and connects it to other military facilities and nuclear laboratories around the country. Each conspiracy theory contains elements of fact, and each is perceived differently by the three government agencies they target: NASA, the CIA, and the Department of Defense. In each conspiracy theory lies an important clue about the real truth behind Area 51.

Michael Schratt, who writes books and travels around the country giving lectures about government cover-ups at Area 51, says that the secret facility is “directly connected to Edwards [Air Force Base] North Base Complex and Air Force Plant 42 at Palmdale by an underground tube-shuttle tunnel system developed by the Rand Corporation and others [circa] 1960.” Schratt also says that Area 51 is “very likely connected to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio” this same way. “The tunnels were dug by a nuclear-powered drill that can dig three miles of tunnel a day,” Schratt says. “These tunnels also connect, by underground train, to other military facilities where leaders of government will go and live after a nuclear event” such as World War III.

In fact, underground tunnels, called N-tunnels, P-tunnels, and Ttunnels, have been drilled next door to Area 51, at the Nevada Test Site, for decades. The 1,150-foot-long tunnel at Jackass Flats, drilled into the Calico Mountains, through which NERVA scientists and engineers like T. D. Barnes accessed their underground workstations is but one example of an underground tunnel at the Nevada Test Site. The NERVA complex in Area 25 has since been dismantled and “deactivated,” according to the Department of Energy, but elsewhere at the test site dozens of tunnel complexes exist. In the 1960s, one tunnel dug into the granite mountain of Rainer Mesa, in Area 12, reached down as far as 4,500 feet, nearly a mile underground. There are many such government tunnels and bunkers around America, but it was the revelation of the Greenbrier bunker by Washington Post reporter Ted Gup in 1992 that set off a firestorm of conspiracy theories related to postapocalypse hideouts for the U.S. government elite — and since 1992, these secret bunkers have been woven into conspiracy theories about things that go on at Area 51.

The Greenbrier bunker is located in the Allegheny Mountains, 250 miles southwest of the nation’s capital. Beginning in 1959, the Department of Defense spearheaded the construction of a 112,544square-foot facility eight hundred feet below the West Virginia wing of the fashionable five-star Greenbrier resort. This secret bunker, completed in 1962, was to be the place where the president and certain members of Congress would live after a nuclear attack. The Greenbrier bunker had dormitories, a mess hall, decontamination chambers, and a hospital staffed with thirty-five doctors. “Secrecy, denying knowledge of the existence of the shelter from our potential enemies, was paramount to all matters of operation,” Paul Bugas, the former onsite superintendent at the Greenbrier bunker, told PBS when asked why the facility was kept secret from the public. Many citizens agree with the premise. Conspiracy theorists disagree. They don’t believe that the government keeps secrets to protect the people. Conspiracy theorists believe the leaders of government are only looking to protect themselves.

The underground tunnels and bunkers at the Nevada Test Site may be the most elaborate underground chambers ever constructed by the federal government in the continental United States. The great majority of them are in Area 12, which is located approximately sixteen miles due west of Area 51 in a mountain range called Rainier Mesa. Beginning in 1957, massive tunnel complexes were drilled into the volcanic rock and granite by hard-rock miners working twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. To complete a single tunnel took, on average, twelve months. Most tunnels ran approximately 1,300 feet below the surface of the earth, but some reached a mile underground. Inside these giant cavities, which averaged one hundred feet wide, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Department of Defense have exploded at least sixty-seven nuclear bombs. There, the military has tested nuclear blast and radiation effects on everything from missile nose cones to military satellites. A series called the Piledriver experiments studied survivability of hardened underground bunkers in a nuclear attack. The Hardtack tests sought to learn how “to destroy enemy targets [such as] missile silos and command centers” using megaton bombs. Inside the T-tunnels, scientists created vacuum chambers to simulate outer space, expanding on those dangerous late-1950s upper atmospheric tests code-named Teak and Orange. And the Department of Defense even tested how a stockpile of nuclear weapons inside an underground bunker would hold up to a nuclear blast.

Richard Mingus has spent many years inside these underground tunnel complexes, guarding many of the nuclear bombs used in the tests before they were detonated. In Mingus’s five decades working at the test site, these were his least favorite assignments. “The tunnels were dirty, filthy, you had to wear heavy shoes because there was so much walking on all kinds of rock rubble,” Mingus explains. “The air was bad and everything was stuffy. There were so many people working so many different jobs. Carpenters, welders… There were forty-eight-inch cutting machines covering the ground.” Most of the equipment was hauled in on railroad tracks, which is at least partially responsible for inspiring conspiracy theories that include trains underneath Area 51—though the conspiracy theorists believe they’re able to ferry government elite back and forth between Nevada and the East Coast. In reality, according to Atomic Energy Commission records, the Defense Department built the train system in the tunnels to transport heavy military equipment in and out. If employees wanted to, men like Richard Mingus could ride the train cars down into the underground tunnel complexes, but Mingus preferred to walk.

Unlike atmospheric weapons tests or the atomic tests in vertical shafts that made the moonlike craters, for the T-tunnel nuclear tests, the bomb was one of the first items to arrive on scene. “The bomb was cemented in the back of the tunnel, in a room called the zero room,” Mingus says. “That was about three-quarters of a mile distance.” Sometimes, Mingus would stand guard with the nuclear bomb at the end of the tunnel for eight- or ten-hour shifts, so he chose to walk in each morning “for the exercise.” Mingus also disliked the assignments inside the underground tunnels because they reminded him of a part of his early life he would rather have forgotten. “When I was a kid working the coal mines,” Mingus explains. But as anxious as a man standing guard over live nuclear bombs might have been, Mingus remained calm. He says the coal mines of his youth were far more dangerous. “There were no electric drills back then so my brother and I drilled by hand. We’d get down on our knees in those little tunnels — three and a half feet wide, not tall enough to stand up in. We’d use black powder as an explosive, not dynamite. We’d set the powder in the hole, tap it with a rod, use a fuse that was like toilet paper, light it, run out, and then wait for the smoke to clear. Some things you never forget even if you want to,” Mingus says.

Before the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963, the Pentagon maintained a policy of announcing nuclear weapons tests to the public, usually one or two hours before shot time, which meant somewhere around 3:30 a.m. the day of the blast. After the test ban, the Pentagon reversed its policy. Information about underground tests — when they were to take place and how big they would be — was now classified secret. Only if a scientist predicted that an earthquake-like tremor might be felt in Las Vegas, sixty-five miles to the south, was a public announcement made in advance of the nuclear test. And so, from 1963 until the last test in 1992, approximately eight hundred tests were conducted underground. By the late 1990s, decades after the first drills bored into the rock at the Nevada Test Site, the nuclear bombs, the hard-rock miners, and Area 51 had merged into one entity. As it is with many urban legends regarding Area 51, the underground-tunnels idea has been spun from facts.

As creative as conspiracy theorists can be when it comes to Area 51, it is surprising how they have missed the one underlying element that connects the three primary conspiracy theories about the secret facility to the truth. For conspiracy theorists, in the captured-aliens-and-UFOs narrative, the federal agency orchestrating the plot is the CIA. In the lunar-landing conspiracy the agency committing the fraud is NASA. In the underground tunnels and bunker plot, the evil operating force is the Department of Defense. And yet the one agency that plays an actual role in the underlying facts regarding all three of these conspiracy theories is the Atomic Energy Commission.

Why have conspiracy theorists missed this connection? Why has the Atomic Energy Commission escaped the scrutiny it deserves? The truth is hidden out in the desert at the Nevada Test Site. To borrow the metaphor of CIA spymaster James Angleton, that is where a “wilderness of mirrors” can be found. Angleton believed the Soviets spun lies from lies and in doing so were able to keep America’s intelligence agents lost in an illusory forest. In this same manner, throughout the Cold War the Atomic Energy Commission created its own wilderness of mirrors out in the Nevada desert, built from illusory half-truths and outright lies. The commission was able to send the public further and further away from the truth, not with “mirrors” but by rubber-stamping documents with Restricted Data, Secret, and Confidential, to keep them out of the public eye. The Area 51 conspiracy theories that were born of the Cold War — the ones peopled by aliens, piloted by UFOs, set in underground cities and on movie sets of the moon — these conspiracies all stand to aid and assist the Atomic Energy Commission in keeping the public away from secret truths.

It is no coincidence that the agency behind some of the most secret and dangerous acts out in the desert — at the Nevada Test and Training Range, the Nevada Test Site, and Area 51—has changed its name four times. First it was called the Manhattan Project, during World War II. Then, in 1947, it changed its name to the Atomic Energy Commission, or AEC. In 1975 the agency was renamed the Energy Research and Development Administration, or ERDA. In 1977 it was renamed again, this time the Department of Energy, “the government department whose mission is to advance technology and promote related innovation in the United States,” which conveniently makes it sound more like Apple Corporation than the federal agency that produced seventy thousand nuclear bombs. Finally, in 2000, the nuclear weapons side of the agency got a new name for the fourth time: the National Nuclear Security Administration, or NNSA, a department nestled away inside the Department of Energy, or DOE. In August 2010, even the Nevada Test Site changed its name. It is now called the Nevada National Security Site, or NNSS.

Since the National Security Act of 1947 reorganized government after the war, the Department of Defense, the CIA, the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force have all maintained their original names. The cabinet-level Departments of State, Labor, Transportation, Justice, and Education are all called today what they were when they were born. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has changed its name once since its formal beginning in 1908. Originally it was called the Bureau of Investigation, or BOI. By changing the name of the nation’s nuclear weapons agency four times since its creation in 1942, does the federal government hope the nefarious secrets of the Atomic Energy Commission will simply disappear? Certainly, many of its records have.

James Angleton spent his career trying to prove Soviet deception. Angleton argued that totalitarian governments had the capacity to confuse and manipulate the West to such a degree that the downfall of democracy was inevitable unless the Soviet deceivers could be stopped. Angleton’s belief system made him paranoid and extreme. For three years, he imprisoned a Soviet double agent and former KGB officer named Yuri Ivanovich Nosenko in a secret CIA prison in the United States — subjecting Nosenko to varying degrees of torture in an effort to break him and get him to tell the “truth.” (After passing multiple polygraph tests, Nosenko was eventually released and resettled under an assumed identity. His true allegiance remains the subject of debate.) The Nosenko affair brought about Angleton’s personal downfall. He was fired and he left the Agency disgraced. Deception may be a game between governments but the consequences of engaging in it are, for some, very real.

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union did not have the monopoly on deception. In 1995, after President Clinton ordered his Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments to look into Cold War secret-keeping at the Atomic Energy Commission, disturbing documentation was found. In a memorandum dated May 1, 1995, the subject line chosen by Clinton’s committee to sum up early AEC secret-keeping protocol read: “Official Classification Policy to Cover Up Embarrassment.” One of the more damaging documents unearthed by Clinton’s staff was a September 1947 memo by the Atomic Energy Commission’s general manager John Derry. In a document Clinton’s 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.