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

Chapter Twenty-One: Revelation

It was January of 2001, nine months before the terrorist attacks of 9/11, and the director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, Cofer Black, had a serious problem. The CIA had been considering assassinating Osama bin Laden with the Predator, but until that point, the unmanned aerial vehicle had been used for reconnaissance only, not targeted assassination. Because two technologies needed to be merged — the flying drone and the laser-guided precision missile — engineers and aerodynamicists had concerns. Specifically, they worried that the propulsion from the missile might send the drone astray or the missile off course. And the CIA needed a highly precise weapon with little possibility of collateral damage. The public would perceive killing a terrorist one way, but they would likely perceive killing that terrorist’s neighbors in an altogether different light. This new weaponized drone technology was tested at Area 51; the development program remains classified. After getting decent results, both the CIA and the Air Force were confident that the missiles unleashed from the drone could reach their targets.

Along came another hurdle to overcome, one that was unfolding not in the desert but in Washington, DC. The newly elected administration of President George W. Bush realized that it had no policy when it came to taking out terrorists with drones. Osama bin Laden was known to be the architect of the 1998 U.S. embassy suicide bombings in East Africa, which killed more than 225 people, including Americans. He masterminded the suicide bombing of the USS Cole and had officially declared war against the United States. But targeted assassination by a U.S. intelligence agency was illegal, per President Ronald Reagan’s Executive Order 12333, and since the situation required serious examination, State Department lawyers got involved.

There was one avenue to consider in support of the targeted-killing operation, and that was the fact that the FBI had a bounty on the man’s head. By February of 2001, the State Department gave the go-ahead for the assassination. Then State Department lawyers warned the CIA of another problem, the same one that had originally sent the Predator drone to Area 51 for field tests; namely, potential collateral damage. The State Department needed to know how many bin Laden family members and guests staying on the compound the CIA was targeting could be killed in a drone attack. Bin Laden’s compound was called Tarnak Farm, and a number of high-profile Middle Eastern royal family members were known to visit there.

To determine collateral damage, the CIA and the Air Force teamed up for an unusual building project on the outer reaches of Area 51. They engineered a full-scale mock-up of Osama bin Laden’s compound in Afghanistan on which to test the results of a drone strike. But while engineers were at work, CIA director George Tenet decided that taking out Osama bin Laden with a Hellfire missile-equipped Predator drone would be a mistake. This was a decision the CIA would come to regret.

Immediately after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the Pentagon knew that it needed drones to help fight the war on terror, which meant it needed help from the CIA. For decades, the Air Force had been thumbing its nose at drones. The pride of the Air Force had always been pilots, not robots. But the CIA had been researching, developing, and advancing drone technology at Area 51 for decades. The CIA had sent drones on more than six hundred reconnaissance missions in the Bosnian conflict, beginning in 1995. CIA drones had provided intelligence for NATO forces in the 1999 Kosovo air campaign, collecting intelligence, searching for targets, and keeping an eye on Kosovar-Albanian refuge camps. The CIA Predator had helped war planners interpret the chaos of the battlefield there. Now, the Air Force needed the CIA’s help going into Afghanistan with drones.

The first reconnaissance drone mission in the war on terror was flown over Kabul, Afghanistan, just one week after 9/11, on September

18, 2001. Three weeks later, the first Hellfire-equipped Predator drone was flown over Kandahar. The rules of aerial warfare had changed overnight. America’s stealth bombers were never going to locate Osama bin Laden and his top commanders hiding out in mountain compounds. Now pilotless drones would be required to seek out and assassinate the most wanted men in the world.

Although drones had been developed and tested at Area 51, Area 52, and Indian Springs for nearly fifty years, the world at large would come to learn about them only in November of 2002, when a drone strike in Yemen made headlines around the world. Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi was a wanted man. A citizen of Yemen and a senior alQaeda operative, al-Harethi had also been behind the planning and bombing of the USS Cole two years before. On the morning of November 2, 2002, al-Harethi and five colleagues drove through the vast desert expanse of Yemen’s northwest province Marib oblivious to the fact that they were being watched by eyes in the skies in the form of a Predator drone flying several miles above them.

The Predator launched its missile at the target and landed a direct hit. The al-Qaeda operatives and the vehicle were instantly reduced to a black heap of burning metal. It was an assassination plot straight out of a Tom Clancy novel, except that it was so real and so dramatic — the first visual proof that al-Qaeda leaders could be targeted and killed— that Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz began bragging about the Hellfire strike to CNN. The drone attack in Yemen was “a very successful tactical operation,” Wolfowitz said. Except it was supposed to be a quiet, unconfirmed assassination. Wolfowitz’s bravado made Yemen upset. Brigadier General Yahya M. Al Mutawakel, the deputy secretary general for the People’s Congress Party in Yemen, gave an exclusive interview to the Christian Science Monitor explaining that the Pentagon had broken a secrecy agreement between the two nations. “This is why it is so difficult to make deals with the United States,” Al Mutawakel explained. “They don’t consider the internal circumstances in Yemen. In security matters, you don’t want to alert the enemy.”

Yemen pushed back against the United States by outing the secret inner workings of the operation. It was the U.S. ambassador to Yemen, Edmund Hull, an employee of the State Department, who had masterminded the plot, officials in Yemen explained. Hull had spearheaded the intelligence-gathering efforts, a job more traditionally reserved for the CIA. Hull spoke Arabic. He had roots in the country and knew people who knew local tribesmen in the desert region of Marib. The State Department, Yemen claimed, was the agency that had bribed local tribesmen into handing over information on al-Harethi, which allowed the CIA to know exactly where the terrorist would be driving and when. Revealing Ambassador Hull to be the central organizing player in the drone strike exposed the Department of State as having a hand in not just the espionage game but targeted assassination as well. Surprisingly, little fuss was made about any of this, despite the fact that diplomats are supposed to avoid assassination plots.

In political circles, Ambassador Hull was greatly embarrassed. He refused to comment on his role in what signaled a sea change in U.S. military assets with wings. The 2002 drone strike in Yemen was the first of its kind in the war on terror, but little did the public know that hundreds more drone strikes would soon follow. The next one went down the very next week, when a Predator targeted and killed alQaeda’s number-three, Mohammed Atef, in Jalabad, Afghanistan. As the war on terror progressed, some drone strikes would be official while others would go unmentioned. But never again would the CIA or the State Department admit to having a hand in any of them. When Mohammed Atef was killed, initial reports said a traditional bomber aircraft had targeted and destroyed Atef’s home. Only later was the strike revealed as being the work of a Predator drone and a targeted assassination spearheaded by the CIA.

Almost everything that has happened at Area 51 since 1968 remains classified but it is generally understood among men who formerly worked there that once the war on terror began, flight-testing new drones at Area 51 and Area 52 moved full speed ahead. This new way of conducting air strikes, from an aircraft without a pilot inside, represented a fundamental reconfiguration of the U.S. Air Force fighting force and would continue to remain paramount to Air Force operations going forward. This meant that a major element of the drone program, i.e., the CIA’s role in overhead, needed to return quietly and quickly into the “black.” The Air Force has a clear-cut role in wartime. But the operations of the CIA, a clandestine organization at its core, can never be overtly defined in real time. Remarkably, after nearly fifty years, the CIA and the Air Force were back in the business of overhead, and they would model their partnership on the early spy plane projects at Area 51. As the war on terror expanded, budgets for drone programs went from thin to virtually limitless almost overnight. As far as developing weapons using cutting-edge science and technology was concerned, it was 1957 post-Sputnik all over again.

No longer used only for espionage, the Predator got a new designation. Previously it had been the RQ-1 Predator: R for reconnaissance and Q indicating unmanned. Immediately after the Yemen strike, the Predator became the MQ-1 Predator, with the M now indicating its multirole use. The company that built the Predator was General Atomics, the same group that was going to launch Ted Taylor’s ambitious spaceship to Mars, called Orion, from Jackass Flats back in 1958.

A second Predator, originally called the Predator B, was also coming online. Described by Air Force officials as “the Predator’s younger, yet larger and stronger brother,” it too needed a new name. The Reaper fit perfectly: the personification of death. “One of the big differences between the Reaper and the Predator is the Predator can only carry about 200 pounds [of weapons]. The Reaper, however, can carry one and a half tons, and on top of carrying Hellfire missiles, can carry multiple GBU-12 laser-guided bombs,” said Captain Michael Lewis of the Forty-second Wing at Creech Air Force Base. The General Atomics drones were single-handedly changing the relationship between the CIA and the Air Force. The war on terror had the two services working together again, exactly as had happened with the advent of the U-2. This was not simply a coincidence or a recurring moment in time. Rather it was the symbiotic reality of war. If the CIA and the Air Force are rivals in peacetime — fighting over money, power, and control — in war, they work together like a bow and arrow.

Each organization has something critical the other service does not have. The CIA’s drones could now give Air Force battlefield commanders visual images from which they could target individuals in real time. Now, intelligence capabilities and military could work seamlessly together as one. Which is exactly what happened next, as the war on terror widened to include Iraq. the night of March 29, 2004, an MQ-1 Predator drone surveilling the area outside the U.S. Balad Air Base in northern Iraq caught sight of three men digging a ditch in the road with pickaxes. Brigadier General Frank Gorenc was remotely viewing the events in real time from an undisclosed location somewhere in the Middle East. He watched the men as they placed an improvised explosive device, or IED, in the hole. Gorenc was able to identify that the men were burying an IED in the road because the resolution of the images relayed back from the Predator’s reconnaissance camera was so precise, Gorenc could see wires. Gorenc and other commanders in Iraq knew what the Predator was capable of. Gorenc described this technology as allowing him to “put a weapon on a target within minutes,” and he authorized a strike. The Predator operator, seated at a console next to Gorenc, launched a Hellfire missile from the Predator’s weapons bay, killing all three of the men in a single strike. “This strike,” explained Gorenc, “should send a message to our enemies that we’re watching you, and we will take action against you any time, day or night, if you continue to stand in the way of progress in Iraq.” Eyes in the sky, dreamed up in the 1940s, had become swords in the sky in the new millennium. Reconnaissance and retaliation had merged into one.

Simultaneous with the early drone strikes in Iraq, the CIA and the Air Force had begun comanaging a covert program to kill al-Qaeda and Taliban commanders in the tribal areas in the northwest of Pakistan, on Afghanistan’s border, using drones. To get the program up and running required effort, just as the U-2 and the Oxcart had. A drone wing, like a U-2 detachment or a squadron of Oxcarts, involved building more Predators and Reapers, training drone pilots, creating an Air Force wing, building secret bases in the Middle East, hooking up satellites, and resolving other support-related issues. From 2003 to 2007 the number of drone strikes rose incrementally, little by little, each year. Only in 2008 did the drones really come online. During that year, which included the last three weeks of the Bush administration, there were thirty-six drone strikes in Pakistan, which the Air Force said killed 268 al-Qaeda and Taliban. By 2009 the number of drone strikes would rise to fifty-three. Since the Air Force does not release numbers, and the CIA does not comment on being involved, those numbers are approximate best guesses, put together by journalists and researchers based on local reports. Since journalists are not allowed in many parts of the tribal areas in Pakistan, the actual number of drone strikes is unknown.

As much publicity as drones are getting today, there is a lot more going on in the skies than the average citizen comprehends. According to T. D. Barnes, “There are at least fifteen satellites and an untold number of Air Force aircraft ‘parked’ over Iraq and Afghanistan, providing twenty-four-hour-a-day coverage for airmen and soldiers on the ground. The Air Force is currently flying surveillance with the U-2, Predator, MQ-9 Reaper, and Global Hawk. These are just the assets we know about. Having been in the business, I would expect we have surveillance capability being used that we won’t know about for years.” The majority of these platforms, all classified, are “in all probability” being built and tested at Area 51, says Barnes.

In April of 2009, reporters with a French aviation newspaper published drawings of a reconnaissance drone seen flying over Afghanistan. With its long wings, lack of tail, and two wheels under its belly in a line, like on a bicycle, what became known as the Beast of Kandahar looks reminiscent of the Horten brothers’ flying wing of 1944. What was this new drone built for? It seemed not to have a weapons bay. Eight months later, in December of 2009, the Defense Department confirmed the existence of the drone, which the Air Force calls the RQ-170 Sentinel. Built by Lockheed Skunk Works and tested at Area 51 and Area 52, the newest drone appears to be for reconnaissance purposes only. As such, it follows in the footsteps of the U-2 and the A-12 Oxcart, comanaged by the Air Force and the CIA at Area 51. Save for its name, all details remain classified. It is likely flying over denied territory, including Iran, North Korea, China, and Russia. Fifty-five years after Richard Bissell set Area 51 as a secret place to test-fly the nation’s first peacetime spy planes, new aircraft continue to be built with singular design and similar intention. Despite the incredible advances in science and technology, the archetypal need for reconnaissance remains.

Quick and adaptable, twenty-first-century surveillance requirements means the future of overhead lies in unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones. The overhead intelligence take once provided by CIA spy pilots like Gary Powers, Ken Collins, Frank Murray, and others now belongs to remotely piloted drones. The old film cameras, which relied on clear skies, have been replaced by state-of-the-art imaging systems developed by Sandia and Raytheon, called synthetic aperture radar, or SAR. These “cameras” relay real-time images shot through smoke, dust, and even clouds, during the day or in the dark of night. But as omnipotent and all-seeing as the drones may appear, there is one key element generally overlooked by the public — but certainly not by the Pentagon or the CIA — when considering the vulnerability of the Air Force’s most valuable asset with wings. Drones require satellite links.

To operate a drone requires ownership in space. All unmanned aerial vehicles require satellites to relay information to and from the pilots who operate the drones via remote control. As the Predator flies over the war theater in the Middle East, it is being operated by a pilot sitting in a chair thirty miles south of Area 51, at Indian Springs. The pilot is seated in front of a computer screen that provides a visual representation of what the Predator is looking at on the ground in the battlefield halfway across the world. Two sensor operators sit beside the pilot, each working like a copilot might have in another age. The pilot and the sensor operators rely on a team of fifty-five airmen for operational support. The Predator Primary Satellite Link is the name of the system that allows communication between the drone and the team. The drone needs only to be in line of sight with its ground-control station when it lands. Everything else the drone can do, from capture images to fire missiles, it does thanks to its satellite link.

Indian Springs is the old airstrip where Dr. Edward Teller, father of the H-bomb, and all the other nuclear physicists used to land when they would come to witness their atomic bomb creations being set off as tests from 1951 to 1992. Indian Springs is where the atomic-sampling pilots trained to fly through mushroom clouds. It is where EG&G set up the first radar-testing facility on the Nevada Test and Training Range in 1954. Indian Springs is where Bob Lazar said he was taken and debriefed after getting caught trespassing on Groom Lake Road. And in 2011, Indian Springs, which has been renamed Creech Air Force Base, is the place where Air Force pilots sit in war rooms operating drones.

For the Department of Defense, the vulnerability of space satellites to sabotage has created a new and unprecedented threat. According to a 2008 study on “Wicked Problems” prepared by the Defense Science Board, in a chapter significantly entitled “Surprise in Space,” the board outlines the vulnerability of space satellites in today’s world. By the Pentagon’s definition, “Wicked problems are highly complex, wide-ranging problems that have no definitive formulation… and have no set solution.” By their very nature, wicked problems are “substantially without precedent,” meaning the outcome of them cannot be known because a wicked problem is one that has never before been solved. Worst of all, warned the Pentagon, efforts to solve wicked problems generally give way to an entirely new set of problems. The individual tasked with keeping abreast of the wicked problem is called a wicked engineer, someone who must be prepared to be surprised and be able to deal with unintended consequences because “playing the game changes the game.”

By relying on satellites to fight the war on terror as well as many of the foreseeable conflicts in the immediate future, the single greatest wicked problem facing the Pentagon in the twenty-first century is the looming threat of the militarization of space. To weaponize space, historical thinking in the Pentagon goes, would be to safeguard space in a preemptive manner. A war in space over satellite control is not a war the United States necessarily wants to fight, but it is a war the United States is most assuredly unwilling to lose.

“Over eighty percent of the satellite communications used in U.S. Central Command’s area of responsibility is provided by commercial vendors,” reads the Pentagon’s “Surprise in Space” report. And when, in 2007, the Chinese — unannounced and unexpectedly — shot down one of their own satellites with one of their own weapons, the incident opened the Pentagon’s eyes to a whole host of potential wickedproblem scenarios in space.

Around 5:00 p.m. eastern standard time on July 11, 2007, a small, six-foot-long Chinese satellite was circling the Earth 539 miles up when it was targeted and destroyed by a Chinese ballistic missile launched from a mobile launcher at the Songlin test facility in Szechuan Province, running on solid fuel and topped with a “kinetic kill vehicle,” or explosive device. The satellite was traveling at speeds of around sixteen thousand miles per hour, and the ballistic missile was traveling approximately eighteen thousand miles per hour. The hit was dead-on. As radical and impressive as it sounds, the technology was not what raised flags and eyebrows at the Pentagon. The significance of the event came from the fact that with China’s satellite kill, the world moved one dangerous step closer to the very wicked problem of weaponizing space. To enter into that game means entering into the kind of mutual-assured-destruction military industrial-complex madness that has not been engaged in since the height of the Cold War.

Actions of this magnitude, certainly by those of a superpower like China, are almost always met by the U.S. military with a response, either overt or veiled, and the Chinese satellite kill was no exception. Seven months later, in February of 2008, an SM-3 Raytheon missile was launched off the deck of the USS Lake Erie in the North Pacific. It traveled approximately 153 miles up into space where it hit a fivethousand-pound U.S. satellite described as being about the size of a school bus and belonging to the National Reconnaissance Office. The official Pentagon story was that the satellite had gone awry and the United States didn’t want the satellite’s hazardous fuel source, stated to be the toxin hydrazine, to crash on foreign soil. “Our objective was to intercept the satellite, reduce the mass that might survive re-entry [and] vector that mass into unpopulated areas ideally the ocean,” General James Cartwright, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the press. International leaders cried foul, saying the test was designed to show the world that the United States has the technology to take out other nations’ satellites. “China is continuously following closely the possible harm caused by the U.S. action to outer space security and relevant countries,” declared Liu Jianchao, China’s foreign ministry spokesman — certainly an example of the pot calling the kettle black.

In the 1950s, the United States and the Soviet Union actually considered using space as a launching pad for war. President Eisenhower’s science adviser James Killian — a man with so much power that he was not required to tell the truth to Congress — fielded regular suggestions from the Pentagon to develop, in his own words, “satellite bombers, military bases on the moon, and so on.” Killian was the man who spearheaded the first nuclear weapon explosions in space, first in the upper atmosphere (Orange), then near the ozone layer (Teak), and finally in outer space (Argus). But Killian shied away from the idea of weaponizing space not because he saw putting weapons in space as an inherently reckless or existentially bad idea but because Killian believed nuclear weapons would not work well from space.

“A satellite cannot simply drop a bomb,” Killian declared in a public service announcement released from the White House on March 26, 1958, a report written for “nontechnical” people at the behest of the president. “An object released from a satellite doesn’t fall. So there is no special advantage in being over the target,” Killian declared. Here was James Killian, who, by his own admission, was not a scientist, explaining to Americans why dropping bombs from space wouldn’t work. “Indeed the only way to ‘drop’ a bomb directly down from a satellite is to carry out aboard the satellite a rocket launching of the magnitude required for an intercontinental missile.” In other words, Killian was saying that to get an ICBM up to a launchpad in space was simply too cumbersome a process. Killian believed that the better way to put a missile on a target was to launch it from the ground. That the extra effort to get missiles in space wasn’t worth the task. This may have been true in the 1950s, but decades later James Killian would be proven wrong.

Flash forward to 2011. Analysts with the United States Space Surveillance Network, which is located in an Area 51-like facility on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, spend all day, every day, 365 days a year, tracking more than eight thousand man-made objects orbiting the Earth. The USSS Network is responsible for detecting, tracking, cataloging, and identifying artificial objects orbiting Earth, including active and inactive satellites, spent rocket bodies, and space debris. After the Chinese shot down their own satellite in 2007, the network’s job got considerably more complicated. The Chinese satellite kill produced an estimated thirty-five thousand pieces of onecentimeter-wide debris and another fifteen hundred pieces that were ten centimeters or more. “A one-centimeter object is very hard to track but can do considerable damage if it collides with any spacecraft at a high rate of speed,” said Laura Grego, a scientist with the Global Security Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. The United States said the NRO satellite it shot down did not create space debris because, being close to Earth when it was shot down, its pieces burned up as they reentered Earth’s atmosphere.

These scenarios create another wicked problem for the U.S. military. Every modern nation relies on satellites to function. The synchronized encryption systems used by banks around the world rely on satellites. Weather forecasts are derived from satellite information, as is the ability of air traffic controllers to keep airplanes safely aloft. The U.S. global positioning system, or GPS, works on satellites, as will the European version of GPS, the Galileo positioning system, which will come online in 2012. The U.S. military relies on satellites not just for its drone programs but for almost all of its military communications worldwide. Were anyone to take down the satellite system, or even just a part of it, the world would see chaos and panic that would make The War of the Worlds seem tame. When considering the actions of the United States and the Soviet Union during the atomic buildup of the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s — the nuclear hubris, the fiscal waste, and the imprudent public policy — it is nothing short of miraculous that the space-based nuclear tests of the late 1950s and early 1960s did not propel the two superpowers to fight for military control of space. Instead, in the last decades of the Cold War, the United States and the USSR worked with a tacit understanding that space was off-limits for warfare. Neither nation tried to put missiles on the moon. And neither nation shot down another nation’s spy satellites. According to Colonel Leghorn, this is because “spy satellites launched into space were accepted as eyes in the skies that governments had to live with.” The governments Leghorn is referring to are Russia and the United States. But today, allegiances and battle lines have been considerably redrawn. At least one enemy army, that of al-Qaeda, would rather die than live according to the superpowers’ rules.

In spite of, or perhaps because of, his ninety-one years, Leghorn speaks with great authority. In addition to being considered the father of aerial reconnaissance, Leghorn founded the Itek Corporation in 1960, which developed the high-resolution photographic system for America’s first reconnaissance satellite, Corona. The Corona program was highly successful and, most notably, was originally designed and run by Richard Bissell for the CIA at the same time he was in charge of operations at Area 51. After leaving the Air Force, Leghorn spent decades in the commercial-satellite business. From the satellite images produced by Itek satellites, the CIA learned that in order to escape scrutiny by America’s eyes in the sky, many foreign governments moved their most secret military facilities underground.

Out in the Nevada desert, while the CIA redoubled its efforts at Area 51 to develop ground sensor technology and infrared tracking techniques to learn more about underground facilities (which also requires the use of drones), the Department of Defense and the Air Force got to work on a different approach. In the 1980s, the military worked to develop the bunker buster, a nuclear weapon designed to fire deep into Earth’s surface, hit underground targets, and detonate belowground. Weapons designer Sandia was brought on board. It was called the W61 Earth Penetrator, and testing took place at Area 52 in 1988. The idea was to launch the earth-penetrator weapon from forty thousand feet above but after many tests (minus the nuclear warhead), it became clear that a nuclear bomb would have little or no impact on granite, which is the rock of choice in which to build sensitive sites underground. After President Clinton ended all U.S. nuclear testing in 1993 (the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1996 and signed by five of the then seven or eight nuclear-capable countries), the idea of developing an earth-penetrating nuclear weapon lost its steam. But the building of underground facilities by foreign governments continued to plague war planners, so along came a nonnuclear space-based weapons project called Rods from God. That weapons project involved slender metal rods, thirty feet long and one foot in diameter, that could be launched from a satellite in space and hit a precise target on Earth at ten thousand miles per second. T. D. Barnes says “that’s enough force to take out Iran’s nuclear facility, or anything like it, in one or two strikes.” The Federation of American Scientists reported that a number of similar “long-rod penetration” programs are believed to currently exist.

After the Gulf War, DARPA hired a secretive group called the JASON scholars (a favored target in conspiracy-theorist circles) and its parent company, MITRE Corporation, to report on the status of underground facilities, which in government nomenclature are referred to as UGFs. The unclassified version of the April 1999 report begins, “Underground facilities are being used to conceal and protect critical activities that pose a threat to the United States.” These threats, said JASON, “include the development and storage of weapons of mass destruction, principally nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons,” and also that “the proliferation of such facilities is a legacy of the Gulf War.” What this means is that the F-117 stealth bomber showed foreign governments “that almost any above ground facility is vulnerable to attack and destruction by precision guided weapons.” For DARPA, this meant it was time to develop a new nuclear bunker buster — Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban-Treaty or not.

In January of 2001, the Federation of American Scientists reported their concern over the disclosure that the nuclear weapons laboratories were working on low-yield nukes, or “mini-nukes,” to target underground facilities despite the congressional ban against “research and development which could lead to the production by the United States of a new, low-yield nuclear weapon.” Los Alamos fired back, claiming they could develop a mini-nuke conceptually. “One could design and deploy a new set of nuclear weapons that do not require nuclear testing to be certified,” stated Los Alamos associate director for nuclear weapons Stephen M. Younger, asserting that “such simple devices would be based on a very limited nuclear test database.” The Federation of American Scientists saw Younger’s assertion as improbable: “It seems unlikely that a warhead capable of performing such an extraordinary mission as destroying a deeply buried and hardened bunker could be deployed without full-scale [nuclear] testing” first. On July 1, 2006, Stephen Younger became president of National Security Technologies, or NSTec, the company in charge of operations at the Nevada Test Site, through 2012.

In 2002, with America again at war, the administration of George W. Bush revived the development of the nuclear bunker-buster weapon, now calling it the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator. In April of the same year, the Department of Defense entered into discussions with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to begin preliminary design work on the new nuclear weapon. By fiscal year 2003, the Stockpile Services Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator line item received $14.5 million; in 2004 another $7.5 million; and in 2005 yet another $27.5 million. In 2006, the Senate dropped the line item. Either the program was canceled or it got a new name and entered into the black world — perhaps at Area 51 and Area 52.

Or perhaps next door at the Nevada Test Site, underground. For as far-fetched and ironic as this sounds — developing a bunker-busting nuclear bomb at an underground nuclear testing facility in Nevada— this is exactly what DOE officials proposed in an unclassified report released quietly in 2005. In this report, officials with the agency formerly known as the Atomic Energy Commission proposed to revive the NERVA program — the Area 25 nuclear-powered rocket program designed to send man to Mars — and to do it, of all places, underground.

Unlike the NERVA program of the 1960s, argued Michael Williams, the author of the report, “DOE Ground Test facilities for space exploration enabling nuclear technologies can no longer be vented to the open atmosphere,” meaning a facility like the one that previously existed out at Jackass Flats was out of the question. But for the new NERVA project, Williams proposed, the Department of Energy could easily conduct its nuclear tests inside “the existing [underground] tunnels or new tunnels at the Nevada Test site for this purpose.”

Former Los Alamos associate director of nuclear weapons Stephen Younger, who currently serves as the president of operations at the Nevada Test Site, categorically denies that any underground nuclear weapons tests are in the works at the test site. But he does confirm that “subcritical” nuclear tests currently take place there, inside an underground tunnel complex located beneath Area 1. To access that facility, Younger says, employees use an elevator that travels a thousand feet underground. What goes on there are “scientific experiments with plutonium and high explosives,” Younger says, “not weapons tests.” Younger insists the “same cannot be said about the Russians.” He says that inside their underground facility at Novaya Zemlya — the location where the Soviet Union detonated their fiftymegaton thermonuclear bomb, called Tsar Bomba, in 1961—“the Russians are developing new nuclear weapons around the clock. Mr. [Vladimir] Putin has said that repeatedly. He keeps saying that because they want us to know.”

There is no way to know precisely what is happening today at the Nevada Test and Training Range — aboveground at Area 51 or Area 52, or in the underground tunnels beneath the test site, because most of what is currently happening out in the Nevada desert is classified and the federal agencies involved believe the people do not have a need-to-know. The question is, does the public have a right to know? Does Congress? Many secret projects that have gone on at Area 51 have delivered results that have kept America safe. The first flight over the Soviet Union, by Hervey Stockman in a U-2 spy plane in 1956, provided the CIA with critical intelligence, namely, that the Russians were not lining up their military machine for a sneak attack. The intelligence provided by an A-12 Oxcart spy plane mission kept the Johnson administration from declaring war on North Korea during the Vietnam War. The F-117 stealth bomber crippled Saddam Hussein’s WMD programs. But there are other kinds of secret actions that have gone on at Area 51, at least one of which should never have been authorized and should not be kept as a national secret anymore.

After World War II, the American government’s hiring and protection of Nazi scientists was based on the premise that these scientists were the world’s best and their information was needed in order to advance science — and win the next war. In doing so, America made a deal with the devil. This deal became a wicked problem for the agencies involved, and playing the game with former Nazis gave way to an entirely new set of problems, one of which has been the federal government’s ongoing complicity in covering up many of these scientists’ original crimes. Approximately six hundred million pages of information about the government’s postwar use of Nazi criminals’ expertise remains classified as of 2011. Many documents about Area 51 exist in that pile.

The reason why the federal government will not officially admit that Area 51 exists is not the secret spy planes, the stealth bombers, or the drones that were, and still are, flight-tested there. The reason is something else. It is a program undertaken by five EG&G engineers at Area 51. This program involved the Roswell crash remains and predated the development of the original CIA facility, currently called Area 51, which was built by Richard Bissell beginning in 1955. Area 51 is named as such not because it was a randomly chosen quadrant, as has often been presumed, but because the 1947 crash remains from Roswell, New Mexico, were sent from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base out to a secret spot in the Nevada desert — in 1951.

The gypsies have a saying: You’re not really dead until the last person who knows you dies. For investigative journalists it goes something like this: As long as there is an eyewitness willing to tell the truth, the truth can be known.

The flying craft that crashed in New Mexico, the myth of which has come to be known as the Roswell Incident, happened in 1947, sixtyfour years before the publication of this book. Everyone directly involved in that incident — who acted on behalf of the government — is apparently dead. Like it does about Area 51, the U.S. government refuses to admit the Roswell crash ever happened, but it did— according to the seminal testimony of one man interviewed over the course of eighteen months for this book. He participated in the engineering project that came about as a result of the Roswell Incident. He was one of the elite engineers from EG&G who were tasked with the original Area 51 wicked engineering problem.

In July of 1947, Army intelligence spearheaded the efforts to retrieve the remains of the flying disc that crashed at Roswell. And as with other stories that have become the legends of Area 51, part of the conspiracy theory about Roswell has its origins in truth. The crash did reveal a disc, not a weather balloon, as has subsequently been alleged by the Air Force. And responders from the Roswell Army Air Field found not only a crashed craft, but also two crash sites, and they found bodies alongside the crashed craft. These were not aliens. Nor were they consenting airmen. They were human guinea pigs. Unusually petite for pilots, they appeared to be children. Each was under five feet tall. Physically, the bodies of the aviators revealed anatomical conundrums. They were grotesquely deformed, but each in the same manner as the others. They had unusually large heads and abnormally shaped oversize eyes. One fact was clear: these children, if that’s what they were, were not healthy humans. A second fact was shocking. Two of the child-size aviators were comatose but still alive.

Everything related to the crash site was sent to Wright Field, later called Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, in Ohio, where it all remained until 1951. That is when the evidence was packed up and transported to the Nevada Test Site. It was received, physically, by the elite group of EG&G engineers. The Atomic Energy Commission, not the Air Force and not the Central Intelligence Agency, was put in charge of the Roswell crash remains. According to its unusual charter, the Atomic Energy Commission was the organization best equipped to handle a secret that could never be declassified. The Atomic Energy Commission needed engineers they could trust to handle the work that was about to begin. For this, they looked to the most powerful defense contractor in the nation that no one had ever heard of — EG&G.

The engineers with EG&G were chosen to receive the crash remains and to set up a secret facility just outside the boundary of the Nevada Test Site, sixteen miles to the northwest of Groom Lake, approximately five and a half miles north of the northernmost point where Area 12 and Area 15 meet. A facility this remote would never be visited by anyone outside a small group with a strict need-to-know and would never have to be accounted for or appear on any official Nevada Test Site map. These five men were told there was more engineering work to be done, and that they would be the only five individuals with a set of keys to the facility. The project, the men were told, was the most clandestine, most important engineering program since the Manhattan Project, which was why the man who had been in charge of that one would function as the director of this project as well.

Vannevar Bush had been President Roosevelt’s most trusted science adviser during World War II. He held engineering doctorates from both Harvard University and MIT, in addition to being the former vice president and former dean of engineering at MIT. The decisions Vannevar Bush made were ostensibly for the good of the nation; they were sound. The men from EG&G were told that the project they were about to work on was so important that it would remain black forever, meaning it would never see the light of day. The men knew that a secrecy classification inside the Atomic Energy Commission charter made this possible, because they all worked on classified engineering projects that were hidden from the rest of the world. They understood born classified meant that no one would ever have a need-to-know what Vannevar Bush was going to ask them to do. The operation would have no name, only a letter-number designation: S-4, or SigmaFour.

The problem that the EG&G engineers would face would be highly complex, wide-ranging, without a definite formulation and with no set solution. This wicked problem was wholly without precedent. Solving it would undoubtedly have unintended consequences, because playing the engineering game would change the game. But there were two puzzles to solve, not just one. Two engineering mysteries for the elite group of EG&G engineers to unlock.

There was the crashed craft that had been sent by Stalin — with its Russian writing stamped, or embossed, in a ring around the inside of the craft. So far, the EG&G engineers were told, no one working on the project when it had been headquartered at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base had been able to discern what made Stalin’s craft hover and fly. Not even the German Paperclip scientists who had been assigned to assist. So the crashed craft was job number one. Reverse engineer it, Vannevar Bush said. Take it apart and put it back together again. Figure out what made it fly.

But there was the second engineering problem to solve, the one involving the child-size aviators. To understand this, the men were briefed on what it was they were dealing with. They had to be. They were told that they, and they alone, had a need-to-know about what had happened to these humans before they were put in the craft and sent aloft. They were told that seeing the bodies would be a shocking and disturbing experience. Because two of the aviators were comatose but still alive, the men would have to transfer them into a JellO-like substance and stand them upright in two tubular tanks, attached to a life-support system. Sometimes, their mouths opened, and this gave the appearance of their trying to speak. Remember, the engineers were told, these humans are in a comatose state. They are unconscious; their bodies would never spark back to life.

Once, the children had been healthy humans. Not anymore. They were about thirteen years old. Questions abounded. What made their heads so big? Had their bodies been surgically manipulated to appear inhuman, or did the children have genetic deformities? And what about their haunting, oversize eyes? The engineers were told that the children were rumored to have been kidnapped by Dr. Josef Mengele, the Nazi madman who, at Auschwitz and elsewhere, was known to have performed unspeakable experimental surgical procedures mostly on children, dwarfs, and twins. The engineers learned that just before the war ended, Josef Mengele made a deal with Stalin. Stalin offered Mengele an opportunity to continue his work in eugenics — the science of improving a human population by controlled breeding to increase desirable, heritable characteristics — in secret, in the Soviet Union after the war. The engineers were told that this deal likely occurred just before the war’s end, in the winter of 1945, when it was clear to many members of the Nazi Party, including Mengele, that Nazi Germany would lose the war and that its top commanders and doctors would be tried and hanged for war crimes.

In Josef Mengele’s efforts to create a pure, Aryan race for Hitler, at Auschwitz and elsewhere, he conducted experiments on people he considered subhuman so as to breed certain features out. Mengele’s victims included Jewish children, Gypsy children, and people with severe physical deformities. He removed parts of children’s craniums and replaced them with bones from larger, adult skulls. He removed and transplanted eyeballs, and injected people with chemicals that caused them to lose their hair. On Mengele’s instruction, an Auschwitz inmate, a painter named Dina Babbitt, made comparative drawings of the shapes of heads, noses, mouths, and ears of people before and after the grotesque surgeries Mengele performed. Another inmate doctor forced to work for Mengele, named Dr. Martina Puzyna, recounted how Mengele had her keep detailed measurements of the shapes and sizes of children’s body parts, casting those of crippled children — particularly their hands and heads — in plaster molds. When Mengele left Auschwitz, on January 17, 1945, he took the documentation of his medical experiments with him. According to his only son, Rolf, Mengele was still in possession of his medical research documents after the war.

The EG&G engineers were told that part of Joseph Stalin’s offer to Josef Mengele stated that if he could create a crew of grotesque, child-size aviators for Stalin, he would be given a laboratory in which to continue his work. According to what the engineers were told, Mengele held up his side of the Faustian bargain and provided Stalin with the child-size crew. Joseph Stalin did not. Mengele never took up residence in the Soviet Union. Instead, he lived for four years in Germany under an assumed name and then escaped to South America, where he lived, first in Argentina and then in Paraguay, until his death in 1979.

When Joseph Stalin sent the biologically and/or surgically reengineered children in the craft over New Mexico hoping it would land there, the engineers were told, Stalin’s plan was for the children to climb out and be mistaken for visitors from Mars. Panic would ensue, just like it did after the radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds. America’s early-warning radar system would be overwhelmed with sightings of other “UFOs.” Truman would see how easily a totalitarian dictator could control the masses using black propaganda. Stalin may have been behind the United States in atomic bomb technology, but when it came to manipulating the people’s perception, Stalin was the leader with the upper hand. This, says the engineer, is what he and the others in the group were told.

For months I asked the engineer why President Truman didn’t use the remains from the Roswell crash to show the world what an evil, abhorrent man Joseph Stalin was. I guessed that maybe Truman didn’t want to admit the breach of U.S. borders. For a long time, I never got an answer, just a shaking of the head. Here was the engineer who had the answer to the riddle inside the riddle that is Area 51, but he was unwilling to say more. He is the only one of the original elite group of EG&G engineers who is still alive. He said he wouldn’t tell me more, no matter how many times I asked. One day, I asked again. “Why didn’t President Truman reveal the truth in 1947?” This time he answered.

“Because we were doing the same thing,” he said. “They wanted to push science. They wanted to see how far they could go.”

Then he said, “We did things I wish I had not done.” Then, “We performed medical experiments on handicapped

children and prisoners.”

“But you are not a doctor,” I said. “They wanted engineers.” “On whose authority did you act?”

“The Atomic Energy Commission was in charge. And Vannevar Bush,” he said. “People were killed. In this great United States.”

“Why did we do that?”

“You do what you do because you love your country, and you are told what you are doing is for the good of the country,” the engineer said. Meaning out at the original Area 51, starting in 1951, the EG&G engineers worked in secret on a nefarious Nazi-inspired black project that would remain entirely hidden from the public because Vannevar Bush told them it was the correct thing to do.

“It was a long, long time ago,” the engineer said. “I have tried to forget.”

“When did it end?” I asked. No answer.

“In 1952?” I asked. Still no answer. “In 1953…1954…?” “At least through the 1980s it was still going on,” he said. “I believe you should tell me the whole story,” I said. “Otherwise,

once you are gone, you will take the truth with you.”

“You don’t want to know,” he said.

“I do.”

“You don’t have a need-to-know,” he said.

For many months, I tried to learn more. I got pieces. Slivers of pieces. One-word details. “This” confirmed and “that” reconfirmed, regarding what he had previously said. One day, when we were eating lunch in a restaurant, I recounted back to the engineer everything I knew. I asked for his permission to put it all in this book. He did not say yes. He did not say no. We interviewed for more than one year. Then one day, I asked him how much of the story I now knew.

“You don’t know half of it,” he said sadly.

I took a crouton, left over from my lunch, and set it down in the middle of the restaurant’s white china plate. “If what I know equals this crouton,” I said, pointing at the little brown piece of bread, “then is what I don’t know as big as this plate?”

“Oh, my dear,” he said, shaking his head. “The whole truth is bigger than this table we are eating on, including the chairs.”

He wouldn’t say more. He said he was hurting. That soon he would die. That, really, it was best that I did not learn any more because I didn’t have a need-to-know. But it is not just me who needs to know. We need to be able to keep secrets, but this kind of secret-keeping— of this kind of secret — is the work of totalitarian states, like the one we fought against for five decades during the Cold War. Fighting totalitarianism was America’s rationale for building seventy thousand nuclear weapons in sixty-five styles. In a free and open democratic society, conducting projects in the name of science is one thing. Keeping forty-year-old secrets from a president even after he tries to find them out is an entirely different problem for a democratic nation. It sets a precedent. It makes it easier for a group of powerful men to set up a program that defies the Constitution and defiles morality in the name of science and national security, all under the deceptive cover that no one has a need-to-know. I believe that even though the engineer didn’t tell me everything, that is why he told me what he did.

According to my source, the Atomic Energy Commission conducted experiments on humans in a classified government facility in the Nevada desert beginning in 1951. Although this was done in direct violation of the Nuremberg Code of 1947, it is far from the first time the Commission had acted in violation of the most basic moral principle involving voluntary human consent. In 1993, reporter Eileen Welsome wrote a newspaper story stating that the Atomic Energy Commission had conducted plutonium experiments on human beings, most notably retarded children and orphan boys from the Fernald State School, outside Boston, without the children’s or their guardians’ knowledge or consent. After this horrible revelation came to light, President Clinton opened an investigation to look into what the Atomic Energy Commission had done and the secrets it had been able to safeguard inside its terrifying and unprecedented system of secret-keeping. I asked the engineer why President Clinton hadn’t learned about the S-4 facility at Area 51—or had he?

“I think he might have come very close,” the engineer said about President Clinton. “But they kept it from him.”

“Who are they?” I asked. The engineer told me that his elite group had been given the keys to the original facility at Area 51. “Who inherited those keys from you five engineers?” I wanted to know.

“You don’t have a need-to-know” is all he would say.

EPILOGUE

In the summer of 2010 a book arrived in the mail from Colonel Leghorn, the father of overhead reconnaissance, age ninety-one. The pages were musty and smelled like an attic. What he had sent was his 1946 Army Air Forces commemorative yearbook from the Operation Crossroads atomic bomb tests. What is most striking is how the story of America’s first postwar nuclear test begins as a “mysterious ArmyNavy assignment” in a “sand-swept town — Roswell.”

“Roswell… Roswell… Roswell… Roswell… Roswell… Roswell.” The word repeats six times in the first few pages of the government-issued yearbook, making it clear that it was from the Roswell Army Air Field in New Mexico that the first shot in what would be a forty-three-year-old Cold War was fired. And what a colossal opening shot Operation Crossroads was, an unprecedented show of force aimed at letting Joseph Stalin know that America was not done with the nuclear bomb. Forty-two thousand people were present in the Pacific for the two nuclear bomb tests, including Stalin’s spies. The U.S. government spent nearly two billion dollars (adjusted for inflation) to show the world the nuclear power it now possessed.

“Stalin learned from Hitler,” the EG&G engineer says, “revenge… and other things.” And that to consider Stalin’s perspective one should think about two key moments in history, one right before World War II began and another right before it ended. On August 23, 1939, one week before war in Europe officially began, Hitler and Stalin agreed to be allies and signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, meaning each country promised not to attack the other when war in Europe broke out. And yet almost immediately after shaking hands, Hitler began plotting to double-cross Stalin. Twenty-two months later, Hitler’s sneak attack against Russia resulted in millions of deaths. And then, just a few weeks before World War II ended, Stalin, Truman, and Churchill met in Potsdam, Germany — from July 17, 1945, to August 2, 1945—and agreed to be postwar allies. Just one day before that conference began, America had secretly tested the world’s first and only atomic bomb, inside the White Sands Proving Ground in the New Mexico desert. Truman’s closest advisers had suggested that Truman share the details of the atomic test with Stalin at Potsdam, but Truman did not. It didn’t matter. Nuclear weapons historians believe that Joseph Stalin was already well aware of what the Manhattan Project engineers had accomplished. Stalin had spies inside the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory who had been providing him with bomb blueprints and other information since 1941. By the time the Potsdam conference rolled around, Stalin was already well at work on his own atomic bomb. Despite Stalin and Truman pretending to be allies, neither side trusted the other side, neither man trusted the other man. Each side was instead making plans to build up its own atomic arsenal for future use. When Operation Crossroads commenced just twelve months after the handshakes at Potsdam, the Cold War battle lines were already indelibly drawn.

It follows that Stalin’s black propaganda hoax — the flying disc peopled with alien look-alikes that wound up crashing near Roswell, New Mexico — could have been the Soviet dictator’s revenge for Truman’s betrayal at Crossroads. His double cross had to have been in the planning stages during the handshaking at Potsdam, metaphorically mirroring what Hitler had done during the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. By July of 1947, Stalin was still two years away from being able to successfully test his own nuclear bomb. The flying disc at Roswell, says the EG&G engineer, was “a warning shot across Truman’s bow.” Stalin may not have had the atomic bomb just yet, but he had seminal hover and fly technology, pilfered from the Germans, and he had stealth. Together, these technologies made the American military gravely concerned. Perplexed by the flying disc’s movements, and its radical ability to confuse radar, the Army Air Forces was left wondering what else Stalin had in his arsenal of unconventional weapons, usurped from the Nazis after the war.

“Hitler invented stealth,” says Gene Poteat, the first CIA officer in the Agency’s history to be assigned to the National Reconnaissance Office, or NRO. Gene Poteat’s job was to assess Soviet radar threats, and to do this, he observed many spy plane tests at Area 51. “Hitler’s stealth bomber was called the Horten Ho 229,” Poteat says, “which is also called the Horten flying wing. It was covered with radar-absorbing paint, carbon embedded in glue. The high graphic content produced a result called ‘ghosting,’ which made it difficult for radar to see.”

The Horten Ho 229 to which Poteat refers was the brainchild of two young aircraft designers who worked for Hitler’s Luftwaffe, Walter and Reimar Horten. These are the same two brothers who, in the fall of 1947, became the subject of the U.S. Army Intelligence’s massive European manhunt called “Operation Harass”—the search for a flyingsaucer-type aircraft that could allegedly hover and fly.

Whatever happened to the Horten brothers? Unlike so many Nazi scientists and engineers who were recruited under Operation Paperclip, Walter and Reimar Horten were originally overlooked. After being captured by the U.S. Ninth Army on April 7, 1945, at their workshop in Gцttingen, they were set up in a guarded London high-rise near Hyde Park. There, they were interrogated by the famous American physicist and rocket scientist Theodore Von Kбrmбn, who decided the Horten brothers did not have much to offer the U.S. Army Air Forces by way of aircraft technology — at least not with their flying wing. After being returned to Germany, Reimar escaped to Argentina, where he was set up in a beautiful house on the shores of Villa Carlos Paz Lake, thanks to Argentinean president and ardent Nazi supporter Juan Perуn. Walter lived out his life in Baden-Baden, Germany, hiding in plain sight.

The information about the Horten brothers comes from the aircraft historian David Myhra, who, in his search to understand all-wing aircraft, industriously tracked down both Horten brothers, visited them in their respective countries in the 1980s, and recorded hundreds of hours of interviews with them on audiotape. These tapes can be found in the archives of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum.

“Reimar had me agree to two restrictions before I went to South America to interview him,” Myhra explains. “One was that I couldn’t ask questions about Hitler or the Third Reich.” And the second was that “he said he didn’t want to talk about the CIA. Reimar said there was this crazy idea that he’d designed some kind of a flying saucer and that the CIA had [supposedly] been looking for him.” Myhra says Reimar Horten was adamant in his refusal to discuss anything related to the CIA. “The subject was off-limits for him,” Myhra says. The conversation with Reimar Horten that Myhra refers to took place in the decade before Army Intelligence released to the public its three-hundred-page file on Operation Harass. This is the file that discusses the U.S. manhunt for the Horten brothers and their so-called flying disc. The Operation Harass file makes clear that someone from an American intelligence organization made contact with Reimar in the late 1940s to interrogate him about the flying disc. More than forty years later, Reimar Horten still refused to talk about what was said. A 2010 Freedom of Information Act request to the Department of the Army, Office of the General Counsel, Army Pentagon, issued a “no records response.” A secondary appeal was also “denied.”

If Stalin really did get the Horten brothers’ flying disc, either from the brothers themselves or from blueprints they had drawn, how did Stalin get their flying disc to hover and fly on like that? What became of the craft’s hover technology, powered by some mysterious power plant, which was also so fervently sought by Counter Intelligence Corps agents during Operation Harass? The EG&G engineer says that while he does not know what research was conducted on the “equipment” when it was at Wright-Patterson, beginning in 1947, he does know about the research conducted on the “power plant” after he received the “equipment,” in Nevada in 1951.

“There was another [important] EG&G engineer,” he explains. That engineer was assigned the task of learning about Stalin’s hover technology, “which was called electromagnetic frequency, or EMF.” This engineer “spent an entire year in a windowless room” inside an EG&G building in downtown Las Vegas trying to understand how EMF worked. “We figured it out,” the EG&G engineer says. “We’ve had hover and fly technology all this time.”

I asked the EG&G engineer to take me to the place where hover and fly technology was allegedly solved, and he did. Archival photographs and Atomic Energy Commission video footage confirm that the site once contained several buildings that were operated by EG&G. Not anymore. Instead, the facility inside of which an EG&G engineer unlocked one of Area 51’s original secrets in the early 1950s is now nothing but an empty lot of asphalt and weeds ringed by a chain-link fence. Is this what will become of Area 51 in sixty years? Will it too be moved? Will it go underground? Has it already?

What about flying saucers from a physicist’s point of view? Edward Lovick, the grandfather of America’s stealth technology, says that in the late 1950s, Kelly Johnson had him spend many months in Lockheed’s anechoic chamber radar testing small-scale models of flying saucers. “Little wooden discs built in the Skunk Works wood shop,” Lovick recalls. According to Lovick, Kelly Johnson eventually decided that round-shaped aircraft — flying discs without wings — were aerodynamically unstable and therefore too dangerous for pilots to fly. This was before the widespread use of pilotless aircraft, or drones.

What about the child-size pilots inside the flying disc? Shortly after the Roswell crash in July 1947, a press officer from the Roswell Army Air Field, a man named Walter Haut, was dispatched to the radio station KGFL in Roswell with a press release saying the Roswell Army Air Force was in possession of a flying disc. Haut was the emissary of the original Roswell Statement, which, in addition to being broadcast over the airwaves, was famously printed in the San Francisco Chronicle the following day. It was Walter Haut who, three hours later, was sent back to KGFL by the commander of the Army Air Field with a second press release, one that said that the first press release was actually incorrect.

Walter Haut died in December 2005 and left a sworn affidavit to be opened only after his death. In the text, Haut said the second press release was fraudulent, meant to cover up the first statement, which was true. Haut also said that in addition to recovering a flying craft, the military recovered bodies from a second crash site — small, child-size bodies with disproportionately large heads. “I am convinced that what I personally observed was some kind of craft and its crew from outer space,” Haut wrote.

The EG&G engineer’s explanation about the child pilots inside the flying disc answers the riddle of the so-called Roswell aliens, certainly in a manner that would satisfy the fourteenth-century English friar and philosopher William of Ockham. It is an answer that is not more complicated than the riddle itself. According to the EG&G engineer, the aviators were not aliens but were created to look like them, by Josef Mengele, “shortly before or immediately after the end of the war.” Children would have had great difficulty piloting an aircraft. The engineer says he was told the flying disc was piloted remotely, but offered almost no information about what would have had to have been the larger aircraft from which this early “drone” was launched. “It came down over Alaska,” he says.

What about Bob Lazar? In the course of interviewing thirty-two individuals who lived and worked at Area 51, I asked the majority what they thought of Lazar’s 1989 revelation about Area 51. Most made highly skeptical comments about Bob Lazar; none claimed ever to have met him. While it appears that Lazar lied about his education, his statements about S-4 should not be summarily dismissed as fraud.

The EG&G engineer says that the S-4 facility that housed the original Roswell “equipment” continued on for decades, which fits with Bob Lazar’s time line. Lazar says he worked at Area 51 from 1988 to 1989. Lazar told newsman George Knapp that at S-4, he saw something through a window, inside an unmarked room, that could have been an alien. Was what happened to Lazar just like what happened to the P-38 Lightning pilot who, flying over the California desert during the dawn of the jet age, thought he saw a gorilla flying an airplane when really he saw Bell Aircraft chief test pilot Jack Woolams wearing a gorilla mask? Perhaps Lazar drew the only conclusion he could have drawn based on the information he had. And perhaps the Atomic Energy Commission had taken a page out of the CIA’s playbook on deception campaigns: it needed to produce the belief that something false was something true. Perhaps scientists and engineers who were brought to S-4 in the later years were told that they were working on alien beings and alien spacecraft. Try going public with that story and you will wind up disgraced like Bob Lazar. As it was with the P-38 Lightning pilots in 1942, it remains today. No one likes being mistaken for a fool.

“It’s difficult to be taken seriously in the scientific community when you’re known as ‘the UFO guy,’” Bob Lazar stated on the record in 2010 for this book.

For decades, hundreds of serious people — civilians, lawmakers, and military personnel — have made considerable efforts to locate the records for the Roswell crash remains. And yet no such record group has ever been located, despite formal investigations by senators, congressmen, the governor of New Mexico, and the federal government’s Government Accountability Office. This is because no one has known where to look. Until now, the world has been knocking on the wrong door. The information has been protected from declassification by draconian Atomic Energy Commission classification rules, hidden inside secret Restricted Data files that were originally created for the Atomic Energy Commission by EG&G.

So now it is known.

How did Vannevar Bush get so much power? He was once the most important scientist in America. President Truman awarded him the Medal for Merit in a White House ceremony, President Johnson presented him with the National Medal of Science, and the queen of England dubbed him a knight. The statements made by the EG&G engineer about what Vannevar Bush authorized engineers and scientists to do at Area 51’s S-4 facility are truly shocking and almost unbelievable. Except a clear historical precedent exists for Vannevar Bush having exactly this kind of power, secrecy, and control.

Vannevar Bush lorded over the mother of all black operations — the engineering of the world’s first nuclear bomb. And as director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, which controlled the Manhattan Project, Vannevar Bush was also in charge of human experiments to study the effects of the bioweapons lewisite and mustard gas on man. Some of those human guinea pigs were soldiers and others were conscientious objectors to the war, but a 1993 study of these programs by the National Academy of Sciences made clear that the test subjects were not consenting adults. “Although the human subjects were called ‘volunteers,’ it was clear from the official reports that recruitment of the World War II human subjects, as well as those in the later experiments, was accomplished through lies and half-truths,” wrote the Institute of Medicine.

The “later experiments” to which the committee refers were conducted by a group also under Vannevar Bush’s direction, this one called the Committee on Medical Research. As discovered by President Clinton’s advisory committee on human experiments, this so-called medical research involved using as guinea pigs individuals living at the Dixon Institution for the Retarded, in Illinois, and at the New Jersey State Colony for the Feeble-Minded. The doctors were testing vaccines for malaria, influenza, and sexually transmitted diseases. Some programs continued until 1973.

Even more troubling is this: buried in Atomic Energy Commission archives is the fact that the first incarnation of the Manhattan Project had a letter-number designation of S-1. Were there two other programs that transpired between S-1 and S-4? And if so, what were they? What else might have been done to push science in a way that the ends could justify the means?

In this book, many pieces of the Area 51 puzzle are put into place, but many questions remain. What goes on at Area 51 now? We don’t know. We won’t know for decades. Airplanes have gotten faster and stealthier. Remote-controlled spy planes fire missiles. Classified delivery systems drop bombs. The players are mostly the same: CIA, Air Force, Department of Energy, Lockheed, North American, General Atomics, and Hughes. These are but a few.

The biggest players tend to remain, as always, behind the veil. Almost a century ago, in 1922, Vannevar Bush cofounded a company that contracted first with the military and later with the Atomic Energy Commission. He called his company Raytheon because it meant “light from the gods.” Raytheon has always maintained a considerable presence at the Nevada Test Site, the Nevada Test and Training Range, and Area 51. Currently, it is the fifth-biggest defense contractor in the world. It is the world’s largest producer of guided missiles and the leader in developing radar technology for America’s early-warning defense system. This is the same system that, in the 1950s, CIA director General Walter Bedell Smith feared the Soviets might overrun with a UFO hoax, leaving the nation vulnerable to an air attack.

As for EG&G, they were eventually acquired by the powerful Carlyle Group at the end of the twentieth century but later resold, in 2002, to another corporate giant called URS. Currently, EG&G remains partnered with Raytheon in a joint venture at the Nevada Test and Training Range and at Area 51. The program, called JT3—Joint Test, Tactics, and Training, LLC — provides “engineering and technical support for the Nevada Test and Training Range,” according to corporate brochures. When asked what exactly that means, EG&G’s parent company, URS, declined to comment. This is corporate America’s way of saying, “You don’t have a need-to-know.”

The veil has been lifted. The curtain has been pulled back on Area 51. But what has been revealed in this book is like a single bread crumb in a trail. There is so much more that remains unknown. Where does the trail lead? How far does it go? Will it ever end?