AREA 51

Also known as the Groom Lake Facility, Area 51 is a high-security military base in the Nevada desert, 90 miles (145 km) north of Las Vegas. The facility, which comprises thousands of acres, is surrounded by security fencing and intruder-detection systems, and is regularly patrolled. A no-fly zone operates above it.

So far, so military-base humdrum. Where Area 51 differs from other military installations is in the longstanding belief by conspiracists that it houses the UFO disc found at Roswell, as well as other crashed alien spaceships. At Area 51, the theory goes, the recovered UFOs are back-engineered so that their technology can be utilized by the US military. The latter are helped – either willingly or unwillingly – by captured alien pilots.

Few of the human government employees who work at Groom have ever talked about their work, but two who did were Leo Williams and Bob Lazar. Williams claimed to have worked in alien technology evaluation, the results of which informed the design of the B-2 stealth bomber. In 1989 Lazar announced on local TV that he too had been involved in “back engineering” at Groom’s S-4 hangars complex, including assessment of the Roswell craft’s propulsion system. He had even uncovered “Gravity B”, a force arising from the manipulation of a new nuclear element, “ununpentium”.Neither Williams nor Lazar proved very convincing witnesses. 

Lazar had invented his purported MIT physics qualification and before working in back-engineering had been engaged in the rather less than cutting-edge employment of managing a photo shop. A steady stream of sightings of strange lights and craft at Groom, however, kept alive the notion of Area 51 as a top-secret UFO lab, perhaps the manufacturing plant of Black Helicopters.Certainly, Area 51 has been the testing centre for weird and wonderful aircraft. 

The U-2 spy plane was flown there; so was the SR-71 Blackbird, the B-2 stealth bomber and the F-117 stealth fighter. And these are only the planes the public has been informed about. It’s reasonable to suppose that other prototype and avant-garde aircraft have taken to the air at Groom, less reasonable to suppose that they have been developed from alien technology.