Area 51: What REALLY Goes On At This Top Secret Military Installation (PHOTOS)

AREA 51 sits inside of the largest government-controlled land parcel in the United States, the Nevada Test and Training Range. It's a little smaller than Connecticut, three times the size of Rhode Island, and more than twice the size of Delaware. It is the most famous military installation in the world and the most secret. Everything that goes on at Area 51 is a black operation, and most of what goes on at the Nevada Test and Training Range is classified. These operations take place in the name of national security and they all involve cutting-edge science. "AREA 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base" is the first book based on recently declassified documents and interviews with firsthand eyewitnesses to base history--seventy-four individuals linked to the secret base, thirty-two of whom lived and served the base proudly and secretly for extended periods of time.

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A rare perspective on Area 51 looking northeast in 1955. The triangular mountain peak ( just right of center in the far distance) is Tikaboo Peak, the single remaining location from where the curious can catch a faraway glimpse of Area 51 today. Viewers who go to Tikaboo at night report seeing lights on runways illuminate and suddenly shut down again in the middle of the night.

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A rare perspective on Area 51 looking northeast in 1955. The triangular mountain peak ( just right of center in the far distance) is Tikaboo Peak, the single remaining location from where the curious can catch a faraway glimpse of Area 51 today. Viewers who go to Tikaboo at night report seeing lights on runways illuminate and suddenly shut down again in the middle of the night.

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This Area 51 Pic

Rank #2  |  Average: 4

Eh. Cool pic!

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Comments

[KIampfbeobachter]

01:07 PM on 06/29/2011

Picture 6 out of 8: The airplane, a glider, is correctly named as the "Horten Parabola". It was in storage at the Wasserkuppe in the Roehn mountains and warped severely during that winter storage and was consequently burned by the Horten brothers. It never flew and was never replicated.
Dr. Reimar Horten in 1947 was already in Argentina his brother Walter somewhere in Europe.

[Las Vegas Mixx]

05:00 PM on 06/22/2011

I cannot put much faith in someone's research about Area 51 who has not even bothered to learn how to pronounce the state of Nevada correctly. Some Easterners should shed their provincial ways and learn to pronounce westerns states like Nevada and Oregon the correct way, not the way their equally uneducated colleagues do.

[Hope Richardson]

02:51 PM on 06/05/2011

#3 reminds me a bit of the movie version of "Holes", only, you know, huge smoldering craters instead of 6 foot diameter holes.

[Gail Dodona]

05:13 PM on 05/25/2011

Trump should buy it and make it an Amuzement Park.

[Scott Kiovsky]

01:06 PM on 05/25/2011

The part about the lights turning on and then off on the runway is funny. Even the smallest airports in the country have a system in place where the lights will turn on through 6 consecutive clicks of the microphone from a plane within the area and on the same frequency of the airport. The runway lights will turn on and then turn back off in about 15-20 minutes. This saves money by not requiring the lights to be on when not in use. I would venture to say that Area 51 (the most technologically advanced airport) would have a system like this. Nothing spectacular about that. Go to any private airport in the country at night and just watch the runway lights turn on and off.

[jflorish]

01:12 AM on 05/23/2011

Area 51 is cool ... I love watching stuff on tv about that.

[wolf1497]

09:36 PM on 05/21/2011

Miss Ann must have been run over by the Ox Cart. Where did she get her information, from the White Rabbit. 1st her comment on reverse engineering, almost made me crash. The example of reverse engineering,she should have use was the soviets cloned as best as they could, of our B29, which they reverse to be the TU-4. It flew in 1949, 2 years after she said the soviets sent a spy saucer to Roswell.. get real they can send a spy saucer, but they have to clone a B29..think about it. Then she gives a line about how Top Gun came about, again she has been sold a bucket of prop wash. Top Gun came about since our early air to air missles had a high failure rate. Plus the only fighter cover that could use guns was the Navy F-8, so dogfighting had to be learned again. Ann your lines on the Mig are also suspect, which Mig's are you speaking about the 17,19,21.23.or the 25 none of what you said is accurate. Check your sources, better yet watch the history channel, they covered it better the last 15 years.

[RedDogBear]

11:45 AM on 05/23/2011

Excellent points. Also, as I understand it both the early MiGs and the early US jets were very similar because they were BOTH essentially re-engineered versions of the German jets. As for her biology, Athena Andreadis demolishes that very effectively: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/athena-andreadis-phd/area-51-annie-jacobsen-book_b_864474.html

[headkat1]

10:51 PM on 05/19/2011

Maybe we're not ready for an honest answer.......! I think though, there isn't any agency or person who is ready to deal with this issue....

[diogeneslives]

02:51 AM on 05/19/2011

I think it is more than slightly odd that the gov't will not acknowledge Area 51 existence.

[headkat1]

10:19 PM on 05/19/2011

Please don't allow Obama to try to deal with it for any reason!! Please!

[RedDogBear]

11:50 AM on 05/23/2011

Its not odd at all. Its SOP for highly classified programs, government officials often won't even acknowledge their existence even after information has leaked to the public. In addition to just being the way secretive organizations work it makes a bit of sense. Once you start answering even the most basic questions you naturally get follow up questions. Its easier to just refuse to speak about the most sensitive secrets at all.

BTW, I'm not saying I condone it. I think that secrecy has been greatly over used by our government since the end of WWII -- and its just as often (if not more so) used to just cover up incompetence or to hide things from our own people as to hide things that really need to be secret.

[dna user]

03:09 PM on 05/18/2011

I still can not get over that interview Jacobsen did at NPR. Those new hypothesis about Roswell are so outlandish, as to make their belief, outlandish itself.

She basically claims that a scientist told her that

A) His account of Roswell was first hand and personal.
B) A flying disk was not only developed by German scientist, but posses "in-flight hover" and later were reverse engineered by Russian and Americans more than 50 years ago.
C) Soviets genetically engineered, physically altered humans to look like movie aliens and to pilot these "flying disks" .
D) Once A through C was done, they mange to crash this flying disk in Roswell (the Russians genetically altered to scare the American public)

Really?

[RedDogBear]

02:31 PM on 05/21/2011

I agree its preposterous and what little science was in her interview is totally wrong as described by Athena Andreadis:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/athena-andreadis-phd/area-51-annie-jacobsen-book_b_864474.html

[Praedor]

10:10 AM on 05/18/2011

I listened to the interview on NPR and it was interesting. My thought at the end was simply that those religiously wed to alien flying saucers will remain so and simply say "Annie's spouting the company line!" and keep believing their alien flying saucer stuff. Those religiously wed to the "moon landing was fake" belief will continue to do so. Those wed to the "tunnels, tunnels everywhere" mythos will continue to be so. All this book will do is...I don't know, prevent a few people from joining one of the 3 main Area 51 religions (1. Aliens! 2. Fake moon landing! 3. Tunnels!).

As scientific research has shown, people strongly wedded to an idea or belief system will dig in and hold to it even tighter when shown even objective, clear facts to the contrary. Hence, the GOP believes what is clearly and repeatedly falsified: that tax cuts increase revenue and that cutting taxes on the rich magically creates jobs. The Fundies believe the earth is a mere 6000-10000 yrs old and that humans walked (or rode) dinosaurs. Facts are to be ignored or twisted to bolster the personally DESIRED belief.

[Chris Berman]

12:01 AM on 05/19/2011

If aliens showed up in the solar system, believe me we'd know it. The energy signature to slow down from anything near 50% of light speed would be incredible and very visible. But....that said, the Earth is 4.5 billion years old and...tax cuts DO generate an uptick in the economy, taxes mute economic growth.

[RedDogBear]

03:33 PM on 05/23/2011

"tax cuts DO generate an uptick in the economy"

That's why the economy did so well under Bush.

[headkat1]

10:31 PM on 05/19/2011

Too many mysteries....all this life on earth and still no knowledge as to ...who are we and why are we here????? So, people started writing stories and inventing religion to get answers?We still don't know anything except that it's greater than anything...for sure!! Again, WHO ARE WE AND WHY ARE WE HERE??????

[american-dolt]

09:52 AM on 05/18/2011

Operation Paperclip....Is very interesting indeed.

[czs5056]

09:31 AM on 05/18/2011

I have a hunch that groom lake (Area 51) is where the military test flies their SUPER secret airplanes at night leading to UFO sightings by the uninformed citizens

[headkat1]

10:36 PM on 05/19/2011

czs5056, You make sense.....probably right!

[Kalikat]

08:00 AM on 05/18/2011

Didn't the move to some place else. I think they went to some place with a larger run way and more secret. They are forever showing re-runs about Area 51 and I think one of the newer ones showed where they had moved to. Altho Area 51 is still being used for every day stuff.

[Lloyd Pinchback]

09:50 AM on 05/18/2011

Dugway Proving Grounds, Utah is the new so-called Area 51.

[jsarets]

07:59 AM on 05/18/2011

I don't know what the Air Force does at Area 51 these days (i.e. since the 1960s), but every really cool flying machine that has eventually been disclosed to the public in the past several decades has been built at Plant 42 in Palmdale, CA where Lockheed, Boeing, and Northrop share a covert aerospace development complex.

Everything from the U-2, SR-71, and X-15 to the F-117, B-2, and the Space Shuttles to the more recent F-22, F-35, and RQ-170 were built at Plant 42 and flight tested out of the nearby Edwards AFB (specifically the heavily restricted North Base hangar area). Whatever they do at Area 51, I can't imagine it's anything more aeronautically exotic than the stuff they do at Plant 42.

[freespeech2]

09:34 AM on 05/18/2011

Ben Rich, former head of the Lockheed Skunk Works, revealed a lot of the work by Kelly Johnson and himself in his book. Before he passed away, he was been quoted as saying that what is being tested is at least 50 years ahead of what people suspect. Makes you wonder what they'[re working on.

And what was that knotted contrail all about anyway?

[Lloyd Pinchback]

09:55 AM on 05/18/2011

The named aircraft may be built in California, but are test flown at Groom Lake, which is part of the reason for the many UFO sightings in that are, but that's only half the real story behind Area 51.