The True Story of Area 51's UFOs
In 1968, 31-year-old hypersonic flight specialist Thornton "T.D." Barnes reported to Groom Lake, the remote Southern Nevada military base also known as Area 51.
He began work on the CIA's top-secret Project OXCART. Over the next seven years, he and many of his colleagues knew one another only by aliases. For additional secrecy, several of them lived in California, commuting to work each day by plane.
Barnes' cover permitted him to go home to nearby Beatty, Nevada, but he couldn't tell his wife, Doris, what he did at work. She only knew that it was top-secret. His children knew even less. "They got used to it," he recalls. "They grew up not expecting me to talk shop when I came home. None of them knew until two years ago, when it was declassified."
He means the CIA's September 2007 declassification of its Groom Lake aircraft testing, new information in spite of which questions remain. To say the least. Area 51 still is heard in the same breath as Roswell, Amityville and Loch Ness.
Why?
Aerospace historian Michael Schratt suspects that extraterrestrial technology was utilized at Area 51 and remains secret "because it will make every man, woman and child on the planet energy independent." Schratt's theories gained some prominence in July 2007 when he produced the following photograph:
During a recent interview, Schratt told me that the picture in fact is "a computer-generated forensic composite" that he commissioned. [To see the undoctored original photo, click here.]
But there were UFOs at Area 51, according to Barnes.
"We were the UFOs," he says. "We were, to a great extent, the sightings being reported."
The flying objects in question include the family of spy planes known as Blackbirds, technological marvels that could fly at heights of 90,000 feet (or about three times the altitude of DC-9s more commonly seen in that era) and speeds near 2,500 mph (think ten football fields in a second), figures that decimated prior records and enabled U.S. reconnaissance photography that arguably tipped the balance of power in the Cold War. Also of note: Although conceived in the 1950s, the sleek jets would not look out of place in the latest George Lucas offering.
So it's little wonder that they were unidentifiable.
Says Barnes, "This posed a great problem to investigators having to explain a sighting without revealing it to be a super secret CIA or Air Force project."
Barnes and company were forced to conceive all manner of cover stories.
Now, with the declassification, he can tell the truth.
Currently President of the Area 51 alumni group Roadrunners Internationale, Barnes has started a website dedicated to the legacy of OXCART and the ensuing Operation Black Shield. "I am trying to make it possible for a lot of people who never got to tell their stories to do so now that the Oxcart project has been declassified," he told me.
For the same reason, he's spearheading an oral history project at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, enabling his fellow Roadrunners to share their experiences in great detail.
Like Barnes, many Roadrunners have children and grandchildren unaware of what they did for a living, let alone their heroics. When the tape starts to roll, Barnes relates, "A lot of them, on finally getting to share their stories, do so with such pent-up emotion that they literally break down in tears."
To hear the interviews, go to the UNLV digital collections. For more of OXCART and other war stories, check out roadrunnersinternationale.com. Barnes' own site is area51specialprojects.com.
Also, post your Area 51 question in the comments section below. Mr. Barnes will log on and try to provide an answer unless it reveals, as he puts it, "anything that might still be classified or that could be of use to our enemies."
The SR-71 reconnaissance aircraft, part of the "Blackbird" family begun with OXCART's A-12
Follow Keith Thomson on Twitter: www.twitter.com/kqthomson
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More mis-information. Groom Lake was removed from maps circa 1992. It was also, during the Clinton Administration that the Open Sky'sTreaty was signed to allow foreign governments i.e. Russia and China, the ability to "lawfully" photograph, va satillite, Area 51 and other facilities, since we were doing it to them anyway.
People like Keith Thompson pop out every now and then tossing out the "we're coming clean" stories but try driving up to Groom Lake and see how far (close) you get and how many "declassified" answers you get. Oh, and wear a helmet. The butt end of a rifle against the noggin hurts.
The simple truth is that any claim of an ET craft being what's behind a ufo sighting is an extraordinary claim, thus, it requires extraordinary proof.
To date, such extraordinary proof has never been offered. Further, any claims that there has been any use of "alien" technology are also extraordinary claims, and, as in the first case, no such extraordinary proofs have ever been offered. All of the technology used in cutting edge planes, etc., has a long history of Earthbound development. In the case of the SR-71 type, the 50s saw a LOT of developments in aircraft, and the 71 was one such product of that decade of rapid and well funded progress.
Reality tends to be far mroe... boring than fantasy. But, smart people live in the real world, and not in factless fantasies. We leave that place for the kooks.
UFO's are real! Here are a few examples of these:
1. A photograph of a purported object in the sky, of which the image has the equivalent of 5 - 6 pixels and vaguely resembles a football. - For your information, a pixel is a square of color, and every pixel in an image has the same size. You can choose any color you like.
2. A saucer thrown at you by your angry wife, in the instant before you realize that it's indeed a flying saucer (if you have time to do so before it knocks you out).
3. An image as seen by anyone who still does not understand what Photoshop or Final Cut Pro can do.
4. (the most common) any object in the sky, before you figure that's the Space Station, or a chopper, or one of these big pafs of 747, or the Space shuttle, or simply a Southwest Airlines 737. Or the moon.
So I have this "friend" who has been lying to me for more than 60 years and now tells me that he is finally telling me the truth and asks that I believe him... should I?
Aurora! Donuts-on-a-rope! Real or not?? Also: when Testor models came out with their stealth fighter kit two years before the project was declassified, how did everyone react?
Yes, let's remember what the letters U.F.O. stand for. I've always figured that it was our government (or others) testing flying machines of some sort. Even though I believe there could be life elsewhere in the universe. Why in the world would they want to come to this planet filled with such a violent species? I want to believe, as the latest X-Files film was called, but you know, I've got other things to worry about right now. If any aliens are out there and want to come down and shake my hand, take pictures with me and such, I'm available.
Maybe they like our resources. We are a watery planet, after all. They may be simply self-interested.
there's plenty of water elsewhere, and plenty of other resources too. unless they're after fossil fuels (which doesn't go well with the idea that they have some super advanced tech that will revolutionize energy dependence), there's nothing here they can't find somewhere else.
While people keep looking for proof of intelligent life in outer space, I keep looking for signs of it here on earth...
Yeah, good luck with that...
I would rather believe in alien visitation--a much juicier story--but after more than 50 years of UFO interest, I see no compelling evidence of that. And the following three facts are not disputed by anyone: 1. Nikola Tesla, inventor of AC current, fractional horsepower AC motors, and so on, spent the second half of his life working on a flying craft technology "without wings or propeller, that drew energy from the universe itself." When he died in 1943 his works were quietly confiscated by the US and never seen again. 2. The Nazi regime had a very active anti-gravity/flying saucer project, complete with a prototype saucer, thought to have been tested in tethered mode only. The US quietly seized the project in 1945, with much higher secrecy than the Peenemunde V-2 project. 3. The modern era of flying saucer sightings started in June 1947 with the Kenneth Arnold sighting at Mt. Rainier, followed by the Roswell crash in July 1947. Best Guess: We have an esoteric air/space technology that is still immature--most sightings report wobbly flight and uncertain flight paths--and that's why we still strap astronauts into dangerous flying bombs for routine spaceflight today.
if this were true you'd see 101 inventions based on whatever physical principle underlies the mechanism. Not just flying saucers. You'd also have a zillion physics graduate students making up stuff. All over the world. You could go zorch the LIGO detector. Since none is true...
You must have looked at a video called "The_Real_Flying_Saucers". I don't know if I can place much credibility in such a video.
If a alien spaceship was discovered it is possible that there is no way we can understand what
makes it tick, like a tv showing up in Rome 500bc.
For sure, it would have been Greek to them!
Scientists have already proved that there are thousands of other galaxies besides our own so do ppl really think we're the only ones that exist?? I bet they're watching us totally screw up this planet and just waiting till the end.
Thousands? Try maybe 500 billion. There are 100 times more galaxies in the universe than there are people on the earth. It is hard to visualize the enormity of these numbers for sure.
What's truly amazing is that the A-12/SR-71 were early 1960s technology.
Created and made "stealthy" without the help of computers/CAD/CAM. All done with pencils and slide rules - there weren't even any calculators.
Yep, we're good at maths, shocking isn't it.
Agree! So was Apollo. Physics hasn't changed. Computer technology has.
"V"
So does this mean NASA is the best we can do?
Space is hard, get over it.
Nah, We're just doing it wrong. :-)
I and two other people saw a UFO hovering over our home in Oregon. It's color resembled the night sky but when it turned on it's sequential lighting it revealed it was round in shape. It resembled two dinner plates put together with the lights in the seam where they were joined. It did not make any noise and when it left it skimmed the tops of the trees and disappeared. I don't know why it was there or why it felt compelled to reveal itself to us but if the US Military has anything similar we wouldn't be strapping astronauts to the end of giant bombs and risking their lives blasting them off into space.
I don't care if anyone believes this or not. It happened.
Thank you for putting thing in perspective. -rob
I believe you; I saw something too one time. What it was I can’t say, but what it wasn’t was like anything I’d ever seen before and I’d been born, raised and married to the military, and at that time (1980-?81) had lived my entire life on military instillations. I was on a street corner in front of a train station in Isehara Japan and saw two women across the street looking up and pointing, so I looked too. What I saw was a low flying circular bright object, very slow and completely silent on an apparently controlled path. Alien? Probably not, but it was very strange.
I believe you too. But as Carl Sagan said, if we are the only life in the cosmos, seems like a real waste of space.
I'll bet Mulder and Scully are pretty embarrassed now!
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