What really goes on at Area 51

What happened

Area 51 explained in a sentence: it is a secret flight-test base in the Nevada desert, and it began with a spy plane. On 12 April 1955, according to the National Security Archive's account of the CIA's declassified history, Richard Bissell and Colonel Osmund Ritland flew over Nevada in a small Beechcraft with Kelly Johnson, the Lockheed engineer who worked with the CIA on the U-2. Near the north-east corner of the Atomic Energy Commission's Nevada Proving Ground they spotted what looked like an airstrip beside a salt flat called Groom Lake, an ideal site, they agreed, for testing the U-2 and training its pilots.

President Eisenhower approved the plan, and the land, known by its map designation, Area 51, was added to the Nevada Test Site. Johnson called the remote camp Paradise Ranch, soon shortened to the Ranch, to make it sound more appealing to his workers. By July 1955 the base was ready, and NBC News, reporting the history's release, dated the first U-2 test flight there to 4 August 1955.

Where is Area 51? It lies near Groom Lake, north of Las Vegas, inside the Nevada Test and Training Range. Nevada's state tourism office places it about 150 miles north of the city, names Rachel, on State Route 375, the Extraterrestrial Highway, as the closest town, and says the nearest point the public can reach is still more than 15 miles away.

The official explanation

Official acknowledgement came late. In 2005 the National Security Archive at George Washington University asked under the Freedom of Information Act for a review of the redactions in a 1992 CIA history of the U-2 and OXCART programmes by Gregory Pedlow and Donald Welzenbach. The review was completed on 25 June 2013, and the archive published the history on 15 August 2013, including material on Groom Lake and Area 51. As NPR later put it, the federal government had acknowledged that spy planes were tested there.

Documents the archive gathered later fill in the rest. The U-2 was followed by the CIA's A-12, codenamed OXCART: a radar test facility was set up at Area 51 in November 1959 to see how easily an OXCART mock-up could be detected, and the first A-12 arrived in late December 1961. Later work on the record includes the F-117 stealth fighter, whose first flight in June 1981 was "presumably" at Area 51; TACIT BLUE, first flown there in February 1982; the Bird of Prey, first flown in 1996; and Soviet MiGs, including a MiG-17 that began flying at Groom Lake on 17 February 1969.

By the mid-1990s the base was widely known and faced threatened legal action over environmental concerns; President Clinton signed an exemption from hazardous and solid waste laws that might otherwise have forced disclosure of classified information about it.

Officially, the site stays closed. When a tongue-in-cheek Facebook call to "Storm Area 51" passed a million sign-ups in July 2019, the Air Force told NPR that "any attempt to illegally access the area is highly discouraged." On 20 September, Nevada authorities said, about 40 people gathered at the gates before law enforcement dispersed them.

What witnesses said

The first UFO witnesses in this story were pilots and air traffic controllers. Gerald Haines, historian of the National Reconnaissance Office, explained why in the CIA journal Studies in Intelligence: the U-2 could fly at 60,000 feet, while most mid-1950s airliners flew between 10,000 and 20,000 feet, so once test flights began, commercial pilots and controllers reported a large increase in UFO sightings. The early U-2s were silver and reflected the sun, especially at sunrise and sunset, and often looked like fiery objects from below.

Air Force Blue Book investigators knew about the flights. By checking with the CIA's U-2 project staff they could attribute many sightings to U-2s, but they were careful not to reveal the true cause to the public, and tried to explain sightings away as ice crystals and temperature inversions. According to later estimates by CIA officials who worked on the U-2 and OXCART projects, Haines wrote, "over half of all UFO reports from the late 1950s through the 1960s were accounted for by manned reconnaissance flights (namely the U-2) over the United States." That deception, he added, "added fuel to the later conspiracy theories."

The witness who tied Area 51 to aliens came decades later. In 1989, as Nevada's tourism office recounts, Bob Lazar claimed he had been part of a classified government project to reverse-engineer alien spacecraft kept at Area 51. In a report released in March 2024, Roll Call reported, the Pentagon's All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office reviewed every US government UFO investigation since 1945 and found no evidence that the government or private companies have access to extraterrestrial technology. Alleged reverse-engineering programmes, it concluded, either do not exist, are misidentified national security programmes, or trace back to a programme that was shut down.

Where scientists stand

The researchers who obtained the documents read them plainly: the National Security Archive concluded that, whatever some enthusiasts believe, Area 51 is better understood as a government facility for testing secret aircraft. The UFO connection has a documented mechanism: aircraft flying far above the airliners of the day, catching the sunlight, while the officials who could explain the sightings stayed silent.

That fits the wider pattern the Pentagon review found: most reports of unidentified objects are ordinary objects that were misidentified, and most such cases could be resolved as ordinary objects with better data.

What is in Area 51 today, the public does not know. The declassified record runs from the U-2 in 1955 to projects of the 1990s. NBC News noted in 2013 that the area was still closely guarded and its airspace off-limits to civilian traffic, and Nevada's tourism office describes it as part of an active military base. Secrecy about current work is not evidence of anything extraterrestrial; the record shows what that secrecy protected in the past.

Questions people ask

Verdict

Area 51 is real, and its origin is confirmed by the CIA's own history: a Cold War test base at Groom Lake, chosen in 1955 for the U-2 and used afterwards for the A-12, later secret aircraft and Soviet MiGs. Its link to UFOs is real too, but it runs the other way from the legend: secret aircraft produced sightings, and officials let the misunderstanding stand. No evidence has surfaced that the base holds alien craft. Real or Legend files the base's purpose as confirmed and the alien claims as unsupported.