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JUNE 1997
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The Audio-Video
Revolution Has
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The Air Force Has
Abandoned Top-Secret Testing
At Its Once Most Secret Test Site.
We Know Why And We Know
Where They Moved It To
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AR RACING PREVIEW
cams Drivers Rules Hardware
COVER STORY
Project 57: Plutonium Dis.
Took Place Near Groom Lake
Area 51 Suffered Effects
Nearby Nuclear Testing
AREA
The Air Force has abandoned top-secret
testing at its once most secret test site.
We know why and we know where
they moved it to.
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RIZONA
BY JIM WILSON, Science/Technology Editor
A cloud of brown dust snakes behind me as I speed
down the desolate desert road. A dozen miles ago, I
passed the solitary steel mailbox that marks the
turnoff for Area 51. For a place that isn't supposed to
exist, it's odd that the "secret" air base occupies whole
chapters of aviation history. It was here, in 1955, that
the U-2 spyplane first took wing. In the years that fol-
lowed, its successors, the A-12 and SR-71 and later the
stealthy F-117A fighter and B-2 bomber, danced
across the same blue-steel Nevada sky.
NEW MEXICO
ALBUQUERQUE
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sonic aircraft or E.T.'s flying machine. My mission
is less lofty. I'm trying to avoid getting arrested.
When POPULAR MECHANICS correspondent Abe
Dane traveled these roads to research our January
1995 cover story, "Flying Saucers Are Real," camou-
flaged guards driving white Jeep Cherokees dogged
his every turn. Tourists who accidentally strayed down
the road I am now driving on were arrested by these
"cammo dudes" and heavily fined. To cover the cost of
a similar encounter, I've packed an envelope with
$2000 in $50 bills in the trunk, along with my sleeping
bag and extra bottled water.
Rumors persist of even more amazing aircraft. Se-
cret hangars supposedly conceal the mythical Aurora,
a methane-burning replacement for the high-flying
SR-71 spyplane. And if you believe that X-files and J.
Edgar Hoover's dress collection exist-there are even
crashed UFOs that engineers patched up and some-
how learned how to fly. I'm not searching for hyper-
POPULAR MECHANICS JUNE 1997
On my flight to Las Vegas, which is about 100 miles
to the south, I read up on Area 51 lore. That may have
been a mistake. Imagining what might be "out there"
paints ordinary desert scenes in a sinister hue. Instead
of dismissing a buzzard-pecked carcass as road kill, I
PM PHOTOBY BRIAN KOSOFF
LANDISCORING PHOTO
55
THE NEW 'AREA 51'
The "cammo dudes" are no longer
patrolling the perimeter of Area 51. What
we found was a securely locked wind
fence that appears to have been
undisturbed for months. Below, Wilson
checks the locks.
THE ORIGINAL AREA 51
MAIN BASE
GROOM DRY LAKE BED
find myself wondering why aliens
would travel hundreds of light-years
to practice laser surgery on a cow.
Driving along in this Area 51 state of
mind, I'm prepared for almost any-
thing except for what I see next.
The road has just vanished, as com-
pletely as if it never existed.
I brake the car, step out, check my
map and compass, and then (sorry,
Avis) climb on the trunk for a better
view. A 360° scan quickly solves the
mystery. There has been a washout.
The missing road reappears about 100
yards ahead. Tracing its line toward
the horizon, I see what I've come to
find
the back door to Area 51.
There is no guard post. A cattle
gate, the sort you can buy at Kmart,
seals the road, but the two heavily tar-
nished brass locks that secure the
gate's chain are no blue-light special.
They are strictly military-issue. Rust-
ing strands of waist-high barb wire
hang just beyond the gateposts. I had
expected something taller, electrified.
The warning signs flanking the gate
aren't very threatening either. One
warns "no trespassing." Its weather-
beaten companion cautions me that
the Air Force drops real bombs on the
other side of the fence. My attention
returns to the locks. The tarnish
extends inward toward the
tumblers, suggesting they
haven't seen a key in a while.
Perhaps no one comes out
here anymore?
To test the theory, I
flash the car's headlights
and lean on its horn. Af-
ter 15 minutes of wear-
ing down the battery, I
quit. Disappointed, I
balance my camera
on the roof of the
car, set the shutter-
release timer and
56
blast off a few crooked snapshots to
show the boss my trip to Las Vegas
hasn't been all buffet and blackjack.
Why it moved
My visit seems to confirm what circum-
stantial evidence first suggested more
than a year ago. Area 51 has shut down.
Not that anyone should be surprised.
After all, the base became America's
worst-kept secret the moment talk-
show host Larry King announced its
presence to his national audience dur-
ing a special on UFOs. Of course,
UFO and aviation buffs knew this all
along. The name "Area 51" and a de-
scription of its mission as the proving
ground for Lockheed's U-2 reconnais-
sance aircraft appeared for a fleeting
moment on a blackboard used as a
prop in an aircraft promotional film.
The equally fleeting moment of
fame that King's television exposure
created for the nearby town of Rachel
has also faded. Today, the locals who
lunch at the Little A'le' Inn after col-
lecting their mail from the line
AREA 51
TOP SECRET RESEARCH FACILITY
As I finish my Alien Burger with
Extrusions (melted cheese) and Ap-
pendages (french fries), Chuck Clark,
author of the Area 51 & S4 Hand-
book, tells me he thinks the airfield's
last secret plane, the Aurora, left a
hangs behind me on a paneled wall
year ago. Bob Lazar-whose picture
filled with autographed photos of
other UFO notables and several movie
stars-claims the government moved
the crashed flying saucer he worked
on at the S4 site to a more secret loca-
tion. Even Glenn Campbell-founder
guide to PM correspondent Dane dur-
of the Area 51 Research Center and
ing his trip-has left for Las Vegas.
of postboxes that mark the
center of this town of
double-wide trail-
ers don't see too
many strangers.
The unusual aerial
phenomena that
once lured tourists
have become so rare
that the Nevada state
legislature has tried to
help boost business by
naming the adjacent
stretch of Route 375 "The
Extraterrestrial Highway."
Special Agent
Security Pass
Clearance Level:
Above
Top Secret
Erypted Date Pe Storage
The Bean Ver
PM PHOTOS BY CHUCK CLARK (TOP AND INSET RIGHT)
AND JIM WILSON (BOTTOM AND INSET LEFT)
「情し
Though it may seem cynical to
some folks, we think the most con-
vincing evidence that top-secret test-
ing has stopped at Area 51 comes
from the Air Force itself. After years
of denying the existence of an airfield
at the northern end of its Nellis
Range, a base spokesman in Nevada
and a Department of Defense (DOD)
official in Washington, D.C., both tell
PM that "training and testing activi-
ties take place at the Groom Dry Lake
Bed." DOD even agreed to consider-
but at press time had still not acted
upon our request to visit the site.
What's happening-or more accu-
rately, not happening-at Area 51?
Lest we mislead anyone into thinking
a talk-show host forced the govern-
ment to abandon a perfectly good se-
cret test site, we should point out that
even before King's production crew
arrived in Rachel, the Air Force had
several good reasons to leave.
High on this list is the Open Skies
POPULAR MECHANICS ⚫ JUNE 1997
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AREA 6413.
Circled areas show existing launch
locations that are suitable for the takeoff
of the type of aircraft that will be tested
from the new Area 51. The map shows
the relationship between the three critical
sites, the launch complex at White Sands,
the landing site at Michael AAF and the
Space Warfare Center.
Treaty. The pact was first proposed by
President Dwight Eisenhower during
a meeting with Nikita Khrushchev in
Geneva, and it was finally signed into
law in 1992. It allows the 27 signatory
nations including former Soviet bloc
countries to fly their most sophisti-
cated spyplanes over one another's
most sensitive military bases.
The reason the Air Force couldn't
simply burrow into the surrounding
mountains to hide their most secret
aircraft is an equally compelling rea-
son for it to leave. Three years ago, a
group of former workers who had be-
come seriously ill after working at
Area 51 asked the government to con-
duct an investigation to see if they
had been exposed to toxic substances.
DOD lawyers convinced a judge the
information had to remain secret. But
Area 51's next-door neighbor, the De-
partment of Energy (DOE), felt dif-
ferently about such secrets. It had
begun to make public previously clas-
sified data documenting the effects of
Atomic Energy Commission (AEC)
nuclear-bomb testing at the Yucca
Flats test site. This data showed that
long-lived radioactive residues from
nearby nuclear bomb tests regularly
rained down on Area 51.
However, even if there had been no
spies above and radiation below to
worry about, the Air Force would
have likely begun packing anyway.
Like the U-2 spyplane that created
the need for Area 51, the base itself
had become obsolete. The next gener-
ation of ultrahigh-performance mili-
tary aircraft would need a different
type of proving ground. We believe
POPULAR MECHANICS JUNE 1997
IDAHO
Michael
SALT
LAKE
CITY
WYOMING
UTAH
White
Sands
COLORADO
AREA
6413
ARIZONA
we know where the Air Force will
build this new base-the new Area 51,
or, as it is officially named, Area 6413.
Picking up the trail
About the time the tourist trade
slumped in Rachel, Nevada, residents
in the Four Corners area of Utah,
Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico
started seeing strange lights in the
sky. What interested PM about these
sightings was their proximity to
Falcon Air Force Base. The small
base in southern Colorado is the head-
quarters for the Air Force Space
Command (AFSPC) and its Space
Warfare Center (SWC). More impor-
tantly, the base had just become the
home for the SWC's 576th Flight
Test Squadron, the unit most likely
to test the prototypes for the next
DENVER
COLORADO
SPRINGS
NEW MEXICO
ALBUQUERQUE
Space
Warfare
Center
generation of breakthrough aircraft.
I booked a flight, rented a Jeep and
spent two days cruising the moun-
tains between Salinda and Colorado
Springs. I didn't see strange lights or
find a secret air base, but I did find
the path that would eventually lead to
the new Area 51.
The first break came when I
learned the types of missions the Air
Force expected its next-generation
aircraft to fly. As the result of a series
of once classified projects named Sci-
ence Dawn, Science Realm and Have
Region, engineers at the Air Force's
Phillips Laboratory at Kirtland AFB,
in New Mexico, concluded it would be
possible to build a plane that could fly
to a trouble spot anywhere on the
globe within 40 minutes, for a bargain
price of between $1 million to $2
PM PHOTO BY INTERMOUNTAIN AERIAL SURVEYS; PM MAP BY GRAPHIC CHART & MAP
57
THE NEW AREA 51
million
a mission.
Discovering
how these planes
would achieve this
level of perform-
ance would tell us
the type of facility that would be
needed for their initial testing. An
important clue came in a remark Gen.
Joseph W. Ashy, the recently retired
commander of AFSPC, had made
while being interviewed by Aviation
Week & Space Technology, which
has such an uncanny reputation for
predicting future aircraft develop-
ments that it is often called Aviation
Leak. Ashy said: "We will have a very
short runway out there and we will
have a reusable space plane." By it-
self, the comment might not have
seemed helpful. But we already knew
another important fact about the
future aircraft's performance from
the Have Region technical studies,
which had by now been declassified.
Engineers had calculated that en-
gines capable of producing the thrust
needed to reach the speeds and alti-
tudes for fast-response global mis-
sions would be so powerful they could
lift a plane off the ground vertically.
Considered together, these two
pieces of information spelled bad
news for our search. A plane that
could land on a short runway after
taking off vertically could be hidden
just about anywhere. If the Air Force
hadn't needed money to build this ex-
traordinary aircraft, we might have
never found the new Area 51.
The winged wonders tested at the
Groom Dry Lake Bed, the original
Area 51, were bought with money fun-
neled through secret "black budget”
accounts created by the nation's intel-
ligence agencies. But since the 1970s,
these organizations had better tools in
the form of spy satellites. In the 1980s,
the capabilities of these orbiting eyes
improved even more. The Air Force of-
ficers assigned to NASA space shuttle
missions had completely mas-
tered the art of on-orbit satellite
refueling. This meant the Na-
tional Reconnaissance Office
could steer a spy satellite just
about anywhere it was interest-
ed in looking. The Air Force's
next-generation plane might
gather the information a bit faster,
but for the type of strategic surveil-
lance information the intelligence
community needed, its existing, well-
proven assets worked just fine. And
with hundreds of billions of dollars of
new F-22s and Joint Strike Fighter
aircraft already on its must-have list,
the Air Force would likely find it 'im-
possible to get Congress to publicly fi-
nance yet another high-performance
aircraft. To get its new plane, the Air
Force would have to get creative.
On February 28, 1997, a pen stroke
solved the Air Force's money prob-
lem. It also pointed us in the direction
of the new Area 51. The event was un-
remarkable. Gen. Howell M. Estes
3rd, commander-in-chief of AFSPC,
and NASA Administrator Daniel
Goldin signed an agreement to share
"redundant assets.'
The most important of these redun-
dant assets was now under construc-
tion at Lockheed Martin Skunk
Works, the Palmdale, California, incu-
bator that previously hatched the
mysterious birds that disturbed the
quiet of the desert near Rachel. The
Air Force's breakthrough aircraft
would be one the public already knew
as NASA's X-33. Skunk Works engi-
neers had designed it as a half-scale
flying testbed for the space plane that
would become the 21st century's
space shuttle. (See Tech Update, page
24, Sept. '96.) Measuring 68 ft. long,
the lifting-body-shaped craft was a
direct descendant of the ultrahigh-
performance Have Region aircraft. It
could take off vertically, fly faster
than Mach 15, soar to 50-mile altitudes
and then land on an ordinary runway.
By the time it was announced, this
NASA's selection of Michael AAF as
the landing site becomes the obvious
choice when the profile of pop-up
missions and lift advantage of altitude
are considered.
assets-sharing agreement between
the Air Force and NASA was already
old news to aerospace industry insid-
ers. Three days earlier, Maj. Ken
Verderame, a deputy manager at
Phillips, had explained precisely how
the X-33 could be turned into a
weapon. Speaking at a NASA-spon-
sored technical conference in Hunts-
ville, Alabama, he pointed out that
Skunk Works designers nestled a 5 ×
10-ft. payload bay between the X-33's
liquid-oxygen and fuel tanks. It
wouldn't be used on the NASA mis-
sions, but engineers at Phillips were
already hard at work on a modular
"pop-up" satellite and weapons
launcher that could fit inside it.
Verderame went on to explain future
plans for modular "pop-in" cockpits.
Knowing that the Air Force had
long planned to use the X-33 as an op-
erational aircraft made a curious
piece of information we had received
months earlier fit into place. In the
fall of 1996, NASA had announced the
selection of the Michael Army Airfield
as a backup runway for several X-33
missions. Given the field's location in a
desolate stretch of desert about 80
miles southwest of Salt Lake City, the
choice seemed puzzling. But now that
the Air Force had acknowledged its
plans to use the X-33 as a weapons
platform, it made perfect sense.
Studying a map of Utah shows that
Michael AAF has the exact same
security feature that drew U-2 devel-
opers to Area 51. It sits next to a fero-
cious junkyard dog.
Where the Groom Dry Lake Bed
had a nuclear test site to discourage the
uninvited, Michael AAF has an equally,
perhaps more, compelling deterrent.
It is in the midst of Dugway Proving
Ground, the place where the Army
stores and tests nerve gas. PM learned
exactly how secure this site is when
we dispatched a plane equipped with
an aerial camera to get a closer look.
The pilot was warned that if he tried to
overfly the site he would be shot down.
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WE 1997
Hitting pay dirt
With Michael AAF in Utah selected
as the landing site for military X-33
missions, we believed we were fast
closing in on the location of the new
Area 51. The next step would be to
find the launch site. The flight profiles
we had been shown made it unlikely
that at least during prototype test-
ing the same base could be used for
both launches and landings.
We found the critical clue hidden in
plain view. An Air Force organization
chart used in a congressional briefing
identified a launch site called WSMR,
the White Sands Missile Range. Dur-
ing the Huntsville technical conference,
Verderame would explain its selection.
Given its elevation of about 4000 ft.,
anything launched from WSMR
would push through nearly a mile less
atmosphere than if launched from the
Air Force's facility at Cape Canaveral.
So, while a vehicle launched from sea
level could lift a 6000-pound payload,
one launched from 4000 ft. could lift
10,000 pounds. The signs pointing to
WSMR in New Mexico as the new
Area 51 seemed almost too clear.
This caused us to take a closer look
at the technical information presented
at the congressional briefing and
Huntsville technical conference. We
saw a problem, and it appeared to be a
showstopper. Some of the numbers
didn't quite add up. The distance be-
tween this launch site in New Mexico
and Michael AAF in Utah-in the
vicinity of 700 miles-was too far a
distance for the X-33 to cover during
pop-up flights required for 40-min-
utes-to-anywhere missions.
There was, however, a second
Whites Sands launch site-one that
wasn't mentioned in either the con-
gressional briefing or the Huntsville
technical conference. It was located
about 200 miles from Michael AAF,
which fit within pop-up mission flight
profiles. What's more, portions of it
were at an even higher elevation,
closer to 4500 ft., which meant an
POPULAR MECHANICS JUNE 1997
even greater payload capacity than
possible from the New Mexico site. It
is the White Sands Missile Range
Utah Launch Complex.
The Utah Launch Complex-which
we believe will be the new Area 51-
is an even more desolate and forbid-
ding stretch of real estate than Groom
Dry Lake Bed. Located south of
Utah Route 70 and east of the Green
River, it is like the Groom Dry Lake
Bed-beneath unlimited-ceiling re-
stricted airspace designated as
R-6413. A satellite reconnaissance ex-
pert who examined images of the site
told PM, "If you wanted to hide some-
thing [from satellite imagery], this
would be the perfect place to do it."
To get a closer look at the terrain,
we contacted Aerial Images, the
American firm that sells satellite pho-
tos taken by former Soviet spy satel-
lites. The company was at first willing
to sell us higher-resolution images.
But after analysts in Moscow re-
Pop-Up Mission
Profile
UTAH
10,000+ LBS
4500 FT.
LAUNCH COMPLEX
50 MILES
10,000 LBS
D
The opposition was swift and intense,
mostly from environmentalists and
other outdoors lovers who worried
about the possibility of missiles falling
on recreational areas in the vicinity of
Moab, to the south. Citing this opposi-
tion, the Pentagon announced it would
drop the project.
PM has, however, obtained copies
of other government documents, in-
cluding budgets, that show $8.2 mil-
lion has been allocated to refurbish
the missile assembly building and im-
prove the surrounding site at the
Utah Launch Complex. Curiously,
these funds will be paid by DOE, the
successor to the old AEC, whose nu-
clear testing blanketed the old Area
51 with radioactive fallout.
Part of the public's fascination with
the original Area 51 is its rich collec-
tion of stories about crashed flying
saucers, alien bodies and unexplained
lights in the sky. The relocation of
Payload
Increases
With
Elevation
4000 FT.
6000 LBS,
viewed the closeups we had request-
ed, we received a call from the com-
pany saying that the images would be
unavailable for "security reasons."
We didn't need satellite images to
see that the Utah site made the per-
fect location for the new Area 51. The
basic infrastructure for launching the
Air Force's next-generation aircraft is
already in place, as a result of the
complex having been built for the
rocket testing in the early days of the
military space program.
With our sights focused on Utah,
we also found recent evidence of the
Pentagon's interest in the site. Two
years ago, just as activity at the origi-
nal Area 51 began to wind down, the
Pentagon began testing the local wa-
ters to gauge the public reaction to
the complex's reactivation. It floated a
trial-balloon story that it planned to
reactivate the base for missile flights
southward to WSMR in New Mexico.
PM ILLUSTRATION BY RON CARBONI
SEA LEVEL
MICHAEL AAF
Area 51 does not necessarily mean
those tales will be left behind when
operations begin here in Utah, per-
haps as early as 1999.
The Air Force Times reports that
the distinctively painted CT-43 trans-
ports, which previously flew workers
between Area 51 to a depot at the
edge of McCarran Airport in Las Ve-
gas, have begun making flights to
Utah. And not far away from the
new Area 51, millionaire Robert M.
Bigelow, the prominent financier of
paranormal and UFO research, has
just purchased the 480-acre Sherman
ranch for the site of the National In-
stitute for Discovery Science. Its mis-
sion: to conduct scientific studies of
the crop circles, cattle mutilations and
other bump-in-the-night phenomena
that the folks in these parts have been
reporting for decades. So there
should be no shortage of fascinating
speculation for years to come.
PM
59