Podcast: Lifting The Veil On Area 51's Secret Flight-Test History

A new scholarly book takes the wraps off the secret flight-test history of the U.S. Air Force facility in the Nevada Test and Training Range like no one ever has before. Listen in as our editors discuss with author Peter Merlin. 

Merlin's voluminous work is titled Dreamland: The Secret History of Area 51 and has been published by Schiffer. More information can be found here.

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Rush Transcript

Guy Norris:

Hello, and welcome to Aviation Week's Check 6 Podcast. I'm Guy Norris, Senior Editor, and with me is Defense Editor Steve Trimble. So most of us are familiar with the term Area 51 and all of the stories of mystery and secrecy associated with the classified US Air Force facility in the Nevada Test And Training Range, but what's the truth about Area 51 and what's really going on there?

To help unravel the mystery and sort fact from fiction, we're incredibly pleased to welcome aviation historian and author Peter Merlin, whose book, Dreamland: The Secret History of Area 51, has just been published. So Peter, first of all, welcome and congratulations on an impressive magnum opus, which I've got to say, stretches all the way from the great extinction events of the Late Devonian 367 million years ago to the NGAD program of today. So without further ado, perhaps we can kick off by... Steve, you've got a question, I guess?

Steve Trimble:

Oh well, sure. And first let me congratulate Peter on this book. It's already my favorite aerospace book. It's not really just about Area 51, I think. There's so much detail about each of these programs and it goes way beyond a flight test center in Nevada. But first I think it would be best to start, Peter, with telling us what Area 51 is. There is so much mythology and so much speculation about what goes on there and how it got started but based on your research and your experience, what is Area 51?

Peter Merlin:

Sure. Well, first let me just say thanks for having me. Pleasure to be here and I'm glad to be able to talk about, as Guy said, my magnum opus. It is indeed the product of more than three decades of very thorough research. And I have to say, when I first became interested in Area 51, there was no UFO or alien stigma surrounding the subject. It was simply known as a place for testing secret airplanes, the U-2, the A-12, which was the earliest version of the Blackbird stealth aircraft, which at that time were still an undisclosed government program, but widely rumored and in fact, Aviation Week and Space Technology had been reporting pretty accurately about it, as early as the mid-1980s, which is about the time I was getting into this.

I first heard about Area 51 in 1983 in the context of a book about the U-2 spy plane, and that's really why the base was built in the first place, back in the 1950s. The CIA needed a secret place to test this new reconnaissance platform. Now, normally a new plan would've been tested at some place like Edwards Air Force Base, but that was considered too public, too much access from people who would not have been briefed into the program. It was right near a lot of population centers, so there would've been no way to do any secret activities.

So the CIA funded construction of a little airfield off the corner of the Nevada Test Site for atomic weapons, which was already under restricted area of space over the land. And of course, they could easily put out a cover story that this was something to support the atomic test program, and that's what they did. So one of the conventional wisdoms about Area 51 is that the government did not admit it even existed until recently, and that's false. It was in fact acknowledged from the very time that they started construction. The CIA obviously wanted to keep their part of it out of the public light, so they hid behind the Atomic Energy Commission. And the AEC put out a press release saying, "Hey, we're building a little airfield to support atomic testing up here off the corner of the test site," And they figured that that would be enough to blunt any interest, and it would fade into obscurity.

But somehow, even within the first six months, it became known to the news media as the secret proving grounds within proving grounds, that Groom dry lake. And that of course suggests that maybe some talk had leaked out, that it was more secret than the things that were going on at Yucca Flat. And this was supposed to be a temporary camp for the U-2 program, while the planes were undergoing developmental flight testing and the crews that would be operational for the CIA and Air Force underwent training.

And so, this went on for several years. The site was shut down, pretty much mothballed in the summer of 1957, which was about the time the atomic test program started really cranking up again at Yucca Flat. And of course, whenever they lit off one of those nukes, this was above ground testing, the fallout had a tendency to drift to the north-east, away from populated areas like Las Vegas and Los Angeles and over places like Groom Lake and ultimately to Cedar City, Utah, and areas like that. So after being essentially mothballed for a few years, the agency wanted to build a replacement for the U-2 that would be more survivable, and that's what became Project Oxcart, a plane capable of flying altitudes up to 90,000 feet and speeds of Mach 3. And Lockheed, again, designed the airplane.

The radar model tests were being done at Indian Springs, which is about an hour north of Las Vegas. But again, security was an issue because that was close to a highway. So Kelly Johnson of Lockheed said, "Well, why can't we just move our radar testing back up to the airstrip where we tested the U-2?" That got approved and so in 1959, they began upgrading what used to be watered down airstrip at Groom Lake into a radar cross-section test facility. And this was done under a construction effort called Project 51, so the site became known as Area 51, because all of the parts of the Nevada test site have area numbers. They're not in any order, they're missing numbers, and this one was randomly picked, and that's how it got its now infamous name.

Guy Norris:

Peter, can I just interrupt you for a second there? I'd loved the fact that in the book there's all of these nuggets like this, and that the contractor company that was working for EG&G, the Reynolds Electrical and Engineering Company, that it was the accountant from that company, Robert Van Campernolle[inaudible 00:07:27], apparently according to your book, who had to create this expense for this new construction project in 1959, which as you said, he called Project 51. And then the AEC then used it, officially designated it Area 51 because they were using that as the project designation.

Peter Merlin:

I thought it was wonderful that I was able to find a picture of Robert Van Campernolle [inaudible 00:07:57] because I found out about him rather by accident at the Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas. There was a courtyard of bricks which have people's names on the, that have been donated by family and whatnot, fundraising for the museum, and many people are named as having their particular role at the test site and whatnot. And I saw this one that said, "Bob Van C," no full last name, just the letter C. And under that it said, "Named Area 51." I'm like, what? Wait a minute, I got to find out more about this guy. So I started talking to the folks at the museum, and eventually I was able to get the details. But that's just one of the little historical trivia tidbits that make the book wonderful.

Guy Norris:

And one of the things that Steve and I were talking about before the podcast was, doing the research to set the scene for the book, you must have come across things like this. Could you tell us what perhaps were the most interesting or new discoveries about Area 51 which you found during the research?

Peter Merlin:

Well, I think one of the things that struck me more than anything, and I've already touched on this a bit, everything I'd ever heard was Area 51 is super secret, government doesn't admit it exists, you can't know anything about it. But it was fascinating to me that Area 51, its existence was not classified. It appeared on unclassified maps, numbered as Area 51. It was in the Atomic Energy Commission phone directories. It was known in the news media, it was reported when there were labor disputes and aircraft mishaps. Obviously this is well before the internet, so it couldn't become viral as such, but it was more widely known than most people expected. And it didn't jump into prominence until the internet really became a thing, and then all the craziness with the flying saucers and whatnot. So it's taken on as part of a pop culture icon status, which means that it isn't just people who are fascinated by military history that would want to know about this.

Everybody, people all over the world are fascinated by the subject because it's been so mysterious and so shrouded and secrecy. And I wanted to take as much factual history as I could find. I took an epistemological approach to it. This is a history of what can be known factually about Area 51. It's devoid of the usual speculation and rumors and conspiracy theories. I just wanted to stick to the facts. One of the features of the book that I'm most proud of is 47 pages of source notes. That's more than 1,300 source notes, and I put those in there for two reasons. One, to show that I'd done my homework, and two, so that nobody would have an excuse to say, "Hey, where the hell did he get that information?" and then accuse me of using some sensitive material. I want to say, "Look, these are the sources I used. Here it is, they're all key to the text with superscripts and..."

Steve Trimble:

And very admirably, you have a chapter on all the UFO reportings that is extremely factual, and it's there because these are in the historical record, but it's not irresponsible or speculative. But I do wonder, there was the Bob Lazar case and all these things, what do you make of it? What do you make of the UFO reports?

Peter Merlin:

Well, the first thing I want to say is I desperately would've wished to write the book without any mention of flying saucers or Bob Lazar or aliens or any of that stuff, but I realized that was not realistic because whether anything of that was true or not, and I believe it's not, Lazar affected the history of Area 51. He wove this UFO mythos into it. And so at first, it was a double-edged sword because on the one hand, it was great for the Air Force because anytime someone now were to mention Area 51, no one would take them seriously, because the first thing anyone thinks of is flying saucers and little green men. So it's almost impossible to have a serious conversation about Area 51. If I tell someone, I've written a book about Area 51, they're not going to think airplanes, they're going to think flying saucers.

This is a serious scholarly history, but it will be hard to get them to accept that. On the other hand, the Air Force was screwed because all this interest by the public meant that now people came from all over the world as tourists with their binoculars and lawn chairs, wanting to peer over the fence and see what's going on. And for a long time, it was possible to do this from some hilltops or right outside the boundary. So you had people camped out up there 24 hours a day, seven days a week sometimes, and the security guards would have to watch them. And nothing could fly at the base, nothing could work. You couldn't have an airplane out on the ramp where people could see it.

And these poor security guards would have to sit there and they're there for several hours, and then switch shifts and other couple guys have to waste their several hours. On and on it went, day and night. It was probably costing the taxpayer boatloads a month because all these workers were sitting idle out there and the projects were stalled out. So, Air Force took some more public land away to remove those hilltops, but still there are hills further away that now people with good high-powered optics and cameras can get pretty good views of, so the game gets on.

Steve Trimble:

I've flown on an airway on American Airlines from DFW to San Francisco and got a really clear look at Groom Lake, so it's still publicly visible.

Peter Merlin:

It's true. And sometimes when the ranch is open, a person in a private plane can simply get permission to fly through, and that's happened recently. A lot of really detailed pictures were taken from every conceivable angle, which probably didn't make folks real happy about that.

Guy Norris:

But Peter, you do mention... And that's what I love about the book, actually. Nothing is off limits, in a way. You have thoroughly covered every aspect, including the UFO, S4, Papoose Lake references, and the Freedom Ridge, Glenn Campbell, Dreamland interceptors, the battle for White Sides and Freedom Ridge, the gradual expansion of the Air Force controlled land around it, as you said. But what I particularly love is going to the flight test history that you've managed to dig out as well. You've got some extraordinary stories about the test pilots and the bizarre things they had to go through, and so many great nuggets, including a lot to do with the foreign material exploitation programs, the RED HATS and so forth, where these people are flying very difficult aircraft to fly. So I think even from a flight test perspective, it's a fascinating read.

Peter Merlin:

There are absolutely some fantastic stories about flight testing and aircraft development that really showcase America's capabilities in that regard. And I think personally, that's a lot more fascinating than any of the UFO rumors. And as for the parts where I discussed the UFOs or the toxic waste lawsuits and land expansions and things like that, I think I handled that in a very balanced way. I did not editorialize. I just lay out the facts from both sides so that the reader can make their own decision.

Guy Norris:

Absolutely. And looking at some of the programs, it really was a Lockheed facility by any other name for many years until gradually you had of the XST program and Northrop began to get involved, and then of course you've got the staggeringly bizarre following on from Have Blue. The way it gradually evolved into a much broader test site.

Peter Merlin:

Yeah, it absolutely... Lockheed's programs were so dominant for a while that the CIA was a little worried that Kelly Johnson thought that it was his own private test site at some point. But by the mid-1970s, the CIA was getting out of the airplane business and the Air Force was more of an active tenant at the Area 51 site with the foreign material exploitation programs and the upcoming stealth programs. So the agency ultimately said, "Why don't we just hand it over to you guys and let the Air Force take over?" And so that changed a lot of things about the culture out there, I think.

One of the other persistent stories nowadays that you run across is that the CIA did not admit their involvement with Area 51 until 2013, but that's not actually true. It was 2010, the fall of 2010, that the agency finally declassified the fact of the CIA's involvement with Area 51. I got that from T. D. Barnes who was at CIA headquarters at the time when the announcement was made, and I mentioned this on several internet discussion forums at the time and it was roundly ignored. And it wasn't until 2013 when somebody had gotten an answer back to a FOIA request and they had some unredacted documents that mentioned Area 51 that it suddenly became a big deal in the news media.

Guy Norris:

One of the things I was also looking at was, apart from the vast number of bizarre flying vehicles and these Soviet types which the RED HATS were testing, I loved some of the comments from these pilots like, "Flew like a pig," and, "For the MiG-23." You don't hold back. And then there's Ken Dyson's great story of flying the whale, Tacit Blue, and how he would be sitting. He felt like he was sitting in his armchair in a living room, in the cockpit of that thing. But great stuff. I think it's... And the other thing I thought you did a good job, Peter, was digging out, even some relatively mundane stuff like EG&G sorting out the shuttle, how would people fly in and out of the base, and doing their due diligence on advising Lockheed on what aircraft to use. And I love the bit that when the 737 was finally chosen, they'd argued because it was 19 times safer statistically than the Lockheed Electra, which the Skunk Works wanted to use. So, it's fascinating.

Peter Merlin:

My first draft of the book, the entire section on the Janet flights, the commuter shuttles to Area 51 from Burbank and Las Vegas and that constituted something like two paragraphs, and you'll notice now it's something like seven pages. I was very fortunate to come across some information that I had not known about the genesis of that fleet of aircraft. And it turned out that someone who had been involved with that was a neighbor of mine, lived down the street. And when I found that out, I was like, hmm, I need to learn more about this. So I went down there, wearing an EG&G cap, and knocked on his door, and I said, "Hi there, I'm one of your neighbors, and I was wondering if I could talk to you." And it turned out that was a good idea because he had some great stories and introduced me to more people, and it ended up being a much more complex story than I had ever realized.

Guy Norris:

Absolutely fantastic. Steve was wondering... I think you mentioned this, Steve, earlier. In this age of satellites, the hyperspectral capabilities, synthetic-aperture radar, what's the point of a secret test base now? Do you think that there's still a relevancy there, that it still fulfills that function?

Peter Merlin:

I do. It's still, despite all the publicity and the fact that so many people are observing, not just a Groom Lake but also Tonopah Test Range airfield, which is part of the whole complex out there at the Nevada Test And Training Range, it's definitely still considered a remote enough and secure enough site that you can get a lot of valuable work done. And there's also the Area 6 airfield at Yucca Flat for unmanned aerial vehicle testing, and that's arguably even more difficult to observe from the outside. So yes, I think the Nevada Test And Training Range as a whole, its multiple airfields and radar ranges is really a world-class test and evaluation asset. It absolutely is.

Guy Norris:

I imagine perhaps even ramping up for an even busier period now as we look ahead with the NGAD program, Next Generation Air Dominance, and also its legacy continuing. Perhaps we don't know for sure whether a full-scale flight demonstrator contributed to the B-21 program, flew in the last decade or so, or even before that. The contributions go on, in other words.

Peter Merlin:

As far as the B-21 went, when they were looking for a new long-range bomber, that was a pretty fierce competition. Lockheed Martin and Boeing, I gather, teamed up, and it sounds to me from some of the stuff I've read they may have fielded a demonstrator of their own. Northrop Grumman really saw themselves as the underdog in that fight. They've literally created an emblem for the program in which Northrop Grumman cast themselves as David fighting a two-headed Goliath, in Boeing and Lockheed Martin. And as we saw, Northrop Grumman won the competition, handily, it appears, and I suspect that was probably a result of their so-called RQ-180 effort that predated the B-21. I think their ability to design and field that and the technologies that were developed, there's probably a lot of cross-over with the bomber.

Steve Trimble:

Them being an underdog is not unreasonable. We think of them as the third-largest aerospace contractor, but they're a distant third to both Lockheed and Boeing in terms of overall revenue. The two of them were teamed up against Northrop, and so they had to feel like an underdog in that competition. But they did have a couple of advantages, one being the incumbent supplier for B-2, as well as allegedly the supplier for RQ-180, which seems very similar in terms of its plan form and modern stealth technology.

Peter Merlin:

And I think it's amazing to look at these new planes now and get... We're only getting the barest feel for the leaps and bounds in low observables that have taken place since those early days of Have Blue and the F-117. The modern aircraft are stunningly improved, just orders of magnitude.

Guy Norris:

Before we close out... In fact, all the way down to Project RAINBOW, really, when you think about the deepest origins of low observable and before the word stealth was even a word. But Steve, I know you had one last question for Peter regarding Aurora. Go on. Just go on, say it, get it out there. You wanted to talk about it, ask Peter.

Steve Trimble:

Well, there's so many of these speculative concepts or programs that are out there that may or may not have existed at Area 51, but I'm sure that's what people in the audience really want to know, or are going to be looking at your footnotes and index in the back of the book and to start there. So Aurora was this rumored speculative program that may or may not have existed in the late '80s, early '90s, got a lot of media attention in the 1990s, including from Aviation Week, I have to say, before my time. But as somebody who was witnessing that contemporaneously, as Guy did as well, what did you make of it and did you discover anything about it in favor of its existence or nonexistence as you reported the book?

Peter Merlin:

Well, the term Aurora came out as something from the defense budget in the mid-1980s. And later on, Buz Carpenter confessed that he had come up with that term, Aurora, as a funding channel for support of building up the flight test program for the B-2, some of the early work before the airplane was actually finished or flying or anything like that. And that certainly sounded reasonable and it came from someone who was in a position to know, but it's even more reasonable when I think now that similarly in the run-up to completing the construction of the B-21 and building up a combined test force for that aircraft that would be able to accept it for developmental testing in the early part of its career, that was done under the name Stingray. And it was basically the same thing, they needed to have some name for this effort and funding channel and all that, and that's what they used.

Steve Trimble:

That's not to confuse it with the MQ-25 Stingray, which also took on that name probably not knowing that the Air Force was using it for something else.

Peter Merlin:

Exactly, totally unrelated. So often you come across names that get doubled up and things like that, because different people are using them and not knowing. From what I hear, the B-21 nickname that was going to be used for that particular effort. There were some suggestions that were stupid, and the Stingray sounded a lot better. And I think some people really hope that would be the name of the airplane when it was finally unveiled. That was one of the many suggestions that was submitted. I believe I mentioned that in the book. But the other thing about Aurora as a replacement for the SR-71, and I'm using Aurora now in quotes, no longer thinking of it as the actual program name, but a lot of people believe there would be a replacement for the SR-71, which had been retired.

And so why not replace it with something more capable? Well, there isn't always a direct need to do that. And I think at the time, the satellite overhead reconnaissance plus the U-2s, there just wasn't a need to field some radically new high-speed development. And the other thing is that a hypersonic reconnaissance plane as a project, it lacks any footprint. These black [inaudible 00:30:17] programs tend to have a footprint. The stealth fighter program back in the '80s certainly had a footprint enough that Av Week was able to do some pretty good reporting on it, and even some of the smaller programs like Have Blue and Tacit Blue, had some footprint that was detectable by people who were interested in following these programs. But the so-called Aurora as a hypersonic craft, either as a prototype or an operational system, which was suggested, doesn't have any footprint. There's nothing there to say that it exists, as far as I can see.

Steve Trimble:

Well, it's a nice factual analysis of what exists and what doesn't there. And there's so many other programs like that. You've got so many of them in the book, things that are just floating out there, designations and names that we're still waiting to find out about. And people can read about it in the book, it's the YF-113 or Quartz or some of these other things. Even the latest ones that came out of,... what was it? Animal Javorsek's biography.

Peter Merlin:

In fact, in '73, the YF-220, these are fascinating hints at things that are out there, and those hints constitute their own part of a footprint, as it were. So there's a great deal of history of Area 51 that is not in my book because it still remains in the shadows and probably will for quite some time. My primary constraint in writing the book was to only use unclassified source material, and I stuck to that. I had no access to any classified material on Area 51, and I'm perfectly happy that I did not. I had more than enough to fill a huge book, which if we can't say it's complete, it's at least comprehensive and will give readers a real understanding of what Area 51 is all about.

Guy Norris:

Well, that makes your achievement all the more remarkable, Peter. And again, thank you for your time and appreciate you coming on. I know we could talk about this literally all day. Anyway, thanks again to Steve, to Peter, and to our editor in London, Guy Ferneyhough. Thank you to you, the audience, for listening to us rabbiting on. Join us again next week for another episode. And one last request, if you're listening to us in Apple Podcasts and want to support this podcast, please leave us a star rating or write a review. Goodbye for now.