Area 51 Spy Plane, Intact

ON TV:Area 51 Declassified premieres on the National Geographic Channel on Tuesday, May 24, at 10:00 p.m. ET/PT.

Suspended upside down, a titanium A-12 spy-plane prototype is prepped for radar testing at Area 51 in the late 1950s. After a rash of declassifications, details of Cold War workings at the Nevada base, which to this day does not officially exist, are coming to light—including never before released images of an A-12 crash and its cover-up.

In 1963 a prototype rocketed out of the secret base—and never returned. See the crash for the first time, and get closer to the truth about Area 51.

Area 51 was created so that U.S. Cold Warriors with the highest security clearances could pursue cutting-edge aeronautical projects away from prying eyes. During the 1950s and ’60s Area 51’s top-secret OXCART program developed the A-12 as the successor to the U-2 spy plane.

Nearly undetectable to radar, the A-12 could fly at 2,200 miles an hour (3,540 kilometers an hour)—fast enough to cross the continental U.S. in 70 minutes. From 90,000 feet (27,400 meters), the plane’s cameras could capture foot-long (0.3-meter-long) objects on the ground below.

But pushing the limits came with risks—and a catastrophic 1963 crash of an A-12 based out of Area 51.

A rapid government cover-up removed nearly all public traces of the wrecked A-12—pictured publicly for the first time in this gallery, thanks to the CIA’s recent declassification of the images.

—Brian Handwerk

Via NatGeo

Were Soviets behind Roswell UFO?

Investigative journalist Annie Jacobsen’s new book, “Area 51,” suggests that the Soviets stirred up the Roswell UFO incident in 1947 by sending flying disks into New Mexico with child-size aviators on board, as a warning that they could spark a UFO panic if they wanted to.

But will that explanation fly?

Jacobsen’s revelation is based on an account from just one unnamed source. This source said he was an engineer with the company EG&G at Area 51,  the hush-hush military research site in Nevada. He told Jacobsen that he studied the remnants of the Roswell crash in 1951, along with four other EG&G engineers.

There are no documents to confirm the account — because, Jacobsen says, this was one of the most tightly held secrets of the Cold War. Even though that confirmation is lacking, Jacobsen says she stands by her source’s amazing account. “He had nothing to gain and everything to lose by telling me,” she told me, “but it was a matter of conscience for him.”

Jacobsen’s source recounted what he says he saw, as well as what he was told and what he surmised based on that information. Here’s the scenario presented in “Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base,”based on the source’s account:

• After World War II, the Soviets capitalized on the work being done on stealthy flying-wing aircraft by a group of Nazi German engineers headed by two brothers, Walter and Reimar Horten. They developed disk-shaped flying machines that could sporadically evade radar detection. The U.S. military perfected such technology at Area 51 over the decades that followed to produce planes such as the F-117 stealth attack aircraft.
• Soviet leaders were spooked by the U.S. military’s use of the atom bomb to bring the war to a quick close. They were a couple of years away from developing their own atomic weapons, based on secrets stolen from the U.S. bomb effort. The Roswell incident was aimed at warning the Truman administration that the Soviets could create a UFO hoax, stirring up fears similar to those that were sparked inadvertently by the fictional “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast in 1938.
• Jacobsen’s source believes that the Soviets dispatched flying-disk drone aircraft from a mothership flying near Alaska. Intermittent radar signals were picked up by U.S. installations, but the disks were nevertheless able to enter U.S. airspace and come down near Roswell, N.M.
• “Child-size aviators” were aboard the disks: humans, seemingly about 13 years old, who may have been surgically or biologically altered to give them enlarged heads and eyes. Jacobsen quotes her source as saying he was told that the alien look-alikes were the result of experiments conducted by Nazi mad scientist Josef Mengele. The bodies were recovered from the wreckage, and two of them were alive but comatose.
• The wreckage and the bodies were transported from New Mexico to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio for study, then transferred again to Area 51 in Nevada. This is where Jacobsen’s source saw them in 1951. The source is quoted as saying he saw Russian writing stamped on a ring that went around the inside of the aircraft, and that he saw the child-size bodies on a life support system.
• When Jacobsen asked why President Harry Truman didn’t report all this in 1947, she said the source replied, “Because we were doing the same thing.” She notes in the book that the Atomic Energy Commission and the Defense Department carried out human experiments on the effects of radiation, and suggests that the hundreds of experiments revealed in 1995 were just the tip of the iceberg. “I believe that a lot of what the Atomic Energy Commission did was reckless and dangerous,” she told me.

This latest explanation runs counter to the scenarios put forward by the federal government— first, that the Roswell wreckage came from a weather balloon, and then that it was debris from a crash-test dummy drop as well as a balloon-borne experiment to monitor nuclear blasts. It also runs counter to the long-held claims by UFO activists that the crash actually represented a covered-up visitation by extraterrestrials.

Drawing fire from both sides
As such, Jacobsen’s Roswell account is taking fire from UFO skeptics as well as those who give the alien scenario more credence. In a novel twist, Clifford Clift of the Mutual UFO Network told the Santa Fe New Mexican that the linkage to German aerospace technology was too tenuous to be believed.

“After researching the claim, I found little truth in this theory,” he said. “It is a stretch. One of my concerns is if they wanted to create panic, why in New Mexico and not in New York where there are more people to panic? I would suggest it is another conspiracy theory, and heavens, MUFON knows about conspiracy theories. They do sell books.”

Peter Davenport of the National UFO Reporting Center said he also was skeptical about Jacobsen’s account, although he stressed that he hasn’t yet read the entire book.

“People have been studying the Roswell case for decades now,” he told the New Mexican. “They’ve got deathbed testimony. They’ve got testimony from military officers who were involved, eyewitnesses. I think I’ll go with the latter, rather than this young lady who penned this new book.”

Investigator Kal Korff — who took aim at the alien claims in his 1997 book, “Roswell UFO Crash” — said he wasn’t buying the “Area 51” story either. “Of all the crazy ideas as to what is behind Roswell, this is one of the most extreme out there,” he told me in an email.

Beyond the substance of the story, there’s the issue of basing such a dramatic story on one person’s account. “I would never report anything related to UFOs based on only one unnamed source!” journalist Leslie Kean, the author of “UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on the Record,” wrote in a Facebook update.

Jacobsen told me that getting the story out of even one of the five engineers who were involved in the Area 51 follow-up to the Roswell incident was a months-long job.

“What’s important to understand is that all of the top five EG&G engineers had top secret clearances and also Q clearances. … So you’re dealing with the most upper-echelon clearances you could possibly have within the federal government, in the Atomic Energy Commission. Your ‘need-to-know’ is so strict that you only know what you know. … To suggest that the five engineers could stand around and discuss, ‘Hey, what do you think is,’ is a bit naive,” she said. “It’s ‘take this craft apart and put it back together … take these bodies and move them over here.’ And that is about the extent of it.”

It’s also important to understand that there’s a lot more to “Area 51” than Roswell. The Roswell tale, which takes up about 30 pages of the 544-page book, is the only one that depends on a single unnamed source, Jacobsen said. Most of the book focuses on the stories behind formerly secret programs ranging from nuclear bomb tests to the development of the U-2 and A-12 Oxcart spy planes. To this day, military officials avoid referring to Area 51 by that name.

The gorilla-mask scenario
So if the Roswell UFO wasn’t an alien (or Soviet) intruder, and if you don’t buy the official explanation that it was a balloon experiment, what else might it have been? One of the alternate explanations is that the “UFO” was indeed a flying disk, but that it was a U.S. rather than a Soviet experimental craft. In this scenario, the alien-looking bodies might have been dummies designed to create a preposterous cover story.

Jacobsen herself refers to a similar disinformation strategy that the Air Force used in 1942, when the first jet aircraft were being developed at California’s Muroc dry lake bed. She said one of the test pilots for the Bell XP-59A jet plane, Jack Woolams, put on a gorilla mask when he went on a flight — just in case other pilots training on different planes came flying nearby to take a look.

“Instead of seeing Woolams, the pilot saw a gorilla flying an airplane — an airplane that had no propeller,” Jacobsen wrote. “The stunned pilot landed and went straight to the local bar and ordered a stiff drink. He told the other pilots what he’d definitely seen with his own eyes. His colleagues told him he was drunk, that he was an embarrassment, that he should go home.”

Thus was the secret of the Bell XP-59A preserved, even from the other fliers at the Muroc base (now known as Edwards Air Force Base).

Were the Roswell aliens actually dummies, the equivalent of pilots wearing gorilla masks? Or is Jacobsen’s source correct? Is the truth more monstrous than people thought? Even though the eyewitnesses are dying off, Jacobsen believes the real story may be contained within the hundreds of millions of documents about “black” projects that are still said to be classified.

She notes that all of the sources she consulted while researching “Area 51” told her they knew much more than they were telling. “Everyone always ends with, ‘Well, Annie, I’ve actually told you 5 percent of what I know,'” Jacobsen said.

Is the truth out there? Or will it remain mired in reams upon reams of conjecture and disinformation? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

– Alan Boyle

Via MSNBC

How Area 51 Hid Secret Craft

ON TV: Area 51 Declassified premieres on the National Geographic Channel on Sunday at 10:00 p.m. ET/PT.

No word yet on alien starships, but now that many Cold War-era Area 51 documents have been declassified, veterans of the secret U.S. base are revealing some of the clever—and surprisingly low-tech—ways they hid futuristic prototypes from prying eyes.

(Also see “Exclusive Area 51 Pictures: Secret Plane Crash Revealed.”)

The CIA created Area 51 in 1955 to test and develop top secret U.S. military projects in the remote Nevada desert. More than 50 years later, the base still doesn’t officially exist and appears on no public U.S. government maps.

In the 1950s and ’60s, Area 51 was the epicenter of the OXCART project, intended to create the successor for the U-2 spy plane.

The OXCART plane was expected to be undetectable in the air as it flew surveillance and information-gathering missions over the Soviet Union. But Area 51 personnel soon found it necessary to conceal the craft from the Soviets eyes even when it was still being tested on the ground.

Cat and Mouse at Area 51

It was discovered that Soviet spy satellites, dubbed ash cans by Area 51 staff, were making regular rounds over Nevada.

U.S. intelligence agencies, though, provided Area 51 workers with a decisive advantage in this international “game of cat and mouse,” according to T.D. Barnes, a former hypersonic flight specialist at Area 51 whose expertise was in electronic counter measures.

No longer sworn to secrecy by the CIA, Barnes said, “In our morning security meetings, they’d give us a roster of the satellites that the Soviets had in the air, and we’d know the exact schedule of when they were coming over.

“It was like a bus schedule, and it even told us whether it was an infrared satellite or what type it was,” Barnes told National Geographic news.

The Area 51 Hoot and Scoot

Often hoisted atop tall poles for radar tests of the planes’ stealthiness, OXCART prototypes were tested outside—making the Soviet spy satellites especially aggravating.

“We had hoot-and-scoot sheds, we called them,” Barnes says in the new National Geographic Channel documentary Area 51 Declassified. (The Channel is part-owned by the National Geographic Society, which owns National Geographic News.)

“If a plane happened to be out in the open while a satellite was coming over the horizon, they would scoot it into that building.”

Former Area 51 procurement manager Jim Freedman adds, “That made the job very difficult, very difficult.

“To start working on the aircraft and then have to run it back into the hangar and then pull it out and then put it in and then pull it out—it gets to be quite a hassle,” Freedman says in the film.

(Also see “Cold War Spy Plane Found in Baltic Sea.”)

Shadows of Area 51

It turned out that even laborious hooting and scooting weren’t enough. Spies had learned that the Soviets had a drawing of an OXCART plane—obtained, it was assumed, via an infrared satellite.

As a plane sat in the hot desert, its shadow would create a relatively cool silhouette, visible in infrared even after the plane had been moved inside.

“It’s like a parking lot,” Barnes told National Geographic News. “After all the cars have left you can still see how many were parked there [in infrared] because of the difference in ground temperatures.”

To thwart the infrared satellites, Area 51 crews began constructing fanciful fake planes out of cardboard and other mundane materials, to cast misleading shadows for the Soviets to ponder. (Not intended to be seen, the decoys themselves were scooted out of sight before satellite flyovers.) Sometimes staff even fired up heaters near imaginary engine locations to make it look as if planes had just landed.

“We really played with the infrared satellites,” Barnes recalled.

Ahead of Its Time—And Gone Before Its Time?

As for the real U-2 successor, the Soviets never solved the secrets of OXCART before the program was made public in the mid-1960s.

But during the course of some 2,850 top-secret test flights numerous people did see an oddly shaped (for the time), Mach-3 aircraft. Unidentifiable even to air controllers or commercial pilots, the gleaming titanium craft no doubt helped fuel the persistent rumors connecting UFOs with Area 51.

In the end, the result of all the subterfuge was the Archangel-12, or A-12, considered by some to be the first true stealth plane. (Related: “‘Hitler’s Stealth Fighter’ Re-created.”)

The A-12 could travel over 2,000 miles an hour (3,220 kilometers an hour) and cross the continental U.S. in 70 minutes—all while taking pictures that could resolve foot-long objects on the ground from an altitude of 90,000 feet (27,430 meters).

But despite being “the most advanced aircraft ever built,” as CIA historian David Robarge writes, the A-12 never saw spy service over the Soviet Union. And just as the Archangel was to be deemed ready for operation, its successor, the U.S. Air Force’s famed SR-71 Blackbird, was already in the works.

Due to fiscal pressures and Air Force/CIA competition, Robarge writes, the A-12, one of Area 51’s greatest creations—at least that we know about—was decommissioned in 1968 after only a year in active service.

Via NatGeo

Super 8 (2011)

Starring: Elle Fanning, Kyle Chandler, Ron Eldard, Noah Emmerich, Gabriel Basso

Director: J.J. Abrams

U.S. Release Date: June 10, 2011

From executive producer Steven Spielberg and director J.J. Abrams.

In the summer of 1979, a group of friends in a small Ohio town witness a catastrophic train crash while making a super 8 movie and soon suspect that it was not an accident.

Shortly after, unusual disappearances and inexplicable events begin to take place in town, and the local Deputy tries to uncover the truth – something more terrifying than any of them could have imagined.