FOREIGN POLICY: Area 51 is a touchstone of America’s cultural mythology. It rose to notoriety in 1989, when a Las Vegas man claimed he had worked at the secret facility to discover the secrets of crashed alien hardware, spawning two decades of conspiracy theories and speculation about little green men. But the facility’s history — and the history of the strange, secret aircraft that were developed there — extends back to 1955. Since its inception, the government has obliquely acknowledged its existence only a handful of times, and even the CIA’s 1996 declassified history of the OXCART program — the development of the SR-71 Blackbird at the secret site — refers only to tests conducted in “the Nevada desert.” The government has never publicly discussed the specific facility … until now.
On Thursday, the National Security Archive reported that it had gotten its hands on a newly declassified CIA history of the development of the U-2 spy plane. The report, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, contains the CIA’s secret record of how Area 51 came to be.
In 1955, CIA Special Assistant for Planning and Coordination Richard Bissell, Col. Osmund Ritland, an Air Force officer working on the U-2 project, and Lockheed aircraft designer Kelly Johnson began looking for a location in California or Nevada to test the U-2 prototype. The location had to be remote — far from the view of the public (or potential Soviet spies). On April 12, 1955, they were scouting locations from the air with the help of Lockheed test pilot Tony LeVier. While flying over the Groom Lake salt flat, they noticed an airstrip that had been abandoned after being used by the Army Air Corps during World War II. The CIA history describes their first encounter with the site: … (more)
