Area 51: The Secret Base the CIA Finally Admitted (1955-2013)

What happened

Area 51 is the most famous place in UFO folklore, and for most of its history, officially it didn’t exist. Its secrecy is real, and its history is partly declassified. The declassified part tells a story about aircraft, not aliens.

The key document is The Central Intelligence Agency and Overhead Reconnaissance: The U-2 and OXCART Programs, 1954–1974, written by agency historians Gregory Pedlow and Donald Welzenbach. A heavily redacted U-2 portion appeared in 1998. A far less redacted version was released to the National Security Archive’s Jeffrey Richelson, who had requested it under the Freedom of Information Act in 2005. The National Security Archive published it on 15 August 2013, and its maps label the site “Area 51” outright.

The footage

No video is attached, because no footage shows anything anomalous at the base. The featured image is a Sentinel satellite view of the airfield’s layout and nothing more.

Timeline

• 1954: The CIA’s U-2 program begins (the history’s start date).
• 1955: The Groom Lake site is chosen. The first U-2 is delivered on 25 July, and the first planned flight is on 4 August. A transport flight bound for the base crashes on 17 November.
• Late 1950s–1960s: UFO reports rise. Project Blue Book checks them against U-2 flight logs.
• 1989: Bob Lazar claims he worked on alien craft at “S-4.”
• 1998: The CIA publishes a redacted U-2 history.
• 2005: Richelson files his FOIA request.
• 25 June 2013: The history is approved for release.
• 15 August 2013: The National Security Archive publishes it.
• 29 October 2013: The Archive’s second posting, “The Area 51 File: Secret Aircraft and Soviet MiGs.”
• 20 September 2019: “Storm Area 51” brings about 75 people to the gates, according to AP.

What witnesses reported

For decades, the witnesses were airline crews and air-traffic controllers. The CIA history puts it this way: “High-altitude testing of the U-2 soon led to an unexpected side effect-a tremendous increase in reports of unidentified flying objects (UFOs).” Once U-2s flew above 60,000 feet, “air-traffic controllers began receiving increasing numbers of UFO reports. Such reports were most prevalent in the early evening hours from pilots of airliners flying from east to west.” At that hour, sunlight still lit the high-flying plane’s silver wings while the ground below was dark.

What the research found

The name. Per the history: “To make the new facility in the middle of nowhere sound more attractive to his workers, Kelly Johnson called it the Paradise Ranch, which was soon shortened to the Ranch.”