The sniffing out of the new site for Area 51

From: "zeropoint" 
Subject: Area 51  -  Tracking down its new location

Http://www.popsci.com/
Http://www.popularmechanics.com/

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Area 6413
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"The New Area 51 Top Secret    Eyes only"
By Jim Wilson,  Science/Technology Editor

Popular Mechanics June, 1997

	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 followed, its successors, 
the A-12 and SR-70 and later the stealthy R-117A fighter and B-2 
bomber, danced across the same blue-steel Nevada sky.
	Rumors persist of even more amazing aircraft.  Secret hangers 
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 somehow learned how to fly.  I'm 
not searching for hypersonic 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." Camouflaged 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 
$2,000 in $50 bills in the trunk, along with my sleeping bag and extra 
bottled water.
	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-packed carcass as road 
kill, I 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 anything-except for 
what I see next.  The road has just vanished, as completely as if it 
never existed.
	I brake the car, stepped out, check my map and compass, and 
then (sorry, Avis) climb on the trunk for a better view.  A 360 degree 
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 tarnished brass locks that 
secure the gate's chain are no blue-light special.  They are strictly 
military-issue, Rusting 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.  After 15 minutes of wearing down the battery, I quit.  
Disappointed, I balance my camera on the roof of the car, set the 
shutter-release timer and blast of 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 circumstantial evidence first 
suggested more than a year ago.  Area 51 has shut down.  Not that 
anyone should b surprised.  After all, the base became America's 
worst-kept secret the moment talkshow host Larry King announced its 
presence to his national audience during a special on UFOs.  Of 
course, UFO and aviation buffs knew this all along.  The name "Area 
51" and a description of its mission as the proving ground for 
Lockheed's U-2 reconnaissance 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 Ale' Inn after collecting their 
mail from the line of postboxes that mark the center of this town of 
double-wide trailers 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."
	As I finish my Alien Burger with Extrusions (melted cheese) 
and Appendages (french fries), Chuck Clark, Author of the Area 51 & S4 
Handbook, tells me he thinks the airfield's last secret plane, the 
Auror, left a year ago.  Bob Lazar - whose picture hangs behind me on 
a paneled wall 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 location.  
Even Glenn Campbell - founder of the Area 51 Research Center and guide 
to PM correspondent Dane during his trip - has left for Las Vegas.
*	Though it may seem cynical to some folks, we think the most 
convincing evidence that top-secret testing 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 activities 
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 accurately, not happening - at Area 
51?  Lest we mislead anyone into thinking a talk-show host forced the 
government to abandon a perfectly good secret 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 Treaty.  The pace 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 - fly their most sophisticated 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 reason for it to leave.  Three years ago, a group of former 
workers who had become seriously ill after working at Area 51 asked 
the government to conduct an investigation to see if they had been 
exposed to toxic substances.  DOD lawyers convinced a judge to 
information had to remain secret.   But Area 51's next-door neighbor, 
the Department of Energy (DOE) felt differently about such secrets.  
It had begun to make public previously classified data documenting the 
effects of Atomic Energy Commission (ABC) 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 15, the 
base itself had become obsolete.  The next generation of 
ultrahigh-performance military aircraft would need a different type of 
proving ground.  We believe we know where the Air Force will build 
this new base - the new Area 51, or, as it is officially names 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 sighting was their proximity to Falcon Air Force Base.  
The small base in southern Colorado is the headquarters for the Air 
Force Space Command (AFSPC) and its Space Warfare Center (SWC).  More 
importantly, 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 generation of breakthrough aircraft.
	I booked a flight, rented a Jeep and spent two days cruising 
the mountains 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 Science 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 million a mission.
	Discovering how these planes would achieve this level of 
performance would tell us the type of faciltiy 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 
developments 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 itself, 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 engines capable of 
producing the thrust needed to reach the speeds and altitudes for 
fast-response global missions would be so powerful they could lift a 
plan of 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 talking off vertically could be hidden just about anywhere.  If 
the Air Force hadn't needed money to build this extraordinary 
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 funneled through secret 
"black budget" accounts created by the nation's intelligence agencies. 
 But since the 1970s, these organizations had better tools in the form 
of spy satellites.  In the 1980's, the capabilities of these orbiting 
eyes improved even more.  The Air Force officers assigned to NASA 
space shuttle missions had completely mastered the art of on-orbit 
satellite refueling.  This meant the National Reconnaissance Office 
could steer a spy satellite just about anywhere it was interested in 
looking.  The Air Force's next-generation plane might gather the 
information a bit faster, but for the type of strategic surveillance 
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 impossible to get 
Congress to publicly finance 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 problem.  It also pointed us in the direction of the new Area 
51.  The event was unremarkable.  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 redundant assets was now under 
construction at Lockheed Martin Skunk Works, the Palmdale, California, 
incubator that previously hatched the mysterious birds that disturbed 
the quiet of the desert near Rachel.  The Air Force's breakthrough 
aircraft would be one of the public already knew as NASA's X-33.  
Skunk works engineers 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 
ultrahighperformance 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 assets sharing agreement 
between the Air Force and NASA was already old news to aerospace 
industry insiders.  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-sponsored technical 
conference in Huntsville, Alabama, he pointed out that Skunk Works 
designers nestled a 5 x 10 ft. Payload bay between the X-33's 
liquid-oxygen and fuel tanks.  It wouldn't be used on the NASA 
missions, 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 in use the X-33 as 
an operational 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 developers to Area 51.  It 
sits next to a ferocious 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.  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 the 
prototype testing - 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.  During 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 
between 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-minutes-to-anywhere 
missions.
	There was, however, a second Whites Sands launch site - one 
that wasn't mentioned in either congressional 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 even greater 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 forbidding 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 restricted airspace designated as R-6413.  A 
satellite reconnaissance expert who examined images of the site told 
PM, "If you wanted to hide something [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 photos taken by former 
Soviet spy satellites.  The company was at first willing to sell us 
higher-resolution images.  But after analysts in Moscow reviewed the 
close-ups we had requested, we received a call from the company saying 
that the images would be unavailable for "security reasons."
	We didn't need satellite images to see that the Utah site made 
the perfect 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 sighs focused on Utah, we also found recent evidence 
of the Pentagon's interest in the site.  Two years ago, just as 
activity at the original Area 51 begin to wind down, the pentagon 
began testing the local waters 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.  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 opposition, the Pentagon announced 
it would drop the project.
	PM has, however, obtained copies of other government 
documents, including budgets, that show $8.2 million has been 
allocated to refurbish the missile assembly building and improve the 
surrounding site at the Utah Launch Complex.  Curiously, these funds 
will be paid by DOE, the successor to the old AEC, whose nuclear 
testing blanketed the old Area 51 with radioactive fallout.

	Part of the public's fascination with the original Area 51 is 
its rich collection of stories about crashed flying saucers, alien 
bodies and unexplained lights in the sky.  The relocation of Area 51 
does not necessarily mean those tales will be left behind when 
operations begin here in Utah, perhaps as early as 1999.
	The "Air Force Times" reports that the distinctively painted 
CT-43 transports, which previously flew workers between Area 51 to a 
depot at the edge of McCarran Airport in Las Vegas, 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 Institute for ?Discovery Science.  Its mission: 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

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