A real USAF facility, officially acknowledged in 2013
Area 51 is real, and for most of its life the government would not say so. It is a highly classified Air Force facility on the edge of Groom Lake, a salt flat in southern Nevada about 83 miles north-northwest of Las Vegas, inside the Nevada Test and Training Range and next door to Yucca Flat, where 739 of the Nevada Test Site's 928 nuclear tests were set off. Officially it is Homey Airport, or simply Groom Lake; its nicknames include Paradise Ranch and Dreamland. Nobody is quite sure where "Area 51" came from, though it may borrow from an Atomic Energy Commission map grid.
The secret began with a spy plane. In April 1955 the CIA chose the dry lake to test the Lockheed U-2, which was too secret for Edwards Air Force Base. The designer Kelly Johnson flew over it and knew within thirty seconds: the lakebed was as smooth as a billiard table, a perfect natural landing field. Johnson called the camp Paradise Ranch to lure workers to the middle of nowhere, and the first U-2 arrived that July in a cargo plane from Burbank, with crews flying in on Monday mornings and home on Friday nights. From 1959 the base was rebuilt for the A-12 OXCART, with a 10,000-foot runway and a vast spiral marked across the lakebed so a pilot running out of runway could abort into it, and later the F-117 stealth fighter was tested here.
The U-2s flew far higher than any airliner of the day, and the CIA's own history notes they set off a tremendous increase in reports of UFOs. Secrecy did the rest. In 1988 a television special first tied Area 51 to aliens, and in 1989 Bob Lazar claimed he had worked on captured flying saucers at a hidden site called S-4 near Papoose Lake. In 2013, in response to a Freedom of Information request filed in 2005, the CIA released a declassified U-2 history that finally acknowledged the base existed. In 2019 more than two million people answered a joke online call to storm it; a little over 150 made it near the gates.
The edge of the base is marked by orange posts and patrolled by guards in white pickups, known to watchers as camo dudes, with cameras and motion sensors reaching out onto public land and signs warning that deadly force is authorised against trespassers. The airspace above is restricted. The way in for everyone else is State Route 375, the Extraterrestrial Highway, and the little town of Rachel, 25 miles north of the lake.
Other places on the map within a couple of hours.
