Area 51 offers best practices, but not from aliens

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Area 51 offers best practices, but not from aliens

Better known as "Military Operations at Groom Lake"

By John Winn Apr 20 2009, 09:40 AM

For years, stories of little green men have been the mainstay of government secrecy concerns, conspiracy theories, and huge sellers in the entertainment industry. Now, after years in the dark, at least some of the truth really is out there. It just doesn't appear to have very much to do with little green men.

ABC News recently reported that with the declassification of the CIA A-12 OXCART project in 2007, project workers have come forward to discuss Area 51, a place that, according to the military, isn't supposed to exist. What they revealed sheds light on at least a portion of the hidden rooms that have long been shadowed from the public eye.

Located 100 miles from Las Vegas, on the shore of Groom Lake, Area 51 is supposedly home to everything from alien autopsies to Roswell space ships. However, from 1958 to 1968, it was home to the development and construction of the A-12 OXCART supersonic jet. Developed as the successor to the U-2 spy plane, the OXCART is a marvel of aeronautical engineering.

"Well over 40 years after it first flew, the A-12's maximum speed and altitude have not been equaled by a piloted operational jet aircraft," wrote David Robarge, the CIA's chief historian in 2007.

The project's end in 1968 was due to budget difficulties brought on by the Vietnam War and competing agency conflicts, not it's technology. In fact, it was that technology that was the basis for other "Black bird" models developed for the Air Force.

According to government sources, Area 51 is an alien free zone. Thornton "T.D." Barnes, 72, a former special-projects engineer at Area 51 who worked on the A-12 OXCART project, told ABC that he didn't see anything that wanted to phone home except the workers. Instead, he noted that a decommissioned CIA supersonic surveillance jet was most likely the cause of the alien conspiracy theories. He explained that because the plane flew 2,850 flights out of Area 51, traveling 2,200 mph at an elevation of 90,000 feet, people wouldn't see the plane, but they would see flashes of light. And though those flashes of light weren't E.T., the team was happy to work under cover of the rumor.

"We considered it to be a bonus," Barnes said. "They [alien conspiracy theorists] made it easier to conceal what we were doing."

Another interview in the Los Angeles Times, in which Barnes was interviewed, explained that the OXCART's disk-like fuselage reflected light, giving it the appearance of a giant silver disk or alien saucer.

Harry A. Martin, 77, a fuel supervisor for the OXCART project, told ABC that the idea that UFOs were stored at the base was all in people's imaginations. "We laughed at it," he said.

Despite the absence of any X-file revelations about Area 51, some UFO "experts" have asserted that the conspiracy may still be real. Stanton T. Friedman, a nuclear physicist and UFO researcher, said that the old Area 51 employees who have come forward may not have known about the secrets of the much ado about nothing property. He believes that the high level of secrecy in Area 51 created intense compartmentalization between projects on the base and suggested that some departments weren't aware of others. In other words, a group could be building an engine in one room while on the other side of the base a space ship was being reverse-engineered.

Whether or not every room's secrets have been explored on the base, the declassification of many of Area 51's programs has allowed for a valuable commodity to be shared. Barnes told ABC that since the OXCART project has been declassified, he and other teammates can freely provide information that for over 40 years have remained secret.

"They're finding that a lot that we did under secrecy, they're making the same mistakes again," Barnes said. Now he and his past colleagues are finally able to work with universities and government agencies to help them avoid costly mistakes and provide solutions to challenges that were solved long ago but hidden in the shadows of UFOs.