TechStuff Classic: The History of Area 51 - Part One

What goes on at the most famous secret base in the world? Ben Bowlin joins the show to talk about Area 51, aka Groom Lake.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
and a lot of all things tech. Is time for
a classic episode. This episode originally published back on September two,

(00:25):
thousand fourteen. It is the first part of a multi
part episode, so we're gonna be doing this over the
next couple of Fridays. This is titled The History of
Area fifty one, Part one. Area fifty one has gone through, obviously,
cycles of infamy as being a top secret location where

(00:47):
all sorts of stuff whereas going on. Some people just said, okay,
well that's just it's it is a top secret facility,
but it's one where regular terrestrial kind of aircraft are
being tested. Others were saying, no, no, no no. Area fifty
one is a secret base where alien technology exists and
is being studied. Um, so let's listen in on the

(01:10):
actual history of Area fifty one. So we decided I
had talked about doing an episode about Area fifty one
for years. Threatening might be the better word for it.
I've been threatening to do an episode about Area fifty
one for years. And just it was one of those
things that we kept on putting off because it's a

(01:30):
it's a big topic, and it's so big that Ben
has been very generous with his time and he and
I are going to be doing three episodes about this subject.
So the first two episodes are a history of this
facility and what what is actually documented as having happened there,
the real history, mind you. The third episode will be

(01:51):
the mythology of Area fifty one and some of the
stories that have been attributed to that area, some of
which border on um whacka doodle. I think it's a
good way of putting in. Yeah. So yeah, So we're
gonna cover all of that. So this episode we're gonna
look at the history. And if you've heard the term
Area fifty one, but you've only seen the depictions in

(02:15):
pop culture, like in science fiction, you probably aren't entirely
sure what it is now. First of all, Area fifty
one isn't necessarily the the proper designation for this facility.
It's the popular one, but really it's more often referred
to within within UM documents official documentation as Groom Lake,

(02:36):
and that's because there's a big dry lake bed in
Nevada called Groom Lake. And this facility is built right
on there, right, and it's built there for a reason.
It's in Nevada. And you you've got some great notes
on this all the way down to latitude and longitude. Yeah,

(02:57):
because because this was the thing, you know, for years
and years and years, the government would would very very
carefully disavow any inform any knowledge of such a facility.
They would say that, you know, nothing out there exists
Groom Lake. What what is that? Why would you groom
a late there's purpose a dry lake. You are speaking

(03:18):
crazy talk. So yeah, but but one of the big
reasons why it's out there is cause a dry lake
bed in Nevada tends to be pretty darn flat. And
if you want to say have a remote location where
you can develop and test secret aircraft, and you need

(03:38):
that space in order to take off and land the aircraft,
a big dry lake beds a pretty good you know location, right, Yeah,
it's fantastic. It's also far enough inland that the any
foreign observers at the time of Groom Lakes construction would
have a really difficult time observing anything happened there without

(04:01):
being noticed. First absolutely, because at the time. This is
before we get into satellites, right, So if you are
trying to spy upon the construction of Area fifty one,
it was built back in the fifties, then you essentially
had to have a spy plane flying over the United States,
which was a pretty risky thing to do. But meanwhile,
that's exactly what was going on at Area fifty one

(04:22):
was the development and testing of spy planes. So it's
also known as Homey Airport. That's more. That's a more
recent moniker over there. Um and it's uh, it's probably
I have it in my notes. I have it as
the most famous secret facility, worst kept. Yeah, it's the

(04:44):
it's the secret facility everyone has heard of, which is
kind of funny. But but they still managed to keep
the actual activities within the the facility itself largely secret.
There's been some reports that have come out. Some of
them are credible, some of them are less so. But
it's it's one of those things that that secrecy has
also led to some serious issues that will get to

(05:07):
more in the second part. Some things that have happened
that that bring up the question of accountability, like how
can you be accountable if you can't acknowledge the stuff
that goes on at that site, right, And it's no
wonder we know that whenever there is a lack of transparency,
we find a plethora and I'm using that word correctly

(05:28):
of speculation, absolutely, because we have to fill in the gaps. Right. Yeah,
it's like a Hitchcock movie. The monster you don't see
is always going to be worse than the monster on screen. Absolutely.
But let's go to UH as as they say in
Alice in Wonderland, let's start at the beginning. What do
you say? Absolutely, So let's say that you are uh,
you are a country that is involved in a little

(05:51):
altercation called World War two, and as a result, you
need to start building out your own military uh capabilities. Well,
the United States was very much concerned with this and
started to look for all sorts of places where they
could build various airport, landing strips or military purposes. So

(06:14):
they identified this one spot. And you mentioned I had
the latitude and longitude. I'm gonna go ahead and give it.
It's at thirty seven degrees fourteen minutes north latitude and
one fifteen degrees forty eight minutes west longitude, which means
it's right. It's within a hundred miles or hundred sixty
one kilometers of Las Vegas. Uh, that's that's to the
south of Every fifty one. And then the closest town

(06:36):
is actually called Rachel, Nevada, and that's about twenty five
miles or forty kilometers to the north. And uh, the
the original purpose of the facility, which wasn't really even
a facility, was just a couple of landing strips, like
more like a little compound or small airport. Yeah, it
was meant to be a training place for gunner schools,

(06:57):
for for people who are actually working on on gun
are positions within aircraft. So it's a training facility. And
uh it was created by the Army Air Corps. Notice
we didn't say Army Air Force. Yeah, this is before
the Air Force was ever a thing. So yeah, it
was Army Air Corps. Uh. They ended up using it,

(07:20):
like I said, during the forties. By the end of it,
they essentially they didn't formally decommission it because there wasn't
really enough there to do that. Yeah, they just sort
of stopped using it. Yeah, they're kind of like, well,
the war is done, let's pack up and go and
they left it kind of where it was. Now, that
didn't mean that that was the only you only organization

(07:41):
to use that area. Uh, there was something else that happened.
So in the nineteen fifties, and this is jumping around
a little bit because I don't actually have it right
here in my notes, But in the nineteen fifties, two
things are going on. One is you have the rise
of the Cold War, which means that now we no
longer have an active armed conflict going on, but we

(08:02):
do have an escalating political conflict between the United States
and the Soviet Union. And a bunch of spine, Yes,
a bunch of spine, which would factor in heavily. We
also had that same time on both sides. Both the
United States and Soviet Union had an era of developing
nuclear weapons. Right, so the part of the developing them

(08:23):
was testing them to make sure that one they worked
and two you you wanted you wanted other countries to
know you had them without knowing specifically what your armament was,
right and without you explicitly admitting that you had them either, right,
it was tricky stuff. So the the waste lands of
Nevada were often areas that uh, the Atomic Energy Commission

(08:47):
would use to test this stuff. And there was this
grid of land that they were using to test various
types of atomic weapons, including some that were developed by
Edward Teller. Joe McCormick and I recorded an episode about
five technologies that were supposed to bring an into World
War but didn't. And Edward Teller is the father of

(09:09):
the hydrogen bombs, so several of his designs were tested
in this area. That grid had thirty squares in it,
and each square was called an area alright, so he
had areas one through Area thirty. This particular parcel of
land where the former Army Air Corps facility was was
more or less adjacent to a square known as Area fifteen.

(09:30):
So it's possible that the Area fifty one name comes
from transposing the one in five and saying, all right,
well that was Area fifteen. This is Area fifty one.
It was not part of the grid originally. In fact,
when when the facility was constructed, the grid had not expanded.
It did expand gradually. I think it eventually had something

(09:51):
like two squares to it. Testing increased and they built
the fake towns and everything right right, yeah, And then
you see Indiana Jones getting the refrigerator. Knew. I knew
we were going to say that, Yeah, that's the new
Jump the Shark, isn't it. Yeah. Yeah, there's Jump the
Shark and Jump in the Fridge, which which did not
work out for Punky Brewster but did work out for
Indiana Jones. Um. So, I mean, while we've got this

(10:15):
testing going on in this remote part of Nevada, which
I don't know if you're aware of. This turns out
that if you're testing lots of nuclear weapons in an area,
it tends to be a deterrent for people to come
snooping around. Oh that's what we did wrong. We weren't
we weren't actively testing new devices around the office. Oh yeah,
so yeah, that's true. There's a there's a profound effect.

(10:40):
And I know it sounds like we're jokingly noting something
that is glaringly obvious. But even at that time, before
there had been the before we had had such extensive
research on the effects of this sort of weaponry. Uh,
everybody kind of saw the writing on the wall. Yeah.

(11:00):
So at that same time, like you were saying, with
all the spying going on, and there was a lot
of it, we've we've done episodes on tech stuff about
spy tech before, and we've even done episodes on specific
spy planes, like the the YouTube plane being one of
the most famous. There needed to be some way of
developing this technology and testing it without people being aware

(11:20):
of it, so that we can maintain that superiority of
folks not knowing what we're we are and are not
capable of doing so. That led to the Central Intelligence
Agency trying to find a good spot for this. And
you might say, wait, the c i A. Aren't they
for an intelligence They are foreign intelligence. So these were

(11:41):
going to be mostly spy plane spying on other places,
not the United States. We have plenty of agencies that
are here to spy on us, and it isn't the
Air Force already involved. So that's what you would think, right, like,
why why the CIA? Why not the Air Force? Well,
it comes down to and been I know you've heard
this to black budgets, right, Yeah, the idea that you

(12:03):
need to have a budget that is impenetrable people. People
approve them, but they cannot see what the budgets are
actually for. And it's all under the umbrella of national security.
And the reason that this exists now. I know these
get a tough time nowadays, and and they should. There's
a great argument for the transparency at this time. Just

(12:25):
to be fair we have to play devil's advocate and
say that the argument against transparency is, of course, during
the Cold War, when people are trying to mask their capabilities,
anyone with the right amount of subterfusion influence could find
uh something that wasn't a black budget all the way

(12:46):
down to individual components, the literal nuts and bolts. So
at the time their argument will be that this is
necessity and if you want something secret, you put it
under At this time in America history, you put it
under the CIA. Yeah. Yeah, because the Air Force would
end up having a budget that was reviewable by Congress,

(13:06):
right exactly. And so this would at least mean that
everyone in Congress and plus all the congressional aids would
have access to those budgets, which could mean that that's
a security risk that that information could leak out and
it would get into the hands of of of foreign
agents that would end up having the advantage because now

(13:26):
they know what we were capable of. By having it
as a black budget, you take that out. It also
means that again, you don't have that transparency and you
leave the world wide open to just speculate on what's
actually going on. So there's a there's another edge to
that sword. So the CIA is in charge of this.
They work with the Air Force, but I mean when
we talk about testing these planes, it was CIA pilots

(13:49):
that we're doing the testing, right, not Air Force pilots.
It's very important distinct. So they were civilians who then
got classification of top secret access through the c I A.
I think I've talked about this before, way way back.
But top secret, by the way, does not mean you
automatically have access to everything that's classified top secret right

(14:10):
spot on intelligence at that level is often what they
call compartmentalized altely. Yeah, so you have access to one
specific branch, but anything outside of that you don't. So
you may be able to go to the very furthest
lengths in that branch, but it doesn't mean you have
access to everything. It doesn't mean, for instance, So then
just to illustrate this, the c i A pilot let's

(14:33):
call him Mr. Smith because that's not a sketchy name,
that's perfect. Mr Smith might be They call it being
read onto a program. So Mr Smith might be read
onto a program for a particular plane, or even something
as small as just a particular engine or design of
a plane. Everything else about that is a mystery, and
it is understood that he is not even supposed to

(14:55):
pretend that he thought of asking. We're gonna take a
quick break, but will be back to talk about more
of the history of Area fifty one in just a moment.
Everyone who was working at Area fifty one, whether you're
a pilot or an engineer, you were only really allowed

(15:17):
to know about whatever it was your specific project was
was concerned with, right, yeah, Yeah, even if you're in
the private industry, which also was involved with this. A
couple of people are familiar with this story. You're probably
waiting and they're saying, Jonathan Ben sure, the CIA, the
Air Force, but why aren't you talking about the people

(15:38):
who actually built the planes. So you're talking about Lockheed
hold On one. So Lockheed is a military contractor among
other things, but they do a lot of work with
the United States military, and so Lockheed was going to
be the company that was largely responsible for building the
planes that we're going to be tested at Area fifty one.

(16:00):
So when we get down to this point where the
CIA is ready to find a site for this, they
work with Lockeed And there is a designer at Lockeed
who is absolutely famous in the spy world, Clarence Kelly Johnson. Yeah,
it's you if you've heard some of the stories about

(16:21):
this stuff. He's definitely famous in the spy world. But
he is a I think we're a family show here,
so I'll just say he is a gosh darn good designer. Absolutely. Yeah.
As a matter of fact, he's the top dog at Lockey.
Jonathan earlier mentioned the YouTube spy playing that is our
boy Kelly. Yeah. He also ended up largely defining skunk

(16:44):
Works at Lockeed, and we've done an episode on Tech
Stuff about skunk Works as well. Skunk Works now is
just a general term that a lot of companies used
to describe their secret R and D projects that aren't
aren't meant for public consumption. This is stuff that is
going to end up becoming part of products maybe five
or ten years down the line. But that was defined

(17:07):
at Lockheed. That was the top secret development lab where
anyone outside of that lab was not aware of what
was going on, and even people within the lab may
only be aware of very small parts of what is
going on. So uh with you two and skunk Works. Obviously,
he had already kind of developed this reputation of being
the go to guy when it comes to this kind

(17:29):
of thing. So the CIA consulted with him as well
as some other military folks, and they started looking around. Now,
Johnson had said that the facility needed to be remote
enough to escape casual attention, so you couldn't have it
close to any kind of metropolitan area or or settlement. Um,
it also had to be close enough to a major
city so that you could get supplies for all the

(17:52):
stuff you need in order to do the testing, the
building and and all of that kind of stuff. Now,
a lot of these vehicles were not actually constructed at
Area fifty one. They'd be built in another facility and
then would be transported Area fifty one for all the testing.
But even so, like you have to get all the
food there, you have to you know, all the all
the basic the fuel that you would need, you would

(18:13):
have to have all of that shipped to Area fifty
one in some way. So there were a lot of
logistics involved, which meant that it had to be far
enough away from a city to avoid uh notice, but
not so far as to make it impossible to get
stuff there. It had to be inconvenient but not inaccessible.
There's a Goldilocks zone here, uh, sort of like in
Star Trek where everybody's looking for an M class planet.

(18:35):
That's a very good way of putting it. So as
they were looking around, uh, there was a member on
the search team named Colonel Osman Ritland who had actually
trained at the gunnery school that had existed at Groom Lake,
and so he said, hey, you know, there was this
place that I had to work at when during World
War Two that might be worth checking out. And so

(18:57):
they ended up going there and as soon as Johnson
saw it, he said that that was the perfect spot.
It would mean that they would have to do obviously
a lot of work to make it ready for it
to actually be a test facility, but he said, this,
this meets all the requirements I had in mind. So
he called it Paradise Ranch, right, which, uh, you have

(19:17):
a great note about this. Yeah, it says, uh, it's
a little more attractive than quote site adjacent to a
former nuclear test area end quote. Uh. In fact, it
wasn't even former, it was a current nuclear test area.
There were times when the Atomic Energy Commission in later
the Nevada Test site ended up having to evacuate Area
fifty one because they were going to be doing some

(19:39):
tests and it's possible that wind could carry radioactive particles
over towards the facility. I mean, you win some, you
lose some, right, Yeah. So the other term you could
have used is desolate hell whole, but that also not
so attractive if you're trying to get uh, civilians interested
in helping out. So they actually did employ civilians to

(20:02):
help construct, right, Yeah, from us surrounding Las Vegas area
and from Rachel, Nevada as well. Yeah, and it meant
it meant that people had to pass some pretty stringent
background checks and they had to sign silence oaths. And
for the most part, people have been really good at
keeping those oaths. I mean there's only been a few

(20:23):
people who have ever talked about Area fifty one, which
is pretty amazing because we talked about how it's really
hard to keep secrets, right, especially in that that difficulty
increases exponentially the more people involved with this secret. But
in this in this part too, It's important for us
to remember that even the people who had signed the
secrets didn't really have that much access. They were they

(20:48):
were limited by necessity, which meant that even first of all,
if you were to communicate outside of area fifty one,
it would very quickly become obvious who was talking because
it would all be dependent upon what they knew. So
if you were talking about stuff that you knew but
you didn't know other things, that narrows down that list

(21:08):
of suspects, and there could be some pretty serious penalties.
We're talking like scary, scary penalties that could go against
you if you were to spell the beans and those people. Also,
this is a side note, but I think this is
a illustrative of the kind of scrutiny that these folks
were under. Afterwards. The I R s UH keeps a

(21:29):
tab for on these people afterward to verify that they're
not suddenly coming into inexplicable amounts of income, to make
sure that they're not like secrets, right what even though
if you I mean, even though, if you think about it, man,
those secrets I'm air quoting so hard here, folks. Those
secrets would be things like, um, I was paid to

(21:52):
drive a truck from Rachel to this location drop off fuel.
Right and and I did you know there were three gates?
I got into one or something like that. Um, And
that's you know, that's for sake of example. I don't
know if there was a number of tiered gates. Please
don't don't come after us. We have not been there,

(22:13):
nor have we tried to look. Um. So, the during
the lifetime of the the test site, which again bordered
Area fifty one, it was pretty active. They did a
hundred and five above ground explosions and more than eight
hundred underground explosions. They would do their last test in
nine two, So this was kind of a just a

(22:36):
fact of life at Area fifty one, is that nuclear
testing was going on. I mean several miles away. I
don't want to give the implication that it was like
just outside the gates, but it was certainly close enough
for it to be a concerned Yeah. Because and also
a lot of people are probably surprised to hear that
that continued until nineteen two. So, you know, most people

(23:00):
will place the end of the Cold War in the
late eighties. But this doesn't mean that the testing would
stop completely because just as a cold war has kind
of a hazy conflict zone. It also has a hazy
beginning and end, whereas we can trace World War Two
with some concrete dates, right yeah, I mean, if nothing else,

(23:22):
you can go with the declaration of war and the
treaties that ended it exactly. But when you get down
to this, you also have the first acknowledgement that there
was actually something there, which comes in a booklet that
the Atomic Energy Commission put out that was titled Background
on Nevada Nuclear Tests, and it came out in nineteen

(23:44):
fifty seven, and it mentions a facility at Groom Lake.
But in that one it's called the Watertown Project, and
that it was meant to study the weather. Ah, And
ladies and gentlemen, remember that last fact, because it comes
into play later. Right in two episode we will cover
the the weather part of the mythology of Area fifty one.

(24:05):
It's interesting, though, because it gives you yet another name
for this place. You know, I tend to call it
Area fifty one when I mentioned it to other folks,
I usually say Groom Lake because that's the official designation.
But Area fifty one, being probably the popular term, is
the one that I tend to say in this in
my notes here. Yeah, Area fifty one is sort of
the street name for groom Lake nickname, but there's uh.

(24:28):
I think one thing that we should talk about real
quick is the nature of secrecy, because we we mentioned
a little bit about how people who are helping, even
in a small way, had things that are essentially gag
orders for life, and again that this comes under the
curtain of national security or the purview rather, and which

(24:48):
gives the the acting government agencies tremendous powers in pursuit
of that goal. So one of the big questions is,
you know, if Area fifty one was first publicly knowledge
shall be under another name in nineteen fifty seven, then
clearly the people at least in Rachel, Nevada knew something

(25:08):
was there, just like the people in the town surrounding
Oak Ridge knew something was there. Yeah. And the fact
that you had people commuting in from places like Las
Vegas or from California who are flying in the construction
crews who are coming in to build out the facility
meant that there's some folks who know that something is

(25:29):
going on. They may not know the full extent of
what the purposes, but It's what's really interesting is that
a lot of the documents that have come out since then,
most of them avoid naming the facility at all, or
the name has been redacted, it's been blacked out. Um.
And a lot of the information I've read has suggested
that in the two or three times that it hasn't

(25:53):
been that it's been in an official document, they think
that it was an oversight, that someone had failed to
black it out exactly. Yeah, they were like, do you
have another sharpie? And no one's got so. Yeah. It's
funny that the only reason why we really have a
lot of information on it at all is because it

(26:13):
could just have been an oversight from someone who failed
to mark that part out. Thank you for being in
a hurry at work, uh, the Uncle Sam employees. But
but with this idea about privacy, one of the big
questions is, well, of course we know it's near Las Vegas, right,
Las Vegas at this point already big airport hub, right,

(26:34):
So so how do they keep these planes from figuring
out what's going on? Yeah? They ended up creating a
restricted air zone where not even military aircraft were allowed
to pass through without authorization, and by authorization, I usually
mean that the military aircraft probably took off from Area
fifty one, went on some sort of test flight which

(26:56):
could go outside the restricted airspace, but then would be
allowed to come back in if it were any other
military flight. Let's say it's a training exercise from Nellis
or something along those lines. They expressly were told they
could not fly through this particular zone, which originally was
five by nine nautical miles, which is about nine by

(27:17):
seventeen kilometers, and the uh it went all the way
up to space. It's time for another quick break, but
we'll be right back. So not the time. Your commercial
aircraft tended to fly at an altitude of around twenty ft,

(27:40):
and your military aircraft might go up to forty feet.
But we're talking spy planes that were designed to fly
at sixty ft or higher. So these altitudes meant that,
you know, you didn't want aircraft coming in and seeing
something flying above them. They could actually have a pretty
good view of that. In fact, that did happen quite
a few times, which lent uh some it end up

(28:01):
being not as big an issue because a lot of
people assumed it was something otherworldly that they were seeing. Right. Yes,
and this this is one of the big facts that
later will later we'll see um provides an explanation to
some of this because at this time, for people surrounding

(28:22):
the area who were just you know, just your regular civilians,
they would they would eventually turn to one another and say,
what the heck is going on up there? Did you
see that? Well, especially since a lot of these test
flights took place at night, so instead of being able
to actually see an aircraft, all you see are the lights.

(28:42):
And some of these aircraft were designed to travel at
remarkable speeds, particularly compared against the state of the art
aircraft in other fields, like a commercial aircraft, could not
hope to keep up with some of the Some of
these were going mock three. I mean, we're talking supersonic
speeds here, and at that speed, seeing a light travel

(29:03):
that quickly could be a real head scratcher if you
didn't know that. In fact, this was a spy plane
developed by the United States government, right. And that's how
these things, that's how these things can evolve. Just imagine,
if you will, and this is hypothetical, an ex airline
pilot saying, well, I flew planes, or a World War

(29:24):
Two veteran saying you know, I was a pilot in
the Pacific Theater, and there is no earthly craft that
could do this. So that's where we see people making
the leap, and again in the absence of transparency, going
with what they think is the I want to say,
the most probable idea, but really it's the most exciting

(29:47):
and the coolest. Yeah, And it's one of those things
where if you can't conceive of people being able to
accomplish that, then what else could it be? Right? So
it's one of those things where you think, I have
never in my life traveled in a vehicle that is
capable of moving at that speed. I don't know of
anything that humans have built that could do it. Then
you start saying, well, if humans didn't build it, who did?

(30:08):
And then you go to the little gray men or
a little green men? Right, And it's weird because we
you know, if I could do a little bit of
a cibar here, man. We see this kind of reasoning
pop up throughout history absolutely, right, yeah, Yeah, Like no
one could build the Pyramids because look at how big
they are. There's no way they have the technology. Therefore,
aliens had to do it right, exactly and in a

(30:31):
lot of times that situation is bound up in assumptions
about human potential. Absolutely, and we don't want to we
don't want to take away from right now the frankly
astonishing and extraordinary things that human beings were doing at
Groom Late. Yeah, the engineering was phenomenal. So that's relatively

(30:51):
small restricted airspace I talked about. By nineteen sixty two,
when they started working on other projects besides the U
two spy plane, which again wasn't developed at Groom Lake,
but it was. It was tested there quite a bit.
Um They would expand it to an area of twenty
two by twenty nautical miles which is forty one by
thirty seven kilometers, and it became known as Groom Box

(31:12):
or just the box. That you were not allowed to
enter the box unless you were expressly told to. So
there were a few times where pilots might accidentally or
perhaps cheekly skirt the box and we're told in no
uncertain terms to get the heck out of it before

(31:32):
they might yeah, yeah, like be forced to the ground
or fired upon. I mean, we're this serious business. So
the first spy plane they started to really work on
at Groom Lake after the U two was the A twelve.
You're gonna get a lot of letters numbers in these episodes. Um.
This was part of Project ox Cart. So in nineteen two,

(31:55):
the first A twelve spy plane arrives at Groom Lake
and it wouldn't to be until I think the following
year that CIA pilots would actually be able to fly it.
So it had been at groom Like for about a
year before it was being flown in tests. So it
was meant to be a more capable spy plane than

(32:16):
the YOU two. And it's major difference was that it
traveled way faster, right, and this this was I mean,
clearly there's an advantage there, but also uh, while it
was traveling faster, it was reducing the footprint that it
leaves on a radar. Yeah, so it was partly to
try and find a way because the YouTube has very

(32:37):
very wide wings, right, It's it's very long and very wide.
It's also from why I understand a true bear to
fly like it's it's supposed to be one of the
hardest planes to fly in land. Yeah, I like that
you added and land. That's a really good point because
it was built for the SPECS for which was built,
and the expectations of this plane are in some ways

(33:00):
contradictory to what makes a good plane. Yeah, it made
it possible to fly it at incredibly high altitudes, which
was important for the spying purposes and also just to
evade UM things like like missile fire, although what was
happening was missile technology was catching up to aircraft technology,
which was again the reason why they had to start

(33:22):
developing things like the A twelve. So the ox Cart
program required the groom like facility to expand and include
more facilities just for military and civilians alike. So it
had to had to have more buildings, and that means
you have to hire construction crews and figure out what
you're gonna do. Uh. The A twelve also needed a

(33:42):
longer and stronger runway than what was that groom like,
so they had to reinforce the existing um runway and
extend it out further or else this plane would not
be able to take off and land. So cleared construction
workers these are civilians security clearance, they would take exactly,
they would take either a C forty seven out of Burbank, California,

(34:03):
or a D eight teen at a Las Vegas. So
both of those planes were military transport aircraft, and uh,
the secrecy around those aircraft fueled the rumors and suspicion
about what was going on at Groom Lake for years,
because you'd have these aircraft lining up at various airports
and there'd be no designation, like you had to know

(34:23):
about it in order to be able to get on
it and be cleared for it, which meant that if
you were paying attention, just as a commuter going through
these air airports, you think, what's going on over there? Yeah,
there's no there's no indication of what's happening here. And
they weren't flown back immediately either, right, They weren't doing
this every day because that's just not that's just not uh,

(34:46):
you know, efficient. So what they had to do was
build some some uh like sleeping facilities essentially trailers originally
out at Groom Lake, and people would spend the week
there and then over the At the end of the
week they could fly back and go home, but for
the duration of the week they would be at the facility,
you know, pretty much cut off from the world, working

(35:06):
on this stuff. And you have a great side note
that I thought was fascinating this is something that I
did not know. So you're talking about how in Nevada,
if you work forty eight hours or longer in the
state for any given project, you are required by law
to have your name recorded so that you would have

(35:26):
to show up on a state document somewhere. Well, the
folks over at Area fifty one, the CIA in particular,
didn't really like that idea too much because in theory,
if you got hold of that list and you made
you cross reference and you figured out where everybody was
from what companies they worked for, you could then start

(35:48):
to figure out weight based upon what this company does.
I have an idea of what's going on at this
secret facility that they're going to uh in Nevada that
you know. I know they're going there because their names
are showing up on the state list. So, again, out
of the concern for national security, they had to figure
out a way, well, how do we keep people's names

(36:08):
off this list, and how do we do it so
it's legal, because if you start doing illegal things and
that catches up to you, it's the same problem. So
they say, ha ha, we found a loophole. It turns
out that government workers were exempt from this forty eight
hour work rule in Nevada, if you work for the government,

(36:28):
you did not have to have your name recorded. So
every single person who worked on that construction crew became
listed as a government consultant. Everyone became a government consultant
for the purposes of working at Area fifty one, which
is a lot better than some of the alternatives, which

(36:50):
would just be not having a job. But also it's
very it's it's strange when you think about it, because
when we say construction, we also mean like the caterers. Absolutely,
there are stories that that the food at Area fifty
one was actually quite good. They said that they would
fly down occasionally, uh a, a chef from Las Vegas

(37:12):
who would cook, which means that someone like chefs in
Las Vegas, had to sign secrecy oaths so that they
could go there. Now, granted, when you were when you
were going there, you might have a lot of secrecy,
not just the fact that you know you're flying on
a plane that's not listed anywhere else where you're going.
You might you might be put into a transport that

(37:32):
has curtains all along it, so you don't get a
real view of what's going on. All the different buildings
are essentially hidden from view from each other, so you're
not gonna be able to look in and see what
people are working on. So it's it's really I mean
like there were times where people were acquired to stay
in their office while an aircraft was being wheeled either

(37:52):
in or out of a hangar because they weren't allowed
to see that aircraft, which again makes sense because in
retrospect as paranoid as this sounds, in red respect, we
know uh a little bit about the extent of KGBS
uh spine in the United States. Yeah, yeah, there have
been KGBS KGB spies that have infiltrated the CIA and

(38:13):
the FBI. I mean, you know, the their their entire stories,
fascinating stories about people who were able to do that,
double agents and all this kind of stuff. And and
with that in mind, you know, yeah, it sounds paranoid.
But if you don't take these incredible precautions, you set
yourself up. And now these precautions are oh I never

(38:33):
get to do this catchphrase now more than ever, the
the government was saying to various departments of the government.
Departments were saying to one another, we have to have
this secrecy because business a groom Lake is booming. Yeah,
they ended up for some of the buildings. You know,

(38:54):
you're trying to you have a black budget, which it's
hard to tell where money is gonna go to a
blank check. Yeah, but they were still being pretty careful.
I mean, they didn't just build state of the art facilities.
It's not like if you were to go to Area
fifty one, especially if you went to Area fifty one
back in nineteen five or so, it's not like you

(39:17):
were going to walk into a super awesome, state of
the art facility. They bought surplus buildings from the Navy.
They had Navy hangars and Navy surplus housing buildings that
had been disassembled, packed into cargo planes or on on trucks,
shipped out to Groomla and then reassembled on the site.

(39:38):
So we're not talking like yeah, no, they were not
cushy accommodations. So getting back to the ox Card aircraft,
I have an account of a test flight the explains
how quick quickly this thing traveled and and sort of
the extent of the test flight. So remember I said,
these test aircraft weren't confined to that stricted airspace. They

(40:00):
could actually leave that restricted airspace depending upon the actual
requirements of the test. So an impressive demonstration of the
ox carts capability occurred on twenty one December nineteen sixty six,
when lockeed test pilot Bill Parks flew ten thousand one
statute miles in six hours. The aircraft left the test

(40:22):
area in Nevada and flew northward over Yellowstone National Park,
thence eastward to Bismarck, North Dakota, and onto Duluth, Minnesota.
It then turned south and passed Atlanta en route to Tampa, Florida,
then northwest to Portland, Oregon, then southwest to Nevada again.
The flight turned eastward, passing Denver and St. Louis, turning

(40:44):
around at Knoxville, Tennessee. It passed Memphis in the home
stretch back to Nevada. This flight established a record unapproachable
by any other aircraft. It began at about the same
time a typical government employee starts his work day and
into two hours before his quitting time. So that's a
pretty interesting tour of the United States right there. It's amazing.

(41:07):
That was literally a whirlwind tour. Yeah. No, the fact
that it goes to just about everywhere in the US
besides the northeast, right or the you know, the not Alaska,
Hawaii obviously, but yeah, it's pretty impressive. So during the
whole history of the twelve, only thirteen were built, and
out of those thirteen, four crashed in some sort of

(41:29):
case or another. Um so that was that it was
never meant to be this is going to be the
replacement you two. It was more like, we are going
to test all of these technologies that we've developed with
this plane and then see which ones work best, and
that those will inform the design of what will become
the U two successor, right. So one important part for

(41:52):
us to remember about that is that this means the
four that crashed, as well as the ale that we're built,
the remaining nine are all going to be a little
bit different, their variations on a theme with further improvements. Absolutely. Yeah,
it's not like they are cookie cutter designs that are

(42:13):
coming out of this. And that concludes Part one of
the History of Area fifty one, a series that originally
began publishing back on September fourteen. We will be back
next week with the continuation of these classic episodes. If
you have any suggestions for topics I should cover in
future episodes of tech Stuff. Let me know the best

(42:33):
way to do that is over on Twitter. The handle
for the show is text Stuff hs W and I'll
talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an
I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio,
visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

(42:54):
you listen to your favorite shows.