Introduction to Area 51

He says they worked on the buddy system, in which two individuals were assigned to be buddies and were allowed to converse with no one else. Staff members were followed by security even into the bathroom. Lazar claims that security monitored his telephone, and when they learned that he was having marital problems, they decided he was a security risk and canceled his clearance. It was after this that Lazar went public with his story. Work with alien spacecraft technology supposedly accounts for the extremely high level of security at Area 51. Black Hawk helicopters patrol the public lands surrounding the base. Electronic sensors along the approaching roads detect the presence of vehicles. The surrounding public lands are monitored by armed men in camouflage fatigues who are the employees of the private security firm Wackenhut Corporation.

On Wackenhut’s board of directors are former FBI Director Clarence Kelley, two former CIA deputy directors, Frank Carlucci and Bobby Ray Inman, former Defense Intelligence Agency Director General Joseph Carroll, and former Secret Service Director James J.Rowley. Wackenhut Corporation has about 30,000 armed employees. There have been reports of Wackenhut guards harassing and detaining citizens on public roads near Area 51 and confiscating cameras at gunpoint. Area 51 itself is posted with notices stating “Deadly Force Authorized.” In addition to surveillance cameras, Area 51 has motion detectors in the ground and detectors that can sense the ammonia in human skin. In 1995 the Air Force obtained an additional 4,000 acres around Area 51, primarily the high points and mountains from which the curious had been watching for UFOs.

Robert Lazar’s background has been checked, and there is evidence to discredit his story. Officials of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and EG&G, the firm where Lazar claims to have been interviewed by the Office of Naval Intelligence for his S-4 job, say that they have never heard of him. Lazar was effectively silenced when his critics were able to associate him with a Nevada brothel. Since 1989 hundreds of persons have flocked to Rachel, Nevada, a tiny community near Area 51, after hearing stories that the U.S. government was experimenting with flying saucers there. Norio Hayakawa, former regional director of a California-based group called Civilian Intelligence Network, has organized many trips to the area surrounding Groom Lake. The degree of security at the area has convinced Hayakawa that the government is test-flying several state-of-the-art aircraft that resemble flying saucers. He also believes that several diamond-shaped aircraft that use some sort of pulse-detonation propulsion system are being tested in the area.

Gary Schultz, director of Secret Saucer Base Expeditions, claims that on February 28, 1990, he saw a metallic, disk-shaped object suddenly appear over the Jumbled Hills south of Area 51 and fly toward the Groom dry lake bed. Schultz believes that U.S. pilots are regularly being given instruction in maneuvering disk-shaped craft in the area.

Aviation Week and Space Technology reports that there have been many sightings of triangularshaped, quiet aircraft seen with flights of Lockheed F-117A Stealth Fighters. On April 20, 1992, the NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw broadcast videotape made near Area 51 of a test flight of a new U.S. aerial craft that seemed to defy the laws of physics.

Abductees claim to have been taken to places described as underground facilities. Some abductees have seen what appeared to be U.S. military people involved, leading to rumors that they were taken to Area 51. There have also been more radical rumors, such as that Area 51 scientists are working with living aliens as part of a secret agreement between certain agencies of the U.S. government and extraterrestrials. The most bizarre of these rumors merge into implausible conspiracy theories rather like those of survivalists, neo-Nazis, and other anti-Semitic groups.