Newly released documents from the NSA have revealed more detail about the popular – and mysterious – part of Nevada known as Area 51.
The 60+ declassified reports, dating from the 1960s and 1970s, speak mostly to the government’s desire for tight security around the area near Groom Lake.
Conspiracy theorists hoping to find documents confirming the government’s harboring of aliens and flying saucers at the facility will be slightly disappointed, though. While Area 51 did house alien aircraft, they were from the Soviet Union — not Mars, or any other planet from some distant galaxy.
You see, the U.S. — embroiled in a Cold War with their Soviet counterparts — had gotten their hands on a bunch of Soviet MiG fighter jets and were housing them at this top-secret location for the purpose of studying the aircraft and advancing the technologies being applied to America’s own fleet of spy and fighter jets.
MiG-21 jet.
Bit of sidebar trivia information from these documents: One MiG-21 was code-named “HAVE DOUGHNUT,” and two MiG-17s were referred to as “HAVE DRILL” and “HAVE FERRY,” for whatever reason.
Throughout the years, American engineers documented various reports on the design, performance, and limitations of the Soviet’s MiGs so as to better understand their vulnerabilities.
While they were studying their enemy’s weaknesses, developers at the site also used the Area to strengthen the country’s fleet of fighter jets, starting first with the Lockheed U-2 reconnaissance plane in 1955 . . .
. . . before eventually getting into stealth plane technology, and the F-117 Nighthawk.
Other documents reveal that while all of this research was going on, there was a lot of Cold War paranoia playing out too. Researchers for the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) were actively photographing Area 51 using a high-altitude U-2 spy plane and a then-classified CORONA reconnaissance satellite, for the purpose of seeing what the Soviet Union might learn about the area should the country’s Sputnik 13 satellite have reconnaissance capability.
The extreme levels of paranoia under which government employees were operating is perhaps most evident in the collection of 1974 memos released, which document an incident involving NASA and the fact that the Agency’s Skylab 4 astronauts had inadvertently taken a picture of Area 51 despite specific instructions not to photograph that area.
The much argued about image of Area 51 inadvertently captured by Skylab 5 astronauts. For those curious, the bright white spot northeast of the site is the dried out bed of Groom Lake.
Basically, a multi-department brouhaha developed over whether or not to make the picture public, with officials from the NRO arguing that it would be best to retain the photograph as a high-priority, classified secret, and NASA stating that there would be domestic and foreign problems that would result from their withholding photographs from the public.
To make a long story short, a lot of back-and-forth memos followed before NASA finally decided to simply tuck the photograph away in its larger collection of Skylab photographs — thereby making it public, but not calling attention to it.
Worth noting about this incident: Despite everyone’s concerns over what the image might reveal / not reveal, it stayed there, untouched, unseen, and unrealized for what it was an actual photograph of, for years on end.
You can read through all of the declassified documents via the National Security Archive.
Story via: space.com
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