UFOs? aliens? Area 51 revealed

Former insiders talk about one of the most secret military bases in the world.

April 10, 2009 — — It’s the centerpiece of virtually every modern UFO theory and a symbol for everything the government doesn’t tell us.

About an hour by bus northwest of Las Vegas, Area 51 is one of the most famous military bases in the world, in part because the government barely recognizes its existence.

In keeping with UFO lore, Area 51, near Nevada State Route 375, also known as the “Extraterrestrial Highway,” is where the Pentagon has for decades stored frozen extraterrestrials and recovered alien spacecraft. In the movie “Independence Day”, it was where the heroes led a final assault against invading aliens.

But now that the CIA has begun declassifying the top-secret programs developed at Area 51, former military officers and engineers are starting to shed some light on the enigmatic airfield and give UFOlogists some new information to consider.

“No one really knew we existed,” said Thornton “TD” Barnes, 72, a former Area 51 special projects engineer. night.”

An expert on advanced radar and Soviet MiG fighter jets, Barnes said he was hired by the CIA to join a “cadre” of experts who could handle any type of military project.

People reported seeing flashes of light

As an electronics engineer at NASA, he worked on the country’s first rocket, the X-15, the Apollo space capsule and lunar research vehicles.

At Area 51, he helped develop the A-12 OXCART, a top-secret spy plane built by the Lockheed Corporation. Barnes said his colleagues conducted 2,850 test flights of the A-12 outside of Area 51.

Traveling at 2,200 mph at 90,000 feet, nothing could catch the planes. But, he said, people would see flashes of light.

This, he thinks, is what started the rumors of an extraterrestrial safe haven.

In a way, Barnes said, the UFO myths actually helped keep the site’s true activities a secret.

“We consider it a bonus,” he said. “They made it easier to hide what we were doing.”

No ETs, no alien spacecraft, no underground tunnels?
In fact, he emphasized, “We were the UFOs.”

In reality, he said, compared to previous positions with frequent missions, “Area 51 was the most boring place I ever worked.”

No aliens, no spacecraft from distant planets, no underground passageways, he said.

The only underground area he remembered was below a nuclear test site in nearby Jackass Flats.

Now that the OXCART program has been declassified, he and his colleagues are working with universities and government agencies to share their knowledge.

His program was one of the CIA’s best programs, he said, but as they declassified the information, they realized how much they didn’t know and couldn’t share with engineers working on similar projects today.

“They’re finding out a lot of what we did in secret, they’re making the same mistakes again,” Barnes said.

Maybe they just didn’t know

Harry A. Martin, 77, who oversaw the supply of the spy planes for four years, said his time at Area 51 was also one of the highlights of his career.

“I was very proud of what we achieved,” he said. “I have never worked with a better group of people than these.”

As for aliens and UFOs, “people have imaginations,” he said. “We laugh about it.”

But some UFO experts say the reports from former inmates don’t necessarily rule out the possibility that Area 51 is in fact home to some UFO-related activities.

“These guys who came forward could very well be telling the truth, with the exception that they wouldn’t know if there was anything going on,” said Stanton T. Friedman, nuclear physicist, lecturer and UFO researcher.

Highly classified works are also highly compartmentalized, he said. And the absence of evidence on their part is not the same thing as the absence of evidence for such work, he suggested.

Americans waking up to the reality of government secrets
Friedman said it is still conceivable that the wreckage of what some people believe was a UFO crash in Roswell, NM, could have been transported to Area 51. And, he added, “it is course” the military has an underground base out there.

But regardless of whether or not Area 51 is connected to UFO activities, Friedman pointed out that the facility captured Americans’ imaginations for another important reason.

It has become a symbol of government secrets and the universe of very sensitive information for public consumption.

As a scientist at General Electric, Westinghouse, McDonnell Douglas and other high-tech companies, Friedman said he has worked on a variety of classified projects that have shown him that government secrets are a fact of life.

Area 51 is just one example of this.

“National security has a real place in all these things. There is no way to tell your friends without telling your enemies,” he said. “Many Americans have woken up to the fact that there are many things happening that they are not told.”

Lee Speigel of ABC News contributed to this report.