The declassified CIA documents on Area 51 confirm what the government spent nearly sixty years refusing to admit: the base at Groom Lake, Nevada was built in 1955 as a secret flight-test site for Cold War reconnaissance aircraft, first the U-2 spy plane and later the A-12 OXCART. The same records also contain a candid admission that those high-altitude test flights produced most of the UFO sightings that fed the base’s mythology.
Why the CIA Built a Secret Base in the Nevada Desert
In the mid-1950s the United States had almost no reliable intelligence on Soviet military capabilities. Satellite imagery did not yet exist, and conventional aircraft could not survive Soviet air defenses long enough to photograph anything useful. The CIA’s answer was a plane that would fly too high to be intercepted, and it needed somewhere hidden to test it.
Lockheed’s chief engineer, Kelly Johnson, sent test pilot Tony LeVier and a Skunk Works foreman on a two-week survey to find a site for the project, codenamed AQUATONE. Richard Bissell, the CIA official running the program, reviewed roughly fifty candidates with his Air Force liaison, Colonel Osmond Ritland, and rejected all of them on security grounds. Ritland then recalled a small abandoned airfield beside a dry lakebed about 83 miles north of Las Vegas, just outside the Atomic Energy Commission’s nuclear proving ground. When the group flew out to Groom Lake, the old strip was overgrown, but the three-mile-wide lakebed made a perfect natural runway. Because the location sat on AEC-controlled land, the government could restrict access without drawing attention to a new perimeter.
Johnson nicknamed the base “Paradise Ranch,” a label he later admitted was chosen to make the desolate assignment sound appealing to recruits. The map designation, Area 51, is the one the public eventually latched onto.
Project AQUATONE and the U-2
The entire reason Area 51 exists is the U-2. Lockheed designed the aircraft to operate above 70,000 feet, roughly twice the cruising altitude of commercial airliners and beyond the reach of any interceptor then in service.1Air Force. U-2S/TU-2S The first flight happened almost by accident on August 1, 1955, when LeVier was running a high-speed taxi test and the aircraft unexpectedly lifted off the ground.2CIA. Area 51 and the Accidental Test Flight From that moment on, Groom Lake became the primary flight-test center for the program, and CIA and Lockheed pilots pushed the aircraft’s envelope in near-total secrecy.
Once operational over Soviet territory, the U-2 delivered photographic intelligence the United States had never possessed. The secrecy that surrounded the program, however, produced a side effect that would shape the base’s public reputation for decades.
The CIA’s Admission That Spy Planes Caused the UFO Wave
One of the more revealing passages in the declassified files is the agency’s own conclusion that its reconnaissance flights were directly responsible for a large share of Cold War UFO reports. According to the CIA’s internal study of its role in the UFO phenomenon, over half of all UFO sightings from the late 1950s through the 1960s were accounted for by manned reconnaissance flights, primarily the U-2.3CIA. CIA’s Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947-90
The mechanism was straightforward. Commercial airline pilots cruising at 20,000 feet had no frame of reference for an aircraft flying at 70,000. When sunlight caught the U-2’s silver wings at those altitudes, especially at dusk when the ground below was already dark but the upper atmosphere was still lit, the result looked like a bright, fast-moving object that matched nothing in the observer’s experience. Ground observers reported the same thing. The CIA knew the sightings were its own aircraft but could not say so without exposing the program, so the reports were left unexplained.
The problem intensified when the A-12 began flying in the 1960s. It was faster, flew higher, and looked stranger. By then, the government had years of practice in not commenting on UFO reports, and the public had years of practice in assuming the worst about what the government would not say.
Project OXCART and the A-12
Even before the Soviets shot down a U-2 over their territory in 1960, the CIA understood the aircraft’s invulnerability would not last. Soviet radar had tracked U-2 missions from the start, and surface-to-air missile technology was catching up. In 1959 the agency awarded Lockheed a contract for a successor that could fly higher and outrun anything the Soviets could put in the air.4CIA. A-12 OXCART
The result, codenamed OXCART, was the Lockheed A-12. It first flew at Groom Lake on April 26, 1962, and eventually sustained Mach 3.2 at 90,000 feet, setting speed and altitude records in 1965: nearly 2,500 miles per hour at an altitude where pilots wore pressure suits similar to those worn by astronauts.4CIA. A-12 OXCART Getting there forced Lockheed to solve engineering problems that had never been attempted, from new titanium fabrication techniques to lubricants and fuels that could withstand extreme heat and engines capable of sustained supersonic combustion.
The A-12 was declared operational in 1965 after hundreds of hours of test flights at Area 51, many flown at significant personal risk by a small team of CIA and Lockheed pilots. The Air Force developed a modified variant, the SR-71 Blackbird, which eventually superseded the A-12. The CIA’s OXCART program was shut down in 1968.4CIA. A-12 OXCART
How the Documents Became Public in 2013
For decades, the U.S. government refused to confirm Area 51 even existed. That changed in June 2013, when the CIA released a substantially less-redacted version of its internal history of the U-2 and OXCART programs in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. The document, titled The Central Intelligence Agency and Overhead Reconnaissance: The U-2 and OXCART Programs, 1954–1974, was written by agency historians Gregory Pedlow and Donald Welzenbach and had originally been published through classified channels in 1992.5National Security Archive. The Secret History of the U-2 – and Area 51
The path to public release took years. National Security Archive senior fellow Jeffrey Richelson first reviewed a version of the history in 2002, but every reference to Area 51 had been blacked out. He filed a new FOIA request in 2005 specifically asking for those redactions to be reviewed. Eight years later the CIA restored the Area 51 references, making the 2013 release the first official agency document to use the name and confirm the location at Groom Lake, Nevada.5National Security Archive. The Secret History of the U-2 – and Area 51
The declassified history covers site selection, construction, flight testing, pilot recruitment, operational missions, and the eventual handoff of the facility to the Air Force. It runs from 1954 to 1974.
What the Declassified History Does Not Cover
The CIA’s release is valuable precisely because its scope is narrow. It documents the agency’s direct operational period at the base. Everything after 1974, more than fifty years of Air Force programs, remains classified to varying degrees. Anyone hoping the 2013 files address recent activity at Groom Lake will not find it there.
Some later programs are known only in fragments, from partially declassified briefing books, retired personnel accounts, and occasional official acknowledgments made years after the fact. Stealth aircraft development moved through Area 51 starting in the late 1970s: the Have Blue technology demonstrator led to the F-117A Nighthawk, whose first flight took off from Groom Lake on June 18, 1981. The Air Force did not acknowledge the F-117 existed until 1988. A separate program, HAVE DOUGHNUT, brought a Soviet MiG-21 to the base for tactical evaluation from January through April 1968. The aircraft had been provided by Israel and received the cover designation YF-110 to obscure its origin, and specialists from the Air Force Foreign Technology Division flew it against American fighters to learn its capabilities firsthand.6National Security Archive. The Area 51 File: Secret Aircraft and Soviet MiGs
The 2013 documents answer the question that drove public curiosity for half a century. The government was hiding something at Area 51, and it was spy planes, not spacecraft. Building aircraft that could fly at the edge of space and outrun anything in the sky was, arguably, a more impressive secret than the theories it inspired.