Las Vegas Review-Journal on "New Area 51" [news]

From: campbell@ufomind.com (Glenn Campbell, Las Vegas)
Date: Tue, 27 May 1997 16:38:23 -0800
Subject: Las Vegas Review-Journal on "New Area 51" [news]

From http://www.lvrj.com/lvrj_home/1997/May-24-Sat-1997/news/5427116.html

Las Vegas Review-Journal
Saturday, May 24, 1997

CLASSIFIED AIR FORCE BASE GROOMING FOR A MOVE?

A magazine says Area 51's activities are moving to Utah, but
others say the facility is preparing for some downtime.

By Keith Rogers
Review-Journal

Claims by a national magazine this week that activities at
the Air Force's classified base, known as Area 51, are being
moved to eastern Utah have stirred a controversy among
observers.

Some say the base, at Groom Lake 90 miles north of Las
Vegas, continues to conduct its secret business as usual --
developing futuristic aircraft and testing U.S. warplanes
against Russian radar systems and fighter jets.

Others say the base has been put in a "caretaker status,"
similar to what happened for periods after the U-2 spy plane
first flew in 1955 and again after another surveillance
craft, the SR-71, became operational in 1966. Both planes
were tested at the base, according to aviation industry
sources.

Another caretaker period when the base was mothballed
occurred in the mid- to late 1970s, before activities picked
up to test and develop Stealth aircraft, the F-117A and the
B-2, said a former base worker who spoke on the condition of
anonymity.

He said the Groom Lake base is not headed for shutdown,
though.

"They've got too much there as far as runways and hangar
facilities to completely walk away from that place," he
said.

"There's some merit that they're putting it into caretaker
status," he said. "They're not even flying a kite up there."

The Air Force, said Capt. Stacey Hawkins, a spokesman in
Washington, won't confirm or deny anything about the base or
whether its function has been transferred to the Utah Launch
Complex, near the Green River in the eastern part of the
state, as reported in the June issue of Popular Mechanics.

The article's author, Jim Wilson, gives a first-person
account of his recent experiences with rusty, locked gates
on the boundary of the restricted Groom Lake area of the
Nellis Air Force Range. He writes about the military and
NASA teaming up to test a reusable Lockheed Martin
spacecraft, the X-33, at the obscure Utah complex,
designated as Area 6413. The Utah site is a launching area
for tests involving the White Sands Missile Range in New
Mexico.

This new class of space planes, Wilson said, "can't be
tested at a site like Area 51. They are designed to be
tested at a place where they can be launched," he said.

Wilson admitted, however, that some type of aircraft testing
is probably taking place at Groom Lake. "But as far as the
testing of the next mysterious generation of aircraft, it's
not happening there," he said in a telephone interview from
New York.

But Glenn Campbell, director of the Area 51 Research Center
and master of an Internet site that tracks base activities,
tells a different story. He says the 1,565-space parking lot
at McCarran International Airport for workers catching the
Janet jets that shuttle them to Groom Lake has been 85
percent full this week.

That means, he said, there are at least 800 to 1,000 workers
going to the base daily, counting some 100 who come from
rural areas. The figure does not include those workers who
are heading to the Tonopah Test Range instead of Groom Lake.

The Popular Mechanics article is "crapola -- you can quote
me on that," said Campbell, whose apartment overlooks the
Janet terminal parking lot.

"The article gives me no evidence at all that anything has
changed at Area 51," he said.

A flurry of e-mail has been posted on Campbell's website.

One message, from Ken MacGray, said Wilson's story has
"suddenly become an unexpected bounty to the Air Force,
particularly to those folks at Nellis Air Force Base who
are, no doubt, rolling on the floor laughing over the
article."

Another e-mailer, Dan Zinngrabe, wrote Campbell: "I
sincerely doubt that the areas they mention are involved in
black aircraft testing. The mention of sightings of lights
in the sky in the Four Corners area is particularly funny,"
given that it's already an air-traffic route.

John Pike, Space Policy Project director for the Federation
of American Scientists, a Washington-based watchdog group,
said he defers to Campbell on the status of the Groom Lake
base.

But Pike said he thinks Popular Mechanics is "definitely on
to something."

He said the article mentions several classified programs
from the late 1980s -- Science Dawn, Science Realm and Have
Region -- which are also mentioned in some military
contracting documents.

The X-33, he said, stands to be a radical, high-risk design,
more like a Stealth bomber than the space shuttle.

"It looked to me that where they jumped the gun is assuming
Groom Lake had been shut down and the X-33 thing was more
covert and clandestine than in fact it is," Pike said.