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For more recent information about Area 51, see the new Area 51 Research Center maintained by Don Emory.
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From: campbell@ufomind.com (Glenn Campbell, Las Vegas) Date: Mon, 29 Sep 1997 17:37:25 -0800 |
[From LV Style Magazine (about a month after the Popular Mechanics story). Reprinted by permission of the author.] THEY CAN'T KILL RACHEL (with stock 8x10 pic of barren Test Site landscape) By Jim Barrows (JBarr84722@aol.com) They say they're going to move Area 51. Which doesn't exist for Americans, but shows up clearly on Russian satellite photos. Area 51, in the remote northern reaches of the Nevada Test Site, is where the Boeing 737s land, disgorging scientists daily from Lawrence Livermore Lab in California and various civilian contractors from Las Vegas. The U-2 and SR-71 spy planes, the Stealth fighter and bomber were developed and tested at Area 51. Strange craft still fly from this secret base. Some say the technology for the Stealth submarine was developed at Area 51. After all, what more unlikely a place to test submarine technology than in the middle of the Nevada desert, hundreds of miles from any water? And how to explain the weird blue-green machines that swoop over Nellis Air Force Base -- the most advanced fighter and bomber training grounds in the world -- hovering over the military's power supplies at Nellis and causing power outages there at several locations in the pre-dawn darkness? Perhaps it is the Aurora, a few steps beyond the Stealth aircraft. Perhaps the mysteious X-33. Or one of the alien craft that survived the notorious "weather balloon" mystery at Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. In the June issue of Popular Mechanics magazine, its Science & Technology Editor Jim Wilson surmises that the mission of Area 51 has been moved to a remote part of Utah -- White Sands, or Area 6413. An interpretation of his accompanying map places Area 6413 somewhere "south of Utah Route 70 and east of the Green River." Perhaps, Wilson means Interstate 70 (not Utah Route 80), vaguely south of the towns of Green River and Salina, somewhere around Goblin Valley State Park; sandwiched between the Roan Cliffs and the Coal Cliffs, Canyonlands and Capitol Reef National Parks. There are also vast areas of national forests. Such overlapping jurisdictions would require stepping on toes at the Department of Interior (U.S. Forest Service) and Bureau of Land Management (U.S. Department of Agriculture) by either the Pentagon (Department of Defense) or the nuclear testers (Department of Energy) -- or any combination thereof. A standard highway map shows no airports in that region; only settlements with names like Moab, Hanksville and Elmo. Civilian aircraft can't fly over the Nevada Test Site, though the Russians monitor Area 51 activities there with their spy satellites. Moreover, Area 6413 is in the middle of a transcontinental flyway for commercial passsenger and next-day-delivery freight jetliners. Why would our military planning geniuses move a testing ground to such a place? * A suit by former Area 51 workers who alleged burning of toxic wastes there made them sick. A federal judge stamped that case "Secret." * Nuclear fallout from above-ground tests at the Nevada Test Site in the '60s and early '60s that poisoned parts of Area 51. * The military needed a different test area for a new type of aircraft that could take off vertically, fly faster than Mach 15, fly as high as 50 miles up, carry a payload of more than five tons, and reach any spot on Earth in 40 minutes -- then land on a regular runway. A re-usable space aircraft. Naah! The community of Rachel, Nevada, has the only bar for close to a hundred miles along Rte. 375, which skirts the northern edges of the Nevada Test Site. If the "Loneliest Road in the World" runs through Central Nevada, Route 375 leads into it. Rachel is so far out, what with the weird lights that sometimes illuminate the rarely traveled two-lane blacktop, that Route 375 is officially (by a decree of the Nevada Highway Department) "The Extraterrestrial Highway." Wilson, the magazine writer, asserts that "Area 51 has been shut down." "Crapola!" says Glenn Campbell, director of the Area 51 Research Center He used to live in Rachel, but moved to Las Vegas a couple years ago. His apartment overlooks the McCarran International Airport runway from which the scientists are flown to Area 51. Their numbers are about 800 to 1,000 a day, he says. Wilson's Popular Mechanics article "gives me no evidence at all that anything has changed at Area 51," Campbell told one local reporter. Nor was there anything to connect Campbell's move from Rachel to Las Vegas with any hint of Area 51 downsizing, as Wilson implies. Campbell told Las Vegas Style two years ago, as a previous story on Area 51 was being written, that he was moving to Las Vegas. That was a few months before UFO-watchers were barred from their usual photo-op mountain at the edge of Area 51 and the real world. "The cammo dudes are no longer patrolling the perimeter of Area 51," asserts Wilson. "Cammo dudes" are security guards who are not officially there. They patrolled inside that restricted area in their white four-wheel-drive vehicles (usually white). Security guards at a place that does not officially exist, peering across an invisible line in the sand and along the ridges at the occasional UFOlogists and read-and-rip television nutcase show editors who, in turn, are directing their film crews with megamillimeter telescopic lenses to get them in the same frame with the massive aircraft hangars in the background, 12 miles away, across the bone-dry Groom Lake. The "cammo dudes" were aptly named for their camouflage skills. White vehicles on the crests of the parched desert hills. A chain of five- foot-high silver-coated spheres has obviated the need for such a payroll expense. Inside each of those spheres: ground-motion detectors, infrared cameras, linked to a central security monitor. In case of any security breach at Area 51's boundaries, dispatch a ground assault team by helicopter (see any version of "The X-Files"). "DOD (Department of Defense) even agreed to consider -- but at press time had still not acted upon -- our request to visit" Area 51, Wilson trumpets. None except those with top-level security clearances have been allowed in Area 51 since the Groom family got kicked off their hardscrabble mining operation there more than 20 years ago, barred access suddenly by forerunners of the "cammo dudes." Compounding Wilson's hypotheses on the meltdown of Area 51, an article in the June 1997 issue of Popular Science magazine debunks the Roswell, New Mexico, UFO crash story. The feds said then it was a weather balloon. The magazine's Dawn Stover says it was "a 700-foot string of weather balloons, radar reflectors and acoustic sensors." Oceanographers had learned of an ocean layer that conducted the sound of underwater explosions for thousands of miles. The Roswell balloons were testing a theory that a similar layer existed in the upper atmosphere so Soviet nuclear tests and ballistic missiles might be detected, Popular Science says. Roswell's new slogan: "Crash in Roswell." Meanwhile, the warning signs remain just outside Nevada's Area 51: "This is a restricted militarty installation. It is unlawful to make any photograph, film, map, sketch, picture, drawing, graphic representation of this area or equipment at or flying over this installation." Violators face a $1,000 fine and a year in federal prison. - - - There's an old English poem that should accompany this story of a military base that doesn't exist that may be moved somewhere else: "Yesterday upon the stair I saw a man who wasn't there. He wasn't there again today. Oh how I wish he'd go away.
Index: Green River Launch Complex Index: 1997 Articles About Area 51
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Created: Sep 30, 1997