AREA 51 - THE TRUTH by the CIA: Official dossier blows lid off US secrets

A declassified CIA report made public this week includes copious references to the United States' mysterious Area 51 base. The Cold War-era dossier on the U-2 spy plane was published by the George Washington University's National Security Archive - and acknowledges the existence of the highly hush-hush patch of Nevada desert, …

[cyke1]

Welcome to what EVERYONE already knows about.

[DrXym]

Everyone sane you mean.

[jai]

that's just what They'd want you to say - your tinfoil hat must have slipped

[Matt Bryant]

Re: cyke1

"Welcome to what EVERYONE already knows about." Exactly! Look at the timing - this is just a distraction to keep the conspiracy theorists busy with one of their favorite bleating points.

[oolor]

Re: Matt Bryant

>Exactly! Look at the timing - this is just a distraction to keep the conspiracy theorists busy with one of their favorite bleating points.

Ya right, and forget the obvious double coverup wherein the Blackbird is being used to cover for the failed balloon info release coverup.

[Code Monkey]

It shows how tragic these UFO fantasists are. Whatever you think about its purpose, the SR-71 is a marvel of human engineering. That people can't appreciate what we're capable of without having to imagine little grey men is sad.

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget the stealth... That I believe was responsible for most of the 'triangle' craft sightings...

And I suspect there have been many more experimental aircraft tested there, drones for one thing!

one amazing thing is that while the SR-71 is grounded now... the U2 is STILL in active service, amazing kit...

[Alan Brown]

"That I believe was responsible for most of the 'triangle' craft sightings..."

Those virtually stopped overnight when existance of the F-117 was revealed.

[Shaha Alam]

what if info about F-117 was only released to misdirect people from the *really* exotic triangular shaped craft.

[Irony Deficient]

Shaha Alam, do you mean exotic triangular shapes like that one that was designed back in ▒▒▒▒ using non-Euclidean geometry? The one that had π corners, for improving the ▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒ of its ▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒ ▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒?

[Dave 32]

Oh, you mean the Aurora:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora_%28aircraft%29

Dave

[Anonymous Coward]

re:Oh, you mean the Aurora

No, Astra.

Like the one that crashed at Boscombe Down in 94.

but I didn't tell you that, or that it crashed, because officially it didn't....

Oh and you should note that Gibson dismissed suggestions it was an F117.. as it isn't.

anon obv. no comment.

[Anonymous Coward]

English Electric Lightning ????

Wasn't there an incident where an SR71 pilot was brushing the edge of space, looked up and was overflown by an Lightning ?

[Ed 13]

Re: English Electric Lightning ????

Yes. Some NATO exercise in Europe in the mid eighties. I recall reading it on the EE Lighting stand at Duxford IWM.

From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Electric_Lightning

"In 1984, during a major NATO exercise, Flt Lt Mike Hale intercepted a U-2 at a height which they had previously considered safe from interception (thought to be 66,000 feet). Records show that Hale also climbed to 88,000 ft (26,800 m) in his Lightning F.3"

[Nigel 11]

Re: English Electric Lightning ????

Going in a different direction, maybe. At top speed and overtaken by, no way!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: English Electric Lightning ????

It was a U2, not an SR-71.

A U2 was slower than SR-71, but it flew extremely high (out of reach of most SAMs). But once the Russians managed to shoot down one of them over Russian soil, that was it.

The Lightning easily had a ceiling as high as the U2, so it is not inconceivable that the Lightning ended up above a U2 as part of an intercept.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: English Electric Lightning ????

Sorry to burst your (probably British) bubble, the SR71 had an operating altitude of 80,000ft, the U-2 70,000, the Electric Lightning 65000. Although they tried and successfully tested U-2 interception around 60-65,000ft. On one occasion they managed to climb to 88,000ft, but it was just a ballistic flight, not a sustained level one.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: English Electric Lightning ????

5000 ft is close enough. The U-2 is flying in a very narrow speed range at that height and would need very little to bring it down. I think the slipstream of another aircraft would probably knock it out of the sky - wouldn't even need to get the airflow off your wing under its wing (a la Tempest vs V-1)

If the 1957 hadn't knocked most all new ideas on the head, I wonder if the UK would have turned out a really high altitude and longer ranged interceptor - and would it have looked like the Vickers-Armstrong Type 559?

[Chrissy]

Re: English Electric Lightning ????

True - read up on "coffin corner" for the weird coincidence of airspeed and mach numbers making flying in the thin air at this altitude equivalent to balancing a pencil on your nose.....one twitch and you are stalled and spinning/

[Christoph]

Re: English Electric Lightning ????

it was just a ballistic flight, not a sustained level one.

You don't need sustained level flight to intercept something and be able to shoot it down.

[Jaybus]

Re: English Electric Lightning ????

Not exactly. It was a U, not a SR71.

[Andrew Moore]

Re: English Electric Lightning ????

I heard it was a Vulcan...

[Aldous]

Re: English Electric Lightning ????

A lightning buzzed a U2 (Empire of the Clouds-Patterson).

[Andy Roid McUser]

SR-71

My favorite aircraft of all time. Mach 3+ using 1960's tech and it still looks like something out of a sci-fi movie. Dreamed of it as a little boy, saw one recently whilst in D.C. Still smiling from it.

[Don Jefe]

Both the U-2 and the SR-71 are excellent examples of not only aerospace design but high speed, high resolution photography and photography processes and logistical support. They were full of complicated engineering problems and keeping them flying was a constant challenge: I'm afraid the abilities to bootstrap engineering solutions on the fly is a lost art these days.

Everyone wants no risk guarantees and assurances these days, not forward thinking. Look at the F-35 for a great example of trying to design around every possible problem and coming up with a big pile of shit that can't do anything, instead of recognizing the need for in the field solutions.

Also, the aliens and their technology are kept at the Mt. Weather facility in Virginia not Area 51.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been to Mt. Weather before and left there with food poisoning; so stay away from the cafeteria there. ;)

[Jaybus]

Wait! Isn't the UFO stuff in hanger 18 at Wright Patterson Air Force Base, not Area 51? Or is that just the little grey bodies?

[Destroy All Monsters]

In truth, Area 51 has not much to do with UFO lore. It was tacked on much later. One could as well talk about Black Oil, Däniken, the Bermuda Triangle, Gurus calling the Endtimes and other commercial ideas.

[Anonymous Custard]

Also a lover of the old SR-71, from an aesthetic but also an engineering viewpoint.

It's the little things, like the story I heard once from one of their pilots at an airshow that they tended to leak fuel when on the ground due to the requirements of tolerance to allow for thermal expansion when they were going supersonic.

A trait (the expansion, not the leakage) it shared with that other supersonic icon, Concorde.

[Dave 32]

SR-71 Pilot

I met one of the SR-71 pilots a number of decades ago, Major Brian Shul, and even got him to autograph a copy of his first book "Sled Driver". His story is quite an interesting one:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Shul

Dave

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: SR-71 Pilot

A brilliant book, I still refer to the SR-71 as The Sled because I really think it's the best name.

[Anonymous Coward]

@Anonymous 14:01

That's correct. The planes were never fully fueled on the ground. They were fueled with enough to get to 'operating temperature' before they were fueled fully in flight.

The one problem they suffered from though were the violent unstarts, which were physically worse than on the Concorde... But they show how much of that engineering was new and how much of it is still novel now...

[Dave 32]

Re: @Anonymous 14:01

And, don't forget that, when the engines started, they blew green flames out the back.

Dave

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: @Anonymous 14:01

Violent unstarts on Concorde? Really? Did any such thing ever happen to a Concorde engine after they'd finished the development work?

Sorting out the engine inlets was a big job, but from what I've read, the effort paid off and Concorde's engines were pretty much immune to such trouble once in service.

Not that I mean to diss the SR-71 designers in any way: that was a military craft designed to hit Mach 3+, not a "mere" twice the speed of sound. Concorde got by with fairly normal turbojets: Blackbird engines operated as ramjets at high speeds. The fact they got the things to work at all is a Big Win.

The engineering's not been replicated before or since AFAIK - not the clever Concorde stuff, nor the clever SR-71 stuff. Both brilliant one-offs, the like of which the world shall probably not see again, damnit!

As for Andrew Orlowski's idea that the SR-71 was the intended successor to U-2s: well, no. SR-71s were meant as an additional reconnaissance platform. After all, U-2s are a good deal easier and cheaper to operate. Then again, SR-71s were harder to shoot down (none were) and can get there quicker.

SR71s have long since been retired, but U2 descendant are still in service despite drones, satellites, and all the modern remote electronic snooping they can do.

[An0n C0w4rd]

Other acknowledgements of Area 51 / Groom Lake

aka "Dreamland"

As part of any outage which affects 911 services, US telco's have to file a report with the FCC detailing areas affected, what happened, and what the fix was

10-15 years ago Sprint filed an outage notice with the FCC detailing a DACC (from memory) that had failed. They listed one of the affected areas as "Military Base 'Area 51'"

I may still have a copy of that outage notification somewhere. Oh, it's even on the wayback machine

http://web.archive.org/web/20011217044254/www.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Engineering_Technology/Filings/Network_Outage/1999/reports/99-228.pdf

[Electric Panda]

In my experience, an awful lot of the ZOMG ALIENS about Area 51 died out a while ago. Most of the die-hard UFO community now accept Area 51 is/was just an R&D and test area for some extremely advanced airborne kit, you'd think if there was something truly dodgy and extra-terrestrial going on that the US military wouldn't keep it in the one place everyone knows about and is obsessed with.

[NomNomNom]

How interesting that they are declassifying this information now.

Wouldn't have anything to do with events in Egypt would it? Events which have been precipitated by the Snowdon release of NSA secrets and the Royal "birth".

Things are now moving faster than I anticipated.

[Richard Wharram]

Things are moving at exactly the pace I dictate mortal.

[kmac499]

SR71 Blackbird

For all enthusiast, there used to be a Blackbird in the USAF display Hangar at the Imperial War Musuem Duxford. sheltering under a B52's wing. (it seems tiny). Well worth the visit just to admire something designed and built a little over 50 years after the first practical aeroplanes Mach 0.1ish to Mach 3.0ish

[Don Jefe]

Re: SR71 Blackbird

There's an SR-71 at the USAF Armament Museum at Eglin AFB in Florida. The museum is open to the public as it's just outside the base. The plane is cool, you can climb all over it, touch it, etc. Nice that they allow the public to come in contact with it. Seems to make it more real somehow.

[graeme leggett]

Re: SR71 Blackbird

The SR-71 is still there at the American Air Museum within IWM Duxford

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Blackbird_Sr71.jpg

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: SR71 Blackbird

There's an M-21 Blackbird at the Museum of Flight in Seattle with its ramjet drone perched on top. The museum is well worth a visit if you are in the Pacific NW - loads of historic aircraft including Kennedy's Air Force 1, the first 747 and a Concorde.

[Annihilator]

Re: SR71 Blackbird

Nothing tops the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in DC. Best day of my life :-) SR-71, Space Shuttle Discovery, Enola Gay, Concorde, F35, F14, the list goes on.

And back in town, Apollo 11.

[Chris G]

The Truth is out there ( pa' vItna' tu'lu'). Old Klingon saying!

This is just a ruse to throw alien hunting, anal probe afficionados off the trail.

The trouble is no matter what the US Gov' now officially releases about Area 51 the conspiricists will believe it is part of a continuing cover up for what is really happening!

[Nigel 11]

Re: The Truth is out there ( pa' vItna' tu'lu'). Old Klingon saying!

They've declassified Ared 51 as a red herring. The real secrets are, of course, to be found at Area 667. Yes, of course you've never heard of it.

Oops.

[Christoph]

Re: The Truth is out there ( pa' vItna' tu'lu'). Old Klingon saying!

The real secrets can only be revealed if you have signed Section Three of the Official Secrets Act.

[JimmyPage]

@Nigel 11 - Area 667

The neighbour of the beast ?

[Charles 9]

Re: @Nigel 11 - Area 667

"The neighbour of the beast ?"

Thought that was 665, as used in Max Payne.

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this the CIA PR machine trying to make it seem fun again?

[Pascal Monett]

Mandatory xkcd reference

http://xkcd.com/1235/

[Anonymous Coward]

@ Code Monkey

I can only image that you a trolling.

If not then you need to follow the community in a neutral frame of mind to find out that it is not all about 'little green men' as the mass media always loves to put it.

The UFO community acknowledges that these days a vast amount of sightings is probably down to military aircraft of an exotic nature.

And by UFO community I mean documented, under oath statements from Doctors, Teachers, High ranking military personnel, Lawyers, Police Officers, Airline Pilots, Politicians, and I could go on.

Anyone who makes blanket statements that such things are the thoughts of 'fantasists' is either close minded or completely ignorant of the reality of the statements made. There is no way any person on this rock orbiting Sol can truthfully make that kind of statement. Where is the proof that craft are not visiting us? Especially when a man made object is in the process of leaving our Solar System right now and entering interstellar space....

For the record I do not believe nor do I deny. I simply remain open to the possibility.

[NomNomNom]

Re: @ Code Monkey

"There is no way any person on this rock orbiting Sol can truthfully make that kind of statement."

Not any living person on this rock no, but what of those creatures who dwell within the rock itself?

[Shasta McNasty]

Re: @ Code Monkey

And by UFO community I mean documented, under oath statements from Doctors, Teachers, High ranking military personnel, Lawyers, Police Officers, Airline Pilots, Politicians, and I could go on.

If you want credible witnesses don't include people who lie for a living.

[Destroy All Monsters]

Re: @ Code Monkey

> If you want credible witnesses don't include people who lie for a living.

A peremtory statement if there ever was one. It also defeats itself.

[Christoph]

Re: @ Code Monkey

It's important to keep an open mind. But not so open that your brains fall out.

[DrXym]

Re: @ Code Monkey

"And by UFO community I mean documented, under oath statements from Doctors, Teachers, High ranking military personnel, Lawyers, Police Officers, Airline Pilots, Politicians, and I could go on."

There is a slight difference between "I saw something in the sky which I cannot account for", and "OMG aliens!".

The clue is in the acronym UFO and sane people would not extrapolate out advanced alien civilisations where a likelier explanation is something far more mundane.

[Tikimon]

Re: @ Code Monkey

"Where is the proof that craft are not visiting us?" - First, it's impossible to prove something does not exist. But that doesn't matter, because if you claim there's a dragon in your garage, the burden is on YOU to prove it. The human-built spacecraft you mention are well-documented, and of no relevance to your argument about UN-documented alien spacecraft.

"And by UFO community I mean documented, under oath statements from Doctors, Teachers..." Are you seriously proposing that certain professions make people immune to mistakes? Lots of well-intentioned people are quite often wrong about what they thought they experienced.

One night in Alexandria, VA hundreds jammed 911 lines to report alien spacecraft zooming over a local mall, which was actually spotlights on low clouds. Made the news later, emergency calls weren't getting through. I saw it myself and knew instantly what it was. You would clearly consider their verbal accounts of a misinterpreted experience to be "documented" evidence, but it's just verbal assertions. Not proof.

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". Until the hordes of alien-visitation believers cough up some hard evidence, they shall remain firmly in the Crank category with Bigfoot sightings.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: @ Code Monkey

"Where is the proof that craft are not visiting us?"

Located in the same secure underground vault that houses the various proofs of, among other things; a teapot orbiting Mars, that God exists, has a long flowing beard and a penchant for have a laugh at his followers expense, that fairies really do live at the bottom of gardens, and that Tories are not born corrupt.

[Destroy All Monsters]

Secrecy is good

Especially when you are a government fucking over the governees and disregarding any Elf and Safety because YOU CAN.

[Anonymous Custard]

Caveat Lector?

Caveat alienus too?

Or perhaps caveat peregrínus (depending if you believe the Choccie Factory or the rest of the 'net).

[Irony Deficient]

abusio Latina

Anonymous Custard, Latin has several words for “foreigner”. Although the English word “alien” came from Latin alienus, the Latin meaning is best preserved in English in related words like “alienate”, to incorporate a sense of separation. Peregrinus is the source of the English word “pilgrim”. For beings from another planet, personally I’d choose advenus if they’re newly arrived, or incola if they’ve been here awhile.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: abusio Latina

Right. Open hillard and boting turn to ex ia section 2 sentence 6…

[John Smith 19]

Astonishingly lovely but just a little bit threatening to look at.

I always thought if it could talk it would probably say "What are you looking at?" in a fairly aggressive way.

Still just an amazing demonstration of what the Advanced Projects Division could do with a small team of clueful engineers.

When this thing was being designed the IBM 360 series had not been announced

[Destroy All Monsters]

Re: Astonishingly lovely but just a little bit threatening to look at.

> Still just an amazing demonstration of what the Advanced Projects Division could do with a small team of clueful engineers.

And infinite money. Mainly infinite money.

Industrial policy, wealth transfer, hidden taxation of the bonobos.

Sure you get a sleek looking craft out of it for a "Cold War" that was more fearmongering to biggen the brass than anything else. But still... it's like the mafia boss gives you a little duck after having collected the protection money.

[Tom 7]

Re "And infinite money. Mainly infinite money."

Lots of money is good if fed in the right hole. If fed into a 'small team of clueful engineers' a small amount of money could do a lot of good. Nowadays we have people being paid £300 an hour to make sure you dont spend a £5 more than you should and they do a very good job so I guess someone somewhere has a huge collection of broken irony meters

[Robert Sneddon]

Re: Astonishingly lovely but just a little bit threatening to look at.

Ah, the old "Mysteries of the Ancients" line makes its appearance again...

The U-2 is basically a high-altitude glider and, as the Gary Powers incident proved, vulnerable to getting shot down quite easily even fifty years ago when flying and spying over somebody else's territory. A modern version would be much better than the drafting-parchment and sliderule designers could manage back then, never mind the refinements in engine technology and construction materials available to today's manufacturers but nobody would bother building one for the purpose of espionage simply because it is so vulnerable.

As for the SR-71 it was a logistical nightmare to operate with major range limitations; sure it could go fast and fly high but it was a fuel hog at the best of times and in high-speed dash mode it would run out of fuel very quickly. A 12-hour mission required a fleet of as many as eight specialised tankers orbiting in safe air outside the target country's 200-mile limit and the range limitations meant the SR-71 couldn't penetrate too far in from the coast before it would have to turn back to safe air to tanker up again. Satellites could see everything below them on every pass in multispectral mode and with the advent of electronic sensors in more detail than any camera a plane could carry and use and without the political implications of another Gary Powers incident, something that was always a risk with the SR-71 spy flights.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Astonishingly lovely but just a little bit threatening to look at.

In response to Robert Sneddon:

According to Wikip, SR-71s were most fuel economical when doing high speed dashes and had a standard range of 5,400 km. An operational radius of about 1500 miles from your last refuelling doesn't sound like too serious a limitation to me. I doubt they'd've stayed in service from 1968 to the 1990s if they were all that bad, how about you?

One big problem with satellites is that you can only see what they fly over, when they fly over. Their orbits are predictable. If you know when a spy satellite is flying over, you can make sure you hide things of interest. It's been SOP since spy satellites were first introduced, and the reason the USA (at least) has developed stealth spy satellites.

One advantage of spy planes is that you can send them in at arbitrary times to cover arbitrary ground.

It's why reconnaissance drones are used so widely - that, and the fact that they're cheap, plentiful, and don't risk an aircrew's life. A low-flying aircraft can record detail that no satellite could possibly see, regardless of advances in orbiting sensors.

When you've got a plane as fast as an SR-71, the recce target's got a job and a half to hide even if it's alerted to the fact that a spy flight's coming in. SR-71s were often shot at, but never shot down. They flew too high and too fast for almost all air-targetting missiles to get anywhere near:

[PaulR79]

Area 51? Pah!

It's just a small research outpost. Everyone knows the real deal is deep inside Cheyenne Mountain.

[itzman]

I THINK nasa has two operational SR71s left,,

so although the last missions of a military/reconnaissance nature were flown years ago, they may get dusted off now and again to do high speed in atmosphere testing.

And from what I can gather it wasn't spy satellites that sounded the final death knell, it was UAVs.. satellites can't shuffle themselves into just the right place and can't see through clouds.

Against lo-tech enemies*, UAVS are perfect.

*or those whose status has been reduced to such...

[SirDigalot]

area 1337

coz they will never crack our code!

[Ron B]

Area 51 is old news

I enjoyed reading a book on the subject two years ago. There were plenty of anecdotes and personal accounts. One was about using Area 51 to test the radar profile of a prototype spy plane. They were careful to hide the plane whenever Russian spy birds flew over, but the Russians took an IR afterimage of the shadow that the model had cast on the desert floor. They sent a copy to the US Army, just to rub it in.

Another chapter was about how the U-2 test flights started so many UFO rumors. They were calibrating the camera platform, and they would fly huge patterns over much of the ConUS. Nobody tried to debunk the UFO stories, because those distracted so many people from the true source of the sightings.

Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base

By: Annie Jacobsen

Sold By: Hachette Book Group

[Bastage]

YA-12

The museum of flight in Seattle has a YA-12 complete with a D-5 supersonic drone on it's back.

[Parax]

Re: YA-12

Isn't that one actually an M-21 with D-21 drone?

[Auror]

Believe there's also an SR-71 at the museum of flight near Seattle. Even let you sit in the cockpit and check things out. Quite a sight to see :)

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're interested the only SR-71 outside ConUS is 61-7962 at Duxford UK.

[Anonymous Coward]

hah!

My favorite area 51 story was how the government used to deny its existence, then it turned out there was a mountain that you could climb and see the base from. Then the air force bought the mountain and blocked off access, and went back to denying that the base existed :)

[Dave 32]

SR-71

They have an SR-71A at the National Museum of the US Air Force in Dayton, Ohio, USA:

http://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/factsheets/factsheet.asp?id=395

Dave

[revdjenk]

Re: SR-71

My grandson and I met a docent at the Air Force Museum in Dayton who had been an SR-71 driver. My grandson asked if anyone ever had to eject from one, and he had! Not everyone survives such an event he assured us.

Everything else, the leaking fuel, the long, long flights, the glowing of skin at speed just added to the allure.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: ejection

I came across this a while ago; an extraordinary story of Bill Weaver, who survived parting company with the SR-71 in a mid flight breakup that killed navigation systems specialist Jim Zwayer.

http://roadrunnersinternationale.com/weaver_sr71_bailout.html

[Charles Manning]

Are you sure???

"My grandson and I met a docent at the Air Force Museum in Dayton who had been an SR-71 driver."

I met Abe Lincoln at a historic park too.

Did you tweak said SR-71 driver's beard to make sure it was not just elasticated?

[Herby]

Existance of "Area 51"

Time was when Apple was first producing Macs that they had a small applications (desktop accessories) that could be accessed from the 'apple' menu. One of these was a map application where they placed lots of Name/Place things with the corresponding Longitude and Latitude. One was "The middle of nowhere" (somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean). Another one (probably someone's idea of a joke) was of course "Area 51", complete with the proper longitude and latitude.

Rumor has it that it was requested that the entry in the Name/Place database be removed (I don't know if this was true, but it DOES make a good story).

[chazza]

@jimmy page Re: 667, the neighbour of the beast ?

I thought it was common knowledge that 668 was the neighbour of the beast. 667 is the chap across the road from the beast.

[stuff and nonesense]

The Lightning had a REPORTED ceiling of 65000ft.

[Aldous]

and then there is what is possible in a ballistic trajectory.

The Canberra's were almost as high as the U2's, which is why the U.S bought the license and why they were only retired recently (cheaper to drone/sat image)

[Peter Johnstone]

[e-mail]

What I'd like to know is where are areas 1 to 50?

[Anonymous Coward]

A-10 on display

There is an A-10 (single seat, SR-71 was two seats) on display at the US Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, AL. It's an outdoor exhibit and is fenced off. They also have an X-15, and a Saturn V stack laying sideways as an indoor exhibit. There's a Saturn V mockup standing upright, and numerous smaller rockets and missiles on display.

http://rocketcenter.com/

[Aldous]

Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base

For anyone interested in the U2/A12/SR-71/Nuclear program the book in the title is a good read. The author interviewed many ex pilots and ground crew. From Area-51 as a load of tents to the base it grew into as well as the tests in the other Area's

Then completely shoots herself in the foot with the last chapter that goes on about mysterious no named engineers who told her there were "things in tanks" etc (to the point that a lot of the people she had interview before said if they had known that was going to be in there they would have not done the interviews)