Area 51

[turboplanner]

Just finished reading the book Area 51 by Annie Jacobsen ($15.98, Amazon.com)

 

It's a big book, 520 pages long.

 

It's based on many interviews with the people who worked there and there's very little speculation.

 

She uses unclassified information and doesn't extend into currently classified operations and this seems to have enabled here to get a lot more detail.

 

She covers in some detail the Roswell crash, the "aliens" and where they are now, explains who sent the craft and why, and why the US Government ordered the cover up and conducted a massive search for the Nazi brothers who designed it, how the government sent designers to Area 51 to reverse engineer the two craft, and how even though one person claims to have understood the technology which allowed them to fly like they did, the two brothers seem to have kept their secret.

 

That was just one chapter of Area 51 though, the real story relates to the development of aircraft which could fly out of reach of fighters and bring back photos, the development of the U2 by the CIA on the orders of President Eisenhower, the extreme jealousy of US Air Force General Curtis LeMay who worked against the technology then tried to get control of it for his own political ego.

 

That part explains an odd period in US aviation history, in the 1950's where a lot of very odd and impractical aircraft were built which either couldn't fly, couldn't carry enough payload or didn't have enough range to attack more that the next farm.

 

In fact you can see the deterioration from the WW2 Jimmy Doolittle days to the failures in Vietnam.

 

The CIA were turned loose with the U2 in the Korean War with spectacular intelligence results and eventually logged data from all over the world. Over 100 pilots were killed on the missions.

 

The disadvantage was that their were highly visible (the silver cigar shaped object) and the book explains why the US Air Force was used to take over all UFO report management, and managed to create the impression of UFO's and flying saucers appearing in various parts of the world as a cover for the U2's.

 

This didn't last long so they needed to make the U2 invisible and Area51 was where the stealth era started.

 

So once again the CIA set in motion the building of a suitable aircraft. No one knew about these developments outside a very small group. The people involved financed the massive development cost through the Atomic Energy Commission which at that time have a blank approval to save America. Lockheed won the contract to build it, designation A12 and it was called Oxcart.

 

Once again the USAF got jealous and more or less blew the cover by campaigning for their own version, the better known SR71 Blackbird, years after the Oxcart flew.

 

The Oxcart had to fly out of range of any Russian missile (the Russians were shooting down U2's), so they were aiming for a cruise altitude of 75 – 80,000’

 

Many of us would remember in school the demonstration where water was heated to near boiling point in a glass vessel, then a stopper was put in the neck to make an airtight seal. The water could be made to boil by cooling the vessel due to the lower air pressure of the cooler air.

 

Human blood boils at the reduced pressure of 63,000 feet and they solved that problem by designing pressure suits which look very similar to those used later by Astronauts.

 

At the Mach 3 cruise speed the friction was so great they decided to build the entire aircraft from Titanium (this was an aircraft built in very low numbers for the CIA on a hidden budget remember.

 

This worked, but at that speed the skin temperature was 600 degrees, and ground crew quickly learned not to touch an aircraft just back from a mission, but that heat fried the wiring, so a whole new interior design concept was needed – very interesting development covered in a lot more detail than I have here.

 

The American fighters were doing very badly at the beginning of the Vietnam war where the North Vietnam airmen in Russian MIG21 Fishbeds had a kill ratio of nine to one – nine American losses for every North Vietnamese.

 

The US managed to get a MIG 21 from the Israelis and started the Top Gun school at Area51, and turned the tables around to a US ratio of 13 to 1.

 

The Oxcarts and SR71’s produced exceptional recon, but the Gary Powers shoot down convinced the Americans they needed to avoid the political fall out, so they embarked on a program of pilotless defence. Overhead surveillance using satellites was developed elsewhere, but overhead shots often didn’t provide enough detail of ground contours, building side profiles etc. So Area 51 was given the task of designing drones (UAV’s) which could fly in close and low.

 

The book covers around 40 years of drone development and goes through all the complicated issues which had to be solved.

 

This is an amazing book about the development of specialized aircraft we have all read about at some time. The video we recently saw of U2 landing screw ups was probably compiled from thousands of landings of tired pilots coming home from missions of 20 hours or more hard flying.

 

You’ll be amazed to see that aircraft designers were actually building ejection seats which broke pilots’ necks and cut their legs off, and a bomber carrying a surveillance aircraft on its back – once. When you think about it, the small aircraft would have to fire up at EXACTLY the same speed as the bomber, but this one dragged its feet, took out the empennage and everyone was killed. This may have led to the more sensible Bell X programme where the small aircraft just dropped away.

 

However, what was more amazing were the stories of the Atomic bomb testing which was going on next door. The spin from the US and USSR governments was that an atomic war would wipe out the earth, but the US was exploding huge bombs just eight miles from Area 51 for years.

 

Another project covered in the book was a giant spacecraft built by one group as an alternative to the rockets used to get to the moon. This was to use repeated atomic blasts to get it to Mars. But the spin the Government had put on things had turned everyone off atomic anything, and it’s still stored out there untried (and unproven)

 

At the time Annie Jacobsen was researching the book, the US Government was still denying the existence of Area 51 (even though they knew the Russians were taking photos of their aircraft.), but these days there’s not a lot of pointb when you can go on Google Maps, search for Groom Lake Nevada and see the Oxcart runways – enormous length, extremely skinny, must have taken a lot of focus to stay on track. The Oxcart landed very fast and you can see the ¾ circle they graded so the aircraft could squeeze in a little more rolling distance before running off the lake.

 

A book well worth reading

 

 

[Gnarly Gnu]

Core bits de-bunked I'm afraid turbo.... that's not to say it's not an enjoyable and interesting novel to read of course.

 

Update: there are two links above.

 

 

[turboplanner]

That's a quick 520 page read GG.

 

I couldn't find the debunking you referred to, just some questions posed in the interview.

 

I'm all ears if you've got another theory.

 

 

[facthunter]

I even get skeptical of most of this skepticism. Always bear in mind that if it comes to a good conspiracy or a stuff-up back the one that requires the least skill and confidentiallity. Nev

 

 

[turboplanner]

I shouldn't have mentioned Roswell, it's only mentioned twice in the book. It's not a book about the Roswell crashes.

 

The book is about designing and testing aircraft and includes photos of the aircraft, key Area 51 engineers and test pilots, U2 pilots like Gary Powers and well known identities like Kelly Johnson and CIA's Richard Bissell and Richard Helms - all verifiable stuff.

 

It's more a detailed history of the work which was done on the site over the years, with a lot of personal experiences like the time one of the test pilots wrote off an Oxcart in a midair failure over the lake, and the procedure he used to save himself.