The mysterious
Area 51, the ultra-secret tract of land seventy-five miles north of Las Vegas, has been UFO central for many years, with reports of captured aliens and their ships being hidden there. It sits right next to the now abandoned
Nevada Test and Training Range, where over 100 atmospheric bomb tests were conducted in the 1950s. The U.S. government has never officially acknowledged the existence of Area 51, which only helped to encourage tales of
UFOs.
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| Area 51 |
The myth is finally broken. Journalist
Annie Jacobsen reports that the government once used the site for secret nuclear testing and weapons development. In her book "In Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base", Jacobsen provides details on how several government agencies, including the
CIA, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Department of Defense and the CIA – used Area 51 to conduct secret research on aircraft, including one that traveled three times the speed of sound and a nuclear-propelled missile launching system to be space based. Jacobson also contends that the area was used for "dirty bomb" testing.
This is where it gets really weird and the credibility of the book is stretched thin. The author also reveals that the famous UFO crash at Roswell was actually
Josef Stalin trying to create mass panic by using German "flying discs" carrying deformed child pilots engineered to look like aliens, by Nazi mad doctor
Josef Mengele. This "War of the Worlds" scenario is a little difficult to swallow, but she goes even further claiming the U.S. was also conducting similar gruesome medical experiments.
From NPR: "In the summer and fall of 1957, a series of atmospheric nuclear tests — called Operation Plumbbob — were conducted above ground at the Nevada testing and training range, located just outside of Area 51. Twenty-nine explosions were set off while tests were conducted on troop readiness, accidental detonations and the effects of flying debris on living targets, according to documents declassified by the Department of Energy that Jacobsen details in her book."
"During the explosions, security officer Richard Mingus stood guard outside many of the weapons-testing sites, including one with the largest atmospheric bomb that has ever exploded in the United States."
""The bomb goes off. Richard Mingus is at ground zero, safe away in a bunker somewhere, and suddenly someone realizes, 'My God, Area 51 is unsecured,' " Jacobsen says. "And so they send Richard Mingus through ground zero, 45 minutes to an hour after this nuclear bomb has exploded, so that he can get to Area 51 to guard the gate.""
"Mingus survived, as did many other atomic veterans who stood close to ground zero during other Plumbbob tests."
There's more. The Department of Defense wondered what would happen if a plane carrying nuclear material crashed, so they simulated the disaster, spreading plutonium on the ground, creating their own "dirty bomb". The resulting fallout made much of the land uninhabitable, which was not cleaned up until the 1980s, when they sent in men in hazmat suits to scrape the earth.
Read more from NPR here.
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