Area 51 officially acknowledged by U.S. government

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Area 51 officially acknowledged by U.S. government

Saturday, 17 August 2013 (16 hours ago)

 

by Stephanie Boyd

The U.S. government has finally acknowledged the secret test site in the Nevada desert known as Area 51 - but makes no mention of the mysterious facility tracking aliens or UFOs

WASHINGTON -- The existence of Area 51, the secret U.S. testing facility shrouded in mystery for decades, has finally been acknowledged by the CIA for the first time.

The first official mention of the remote test facility located around 80 miles northwest of Las Vegas was made in a newly declassified CIA history of its U-2 spy plane program.

The 400-page document describes the 1955 acquisition of the test site surround a dry lake bed, Groom Lake, for the development of the top-secret U-2 plane. The U-2's purpose was to spy on the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

According to the report, testing of the U-2 plane in the 1950s - at altitudes much higher than commercial aeroplanes then flew - provoked "a tremendous increase in reports of unidentified flying objects (UFOs)".

Authors Gregory Pedlow and Donald Welzenbach note in the document: "At this time, no one believed manned flight was possible above 60,000 feet, so no one expected to see an object so high in the sky."

The CIA was forced to release a map and other documents related to Area 51 in response to a Freedom of Information Act request submitted by Jeffrey T. Richelson, a senior fellow at the National Security Archives, in 2005.

"It's the first time that there must have been a senior-level decision to acknowledge the term 'Area 51' and its specific location," Richelson told Reuters reporters on Friday.

Despite some details such as the existence and location of Area 51 being provided in the document, Richelson believes there is more to the secret facility and the information will be provided in time.