Area 51

For decades, the US government's official position on Area 51 was to neither confirm nor deny that the facility, sited around Nevada's dry Groom Lake bed, existed at all — even as satellite imagery and persistent public records requests made its physical presence an open secret. The base entered mass popular consciousness in 1989 when a Las Vegas man named Bob Lazar claimed on television to have worked at a site near Area 51 reverse-engineering crashed alien spacecraft, launching two decades of escalating UFO and conspiracy speculation that the site was never publicly permitted to directly address.

The wall cracked through patient bureaucratic persistence rather than dramatic leak: National Security Archive senior fellow Jeffrey Richelson first reviewed a CIA history of the U-2 programme in 2002, but found every reference to Area 51 blacked out. He filed a renewed Freedom of Information Act request in 2005 specifically challenging those redactions. In June 2013, the CIA released a substantially less-redacted version of "The Central Intelligence Agency and Overhead Reconnaissance: The U-2 and OXCART Programs, 1954–1974" — a 400-plus-page internal history originally written by agency historians Gregory Pedlow and Donald Welzenbach in 1992, now finally confirming, in the government's own words, both the site's existence and its actual purpose.

The declassified history confirms Area 51 was selected in 1955 — personally approved by President Eisenhower, chosen partly for its proximity to an existing nuclear test facility to help maintain secrecy — as the development and testing site for the U-2 spy plane, designed to photograph Soviet military installations from altitudes far beyond the reach of contemporary Soviet air defences, and later the A-12 OXCART, the even faster, higher-flying precursor to the SR-71 Blackbird. The CIA's own cover story for unusual aerial activity at the site was, per the declassified document, deliberately built around weather balloons — an explanation that collapsed embarrassingly in May 1960, when the Soviet Union shot down a U-2 over its territory, captured pilot Francis Gary Powers alive, and publicly produced the wreckage, directly contradicting NASA's cover statement that a weather research plane had drifted off course.

Area 51 remains an active, restricted military installation today, and its precise current activities remain classified — the 2013 disclosure covers historical Cold War programmes, not present-day operations. What the declassification does offer is a genuinely rare thing in this collection: an official government confirmation, in the government's own internal historical language, of both a decades-long secret's true content and a specific, well-documented mechanism for why that secret generated so much of the UFO folklore later built around it.