Area 51 / Rachel, Nevada

The base that was not there

Groom Lake is a dry lakebed inside the Nevada Test and Training Range, picked in 1955 as a flight test site for the U-2 because it was flat, remote, and already under restricted airspace. The A-12 OXCART came next, then the F-117, then programs still unnamed. Aircraft that did not officially exist were flown out of a base that did not officially exist.

The acknowledgment took until August 2013. The National Security Archive at George Washington University published "The Central Intelligence Agency and Overhead Reconnaissance: The U-2 and Oxcart Programs, 1954-1974," released to it under a Freedom of Information request the Archive had filed in 2005. The document names Groom Lake and maps it.

Bob Lazar

The extraterrestrial version traces to one man and one broadcast. In 1989, Bob Lazar told the Las Vegas television reporter George Knapp that he had worked at a site called S-4 near Groom Lake, reverse-engineering alien craft, and that his employment and education records had been erased.

The erasure claim is where it comes apart. The institutions he names have no record of him, and no evidence of the degrees he claims has been produced. His supporters read that absence as proof the erasure happened, which makes the claim impossible to test. The period he describes is also the period when the F-117 was still classified and flying out of Nevada, which gives a plainer reading of strange craft over the desert.

What you can get to

Nevada named State Route 375 the Extraterrestrial Highway in 1996. The only settlement on it is Rachel, a few dozen residents with one bar and motel, the Little A'Le'Inn. Groom Lake Road runs from the highway toward the perimeter, which is unfenced in places, marked with orange posts and warning signs, and watched from the ridgelines by contractors in white pickups that everyone calls the Camo Dudes. Crossing it brings a real arrest.

In 2019, a Facebook event proposing to storm the base drew millions of responses and a few thousand people to the area, and two counties declared emergencies in advance. Nothing was stormed.

Rachel is the practical destination. The Little A'Le'Inn has rooms, food, and fuel, and it is the only such stop for a long stretch of State Route 375, so filling the tank before the highway rather than during it is the standard advice. There is no cell coverage across most of the route.

The perimeter is the other thing people drive out for. It is reached on unpaved Groom Lake Road, the boundary is marked rather than fenced, and it is monitored continuously. Crossing it is prosecuted, cameras cover the approach, and photographing across the line is where most trouble starts.

The black mailbox that features in older accounts belonged to a rancher, was replaced with a white one, and was eventually removed, so the thing signposted by that name is no longer there.