U.S. government's positions on Area 51

Published on: 10:36 by Unknown - No comments

he amount of information the United States government has been willing to provide regarding Area 51 has generally been very minimal. The government explicitly concedes (in various court filings, government directives and replies to inquiries) that the USAF has an "operating location" near Groom Lake, but does not provide any further information. Information on and photos of various past projects have been declassified however and are now available to the public.
The base does not appear on public U.S. government maps the USGS topographic map for the area only shows the long-disused Groom MineA civil aviation chart published by the Nevada Department of Transportation shows a large restricted area but defines it as part of the Nellis restricted airspace. The official aeronautical navigation charts for the area show Groom Lake but omit the airport facilities Similarly the National Atlas page showing federal lands in Nevada does not distinguish between the Groom block and other parts of the Nellis range. Although officially declassified, the original film taken by U.S. Corona spy satellite in the 1960s has been altered prior to declassification; in answer to freedom of information queries, the government responds that these exposures (which map to Groom and the entire NAFR) appear to have been destroyed. Terra satellite images (which were publicly available) were removed from web servers (including Microsoft's TerraServer-USA) in 2004, and from the monochrome 1 m resolution USGS data dump made publicly available. NASA Landsat 7 images are still available (these are used in the NASA World Wind). Higher resolution (and more recent) images from other satellite imagery providers (including Russian providers and the IKONOS) are commercially available. These show, in considerable detail, the runway marking, base facilities, aircraft, and vehicles.
Although federal property within the base is exempt from state and local taxes, facilities owned by private contractors are not. Area 51 researcher Glenn Campbell claimed in 1994 that the base only declares a taxable value of $2 million to the Lincoln County tax assessor, who is unable to enter the area to perform an assessment
When documents that mention the Nevada Test Site (NTS) and operations at Groom are declassified, mentions of Area 51 and Groom Lake are routinely redacted. One notable exception is a 1967 memo from CIA director Richard Helms regarding the deployment of three OXCART aircraft from Groom to Kadena Air Base to perform reconnaissance over North Vietnam. Although most mentions of OXCART's home base are redacted in this document, as is a map showing the aircraft's route from there to Okinawa, the redactor appears to have missed one mention: p15 section No. 2 ends "Three OXCART aircraft and the necessary task force personnel will be deployed from Area 51 to Kadena

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Area 51

Published on: 10:19 by Unknown - No comments

The Area 51 base lies within the United States Air Force's vast Nevada Test and Training Range (NTTR), formerly called the Nellis Air Force Range (NAFR). Although the facilities at the range are managed by the 99th Air Base Wing at Nellis Air Force Base, the Groom facility appears to be run as an adjunct of the Air Force Materiel Command Air Force Flight Test Center (AFFTC) at Edwards Air Force Base in the Mojave Desert, around 186 miles (300 km) southwest of Groom, and as such the base is known as Air Force Flight Test Center

Though the name Area 51 is used in official Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) documentation,other names used for the facility include Dreamland, Paradise Ranch,Home Base, Watertown Strip, Groom Lake,and most recently Homey Airport.The area is part of the Nellis Military Operations Area, and the restricted airspace around the field is referred to as (R-4808N), known by the military pilots in the area as "The Box" or "the Container"

The facility is not a conventional airbase, as frontline operational units are not normally deployed there. It instead appears to be used for highly classified military/defense Special Access Programs (SAP), which are unacknowledged publicly by the government, military personnel, and defense contractors. Its mission may be to support the development, testing, and training phases for new aircraft weapons systems or research projects. Once these projects have been approved by the United States Air Force or other agencies such as the CIA, and are ready to be announced to the public, operations of the aircraft are then moved to a normal air force base.]

The intense secrecy surrounding the base, whose very existence the U.S. government did not even acknowledge until 29 September 1995, has made it the frequent subject of conspiracy theories and a central component to unidentified flying object (UFO) folkloreEverything that happens at Area 51 is classified Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS/SCI). This security policy ensures that only those insiders with a "need to know" have access to only the information they require, and ensures that outsiders don't know what they don't know