The path to Area 51 is different for everyone. For T. D. Barnes it began in 1962 when the CIA wanted him to go to Vietnam to be an “adviser” there. Barnes was just back from Bamburg, Germany, where he’d been deployed during the Berlin Wall crisis, tasked with running Hawk missile sites along the border with Czechoslovakia. It had been two years since he’d worked on the CIA’s Project Palladium out of Fort Bliss.
“I said I’d go work for the Agency. But I had this dream of becoming an Army officer, which meant going through officer training school first. The Agency and the Army agreed and sent me to officer school.” There, during survival training Barnes ripped open his knees and got a rare blood disease. “It just about nearly killed me. I was never going to do combat. I’m lucky I didn’t die,” says Barnes. He recovered but because of the blood disability, he couldn’t go to Vietnam for the CIA. This also meant that after ten years of service, his military career was over. Barnes and his wife, Doris, moved home to Oklahoma and bought a house there with a yard for their two little girls, and one day when Doris was reading the classified section of the local newspaper, she found an advertisement of interest. “A contractor called Unitech was looking for telemetry and radar specialists that could work on a project involving space,” Barnes recalls.
Barnes figured Unitech was harvesting résumés. “Getting a list of people who might be qualified to work on a highly specialized kind of a project if a contract were to materialize with, say, NASA down the road.” Barnes told Doris it wasn’t worth the phone call. Doris said to call anyway. “Within two days our house was on the market, we were packed up, and we were traveling to this little one-horse town in the Mojave Desert called Beatty.” Beatty, Nevada. Population somewhere around 426, depending on who wants to know.
In 1964, Beatty, Nevada, was one strange town. Situated 120 miles northwest of Las Vegas, it lay on a strip of land between Death Valley and Nevada’s atomic bomb range. Beatty had one sheriff—he was eighty years old, was a great shot with a rifle, and was missing most of his teeth. Beatty also had nine gas stations, eleven churches, an airstrip, and a whorehouse called the Vicky Star Ranch. Behind the facade, Beatty housed a collection of three-and four-letter federal agencies, many of which were working different angles on various overt and covert operations there. “Nobody knew what anybody else in Beatty was really doing there and since you didn’t have a need-to-know you didn’t ask,” recalls Barnes. Forty-five years later he still hadn’t “figured out what the service stations or the churches were a cover for.”
How Beatty worked and who was running whom left much to the imagination. “When Doris and I drove into town that first day,” Barnes recalls, “we pulled up to the service station to get some gas. One of the town characters, a semi-homeless person everyone called Panamint Annie, walked up to us and leaned against our car. She looked at me—it was summer—and she said, ‘Well, it’s hotter than Hell’s hubs, now isn’t it, Barnes?’ I thought, How the hell does she know my last name?” Technically, Barnes had been recruited by Unitech. It turned out they had a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA, after all. “But there were lots of other agencies in Beatty who were working in the dark,” Barnes says. “Unitech was the sign on the door.”