The sparsely populated, high-desert outpost of Tonopah, Nevada, was once the nation’s most important producer of gold and silver ore. In 1903, eighty-six million dollars in metals came out of the area’s mines, nearly two billion in 2011 dollars, and at the turn of the century, thirty thousand people rushed to the mile-high desert city seeking treasure there. Tonopah’s nearest neighbor, the town of Beatty, where T. D. Barnes lived in the 1960s, became known in 1907 as the Chicago of the West. For several years the Las Vegas & Tonopah Railroad maintained a rail line between the two cities, which at one point was the West’s busiest rail line. And then, almost overnight and like so many towns ensnared in the gold rush, Tonopah went bust. Within ten years, it was just a few families too many to be called a ghost town. Even the railroad company ripped up its steel tracks and carted them away for better use. Packs of wild horses and antelope came back down from the mountains and began to graze as they had before the boom, pulling weeds and scrub from the parched desert landscape between the Cactus and the Kawich mountain ranges. When a group of weaponeers from Sandia descended upon the area four decades later, in 1956, they were thrilled with what they found. Tonopah was a perfect place for “secret testing [that] could be conducted safely and securely.” Years later, boasting to their corporate shareholders, the Sandians, as they called themselves, would quote Saint Paul of Tarsus to sum up their mission at Tonopah Test Range: “test all things; hold fast that which is good.”
Between 1957 and 1964, Sandia dropped 680 bombs and launched 555 rockets from what was now officially but quietly called the Sandia National Laboratories’ Outpost at Tonopah. In 1963, Sandia conducted a series of top secret plutonium-dispersal tests, similar to the Project 57 test that had been conducted at Groom Lake just a few years earlier. Called Operation Roller Coaster, three dirty bomb tests were performed to collect biological data on three hundred animals placed downwind from aerosolized plutonium clouds generated from three Sandia nuclear weapons. With seven hundred Sandians hard at work in the desert flats for Operation Roller Coaster, a report called it Sandia’s “highlight of 1963.” Tonopah was so far removed from the already far removed and restricted sites at Area 51 and the Nevada Test Site that no one outside a need-to-know had ever even heard of it.
In October of 1979, construction for an F-117 Nighthawk support facility at Tonopah began inside Area 52. The facility at Area 51 served as a model for the facility being built at Area 52. Similarly styled runways and taxiways were built, as well as a maintenance hangar, using crews already cleared for work on Nevada Test Site contracts. Sixteen mobile homes were carted in, and several permanent support buildings were constructed. Sandia didn’t want to draw attention to the project, so the Air Force officers assigned to the base were ordered to grow their hair long and to grow beards. Sporting a hippie look, as opposed to a military look, was less likely to draw unwanted attention to a highly classified project cropping up in the outer reaches of the Nevada Test Site. That way, the men could do necessary business in the town of Tonopah.
The two facilities, Area 51 and Area 52, worked in tandem to get the F-117 battle-ready. When the mock attack at the guard gate at Area 51 occurred, in 1982, test flights of the F-117—which only ever happened at night—were already in full swing. For some weeks, a debate raged as to how an act of idiocy by a small group of Wackenhut Security guards nearly outed a billion-dollar aircraft as well as two top secret military test facilities that had remained secret for thirty years. An estimated ten thousand personnel had managed to keep the F-117 program in the dark. There was a collective mopping of the brow and succinct orders to move on, and then, two years later, the program was nearly outed again when an Air Force general broke protocol and decided to take a ride in one of Area 51’s prized MiG fighter jets.
The death of Lieutenant General Robert M. Bond on April 26, 1984, in Area 25 of the Nevada Test Site was an avoidable tragedy. With 267 combat missions under his belt, 44 in Korea and 213 in Vietnam, Robert M. Bond was a highly decorated Air Force pilot revered by many. At the time of his accident, he was vice commander of Air Force Systems Command at Andrews Air Force Base, in Maryland, which made him a VIP when it came to the F-117 program going on at Area 51. In March of 1984, General Bond arrived at the secret facility to see how things were progressing. The general’s visit should have been no different than those made by the scores of generals whose footsteps Bond was following in, visits that began back in 1955 with men like General James “Jimmy” Doolittle and General Curtis LeMay. The dignitaries were always treated in high style; they would eat, drink, and bear witness to top secret history being made. Following in this tradition, General Bond’s first visit went without incident. But in addition to being impressed by the F-117 Nighthawk, General Bond was equally fascinated by the MiG program, which was still going on at Area 51. In the fifteen years since the CIA had gotten its hands on Munir Redfa’s MiG-21, the Agency and the Air Force had acquired a fleet of Soviet-made aircraft including an MiG-15, an MiG-17, and, most recently, the supersonic MiG-23. Barnes says, “We called it the Flogger. It was a very fast plane, almost Mach 3. But it was squirrelly. Hard to fly. It could kill you if you weren’t well trained.”