In this book, many pieces of the Area 51 puzzle are put into place, but many questions remain. What goes on at Area 51 now? We don’t know. We won’t know for decades. Airplanes have gotten faster and stealthier. Remote-controlled spy planes fire missiles. Classified delivery systems drop bombs. The players are mostly the same: CIA, Air Force, Department of Energy, Lockheed, North American, General Atomics, and Hughes. These are but a few.
The biggest players tend to remain, as always, behind the veil. Almost a century ago, in 1922, Vannevar Bush cofounded a company that contracted first with the military and later with the Atomic Energy Commission. He called his company Raytheon because it meant “light from the gods.” Raytheon has always maintained a considerable presence at the Nevada Test Site, the Nevada Test and Training Range, and Area 51. Currently, it is the fifth-biggest defense contractor in the world. It is the world’s largest producer of guided missiles and the leader in developing radar technology for America’s early-warning defense system. This is the same system that, in the 1950s, CIA director General Walter Bedell Smith feared the Soviets might overrun with a UFO hoax, leaving the nation vulnerable to an air attack.
As for EG&G, they were eventually acquired by the powerful Carlyle Group at the end of the twentieth century but later resold, in 2002, to another corporate giant called URS. Currently, EG&G remains partnered with Raytheon in a joint venture at the Nevada Test and Training Range and at Area 51. The program, called JT3—Joint Test, Tactics, and Training, LLC—provides “engineering and technical support for the Nevada Test and Training Range,” according to corporate brochures. When asked what exactly that means, EG&G’s parent company, URS, declined to comment. This is corporate America’s way of saying, “You don’t have a need-to-know.”
The veil has been lifted. The curtain has been pulled back on Area 51. But what has been revealed in this book is like a single bread crumb in a trail. There is so much more that remains unknown. Where does the trail lead? How far does it go? Will it ever end?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many have asked me how this book came to be. In 2007, I was at a Christmas Eve dinner when my husband’s uncle’s wife’s sister’s husband—a spry physicist named Edward Lovick, who was eighty-eight years old at the time—leaned over to me and said, “Have I got a good story for you.” As a national security reporter, I hear this line frequently—my work depends on it—but what Lovick told me ranked among the most surprising and tantalizing things I’d heard in a long time. Until then, I was under the impression that Lovick had spent his life designing airplane parts. Over dinner I learned that he was actually a physicist and that he’d played a major role in the development of aerial espionage for the CIA. The reason Lovick could suddenly divulge information that had been kept secret for fifty years was because the CIA had just declassified it. When I learned that much of Lovick’s clandestine work took place at that mysterious and mythic location Area 51, also called Groom Lake, I smiled. So, the place was real after all. Immediately, I wrote to the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense requesting an official tour of the Groom Lake Area—Lovick also told me that the CIA had given up control of the place decades earlier. My request was formally denied, on Department of Defense letterhead, but oddly with the words “the Groom Lake Area” separated out in quotes attributed to me, so as to make clear the Pentagon’s official position regarding their Nevada base: That locale may be part of your lexicon, they seemed to be saying, but it is most definitely not officially part of ours. As an investigative journalist I sought to know why.