For all the investigating that goes on in writing a book like this, sometimes the most sought-after information comes in the most whimsical of ways. In the summer of 2009, I went to the Nuclear Testing Archive library in Las Vegas to locate declassified documents on the Project 57 “dirty bomb” test, ones that were mysteriously missing from the Department of Energy’s online repository. Even in person, the staff was unable to fulfill my records request. Hindered and frustrated, I took a walk around the adjacent atomic-testing museum to cool down. Reporter’s notebook in hand, I was staring at a photograph of a mushroom cloud hanging on the wall when the museum’s security guard walked up and said hello. It was Richard Mingus. We’d met briefly before, on an earlier visit. I told Mingus that I felt records on Project 57 were being withheld from me over at the library. In his characteristic matter-of-fact style Mingus said, “Well, I worked on that test. What is it you’d like to know?” Mingus, I quickly learned, was also one of the CIA’s original Area 51 security guards. Thanks to Mingus, the “missing” Project 57 documents became easier to locate.
At the National Archives and Records Administration, thank you to Timothy Nenninger, chief of the Textual Records Reference Staff, Martha Murphy, chief of Special Access and FOIA Staff, and Tom Mills, who specializes in World War II records; thank you, Rita Cann, at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, Missouri; Martha DeMarre of the Nuclear Testing Archive in Las Vegas; Troy Wade of the Nevada Test Site Historical Foundation; Tech Sergeant Jennifer Lindsey of the U.S. Air Force; Staff Sergeant Alice Moore, Creech Air Force Base; Dr. David R. Williams, NASA; Dr. David Robarge, chief historian, Central Intelligence Agency; Tony Hiley, curator and director of the CIA Museum; Cheryl Moore, EEA CIA; Jim Long, Laughlin Heritage Foundation Museum; R. Cargill Hall, historian emeritus, National Reconnaissance Office; Dr. Craig Luther, chief historian, Edwards Air Force Base; S. Eugene Poteat, president of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers; Melissa Dalton, Lockheed Martin Aeronautics; Dr. Jeffrey Richelson, National Security Archives; David Myhra, author and aviation historian; Fred Burton, former special agent with the U.S. Diplomatic Security Service; Sherre Lovick, former Lockheed Skunk Works engineer; Colonel Adelbert W. “Buz” Carpenter, former SR-71 pilot; Charles “Chuck” Wilson, former U-2 pilot; Arthur Beidler, 67th Reconnaissance Tactical Squadron, Japan; Dennis Nordquist, Pratt & Whitney mechanical engineer; Tony Landis, NASA photographer; Michael Schmitz, Roadrunners Internationale photographer; Joerg Arnu, Norio Hayakawa, and Peter Merlin of Dreamlandresort.com. A special thank you to Doris Barnes, Barbara Slater, Stacy Slater Bernhardt, Stella Murray, Mary Martin, and Mary Jane Murphy. Thank you, Jeff King, for making me such an excellent map, and Ploy Siripant, for a phenomenal job on the jacket. Thank you Tommy Harron, Jerry Maybrook, and Jeremy Wesley for the great work on the audio book.
Once I completed a draft of this manuscript, my editor, John Parsley, helped me to refine it into the book that it is. What I learned from John about storytelling is immeasurable. Thank you also to Nicole Dewey, Geoff Shandler, and Michael Pietsch.
I owe a debt of gratitude to Jim Hornfischer, the perfect agent for someone like me, and to my confidant Frank Morse. Thank you for the wise counsel, Steve Younger, David Willingham, Aron Ketchel, Eric Rayman, and Karen Andrews.
It takes a village to make a writer. I’m one of the lucky ones who has always known writing is what I was meant to do. I arrived at St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire, at the age of fifteen, typewriter in hand, and wrote for nearly twenty years straight without earning as much as one cent. Only at the age of thirty-four did things shift for me, and I’ve earned my living as a writer ever since. I say that for all of the writers following in my footsteps. Don’t give up. My village fire keepers—those to whom I am deeply indebted for their individually imperative roles—include Alice and Tom Soininen, Julie Elkins, John Soininen; my writing teacher at St. Paul’s School, Michael Burns, and at Princeton University, Paul Auster, Joyce Carol Oates, and P. Adams Sitney; my storytelling hero in Greece, John Zervos; those who supported me in Big Sur: Lisa Firestone, Thanis Iliadis, Alex Timken, Robert Jolliffe, Harriet and Jeremy Polturak, James Young, Nate Downey, Emmy Starr and Stephen Vehslage, Samantha Muldoon, Erin Gafill and Tom Birmingham; my mentors in Los Angeles: Rachel Resnick, Keith Rogers, Kathleen Silver, Rio Morse, and my friend and editor in chief at the Los Angeles Times Magazine, Nancie Clare, who commissioned my original two-part series on Area 51 for the magazine; my fellow writers from group: Kirston Mann, Sabrina Weill, Michelle Fiordaliso, Nicole Lucas Haimes, Annette Murphy, Terry Rossio, Jolly Stamat, Moira McMahon, Lisa Gold; fellow storyteller Lucy Firestone; my mother-in-law, Marion Wroldsen, not only for her deep love of reading but for lending me her son.
Nothing in this world is so joyful as being the wife of Kevin Jacobsen and the mother of our two boys. While writing this book, it was Kevin who made endless sandwiches for me, brewed pots of coffee, and let me travel to wherever it was that I needed to go. Kevin hears out every first draft, usually standing in our kitchen or yard. Everything gets better after I listen to what he has to say.