Mingus drove quickly up through the test site, heading north toward Area 51. “The whole of Bandit Mountain was on fire,” Mingus explains, referring to the low hills between Papoose Lake and Yucca Flat. “You could see individual Joshua trees on fire.” Mingus kept on driving, moving as fast as he could while avoiding an accident. But to get to where he needed to go, Mingus had to drive straight through ground zero. “There were huge rocks and boulders in the road sent there by the blast,” Mingus explains. “I had my windows rolled up tight and I was driving like hell and my Geiger was screaming. I was worried if I drove too fast and had a wreck in that area, that wouldn’t have been good. At guard post three eighty-five, my Geiger counter was chirping like hell. I remember distinctly it was reading eight point five Rs [never considered a safe amount]. We’d already deactivated that post because of the bomb and now it was way too hot to stay there so I drove on over the hill to Area 51.”
When Mingus arrived at Groom Lake, his Geiger counter finally settled down. It had been approximately fifty minutes since the bomb had gone off. Having reached forty-eight thousand feet, the mushroom cloud would have already floated over Area 13 and Area 51 by that time. Most likely, it was somewhere over Utah now. “When I pulled into Area 51, it was like a ghost town,” Mingus recalls. “I set up a west-facing post. I could see far. Pretty soon, the other guard arrived. He took up the post at the control tower and I stayed in the truck, parked there on the road facing west.” Mingus was fewer than ten miles from ground zero, where the Hood bomb had exploded just an hour before. The blast wave had hit Area 51 with such force, it buckled the metal doors on several of the west-facing buildings, including a maintenance hangar and the supply warehouse. Radioactive ash floated down from the sky. And yet, despite the near-constant rain of nuclear fallout, the requirement for security took precedent. Mingus drank water from his five-gallon jug and waited for the smoke from the nuclear bomb to clear. He ate the sandwich that Gloria had made for him and watched the hills burn. After several hours, he took the can of Dinty Moore stew from his lunchbox and opened it with the can opener that Gloria always made sure to pack. Mingus got out of the AEC truck and opened the hood. He set the soup can on the control block and stirred it with a spoon. It didn’t take long for the liquid to heat up. Mingus got back in the car and checked to see if his radio was working. “Delta is secure,” Mingus said before kicking back to enjoy his stew. For the rest of the day and well into the night, every half hour a voice came over the radio from the control point asking if everything was “okay.” Each time, Mingus let his boss know that Groom Lake was secure. He didn’t see another soul out there in the desert for the rest of the day. By nightfall, all that was left of the fire were the Joshua trees smoldering on the hills. The land at the test site had been appropriately chosen; mostly it was just creosote bush and sand. The bushes had burned, and the sand, after being subjected to 5,400 degrees Fahrenheit, had fused into little pieces of glass. Between the fallout and the structural damage, Area 51 had become uninhabitable. After Hood, the once-bustling classified facility transformed into a ghost town overnight—not unlike the mining towns that had preceded it a century before. The future of the secret base was, almost literally, up in the air.
CHAPTER SEVEN
From Ghost Town to Boomtown
After the Plumbbob atomic tests rocked Area 51, the CIA base sat like a ghost town. Very little is known about what happened there from the summer of 1957 through the summer of 1959. According to Richard Mingus, a pair of caretakers lived at the Groom Lake facility, a man and his wife. No record of their names has been found. What is known is that after the Plumbbob series effectively shut down operations at Area 51, workers from the Atomic Energy Commission roamed the hills and valleys measuring fallout with Geiger counters in hand. As impossible as it is to imagine in the twenty-first century, in the early days of atomic testing there was no such thing as HAZMAT suits for workers performing tasks in environments laden with WMD. Instead, workers combed the desert floor dressed in white lab coats and work boots, looking for particles of nuclear fallout. According to Atomic Energy Commission documents made public in 1993, this radioactive debris varied in size, from pinhead particles to pencil-size pieces of steel.