Freedman’s first job at the test site had been installing radios in EG&G vehicles used during weapons tests. Next, he was trained as an engineer in the art of wiring nuclear bombs. In the 1950s, Freedman participated in dozens of nuclear tests on the arming and firing party alongside Al O’Donnell at the test site and also at the Pacific Proving Ground. “I even managed to survive a helicopter crash in the Marshall Islands,” Freedman adds. In 1957, EG&G learned that Freedman had studied photography after high school and assigned him to a team photographing nuclear explosions. But by 1960, the nuclear-test-ban treaty was in effect, testing had moved underground, and Freedman’s life had taken what he called “a dull turn.”
One afternoon, he was sitting inside an EG&G warehouse in Las Vegas, cleaning camera equipment. “I was thinking about how fast office work gets boring when my boss walked up to me and said, ‘Hey, Jim, do you want to go work on a secret project?’” Freedman didn’t hesitate. “I said yes, because it sounded interesting, and I wound up at Area 51. I’d never heard of the place before I went there. I never knew it existed just over the hill from the Nevada Test Site where I’d worked for so many years. Neither did anyone else who didn’t have a need-to-know.” When Freedman arrived at Area 51, it felt to him “like I was arriving on the far side of the moon. You know about the bright side of the moon; well, in relative terms, that was what the test site was like. Area 51 was the dark side.” What began as a short-term contract in December of 1960 would last for Jim Freedman for the next fourteen years.