Area 51

"Insanity runs rampant here," Sharon tells me with a sassy smirk, the kind small-town waitresses develop after years of pouring coffee for bikers, truckers and other highway bandits making a pit stop off the interstate.But Sharon's greasy spoon—the infamous Little A 'Le' Inn of Rachel, Nevada—plays host to characters more colorful than your standard highway travellers. Scrubby and beyond desolate, Rachel sits about 150 miles north of Las Vegas off Interstate 375.Rechristened the "Extraterrestrial Highway" in 1996 in an effort to lure tourists to this real-life twilight zone, the permanent population, inhabiting helter-skelter trailer encampments and a half-dozen homes, hasyet to exceed 100.

And residents like it that way. The population roughly doubled this past weekend, when "truth seekers" from as far afield as New York, Florida and Iowa gathered for the annual Memorial Day UFO/Friendship Campout, which Boise, Idaho, resident Ike Bishop has been organizing since 2002. In 1955, Groom Dry Lake was chosen as a test site for Lockheed's super-secret U-2 spy plane. First dubbed "The Ranch," and then Watertown (named after former CIA director Allen Dulles' New York hometown), the Atomic Energy Commission later renamed the secret aircraft testing facility Area 51. An entire mythology has grown up around Area 51 (also known as Dreamland, the airspace code name for the site), a 6-by-10 mile "operating location" adjacent to the Nellis Test Range and overseen by theU.S. Air Force. Its runway, the longest on Earth, has been the testing ground for spy planes like the U-2, SR71 and B-2 Stealth Bomber. Rumors that the "secret" base was used as a storage space for crashed UFOs, and where alien technology has been "back-engineered" and applied to military aircraft circulated for years before Las Vegan Bob Lazar made the claim on local television that he tinkered with alien spacecraft at Papoose Lake, a dry lake bed located south of the Groom Lake facility. Lazar referred to the location as S4. Area 51, hidden behind a range of impenetrable mountains, lies some 25 miles south of Rachel. Bishop lived in Las Vegas for 29 years, where he worked as a private investigator. He left in 1989, the same year Lazar's claims began luring the curious out to the Little A 'Le' Inn. "A lot of interesting thingsa......

Far out in the Nevada desert, miles from prying eyes, is a secret Air Force facility that has been known by numerous names over the years. It has been called Paradise Ranch, Watertown Strip, Area 51, Dreamland, and Groom Lake. Groom is probably the most mythologized real location that few people have ever seen. According to people with overactive imaginations, it is where the United States government keeps dead aliens, clones them, and reverse-engineers their spacecraft. It is also where NASA filmed the faked Moon landings.However, for humans whose feet rest on solid ground, Groom is the site of highly secret aircraft development. Itis where the U-2 spyplane, the Mach 3 Blackbird, and the F-117 stealth fighter were all developed.

It has also probably hosted its own fleet of captured, stolen, or clandestinely acquired Soviet and Russian aircraft. Because of this, the United States government has gone to extraordinary lengths to preserve the area’s secrecy and to prevent people from seeing it.This secrecy was threatened in early 1974 when the astronauts on Skylab pointed their camera out the window and took pictures of a facility that did not officially exist. They returned to Earth and their photographs quickly became a headache for NASA, the CIA, and the Department of Defense. That story has never been told before. On April 19, 1974 someone in the CIA sent the Director ofCentral Intelligence, William Colby, a memorandum regarding a little problem.“The issue arises from the fact that the recent Skylab mission inadvertently photographed” the airfield at Groom Lake. “There were specific instructions not to do this,” the memo stated, and Groom “was the only location which had such an instruction.” In other words, the CIA considered no other spot on Earth to be as sensitive as Groom Lake, and the astronauts had just taken a picture of it.

View: Full Article | Source: The Space Review

For someone brought up on a steady diet of the “X-Files” and the occasional “government using UFO technology” conspiracy theory, the chance to drive a highway famous for spotting the strange and often unexplainable was a chance too good to pass up.Dedicated as the Extraterrestrial Highway on April 18, 1996, Nevada’s State Route 375 is a 100-mile stretch of two-lane asphalt that runs through Lincoln and Nye counties. Marked at either end with signage that uses images of F-117 stealth fighters as well as flying saucers, the road is actually one of the least traveled roads in America.Strange things have been reported in the Nevada skies north of Las Vegassince the 1950s, when Lockheed test pilot Tony Levier was sent out by his bosses to find someplace out of the way to test the company’s next generation spy plane, the U-2.

Levier happened upon the perfect dry lake bed that later became known as Area 51. In the 1980s, alleged Area 51 engineer Bob Lazar shocked Las Vegas-area TV viewers with statements that he not only had seen a captured UFO at Area 51, but that he and others were reverse-engineering the craft’s propulsion system for military use. There were subsequent questions of whether he was who he said he was - he remains a poster child for what others claim was governmental character assasination. In any event, Lazar’s allegations whipped up both UFO and conspiracy buffs, bringing many to spend a night in the Nevada desert looking for that encounter with alienvisitors. I started at the northwestern end of the ET and, with the sinking sun at my back, I cruised at the 70 mph speed limit enjoying the view of the desert’s hills and mountains interspersed with plains covered in Joshua trees, cholla and other low-flow plant life, and wondered what awaited me between here and my only scheduled stop, 59 miles away in the town of Rachel. I didn’t have long to find out. Not far after the ET highway markers, I passed a yellow sign with a black cow silhouette and though it looked pretty silly (DANGER - COWS!) it should be taken life-or-death seriously. The sign marked the beginning of open range - a true sign you’re driving in the West, where cattle are free to roam and graze on either side of the road and even on the highway itself. During daylight hours it can leadto lots o......

"Area 51" is a part of an off-limits military base near Groom Dry Lake in Nevada. UFOers are sure it is used to hide aliens from us. The state of Nevada recently designated a barren 98-mile stretch of Route 375, which runs near area 51, as the Extraterrestrial Highway. Such a move is no doubt proof of a government attempt to throw us off the track and think there is not a cover-up when there is one. This is a cover-up of the cover-up, typical of government agencies when dealing with sensitive information regarding UFOs and aliens.

Since you can be shot if you try to trespass on the military base where area 51 is located, UFO tourists must view the sacred ground from a distant vantage point. Many do this, hoping for a glimpse of a UFO landing. Apparently, our government has a treaty with the aliens that allows them to fly into this area at will, as long as we can experiment on them and try to duplicate their aircraft. You don't really think that any human could have come up with the idea of the Stealth Bomber, do you?