Area 51

Area 51 is likely the most famous place in the world that you're not supposed to know about. It's part of countless alien movies, conspiracy theories, and often some combination of both. So what is it? Where is it? What really goes on there? And why doesn't it just have a normal name (hint: it does)? We're taking all that on in this show.

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

If you want to take a road trip this summer, you could celebrate the hundredth anniversary of Route 66 by coming here to Arizona and traveling the longest uninterrupted stretch of it that still exists. We talked about that a couple of shows back, but if military secrets and UFOs are more your speed, you can go to Nevada and take Route 375 to the town of Rachel. Nevada's official designation for this road is the extraterrestrial highway. Why that highway and that town? Because that's the closest you'll get to the place that is ground zero for every secret conspiracy ever. We are talking about Area 51.

SPEAKER_03 0:49

We choose to go to the moon! The Rem Tem Tuga is a curious 10 hundred billion other galaxies.

SPEAKER_00 1:12

Of all the places we don't know anything about, there's probably no place we think we know about more than Area 51. And the people who think they know the most are all in Hollywood.

SPEAKER_02 1:26

Area 51.

SPEAKER_01 1:35

They took the craft and the aliens out to that location in the middle of the Nevada desert because it was so remote. And around that they built Area 51.

SPEAKER_03 1:44

You had the spaceship and you had the bodies. They were all locked up in a bunker. David! Area 51, right? Area 51! You know that! Welcome to Area 51. Please follow me.

SPEAKER_00 1:57

Area 51 is ground zero for conspiracy theorists, UFologists, tinfoil enthusiasts, and people who believe the truth is out there. So what exactly is Area 51? Well, we can't tell you exactly because we don't know either. Currently the laws governing top secret military installations don't make an exception for podcasts. What we do know about Area 51 is kinda random and also kind of accidental. Let's start with the location. Area 51 is about a hundred miles north of Las Vegas. The actual size of Area 51 is about sixty square miles, but the restricted airspace around it is much bigger, like six hundred square miles. It's basically open desert with no water or facilities around, so it's quite difficult to get to. It's also next to a government testing site for nuclear weapons, so even if you could get there, you probably wouldn't want to. So how do we know all this about a top secret government facility? Well, that's the accidental part. In 1973, astronauts on board Skylab inadvertently took a photo of it. The government was able to cover that up, but in 2000, a Soviet spy satellite did get a bunch of pictures, and those were published on the website of the Federation of American Scientists. Now that the cat's out of the bag, you can just type Area 51 into the search bar on Google Earth and you can see all of it. So let's see what's there. Uh nothing crazy, at least from overhead. There's an airfield with runways and a hangar. Bunch of nondescript office buildings, what looks like a mess hall. You can even see some aircraft, though probably not the ones that make this place so secret. One of the things that we do know about Area 51 is that it is officially a testing and training site for operations and new technology. One of those was something called the A-12 Oxcart. This was a prototype surveillance aircraft that was ridiculously fast. It could hit speeds of Mach 3.3, which is about 2300 miles an hour. It looked kind of flat and vaguely disc shaped, and it was made of shiny titanium. No way that thing could ever be mistaken for anything else, right? So as it turns out, super fast, shiny objects flying around secret desert military facilities can look an awful lot like alien spacecraft, and alien spaceships were very much on people's minds in the early 1950s. For what it's worth, the military had a lot to do with that. In 1947, a rancher outside of Roswell, New Mexico found some debris scattered all across his ranch, tinfoil, rubber, tape, wooden beams. You know, stuff made right here on Earth that would have no chance of surviving an interstellar flight or entry into Earth's atmosphere. So is that what the Army told the Associated Press in their official statement? Listener, it was not. Yeah, just the kind of thing that would calm everyone down. The next day the military retracted that statement and said it was a weather balloon. It was neither. It was actually a sophisticated device designed to spy on Soviet atomic testing, but the damage was done. People speculated that this was a crashed alien spacecraft that was then sent to Area 51. This tapped into a larger flying saucer craze that made both Roswell and Area 51 famous in UFO circles. It also perpetuated all kinds of ideas about what's really going on at this place that's so secret that it doesn't even have a real name. That name certainly doesn't help, which is why it might surprise you to know that Area 51 isn't actually called Area 51. That's mostly an invention of conspiracy theorists. Nobody really knows where Area 51 came from. There was an old numbering grid used by the Atomic Energy Commission, but Area 51 isn't part of that. Officially, it's called Groom Lake, after the dry lake bed next to it. Dreamland is the air traffic control designation for its airfield. The defense contractor Lockheed Martin calls it Paradise Ranch to entice their employees to move there. Now, everything I've just said is all publicly available. You can believe it, or you can dismiss this as yet another pathetic attempt by a sheeple to beam government propaganda directly into your brain. The truth is out there, people. Go hit the extraterrestrial highway and find it. That's our show this week. If the black helicopters haven't come for us, we'll see you next time. Thanks for listening.