In what has to be one of the worst kept government secrets of all time the Central Intelligence agency has finally revealed publicly that the Disneyland for conspiracy theorists, Area 51, actually does exist and is located in the Nevada desert, according to the Huffington Post.
The National Security Archive at George Washington University received a report from the CIA about the program that created the U-2 spy plane that had been declassified and proved the existence of the secret military base. A map of its location was also included in the document, according to the Huffington Post.
The site was used to test the U-2 spy plane which had a cruising altitude of 60,000 feet, far higher than any other plane. The report talks about how local residents may have mistaken the futuristic U-2 for something from another planet, according to ABC News.
"High-altitude testing of the U-2 soon led to an unexpected side effect - a tremendous increase in reports of unidentified flying objects (UFOs)," the report states. "U-2 and later OXCART flights accounted for more than one-half of all UFO reports during the late 1950s and most of the 1960s."
In order to develop a top-secret spy plane it is necessary to find a place that is as far away from the general populace as possible, hence the existence of Area 51. The problem with being so isolated is that no one will want to move to such a place to work. It took a devious little lie to convince engineers to agree to come out, the Huffington Post reports.
"To make the new facility in the middle of nowhere sound more attractive to his workers, [Lockheed engineer] Kelly Johnson called it the Paradise Ranch, which was soon shortened to the Ranch," the report said.
While the report details some of what happened at the facility and acknowledges that it opened in 1955 it makes no reference to anything that happened at the site after 1974, an omission that conspiracy theorists will be sure to jump on, according to ABC News.
"It marks an end of official secrecy about the facts of Area 51," Jeffrey Richelson, a senior fellow at the National Security Archive, told the Las Vegas Sun. "It opens up the possibility that future accounts of this and other aerial projects will be less redacted, more fully explained in terms of their presence in Area 51."
