Roy Exum: Those Nevada UFOs

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Roy Exum: Those Nevada UFOs
April 27, 2009
Roy Exum
chattanoogan.com

As a rule I avoid anything spooky. I don’t read science-fiction stuff, go to scary movies or mess around with people who like to hunt for ghosts. It’s not that I am scared, but those things make me nervous and I figure it is much better for all of us if I let somebody else be in charge of the paranormal and supernatural stuff.

So it took a couple of deep breaths not long ago before I was able to read an article that appeared in the Los Angeles Times’ Sunday magazine about the fabled “Area 51” facility, a long-denied military complex which has now been confirmed about 100 miles from Las Vegas in the high desert mountains.

When we were growing up, it was pretty commonly known that UFOs (Unidentified Flying Objects) were seen all the time in the Nevada skies. There were too many people who actually had seen them to discount such rumors and, to those of us who get jittery over that sort of thing, I would quickly turn to the next page of the newspaper.

About a year ago, according to the Times’ brilliant Annie Jacobsen, the CIA declassified documents about an Area 51 spy plane called Operation OXCART. Today some of the ancient characters who lived through the spine-chilling Cold War era and flew spy planes from the to-secret Nevada installation are actually eager to tell about some of the things that once happened there.

The actual site is still “officially” denied by the government, its CIA ties too strong and rich, but you can find it on Google Earth, of all things. You will learn the huge complex, built around what used to be called Groom Lake on older maps, is actually located between a modern-day Air Force base and an old nuclear testing ground. Don’t try to take a day trip; there is so much security a flying saucer couldn’t get into the place.

And that brings me to the best part of the story because the older guys who sat for Jacobsen’s interviews confirmed there are no frozen aliens or rocket ships from Mars inside the ingeniously-disguised hangars but instead it is stocked with survelliance aircraft like nothing you ever dreamed.

One code name that brought hundreds of scientists and engineers today was the A-12 OXCART. It followed the U-2, which Frances Gary Powers made famous when he was shot down high over Russia. The government had denied there was any plane like that but when Russia bagged Powers in 1960, the cat was out of the bag.

That’s when the A-12 OXCART came along and now, some 50 years later, we learn that the actual airplane, which was manufactured by Lockheed, had a wide, disc-like fuselage to carry special jet fuel. It seems that if you take regular jet fuel and add factors of extreme speed, extreme height and extreme temperature, the “regular” explodes.

So they developed a “high test” fuel for the A-12 OXCART. The airplane had a top speed of Mach 3 – three times faster than sound – so when other pilots would see one of the titanium-skinned test planes go past a three times faster than they’d ever witnessed – presto – you had a “flying saucer” sighting.

An Air Force Colonel, Hugh ‘Slip” Slater, was the commander of the Area 51 base in the ‘60s and said there were 2,850 flights by OXCART aircraft on his watch. That was in the ‘60s, mind you, so what do you think they put in the skies today to protect this country?

Back to the story: When a commercial pilot would actually spot one of the OXCART planes and report it to the tower, that pilot would be met by FBI agents as soon as he landed and would be urged to sign nondisclosure forms, which – of course – they would do because of the national security implications. Or jail.

But not all of them stayed quiet and, in the early 1960s, Project BLUEBOOK was started to fight the growing paranoia of an alien attack. Today there are 74,000 pages of reports housed in 37 cubic feet of files in the National Archives. Project BLUEBOOK was shut down in 1969 and, as unbelievable as this may well be to you, there isn’t one word that mentions Operation OXCART or the mysterious base called Area 51.

So, as you are once again led to believe there are not saucers that hover over our cornfields or aliens-on-ice high above the Nevada desert, you’ll be the smartest guy in the class if you don’t lose sight of the fact that, according to the CIA and the American government, a place called “Area 51” has never, ever, existed.

How does that go down with your Cherrios? If it bothers you, just remember I was more worried about the flying saucers.