What was Area 51 before it was Area 51?
Quick question, when was the first time you ever heard of Area 51?
It’s a strange part of pop culture to become known by nearly everyone in the world, but it has. The phrase is becoming a byword for “weird place the government doesn’t want you to know about” all over the English-speaking world. That’s bizarre, right? That a US Air Force testing facility would become one of the most famous places in the world? One so famous that I can’t remember the first time I heard of it, it just has always been there, like the BBC or sports.
That’s what it is, by the way. The US Government doesn’t want to keep the goings on at Area 51 a secret because it houses aliens or crashed space ships. It’s where they tested the Lockheed U-2 spy plane, which also gave the band U2 their name (if you’re looking for crimes against humanity that Area 51 lead to, there you go). The tests they carried out on the plane were so effective that they kept testing out state-of-the-art warplanes there, thus the top secret level of security that goes on there.
I hate to burst your bubble, but that is the long and the short of why there is such a level of secrecy around Area 51. It’s not cool aliens, it’s war crimes. Soz. It makes sense that people would think that the story goes deeper than that. The CIA didn’t even publically acknowledge the base’s existence until 2013, so they denied the base’s existence. That’s not because they were trying to hide extraterrestrial life from the world; they were trying to hide the next ways they were going to subjugate foreign countries in the name of American imperialism from people who’d hold them accountable.
So, what was Area 51 before the American Military system turned up?
The history of Area 51
This is gonna be a tough one because the short answer here is that Area 51 was (and kinda still is) a desert.
It’s a six-by-ten-mile slice of the Nevada desert, just over 80 miles northwest of Las Vegas. One can only imagine the number of Area 51 employees desperate to make the drive into Sin City to blow off some steam over some Hold ‘Em, but I’d imagine that’s a hell of a lot more than their everlasting souls’ worth, let alone their job.
Perhaps the biggest reason the area was chosen to be an airbase is the salt flat next to it. The runways of Area 51 are built onto Groom Lake, a vast dry lake whose flatness contrasts with the rocky, uneven surface of the surrounding desert. As you can imagine, this made it an ideal place for planes to take off and land and thus, an airfield was first built on the site in 1942 as the Indian Springs Airfield Auxiliary Field.
It wasn’t until 1955 that the CIA took over the space for the U-2 project, at the time known as Project AQUATONE. Extreme secrecy is needed for the project. The whole point of a spy plane is somewhat negated if people know you’re building it, after all. Thus, Groom Lake and the airfield built on it were deemed close enough to the middle of nowhere that no pesky commies would come sniffing around.
The irony is that the level of secrecy made it the single most famous airbase in the history of aviation. C’est la vie.