Whatever They're Hiding, I'd Like to Know What It Is
Memorial Day at Area 51
By Skylaire Alfvegren
 |
"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, has yet 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 the U.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.
site by
