Area 51, the infamous remote patch of desert in Southern Nevada, was declassified today by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and George Washington University's National Securities Archive. Long synonymous amongst conspiracy theorists with alien spacecraft and government cover-ups, the documentation on the site reveals a far blander reality. The site was nothing more than a testing ground for Lockheed U-2 surveillance planes.
Area 51's history as an alien testing ground, thus, comes to a fizzling close. Long a feature in popular culture, the site has been referenced everywhere from the Indiana Jones films to Independence Day. Most commonly, the site was associated with the Roswell, New Mexico UFO incident of 1947, when an unidentified flying object - first reported as a flying disk - crashed down upon a private ranch. Later that day, United States Armed Forces claimed the crashed object was a high-altitude weather balloon; conspiracy theorists counter that the spacecraft was extraterrestrial and that both the aircraft and living alien beings were recovered before a massive cover-up was engineered.
Regardless of what happened at Roswell, the declassification of Area 51 suggests that no spaceships were carted the 891 miles between the Roswell ranch and the Nevada top-secret base, as conspiracy theorists have popularly asserted. Instead, the secrecy around Area 51 seems to have stemmed from a beast of a very different nature: the Communist Russian party-state, and the cold war that America fought with it.
The Lockheed U-2, tested at Area 51, was a spy plane that took high quality photographs of enemy territory from the safety of higher altitude (70,000 feet/21,000 meters). In May of 1960, the Soviet Union shot down one such plane over Russian airspace, taking captive American pilot and spy Francis Gary Powers. That incident lead to a deterioration of relations between the United States and the Soviet powers.
It may not be as exciting an explanation of Area 51 as the one Will Smith got in his Hollywood blockbuster, but it's apparently the truth. So maybe now all the X-Files fans who talk ad infinitum about how "The Truth is Out There" need to update their refrain:
"The Truth is Here."
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