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By Root 1067 0

Atoll in 1946. Because much of this information was originally created under the strict Atomic Energy classification Secret/Restricted Data—i.e., it was “born classified”—it has largely remained classified ever since. It cannot be transferred to another steward. For decades, this meant there was no one to compete with EG&G for the remote sensing job. How involved EG&G is in remote sensing today, their corporate headquarters won’t say.

So secret are the record groups in EG&G’s archives, even the president of the United States can be denied access to them, as President Clinton was in 1994. One year earlier, a reporter named Eileen Welsome had written a forty-five-page newspaper story for the Albuquerque Tribune revealing that the Atomic Energy Commission had secretly injected human test subjects with plutonium starting in the 1940s without those individuals’ knowledge or consent. When President Clinton learned about this, he created an advisory committee on human radiation experiments to look into secrets kept by the Atomic Energy Commission and to make them public. In several areas, the president’s committee succeeded in revealing disturbing truths, but in other areas it failed. In at least one case, regarding a secret project at Area 51, the committee was denied access to records kept by EG&G and the Atomic Energy Commission on the grounds that the president did not have a need-to-know about them. In another case, regarding the nuclear rocket program at Area 25 in Jackass Flats, the president’s committee also failed to inform the public of the truth. Whether this is because the record group in EG&G’s archive was kept from the committee or because the committee had access to it but chose not to report the facts in earnest remains unknown. Instead, what happened at Jackass Flats, well after atmospheric testing had been outlawed around the world, gets a one-line reference in the Advisory Committee’s 937-page Final Report, grouped in with dozens of other tests involving “intentional releases” near human populations. “At AEC sites in Nevada and Idaho, radioactive materials were released in tests of the safety of bombs, nuclear reactors, and proposed nuclear rockets and airplanes,” the report innocuously reads.

If Area 51 had a doppelgänger next door at the test site, it would certainly be Area 25, which encompasses 223 square miles. The flat, sandy desert expanse got its name during the gold rush when miners used to tie their donkeys to trees in the flat area while searching the surrounding mountains for gold. Like Area 51, Jackass Flats is surrounded by mountain ranges on three of its four sides, making them both hidden sites within federally restricted land. Unlike Area 51, which technically does not exist, Jackass Flats in the 1950s and 1960s maintained a polished public face. When President Kennedy visited the Nevada Test Site in 1962, he went to Jackass Flats to promote the space travel programs that were going on there. Richard Mingus was one of the security guards assigned to assist the president’s Secret Service detail that day. Photographs that appeared in the newspapers showed the handsome president, wearing his signature sunglasses and dark suit, flanked by aides while admiring strange-looking contraptions rising up from the desert floor; Mingus stands at attention nearby. Next to the president is Glenn Seaborg, then head of the Atomic Energy Commission and the man who co-discovered plutonium. But as with most nuclear projects of the day, the public was only told a fraction of the story. There was a lot more going on at Jackass Flats behind the scenes—and in underground facilities there—about which the public had no idea.

Area 25 began as the perfect place for America to launch a nuclear-powered spaceship that would get man to Mars and back in the astonishingly short time of 124 days. The spaceship was going to be enormous, sixteen stories tall and piloted by one hundred and fifty men. Project Orion seemed like a space vehicle from a science fiction novel, except it was real. It was the brainchild of a former Los