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legendary, often still used to make an important visual point about the stealthy F-117 Nighthawk with its high-frequency radar signature that is as tiny as a ball bearing.” In 1976, Lockheed won the contract. Immediately, they began manufacturing two Have Blue aircraft in the legendary Skunk Works Building 82. The man in charge of engineering, fabrication, and assembly of the pair of stealth bombers was Bob Murphy, the same person who twenty-one years earlier had begun his career in a pair of overalls at Area 51, working for Kelly Johnson as chief mechanic on the U-2.

Testing a bomber plane would be a radically different process from testing a spy plane, and the F-117 was the first bomber to be flight-tested at Area 51. Most notably, the new bomber would require testing for accuracy in dropping bombs on targets. For nearly twenty-five years, the CIA and the Air Force had been flying spy planes and drones in the Box. But there was simply not enough flat square footage at Groom Lake to drop bombs. There was also the issue of sound. With multiple projects going on at Area 51, not everyone was cleared for the F-117.

A second site was needed, and for this, the Air Force turned to the Department of Energy, formerly the Atomic Energy Commission. A land-use deal was struck allowing the Air Force to use a preexisting, little-known bombing range that the Atomic Energy Commission had quietly been using for decades. It was deep in the desert, within the Connecticut-size Nevada Test and Training Range. Located seventy miles northwest of Area 51, the Tonopah Test Range was almost in Death Valley and had been in use as a bombing range and missile-launch facility for Sandia Laboratories since 1957. The Department of Energy had no trouble carving a top secret partition out of the 624-square-mile range for the Air Force’s new bomber project. To be kept entirely off the books, the secondary black site was named Area 52. Like Area 51, Area 52 has never been officially acknowledged.

The sparsely populated, high-desert outpost of Tonopah, Nevada, was once the nation’s most important producer of gold and silver ore. In 1903, eighty-six million dollars in metals came out of the area’s mines, nearly two billion in 2011 dollars, and at the turn of the century, thirty thousand people rushed to the mile-high desert city seeking treasure there. Tonopah’s nearest neighbor, the town of Beatty, where T. D. Barnes lived in the 1960s, became known in 1907 as the Chicago of the West. For several years the Las Vegas & Tonopah Railroad maintained a rail line between the two cities, which at one point was the West’s busiest rail line. And then, almost overnight and like so many towns ensnared in the gold rush, Tonopah went bust. Within ten years, it was just a few families too many to be called a ghost town. Even the railroad company ripped up its steel tracks and carted them away for better use. Packs of wild horses and antelope came back down from the mountains and began to graze as they had before the boom, pulling weeds and scrub from the parched desert landscape between the Cactus and the Kawich mountain ranges. When a group of weaponeers from Sandia descended upon the area four decades later, in 1956, they were thrilled with what they found. Tonopah was a perfect place for “secret testing [that] could be conducted safely and securely.” Years later, boasting to their corporate shareholders, the Sandians, as they called themselves, would quote Saint Paul of Tarsus to sum up their mission at Tonopah Test Range: “test all things; hold fast that which is good.”

Between 1957 and 1964, Sandia dropped 680 bombs and launched 555 rockets from what was now officially but quietly called the Sandia National Laboratories’ Outpost at Tonopah. In 1963, Sandia conducted a series of top secret plutonium-dispersal tests, similar to the Project 57 test that had been conducted at Groom Lake just a few years earlier. Called Operation Roller Coaster, three dirty bomb tests were performed to collect biological data on three hundred animals placed downwind from aerosolized