Area 51_ An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base - Annie Jacobsen [4]
This job was far from any old advanced engineering job. Edward Teller had recommended Bob Lazar to the most powerful defense-industry contractor at Area 51, a company called EG&G. Among the thousands of top secret and Q-cleared contractors who have worked on classified and black projects at the Nevada Test Site and Area 51, none has had as much power and access, or as little oversight, as EG&G. On Teller’s instruction, Lazar called a telephone number. A person at the other end of the line told him to go to McCarran Airport, in downtown Las Vegas, on a specific date in December—to the EG&G building there. Lazar was told he would be flown by private aircraft to Groom Lake. He was excited and followed orders. Inside the EG&G building, he was introduced to a man called Dennis Mariani who would soon become his supervisor. The two men went to the south end of the airport and into a secure hangar ringed by security fences and guarded by men with guns. There, EG&G ran a fleet of 737 airplanes that flew back and forth to Groom Lake—and still do. Because they flew with the call sign Janet, this private Area 51 commuter fleet had become known as Janet Airlines. Lazar and his supervisor passed through security and boarded a white aircraft with no markings or logo, just a long red stripe running the length of the airplane.
Fly to Area 51 on a northerly course from Las Vegas and you’ll see a Nevada landscape that is classic American Southwest: snowcapped mountains, rolling hills, and desert valley floors. Bob Lazar would not have seen any of this on his approach to Groom Lake because the window curtains on his Janet Airlines flight would have been drawn—they always are when newcomers arrive. The airspace directly over Area 51 has been restricted since the mid-1950s, which means no one peers down onto Area 51 without authorization except satellites circling the globe in outer space. By the time Lazar arrived, the 575-square-mile airspace had long been nicknamed the Box, and Air Force pilots at nearby Nellis Air Force Base know never to enter it. Distinctly visible at the very center of Area 51’s Box sits a near-perfect six-mile-diameter endorheic basin, also known as a dry lake. It was the lake bed itself that originally appealed to the CIA; for decades it had doubled as a natural runway for Area 51’s secret spy planes.
Almost everything visible on approach to Area 51 from the air is restricted government land. There are no public highways, no shopping malls, no twentieth-century urban sprawl. Where the land is hilly, Joshua trees and yucca plants grow, their long spiky leaves extended skyward like swords. Where the land is flat, it is barren and bald. Except for creosote bushes and tumbleweed, very little grows out here on the desert floor. The physical base—its hangars, runways, dormitories, and towers—begins at the southernmost tip of Groom’s dry lake. The structures spread out in rows, heading south down the Emigrant Valley floor. The hangars’ metal rooftops catch the sunlight and reflect up as the Janet airplane enters the Box. A huge antenna tower rises up from the desert floor. The power plant’s cooling tower comes into view, as do the antennas on the radio-shop roof, located at the end of one of the two, perpendicular taxiways. Radar antennas spin. One dish is sixty feet in diameter and always faces the sky; its beams are so powerful they would instantly cook the internal organs of any living thing. The Quick Kill system, designed by Raytheon to detect incoming missile signals, sits at the edge of the dry lake bed not far from the famous pylon featured in Lockheed publicity photos but never officially identified as located at Area 51. Insiders call the pylon “the pole”—it’s where the radar cross section on prototype stealth aircraft is measured. State-of-the-art, million-dollar black aircraft are turned upside down and hoisted aloft on this pole, making each one look tiny and insignificant in the massive