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As a passenger on the Janet 737 gets closer, it becomes easier for the eye to judge distance. Groom Mountain reveals itself as a massive summit that reaches 9,348 feet. It towers over the base at its northernmost end and is rife with Area 51 history and lore. Countless Area 51 commanding officers have spent weekends on the mountain hunting deer. Hidden inside its craggy lower peaks are two old lead and silver mines named Black Metal and Sheehan Mine. In the 1950s, one ancient miner hung on to his federal mining rights with such ferocity that the government ended up giving him a security clearance and briefing him on Area 51 activities rather than continuing to fight to remove him. The miner kept the secrecy oath and took Area 51’s early secrets with him to the grave.

At the southernmost end of the base sits a gravel pit and concrete-mixing facilities that are used to construct temporary buildings that need to go up quick. Against the sloping hills to the west sit the old fuel-storage tanks that once housed JP-7 jet fuel, specially designed for CIA spy planes that needed to withstand temperature fluctuations from −90 degrees to 285 degrees Fahrenheit. To the south, on a plateau of its own, is the weapons assembly and storage facility. This is recognizable from the air by a tall ring of mounded dirt meant to deflect blasts in the event of an accident. Behind the weapons depot, a single-lane dirt road runs up over the top of the hill and dumps back down into the Nevada Test Site next door, at Gate 800 (sometimes called Gate 700). Old-timers from the U-2 spy plane days called this access point Gate 385, originally the only way in to Area 51 if you were not arriving by air. On the Area 51 side of the gate, the shipping and receiving building can be found. In the height of the nuclear testing days, the 1950s and 1960s, trucks from the Atomic Energy Commission motor pool spent hours in the parking lot here while their appropriately cleared drivers enjoyed Area 51’s legendary gourmet chow.

In December of 1988, had Lazar been looking out the Janet 737 aircraft window just before landing, off to the northwest he would have seen EG&G radar sites dotting the valley floor in a diagonal line. Part of the Air Force’s foreign technology division, which began in 1968, these radar sites include coveted Soviet radar systems acquired from Eastern-bloc countries and captured during Middle East wars. Also to the north lies Slater Lake, named after Commander Slater and dug by contractors during the Vietnam War. Around the lake’s sloped banks are trees unusual for the area: tall and leafy, looking as if they belong in Europe or on the East Coast. This is the only nonindigenous plant life in all of Area 51. Move ahead to December of 1998, and five miles beyond Slater Lake, across the flat, dry valley floor, an airplane passenger would have seen a crew of men dressed in HAZMAT suits busily removing the top six inches of soil from a 269-acre parcel contaminated with plutonium. Set inside Area 51’s airspace but in a quadrant of its own, this sector was designated Area 13. What the men did was known to only a select few. Like all things at Area 51, if a person didn’t have a need-to-know, he knew not to ask.

The airplane carrying Lazar would likely have landed on the easternmost runway and then taxied up to the Janet terminal, near the security building. Lazar and his supervisor, Dennis Mariani, would have gone through security there. According to Lazar, he was taken to a cafeteria on the base. When a bus pulled up, he and Mariani climbed aboard. Lazar said he could not see exactly where he was taken because the curtains on the bus windows were drawn. If Lazar had been able to look outside he would have seen the green grass of the Area 51 baseball field, where, beginning in the mid-1960s, during the bonanza of underground nuclear testing, Area 51 workers battled Nevada Test Site workers at weekly softball games. Lazar’s bus would have also driven past the outdoor tennis courts, where Dr.