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black. They also had other businesses, such as radar testing. In the early 1950s, EG&G ran a radar-testing facility approximately thirty miles south of Area 51, at Indian Springs. Very little information is known about that period or about what EG&G was working on, as the data remains classified in EG&G’s unique Restricted Data files. At Bissell’s behest, in 1957 EG&G agreed to set up a radar range on the outskirts of Area 51 to measure radar returns for the dirty-bird project. In a CIA monograph about the U-2, declassified in 1998, the EG&G tracking station just outside Groom Lake is alleged to be “little more than a series of radar sets and a trailer containing instrumentation” where engineers could record data and analyze results. And yet the exact location of this “small testing facility” has been redacted from the otherwise declassified U-2 record. Why? The key term is EG&G. Giving away too much information about EG&G could inadvertently open a can of worms. No one but an elite has a need-to-know where any exterior EG&G facilities are located at Area 51—specifically, whether they are located outside the blueprint of the base.

And so, in April of 1957, with EG&G radar specialists tracking his aircraft’s radar returns, Lockheed test pilot Robert Sieker took one of the newly painted U-2s to the skies over Groom Lake. His orders were to see how high he could get the dirty bird to climb. Sieker took off from Area 51 and flew for almost ninety miles without incident when suddenly, in a valley near Pioche, the Boston Group’s paint caused the airplane to overheat, spin out of control, and crash. Sieker was able to eject but was killed when a piece of the spinning aircraft hit him in the head. Kelly Johnson was right. It was a bad idea to try to retrofit the U-2. CIA search teams took four days to locate Sieker’s body and the wreckage of the plane. The crash had attracted the watchful eye of the press, and the U-2’s cover story, that it was a weather research plane, wore thin. Halfway across the country, a headline at the Chicago Daily Tribune read “Secrecy Veils High-Altitude Research Jet; Lockheed U-2 Called Super Snooper.”

A pilot was dead, and the camouflage paint had made the U-2 more dangerous, not more stealthy. Bissell knew he needed to act fast. He was losing control of the U-2 spy plane program and everything he had created at Area 51. His next idea, part genius and part hubris, was to petition the president for an entirely new spy plane. The CIA needed a better, faster, more technologically advanced aircraft that would break scientific barriers and trick Soviet radars into thinking it wasn’t there. This new spy plane Bissell had in mind would fly higher than ninety thousand feet and have stealth features built in from pencil to plane. Bissell was taking a major gamble with his billion-dollar request. Bringing an entirely new black budget spy plane program to the president’s attention at a time when the president was upset with the results of the previous work done at Area 51 was either madness or brilliance, depending on one’s point of view. But just as Richard Bissell began presenting plans for his radical and ambitious new project to the president, a national security crisis overwhelmed the country. On October 4, 1957, the Soviets launched the world’s first satellite, a 184-pound silver orb called Sputnik 1. This was the secret that Sergei Korolev had been working on at Area 51’s Communist doppelgänger, NII-88.

At first, the White House tried to downplay the fact that the Soviets had beat the Americans into space. Eisenhower, at his country home in Pennsylvania for the weekend, didn’t immediately comment on the event. But the following morning, the New York Times ran a headline of half-inch-high capital letters across all six columns, a spot historically reserved for the declarations of war.

SOVIET FIRES EARTH SATELLITE INTO SPACE; IT IS CIRCLING THE GLOBE AT 18,000 MPH; SPHERE TRACKED IN 4 CROSSINGS OVER U.S.

A satellite launch meant the Russians now had a rocket with enough propulsion and guidance to