Area 51_ An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base - Annie Jacobsen [64]
CHAPTER SEVEN
From Ghost Town to Boomtown
After the Plumbbob atomic tests rocked Area 51, the CIA base sat like a ghost town. Very little is known about what happened there from the summer of 1957 through the summer of 1959. According to Richard Mingus, a pair of caretakers lived at the Groom Lake facility, a man and his wife. No record of their names has been found. What is known is that after the Plumbbob series effectively shut down operations at Area 51, workers from the Atomic Energy Commission roamed the hills and valleys measuring fallout with Geiger counters in hand. As impossible as it is to imagine in the twenty-first century, in the early days of atomic testing there was no such thing as HAZMAT suits for workers performing tasks in environments laden with WMD. Instead, workers combed the desert floor dressed in white lab coats and work boots, looking for particles of nuclear fallout. According to Atomic Energy Commission documents made public in 1993, this radioactive debris varied in size, from pinhead particles to pencil-size pieces of steel.
Much to the surprise of the nuclear scientists, the atomic weapons tests revealed that sometimes, in the first milliseconds of destruction, the atomic energy actually jettisoned splintered pieces of the bomb tower away from the intense heat, intact, before vaporization could occur. These highly radioactive pieces were then carried aloft in the clouds and deposited down on places like Groom Lake, and Atomic Energy Commission workers could then locate them with magnets. But while workers measured fallout patterns, weapons planners moved ahead with preparations for the next atomic test series, which would take place the following fall. The Operation Hardtack II nuclear test series would prove even bigger than Plumbbob, in terms of the number of tests. From September 12 to October 30, 1958, an astonishing thirty-seven nuclear bombs were exploded—from tops of tall towers, in tunnels and shafts, on the surface of the earth, and hanging from balloons. Areas 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 12, and 15 served as ground zero for the detonations, all within eighteen miles of Area 51.
All but abandoned by the CIA and left to the elements, the once-bustling Area 51 facility took on a spooky, postapocalyptic feel. Guards from the test site did occasional spot tests, but the classified material had all been moved. While the barren landscape weathered the fallout, the animals observed around Groom Lake suffered terribly. Wild horses, deer, and rabbits roamed around the abandoned hangars and vacant airfields covered with beta radiation burns—the skin lesions caused by radiation poisoning that had plagued so many people and animals in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the war. It was also during this period that a rare breach of security over Area 51 airspace occurred. On July 28, 1957, a Douglas Aircraft Company employee named Edward K. Current made what he said was an emergency landing on the former U-2 airstrip at Groom Lake. Mr. Current told Atomic Energy Commission security officers who questioned him that he had been on a cross-country training flight when he became lost and ran low on fuel. He was held overnight and released. The following day, the Nevada Test Organization uncharacteristically issued a press release stating that a private pilot had mistakenly landed on the “Watertown landing strip.” Mr. Current never made a public statement about his curious visit and remains the only civilian who ever landed at Area 51 uninvited in a private airplane, got out, and roamed around.
Meanwhile, in Washington, DC, Richard Bissell waited for presidential approval to plan more overflights using U-2s stationed at secret CIA facilities