Locations // Area 51
Area 51
United States Air Force facility at Groom Lake, Nevada — a classified test site for advanced aircraft, declassified in 2013.
ALSO KNOWN AS: Groom Lake · Homey Airport · Dreamland
Officially designated Homey Airport. Confirmed by the CIA in 2013 as a development site for the U-2, A-12, and other classified aircraft programmes.
The facility sits within the Nevada Test and Training Range, beside the dry bed of Groom Lake, and its existence was a matter of public inference long before it became a matter of public record. For decades the United States government neither confirmed nor denied it; the name “Area 51” entered circulation through maps and worker accounts rather than official designation. In 2013 a declassified CIA history of the U-2 programme named the site directly, and with that the documentary record finally caught up with what aviation observers had long maintained: this is a flight-test base.
That documented purpose is considerable. Groom Lake is associated with the U-2 and A-12 reconnaissance aircraft and with later stealth development — genuine, secret, state-of-the-art aviation. We treat that programme as established fact, separate from the folklore that has grown around the site. Claims of recovered craft, captive non-humans, or reverse-engineered technology rest on testimony rather than documents, and we say so plainly.
We hold the two strands apart deliberately. Where the secrecy is explained by a known and acknowledged aircraft programme, we record that explanation; where a claim extends beyond it, we mark the boundary and cite what little trail exists.
CASE FILES
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LO-26002 // Las Vegas and the Nevada desert near Groom Lake, Nevada, United States
Bob Lazar, S-4 and Element 115
In May and November 1989, Las Vegas television station KLAS-TV broadcast interviews by reporter George Knapp with a man — first disguised as "Dennis", later named as Robert "Bob" Lazar — who said he had worked at a facility he called S-4, near Area 51, reverse-engineering extraterrestrial craft powered by a stable superheavy element with atomic number 115. Element 115 was later synthesised for real and named moscovium, but the isotopes produced survive for tens of milliseconds, not indefinitely. The claim of a reverse-engineering programme rests on Lazar's testimony alone; the US Department of Defense reported in March 2024 that it found no empirical evidence for any such programme.
CONFIDENTIAL -
AL-26003 // Las Vegas, Nevada, United States // tagged
Las Vegas Backyard NHI Encounter
On the night of the thirtieth of April 2023 a bright fireball crossed the skies over the US Southwest and was independently logged by the American Meteor Society. About an hour later a Las Vegas family called 911 to report that eight- to ten-foot non-human beings were standing in their backyard. Las Vegas Metropolitan Police responded, found no physical evidence, and closed the case; the beings rest entirely on witness testimony and a later family cellphone video.
CONFIDENTIAL -
UF-26008 // Los Alamos, Sandia and Kirtland installations, New Mexico, United States // tagged
Los Alamos Green Fireballs and Project Twinkle
Between late 1948 and 1951, brilliant green fireballs were repeatedly observed on near-horizontal, silent paths over New Mexico's most sensitive nuclear installations. The sightings alarmed the Atomic Energy Commission, the FBI and the Air Force enough to convene a secret conference at Los Alamos on the sixteenth of February 1949 and to launch a dedicated observation study, Project Twinkle. Twinkle's final report of November 1951 closed the effort, with the official conclusion that the objects were likely natural in origin.
CONFIDENTIAL