Web Site Posts Most Revealing Photos Ever Of Area 51

April 18, 2000
Kevin Fagan
© The San Francisco Chronicle Web site at http://www.sfgate.com 

No little green men. No ornate flying saucers. No bizarre, flashing force fields.

So much for the big UFO conspiracy theories about the ultra-secret Area 51 military test site in Nevada - for now, that is.

A Web site based in North Carolina has posted the most extensive photos ever seen of Area 51, the focus of more space alien theories than just about any other place on earth. And the breathlessly awaited answer to the question of what it looks like out there is:

It's a big, desert missile and aircraft range, that's what. A mountainous, arid nowhere with a lot of runways, boxy buildings and crater holes from decades of bombing tests.

Of course, the photos will now have to be peered at, analyzed and studied exhaustively by the vast community of extraterrestrial and governmental theorists, and they may yet find something that unlocks a secret or two. And nobody knows, still, what bunkers or spaceships or aliens might be hiding beneath the ground, away from the cameras, or inside the many mountains at the base.

But at first transmission, the Internet photos yielded no smoking guns. Or particularly secret looking stuff, for that matter.

"We have some shots pretty much like those up on our wall right now, have had 'em for years. And they are plenty interesting but I'm not sure they really prove anything,'' said Carol Syska, director of the UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell, New Mexico, another place that hears a lot of space alien talk. Also in a desert, Roswell is where UFO aficionados say an extraterrestrial-populated craft slammed into the sand 52 years ago.

"It's going to take a lot more investigation to know for sure,'' Syska said.

The pictures posted by Aerial Images on www.terraserver.com aren't by any means the first of the mysterious testing range, located 75 miles north of Las Vegas in the vast, ecologically harsh and sparsely inhabited center of Nevada.

Amateur sleuths of every stripe, from the serious to the silly, have been distributing photos of the site for years. Presumably they address theories that captured extraterrestrial craft or aliens are squirreled away there, or that a sinister world-wide government is being plotted in secret bunkers.

And there is no shortage of information to go with those photos- punching the words ``Area 51'' into the Yahoo search engine alone serves up 2,427 Web sites. However, photos to date have been missing parts of the 38,400-acre rectangular missile and testing range, and Aerial Images' offerings are meant to fill in the gaps, company spokesman David Mountain said.

The pictures, all in black and white, were snapped by a Russian satellite launched from Kazahkstan in 1998 by Aerial Images and five partners, including Microsoft, to map the Earth's surface.

"There's high interest in Area 51, and we want to present images people want to see,'' Mountain said, explaining why the range is getting its own department on the Web site before other places, such as South America, for example. ``We're not really into the aliens angle of this, but there is certainly a lot in there for people who wonder about UFOs.

"If people want to draw conclusions from what they see on our site, that's fine.''

The 20 images on the site are presented pretty much as snapped, with mildly titillating headlines alluding to the mystery around the range. One, showing a squiggle of airstrips in the bland desert sand, is labeled, ``Mystery Airfield. What do YOU think this is?''

The resolution on the images is sharp enough to distinguish a car from a truck, Mountain said, ``but not a Ford from a Chevy.'' They show tennis courts, runways, somewhat conventional-looking military jets, a baseball field, hundreds of buildings and a swimming pool.

Probably the most interesting objects are the jagged craters from missile testing, some blasted into the earth and some blasted out of the earth, and pictures of roads disappearing into the sides of mountains.

``There's all sorts of exciting stuff here,'' said Mountain. ``You've got an enormous area of restricted military land that's never been seen this fully before.''

The Air Force, which already knows what is there, had little to say about the new photos Monday. The military didn't acknowledge the existence of the testing range until recent years, and anything it does out there ``is so classified we can't talk about it,'' said Captain Cheryl Law, a spokeswoman at Air Force headquarters in Virginia.

The testing area is part of the Nellis Range Complex, and spreads out around Groom Dry Lake. Since the 1950s, the base has been the laboratory for top-secret aircraft development, including the U-2 and SR-71 spy planes and the B-2 stealth bomber.

Airspace is restricted over the range, but the new photos were allowed under a 1994 executive order and a 1992 international open-skies agreement.

Base air controllers call the place Dreamland, but not Area 51- that name sprouts from its designation on old gridded Nevada test-site maps.

© The San Francisco Chronicle Web site at http://www.sfgate.com 

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