ScienceDirect - Technol Rep Tohoku Univ ... - Garryck Osborne

NICK COOK 149
that didn't exist a hundred miles north of Las Vegas, north of a bend on
Highway 375—the "Extraterrestrial Highway," as it had been dubbed by
the Nevada state legislature.
Here, Tikaboo Valley, 25 miles wide and six times as long, as lonely a
place as you could find on the planet, stretched into the distance till it
merged with the horizon.
It was Tikaboo Valley that connected the outside world to Area 51,
hidden as it was by the jagged peaks and ridges of the Groom Range and
the Jumbled Hills. Right above it, high on top of Bald Mountain,
elevation 9,380 feet, sat the radar site and observation post that gave
security officers an unrestricted view of all traffic entering and transiting
the area. It was the first of several security rings and sensor networks
employed by the Air Force to ensure that nothing penetrated the discreet
cordon sanitaire around the base. The others, if you were unlucky, could
be a lot less passive, more in-the-face: the sworn-in deputies from
"Pittman Station" who patrolled the valley looking for miscreants and
who occasionally locked them up and were said to throw away the key;
and the Black Hawk helicopters that had been known to sandblast the
odd Desert Rat from his hidey-hole on the high ground overlooking Area
51's 27,000-foot run way.
Already one of the longest paved runways in the world, it had been
specially extended in the late 1980s in a move that supported the widely
held view in the "stealth-watcher" community that a very high-speed
aircraft was under test at Area 51. Couple this with the unmarked charter
planes and buses with their windows blacked out that were ferrying up to
4,000 workers in and out of the base from Los Angeles and Las Vegas
every week and word soon got around that Area 51 was as busy as it
had ever been in its 40-year history—ever since, in fact, Kelly Johnson,
the Skunk Works' founder, brought the U-2 here for testing in the
mid-1950s.
But alongside the stealth-watchers, another set of pilgrims regularly
made the trip to Tikaboo Valley. Many of these people had been drawn
to Area 51 by the revelations of a man named Robert Lazar, who in 1989
claimed to have worked on recovered alien spacecraft at a site adjacent to
Area 51 known as S-4. While Lazar's claims seemed wild, his followers
consistently reported sightings of strange orbs of light over the base;
objects that seemed to defy the way aircraft—even the top secret variety
at Groom Lake—ought to fly.
But tread the fine line between the world of black programs and the
world of UFOs and you entered another minefield of disinformation.
In 1997, the CIA admitted in a set of released documents that it had