Pilot reveals the secrets of ‘alien base’ at Area 51

Such was the secrecy shrouding the Nevada site, the US refused for decades to acknowledge its existence. Now, a pilot has photographed it from the air.

Gabriel Zeifman’s image shows the base has expanded in recent years. Picture: Gabriel Zeifman

Such was the secrecy shrouding the military base known as Area 51 that the US government refused for decades to even acknowledge its existence.

The vacuum of information about the desert site in Nevada fostered conspiracy theories featuring crash-landing aliens, teleportation, tourism and a recent gathering of alien-spotters who urged Facebook followers to “Storm Area 51”. They never did.

Now, however, a pilot, Gabriel Zeifman, has taken a series of photographs of the base from his Cessna, approved by local air traffic controllers, and posted them online. He failed to expose little green men or flying saucers but the pictures of Area 51 and the adjoining Tonopah Test Range Airport revealed that whatever goes on inside has been hugely expanded in recent years.

 

Mr Ziefmann found new structures that dwarf nearby berths used for the F-117 stealth fighters and a huge hangar isolated at the end of a runway that is said to have appeared five years ago.

Mr Zeifman, an air traffic controller, told the military website The War Zone that he had been routed over often restricted areas because they were not in use that day. Flying from the town of Tonopah to Rachel, Nevada, he “got some good views of Groom (Area 51) from the north”. He said he was given permission to fly along the edge of the restricted airspace that covers the test site. “I only had my cell phone camera at the time so I waited to come back with a good camera,” he said.

He flew again with a friend and a better camera on a day with a bright, clear sky. “I don’t have any kind of special authorisation,” he said. “They’re just random transits that I’ve been given en-route to other places when the airspace is cold [free of military traffic].”

Area 51 was constructed in the 1950s beside the Nevada Test Site for nuclear weapons and was used for trials of spy planes, stealth aircraft and attack jets.

Conspiracy theorists speculated that the metal rods and debris found by a farmer at Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947 and carted away by the military, were pieces of an alien spacecraft that had been taken to Area 51 for rebuilding.

Pilot Gabriel Zeifman.

Johnathan Turley, a Washington DC lawyer who represented workers who became sick at the site in a case in the mid-1990s, argued that the veil of secrecy there allowed the government to evade responsibility. Workers said that hazardous waste and discarded equipment were doused in jet fuel and burnt, causing toxic smoke that they called “London fog”.

“At one point [during the case] I offered to drive the judge personally to the base and point at it from a mountaintop,” Mr Turley wrote. “The government then acquired the mountaintop and barred the public.”

The workers received no compensation for their injuries, which were said to include respiratory and skin conditions, but Mr Turley said the case made the government clean the site up.

Area 51 was officially recognised only in 2013 in response to a request from an academic. An internal CIA account of the U-2 reconnaissance aircraft program revealed that it was formed in 1955 after President Eisenhower “approved the addition of this strip of wasteland, known by its map designation as Area 51, to the Nevada Test Site”.

The Times