Area 51

Area 51 map

Made famous by the movie Independence Day, Area 51 is a classified military base in Nevada near Groom Lake that is the home to the most advanced aircraft and weapons testing by the United States. It is an irony that this highly “secret” base is wellknown enough that tourists know where it is— although the tight security provided by the Wackenhut corporation ensures that few get close enough to see much.

Area 51 (also called “Dreamland,” for Data Repository and Electronic Amassing Management) covers 38,500 acres of land northwest of Las Vegas near Rachel, Nevada, and close to the old Nellis, Nevada, test range. It is nestled within several mountain ranges that provide still more privacy and security.

Nevertheless, television news shows such as Sightings and Strange Universe have produced features on Area 51. Up to 5,000 personnel per day are flown in on chartered aircraft; the lands surrounding the base feature motion sensors, security cameras, and constant patrols by the Wackenhut guards.


In 1955, the government gave Lockheed Aircraft’s designer of the U-2 spy plane the task of finding a test base, and after looking at three locations, he selected Groom Lake. Operations commenced later that year under the name “Paradise Ranch” or simply “The Ranch.”

It was officially designated Area 51 in 1958 by the Atomic Energy Commission, but in 1970 the United States Air Force (USAF) took over operations at Groom Lake, and it is currently administered by the Air Force Flight Test Facility at Edwards Air Force Base. The USAF is known to have tested the F-117 Stealth fighter there, and likely the B-2 Spirit bomber was also tested at Area 51. In the 1970s, Soviet MiG aircraft were taken there and examined.

A number of programs that eventually did not produce working aircraft or weapons also were tested there, including cruise missile variants, the Lockheed Darkstar unmanned vehicle, stealth helicopters, and the Osprey. Lights in the sky have been seen from a distance on many nights, which some observers attribute to proton beam systems.

Somewhere in area 51

Some claim more than U.S. aircraft are tested there. Robert Lazar, a videotape producer who claims to have worked at Area 51, tells lecture audiences that the facility tests alien spaceships and “reverse-engineers” extraterrestrial technology under the supervision of the mysterious government body “Majestic 12.”

One of the more extravagant claims is that the government is holding aliens—either living or dead—at the base. (A similar claim is made about Hangar 18 at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio.) In some cases, these aliens help humans decipher and decode the technology, from which, it is alleged, we have reverse-engineered microwave ovens, cellular phones, and computers.

More exotic technologies are also tested there, according to Lazar and others. The “Pumpkin Seed” and Aurora aircraft have supposedly been operating out of Area 51 for years. But the difficulties associated with reverse-engineering even earthly technologies are substantial.

Even the Soviet Union found it difficult to work backward from captured U.S. aircraft. The notion that humans could create useful weapons or equipment from the debris of an alien vessel is based on the presumption that it would not be so advanced as to defeat any attempts to understand it.

Still others maintain that not only have the aliens helped us reverse-engineer technology, but they actually have taken up residence in the towns surrounding Area 51, such as Rachel and Little A’Le’Inn. According to this view, the aliens act as extraterrestrial flight instructors for humans, possibly in exchange for access to human subjects upon whom they conduct tests.

More recently, an offshoot of this theory claims that conflict broke out between the humans and aliens, which resulted in complete alien dominance of the base at Area 51. Thus, the base and others like it (the supposed alien hideouts at Laguna Cartagena, Puerto Rico, and Archuleta Mesa in New Mexico) have become alien enclaves that humans may not enter. This was to provide the foundation for a worldwide takeover of all humans.

The region around Area 51 is home to “Ufomindand Aliens on Earth,” a small company that specializes in “investigating” the Groom Lake facility. Regardless of the size of the facility and the known operations, the U.S. government refuses to acknowledge the existence of the base.

Benedict Arnold

Benedict Arnold

A military commander during the American Revolution, Benedict Arnold (1741–1801) felt that he had been insufficiently rewarded for his service. In revenge and in order to advance his own flagging career, Arnold conspired with the loyalists to betray General Washington by surrendering West Point to the British in September 1780, but the plot was foiled.

Son of a prominent Connecticut and Rhode Island founding family, Benedict Arnold had the advantages of a sound Latin education and family support to establish him in a druggist and bookselling business, as well as a good marriage to Margaret Mansfield, the daughter of a prosperous neighbor.

Arnold, however, evidenced a wild streak, running away at age fifteen to join Connecticut troops fighting the French in the Seven Years’ War, and engaging in Caribbean trade as the master of a cargo ship. Arnold also served as the captain of the governor of Connecticut’s guard, a position he held when news of Lexington and Concord reached him in 1775.


Against the advice of the governor, Arnold assembled volunteers, armed them from colony stores, and marched them to Boston to aid in the struggle. With the support of Dr. Benjamin Warren, Arnold secured a colonel’s commission from Massachusetts and raised more than 400 men for an assault on Fort Ticonderoga.

En route, he joined with Ethan Allen and his Vermont men and tried to assume command over both groups. When Allen refused, Arnold rankled, but went along as a volunteer. He was particularly upset that the Connecticut legislature rewarded Allen for this success by giving him command of the captured fort.

Arnold then proposed a daring winter raid on Quebec, and led a force of approximately 1,000 men across northern Maine with few supplies, an achievement that soured when the force proved unable to take Quebec, even with reinforcements from American-captured Montreal. Although badly wounded in the leg, Arnold oversaw the U.S. withdrawal from Canada, and in a brilliant delaying tactic, engaged the British in the Battle of Valcour Island in Lake Champlain, preventing a British invasion of New England that year.

Although promoted to brigadier for his actions, Arnold resented the politics of the revolution, which demanded men of less ability but from more powerful colonies be given commands. As a supporter of Washington, Arnold also ran afoul of the members of the Conway cabal, who stalled his promotion and accused him of misusing army property.

Learning of a British army marching south into New York, Washington dispatched Arnold to join Generals Philip Schuyler and Horatio Gates. Arnold commanded the left wing at the Battle of Saratoga, and, acting against the more cautious Gates’s orders, broke the British advance by rushing onto the field to rally his men, and was again wounded in the leg.

Washington rewarded the now crippled Arnold with command of the recently recaptured city of Philadelphia, where he quickly gathered a willing audience of British loyalists and disgruntled rebels to hear his complaints against the Continental Congress and fellow commanders: no recognition for his heroic service, the promotion of junior and less competent men, and endless politics and petty gestures.

Living beyond his means, Arnold courted the daughter of William Shippen, a prominent loyalist, and picked fights with the executive council of Pennsylvania. Joseph Reed, the head of the council, twice brought Arnold to court-martial, and although Arnold was acquitted of all but two trivial charges and praised by Washington, he felt betrayed by the government he had served at such great cost to himself.

While in Philadelphia, Arnold met Beverly Robinson and made contact with British officer John André, a former suitor of Arnold’s fiancée (and later second wife), Margaret Shippen. Arnold saw an opportunity to salvage his own career and the failing cause of the revolution by aiding a British victory, for which he expected lavish rewards and a peace treaty that would offer the colonies the privileges they demanded in the negotiations of 1775.

Citing historical instances, including that of General Monck, who engineered the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, Arnold convinced himself that his motives were of the highest order. He then asked for and received command of the key Hudson River fortress of West Point, with the object of betraying it to the British. Sir Henry Clinton, the British commander in New York, promised Arnold 50,000 dollars in gold, and the commission of a British brigadier-general.

André conferred with Arnold near West Point on the night of 20 September 1780, and the two men agreed that the fort should fall as General Washington returned from Hartford, where he was scheduled to meet with the French commander Rochambeau.

The West Point garrison should be deployed inefficiently and the British allowed to take control with as few casualties as possible. Clinton’s men were to attack as Washington approached, with the aim of possibly capturing the commander-in-chief of the Revolutionary army and his forces.

Unfortunately, André had to leave this meeting by land, carrying written reports of the fort’s defenses in his boots, and using a false pass in the name of “John Anderton.” Going against his instructions from Clinton, André exchanged his officer’s greatcoat and scarlet uniform coat for a borrowed American jacket (this disguise ultimately led to André being hanged as a spy, rather than as a British officer).

At Tarrytown, three militiamen stopped André, and captured him after André wrongly assumed them to be loyalists and identified himself. André then attempted to convince them he was a double agent, acting on a pass from Arnold, but the militiamen, flushed with their triumphant capture, searched him enthusiastically, revealing the West Point plans.

The local commander, sensing a conspiracy, refused to send André to Arnold, but sent a letter to West Point asking for instructions. Meanwhile, Washington’s entourage arrived and was eating breakfast with the Arnolds when the warning letter arrived.

Arnold paused to say goodbye to his wife before taking one of his guest’s horses and escaping to the barge Vulture, moored down the river, which rowed him to New York City and the safety of Clinton’s headquarters. Margaret Shippen Arnold stalled Washington by falling into hysterics when he arrived, having received a letter from André himself fully confessing the plan.

Arnold was stunned to be treated shabbily by Clinton, who disliked Arnold personally and blamed him for the death of André, Clinton’s adjutant, and did not reward him for the failed venture. Now in British pay, and with the rank of brigadier, Arnold led a raid into Virginia in 1781, but accomplished little.

In 1782, he arranged to reunite with his wife and spent the winter in London, where he was reviled as a turncoat despite being praised by King George III. After the revolution ended, Arnold attempted to start a trading business in New Brunswick, but this failed, and he retired permanently to London on his army pension. Arnold’s last years were spent in bitterness at his treatment by the British and resentment at the failure of his plan to emerge as the savior of America.

Aryan Nations

Aryan Nations

Aryan Nations was founded by Richard Girnt Butler in the 1970s as the political arm of the Church of Jesus Christ Christian, part of the religious movement called Christian Identity. Aryan Warriors, as they are called, believe it is their duty to fight for the preservation of the Aryan race against the scourge of international Jewish communism, which they believe seeks the destruction of the white race.

Butler was an associate of Wesley Swift—the founder of the original Church of Jesus Christ Christian in 1946 and Christian Identity’s most successful proponent. Butler’s goal for Aryan Nations has long been to build a white homeland in the northwest of the United States.

Aryan Nations reached its peak of popularity and influence in the mid-1980s, following years of inflation, sluggish economic growth, and the farm crisis. The group occupied a forty-acre compound in northern Idaho, which was known by many in the survivalist right as the international headquarters of white nationalism.


By 1986, Aryan Nations claimed over 6,000 members nationwide, had created eighteen state offices, and began hosting the Aryan World Congress, an annual convention of Ku Klux Klan members, skinheads, and various other neo-Nazis. Like most Identity Christians, Butler preaches that only Aryans are descended from Adam and are engaged in a millennial struggle against the forces of darkness, the Jews.

Jews are the literal children of Satan, the descendants of Cain, who was the offspring of Eve’s physical seduction by Satan. By controlling the international banking system and promoting such practices as abortion and intermarriage, “world Jewry” is gradually forcing the extinction of the white race. According to the Aryan Nations platform, “The Jew is like a destroying virus that attacks our racial body to destroy our Aryan culture and the purity of our Race.”

Consequently, Aryan Warriors prepare for a coming race war, “a day of reckoning” when the enemy will be defeated and Christ will establish his true kingdom on earth. In 2000, Aryan Nations was forced into bankruptcy and the sale of its compound and name after a jury awarded over six million dollars in a lawsuit brought by Victoria and Jason Keenan.

The Keenans claimed that they had been assaulted and shot at by security guards outside the Aryan Nations Idaho compound. Although its future is in doubt, several former Aryan Nations members have founded splinter groups, and the aging Butler, now well into his seventies, has named a successor and insists the group will rebuild.

Asian Americans

Asian Americans

Like other minorities, Asian Americans have repeatedly been the target of conspiracy-infused scapegoating. The term “yellow peril” was first used to refer to Chinese and later Japanese immigration in the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century, but it was rapidly extended to all Asians seen as a threat to Western Christian civilization.

This conspiracy-minded fear gave birth to an imagery soon exploited by the media (press, cartoonists, dime novels, comics, and motion pictures) of legions of Asians sweeping into the country, to destroy the white man, and take his job and his women.

The roots of the “yellow peril” can be traced back to the time of Attila the Hun and the subsequent sacking of Rome by the Barbarians, and much later to Genghis Khan and Mongolian invasions of Europe, whose inhabitants lived under the threat of invasion. These deeply ingrained fears were passed on from one generation to the other, and crossed the Atlantic, to be revived in nineteenth-century America.


In the United States, the “yellow peril” needs to be considered as part of the general ideology of nativism, which was strengthened by the large numbers of immigrants entering the country during the nineteenth century. In the case of Asians, the immigration of Chinese laborers—coolies— started in the 1840s, accelerating with the 1849 gold rush in California.

In 1852, over 20,000 Chinese, mostly from the Canton area, immigrated to work in gold mines. A new flow started in the late 1860s, when the U.S. government signed the Burlingame Treaty (1868), which opened the doors to Chinese workers, wanted to build the transcontinental railroad.

As many historians and wise contemporaries noted, if they did come to the United States in search of work, it was because work was available and there were Americans ready to employ them. Their attitude toward work and willingness to take lower wages fueled a debate on whether cheap labor led to economic instability.

Moreover, as it became rapidly apparent that many Asians were settling permanently in the United States, the fear of miscegenation appeared, a term coined in Irish newspapers, condemning interracial marriage and the deleterious effects of sexual contact between the races.

The yellow danger poster

“A Rotten Race”

In California the idea of excluding the Chinese was part of the wider ideology of nativism. When it entered the Union as a free state in 1850, California made attempts to legislate against the entrance of nonwhites, meaning blacks and Asians. In the 1850s, the Chinese outnumbered blacks—4,000 black residents and 47,000 Chinese—and were seen as a greater threat. As an example of one of many discriminatory measures, the California Supreme Court ruled in 1854 that the Chinese could not testify in court against a white person.

They were gradually driven out of mining and agriculture; when the transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869, the Chinese turned to occupations (manufacturing, laundering, and domestic jobs) where they competed with the Irish, another recent immigrant group, who were instrumental in developing the “yellow peril” obsession.

Consequently, at the national level, U.S. legislators devoted a lot of energy to controlling Asian immigration, in spite of the opposition of the supporters of the “open” tradition inaugurated by the 1790 Naturalization Act. Although this act explicitly stated that naturalization was only possible for “free white persons,” it was targeted at blacks and not Asians, then considered as belonging to the “white” category.

In 1870, the act was amended to include blacks while excluding Asians, considered as “aliens ineligible to citizenship.” In 1882 the Chinese Exclusion Act made the naturalization of Chinese people impossible, and closed the gates. An 1884 amendment tightened both exclusions.


There remained the problem of those Chinese immigrants already residing in the United States. A series of race riots starting in California spread to Washington territory, Wyoming, and New York. Now the threat was no longer new immigration but miscegenation.

At the end of the nineteenth century, the United States defeated the Spanish in the 1898 Spanish-American war. Although the acquisition of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines satisfied the imperialists, many Americans were alarmed at the prospect of all those members of “inferior races” likely to enter the United States.

The fear of “yellow peril” led to more restrictions on immigration, especially when another Asian community, the Japanese, was unexpectedly and brutally brought to the fore by international developments in the Far East. In 1905 the Japanese defeated the Russian fleet at Port-Arthur, thus winning the Russo-Japanese War in what was publicized by the Japanese and sorely experienced by the Westerners as the first time Asian military power triumphed over Western power.

Consequently Japan lost its special exemption from immigration restrictions into the United States, which had allowed the first Japanese immigrants to go to Hawaii to work on sugar plantations, quickly followed by others who came to mainland cities, especially in the far West. They had arrived with the hope of making a better life for themselves but often faced racial prejudice.

In 1908, a gentleman’s agreement signed by Japan and the United States prohibited Japanese laborers from entering the country. It was followed in 1913 and 1920 by the California Alien Land Laws, which prevented Asian immigrants from purchasing or leasing land.

Finally, in 1922, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in Ozawa v. United States that first-generation Japanese immigrants were not eligible for citizenship, and in 1924 the Exclusion Act halted Japanese immigration altogether until 1965.

By 1920 there were well over 100,000 Japanese immigrants on the U.S. mainland, facing anti-Japanese feeling and discriminatory laws. With World War II came concentration camps, when Japanese Americans were interned in prison camps in California and other states because of fears that they would commit sabotage.

The news of mounting discrimination against Japanese immigrants and their descendants was received with shock in Japan, and perceived as humiliating, especially since Japan had been striving to convince the United States that it was a friendly nation.

This definitely contributed to the degradation of Japanese and American diplomatic relations. Only in 1988 did the U.S. Congress issue a formal apology to wartime internees of Japanese ancestry.

Concerning the fear of interracial marriage, Congress passed the 1922 Cable Act, which revoked the citizenship of any woman who married a foreign national. By 1952, twenty-nine of the forty-eight states had antimiscegenation laws forbidding marriage between “whites” and “nonwhites.”

At the end of World War II when China fell to communism, the idea of the “yellow peril” was superimposed on the threat of the “red menace,” which symbolically had the effect of locating the source of the peril no longer at home but abroad. However, in the 1980s, the notion of a “yellow peril” was revived as an internal danger through the fear of Japanese companies seeking to control the U.S. economy, and Hollywood in particular.

Atomic Secrets

Atomic Secrets

Although there are imagined conspiracies, there are also real conspiracies, and Soviet atomic spying belongs to the second category. There was a largescale espionage apparatus reaching into at least three countries—the United States, Great Britain, and Canada—during the Cold War. Historians of the 1960s and 1970s tended to dismiss the accusations of spying as products of popular paranoia during the McCarthy witch-hunts of the 1950s.

More recently, however, with the release of formerly unavailable U.S. intelligence documents and files from the Soviet Union, some historians and commentators have begun to reassess the accusations of atomic spying, arguing that the case has finally been proven; others remain convinced that the original charges were exaggerated or fabricated.

The beginning of the story dates back to late 1940, when Leonid Kvasnikov of the scientific and intelligence section of the NKVD (the Communist secret police) noted a flurry of publications in Western scientific journals dealing with atomic energy following the German chemist Otto Hahn’s successful splitting of the uranium atom. Kvasnikov instructed NKVD agents abroad to keep a watch for developments in that area.


The most important response came in September 1941—most likely from John Cairncross, then private secretary to the British government’s top scientific adviser and one of the “Cambridge Five” recruited as Soviet spies in the 1930s—telling of British plans to develop an atomic bomb. Further details about these plans were supplied by a German Communist émigré scientist working in Britain named Klaus Fuchs. The upshot was that Kvasnikov was sent to New York at the end of 1942 to head up atomic spying in the United States.

Lax (or worse) British security procedures that failed to follow up reports about Fuchs’s Communist ties allowed him to be transferred to the Manhattan Project’s atom bomb building program at Los Alamos in New Mexico.

Fuchs was probably the most important source supplying the Soviets information about how to overcome the technical problems of producing the plutonium bomb. Although he provided data about the proposed hydrogen bomb, his contribution to the Soviets in that area was not as significant.

Keep secret announcement

Fuchs was not the only Soviet spy at Los Alamos, but U.S. security officials made the mistake of dealing quietly via dismissal or transfer with those suspected of passing on information. The public at large remained ignorant of the problem until the defection in September 1945 of Igor Gouzenko, a code clerk at the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, Canada.

The data turned over by Gouzenko revealed a Soviet espionage network headed by the two top leaders of the Canadian Communist Party that included Alan Nunn May, a British physicist working for the Canadian atomic research program.

Despite the Gouzenko revelations, the search for atomic spies did not move into high gear until after the explosion of the first Soviet atomic bomb in August 1949. U.S. investigators focused their attention on Fuchs, who had by this time returned to Britain.


Under questioning, Fuchs confessed in early 1950 to his own spying—but with one exception refused to name others involved. And even regarding that one exception—his contact in the United States, Harry Gold—Fuchs did not take the initiative but simply confirmed his identity after Gold had become suspect from other sources.

The reputation of British counterintelligence was further tarnished when the Italian-born physicist Bruno Pontecorvo and his wife defected to the Soviets in August-September 1950. An even more devastating blow was the flight behind the Iron Curtain in May 1951 of two of the “Cambridge Five”—diplomats Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess. Maclean was the bigger Soviet prize because he had been the representative of the British embassy in Washington, D.C., dealing with the political aspects of atomic energy.

The Rosenbergs

By this time, the major focus of action had shifted to the United States, with the arrest on 23 May 1950 of Harry Gold. Gold’s confession implicated David Greenglass, who had worked as a mechanic at Los Alamos, and his wife Ruth. They implicated David’s sister, Ethel Rosenberg, and her husband Julius. The trial and execution (19 June 1953) of the Rosenbergs remains controversial because of complaints about the bias of the presiding judge, prejudicial actions by the prosecution, and the excessiveness of the penalty.

Many on the Left have argued (and continue to argue) that the Rosenbergs were the victims of a deliberate government conspiracy to frame them (or, in a lesser charge, that the government succumbed to the public hysteria in pushing for the death penalty), but in the eyes of most historians there now remains no question about Julius Rosenberg’s guilt. More doubtful is how active a role had been played by his wife.

She appears to have been included in the prosecution as a lever to pressure Rosenberg into naming others, and the Greenglasses—who were the government’s major witnesses—changed their testimony about her involvement only on the eve of the trial. On the other hand, Julius could have saved his life and hers by cooperating with the government had he not put his loyalty to the Stalinist regime first.

An even more valuable Soviet informant was Theodore A. (Ted) Hall, who had come to Los Alamos in 1944 as a nineteen-year-old scientific prodigy. At least as Hall would later tell the story, he had not been recruited, but had approached the Soviets on his own initiative because he felt that a United States monopoly of the atomic bomb would be a threat to the world.

Although Hall came under suspicion, the Federal Bureau of Investigation lacked sufficient hard evidence for an arrest before he and his wife left for Britain. There he built a successful career as a scientist. His definitive exposure would not come until the 1990s.

The one major actor accused of spying whose guilt remains open to question is J. Robert Oppenheimer, who had headed the Los Alamos project. Oppenheimer’s opposition to building the hydrogen bomb reinforced suspicions about his loyalty growing out of his close personal ties with Communists and fellows travelers.

Hearings in 1954 resulted in the revocation of his security clearance. Although Oppenheimer’s defenders charge that he was the victim of a baseless witch-hunt, new evidence shows that at a minimum, he had been guilty of failing to inform security officials fully about Soviet infiltration efforts of which he had knowledge.

One of the difficulties in countering Soviet atomic espionage was that the culprits were ideologically motivated rather than spies-for-hire. Thus, few would cooperate even when caught and even fewer would express any regret.

Although Fuchs pretended to do so, he left for East Germany after his release, announced that he was still a loyal Marxist, and went on to become director of the East German Central Institute for Nuclear Physics.

Estimates of the contribution made by espionage to speeding up the building of the Soviet atomic bomb range from a minimum of eighteen months to a maximum of five years. And except for the Rosenbergs none of the guilty suffered punishment commensurate with the enormity of their crimes.

Even those imprisoned—such as May, Fuchs, David Greenglass, and Gold—served no more than part of their sentences before release. Ruth Greenglass avoided prosecution because of a deal struck by her husband in return for his testimony.

At least two of Julius Rosenberg’s accomplices—Joel Barr and Alfred Sarant—fled the country and successfully disappeared. None of the “Cambridge Five” spent a day of prison time. Worst, Anatoly Yatskov, Kvasnikov’s successor as top Soviet atomic spy master in the United States, would boast that at most half of his spy network had been uncovered.

Aurora

Aurora plane

Following the initial research and development of a hypersonic “scramjet”-powered aircraft in the early 1980s, and the funding of the National Aerospace Plane (NASP) in 1984 (often mischaracterized as the “Orient Express”), rumors began to swirl that either the Air Force or the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) had already funded a secret, ultrafast aircraft code named “Aurora.” Adding to the rumors, the SR-71 Blackbird was retired in the 1980s, leaving the United States ostensibly with no human-piloted supersonic spy aircraft.

Popular Science frequently ran artists’ illustrations of a “secret, hypersonic jet” that was supposedly based at Area 51 near Groom Lake, Nevada— the site of the Defense Department’s most classified projects. The aircraft’s proposed propulsion was as shrouded in mystery as its existence.

NASP was to use a supersonic combustion ramjet, which requires no moving parts to achieve compression of the air as a turbojet does, but instead relies on the forward speed of air coming through the intake to a funnel to compress the air, known as “scramjet.”


This itself constituted a major obstacle in the program, because no wind tunnel even existed to test any article at a speed beyond Mach 8, while tunnels capable of testing larger articles for longer times could only generate winds up to Mach 5. (NASP was intended to fly at Mach 25, while Aurora, according to the magazine accounts, was supposedly capable of Mach 10.) Thus, the concept for building the aerospace plane as an entire aircraft system in the first place rested, in part, on the premise that to “test it you had to fly it.”

The “Pumpkin Seed,” another propulsion system linked to Aurora, involved a shock-wave pulse engine in which the exploding fuel propelled the aircraft through the sky at hypersonic speeds by exerting pressure on the aircraft’s flattened body, as when one squeezes a pumpkin seed between the thumb and forefinger. The “Pumpkin Seed” supposedly released a telltale vapor trail of smoke in puffs, much like a cigarette, rather than a steady stream.

The more widely held view of the propulsion system of any secret spy plane involved the scramjet, which needed another engine to get it up to supersonic speeds, at which point the scramjet could take over. A scramjet, in the most simplistic sense, is a funnel that compresses air going into the intake. The compression of the air forces it through the engine at vastly faster speeds, like putting one’s thumb over the end of a hose to accelerate the stream of water.

Igniting and combusting the fuel is a monumental task, compared to lighting a match in a hurricane. To facilitate combustion and airflow, the entire aircraft must become part of the engine design, with the forebody an intake and the aft section an exhaust. Eventually, most experts agreed a “lifting body” design (wide and flat, with short, stubby wings) was desirable.

If observers reported seeing a “Pumpkin Seed” aircraft that supposedly was the Aurora, another variant of the “secret hypersonic jet” story involved diverted funding from the NASP program. According to this well-circulated view, NASP was a front program to channel money to the real hypersonic program, the Aurora. In this theory, NASP was deliberately underfunded so as to keep it barely operable while the real support went to the black hypersonic program.

Artist conceptions of Auroras appeared, usually with text claiming they were already in existence and conducting spy operations. Most of these reports placed the speeds at between Mach 6 and Mach 10. And yet another variant of the story had the Aurora as a stealth aircraft— something extremely difficult to accomplish at the speeds credited to it.

Meanwhile, NASP found its funding cut repeatedly, until the goal of constructing an actual aircraft—even a subscale vehicle, which partially used rocket power—was abandoned. By that time, the Air Force and NASA still struggled with a scaled-down project to fly a scramjet atop a Minuteman missile, and even that was canceled.

When NASP ended in 1995, it had failed to build any full-sized scramjet engines, let alone an aircraft powered by a scramjet. The NASP/scramjet technology was divided into three smaller programs, including the X-33 and Hyper-X programs.

Rumors, however, continued to circulate about a new hypersonic spy plane called the Aurora. As early as 1992, the Wall Street Journal ran the headline “Evidence Points to Secret U.S. Spy Plane,” and a year later, Popular Science touted a “Secret Mach 6 Spy Plane.” Starting in 1994, Popular Science frequently ran articles on “the Secrets of Groom Lake.”

That year, the Federation of American Scientists alleged that NASP money was diverted for Aurora, claiming that Aurora’s budget was “hidden in plain sight” with the aerospace plane. In fact, the NASP budget was minuscule compared to the technological challenge. By 1990, according to the original 1986 plans, the program was to have been at $1 billion per year and was increasing.

Instead, it was at $250 million and falling—an amount that could not fund any serious technology, let alone a “super secret spy plane.” A more significant issue for the proponents of the Aurora to address was the lack of progress on any kind of scramjet engines. Numerous tests, at dozens of Air Force and NASA labs associated with NASP by 1995, had yet to get scramjet engines to generate thrust over drag.

Moreover, the tests that had been conducted involved running scramjets at fractions of seconds. Whereas the Blackbird utilized existing technology, improved by important innovations, moving an aircraft to the Mach 6–Mach 10 levels would have required an order-of-magnitude leap in technology not present in U.S. aeronautics in the 1990s.

B-25 Ghost Bomber

B-25 Ghost Bomber

On 31 January 1956, a Mitchell B-25 Bomber en route to Olmstead Air Force Base near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, ran out of fuel over the Pittsburgh area. The pilot was forced to ditch the plane in the Monongahela River near Homestead, Pennsylvania, after failing to make it to the Greater Pittsburgh Airport. The plane disappeared beneath the water and was never seen again.

Eyewitnesses soon came forward, claiming that the plane had been secretly removed from the river at night. Rumors and speculations about the bomber’s secret cargo spread quickly in the cold-war climate of industrial western Pennsylvania.

Flight B-25N No. 44–29125 originated at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada, on 30 January. After an overnight stop at Tinker Air Force Base, Oklahoma, the flight continued to Selfridge Air Force Base, Michigan. At Selfridge the plane was supposed to refuel, but it was discovered that it would take three hours. The crew believed that they had enough fuel to reach Olmstead, so they departed at 2:43 P.M. without refueling.


Over western Pennsylvania the fuel ran out and the pilot ditched in the Monongahela River at approximately 4:10 P.M. Recovery attempts began soon after, and the police and people working by the river rescued four crew members. The other two crew members drowned and their bodies were recovered later that year. Reports of a fifth and even a sixth man being pulled from the water circulated immediately, with newspaper stories appearing to verify this account.

According to the official record, the fifth man was a rescuer who went into the river to help, but others believed he was a secret passenger. Initially, the Coast Guard supervised the attempts to retrieve the aircraft, but on 9 February the operation was taken over by the Army Corps of Engineers. They searched for two weeks, but the plane was never located.

After the crash, many people came forward claiming to have seen the covert removal of the aircraft. Most of these accounts describe the removal of the plane by unidentified government agents in the middle of the night. These accounts often describe the plane being cut apart and loaded on a barge or train to be shipped off to a local military base.

Proponents of the secret removal theory cite a variety of evidence other than eyewitness reports to prove their case. It has been pointed out that it is difficult to lose a plane that is 12 feet tall with a 70foot wingspan in a river that has an average depth of 20–25 feet and a width of between 800 and 1,000 feet. In all other aircraft accidents involving the river, the planes have been recovered quickly.

Witnesses to the salvage operation reported seeing a helicopter fly over the crash site with a Geiger counter. They also point to problems in the official Air Force accident report. It contains discrepancies in the flight manifests and the cause factor analysis, and vital parts of the account of the crash are blacked out. Questions have also been raised about the original weight of the aircraft.

This led to speculation that the weight of the secret cargo caused the crew to underestimate the amount of fuel needed. Several researchers have suggested that the secret cargo was some type of nerve gas or chemical weapon, since there were experiments with chemical weapons conducted in Oklahoma at the time. Other theories about the makeup of the cargo include atomic materials, secret or state-of-the-art communications and radar technology, Mafia money, a Russian defector, Howard Hughes, and even Las Vegas showgirls.

In the late 1990s, new scientific searches for the plane have been conducted with the use of side scan sonar and divers. The B-25 Recovery Group and the Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania have speculated that the plane may rest in a 40-foot-deep gravel pit on the bottom of the Monongahela River, which has been filled in with silt since the time of the accident. All of their searches to date have been unsuccessful, and some view this as further proof that there was a secret removal of the aircraft.