UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

The name is almost synonymous with American black projects and secrecy, and there is perhaps no other government installation or operation that has aroused more interest over the years.

In fact, if just one term could be associated with all the claims of exotic looking, experimental U.S. test aircraft from over the years–as well as the possibility of a few “crash retrievals” that may represent technology that was never ours to begin with–there is one obvious name stands out among the rest.

Area 51.

Few places are associated with more rumors and secrecy than America’s famous Area 51. Prior to the administration of President Barack Obama, no sitting U.S. commander in chief had ever said its name publicly; this was primarily because the test site remained officially off-the-books until 2013, when the CIA declassified historical documents about the U-2 and Oxcart spy plane programs, which were developed there.

The Groom Lake site as it appeared in 2010, as seen from the air

(Credit: Wikimedia Commons).

However, what many aren’t aware of when it comes to Area 51 is just how much information about the “secret” installation had already been made public prior to that time. In fact, some would have argued that Area 51–widely considered one of the most secretive facilities in all of American government–had never really been all that secret.

The history of the site is well known today. With the end of World War II and the emergence of the new world superpowers, the United States knew it had to have advance knowledge of any weapons and technological advancements being developed in the Soviet Union. Arguably, the best way to achieve that would be to use sophisticated aerial photography to help visualize what was happening behind the Iron Curtain; this would obviously require new kinds of aircraft capable of such missions.

Officials with the U-2 spy plane’s Development Projects Staff began to look for an area within the United States where such aircraft could be developed and tested safely, and away from the public. According to the CIA’s history of the site’s discovery, it was during a flight over Nevada in the early 1950s that officials spotted “what appeared to be an airstrip by a salt flat – Groom Lake – near the northeast corner of the Atomic Energy Commission’s (AEC) Nevada Proving Ground, which had been used during World War II as an aerial gunnery range for Army pilots.”

It seemed like the most logical place for spy plane tests to be carried out, although there were a few issues. As a CIA.gov article on tests at the site discusses, “upon further discovery, the U-2 Project Staff learned Groom Lake was not actually part of the AEC proving ground. They asked the AEC to add the Groom Lake strip to its real estate holdings in Nevada, to which the AEC readily agreed, and the deal was approved by President Eisenhower.”

For years thereafter, portions of the highly clandestine U-2 aircraft were developed out at nearby Barstow, California, draped in sheets, and then flown in transport aircraft out to the Groom Lake facility for final assembly there. Pilots were brought in (they were referred to as “drivers”, since the operation was being carried out by the CIA, rather than the Air Force), and training aimed at getting personnel up to speed on the specifics of flying these large, and potentially fragile spy planes began.

According to the CIA, the famous name “Area 51” was simply what the location’s map designation had been at that time (author Annie Jacobsen, who wrote an uncensored history of the location in 2011, also notes that the “51” was a reference to the year the site was established). Since “Area 51″ left a bit to the imaginations of those prospective employees who might come and work there, nicknames like “Paradise Ranch” became common, as well as “Watertown,” in reference to the rainwater runoff that would periodically spill off the surrounding mountains and fill the otherwise dry bed of Groom Lake.

Although it is without question that Area 51 and the projects carried out there over the years have been done so with a degree of secrecy, the idea that Area 51 had been largely undisclosed until 2013 isn’t entirely true. In fact, a review of early documentation from around the time of its founding shows that the site, and its various nicknames, were pretty common knowledge.

Area 51 site map, as depicted in declassified CIA documents released via its CREST program

(Credit: CIA.gov/Wikimedia Commons).

“The ‘base that doesn’t exist’ has always been public knowledge,” argues Peter Merlin, an aerospace writer and historian. “Construction of the airfield at Groom Lake, Nevada was announced by the government, and its existence has been repeatedly acknowledged by official sources.” Merlin has argued in the past that a number of unclassified maps produced over the years displayed the “secret” location, but that “Test Site insiders, government officials, military personnel, and the general public have, however, unknowingly conspired to perpetuate the myth that the existence of the base is a closely guarded secret.”

Perhaps the earliest public mention of Area 51 appeared in a press release on May 18, 1955, penned by Seth Woodruff Jr., who was at that time Manager of the Atomic Energy Commission’s Las Vegas Field Office. Woodruff wrote about the personnel from the Reynolds Electrical and Engineering Company being brought in “to begin preliminary work on a small, satellite Nevada Test Site installation.” Runways and a few buildings were planned for the site, which Woodruff said would be “essentially temporary.”

Although the name “Area 51” was never used in the press release, it is obvious in hindsight what Woodruff was referring to. The newly announced project was referenced again in an article in 1955 that appeared in the Las Vegas Review-Journal:

“Construction at the Nevada Test Site installation a few miles north of Yucca Flat which was announced last spring is continuing. Data secured to date has indicated a need for limited additional facilities and modifications of the existing installation. The additional work which will not be completed until sometime in 1956 is being done by the Reynolds Electrical and Engineering Company, Incorporated, under the direction of the Atomic Energy Commission’s Las Vegas branch office.”

During this period, the site was more commonly referred to by its “Watertown” moniker, although this wasn’t always the case. As Peter Merlin notes, a January 1960 edition of the N.T.S. Bulletin (“N.T.S.” referencing the Nevada Test Site) published a series of new telephone numbers for the installation on its front page, under the inconspicuous heading, “Area 51 Telephone Numbers” (see below). It doesn’t get much more obvious than that, especially considering that the N.T.S. Bulletin was an unclassified publication.

Other names for the site came into use over the years, which included Dreamland (the radio call sign for the base), although today, the name that is most often employed for official use is the Nevada Test and Training Range at Groom Lake. In the past, Area 51 and Watertown were both used as official names for the site, and according to T.D. Barnes, a former employee of the site and president of a similar collection of past employees called Roadrunners International, Area 51 can be found on some official maps and documentation produced by the Nevada Test Site, the Department of Energy, and other agencies. In fact, Watertown is even included on a list of legal members of the Alamo Township in Lincoln County, Nevada.

While nobody would dispute the use of secrecy in keeping Area 51 and the operations carried out there over the years away from prying eyes (and enemy spies), to say that the installation had been treated as though it “didn’t exist” until its disclosure in 2013 is a bit of a stretch. In fact, the passing references to it at that time, in relation to the CIA’s historical account of the development of the U2 and Oxcart, is probably best explained by the simple fact that Area 51 didn’t need to be “disclosed” to the public: it had already been well known by its various names, and referenced many times in print over the decades.

50 years later, the experiments still teach us things and the trash needs to be preserved

BY MARIA TEMMING

LUNAR LEFTOVERS Astronauts, like those who touched down in the Apollo 15 lunar module (shown) in July 1971, left a lot on the moon’s surface, from scientific instruments to trash.

NASA

Magazine issue: Vol. 195, No. 12, July 6, 2019, p. 26

Once on the moon, Apollo astronauts had two major goals: get themselves and the moon rocks home safe.

To make space on the cramped lunar modules for the hundreds of kilograms of moon samples, the astronauts had to go full Marie Kondo. Anything that wasn’t essential for the ride home got tossed: cameras, hammocks, boots and trash. Downsizing also meant abandoning big stuff, like moon buggies and the descent stage that served as a launchpad for a module’s lunar liftoff.

But the astronauts left more than castoffs. Starting with the Apollo 11 mission, which touched down on July 20, 1969, astronauts left six American flags and plenty of personal and political mementos. Importantly, the crews also left behind instruments for about a dozen experiments to keep tabs on lunar conditions (SN: 8/2/69, p. 95); one is still running today.

These devices “were really important parts of Apollo,” says Noah Petro, project scientist for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission. Back then, the experiments didn’t get much time in the limelight, “because humans on the surface are obviously the big story,” says Petro, who is based at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

Special Report: Moonstruck

50 years after Apollo 11, lunar science still surprises and delights

JPL/NASA

This story is part of a special report celebrating humans’ enduring fascination with the moon and exploring the many ways it affects life on Earth. See all the articles, plus our 1969 coverage of Apollo 11, here.

When we think of Apollo’s 50-year legacy, most of us probably aren’t picturing the scattered remnants of astronaut outposts gathering space dust. But as nations plan new ventures to the moon, preservationists are fighting to protect these historic sites so that future lunar visitors don’t erase the marks of humans’ first steps beyond Earth.

Solving old mysteries

By December 1972, six Apollo crews had collectively spent nearly 80 hours exploring the moon’s surface (SN: 12/23/72, p. 404). They gathered rocks, photographed the landscape and performed all manner of experiments — from unfurling metal foil to catch solar wind particles to setting off explosives and measuring the resulting seismic tremors.

Apollo 11 left behind solar-powered seismometers and a reflector array that could be paired with lasers on Earth to precisely measure the distance between Earth and the moon. On five later missions, Apollo 12 through 17 (Apollo 13 returned home without landing on the moon), astronauts left more elaborate setups powered by nuclear batteries that generated electricity through radioactive decay (SN: 11/8/69, p. 434). Some of those instruments collected data through 1977, when NASA decided to focus on other projects and pulled the plug on the whole operation (SN: 10/1/77, p. 213).

“There was this period of time where the data languished,” Petro says. But within the last decade or so, a new generation of scientists has taken up the torch, analyzing Apollo observations to answer questions lingering from early studies. Unfortunately, this isn’t nearly as simple as picking up where 1970s scientists left off, as geophysicist Seiichi Nagihara discovered when he set out to solve a decades-old puzzle about the moon’s underground temperature.

On Apollo 15 and 17, astronauts installed thermometers in the lunar surface, which took the moon’s temperature at various depths and sent the data back to Earth (SN: 9/11/71, p. 167). When Apollo-era scientists reviewed data collected through 1974, the results revealed something odd: The moon’s temperature just beneath the surface appeared to be slowly rising.

Images like this one of the Apollo 17 site reveal that the soil where astronauts drove and walked (horizontal lines) and did their work is darker than other terrain. These areas probably absorbed more sunlight, warming the underlying ground.

GSFC/NASA, ASU

“We’re talking about very minor warming,” just a couple degrees, says Nagihara, of Texas Tech University in Lubbock. But researchers at the time couldn’t figure out why. Nagihara decided to examine all the temperature data collected through 1977 to figure out what was going on. Unfortunately, the tapes that recorded these measurements were missing. This is a common problem, because during the Apollo era, data were housed at the individual labs of scientists working on each experiment and many measurements were never properly archived.

“A group of us decided to … try to hunt down the tapes,” Nagihara says. After scouring thousands of documents at NASA’s Johnson Space Flight Center in Houston, the researchers traced 440 tapes to an archive in Suitland, Md. But even those covered only about three months of observations. At the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Nagihara and colleagues discovered more temperature measurements noted by Apollo-era scientists in weekly memos. Between the recovered tapes and the memos, Nagihara’s team pieced together a picture of the moon’s temperature from 1971 through 1977.

The slow warming under the surface continued through the end of data collection, the researchers reported in April 2018 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets. In search of a source for the heat, Nagihara and colleagues turned to pictures taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been orbiting the moon since 2009 (SN: 6/11/16, p. 10). The images showed that soil stirred up by astronaut activity was slightly darker than other lunar terrain. Perhaps it was dark enough to absorb more sunlight and warm the underlying ground.

Computer simulations confirmed that the moon wasn’t heating up from internal processes. Astronauts trekking around the Apollo sites probably caused an increase in surface temperature of about 2 to 3 degrees Celsius, and the extra heat slowly spread more than a meter into the ground — causing the gradual warming detected by Apollo instruments. Turns out that astronaut footsteps left marks on the moon far deeper than those iconic boot prints.

Keeping vigil over gravity

While Nagihara and other researchers are digging up old Apollo data for new analyses, one lone project is still in full swing: the laser ranging retroreflector experiment.

This experiment uses arrays of reflectors placed on the moon by Apollo 11, 14 and 15 astronauts and anchored on two rovers left behind by the Soviets (SN: 5/20/78, p. 326). These arrays consist of special mirrors, each with three sides in the shape of a cube’s corner, which always reflect light in the exact direction from which it came. By shooting a laser beam at a corner-cube array from a telescope on Earth and clocking the time it takes for the light to return, researchers can measure the exact distance between different spots on the moon and Earth.

Still running

To measure the Earth-moon distance, arrays of “corner-cube” mirrors were set up at Apollo sites (top). Inside each circle (bottom left) is a corner cube that reflects laser light back to Earth in the exact direction it came from (illustrated, bottom right).

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: NASA; CHETVORNO/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS (CC0); NSSDC

Laser ranging retroreflector measurements have offered several insights — like the fact that the moon is withdrawing from Earth at about 3.8 centimeters per year. Plus, slight variations in the moon’s rotation suggest that the orb has a relatively small core.

Physicist Tom Murphy of the University of California, San Diego is using the corner-cube arrays to probe a question much bigger than the moon. He’s testing whether a key part of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, called the equivalence principle, holds up.

The equivalence principle states that any two objects in the same gravitational field should fall at the same rate (SN: 1/20/18, p. 9). Just like a bowling ball and a golf ball should hit the ground simultaneously, the Earth and moon should fall around the sun (that is, orbit the sun) at exactly the same rate. “You’re sensitive to any difference in how they’re [orbiting] the sun by measuring the distance between the Earth and moon as they weave around each other,” Murphy says. If the Earth-moon distance ultimately breaks with the equivalence principle, that would reveal a shortcoming of general relativity. And that, in turn, could inform the creation of a theory of quantum gravity that resolves the tension between general relativity and quantum mechanics (SN: 10/17/15, p. 28).

So far, laser ranging retroreflector measurements with centimeter-level precision haven’t shown any difference in how quickly the Earth and moon are falling around the sun. But in 2006, Murphy started collecting data with millimeter-scale precision using improved laser technology and a larger telescope at the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico.

Amassing enough data will require several more years of observation and researchers will need more sophisticated computer models to analyze the observations, Murphy says. Luckily, since the reflectors on the moon don’t require any power, he can collect data into the foreseeable future. Eventually, those observations — at the millimeter level or even smaller scales — could reveal a crack in the equivalence principle.

Since general relativity is fundamentally incompatible with quantum mechanics, something eventually has to give. The equivalence principle might be one of those things, Murphy says. “We have to turn over every rock and see where the bugs are.”

One astronaut’s trash

Thermometers and reflectors were among about a dozen types of instruments installed on the moon. Other devices measured the moon’s magnetic field and sniffed out chemical components of the moon’s tenuous atmosphere. NASA’s Lunar Data Project is restoring data from these and other Apollo experiments, so that scientists can continue to pore over the observations for years to come.

“When you have this incredibly rare resource, you can’t not keep working on it,” says planetary scientist Renee Weber of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., who studies lunar seismic data. “There are always new techniques to try” and better computer processing to tease out previously missed signals.

Based on moonquakes sensed by Apollo seismometers, Weber and colleagues reported in May that the moon may still be tectonically active, as revealed by young faults on the lunar surface called lobate scarps (SN: 6/8/19, p. 7). Understanding moonquakes could help NASA and other agencies decide where to land future spacecraft or construct buildings on the moon, Weber says. If these lobate scarps truly mark sites of tectonic activity, future lunar visitors may want to avoid them, she says.

There’s also plenty to learn by testing how well the Apollo instruments, as well as the nonscientific paraphernalia strewn across the lunar surface, have held up. All of that stuff has been exposed to the lunar elements for decades. Future expeditions could sample the detritus to get a sense of how human communities might one day fare on the moon.

“Every single thing at the sites would be a completely priceless scientific investigation,” says planetary scientist Philip Metzger of the University of Central Florida in Orlando. He can imagine scrutinizing the effects of ultraviolet radiation, solar wind and other factors on everything from batteries to camera lenses to towels and earplugs.

Metzger sees value in everything left behind on the moon, including the astronauts’ discarded bags of excrement. “We have studies of microbes lasting in space over very short amounts of time on the International Space Station,” he says, but testing whether microbes in astronaut waste have survived or mutated over the last 50 years could help determine whether life is up to the challenge of hopping between planets or even solar systems. These are “really important questions about the position of life in the cosmos,” he says.

Protecting Apollo

While Metzger and other space scientists are hoping Apollo remnants can teach us more about how humans would fare on the moon, Beth O’Leary and other archaeologists are hoping to preserve these items as testaments to the human endeavor of getting there.

“Space is not a vacuum. We carry our culture into it,” says O’Leary, of New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. The remnants of Apollo sites are important relics of a singular time in human history. Astronaut memorials, messages of peace and commemorative plaques on the moon are obvious pieces of heritage. But “even the scientific stuff has cultural importance,” she says. More than 400,000 space-age Americans at over 20,000 companies and universities across the country teamed up to put Apollo astronauts on the moon. That kind of mass collaboration, in itself, was “a cultural act, as well as a scientific or engineering feat,” O’Leary says.

Unfortunately, securing legal protections for the historical preservation of Apollo sites isn’t easy. Don’t expect the United States to establish an Apollo National Park on the moon any time soon. As fun as that sounds, it would violate the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which states that no nation can claim sovereignty over the moon’s surface.

NASA has published guidelines on how to avoid ruining Apollo artifacts in preparation for the many countries and companies that are vying for parking spots on the moon (SN: 11/24/18, p. 14). This rulebook includes policies such as the distance a future lunar spacecraft should land from Apollo sites so that the rocket exhaust doesn’t wipe Neil Armstrong’s first boot print off the face of the moon. These guidelines aren’t legally binding, Metzger says, but “no company is going to want to be known as the company that ruined one of the Apollo sites.”

Michelle Hanlon, who specializes in space law at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, has her sights on a much broader agreement to protect Apollo sites. Her nonprofit, For All Moonkind, is seeking United Nations protections for relics on the moon. The U.N. Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space is “the ideal place to negotiate a new treaty on heritage in space,” Hanlon says, though she suspects it may take decades to reach such an international deal.

By then, many more people than professional astronauts may be walking the moon, fueling concerns about visitors making off with Apollo artifacts. In 2015, a lunar sample bag used by Armstrong was mistakenly sold at a government auction for $995 and later resold for $1.8 million. Other space-age memorabilia has sold for similarly astronomical prices.

“If NASA can lose [Armstrong’s] bag, how can they keep track of all the artifacts” once people begin making regular round trips to the moon? Hanlon asks. “You can imagine [looters] going up and just grabbing artifacts and bringing them back to sell.”

It’s not just Apollo artifacts Hanlon wants to see preserved. Earlier this year, China let the first rover loose on the farside of the moon (SN: 2/2/19, p. 5), and Israel crash-landed its first spacecraft on the lunar surface (SN Online: 4/11/19). “These are all wildly important milestones” in humankind’s quest to touch the stars that deserve to be preserved, Hanlon says.

This story appears in the July 7, 2019 issue of Science News with the headline, "Lunar Leftovers: 50 years on, the Apollo landing spots still generate fervent interest from scientists and historians."

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