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Area 51: Secrets, Myths, and the Truth Behind the Fence
Paperback
Air CombatInternational Relations
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Publisher: Independently Published
Pages: 216
Weight: 0.65
Height: 0.46 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
For seventy years, a patch of Nevada desert has held more secrets than any other piece of real estate in American history. The government built something extraordinary there - and then spent decades insisting it had built nothing at all.
Area 51: Secrets, Myths, and the Truth Behind the Fence is the definitive narrative history of America's most classified installation: from Eisenhower's 1954 secret order authorizing a spy plane that would photograph Moscow from seventy thousand feet, through the titanium aircraft that flew at Mach 3 when no such speed was supposed to exist, through the stealth programs that made radar obsolete, through the legal battles of workers whose health the government sacrificed and whose records it classified, through the mythology that Bob Lazar, The X-Files, and Independence Day built into a global cultural phenomenon - and into the congressional hearings and Pentagon reports of the present decade, where the questions have grown more urgent and the answers remain just out of reach.
The truth about Area 51 is this: what the government actually built there was extraordinary enough to make the mythology almost unnecessary. The U-2 spy plane that could cross a continent in seventy minutes. The A-12 OXCART that flew at ninety thousand feet so fast that its titanium skin burned to the touch. The F-117 Nighthawk that crossed Iraq on the first night of Desert Storm without appearing on a single radar screen. These were not alien gifts. They were human achievements - produced in secrecy, tested in isolation, flown by men whose names could not be acknowledged and whose sacrifice could not be honored in public.
But secrecy has a price. Every classified aircraft that streaked across the Nevada sky without explanation fed the mythology that the government was hiding something extraordinary. Every weather balloon cover story that failed to account for what witnesses had actually seen trained a generation to distrust official explanations. Every legal maneuver that invoked state secrets to defeat the claims of workers whose lungs the open-pit burning had destroyed confirmed that the institution behind the fence was capable of any concealment the security apparatus required. The government that built the most advanced aviation technology in history also built, as the unavoidable byproduct of the secrecy that protected it, the most durable conspiracy mythology in American cultural life.
This book tells both stories - the documented and the invented, the titanium and the mythology, the men in the hangars and the trucks on the ridges - with the rigor that the historical record demands and the human honesty that the people who built the secret city deserve. The fence is still standing. The work is still classified. And the question of what lies behind it - what was built, what was hidden, what was lost - is still the most American question the Nevada desert has ever been asked to hold.
The most thorough and analytically serious history of Area 51 yet written - a book that finally gives the real story the attention the mythology has always received.
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