Fly to Area 51 on a northerly course from Las Vegas and you’ll see a Nevada landscape that is classic American Southwest: snowcapped mountains, rolling hills, and desert valley floors. Bob Lazar would not have seen any of this on his approach to Groom Lake because the window curtains on his Janet Airlines flight would have been drawn—they always are when newcomers arrive. The airspace directly over Area 51 has been restricted since the mid-1950s, which means no one peers down onto Area 51 without authorization except satellites circling the globe in outer space. By the time Lazar arrived, the 575-square-mile airspace had long been nicknamed the Box, and Air Force pilots at nearby Nellis Air Force Base know never to enter it. Distinctly visible at the very center of Area 51’s Box sits a near-perfect six-mile-diameter endorheic basin, also known as a dry lake. It was the lake bed itself that originally appealed to the CIA; for decades it had doubled as a natural runway for Area 51’s secret spy planes.
Almost everything visible on approach to Area 51 from the air is restricted government land. There are no public highways, no shopping malls, no twentieth-century urban sprawl. Where the land is hilly, Joshua trees and yucca plants grow, their long spiky leaves extended skyward like swords. Where the land is flat, it is barren and bald. Except for creosote bushes and tumbleweed, very little grows out here on the desert floor. The physical base—its hangars, runways, dormitories, and towers—begins at the southernmost tip of Groom’s dry lake. The structures spread out in rows, heading south down the Emigrant Valley floor. The hangars’ metal rooftops catch the sunlight and reflect up as the Janet airplane enters the Box. A huge antenna tower rises up from the desert floor. The power plant’s cooling tower comes into view, as do the antennas on the radio-shop roof, located at the end of one of the two, perpendicular taxiways. Radar antennas spin. One dish is sixty feet in diameter and always faces the sky; its beams are so powerful they would instantly cook the internal organs of any living thing. The Quick Kill system, designed by Raytheon to detect incoming missile signals, sits at the edge of the dry lake bed not far from the famous pylon featured in Lockheed publicity photos but never officially identified as located at Area 51. Insiders call the pylon “the pole”—it’s where the radar cross section on prototype stealth aircraft is measured. State-of-the-art, million-dollar black aircraft are turned upside down and hoisted aloft on this pole, making each one look tiny and insignificant in the massive Groom Lake expanse, like a bug on a pin in a viewing case.
As a passenger on the Janet 737 gets closer, it becomes easier for the eye to judge distance. Groom Mountain reveals itself as a massive summit that reaches 9,348 feet. It towers over the base at its northernmost end and is rife with Area 51 history and lore. Countless Area 51 commanding officers have spent weekends on the mountain hunting deer. Hidden inside its craggy lower peaks are two old lead and silver mines named Black Metal and Sheehan Mine. In the 1950s, one ancient miner hung on to his federal mining rights with such ferocity that the government ended up giving him a security clearance and briefing him on Area 51 activities rather than continuing to fight to remove him. The miner kept the secrecy oath and took Area 51’s early secrets with him to the grave.
At the southernmost end of the base sits a gravel pit and concrete-mixing facilities that are used to construct temporary buildings that need to go up quick. Against the sloping hills to the west sit the old fuel-storage tanks that once housed JP-7 jet fuel, specially designed for CIA spy planes that needed to withstand temperature fluctuations from ?90 degrees to 285 degrees Fahrenheit. To the south, on a plateau of its own, is the weapons assembly and storage facility. This is recognizable from the air by a tall ring of mounded dirt meant to deflect blasts in the event of an accident. Behind the weapons depot, a single-lane dirt road runs up over the top of the hill and dumps back down into the Nevada Test Site next door, at Gate 800 (sometimes called Gate 700). Old-timers from the U-2 spy plane days called this access point Gate 385, originally the only way in to Area 51 if you were not arriving by air. On the Area 51 side of the gate, the shipping and receiving building can be found. In the height of the nuclear testing days, the 1950s and 1960s, trucks from the Atomic Energy Commission motor pool spent hours in the parking lot here while their appropriately cleared drivers enjoyed Area 51’s legendary gourmet chow.