Area 51 has been firmly embedded in American lore, often as the home of little green men secreted away in the Nevada desert. Now, the U.S. government has acknowledeged the existence of the site in a history of the Lockheed CL-282, also known as the U-2 spy plane.
In response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed in 2002, George Washington University's National Security Archive has published the CIA-authored report, The Central Intelligence Agency and Overhead Reconnaissance: The U-2 and Oxcart Programs, to its site, complete with a full torrent of the document to minimize the load on its servers.
The report, authored in 1992, was originally classified as "secret," but was declassified with redactions in 1998. Secreted away within those redactions were the references to Area 51, the site also known as "Groom Lake" in the Nevada desert. Those redactions were almost all eliminated in June; the university then published the report.
Jarnot.comA Google Earth shot of Area 51
Following World War II, the government's goal was to keep tabs on known and potentially hostile countries, with airborne surveillance seen as a means with great potential. The government also believed that a plane flying above 65,000 feet would evade the early-warning radars used by Russia and other hostile nations, and set out to develop a plane to do just that: the Lockheed CL-282 , which was renamed the U-2 in July 1955, according to the report.
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