Lights Over Paradise Ranch

This episode takes us to the desert north of Las Vegas, to a small town named Rachel, Nevada, and the history of the area that brings thousands of sightseers to the town of 54 people. 

So what exactly is the history of the area surrounding Rachel, Nevada? Well, it's a lot less ranching and gambling, and a lot more... extraterrestrial. In fact, Rachel is the nearest town to the place known as Area 51, and we take a deep dive into the history of this top-secret facility, the potential origin of the "Men in Black" and why exactly a man originally known only as "Dennis" is the reason you probably know what Area 51 is. 

Curious? Wanna know where the aliens might be? Do you have eighteen minutes, give or take?

LISTEN TO THE EPISODE!

Transcript

1.       About 80 miles north of Las Vegas, deep into the desert, lies the town of Rachel, Nevada. 

2.       Originally founded in 1973, it started as a mining town, with most of the townspeople working in the tungsten mine nearby. 

3.       However, the mine dried up and closed in 1988 and the majority of the townspeople moved on. 

4.       Nowadays, according to the last census, the town of Rachel has 54 people living within the town limits. 

5.       Despite its small size, Rachel does a decent business in tourism, with thousands of people driving by the town and stopping in annually. 

6.       One particular restaurant, formerly known as the Rachel Bar and Grill, tends to draw in many of the tourists. 

7.       The restaurant also runs as a de-facto social hub for the town, with tours of the surrounding areas starting in the parking area, as well as many guidebooks being sold and souvenir t-shirts, 

8.       cups, bottle openers, and almost any sort of memorabilia you can think of being sold in the restaurant as well. 

9.       You could also explore the nearby ghost town of Tempiute, providing you bring enough food and water to deal with spending a day out in the desert. 

10.   There’s also a massive collection of geocaching sites off of the highway nearby, though there is an emphasis that you SHOULD NOT go beyond the north side of the highway. 

11.   As Pat Travis, the owner of the restaurant formerly known as the Rachel Bar and grill says, there’s plenty of trouble to get into if you don’t read the warning signs posted.

12.   There is also a brush with Hollywood fame as well in the town, as parts of the film Independence Day were filmed in the area. 

13.   As a thank you to the townsfolk of Rachel, the producers of the film gave them a time capsule, which was not to be opened until the year 2050. 

14.   It remains to this day installed right outside the restaurant, to be opened in another 29 years, give or take.

15.   But none of those things would seem to be enough on their own to sustain a relatively booming tourist trade. 

16.   So what exactly brings all these people to the town of Rachel, Nevada? 

17.   One hint could be the new name of the Rachel Bar and Grill: The Little A’Le’Inn. 

18.   In fact, it is the nearest town to Groom Lake, a highly classified United States Air Force facility that has another name to most people: Area 51. 

19.   I’m Braden Thorvaldson, and this is What?! Explain.   

20.   The official history of the place known as Area 51 started in April of 1955, when the CIA created the Groom Lake testing facility. 

21.   The CIA took a particular interest because they needed a place to test a new prototype airplane called the Lockheed U-2. 

22.   The U-2 was the answer to the United States government wanting to increase their aerial capacity to find out Soviet capabilities after World War 2. 

23.   The US Navy and Air Force did not want to be caught off-guard like they were at Pearl Harbor, and they reasoned that the best way of finding out what armaments the Soviets had would be a small plane that could be flown at a high enough altitude to not be detected, 

24.   but have a camera mounted on the plane to take as many photos as needed. 

25.   The Americans had intel that the highest any of the Soviet planes could fly was 45,000 feet, and they had a theory that Soviet radar couldn’t detect anything above 65,000 feet. 

26.   Thus, the bar was set that the plane needed to be able to fly over 65,000 feet in the air, and have a camera attached that was powerful enough to deliver actionable intelligence to the CIA.

27.   To add further clarification to the urgency on the American government’s part, the most recent images they had of anything west of the Ural Mountains in Russia were pictures taken from German planes during world war 2. 

28.   That was over a decade with no photographic evidence of what was happening beyond the iron curtain, and that was not a streak the CIA intended to continue if they could avoid it. 

29.   The Lockheed Aircraft company created a prototype that was most in line with what the United States government was hoping for, but the airplane’s flight capability still needed to be tested. 

30.   Most importantly, it needed to be tested in a place far away from any potential prying eyes or Soviet cameras, so the nearby Edwards Air Force Base and the Lockheed facility itself was out. 

31.   The CIA searched for a potential alternative, and found that the salt flats on Groom Lake would be perfect for their needs.  

32.   The CIA asked the United States Atomic Energy Commission to acquire the land for them, and the Groom Lake testing facility was born. 

33.   The Lockheed U-2’s designer, Kelly Johnson, nicknamed the area “Paradise Ranch” to try and convince workers to move from Lockheed’s Palmdale, California facility to the fledgeling Groom Lake. 

34.   Apparently, Johnson’s salesmanship worked, as the facility grew to three additional hangars, a control tower, a movie theatre, and a volleyball court for the personnel by July of 1955.  

35.   The CIA was so intent on maintaining the secrecy of the project that people originally based in California were flown out to Nevada on the Monday, and flown back to California on the Friday to hide the amount of permanent staff on base.

36.    However, the tales never really started to leak beyond the people around the Groom Lake facility until the testing of the U-2’s successor. 

37.   The Lockheed U-2 was designed and built on two assumptions: that the highest any soviet plane could go was 45,000 feet, and that they couldn’t radar detect anything flying above 65,000 feet. 

38.   In practice, only ONE of those assumptions proved accurate. 

39.   In fact, the first flight that a U-2 made over Soviet Airspace was not only pinged by radar, it was pinged with such accuracy that the Soviets even knew the exact altitude that the plane was flying at. 

40.   Granted, the Soviets dismissed the findings, since they had no information that a plane could even fly that high, but the issue still remained: the invisible plane was not invisible to Soviet radar. 

41.   With GARY Powers, a CIA agent who was flying a U-2 plane being shot down over Soviet airspace on May 1, 1960, the U-2 spy program was no longer effective at its primary need: to be unobserved. 

42.   After a few attempts at masking the U-2 from radar failing, Lockheed and the CIA realized that they needed a new plane that could get enough altitude to avoid Soviet detection by any means. 

43.   The design and research started anew, and eleven iterations later, construction began on the Lockheed A-12, codenamed Archangel, and testing needed to start somewhere. 

44.   To accommodate the larger A-12s and the correspondingly larger crews needed, more needed to be built in Area 51, including multiple new runways and for the first time, permanent buildings for crew and personnel to stay on site without having to be flown in and out on weekends. 

45.   Flight testing of the A-12s began on April 30th, 1962, and they first reached supersonic speed, faster than the speed of sound less than a week later.

46.    With specialized engines installed, the planes were able to reach Mach 3.2 at their fastest, and at that point, they’d be able to outfly pretty much anything in the sky. 

47.   The problems with testing planes that were on the cutting edge of technology are two-fold. 

48.   Firstly, it is impossible to hide something breaking the speed of sound. 

49.   A sonic boom is not a quiet thing, and there were enough landowners within extended earshot of the Groom Lake facility that word would have gotten around. 

50.   Secondly, these planes were designed and tested to see exactly what their limits were. 

51.   Which sometimes meant the limits get surpassed in a pretty explosive way, often by the plane smashing into the ground, and the pilot barely making it out. 

52.   Four A-12’s were lost in various stages of flight testing, but the first crash showed just how serious the CIA was about keeping the project a secret.. 

53.   The pilot managed to eject safely and hitched a ride to the nearest highway patrol office, where he called the base and explained the situation. 

54.   The CIA jumped into action, telling two farmers with fields near to the crash site that the plane had atomic weapons, so they shouldn’t approach. 

55.   Local law enforcement in the area, as well as a family that lived nearby were given $25,000 each in cash in exchange for not talking to anyone about what they had seen. 

56.   So, for those keeping track, you have sonic booms, mysterious aircraft, and mysterious men (presumably dressed in black) appearing to warn people who may have seen something to not talk to anyone about it.  

57.   Yet another cause for the unidentified flying object sightings that seemed to crop up around Area 51 was that… well, there were in fact a fair number of flying objects around that had rarely been seen by American eyes. 

58.   Groom Lake was also where the Americans tested whatever Soviet flight technology they manage to capture, recover, or reverse-engineer to see precisely what they were up against. 

59.   Their first massive success in that field was that they had an Iraqi fighter pilot defect to the United States in August 1966, landing his fully intact Soviet fighter plane in Israel. 

60.   The CIA acquired the plane and transferred it to Groom Lake in 1967, where they put the plane through its paces, and directly compared it to the A12s, to see where the American technology stacked up. 

61.   The CIA did try to keep the planes within the no-fly zone surrounding the Groom Lake facility, but if you’re flying planes faster than the speed of sound, it’s really difficult to stay within a certain area. 

62.   Claim of flying lights and UFOs started in the area in the late 1950s, when some pilots and landowners north of Las Vegas started reporting seeing “fiery discs” in the sky, much higher than any plane they had ever seen before. 

63.   When the sightings started spreading out beyond the desert areas, the CIA did a cross-check with the reported sightings, and whereabouts the U-2s and the A-12s were flying. 

64.   Interestingly, they found that about half of the reported sightings coincided exactly with manned flyovers of either of those plane types.

65.    Since they flew twice as high as any commercial jet at the time, had the ability to go much faster, and the titanium wings of the A-12s had the ability to catch the sunlight and give the plane a fiery appearance, the CIA concluded that this was probably the reason for a lot of the sightings. 

66.   In fact, one could argue that the CIA probably used the sightings to find out exactly how conspicuous their stealth aircraft was when flying over populated areas.

67.    If you’re flying over a large city, and you’re only being seen by a couple people, that’s not a bad record. 

68.   Plus, since UFOs sightings were widely discredited, there was also the bonus of people writing off the very real spy plane they saw in favor of a UFO that they imagined. 

69.   But what about the tradition UFO shape of a disc? That’s definitely 100% not a regular terrestrial plane shape. 

70.   Well, some of the engineers and designers that created the A-12 think they may potentially be responsible for that.  

71.   You see, the A-12 was a lot less plane-shaped when viewed from below, as the fuselage connecting the two jet engines to the cockpit looks… well, a lot like a disc. 

72.   Combining that with blasting above some poor unsuspecting commercial pilot at four times their speed, and with a setting sun catching the wings, you’ve got yourself a recipe for a flying glowing disc sighting. 

73.   That was pretty much as high-profile as the sightings ever were around Area 51, until 1989, where an interview was broadcast on a Las Vegas TV station changed the theories around UFOs in America forever. 

74.   In May of 1989, George Knapp, an investigative reporter working at the time for KLAS, a local Las Vegas TV station, sat down to interview a man who identified himself as “Dennis” and would only appear on camera with his face hidden.

75.    “Dennis” claimed to have been employed in an area known as S-4, near Area 51.

76.    S-4, said Dennis, was made up of concealed aircraft hangars built into the surrounding mountainsides, where nine different flying saucers recovered by the CIA at various times were stored.

77.    Dennis claimed that his job was to help reverse-engineer some of the technology from the saucers for use by the United States government. 

78.   While the interview met with some astonishment, most people considered it a hoax, so in November “Dennis” was interviewed again, this time unmasked and using his real name: Robert Lazar. 

79.   During the second interview, he expounded more into the work that he was alleged to have done for the US government. 

80.   He claimed to have studied a flying saucer that was run by an anti-matter reactor fueled by a chemical element not yet synthesized on earth, 

81.   and that he had read briefing documents about extraterrestrial arrivals on earth over the last 10,000 years, particularly from a group described as grey Aliens coming from a planet orbiting the twin binary stars of the system Zeta Reticuli. 

82.   Most astonishing of all, Lazar said that he had in fact seen two men in lab coats conversing with a creature that he described as “something small with long arms”, 

83.   implying that the US Government not only knew about extraterrestrial life, but they were in personal communication with it. 

84.   So. With all of this damning information revealed, why are aliens still considered a hoax? 

85.   Well, as you may have gathered from all the “claimed” and “allegeds” over the last couple minutes, Robert Lazar’s story fell apart quite rapidly. 

86.   The company he claimed to have interviewed with to get the job at S-4 said they have never heard of him, nor did the United States Navy, who Lazar said was running the project. 

87.   While that seems pretty par for the course for an agency that wanted their secrets to remain secret, the cracks in the story didn’t stop there. 

88.   Lazar had claimed to have a Masters degree in physics from MIT, and a Masters Degree in electronic technology from Caltech. 

89.   Both institutes have no record of him ever attending. 

90.   The one solid bit of information that could be dug up about Robert Lazar was that he filed for bankruptcy in Las Vegas in 1986, where he claimed that his occupation was as a self-employed film processor.

91.   Furthermore, he was arrested for aiding and abetting a prostitution ring in 1990, less than a year after his second interview claiming the US Government has alien technology, and pled guilty to felony pandering. 

92.   He was also arrested in 2006 for shipping restricted substances across state lines, and in 2017, his workplace was raided as part of a murder investigation. 

93.    Lazar has been heavily discredited by most of the UFOlogist community, despite him being one of the main reasons for Area 51 being this present in the public consciousness. 

94.   Area 51 still remains a cultural touchstone of alien theories to this day.

95.    The X-Files TV series was released in 1993, and much of the overarching storyline of the series involved parts of the US government hiding their involvement with aliens that were bent on destroying humanity. 

96.   A CNN poll in 1997 found that 80% of Americans thought that the government was hiding knowledge of the existence of extra-terrestrial life forms, and Area 51 seems to be where the majority of Americans think the aliens are hidden. 

97.   This was emphasized even more heavily in 2019, when an anonymous Facebook event called “Storm Area 51, They Can’t Stop All of Us” made the rounds online. 

98.   Despite the fact that over 365,000 people confirmed that they would attend online, only a few hundred people made it to the area, and the crowds were mostly deterred by the armed guards at the gate of Area 51. 

99.   Area 51 still remains active to this day, and if you look to the skies around Rachel, Nevada, you can occasionally see glimpses of… something flashing through the night sky. It’s probably just a plane though. Right?

100.                       I’m Braden Thorvaldson, and I’ll talk to you in a couple of weeks. 

101.                      Audio mixing for this episode was done by Craig Murdock, who advised me that camping out in the desert outside of Rachel, Nevada is a terrible way to gain firsthand research, but an excellent way to get a sunburn.  

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