Area 51
It is the most famous military installation in the world. And it doesn't exist. Located a mere seventy-five miles outside of Las Vegas in Nevada's desert, the base has never been acknowledged by the U.S. government-but Area 51 has captivated imaginations for decades. Myths and hypotheses about Area 51 have long abounded, thanks to the intense secrecy enveloping it. Some claim it is home to aliens, underground tunnel systems, and nuclear facilities. Others believe that the lunar landing itself was filmed there. The prevalence of these rumors stems from the fact that no credible insider has ever divulged the truth about his time inside the base. Until now. Annie Jacobsen had exclusive access to nineteen men who served the base proudly and secretly for decades and are now aged 75-92, and unprecedented access to fifty-five additional military and intelligence personnel, scientists, pilots, and engineers linked to the secret base, thirty-two of whom lived and worked there for extended periods. In Area 51, Jacobsen shows us what has really gone on in the Nevada desert, from testing nuclear weapons to building super-secret, supersonic jets to pursuing the War on Terror. This is the first book based on interviews with eye witnesses to Area 51 history, which makes it the seminal work on the subject.
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4recommend
7mentions
7people
2016–2026years
57% recommend43% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Actually, I've seen the take that the previous poster has made too. The wikipedia page is pretty good IMO. Proof of a hypothetical future event is pretty hard to get, but here's the wiki rabbit hole (if you're anything like me you'll find this fascinating and spend the next couple hours clicking links - you're welcome!).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_holocaust#Likelihood_o...
Annie Jacobsen is awesome, her book about Area 51 was riveting, but I also cannot unsee "Capitalist Realism" and the idea that we keep picturing civilization-ending catastrophes because we don't want to go to work in the morning, and walking/biking everywhere and living in a small community is amazingly appealing to us at a base level. We yearn for the lifestyle of the apocalypse survivor, but none of us want to go through the apocalypse. Generally, I think we kind of say, "oh, it'll be the end of the world" because most of us (myself included) lack the imagination to really look beyond linear extrapolations of the status quo most of the time.
- legend is that president johnson got it confused in a press conference and called it the sr-71 so instead of correcting him they just changed the name.
"skunk works" is a great read. i'm almost done with "area 51" by annie jacobsen and it's quite the interesting read as well, though it does get dry at times. https://openlibrary.org/works/OL15839422W/Area_51
- If you're curious about the development of Oxcart as well as Area-51, check out Amy Jacobson's Area 51 book[1]. Appears like a solid detail of Skunkworks and spy plane history.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Area-51-Uncensored-Americas-Military/...
- I read a history of Area 51 that had several interesting stories in a similar vein. The book struck me as down-to-earth and well researched. http://www.amazon.com/Area-51-Uncensored-Americas-Military/d...
- This sounded so ridiculous that I had to check. The book is Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base. This unflattering contemporary review, retrieved from the Wayback Machine, has an excerpt:
https://web.archive.org/web/20110713153629/https://www.washi...
The engineers were told that the children were rumored to have been kidnapped by Dr. Josef Mengele, the Nazi madman who, at Auschwitz and elsewhere, was known to have performed unspeakable experimental surgical procedures mostly on children, dwarfs, and twins. The engineers learned that just before the war ended, Josef Mengele made a deal with Stalin. Stalin offered Mengele an opportunity to continue work in eugenics. . . . in secret, in the Soviet Union.
Mengele held up his side of the Faustian bargain and provided Stalin with the child-size crew. . . .
- Annie Jacobsen Book "Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military has an interesting take on UFOs. The government actively perpetuated rumors about sightings to keep people from thinking top secret projects flying around the bases were real.
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