What's at Area 51? The Base, Spy Planes and the Legend

Where is Area 51 in Nevada?

Area 51 lies in the southern Nevada desert, about 83 miles north-northwest of downtown Las Vegas. Its airfield sits on the southern shore of Groom Lake, a salt flat roughly three and three-quarter miles long from north to south and about three miles across at its widest point, at an elevation of around 4,400 feet. The nearest settlement is Rachel, a very small community on State Route 375, the road known as the “Extraterrestrial Highway.”

The base is part of the Nevada Test and Training Range, the vast military range once known as the Nellis Air Force Range. It borders the old Nevada Test Site, including Yucca Flat, where 739 of the 928 nuclear tests at the test site took place. That neighbor matters to the story: the land around Groom Lake has been closed, watched and secret for a very long time.

A few figures help with scale:

• The base itself: the original rectangle is about 6 by 10 miles, around 60 square miles or 38,400 acres.
• The airspace: a larger restricted block, about 23 by 25 miles, nicknamed the “Groom box.” Its formal designation is R-4808N, and military pilots call it “The Box.”
• The approach: the only obvious road in, Groom Lake Road, runs through a pass in the Jumbled Hills from the Tikaboo Valley to a security checkpoint, well before any buildings come into view.

For a closer look at the roads, viewpoints and the town of Rachel, the journal’s guide to the Area 51 locations along Groom Lake and Highway 375 covers the geography in detail. One plain warning belongs here too: the boundary is patrolled, the signs mean what they say, and crossing them is a federal offense.

What is at Area 51 today?

The short answer to what is at Area 51 is an airfield built for secrets. Officially, the facility is called Homey Airport, with the ICAO code KXTA and the FAA identifier XTA. It is run as a remote detachment of the Air Force Test Center at Edwards Air Force Base in California, known as Detachment 3. The Air Force describes the wider area as an open training range; details of what happens at the base are not made public.

What can be described comes from declassified history and from satellite imagery anyone can view. Taken together, they show what is at Area 51 on the ground:

• Runways. The main paved runway, 14L/32R, is close to 12,000 feet long. A second paved strip runs about 5,400 feet, and several very long runways are simply marked out on the hard surface of the dry lake bed, some over 11,000 feet.
• Hangars. Large hangars line the flight line, including three surplus Navy hangars erected in the early 1960s and newer construction since.
• A small town. Housing, a mess hall, workshops, warehouses, administration buildings, a fire station and a control tower. Earlier decades added a gym, a movie theater and a baseball diamond.
• Fuel and utilities. Wells, storage tanks and, historically, a dedicated tank farm for the special fuel used by Cold War spy planes.

Then there is the commute. Government-owned passenger jets, widely nicknamed “Janet” after their radio call sign, fly from a private terminal at the Las Vegas airport to destinations in the desert, Homey Airport among them. Air traffic recordings make that much clear even if the passenger lists do not.

What is at Area 51 that cannot be seen from orbit is the real question, and the honest answer is that the current programs are classified. The base is commonly understood to support the development and testing of experimental aircraft and weapons systems. Research there is handled as Top Secret with compartmented access, meaning even cleared staff only see the parts they are assigned. The journal’s companion piece on what is inside Area 51, from runways to hangars looks more closely at the buildings themselves.

How a dry lake became a spy plane base

Before the airplanes, there were miners. Lead and silver were found in the Groom Range in 1864, and mining in the district came and went until the early 1950s. During the Second World War the military built a simple airfield on the site, with two unpaved runways, as an auxiliary training field. After the war it went quiet.

The U-2 and “Paradise Ranch”

The base as it exists began in 1955. The CIA, working with the Air Force, needed a hidden place to test the Lockheed U-2, a spy plane designed to fly far above Soviet air defenses. The program, code-named Project AQUATONE and directed by Richard Bissell, could not be run at Edwards or at Lockheed’s own facilities without drawing attention.

A Lockheed team led by designer Kelly Johnson flew over Groom Lake and, by Johnson’s own later account, knew almost immediately that the smooth lake bed was the spot: a natural landing field, protected by mountains and by the nuclear test site next door. The CIA asked the Atomic Energy Commission to acquire the land and fold it into the test site.

Johnson gave the place a cheerful name, “Paradise Ranch,” to coax workers out to the middle of nowhere. It shrank to “the Ranch.” A survey team laid out a 5,000-foot runway in May 1955, and the first U-2 arrived by cargo plane on 24 July 1955. Staff flew in on Monday mornings and back to California on Friday evenings.

OXCART, drones and the bigger base

The next project was far more demanding. Project OXCART produced the Lockheed A-12, a Mach 3 reconnaissance aircraft and forerunner of the SR-71 Blackbird. The base needed a new runway, more housing, hangars and a dedicated fuel farm. Construction began in 1960, and it was in this period that the name “Area 51” appears in the records.

Builders also marked a huge spiral on the lake bed, roughly two miles across, so a pilot overrunning the runway could turn rather than plunge into the brush. Pilots called it “The Hook.” The A-12 first flew from Groom Lake on 26 April 1962, by which time more than 1,000 people worked at the base. Groom also hosted the first flight tests of the D-21, a high-speed reconnaissance drone launched from the back of a modified A-12.

Soviet MiGs and stealth

Later decades brought projects that are now public: the evaluation of a Soviet-built MiG-21 acquired from a defecting pilot, used to study enemy aircraft up close, and the testing of the F-117 Nighthawk stealth attack aircraft. These are only the programs that have been declassified. Anything more recent sits behind the same wall of secrecy.

Why “51”? Nobody knows for certain. One theory points to a numbering grid used by the Atomic Energy Commission at the test site, although Area 51 does not fit neatly into it; it sits next to Area 15. Another holds that 51 was picked because the commission was unlikely ever to use it. The base has collected other names too: Dreamland (the radio call sign for the surrounding airspace), Watertown, Home Base, and simply Groom Lake.

Why Area 51 is so secret and so protected

For decades the government would not say the base existed at all. The CIA’s own declassified history of the U-2 program, released in 2013 in answer to a Freedom of Information Act request filed years earlier, discussed the site openly and used the name Area 51. Accounts differ on when earlier official acknowledgements happened, but 2013 is when the spy-plane history became broadly public.

The reasons for the secrecy are not mysterious in themselves. During the Cold War, the whole point of the base was to build and fly aircraft the Soviet Union did not know about. A spy plane that Moscow could anticipate was a spy plane Moscow could shoot down, which is what eventually happened to pilot Gary Powers and his U-2 over Soviet territory. That logic has never really gone away.

Security works in layers:

Secrecy also has a side effect. When a government refuses to say what is at Area 51, people fill the silence themselves, and the stories they told turned out to be far more durable than the official silence. The journal’s piece on whether Area 51 is real and what the CIA admitted traces that tension between acknowledgement and myth.

Aliens, Bob Lazar and the UFO legend

The strangest part of the story is that the spy planes themselves helped create the flying saucers. In the late 1950s, as far as the public knew, even the most advanced military aircraft flew below 40,000 feet. The U-2 cruised above 65,000 feet. At dusk, its body could still catch sunlight long after the ground below had gone dark, and airline pilots flying west reported fiery disks at heights they considered too high for any human-made plane.

The CIA’s own history later acknowledged that U-2 testing produced a large increase in UFO reports. The Air Force’s Project Blue Book, which investigated UFO sightings from 1952, could quietly check some reports against classified flight logs, then offer the public a vaguer explanation such as a weather phenomenon. Witnesses were telling the truth about what they saw. They just were not told what it was.

Sector 4 and the reverse-engineering claim

The modern legend took shape in 1989, when Las Vegas TV station KLAS aired an interview with a man named Bob Lazar. According to Lazar, he had been stationed at an underground site called S-4, or Sector 4, connected to Area 51 by a miles-long underground rail system. There, he said, he and others worked to reverse-engineer an alien spacecraft powered by an antimatter reactor.

Skeptics point out that no record of Lazar’s employment by any government or military body has ever been found. Supporters note that at least one journalist has argued he knew real details about the inner workings of Nellis Air Force Base, the Groom Lake facility and Los Alamos National Laboratory, and they insist that missing records are exactly what a cover-up would produce. That argument has never been settled, and it sits at the heart of the alien from Area 51 legend.

From there, popular culture took over. The X-Files used the base as a shadowy backdrop, and the 1996 blockbuster Independence Day put it on movie screens as a hangar full of alien secrets. In 2019, a joke Facebook event called “Storm Area 51, They Can’t Stop All of Us” drew around two million online RSVPs. In the end, roughly 1,500 people traveled to the desert, mostly for festivals in Rachel and nearby, and only a small group approached the outskirts of the base before dispersing when law enforcement arrived.

For the broader history of sightings and official investigations, the UFOs and UAP section gathers the journal’s coverage. UAP, or unidentified anomalous phenomena, is the term US officials now use for what used to be called UFOs. The Pentagon’s admission in 2017 that it had run a secret program studying such reports, and its release of Navy pilot videos in 2020, have kept the wider subject, and with it Area 51, firmly in the public conversation.

What remains unknown, and the mistakes people make

Here is where the line between record and rumor really matters. The documented history answers the Cold War part of the question about what is at Area 51. It does not answer the present. Nobody outside the programs knows which aircraft, drones or systems are being tested at Groom Lake today, and the government has no obligation to say. That is a real, ongoing secret, and it is reasonable to find it intriguing.

What the record does not support is the leap from “classified” to “extraterrestrial.” The most common mistakes in thinking about what is at Area 51 tend to fall into a few patterns:

1. Assuming secrecy equals aliens. Most military secrets are mundane only in hindsight. The U-2 was a genuine wonder in 1955, and it was hidden just as fiercely as any saucer would be.
2. Treating one witness as a body of evidence. Lazar’s account is a single story, unsupported by records. That does not prove it false, but it cannot carry the weight placed on it.
3. Confusing the base with the region. Rachel, Highway 375 and the roadside attractions are a tourism economy built around the legend; they are not windows into the base.
4. Thinking the gates are a dare. They are not. The perimeter is enforced, the desert is remote and unforgiving, and there is nothing to see from the boundary that satellite imagery does not show more safely.
5. Believing every “release” headline. Declassified material about the base has so far concerned aircraft programs, not biology from another world.

The strongest ordinary explanation, then, is the one the documents tell: an isolated lake bed chosen for flight testing, kept secret because enemies were watching, whose high-flying aircraft fooled honest observers into seeing the impossible. The strongest case for something stranger rests on the gaps: a site that still will not explain itself, a government that has admitted hiding sky-related programs before, and witnesses who insist they saw or were told more.

Weighed fairly, what is at Area 51 is almost certainly a test center for aircraft and technology the public will hear about years from now, if ever. Whether that leaves room for something more is a question the base itself is in no hurry to answer, and the conspiracy theories, examined section is a good place to see how similar secrets have played out elsewhere. For long-form conversations about the unexplained, the Troubled Minds Vault collects the radio show’s archive.

Questions and answers

What is the area of Area 51?

The original rectangular base measures roughly 6 by 10 miles, about 60 square miles or around 38,400 acres. It sits inside a much larger block of restricted airspace known as the Groom box, roughly 23 by 25 miles, which itself lies within the Nevada Test and Training Range. The ground security perimeter extends well beyond the visible buildings and runways.

Is Groom Lake still active?

Yes. The Groom Lake facility has been in use since 1955 and is considered operational today. Recent satellite imagery shows maintained runways, hangars and buildings, and government-owned passenger jets still fly workers in from Las Vegas. What it is used for now is not public, though it is widely understood to support classified aircraft and weapons testing.

What is the ICAO code for Area 51?

The airfield at Area 51 is listed as Homey Airport, with the ICAO code KXTA and the FAA location identifier XTA. It is not a public airport. The surrounding restricted airspace is designated R-4808N, which military pilots nickname "The Box," and civilian aircraft are not permitted to enter it without authorization.

Can you get stationed in Area 51?

Not in the ordinary sense. Area 51 is not a conventional air base, and frontline operational units are not normally deployed there. It functions as a remote detachment of Edwards Air Force Base for classified programs, and many workers are cleared contractors and government staff who commute by air from Las Vegas. Assignments, where they exist, are not advertised publicly.

Does Area 51 have aliens?

There is no evidence that it does. The best-known claims come from Bob Lazar, who said in 1989 that he worked on alien craft at a nearby site called S-4, but no record of his government employment has been found. Declassified CIA history instead links the base to spy planes, and notes that high-flying U-2 tests drove a surge in UFO reports.

Why is Area 51 so protected?

Because the work there has always been highly classified. From the 1955 U-2 program onward, the base has tested aircraft and systems the government wanted hidden from rivals, especially the Soviet Union. Research there is treated as Top Secret with compartmented access, the airspace is closed, and the land border is patrolled and posted with warnings against trespassing.

Stay curious. Keep the question open.
Follow the evidence wherever it leads.