Nellis Range

Since the beginning days of the Cold War, the United States Military and other government agencies have been active on the lands north and west of Las Vegas. The beginning of military land use was in 1941, when President Roosevelt signed 5,000 square miles of land in the Nevada Desert to the War Department, who would initially use it as a gunnery range. This land stretched from Las Vegas in the southwest to Tonopah in the north; both sites housed Army Air Force (later Air Force) fields. The Nellis Range is slightly smaller than the state of Connecticut.

Nevada Test Site

After the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and tests of atomic weapons in the south Pacific, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) determined that they needed a closer range for further testing of the devices. In 1952, a public land order set aside 680 square miles of the newly renamed Nellis Range for the atmospheric testing of low-yield atomic devices. In all, 119 atmospheric tests were conducted, many on Frenchman and Yucca flats [see map].

The largest above-ground test was codenamed Hood with a yield of approximately 74 kilotons or 74 thousand tons of TNT. When the Limited Test Ban treaty of 1962 went into effect, the testing went underground. From 1962-1992, around 800 below-ground tests of nuclear weapons were done at the test site, pockmarking the landscape [see graphic below]. The largest of these were in excess of 100 kilotons and formed craters several hundred feet deep.

Not all US nuclear tests were conducted inside the Test Range, and of particular interest is a crater left over from 'Project Faultless' in south-central Nevada that is not on restricted land. You can visit it and see the visible depression the underground test left behind. See the section devoted to Other Locations of Interest.

Groom Lake Facility

In April, 1955, the CIA needed a remote location to flight-test their new joint venture with the Air Force, the U2. They settled on a dry lakebed just west of the Groom Range nestled on the outskirts of the Nevada Test Site. With $800,000, an airstrip, control towers and hangers were built on the southwest corner of the lake. The Lockheed company test pilots that used the base nicknamed it "Paradise Ranch".

When a U-2 was shot down on a reconnaisance overflight of the Soviet Union, its successor was already in development at "Dreamland" (as the airspace around the base is called by pilots). The SR-71 Blackbird was an aircraft designed to fly at Mach-3 at the edge of the atmosphere, well beyond the reach of Soviet missles. After housing the development and flight testing of the SR-71 (also known as the A-12), Dreamland began to diversify its operations. An operation to reverse-engineer foreign aircraft was began in 1967. The precursors to the F-117A Stealth Fighter began flight-testing in the late 1970s and was home to the aircraft until it was unveiled to the public in 1990.

The Groom Lake Facility, which is located in Area 51 of the Nellis Range, began to gain widespread public noteriety in 1989. Bob Lazar, who claimed to be a physicist and to have worked at a base near Area 51 reverse engineering alien spacecraft, appeared in a series of interviews on a local Las Vegas television station. He led 'expeditions' to a mailbox (the now-famous 'Black Mailbox') on a highway outside of the Range. From there, many people witnessed spectacular aerial shows of lights and other craft that some people claimed were alien in origin.

Soon, Area 51 became a media sensation. It appeared in The New York Times, Popular Science, network nightly news programs, and many other forms of media. The Little A'Lee'Inn (pronounced alien) became a popular tourist destination because of its central location on that same stretch of highway north of the Black Mailbox. The base was featured in the movie Independence Day, though in a way that was anything but accurate.

Due to all this popularity, the Air Force seized several thousand acres and two popular vantage points around the base in April 1995. Since then, the hype has died down. You can still visit the all the places mentioned above (outside the restricted line, that is); they continue draw visitors daily.