Message posted by Peter Merlin on June 22, 2011 at 15:54:40 PST:
I have attempted to catalog the various factual errors and historical inaccuracies in Annie Jacobsen’s "Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base" (Little, Brown and Company, May 2011) This is by no means a complete list. I concentrated my efforts mainly on Area 51 and Nevada Test Site history. No doubt, other readers will pick up additional errors that I have missed. In describing the selection of Groom Lake, Jacobsen writes, “Richard Bissell and Herbert Miller chose the place to be the test facility for the Agency’s first spy plane, the U-2.” According to a 1974 U.S. Air Force oral history interview with Maj. Gen. Osmond J. Ritland, USAF liaison to the CIA for Project Aquatone, it was Ritland who recommended Groom Lake to Bissell. This makes sense because Ritland was familiar with the location, having flown over it many times while he commanded the 4925th Test Group (Atomic). Jacobsen also writes that, “Part of Area 51’s secret history is that the so-called Area 51 zone had been in existence for four years by the time the CIA identified it as a perfect clandestine test facility.” There was, in fact, nothing at Groom Lake prior to May 1955 other than a WW2-era dirt strip and debris from gunnery practice. Aerial photos taken in 1952 show no man-made structures whatsoever. Jacobsen writes that, “For more than sixty years, no one has thought of looking at the Atomic Energy Commission to solve the riddle of Area 51.” Actually, declassified and unclassified AEC documents available at the Department of Energy’s Public Reading Room in Las Vegas have been a rich source of information on Area 51. Researchers have been using this resource to solve the riddle of Area 51 since the mid-1990s. Describing the EG&G radar facility, Jacobsen writes, “One dish is sixty feet in diameter and always faces the sky.” I assume she is referring to pictures showing the dish pointed straight up. There are two such antennas. Both are only pointed toward the sky when parked. Historic and recent photos show the dish antennas pointed in different directions and at various angles, including parallel to the ground. She writes that, “The Quick Kill system, designed by Raytheon to detect incoming missile signals, sits at the edge of the dry lake bed.” There are three Quick Kill radar sites known as QK-1, QK-2, and QK-3. They are simulators of the Russian Fan Song fire control and tracking radar that is typically used to guide the SA-2 surface-to-air missile. At Groom Lake they serve as part of the radar test complex used to evaluate stealth aircraft. Jacobsen claims that the Area 51 bar, called Sam’s Place, was “built by and named after…[Oxcart navigator] Sam Pizzo.” According to established Area 51 lore, the bar is named in honor of Sam Mitchell, the last CIA commander of Area 51. Jacobsen writes that in 1955, “Richard Bissell and his fellow CIA officer Herbert Miller,…flew across the American West in an unmarked Beechcraft V-35 Bonanza in search of a location where they could build a secret CIA test facility,…” Lockheed test pilot Tony LeVier and shop foreman Dorsey Kammerer conducted this reconnaissance trip in the company’s Beechcraft Model 50 Twin Bonanza. Jacobsen conflates this with Kelly Johnson’s first trip to Groom Lake, further claiming that LeVier flew the plane with Johnson in the back looking at maps. She appears to have taken this account from Bissell’s autobiography, written shortly before his death. According to Ritland’s 1974 oral history interview and Kelly Johnson’s personal log, written in 1955, the April 1955 visit to Groom Lake included LeVier, Johnson, Bissell, and Ritland. Jacobsen claims that the CIA sought “to hide the U-2 from Soviet radar by inventing some kind of radar-absorbing paint.” Approaches to reducing the U-2’s radar cross-section included application of radar-absorbent blankets and wires with ferrite beads strung across stand-off posts. She writes that, By the winter of 1957, the Boston Group had completed what Richard Bissell wanted in radar absorbing paint.” In the first phase of Project Rainbow, technicians coated the lower fuselage of the U-2 prototype with a fiberglass honeycomb sandwich, varying in thickness from a quarter-inch to about one inch, was topped with layers of Salisbury Screen, canvas painted with a conductive graphite grid. Regarding the loss of the U-2 and test pilot Robert Sieker during a Project Rainbow test flight, Jacobsen writes that, “the Boston Group’s paint caused the airplane to overheat, spin out of control, and crash. Sieker was able to bail out but was killed when a piece of the spinning aircraft hit him in the head.” The thick radar-absorbent blanket was nicknamed “thermos” because it acted as insulation that prevented dissipation of engine heat through the aircraft’s skin. Airframe heat build-up caused the engine to flameout at 72,000 feet. Normally this would not be a problem because the pilot could glide to a lower altitude and relight the engine. Sieker’s pressure suit inflated properly when cabin pressure was lost but the clasp on his faceplate failed, resulting in a loss of oxygen that caused him to temporarily lose consciousness. He died while attempting to bail out at extremely low altitude. In discussing a nuclear weapon safety experiment called Project 57, Jacobsen constantly uses the misleading phrase “dirty bomb.” Using inflammatory language she writes, “The dirty bomb menace posed a growing threat to the internal security of the country, one the Pentagon wanted to make less severe by testing the nightmare scenario first.” Actually, tests of this type were conducted to determine that a weapon or warhead damaged in an accident would not detonate with a nuclear yield, even if some or all of the high explosive components burned or detonated. While not producing a nuclear explosion, such a detonation usually spreads plutonium into the atmosphere and across the surrounding landscape. As such, safety experiments are also known as plutonium dispersal tests. Such experiments were necessary because aircraft crashes and other operational and logistical accidents involving nuclear weapons could result in one-point detonation of the weapon’s high explosive components, producing no nuclear yield but contaminating the local area with radioactive materials. Project 57 was designed to study the particle physics of plutonium, biomedicine of animals exposed to the fallout, radiation monitoring techniques, and decontamination of plutonium-contaminated surfaces. Jacobsen claims that Project 57 was conducted “in total secrecy. No one outside the project, absolutely no one, could know.” This seems to have no basis in truth. AEC Nevada Test Organization public affairs officers regularly supplied the news media with booklets containing background information on nuclear testing. The September 1958 edition contains a section titled, “Safety Experiments at Nevada Test Site.” It describes “so-called safety experiments” as part of “a continuing program…intended to determine which among several weapons development designs affords the maximum assurance of nuclear safety in handling and storage.” This section also includes a summary list of all 14 safety experiments at NTS that had been accomplished to date, including the April 24, 1957, test, including the fact that it was a surface burst and also that it was sponsored by Sandia National Laboratories. Jacobsen writes that, “If the dirty bomb was set off outside the legal perimeter of the Nevada Test Site, secrecy was all but guaranteed.” Area 13, the Project 57 test site, was adjacent to public lands, as well as private mining claims and ranch properties. It was highly visible from the Groom Mine and the nearby mountains that were frequented by hunters and prospectors. Writing about Area 13, Jacobsen claims that, “the land designation even allowed Project 57 to be excluded from official Nevada Test Site maps.” Not contiguous with the NTS boundary, Area 13 is considered an “off-site” test area similar to several other safety experiment locations at Tonopah Test Range and elsewhere on the Air Force range areas. Area 13 appears on some maps, though usually as a point (or by the boundary of its contaminated zone) rather than as a 10-by-16-mile box. Other NTS areas, including Area 31 (a buffer zone west of Jackass Flat), are frequently left off test site maps for no discernible reason. She further claims that, “Scientists predicted the warhead would release radioactive plutonium particles, but because a test like Project 57 had never been done before, scientists really had no clear idea of what would happen.” There had, in fact, been four previous tests under the designation Project 56. Between November 1955 and January 1956, all four had been conducted as surface bursts in Area 11 of the NTS, and had resulted in the contamination of approximately 1,200 acres of desert with radioactive debris. The results undoubtedly informed the planning of Project 57. Of the incident in which a civilian pilot landed at Watertown Airstrip in July 1958, Jacobsen writes that, “the Nevada Test Organization uncharacteristically issued a press release.” The AEC had been issuing statements to the press about Watertown since April 1955 when construction of the base was announced. There had been follow-up statements, and some editions of the booklet, “Background Information on Nevada Nuclear Tests,” had a section titled “Watertown project.” Jacobsen claims the pilot “remains the only civilian who ever landed at Area 51 uninvited in a private airplane, got out, and wandered around.” First, the press release states that the pilot was detained overnight by NTS security, most likely having been taken into custody upon landing. Second, there have been a number of unauthorized aerial visitors to Groom Lake. In 1959, a NASA C-47 briefly landed on Groom Lake, but took off before security jeeps arrived. According to Oxcart pilot Dennis Sullivan, a civilian pilot arrived at Area 51 one night with his girlfriend after they lost their way on a flight from Reno to Las Vegas. Oxcart pilot Frank Murray recalls a small airplane landing on the Area 51 taxiway when a student pilot became lost during a solo cross-country training flight. The security police checked his story and he was allowed to leave after his plane had been refueled. One day in late 1977, a red Beech Bonanza flew low over the base when the pilot became lost due to low clouds. Aircraft were scrambled to force the plane down so that the pilot could be debriefed. While describing the 1959 activities involved with setting up the A-12 mock-up on the EG&G radar range, Jacobsen writes that, “The small group of Skunk Workers bunked in the Quonset huts where the U-2 pilots and engineers had once lived.” Workers at Groom Lake never lived in Quonset huts. During the U-2 program, most personnel occupied 30-foot-long mobile homes, each housing three people. In addition, there was an 18-room dormitory building. By 1959, most of the trailers were gone. In 1960, several new trailers were brought to the site along with more than 200 three-bedroom Babbitt houses. Describing the National Reconnaissance Office, she writes that, “no one outside a select few knew of the NRO’s existence until 1992.” Although the agency’s name was officially classified until the early 1990s, it was not unknown to the public. In the mid-1970s, when Congress asked for a public accounting of the intelligence budget, a list of agencies – including the NRO – was entered into the Congressional Record. This unclassified document, published by the U.S. Government Printing Office, is available to the public. A decade later, William E. Burrows published a lengthy and detailed description of the NRO mission, organization, and budget in "Deep Black: Space Espionage and National Security" (Random House, 1986). Jacobsen claims that Project Oxcart was “declassified in 2007 and never before made public.” In a previous article for the Los Angeles Times, she made this claim about both Oxcart and Tagboard, the D-21 drone program. In fact, these programs were first declassified in 1976 when the surviving D-21B drones were placed in outdoor storage at Davis-Monthan AFB, Arizona. The A-12 aircraft were to join the drones, but instead remained in a building at A.F. Plant 42 in Palmdale until 1981. In preparation for placing the aircraft outdoors in 1976, the CIA crafted a memo for Air Force officials to use in response to queries about the aircraft. In 1981, after the A-12 airframes were moved outdoors at Palmdale, a number of historical photos of the A-12 and D-21 were released along with some general details about the Oxcart and Tagboard programs. "The Oxcart Story," a 1982 article in the CIA's Studies in Intelligence magazine was declassified in 1991 when A-12 aircraft started entering museums for public display. Over the next 16 years the CIA declassified thousands of pages of Oxcart-related documents, mostly in response to FOIA requests. In 2007, an A-12 was placed on permanent display at CIA Headquarters in a ceremony that recognized the accomplishments of the pilots who performed operational reconnaissance missions in the aircraft. Jacobsen writes, “Designated the RS-71 Blackbird, this now-famous aircraft had its letter designation accidentally invented by President Lyndon B. Johnson in a public speech.” During the 1964 campaign, Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater criticized President Johnson and his administration for falling behind the Soviets in the development of new weapons systems. Johnson countered this criticism by announcing the YF-12A interceptor and, on July 25, 1964, the reconnaissance model. Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Curtis LeMay preferred the SR (Strategic Reconnaissance) designation and wanted the RS-71 to be named SR-71. Before the July speech, LeMay lobbied to modify Johnson's speech to read SR-71 instead of RS-71. The media transcript given to the press at the time still had the earlier RS-71 designation in places, creating the myth that the president had misread the aircraft's designation. In one of Jacobsen’s most inane passages, she writes, “The Pentagon already had a catchy name for its versions of the Oxcart. They would call them Blackbirds. Black because they had been developed in the dark by the CIA, and birds because they could fly.” The Blackbirds earned their nickname because they were coated with a high-emissivity black paint to better radiate heat, thus reducing thermal stresses on the airframe. The first A-12 initially flew unpainted, but the aircraft was subsequently painted black only on the periphery of the airframe where heating was greatest: on chines, leading and trailing edges, and rudders. Engineers took advantage of “Kirchoff’s Law of Radiation” that describes how a good heat absorber, such as a “black body” (any extremely dark object), is also an efficient heat emitter. Therefore, in 1964, Skunk Works engineers decided to paint the entire fleet of Mach 3 aircraft overall black, and the nickname followed. Chp. 12, p.208 Jacobsen claims that a “UFO” seen in NASA motion picture film taken during an X-15 flight was actually the A-12. There was a CIA memorandum expressing concern about a NASA X-15 research mission that took place on the same day as an A-12 flight, since there had been recent reports of unidentified objects appearing in film taken during the high-altitude missions. NASA had, in fact, released a statement and photos from a 1961 incident but the pictures showed an object (apparently a flake of frost spinning away from the X-15) in space. Such incidents were noted on later flights and attributed to frozen condensation around the rocket plane’s fuel tanks and reaction-control thrusters. The X-15 was equipped with several cameras on the wingtips, tail, and fuselage but none had sufficient resolution to capture an image of an A-12 in flight. Jacobsen states that missions for practicing recovery of the D-21 camera package resulted in “a lot of lost drones,” and that, “Col. Slater and Frank Murray would follow the M-21/D-21 in chase planes and oversee he subsonic launches of the drone.” There were never any subsonic launches of the D-21 drone. For practice missions, camera packages, like those used on the D-21, were tossed out the back of a C-130 so that a recovery crew at a lower altitude could attempt to retrieve them. Of the accident on July 30, 1966, Jacobsen writes that, “the 1129th Special Activities Squadron…prepared to make the first official nighttime drone launch off the coast of California.” The test was the fourth launch of a D-21 from the M-21 over the Pacific. All tests were conducted by Lockheed crews, and all flights occurred in daylight. Although the sky is relatively dark at high altitude, motion picture film of the event (widely available on YouTube) shows the vehicles illuminated by sunlight. Referring to the arrival of the first two YF-12A prototypes at Edwards Air Force Base in 1964, Jacobsen writes that, “The airplanes’ titanium surfaces were so hot they set off the hangar’s sprinkler system.” Speeds experienced during the short hop from Groom Lake to Edwards were insufficient to generate enough skin-friction heating to activate the fire sprinklers. The hangar’s fire-suppression system was reacting to heat radiating off the engine nacelles. Jacobsen writes that Sylvania built two ECM systems, “one to simulate Russian SA-2 radar and a second one to simulate the Fan Song surface-to-air missile system.” This garbled account should have explained that the SA-2 is a surface-to-air missile system associated with the Spoon Rest fire control radar, Knife Rest early warning radar, and Fan Song fire control and tracking radar, of which simulators were built for test purposes. When describing CIA pilot Walt Ray’s final words in radio transmissions prior to losing his life in the crash of an A-12, Jacobsen writes that, “The transcript would remain classified until 2007.” Actually, a partial transcript was released in 1999, and a complete transcript declassified in 2001. In yet another ridiculous aside without reference sources, Jacobsen claims that the MiG-21, tested at Area 51 in 1968 under Project Have Doughnut, “had been nicknamed the doughnut because the jet fighter’s nose had a round opening in it, like a doughnut.” Whether classified or not, all such projects have unclassified nicknames, usually consisting of two words. The first word identifies the sponsoring agency, and the second is usually chosen at random from a selection of available words. All projects sponsored by Air Force Systems Command used “Have” as the first word. Although some fighter pilots have claimed the second word “Doughnut” was a reference to the target pipper on the gunsight, it was most likely a random selection. Another program from the same era was called Have Coffee. Jacobsen writes that, “During he Have Doughnut, the MiG would be flying tactical missions against U.S. airplanes in the skies over Groom Lake,” then inexplicably claims, “The Air Force wasn’t interested but the Navy leaped at the chance.” Managed by the Air Force’s Foreign Technology Division, Project Have Doughnut was a joint Air Force/Navy technical and tactical evaluation of a MiG-21. Air Force Systems Command personnel evaluated performance and handling qualities. Several pilots from Naval Air Test and Evaluation Squadron 4 (VX-4) and the Air Force Tactical Air Command conducted tactical evaluations of the aircraft. The tactical demonstration included numerous flights against all major Air Force and Navy combat aircraft then in the services’ inventories. In describing the response to the nuclear weapon accident at Palomares, Spain, in 1966, Jacobsen writes, “The ’16th Nuclear Disaster Team’ sounded official enough, but if fifteen nuclear disaster teams had preceded this one or existed concurrently, no record of any of them exists in the searchable Department of Energy archives.” With a little research, she might have learned that a the first responders to the accident site included 33 members of the Disaster Control Team, a unit that had been organized by the 16th Air Force as a contingency for such accidents. In discussing early stealth developments, Jacobsen refers to “Harvey, a prototype aircraft.” Actually Project Harvey was a DARPA study on low observables. It never produced any flying models or prototype aircraft. Jacobsen writes that, “an Air Force general broke protocol and decided to take a ride in one of Area 51’s prized MiG fighter jets.” As vice commander of Air Force Systems command, it was in his purview to take orientation flights in AFSC assets as he had done previously, flying two sorties in the F-117A. Depending on whom one asks, Gen. Bond was either a highly qualified fighter pilot, extremely arrogant, or both. While his motivations and qualifications for that particular flight are debatable, he had every right to request it. Jacobsen claims that, “By 1974, the Agency had ceded control of Area 51.” All available documentation and testimony indicates that while the CIA had little use for Area 51 by the mid-1970s, the Air Force did not take responsibility for the base until 1977. Jacobsen makes the ludicrous claim that, “Area 51 is named as such not because it was a randomly chosen quadrant, as has often been presumed, but because the 1947 crash remains from Roswell, New Mexico, were sent from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base out to a secret spot in the Nevada desert – in 1951.” This ridiculous claim has no basis in fact and makes no logical sense. First, a vast amount of available documentation describes the origins of Area 51, starting with its selection in 1955 as a test site for the U-2. Aerial photos show that no facilities existed at Groom Lake in 1952. The various Nevada Test Site areas are not organized in any logical order, and include Areas 1 through 31 (with a few absent numbers). Areas 13 and 31 rarely appear on maps, and Area 51 only appears on those dating between 1958 and 1978. Some maps show Area 25 (Nuclear Rocket Development Area) broken down into Areas 400 and 401. Area 52 (Tonopah Test Range) was established in 1957. Area 58 (Central Nevada Test Area) was established in 1967. There is no connection between the year of creation and the area number.
Chp. 1, p.4
Chp. 1, p. 5
Chp. 1, p.8
Chp. 1, p.10
Chp. 3, p.50
Chp. 5, p.89
Chp. 5, p.95
Chp. 5, p. 97
Chp. 6, p. 100
Chp. 6, p. 101
Chp. 6, p. 103
Chp. 6, p.111
Chp. 7, p.125-126
Chp. 7, p.132
Chp. 9, p. 169
Chp. 11, p. 197
Chp. 11, p.198
Chp. 11, p.200
Chp. 13, p.219
Chp. 13, p.220
Chp. 14, p. 233
Chp. 14, p. 241
Chp. 14, p. 258
Chp. 17, p. 291
Chp. 17, p. 292
Chp. 18, p. 298
Chp. 20, p. 329
Chp. 20, p. 343
Chp. 20, p. 346
Chp. 21, p. 367
Replies: