Message posted by gary on February 01, 2003 at 11:10:24 PST:
To take everyone's mind off the shuttle for a while (not that you should ever forget), I met a truck driver who delivers to Groom Lake via the NTS. I gave him this website and another list, hoping that he would post his story first hand, but it looks like that isn't going to happen. I'll leave out what he delivers and the frequency of trips to make it impossible to track down this guy. To make a delivery of a common industrial expendible item, the folks at Groom don't use a special military truck. Rather, a commercial truck from the vendor is used. The truck is driven to gate 700 by the commercial truck driver. At that point, the commercial driver waits in the guard shack, and someone from the base drives the truck to the operation near Groom Lake. The one-way distance is 13.5 miles. No GPS tracking equipment is allowed on the truck. I don't recall the minimum time to get the truck back, but once it took 3 hours. The guard gave the driver dinner. [And who said the camo dudes are heartless...] While in the guard shark, the driver told me that he has heard alarms go off. The guards claim they often go off due to the wind. This would indicate that cameras are not a primary means of detection, which you could pretty much guess as the coverage of cameras is really very limited.
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