About Annie Jacobsen: Annie Jacobsen is an American freelance journalist and contributing editor to the Los Angeles Times Magazine.
For decades, the men at Area 51 thought they'd take their secrets to the grave. At the height of the Cold War, they cultivated anonymity while pursuing some of the country's most covert projects. Conspiracy theories were left to popular imagination.
The idea that Area 51 was this test facility working to move science and technology faster and further than any other nation is true and is one of the great hallmarks of Area 51. There are other areas of the base that are controversial - but they bot...
Anyone who's read my 'Terror in the Skies' series knows that I have not been writing with an eye toward approval from any government agency.
The CIA teamed up with Army, Air Force and Naval Intelligence to run one of the most nefarious, classified, enhanced interrogation programs of the Cold War. The work took place inside a clandestine facility in the American zone of occupied Germany, c...
Since 9/11, the Justice Department has been widely criticized for one particular tactic it uses in fighting the War on Terror: it detains suspicious persons for long periods of time and puts them under heavy questioning before they are ever even char...
Can a democratic nation fight a War on Terror and at the same time bend over backward so as not to offend a few visitors' rights?
In 1957, with the arms race in full swing, the Department of Defense had decided it was just a matter of time before an airplane transporting an atomic bomb would crash on American soil, unleashing a radioactive disaster the likes of which the world ...
I do believe that the truth gets out.
The Cold War had become a battlefield marked by doublespeak. Disguise, distortion, and deception were accepted as reality. Truth was promised in a serum.
In the winter of 1973, the American POWs held captive in Vietnam were released according to the terms of the Paris Peace Accords.
Many of the engineers I interviewed worked on reverse-engineering technology. It's a hallmark of Area 51.
With stealth technology, the U.S. could spy on its Cold War adversaries without running the risk of getting caught.
On the morning of January 17, 1966, a real-life dirty bomb crisis occurred over Palomares, Spain. A Strategic Air Command bomber flying with four armed hydrogen Bombs - with yields between 70 kilotons and 1.45 megatons - collided midair with a refuel...
To understand how black projects began, and how they continue to function today, one must start with the creation of the atomic bomb. The men who ran the Manhattan Project wrote the rules about black operations. The atomic bomb was the mother of all ...
Area 51 is located in southern Nevada desert about 75 miles north of Las Vegas. It's set inside a greater land parcel that's about the size of the state of Connecticut that's called the 'Nevada Test and Training Range.'
Everything that goes on at Area 51 is classified 'top secret' when it's going on.
I examined a lot of CIA declassified UFO files, which are fascinating, because there was a huge UFO craze going on in America. There still is today, but it certainly started in '47. And by the '50s, it was in full force.
I believe it is called 'Area 51' because of a project, the very first project that went on out there, in 1951.
One of the few things the Air Force did admit to me existed out there presently without admitting that it was Area 51 is this drone called the 'Beast of Kandahar' which does not fire missiles, unlike the Predator and the Reaper, but just conducts sur...
I'm not an aviation historian, I'm not an Air Force aficionado, and I'm definitely not a ufologist. I'm not someone who studies UFOs.
