The entire 'Area 51' complex is a facade set up specifically to draw attention from the real secret bases. All the rumors of alien crafts there (and at Roswell) and stories of advanced weapons testing were started by the Air Force itself. Even the lawsuits were faked; the 'toxic gas victims' were paid to fake their own deaths, relocated and given plastic surgery to disguise themeselves.
The 'base' is nothing more than a small landing strip and a few empty buildings. The workers who are brought there daily are part of the fraud, being paid to literally do nothing but show up. The only operational part is the airstrip, which the USAF occasionally uses as a refuelinfg point for experimental craft flying out of the real secret bases (or, more often, conventional aircraft mocked up to look unusual) in order to keep the hoax alive.
The plan was put into operation towards the end of WWII, when it was realized that this sort of Potemkin Village arrangement could serve both to mislead foreign intelligence agencies, and distract the more curious, paranoid and/or intelligent civilians who had caused so many security problems during the war. The Navy had a similar project regarding the so-called Philadelphia Experiment, which rumors place at two completely inocuous locations. The Air Force, seeing the effectiveness of the Navy plan, ran a test project at Roswell; when that succeeded well beyond their expectations, they started the Area 51 hoax. |
