;City Guides is an organization in San Francisco that provides free tours to tourists and local residents of sites of historical interest in San Francisco. City Guides organizes the tours by subject, the waterfront, the theater, the gold rush. I signed up and was accepted for the City Guides training program, but I am also interested in tours beyond San Francisco and in particular science tours.

Therefore, I was delighted to come across a book series published by Rutgers University Press and edited by Dr. Duane S. Nickell entitled Guidebook for the Scientific Traveler. I ordered the first book in the series subtitled Visiting Astronomy and Space Exploration Sites Across America  ;and when I received it started looking for close to home destinations in the book.

I am a native Nevadan and found one Nevada site Area 51 (Groom Lake) and the nearby Extraterrestrial Highway. Groom Lake is approximately 83 miles north-northwest of downtown Las Vegas. The Groom Box is a 23 by 23.5 box of restricted airspace at whose center lies dry bed of Groom Lake with a super secret airbase on its southern shore. The site is crossed by restricted Groom Lake Road which outside the restricted area joins State Route 375, the Extraterrestrial Highway outside the hamlet of Rachel. The photo at the right is an aerial view of the Lake.

The military used Groom Lake for artillery and bombing practice during World War II, but then abandoned it until April 1955 when a Lockheed Skunk Works team selected it as a site to test the U-2 spy plane because the site was within the perimeter of the Nevada Nuclear Test site and surrounded by the Emigrant Valley Mountains which protected the site from outside inquiry.

Before the U-2 development was complete Lockheed began work on another project in the 1960 s that has contributed to the area’s atmosphere of mystery, the OXCART project. The goal of the OXCART project was to develop a Mach-3 high altitude reconnaissance aircraft to overfly the Soviet Union and Cuba. The first shakedown flight of the A-12 took place at Groom Lake on April 26,1962. The production run of 18 aircraft made 2,850 test flights out of Groom Lake. The aircraft had an entirely new wide disk-fuselage in order to carry vast quantities of fuel (see picture above left). Commercial pilots flying over Nevada at dusk would look up and see the bottom of an Oxcart aircraft with the sun glinting off its titanium body at 2000 miles per hour. It was little wonder that many thought that they had seen a UFO.

 The secrecy surrounding the site and the connection to super secret aircraft made Area 51 a focus of UFO and conspiracy theories. Among the the stories  put forward as to what the government was doing at the site were the following:

• The government engaged in reverse engineering in which it examined and recreated crashed alien spacecrafts. This included the study of the alien occupants living or dead found in the craft.
• The government used the site to meet with extraterrestrials.
• The government developed exotic weapons and means of controlling the weather at the site.
• The government used the site for time travel and teleportation research and exotic propulsion systems.
• The government used the site for activities related to a shadowy one world government sometimes called the Majestic 12 organization.

There was a touch of truth to some of these suppositions. Reporter Annie Jacobsen interviewed some people who had worked at Area 21 in an April 5,2009 story in the Los Angeles Times. Thorton”T.D” Barnes, a special projects engineer, stated that the group at Area 51 did reverse engineer foreign technology such as the MIG 21 out of the area and he also worked on a rocket project in underground chambers located at nearby Jackass Flats, but there is no real evidence to support any of the other conjectures.

Stephen Rgenold, a reporter for the New York Timestravelled down the vast expanse of the Extraterrestrial Highway in a feature dated April 13,2007. He stopped at the Little A’Le’Inn ( pronounced Little Alien) in Rachel, population 75, and found people who believed and who debunked the alien tales. I believe the Nevada desert and mountain scape has a severe beauty that can be appreciated. See picture above. Who is to say that there may not be some extraterrestrials out there somewhere who also find it appealing?