Secret planes that helped America win the Cold War lie
buried at Area 51
By KEITH ROGERS
REVIEW-JOURNAL
As big as football fields and deep enough to bury airplanes,
the graves at Groom Lake lie scattered around the government's secret
installation, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
There are no headstones or markers to denote the final
resting place for such high-tech aircraft as the predecessors to the F-117A
Nighthawk stealth fighter jet and the SR-71 Blackbird spy plane.
But people who worked there and researchers who track
aviation history and the government's so-called "black budget"
programs say some planes that crashed and other experiments that failed were
hauled to the bottom of 40-foot-deep holes and covered overnight with mounds of
dirt.
One former Groom Lake worker, who spoke on condition of
anonymity, said he watched while an earthmover spent a day in 1982 scraping out
a burial site.
It was a massive excavation, he said. "They didn't dig
that hole and put Martians or moon men in it."
He said the wreckage of a classified plane that was buried
on the base was for months in what's called the "Scoot-N-Hide," a
shed off a taxiway where secret planes are kept out of view of orbiting
satellites.
"They put it on a flatbed truck and put it in a hangar.
Then one day they scraped it off the flatbed into the hole and buried it,"
he said. "They attached a cable to the aircraft and just pulled it off.
The thing was shattered like an egg."
According to aviation writer and historian Peter Merlin --
who has obtained declassified flight documents and interviewed personnel
involved with Groom Lake programs spanning a period since 1955 -- more than a
dozen aircraft are buried around the installation. Combined, the craft were
worth at least $600 million and might be valued as much as $1 billion.
This practice of disposing secret, high-tech equipment
continues today, he said. "We have no reason to believe it has
stopped."
Because it is cloaked in secrecy by a presidential order,
Air Force officials will not discuss what it acknowledges only as "the
operating location near Groom Lake," which is widely known as Area 51, a
38,400-acre swath of desert along the dry lake bed.
Merlin said the equipment that now lies 40 feet beneath the
surface represents cutting-edge technology that in its time kept the U.S.
military and the nation's intelligence community ahead of foreign adversaries.
For example, three generations of high-flying spy planes --
U-2s, A-12s, and SR-71s -- have been demonstrated at Groom Lake, each becoming
progressively superior to foreign forces. "Nobody ever shot down an
A-12," he noted.
Even former Soviet bloc aircraft, such as the 1970s-vintage
MiG-23, have been obtained by the U.S. intelligence community and tested at
Groom Lake to see how U.S. planes and radar stack up against it, said Merlin,
who writes for several aeronautical trade publications, including a newspaper
for the NASA Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base.
The 1982 burial site described by the former Groom Lake
worker was near a gravel-pit road and system of trenches where secret documents
and materials including drums of toxic coatings for stealth fighter jets were
routinely burned for years. A lawsuit by former base workers alleged they had
developed illnesses from toxic fumes, but the Air Force has declined to release
documents regarding the disposal practice, citing national security concerns.
John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org -- a Washington,
D.C.-area defense-policy organization, said "the notion that the Air Force
is burying its mistakes at Groom Lake makes sense." It is patrolled by
helicopters carrying doorgunners manning machine guns.
The Groom Lake graveyard, according to Merlin, includes:
• Several 1960s-vintage A-12s, predecessors of the fast,
high-flying SR-71 Blackbird spy planes.
• Four U2s from the 1950s.
• An F-101 chase plane that crashed in 1965.
• Two Have Blue airframes that were used to demonstrate
technology for the F-117A.
• Wreckage of a MiG-23 that crashed in 1984.
Merlin and three other sources who worked at the base said
base officials wanted to retrieve one of the Have Blue airframes buried
somewhere near the Groom Lake installation but were unable to find it.
He said there was a plan to bury a unique surveillance
aircraft, Tacit Blue -- a white plane equipped with sensors and radar that
could survive flying close to war zones -- but it was rescued and placed in the
U.S. Air Force Museum in Ohio instead. Tacit Blue was tested at Groom Lake from
1982 to 1985, he said.
Not all once-secret planes from Groom Lake that crashed have
been buried there, including the first production F-117A, tail No. 785,
according to Merlin and others who worked at the base at the time.
On April 20, 1982, Lockheed test pilot Robert Riedenauer was
at the controls of that plane when it cartwheeled wing over wing attempting to
take off from a Groom Lake runway.
To this day neither Riedenauer nor Air Force officials can
say where the ill-fated takeoff occurred -- but other sources who worked at the
base as well as Merlin say that crash was indeed at the Groom Lake
installation.
While Riedenauer can't talk about the crash location he
spoke openly about how he escaped death that day, when miswired controls caused
the craft to go down instead of up.
"I had four seconds to think about it," Riedenauer
explained in an interview about his ride aboard the jet.
He said he spent the first two seconds trying to get the
craft under control. "The third was reaching for handles to bail out, and
the fourth was I realized the aircraft was inverted so it didn't make sense to
bail out, so I started shutting down the engine and throttle."
Rescuers managed to save Riedenauer from a fire that flared
up. They spent 20 minutes cutting him out of the cockpit. He would spend months
in the hospital.
The wings of the $46 million plane were shattered. The plane
was to have been the first of 59 stealth F-117As delivered to the Air Force.
Much of it, however, was salvaged and spared from burial,
according to Merlin.
The damaged aircraft was returned to Palmdale, Calif., where
it now sits on a pylon on display. The first preproduction F-117s have also
been converted to displays. One of them, tail No. 780 is at Freedom Park at
Nellis Air Force Base.
Bob Pepper, a spokesman for the F-117A stealth fighter jet
unit at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, said the policy for disposing of
wrecked stealths is to store them temporarily at Holloman and then to follow
the procedure for disposing other military aircraft.
The current procedure for disposing of Air Force planes
developed from unclassified technology, according to Pike, is to take them to
Davis-Monthan Air Force Base near Tucson, Ariz., where they are kept for parts,
chopped up and melted down to recycle their aluminum and other metals.
"A stealth composite airplane is not the sort of thing
that can be melted down to make pots and pans. You would want to dispose of
them so they don't come back to haunt you," he said, explaining that the
government's intention is to keep secret materials and components in a secure
location so they can't be obtained by other countries.
One former base worker described the 1984 crash of a MiG-23
that ultimately ended up in the Groom Lake graveyard.
"I saw that thing explode," he said. "I was
looking up at the sky. I thought, `God, these guys are going fast.'
"Then it was just like it disappeared. The plane came
apart. The wings came off it and he punched out," he said, referring to
the pilot's fatal bail-out.
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