Chapter 20: From Camera Bays to Weapons Bays

By 1974, the Central Intelligence Agency had ceded control of Area 51. Some insiders say the transition occurred in 1979, but since Area 51 does not officially exist, the Air Force won’t officially say when this handover occurred.

Certainly this had to have happened by the time the stealth bomber program was up and running; the F-117 program was the holy grail of Pentagon black projects — and, during that time period, the Air Force dominated Area 51.

Having no business in bombs, the CIA maintained a much smaller presence there than historically it had before. During the 1970s, the Agency’s work concentrated largely on pilotless aircraft, or drones. Hank Meierdierck, the man who wrote the manual for the U‑2 at Area 51, was in charge of one such CIA drone project, which began in late 1969.

Code-named Aquiline, the six-foot-long pilotless aircraft was disguised to look like an eagle or buzzard in flight. It carried a small television camera in its nose and photo equipment and air-sampling sensors under its wings. Some insiders say it had been designed to test for radiation in the air as well as to gather electronic intelligence, or ELINT. But Gene Poteat, the first CIA officer ever assigned to the National Reconnaissance Office, offers a different version of events.

“Spy satellites flying over the Caspian Sea delivered us images of an oddly shaped, giant, multi-engine watercraft moving around down there on the surface. No one had any idea what this thing was for, but you can be sure the Agency wanted to find out."

"That is what the original purpose of Aquiline was for,” Poteat reveals. “To take close‑up pictures of the vehicle so we could discern what it was and what the Soviets might be thinking of using it for. Since we had no idea what it was, we made up a name for it."

"We called it the Caspian Sea Monster,” Poteat explains. Project Aquiline remains a classified project, but in September of 2008, BBC News magazine produced a story about a Cold War Soviet hydrofoil named Ekranopian, which is exactly what the CIA’s Aquiline drone was designed to spy on.

At Area 51, Hank Meierdierck selected his former hunting partner Jim Freedman to assist him on the Aquiline drone program. “It flew low and was meant to follow along communication lines in foreign countries and intercept messages,” Freedman says. “I believe the plan was to launch it from a submarine while it was waiting in port.” The Aquiline team consisted of three pilots trained to remotely control the bird, with Freedman offering operational support.

“Hank got the thing to fly,” Freedman recalls. Progress was slow and “it crash-landed a lot.” The program ended when the defense contractor, McDonnell Douglas, gave a bid for the job that Meierdierck felt was ninety-nine million dollars over budget. McDonnell Douglas would not budge on its bid, so Hank recommended that the CIA cancel Project Aquiline, which he said they did.

After the program was over, Hank Meierdierck managed to take a mock‑up of the Aquiline drone home with him from the area. “He had it sitting on his bar at his house down in Las Vegas,” Freedman recalls.

Project Aquiline was not the CIA’s first attempt to gather intelligence using cover from the animal kingdom. Project Ornithopter involved a birdlike drone designed to blend in with nature by flapping its wings. And a third, even smaller drone was designed to look like a crow and land on windowsills in order to photograph what was going on inside CIA-targeted rooms.

The tiniest drone program, orchestrated in the early 1970s, was Project Insectothopter, an insect-size aerial vehicle that looked like a dragonfly in flight. Insectothopter had an emerald green minifuselage and, like Ornithopter, flapped its wings, which were powered by a miniature engine that ran on a tiny amount of gas. Through its Office of Research and Development, or ORD, the CIA had also tried turning live birds and cats into spies.

In one such program, CIA-trained pigeons flew around Washington, DC, with bird-size cameras strapped to their necks. The project failed after the extra weight tired out the pigeons and they hobbled back to headquarters on foot instead of in flight. Another CIA endeavor, Acoustic Kitty, involved putting electronic listening devices in house cats.

But that project also backfired after too many cats strayed from their missions in search of food. One acoustic kitty got run over by a car. The Agency’s pilotless-vehicle projects were forever growing in ambition and in size. One robotic drone from the early 1970s, a project financed with DARPA, was disguised to look like an elephant —ready to do battle in the jungles of Vietnam.

Chapter 4: The Seeds of a Conspiracy

As soon as the U-2s started flying out of Area 51, reports of UFO sightings by commercial airline pilots and air traffic controllers began to inundate CIA headquarters.

Later painted black to blend in with the sky, the U-2s at that time were silver, which meant their long, shiny wings reflected light down from the upper atmosphere in a way that led citizens all over California, Nevada, and Utah to think the planes were UFOs.

The altitude of the U-2 alone was enough to bewilder people. Commercial airplanes flew at between ten thousand and twenty thousand feet in the mid-1950s, whereas the U-2 flew at around seventy thousand feet. Then there was the radical shape of the airplane to consider. Its wings were nearly twice as long as the fuselage, which made the U-2 look like a fiery flying cross.

In 1955 the UFO phenomenon sweeping America was seven years old. The modern-day UFO craze officially began on June 24, 1947, when a search-and-rescue pilot named Kenneth Arnold spotted nine flying discs speeding over Washington State while he was out searching for a downed airplane Approximately two weeks later, the crash at Roswell occurred.

By the end of the month, more than 850 UFO sightings had been reported in the news media.

Rumors of flying saucers were sweeping the nation, and public anxiety was mounting; Americans demanded answers from the military.

According to a CIA study on UFOs, declassified in 1997, the Air Force had originally been running two programs. One was covert, initially called Project Saucer and later called Project Sign; another was an overt Air Force public relations campaign called Project Grudge. The point of Project Grudge was to “persuade the public that UFOs constituted nothing unusual or extraordinary,” and to do this, Air Force officials went on TV and radio dismissing UFO reports.

Sightings were attributed to planets, meteors, even “large hailstones,” Air Force officials said, categorically denying that UFOs were anything nefarious or out of this world. But their efforts did very little to appease the public. With the nuclear arms race in full swing, the idea that the world could come to an end in nuclear holocaust had tipped the psychological scales for many Americans, giving way to public discussion about Armageddon and the End of Times.

In 1951, Hollywood released the film The Day the Earth Stood Still, about aliens preparing to destroy Earth. Two years later, The War of the Worlds was made into a movie and won an Academy Award. Even the famous psychiatrist Carl Jung got into the act, publishing a book that said UFOs were individual mirrors of a collective anxiety the world was having about nuclear annihilation.

Sightings continued and so did intense interest by both the Air Force and the CIA.

At Area 51, the reality that the U-2 was repeatedly being mistaken for a UFO was not something analysts welcomed, but it was something they were forced to address. The general feeling at the Agency was that CIA officers had more important things to do than handle the public hysteria about strange objects in the sky.

Dealing with UFO reports, the CIA felt, was more appropriately suited for pencil pushers over at the Air Force.

According to declassified documents, the CIA did open up a clandestine UFO data-collecting department, albeit begrudgingly. Seeing as the CIA could easily clear its own analysts to handle information on the U-2, this made sense. This attitude, that CIA officers were above plebeian affairs such as UFO sightings, was endemic at the Agency and trickled down from the top. CIA director Allen Dulles was an elitist at heart, an old-school spy brought up in the Office of Strategic Services, the World War II espionage division of the Army.

Dulles preferred gentlemen spy craft and disliked technology in general, which was why he’d delegated control of the U-2 spy plane to Richard Bissell in the first place. As for the UFO problems, Dulles assigned that job to a former OSS colleague named Todos M. Odarenko. The UFO division was placed inside the physics office, which Odarenko ran. Almost immediately Odarenko “sought to have his division relieved of the responsibility for monitoring UFO reports,” according to a CIA monograph declassified in 1997.

And yet the significance of UFOs to the CIA could not have had a higher national security concern.

The case file regarding unidentified flying objects that Allen Dulles had inherited from the Agency’s previous director, General Walter Bedell Smith, was, and remains, one of the most top secret files in CIA history.

Because it has yet to be declassified, there is no way of knowing how much information Bedell Smith shared with his successor. But Bedell Smith himself would more likely than not have had a need-to-know about the Army intelligence’s blackest programs, and that would have included the flying disc retrieved at Roswell.

When the crash occurred, in July of 1947, Bedell Smith was the ambassador to the Soviet Union. During the search for the Horten brothers under the program known as Operation Harass, Bedell Smith was serving as commander of the First Army at Governors Island, New York — a locale from which Project Paperclip scientists were monitored, evaluated, and assigned research and engineeering jobs.

And when the crash remains left Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio to be shipped out to the desert in Nevada, Bedell Smith was the director of the CIA. The degree of need-to-know access he had regarding secret parallel programs set up there remains one of the great riddles of Area 51.

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/05/17/exclusive-inside-area-51-secret-birthplace-u2-spy-plane/

I honestly believe that Area 51 is nothing more then a place where new military aircraft is designed and tested and operated. Hell, I am sure they have stuff there we will never know about.

there are more secret places than Area 51 now... i can't tell you what they are, they might be watching...

I have lived near and been associated with (both directly and indirectly) an AFB here that has a supposed "secret hangar" for near 30 yrs

locally we just consider it a fable - lotta peeps from here have been over there and it's actually empty - or was last I heard

but this might be a different secret hangar tale - different Nessie - than the one I'm familiar with

I don't care what they got..I wanna see anyways..when they decide to let people in..I'm am so there!

Why is it that the media can find out pretty much anything that's on a person,place or thing yet they can't figure out jack about Area 51 and what it holds?

That will never happen. I lived less then 40 miles from there at one point. You can go up to the borders, you can see the CCTV cameras and then all the sudden you see a Truck or SUV on the hill with people in camo with rifles and binoculars watching you, if you cross the line they call the Nye county sheriff's and you get arrested and are interviewed by an FBI Agent while in jail or right after your released apparently. The also have Blackhawk helo's apparently for security purposes as well.

They also have signs up all over on the fenceline telling you that you can be shot if you cross into the terrotory.

I know the former Governor of Nevada who I worked for was a former fighter pilot and a Col. in the Air Force and Nevada Air Guard told us that when he flew out of Reno Tahoe Airport(Where the Air Guard operates in Northern Nevada) or Nellis Air Force Base he couldn't go close to the area, it's all restricted airspace, military pilots cant even enter unless they have clearance and if they he said they can be grounded, demoted, put in the brig or even shot down.

It is the most secure facility on the planet. Hell, I even read where astronauts have gotten in serious trouble for taking pictures of the area from space.

There is definately a lot going on there, probably all new Aircraft technology. I highly doubt that there is ailens there, ALTHOUGH Bob Lazar did claim to work there and made some pretty wild claims, but he also passed a polygraph administered by a former Federal Law Inforcement Agent who stated if he is lying he should goto Hollywood because he would be very successful and highly doubted Lazar was lying, so I dont know. I guess you never know, thats what the fascination is with it.

No! You are not popping that hope bubble! Lol
I still don't care..I wanna see anyways

You never know, Obama might just turn it into an Amusement Park at the rate hes going disclosing classified stuff.

He can disclose away on area 51...I wonder if they would even let him in.

They wouldn't have a choice.

Hell, the only time ive seen subordinates stop a President from doing something was when the CIA and DOD were involved in the JFK Assasination.