What is Area 51, where is it located and what happens if you look for it on Google Maps?

Sitting about 135 kilometers north of Las Vegas in the United States is a US Air Force base known as Area 51 in the Nevada desert. Formerly known as “The Land of Dreams” or “Rancho Paraíso”, over the years there has been speculation that there could be knowledge of possible extraterrestrial life, or even that spaceships from other planets could be housed there.

But beyond these extraordinary theories, it is fundamentally a base of the American air unit. They use it to test and develop top-secret projects in this field, such as the Lockheed U-2 spy plane, also known as the Dragon Lady, and the F-117 stealth plane. It was created during the 1950s, with the growth of the Cold War, in order to test different types of weapons that could be used in any potential battle against the Russians.

Secrecy has always surrounded this base. So much so, that not even the workers themselves could reveal to their families what they did for a living. As a result of this, the collective imagination has built theories about what the base may contain, including those alien vessels. However, the journalist and author of Area 51: An Uncensored History, Annie Jacobsen, has given an explanation for this conspiracies.

Why Area 51 is linked to extraterrestrial life?

In the mid-1950s, the base began testing U-2 aircraft. These reached heights of 18 meters. And, “as soon as the test flights began, people wrote letters to their local authorities saying: ‘I saw a UFO’.”, she explained in an interview for the magazine National Geographic.

She is not the only one. The BBC collected the statements of Colonel Hugh Slater, who served as commander at Area 51 during the 1960s, when tests of the Lockheed A-12 began. And he has put the number of test flights at 2,850: “That’s a lot of UFO sightings!”, the colonel pointed out.

Every time the test model made one of its flights, the passengers and pilots of commercial flights believed that they had seen a UFO (which, by definition they had!) and notified the control tower of what happened. Once the plane reached its destination, the authorities forced them to commit to not revealing what they had seen.

Since 2013: Area 51

In 2013, a series of documents were declassified that provided some information about the base. It was the first time that the US government officially confirmed the existence of Area 51 and its function. But all the activity that it carries out on a daily basis remains unknown and its access is vetoed to anyone who is not authorized.

The secrecy remains such that it is impossible to find images through the Google Maps satellite. Street View doesn’t work either: when trying to locate the yellow person at one of the points on the base map, it amusingly appears in a flying saucer, like the one usually associated with UFOs.

If images cannot be viewed on the Internet, it seems logical that physical access to them for the general public would be totally vetoed. Base authorities are authorized to charge anyone who attempts to enter the base.