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By Kkith R(m;krsLas Vegas Review-JovrnaeLAS VEGAS (AP) — As big as football fields and deep enough to bury airplanes, the graves at Groom Lake lie scattered around the government's secret installation in the desert.There arc no headstones or markers to denote the final resting place for such high-tech aircraft as the predecessors to the F-l I7A Nighthawk stealth fighter jet and the SR-71 Blackbird spy plane.But people who worked at what is widely known as Area 51 and researchers who track aviation history 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.According to aviation writer and historian Peter Merlin — who has obtained declassified flight documents and interviewed personnel involved with Groom Lake programs since 1955 — more thana dozen aircraft are buried around the installation. Combined, the craft were worth at least $6(X) million and might be valued at 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 presidential order. Air Force officials will not discuss what it acknowledges only as “the operating location near GroomLake, which is a 38,400-acre swath ofdesert along the dry lake bed 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.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. Merlin said.For example, three generations of high-flying spy planes — U-2s, A-12s, and SR-7 Is — have been demonstrated at Groom Lake, each becoming progresThe 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, claims writer and historian Peter Merlinsively superior to foreign forces. “Nobody ever shot down an A-12,” Merlin 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, Calif.erjets were routinely burned for years. A four U2s from the 1950s; a F-l 01 chaseplane that crashed in 1965; and wreckage of a MiG-23 that crashed in 1984.Merlin and three other sources wholawsuit by former base workers alleged they had developed illnesses from toxic fumes, but the Air Force has declined to release documents regarding the disposal worked at the base said base officials practice, citing national security con- wanted to retrieve one of the Have Blueairframes used to demonstrate technology for the F-l 17A that was buried somewhere near the Groom Lake installationcems.John Pike, director of GlobalSecuri-ty.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 carryingA 1982 burial site described by a for- doorgunners manning machine guns.mer Groom Lake worker was near a grav-el-pit road and system of trenches whereThe Groom Lake graveyard, according to Merlin, includes several 1960s-but were unable to find it.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 Ohiosecret documents and materials including vintage A-12s, predecessors of the fast, instead. Tacit Blue was tested at Groom drums of toxic coatings for stealth fight- high-flying SR-71 Blackbird spy planes; Lake from 1982 to 1985, Merlin said.
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Alamogordo Daily News
Alamogordo, New Mexico, US
Thu, Mar 29, 2001
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