Area 51: Why the Government Wouldn’t Name It for Decades

For decades, the official answer to “What is Area 51?” was no answer at all.

From The Unexplained, a coloring book of UFOs, cryptids and unsolved mysteries by Pencil Box Press.

A dry lakebed in the Nevada desert. A runway that didn’t appear on public maps. Guards, warning signs and a steady stream of people who swore they saw lights in the sky that moved like nothing they had ever seen. It is no wonder Area 51 became the most famous UFO destination in the world.

What was really being tested

In 2013, a declassified CIA history, released through George Washington University’s National Security Archive, finally acknowledged the site. It was built in the 1950s to test the U-2, a spy plane designed to fly higher than anything else in the sky at the time.

The same history makes a striking claim: U-2 flights, and later flights of the OXCART spy plane, accounted for more than half of the UFO reports in the late 1950s and most of the 1960s. A silver aircraft at the edge of space, catching the sun after dark on the ground, would look very strange to a pilot or a rancher looking up.

So, case closed?

Not for everyone. The spy plane explanation covers a lot of sightings, but not every one of them, and decades of official silence left plenty of room for other theories. People on the ground weren’t imagining things. They were seeing something classified. What else might still be classified is the question that keeps the legend alive.

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Area 51 is one of the case files in The Unexplained, a bold and easy coloring book of UFOs, cryptids and unsolved mysteries from Pencil Box Press.