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Area 51 Viewer's Guide

The Area 51 Viewers Guide

While ‘Area 51’ may be almost a household name today, twenty years ago it was only just coming to public attention through the work of independent researchers. In the early 1990s one researcher in particular, Glenn Campbell, was instrumental in bringing press attention to the secret military base at Groom Lake in the Nevada desert – rumoured by some to be a repository of secret alien spacecraft technology – largely through his self-published guide to the location, the Area 51 Viewer’s Guide. Campbell has now published this seminal document online for free as a PDF, and you can grab a copy for yourself from his website (make sure you check out the terms and conditions before doing so):

In UFO research, it can be hard to distill the truth from the overwhelming ocean of rumors, ideologies, hyperbole, hoaxes and false perceptions. All of these things are rampant here, so I have chosen in this document to stay as close as possible to concrete, undeniable fact. This is a guide not to UFOs themselves but to the many practical matters concerning the hunt for aerial objects in the vicinity of the “Black Mailbox,” the remote highway location north of Las Vegas where many visitors claims to have seen UFOs. This document reviews the geography of the region, the references available, local accommodations and services and many other practical topics of interest to visitors. Much of this information should be helpful to any traveler passing through the area regardless of their views on flying saucers. It should also be of interest to aviation enthusiasts in search of secret “Black Budget” aircraft built entirely by humans.

This book is an anomaly. It is a guide to hunting for UFOs and secret aircraft, but I do not honestly believe you are going to see any. In over two years living in this area, I have never seen any light in the sky I cannot explain or any military device that I would regard as particularly secret. There are a few intelligent UFO stories emanating from the military area that I think deserve serious attention. These concern the claim that the U.S. government may have had extraterrestrial hardware in its possession and may even have been in contact with aliens themselves. That is different from the claim-fostered by the less reputable media and by a certain local merchant – that you can come here to this remote desert highway and see flying saucers in on demand. This is ridiculous. The “Alien Highway” is a myth that, regrettably, I helped create by drawing attention to this area. It serves the human need for rituals and things to buy, but it does not bring us any closer to the truth.

This document reflects a certain period in my investigation of Area 51, ending around Dec. 1993, when I was collecting a general base of geographical knowledge about the area. I continue to update this Viewer’s Guide on an irregular basis to reflect changes in the facts initially reported, but I will not pursue any new avenues of investigation here.

If spotting a saucer at Area 51 is unlikely, I hear you ask, then why then bother consulting the guide in the first place? Because, as Campbell says, “a saucer-watching expedition has a certain nostalgic appeal, and nothing can be more pleasant in the summer than setting up a lawn chair under the crystal clear desert skies, miles from anywhere, with the dream of seeing something out of the ordinary”. I like his thinking.

For those interested in more up to date tales of Area 51 incursions, in the spirit that Glenn Campbell mentions above, make sure you check out Blair MacKenzie Blake’s wonderful article in Darklore Volume 7, “Dirt Roads to Dreamland” (grab a copy from Amazon US or Amazon UK), in which he tells of his expeditions to the famed secret base along with his good friend Danny Carey, drummer for the best band on the planet, Tool.

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  1. UFOs at Fort Tejon, Antelope Valley CA?
    While I can’t say anything about spotting UFOs at Area 51, I live a couple hours south of Northrop’s Tejon Ranch Radar Cross Section Facility in the foothills of the Tehachapi Mountains in Antelope Valley, CA. Way back around 1993-94 I heard some guest caller on a morning radio show – maybe Bill Hamilton?…claiming he was observing UFO’s there and he gave driving directions and said to go on the night of a full moon for most activity. So I got a buddy and did just that. On arriving there were a handful of other people at the spot in the desert off a dirt road armed with binoculars and telescopes. Many had blurry photos taken the month prior of white smudges in the sky they said were glowing objects that left the facility and flew around for a couple of hours.

    From our vantage point on the valley floor, the facility is midway up the mountain several miles away, so one is peering up from below at the buildings. There are long winding roads that lead up the mountain to the south west of the facility and then travel horizontally across the face of the mountain to the facility, with a trucks cruising regularly along the roads to the facility while we watched.

    We waited a couple hours and it was probably after 9 or 10 pm when the roof of one of the buildings appeared to open and a large brightly glowing orb rose maybe 1/4 of the way out of the roof so only the top rounded portion of it was visible. It remained motionless for the next hour or so, but pulsated variably from a bright glow to an extremely bright glow. My hopes of seeing it fly up into the night sky never materialized and it eventually dimmed and disappeared back inside the building with no more discernible activity the next hour or so and we left.

    However on researching archived witness statements of observations made of the facility during this time period, others claim to have seen identical brightly glowing football shaped objects leave the building and fly in the skies above for several hours before returning.

    So I can vouch for having seen something bright and glowing there – it just never flew for me. Wondering if might be worth the hour plus drive up there one full moon night to revisit my curiosity from so many years ago…?

      1. Doesn’t seem like any known
        Doesn’t seem like any known drone in that it was round and glowed without any discernable features, from our vantage point below and only being able to see the top round portion of whatever it was. If other’s published observations are to be believed, there seemed to be many of these objects, of different sizes but all round or football shaped and glowing brightly that flew in the skies. I have no doubt these were of earthly origin and were some type of advanced technology or perhaps reverse engineered…

        Also at the time, early 1990’s there was much talk of black triangles flying around there as well, probably the stealth fighters we all are familiar with now…or some similar craft.

        My suspician is the glowing orbs are some type of anti-gravity craft…

  2. The Rat in the Desert

    I fondly remember all the hours I spent as a college student peering through the files of the Groom Lake Desert Rat –the online newsletter Campbell ran in the 90s– inside my campus's computer lab.

    Thanks to it, I learned how one of the reasons Area 51 became so prominent back in those days was due to the legal dispute triggered by the base's illegal extension of its perimeter fence, meant to engulf some of the vantage points from which civilians like Blair could get a good look on the facility's activity, while still standing in public land. Well, it just so happens that our good friend Norio Hayakawa is documenting something similar happening at Kirtland AFB in New Mexico –a base familiar to those who've read Greg Bishop's Project Beta.

    http://youtu.be/Jq5QKxGX87Q

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