Area 51 Palmdale facility. A search for a suitable testing site for the U-2 was conducted under the same extreme security as the rest of the project. He notified Lockheed, who sent an inspection team out to Groom Lake. According to Lockheed's U-2 designer Kelly Johnson: The lakebed made an ideal strip from which they could test aircraft, and the Emigrant Valley's mountain ranges and the NTS perimeter, about north of Las Vegas, protected the test site from visitors. The CIA asked the AEC to acquire the land, designated "Area 51" on the map, and add it to the Nevada Test Site.
Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base and its "error-ridden" prose. The book was sharply criticized for extensive errors in an essay by a senior fellow at the Federation of American Scientists and a senior fellow at the National Security Archive. Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base is a book by American journalist Annie Jacobsen about the secret United States military base Area 51. The book, based on interviews with scientists and engineers who worked in Area 51, addresses the Roswell UFO incident and dismisses the alien story. Instead, it suggests