Area 51: The Dreamland Chronicles place and its hold on our collective psyche" and "wonderfully even-handed" towards Ufologists who speculate about "the physically impossible". Area 51: The Dreamland Chronicles Area 51: The Dreamland Chronicles is a 1997 non-fiction book about Area 51 in Nevada by David Darlington. A review in the "Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists" called the book "a real service" for readers interested in the early history of the site, but also scolded the author for entertaining "alien seekers, the tragically abducted, and self-appointed aliens ... saucer nuts" whose record "drown[s] out any legitimate inquiry into how much secrecy and how large a
Area 51 came to the Air Force's Project Blue Book, which investigated UFO sightings, through air-traffic controllers and letters to the government. The project checked U-2 and later OXCART flight records to eliminate the majority of UFO reports it received during the late 1950s and 1960s, although it could not reveal to the letter writers the truth behind what they saw. Similarly, veterans of experimental projects such as OXCART and NERVA at Area 51 agree that their work (including 2,850 OXCART test flights alone) inadvertently prompted many of the UFO sightings and other rumors: They believe that the rumors helped maintain secrecy