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 show what appears to be F-16 Fighting Falcon aircraft stationed on the base. Its secretive nature and undoubted connection to classified aircraft research, together with reports of unusual phenomena, have led Area 51 to become a focus of modern UFO and other conspiracy theories. Some of the activities mentioned in such theories at Area 51 include: Many of the hypotheses concern underground facilities at Groom or at Papoose Lake (also known as "S-4 location"), south, and include claims of a transcontinental underground railroad system, a disappearing airstrip (nicknamed the "Cheshire Airstrip", after Lewis Carroll's Cheshire cat) which briefly appears when