Photo: LAURA RAUCH
The CIA officially acknowledged the existence of Area 51 on Thursday in newly declassified documents obtained by George Washington University’s National Security Archive through a public records request. They describe how in 1955, two Air Force officers and two Lockheed employees flew over the Nevada site, decided it would be the perfect place to test the U-2 spy planes they were developing, and got approval from President Eisenhower to use the land. The report makes no mention of aliens, so it’s obviously just a Cold War-era testing site that the government refused to discuss for the next 58 years.
