The document said: “High-altitude testing of the U-2 soon led to an unexpected side-effect – a tremendous increase in reports of unidentified flying objects. The documents reveal that British pilots were used to fly missions in the U-2 in an attempt to confuse the Soviets, but that tests on the aircraft and its successor, known as Oxcart, also seemed to be responsible for many sightings of UFOs. They also provide detailed history about tests and missions of the U-2 plane from Area 51, along with information about the aircrafts use in other parts of the world. The documents also mention how a Military Air Transport Service flight crashed in 1955 at Area 51 killing 14 people. It also states that to make the facility more attractive to workers there, it was named Paradise Ranch, or sometimes the Ranch.Ī poor quality photograph of “The Ranch” is also included. It then became central in the development of the U-2 spy plane. President Dwight Eisenhower later approved “this strip of wasteland, known by its map designation as Area 51, to the Atomic Energy Commissions Nevada test site and training range. It describes how the facility had been used during World War Two as an aerial gunnery for the Army Air Corp pilots. One of the first mentions describe how two senior project staff on the U-2 project had been flying over Nevada when they spotted an old airstrip near Groom Lake. The latest version to be released shows that Area 51 is mentioned on at least 12 pages, including a map. The mentions of Area 51 were contained in documents detailing the history of the U-2 and Oxcart spy plane programs were written in 1992 by Gregory Pedlow and Donald Welzenbach, who were historians at the CIA.Ī heavily redacted version of the seven chapter history was published in 1998 with a more detailed version released under the Freedom of Information Act in 2002. “The latest release is notable for the significant amount of newly declassified material with respect to the U-2 - with regard to names of pilots, codenames and cryptonyms, locations, funding and cover arrangements, electronic countermeasures equipment, organisation, cooperation with foreign governments, and operations, particularly in Asia.” In a blog posted on the research organisation’s website, Mr Richelson said: “What the CIA released in response to a 2005 Freedom of Information Act request is a substantially less redacted version of a history of two key aerial reconnaissance programs.
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