I Wanted to Believe

March 31, 2010 2:57 PM

Declassified secrets about the top-secret U.S. military base Area 51 revealed: Great food, cash-stuffed briefcases, no UFOs.
posted by Chinese Jet Pilot (43 comments total)

Well duh, they have been identified by now.
posted by furiousxgeorge at 2:59 PM on March 31, 2010

Very cool...still wish I could get inside, aliens or no.
posted by 3rdrate at 2:59 PM on March 31, 2010

How fucking awesome would it be to be on vacation in the middle of nowhere, see a crazy plane crash, and then have some guy in a suit walk up to you and give you a briefcase with $25,000 in cash. Good fucking vacation I say.
posted by Lutoslawski at 3:09 PM on March 31, 2010 [26 favorites]

Obviously this is a cover story to prevent us from thinking about the flying saucer they have there!
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 3:13 PM on March 31, 2010 [2 favorites]

WHAT PART OF TRUST NO ONE DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND?
posted by The Card Cheat at 3:15 PM on March 31, 2010 [4 favorites]

Noce remembers always getting paid in cash, signing a phony name to the receipt, during his several years of working security at the site. It was, in CIA parlance, "a black project."

Noce says he has no paperwork showing that he worked at Area 51 for the CIA. He says that was common. Others who got checks say they came from various companies, including Pan American World Airways.

Enjoy the audit boys!
posted by Big_B at 3:16 PM on March 31, 2010 [2 favorites]

On one occasion, he remembers, when the first jets were being tested at what Muroc Army Air Field, later renamed Edwards Air Force Base, a test pilot put on a gorilla mask and flew upside down beside a private pilot.

"Well, when this guy went back, telling reporters, 'I saw a plane that didn't have a propeller and being flown by a monkey,'

This might be the greatest thing I've heard all day. If I was a test pilot in charge of technology that no one had ever seen before? Oh hell yeah I'd be abusing it, just like this.

"Yeah, officer, it was some sort of glowing motorcycle thing that floated. But, and this is the really odd part, I think it was Big Foot driving it... No I'm not drunk, get your hands off me!.."
posted by quin at 3:19 PM on March 31, 2010 [10 favorites]

Apparently UFOs do exist, they just look like propellerless airplanes, and their alien pilots look like men wearing gorilla masks. THE TRUTH COMES OUT
posted by The Winsome Parker Lewis at 3:21 PM on March 31, 2010

posted by Chinese Jet Pilot

Eponysterical....? Or is that just what they want you to believe??
posted by gimonca at 3:25 PM on March 31, 2010 [3 favorites]

I have often wondered about the zillions of people on the CIA pad...if, in many instances, they have a regular job--say at a university--and to intel work when they travel on "projects," do they declare govt income when they pay taxes? or do they get to keep the silence by not having to declare the extra income. If this site is being monitored by NSA, perhaps someone there could post a comment here.
posted by Postroad at 3:26 PM on March 31, 2010 [2 favorites]

Surely someone that worked as a security guard for three years would have seen everything.
posted by Big_B at 3:28 PM on March 31, 2010

Lobster was flown in regularly from Maine. A jet, sent across the country to test its engines, would bring back the succulent payload.

Sorry, buddy, but that wasn't lobster, and it sure as shit didn't come from Maine. Xenomorphs in captivity have little else to do but procreate, but there is only so much room for incubator sacs in the artificial pod-hive, so what you were eating was abortion. Alien abortion. The butter and lemon wasn't for flavour: citric acid/dairy protein compounds are well-known for their capacity to neutralise the cooked fetus's natural last-ditch defense response, which is to burrow through your philtrum and into your brainmeat and sting the backs of your eyes. You don't know just how lucky you really are, Noce.
posted by turgid dahlia at 3:32 PM on March 31, 2010 [34 favorites]

Great food, cash-stuffed briefcases, no UFOs

Oddly, this also describe Google HQ.

COINCIDENCE?

oh wait, shit, they have a UFO too!
posted by GuyZero at 3:34 PM on March 31, 2010 [1 favorite]

I need to find some way to get myself in on some of this suitcase-of-cash action.
posted by dunkadunc at 3:46 PM on March 31, 2010 [1 favorite]

Enjoy the audit boys!

Wouldn't that implicate the ones who gave him the money in the first place?
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 3:55 PM on March 31, 2010

Wouldn't you think that giving people big bags of money would make them want to talk more? Or would having a briefcase full of money from The Government be something to ruin their credibility? Perhaps having a sudden influx of money would make people more likely to hide their activities surrounding the reception of such funds?

And now I hope that giving out large sums of money was the culmination of some other government experiments on ways to best cover up private experiments accidentally seen by the public.
posted by filthy light thief at 4:05 PM on March 31, 2010

I'm guessing it's a "Here's some money, keep your mouth shut or we're going to audit the hell out of you or maybe worse" sort of deal.
posted by dunkadunc at 4:18 PM on March 31, 2010

Now really, Seattle Times should have posted the link for Roadrunners Internationale. This is a big-ass website with 1950s-1960s Area 51 photos, memorabilia, and stories. The big caveat on all this is that the cloak of secrecy is still up for anything past 1968. The declassification (if there was a formal declassification to begin with -- I'm not sure why putting an A-12 in CIA headquarters makes it where you can talk openly) applies entirely to Oxcart and the A-12 program.
posted by crapmatic at 4:20 PM on March 31, 2010 [3 favorites]

A suitcase full of money says "Look what we can do to arrange your voluntary silence. Imagine what we can do to arrange your involuntary silence if you make it necessary to do so."
posted by FishBike at 4:22 PM on March 31, 2010 [7 favorites]

Tax peculiarities were exactly what came to my mind, reading this article. It's hard for me to imagine two government organizations as disparate as the CIA and the IRS working well enough together to keep everyone involved from getting fucked somehow.
posted by invitapriore at 4:27 PM on March 31, 2010 [1 favorite]

Wouldn't that implicate the ones who gave him the money in the first place?

It's not unreasonable to assume the CIA did their homework on this and instituted some sort of agreement with the IRS to make sure certain people don't come under review. It was probably not that big of a deal, as there wasn't all that paranoia over drug money that exists today.
posted by crapmatic at 4:30 PM on March 31, 2010

One of the best things about Bill Clinton is that he apparently used his security clearance when he was president to check out whether the U.S. had any alien bodies or artifacts. (He said no, although a lot of UFO sites out there seem to believe the opposite.)
posted by Halloween Jack at 4:33 PM on March 31, 2010 [2 favorites]

I like to imagine that every new president sits behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office on his first day, staring at the phone and trying to work up the nerve to pick it up and ask: "So, um, hey. Do we, like, have any. . .you know. Alien bodies? Or flying saucers? Any of that stuff?"
posted by EarBucket at 4:54 PM on March 31, 2010 [4 favorites]

I'm certain they get a briefing on everything they might have wondered, basically "Being President For Dummies".
posted by dunkadunc at 4:56 PM on March 31, 2010

Did they give him a physical? He might be an alien decoy they created in a lab made to trick us. THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE.
posted by anniecat at 4:58 PM on March 31, 2010

I keep telling you people, it's not Area 51. It was never Area 51. That's just the one they they want you to bang your head against the wall investigating. It's Area 49. It was always Area 49.
posted by philip-random at 5:01 PM on March 31, 2010

Having waited several nights by the black mailbox myself, I can tell you nothing. But the reality boundary runs well outside the base perimeter. Lutoslawski's vacation fantasy above could happen and seem completely normal anywhere in the vicinity. Like an acid trip with sunburn included.
posted by fourcheesemac at 5:08 PM on March 31, 2010 [2 favorites]

(The black mailbox that is actually white.)
posted by fourcheesemac at 5:09 PM on March 31, 2010 [1 favorite]

So is it safe to assume that the CIA used those high-tech spy planes to run coke up from Bolivia?
posted by "Elbows" O'Donoghue at 5:15 PM on March 31, 2010 [2 favorites]

What if they found human babies?
posted by litleozy at 5:16 PM on March 31, 2010 [1 favorite]

Dead ones.
posted by litleozy at 5:16 PM on March 31, 2010

Apparently Barry Goldwater tried the same thing and got cussed out by Curtis LeMay for his troubles.
posted by Grimgrin at 5:19 PM on March 31, 2010

dunkadunc: "I'm certain they get a briefing on everything they might have wondered, basically "Being President For Dummies"."

Yeah, Bill Hicks talked about that:

I have this feeling that whoever's elected president, like Clinton was, no matter what promises you make on the campaign trail - blah, blah, blah - when you win, you go into this smoky room with the twelve industrialist, capitalist scumfucks that got you in there, and this little screen comes down... and it's a shot of the Kennedy assassination from an angle you've never seen before, which looks suspiciously off the grassy knoll.... And then the screen comes up, the lights come on, and they say to the new president, 'Any questions?'

"Just what my agenda is."

posted by Joakim Ziegler at 6:09 PM on March 31, 2010 [9 favorites]

So after all the hub-bub and the rampant, feverishly all-capped speculative blogging, Area 51 turns out to have been exactly what sane people said it probably was all along.

Only with wacky antics.

(I smell TV comedy gold here, boys...)
posted by saulgoodman at 7:36 PM on March 31, 2010

♡ it.

Also, if any shadowy organizations wish to pay me large cash to not talk, I'm your guy. I have no problems wearing a monkey mask.

So is it safe to assume that the CIA used those high-tech spy planes to run coke up from Bolivia?

Suggesting that Area 51 is essentially like FedEx's Memphis International Airport, only for the CIA's massive drug shipments?
posted by five fresh fish at 8:28 PM on March 31, 2010 [2 favorites]

Dr. Edgar Mitchell (astronaut, Captain, USN) says the crash and aliens at Area 51 are real. He's a former test pilot, and he grew up around Roswell. I heard him say it himself. With a PhD in SCIENCE! from MIT, and command rank in the United States Navy, this makes it difficult to dismiss the alien story as an old fantasy.
posted by Goofyy at 9:00 PM on March 31, 2010

With a PhD in SCIENCE! from MIT, and command rank in the United States Navy, this makes it difficult to dismiss the alien story as an old fantasy.

Not really. Those facts are unrelated to his beliefs, and moreover, he never worked at Area 51.

Think about this way: given the set of possibilities concerning this situation, some of which involve aliens being real and some of which involve Dr. Edgar Mitchell being full of shit, either because he is delusional or because he likes the attention or some other such thing, are you really going to conclude that his having a PhD and a high Navy rank tips the balance of plausibility in favor of aliens? I think it just makes his kookiness a little stranger, if even that. The fact is that people do weird things! Even people with PhDs!
posted by invitapriore at 9:11 PM on March 31, 2010 [1 favorite]

I'm gonna go wayy out on a limb here and guess that Goofyy was being all ironical-like, invitapriore.

Incidentally, Mitchell's daughter-in-law used to be an HR VP at the company I work for (she hired me, actually). Really great lady. Never had a chance to talk to her about her father in law, though.
posted by saulgoodman at 9:17 PM on March 31, 2010

Well then. He deserves an abduction and all of its attendant probing, tricking poor old tired me like that.
posted by invitapriore at 9:21 PM on March 31, 2010 [4 favorites]

Joakim Ziegler: "Yeah, Bill Hicks talked about that:

I have this feeling that whoever's elected president, like Clinton was, no matter what promises you make on the campaign trail - blah, blah, blah - when you win, you go into this smoky room with the twelve industrialist, capitalist scumfucks that got you in there, and this little screen comes down... and it's a shot of the Kennedy assassination from an angle you've never seen before, which looks suspiciously off the grassy knoll.... And then the screen comes up, the lights come on, and they say to the new president, 'Any questions?'

"Just what my agenda is."

Not exactly...
posted by Rhaomi at 10:15 PM on March 31, 2010 [1 favorite]

Edgar Mitchell also claims to have been cured of cancer by a teenaged "remote healer" named Adam Dreamhealer. Just throwing that out there.
posted by EarBucket at 5:25 AM on April 1, 2010

The A-12/Sr-71 is still so mindblowing in appearance, I can't even fathom what the thing did to people's heads in the mid-60s.

I wish we'd get an image of the new one already instead of artist sketches.
posted by Skygazer at 3:55 PM on April 1, 2010

Also, you're getting paid a mini-fortune in cash to work on mythical sky machines that no one else ever gets to see and you have a 24 hour chef and you can drive to Vegas in your 500hp Ford Mustang, whenever you feel like, but back in the 50s and 60s when it was a swingin' atomic powered cocktail swilling good time and you could catch Sinatra and the Sammy and afterwards well sauced and surrounded by Atomic powered bosoms you could basically watch an atomic bomb being tested in the distance while you explode in an ejaculatory holy fuck, Jesus H. Fuckin' CHrist on crutches, cue the James Bond music, already....
posted by Skygazer at 4:03 PM on April 1, 2010