Area 51 Spy Plane, Intact
Photograph from Roadrunners Internationale via Pangloss Films
ON TV: Area 51 Declassified premieres on the National Geographic Channel on Saturday, May 28, at 10:00 p.m. ET/PT.
Suspended upside down, a titanium A-12 spy-plane prototype is prepped for radar testing at Area 51 in the late 1950s. After a rash of declassifications, details of Cold War workings at the Nevada base, which to this day does not officially exist, are coming to light—including never before released images of an A-12 crash and its cover-up.
Area 51 was created so that U.S. Cold Warriors with the highest security clearances could pursue cutting-edge aeronautical projects away from prying eyes. During the 1950s and '60s Area 51’s top-secret OXCART program developed the A-12 as the successor to the U-2 spy plane.
Nearly undetectable to radar, the A-12 could fly at 2,200 miles an hour (3,540 kilometers an hour)—fast enough to cross the continental U.S. in 70 minutes. From 90,000 feet (27,400 meters), the plane's cameras could capture foot-long (0.3-meter-long) objects on the ground below.
But pushing the limits came with risks—and a catastrophic 1963 crash of an A-12 based out of Area 51.
A rapid government cover-up removed nearly all public traces of the wrecked A-12—pictured publicly for the first time in this gallery, thanks to the CIA's recent declassification of the images.
—Brian Handwerk
Published May 20, 2011
Stranded Far From Area 51
Photograph from CIA via Pangloss Films
Remnants of a crashed A-12 spy plane—including two engines and the shattered rear fuselage—litter the ground near Wendover, Utah, in a 1963 picture recently declassified by the CIA and published here for the first time.
Things went horribly wrong for test pilot Ken Collins (flying under his Area 51 code name Ken Colmar) when testing the plane's subsonic engines at low altitude. At 25,000 feet (7,620 meters), "the airplane pitched up and went up and got inverted and went into a flat incipient spin," Collins says in the new National Geographic Channel documentaryArea 51 Declassified. (The Channel is part-owned by the National Geographic Society, which owns National Geographic News.)
From such a position, "you just can't recover. So I thought I’d better eject, so I ejected down, because I was upside down."
U.S. officials later asked Collins to undergo hypnosis and treatments of sodium pentothal (a "truth drug") to be sure he relayed every detail of the incident truthfully and correctly.