Transcript of V.L.’s Custer, South Dakota Meeting in August 1995. This is a transcript from a tape of a talk that he gave regarding his 12 years at Area 51. V.L. is an upstanding citizen, a gentleman, and speaks the truth, this we assure you.
I spent from June of 1965 to August of 1977 directly on the Nevada Test Site, worked there full time. I was Radiation – Health and Safety. Most of the time I worked there, I either worked for Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, Lawrence Radiation Laboratory out of Livermore, Berkeley rather, California or Sandia Corporation out of Albuquerque, New Mexico. All those testing laboratories have since changed their names. Lawrence Radiation Laboratory is now the Lawrence National Laboratory, they don’t use the word radiation. In my job we had responsibility for and access to all of the areas of the Nevada Test Site which encompasses about 1800 square miles. It begins north of Las Vegas at Indian Springs where the bombing and gunnery range starts and goes all the way to Beatty, Nevada.
It’s an area that has armed guards around it, surveillance devices, it’s a restricted air space, you can’t fly over it. If you’re caught on it, things happen to you. I had a top-secret clearance and I think there probably wasn’t a square mile of that test site that I haven’t been on or seen, part of which is Area 51. One of the things I’d like to tell you, folks, right now is that there are certain things that I cannot and will not talk about. When you quit out there, quitting what used to be the Atomic Energy Commission, it’s now the Department of Energy, it’s kind of like quitting the Central Intelligence Agency. You never quit. They never let loose of you.
There are certain things that I saw and was part of that I will take to the grave with me without talking about it. However, there are a lot of things that I can talk about. And I think the news media has titillated public interest in a very dishonest way because 95% of what’s at Area 51 is totally uninteresting, it’s very mundane. The Federal Government tests aircraft at Area 51 that they want to keep secret. To give you an example, when I was out there, during the later years I was out there, they tested the stealth fighter and the stealth bomber, the Blackbird, SR-71 flew in and out of there on a weekly basis. The reason the government uses Area 51 is that it has a 10-mile long runway, absolute secrecy, you can’t see anything that’s worth seeing from the air or the ground. And that hill that sits away from Area 51 where everybody goes up and looks, all they can see… we used to sit there and look back at people and do this (wave) because all you can see is administration buildings. That’s all you can see. The government knows that people are out there looking into the area and because of that a deliberate effort has been made that there’s absolutely nothing to see right there. Now if you go a few miles north, there’s a lot of things that people might want to see but never will.
The Dept. of Energy now has yearly tours on the test sight, once a year the families of employees, that belong to certain classifications of workers, are allowed to take bus tours through part of the test site. It’s a very small area that they let people see, it’s Frenchman Flat, the flat where the old air bursts, where atmospheric tests were performed. But you can’t get within 40 miles of Area 51. As I told Paul Strassels on the radio the other day, there were things I saw and have seen in Area 51 that would make one wonder where they came from. I’ve also seen things out there that violate most of the laws of physics. My degree is in physics, and we, on a routine basis, used to observe… because we worked at night, it was a 24 hour a day, 365 days a year operation out there. And I worked all three shifts, graveyard, swing, and days. I worked at night a lot out there.
I’ve seen things that most aircraft or no aircraft that I know of could do, do. So the news reports that you hear are accurate to the extent that someone is testing either weapons or various vehicles that go through the atmosphere that use technology that we’re not really in possession of. Now, if that sounds a bit odd, I would say this. The Federal Government is afraid. . . . in fact we had a whole division of public relations people to feed the public information that was cleansed. The Federal Government is afraid that if the population of the United States knew some of the things that we have done and have seen and have found, people would panic. And that’s all I can say about that. The other thing is that while we were testing nuclear weapons out there, the last year I was out there, the last full year I was out there, in ’76, we had 53 or 54 underground nuclear weapons tests. We announced 2 of them to the public. The reason for that was strictly political.
There was a groundswell movement to eliminate nuclear weapons testing, the government didn’t want people thinking they were hopelessly contaminating part of Nevada for all times, which they have, it’s too late now, it poses no real threat to us, anyway. So they didn’t announce those things. I use that as an example of part of which isn’t told to the public. There was nuclear weapons testing I was involved in, I should hasten to say that most of that was stockpile testing. We would take a nuclear device out of stockpile and test it, see if it worked. It’s as simple as that. Nuclear weapons tend to deteriorate when they sit around for periods of time. Degrade is the term. We haven’t tested at the test site now since 1992. Probably never will again. There’s a massive clean-up effort out there, that will take a long time.