Area 51 former engineer says UFOs were us (U.S.)

By William Atkins
Sunday, 12 April 2009 19:04

Science - Space

According to a former engineer at Area 51, the top-secret U.S. military facility in Nevada, the reported sightings of UFOs in the 1960s were really light flashes from extremely high-speed experimental jets and that aliens are not stored at the super-secret facility.


In the ABC News article UFOs? Aliens? Area 51 Revealed, former special-projects engineer at Area 51, Thorton “T.D.” Barnes, stated that spy planes being tested at over 2,000 miles per hour at altitudes of 90,000 feet would produce flashes of light that people on the ground thought were UFOs (unidentified flying objects)--or alien spaceships.

Area 51 is the slang name for a U.S. military base located in the southern portion of Nevada, about 80 miles north-northwest of Las Vegas. Located on the southern shore of Groom Lake, it is supposedly a developmental and testing site for experimental aircraft and weapons.

Barnes reported to ABC reporters that the myth of UFOs flying over the United States and aliens being stored at Area 51 actually helped them keep the classified activities of the military center secret from the public.

He stated, "We considered it to be a bonus. They [the UFO sightings] made it easier to conceal what we were doing."

In fact, Barnes said that "Area 51 was the most boring place I ever worked."

He made the statement, “We were the UFOs,” referring to his and other pilots’ activities of flying super-fast jets over the sky of the United States during the early reporting of UFOs (or unidentified flying objects).

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