Newly declassified government documents obtained by George Washington University's National Security Archive for the first time acknowledges the existence of Area 51 in southern Nevada.
Some UFO conspiracy theorists have maintained that Area 51, which was carved out of the Atomic Energy Commission's Nevada Proving Ground, is the site of government research involving a crashed alien spacecraft. But the documents indicate it was used originally to develop the military's first high-flying spy planes.
The declassified documents include hundreds of pages of material but there's no mention aliens,
The Atlantic Wire reports.
The Atlantic report, based on the documents, discloses how the Area 51 site was chosen for it remoteness near Groom Lake, how it was named for its map designation, and its connection to the U-2 spy plane that made headlines after pilot Francis Gary Powers' craft was downed by a Soviet surface-to-air missile on May 1, 1960.
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