(Image: USAF; Lockheed Have Blue demonstrator, now buried)
In our popular 2013 article titled Top Secret Tombs: The Classified Stealth Aircraft Burial Grounds of Area 51, we cited an interview allegedly given by a former employee at Nevada’s shadowy Groom Lake test site to the Las Vegas Review-Journal in 2001.
Speaking to the newspaper on condition of anonymity, the former Area 51 employee told of the wreck of a highly classified aircraft that had been buried out on the barren dry lake. The event is understood to have taken place in 1982. It’s unknown whether the aircraft was manned or unmanned.
(Image: Doc Searls; the expansive Groom Lake test site seen from the air)
The Review-Journal reported how its source had witnessed an earth-moving vehicle spend an entire day excavating a burial site at Groom Lake. The aircraft, which may have crashed at Area 51 and could have been a top secret technology demonstrator or classified prototype, was then pushed into the pit and covered with earth.
The source continued that the secret plane wreck had been stored for months inside the ‘scoot-n-hide’ shed (easily visible on Google Earth), so called because of its proximity to the runways, designed to allow classified aircraft that might be taxing on the airfield to quickly get under cover should foreign spy satellites – or domestic commercial ones, for that matter – pass overhead.
Why such an aircraft would be stored in the scoot-n-hide wasn’t elaborated on, and seems an odd choice for a wrecked craft that would surely take up valuable space in a building designed for an important purpose. However, the source continued: “They put it on a flatbed truck and put it in a hangar. Then one day they scraped it off the flatbed into the hole and buried it… They attached a cable to the aircraft and just pulled it off. The thing was shattered like an egg.”
(Image: X51; no fence marks the perimeter to the vast site)
Unfortunately the link to the newspaper’s original article is now dead as the story appears to have been archived. But it’s well known that top secret technology demonstrators and classified prototypes, including at least one of the crashed Lockheed Have Blue proof-of-concept aircraft, have been buried beneath the barren surface of Groom Lake, and elsewhere with the boundaries of Area 51, over the decades.
With so many experimental aircraft rumoured (and others confirmed) to have been buried in unmarked graves deep within the vast, restricted expanses of the Nevada desert, reports of a wrecked test plane ploughed into a pit in the early 1980s are perfectly plausible. But what is was, and indeed where it’s buried, will likely remain a mystery for many years to come, and perhaps in perpetuity.
(Image: Google Earth; the so-called ‘scoot-n-hide’ shed at Groom Lake/Area 51)
In recent years, the US Air Force is understood to have gone to some trouble to clean up Area 51 and allow environmental agencies to monitor its efforts. It seems unlikely, therefore, that the practice of burying crashed, failed or retired demonstrators, along with propellants and other hazardous waste, continues today. But the number that do remain out on the range, why they were built and what they were, will probably never be known.
Related – Boscombe Down Incident: Classified Plane Crash or Urban Legend?
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