Area 51 is one of the great Nevada mysteries.
Does it exist?
If so, what is its purpose?
Actually, more has been revealed about Area 51, also known as Groom Lake and Homey Airport, since July 2013, when the CIA publicly acknowledged the existence of the Air Force base here (the first time a U.S. government agency had ever done so) and declassified some documents in response to a Freedom of information request filed eight years earlier.
Groom Lake is, it turns out, a remote detachment of Edwards Air Force Base in southern California; it's 80 or so miles northwest of Las Vegas within the vast off-limits area of Nevada known as the Test and Training Range.
The airfield's primary purpose, though never stated officially, is believed to be the secret development and testing of experimental military aircraft, as well as the storage and analysis of enemy aircraft and weapons systems.
Area 51 has also been a magnet for UFO and ET conspiracy theories since the late 1980s, when one Bob Lazar, a former engineer at the Los Alamos labs in New Mexico (who became a Nevada brothel owner) told a Las Vegas reporter that he'd been working on extraterrestrial aircraft at a top-secret Air Force facility, known as Papoose Lake, near the tiny Nevada settlement of Rachel (which was established in the early 1980s for the aborted MX missile project).
His story, though never confirmed, launched a media feeding frenzy that turned up Papoose and Groom lakes. Meanwhile, UFOnauts from around the planet descended on Rachel, convinced that the answers to all their life-beyond-Earth questions rested somewhere in the alkali flats of dried-up Groom Lake.
Rachel today has a population of around 100. The 93-mile stretch of road (NV 375) that runs from US 93 at Ash Springs to US 6 at Warm Springs and passes through Rachel (no gas station) was designated the Extraterrestrial Highway in 1997. The Little A-Le-Inn cafe and souvenir shop welcomes Earthlings as well as ETs.