peter young’s listopia

Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones finds the Illuminati in last year's famous ad for Virgin Atlantic. Time to up the dosage, Alex.

Yesterday afternoon I landed at McCarran Airport in Las Vegas, on my first and probably only visit to Sin City, and to my delight on the taxiway in front of us was nothing less than a Janet Airlines 737. These mysterious aircraft are known to shuttle workers several times a day to and from Area 51 at Groom Lake, Nevada, where they are almost certainly involved in top sekrit Black Ops aircraft development. My own opinion, based largely on Nick Cook's research for The Hunt for Zero Point, is that the stuff they are working on probably originated from early anti-gravity research conducted in Germany towards the latter end of World War 2 – specifically, 'The Bell' – and that this research was removed to the US after the war (and on the Wiki page for The Bell I do like the line "a following akin to science fiction fandom exists around it"). I acknowledge that this contains a whiff of conspiracy theory, but if you are more conspiratorially delusional about Area 51 you probably believe their work involves reverse-engineering alien tech captured from Roswell, etc etc et bloody cetera.

Anyway. Today I was searching for stuff relating to Janet Airlines and inevitably ended up on Google Maps, specifically to see if, according to urban myth, Area 51 has been 'removed' from it. It hasn't, of course, it's there for all to see in Satellite view right up to maximum magnification, and two Janet Airlines 737s can be seen parked there, slightly below the centre and to the left in this screencap. You can also zoom in much closer than this.


Then looking further down my list of Google links my eye was caught by a webpage which mentions strange symbols on the landscape to the north of Groom Lake. My first thought was, here we go, more conspiracy shit of the Crop Circle variety, photoshopped screencaps etc., but decided to search for myself anyway. And the markings are indeed there, somewhere to the west of Area 51, and I realised I was looking at the remains of some Cold War weapons-testing sites.

 
There are possibly more like this to be found around the landscape, if you look hard enough. During the development of nuclear weapons either vast quantities of TNT or a nuke would be buried in the Nevada Test Site and then detonated, before which a series of circular roads would have been dug around their epicentres to measure the blast effects, sometimes up to a radius of ten miles in the event of nuclear testing. Area 51 is at the north eastern edge of the Nevada Test Site so these sites would be near the northerly limit, and as neither appear to have subsidence craters they may have been used for non-nuclear testing. A good find.