Friday, May 20, 2011 How we know about Area 51 in the first place There has been a lot of talk about Area 51 this week with the release of the new book by journalist, Annie Jacobson, which features interviews with ex-employees working at the base. In a funny dichotomy the base is the most famous and the most secret all at once. But something that these latest news stories are missing is how the public came to know about Area 51 in the first place. Map from the Weekly World News, 1980. In the past, stories about black projects, such as the U2 spy plane, the SR-71, stealth aircraft, and the back engineering of Russian MiGs, mentioned this sort of work being done somewhere in the Nevada desert, but were not specific. The first article I could find that actually mentions the name Area 51 is in the tabloid, Weekly World News , from 1980. The article is about the work of two Las Vegas reporters, Ned Day of the Las Vegas Valley Times , and Bob Stodal of KLAS TV. They say that, like Jacobsen but many years earlier, they too had interviewed employees from the base. They were told that laser weapons were being developed there, along with a plane so secret that when it comes out of its hangar a siren goes off and "all personal lie face down to make sure they don't look at it." You can read the entire story here . Although