TAMPA – Lewis Nelson had no idea where he was going when the colonel told him to get aboard the C-47.
It was February 1957. Nelson, an Air Force welder with a security clearance to work on classified aircraft at MacDill Air Force Base, had been ordered on a circuitous route that took him from Tampa’s MacDill to bases in Georgia and California.
After crossing the Sierra Nevada, Nelson says he looked out the window and saw “nothing but desert.”
The plane landed at a 60-square-mile base carved out of a former atomic bomb testing site.
It would soon be known as Area 51.
Even today, the Central Intelligence Agency doesn’t acknowledge its existence.
But with the programs they worked on now declassified, Nelson and other men can talk publicly about what it was like to live at the secret base a few hours north of Las Vegas made infamous by conspiracy theorists who think it was where the government kept captured alien spacecraft.
Sitting in the sunroom of his house in Hudson, Nelson, 82, laughs at the notion. So do James Janowski and Alva McMillion, local men who also worked at Area 51.
But spacemen or no spacemen, there were some amazing things to see at Area 51, they say.
Eye in the sky
On his first day, Nelson toured the facility. Save for one of the world’s largest runways, it was sparse, he says.
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The Extraterrestrial Highway runs along the eastern border of Area 51, a military base on the Nevada Test Site.
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