Area 51’s ‘literally out of this world’ UFO secrets might finally come to light sometime next year.
Jim Goodall, an aviation journalist with firsthand sources who have worked at the classified base, gave an interview in the mid-1990s where he discussed top-secret technologies at the site that ‘would make George Lucas envious.’
‘One gentleman spent 12 of his 30 years in black programs at Groom Lake [as Area 51 is also known],’ Goodall explained in the unearthed documentary interview.
‘I asked him, ‘Can you really tell me what’s happening out there?” he continued.
‘And he said, ‘Well, there’s a lot of things going on there that I won’t be able to tell you until the year 2025.”
The mention of ‘2025’ could refer to an executive order by then-President Bill Clinton, which established a 25-year timer for the ‘automatic declassification’ of government secrets.
This means many top-secret projects from the 1990s could soon be declassified.
Area 51 is just one of many sensitive military facilities located within the US Air Force’s Nevada Test and Training Range (NTTR), a sprawling military training area in Nevada’s Mojave Desert.
The shroud of secrecy surrounding Area 51 has fueled widespread conspiracy theories about its true purpose, including claims that it houses captured or crashed UFOs.
Above, a satellite view of Area 51. The United States Air Force facility is a remote detachment of Edwards Air Force Base, within the Nevada Test and Training Range
UFO enthusiasts are pouring over comments Goodall (pictured) made in the mid-’90s, quoting his anonymous sources. One Area 51 source told him, ‘I won’t be able to tell you until the year 2025. But we have things in the Nevada desert that would make George Lucas envious’
In the resurfaced interview, Goodall recounted a conversation with a ‘safety specialist’ and US Air Force chief master sergeant who worked at the Nevada test site.
The specialist reportedly told him: ‘We have things out there that are literally out of this world… better than Star Trek.’ or anything you can see in the movies.’
When Goodall asked his anonymous source, ‘Do you believe in UFOs?’ the answer was unequivocal.
‘He looked at me with a straight face, one-on-one, and said, ‘Absolutely. Positively. They do exist,” Goodall recalled in the documentary.
‘I said, ‘Can you expand upon that?’ And he replied, ‘No, I can’t.”
From his vantage point spying on Area 51 in the Nevada desert, Goodall caught glimpses and heard firsthand accounts of exotic craft that defied conventional understanding.
‘There is a stealth or low-observable electronic warfare aircraft. It’s been referred to as ‘Excalibur,” he said in the interview.
‘There’s an aircraft designed to fly very, very high, but also very, very slow and incredibly quiet,’ he add.
A rendering of the metallic egg-shaped UFO is seen. ‘X-rays couldn’t penetrate it; it showed up on X-ray as a solid object. They tried to open it and penetrate its hull; they couldn’t,’ Taber said
Goodall also discussed how witnesses near the Skunk Works facility reported seeing three triangle-shaped craft that made ‘no noise,’ even when flying at relatively low altitudes.
He then shared reports of an aircraft tracked by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) out of the San Francisco Bay Area TRACON (Traffic Control) in Oakland, California.
This craft, spotted at least eight times since 1986, reportedly flew through controlled airspace at speeds exceeding 10,000 miles per hour.
‘And it’s a very, very large aircraft at that,’ he added.
Goodall’s accounts align with claims made on the record by Ben Rich, the late director of Lockheed Martin’s classified Skunk Works division.
‘Ben Rich told me twice before he died,’ Goodall recounted, ”We have things at Area 51 that you and the best minds in the world won’t even be able to conceive of for another 30 or 40 years—and they won’t be made public for another 50.”
Rich died on January 5, 1995.
But Goodall today noted that Area 51 has become much more difficult to penetrate than during his 1990s heyday — which might indicate it will hold on to its secrets well beyond 2025, matching a timeline closer to Rich’s 50-year window.
‘That veil is pretty thick today,’ Goodall told Las Vegas TV news reporter George Knapp in 2019. ‘The security around Area 51 is thicker than we’ve ever seen.’
In 2021, private pilot and amateur photographer Gabe Zeifman nabbed this image of a triangle craft while flying his own plane past the Nevada Test and Training Range (NTTR), past Papoose Dry Lake, and past Groom Lake which is home to Area 51
Above: a collection of once ‘top secret’ aircraft made by Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works for the US military over the years
Last year, defense aerospace contractor Eric Taber told to DailyMail.com that a close relative who worked as an Area 51 contractor, Sam Urquhart, had revealed that he had worked on strange ‘egg-shaped’ spacecraft at the mysterious desert base.
This egg-shaped metallic UFO was kept at Area 51 in the 1980s, after the CIA found the strange craft in the desert, according to Taber.
‘It was egg-shaped, about the size of an SUV, smooth and seamless, metallic-looking, silverish gray in color, with no control surfaces, no flaps, no inlet, and no exhaust, and no writing or symbols on the outside,’ Taber was told by his late great uncle Urquhart.
Other claims of alien craft housed at Area 51 have included the so-called ‘Fluxliner’ or Alien Reproduction Vehicle (ARV), a man-made reverse-engineered alien spacecraft uncovered by an aerospace industry illustrator in 1988.
In 2021, Gabriel Zeifman captured an image of a triangular craft that might have been a UFO or might have been a man-made craft capable of hypersonic flight.
The craft was parked just a 120-feet wide by 320-feet long shelter at Area 51 that has been identified in the past as Hangar 19.
Defense industry watchers at The War Zone speculated that the triangle might have been an actual known hypersonic aircraft, called the Martin Marietta X-24B.
‘Although its odd shape is intriguing,’ the site noted, ‘most things that fly out of Groom under a secretive test regime look alien, at least historically speaking.’
