For reasons unknown, the government finally has admitted that Area 51 ”” the Shangri-La of alien hunters and a sturdy trope of Âscience-fiction movies ”” is a real place in the Mojave Desert about 100 miles north of Las Vegas.
It presumably does not house hideous squidlike ETs, but at least you can see the place on a map. Area 51 is confirmed in declassified CIA documents posted online Thursday by the National Security Archive at George Washington University. A dogged researcher pried from the CIA a report on the history of the U-2 spy plane, which was tested and operated at Area 51.
The military, which runs the base, always denied that Area 51 was called by its famous moniker, preferring a designation connected to the Groom Lake salt flat, a landing strip for the U-2 and other stealth aircraft.
This is a write up done in the Berkeley Independent.
“The truth is out there …â€
The famous line from “The X Files†comes to mind after visiting with St. Stephen resident Milton Finch, who has made watching the night skies something of a hobby.
Finch wants to know what has been lighting up the night skies above St. Stephen and the Francis Marion Forest for the past three months. “There is something strange going on up there,†he said. “I’ve seen it. My wife has seen it, and so has my family.â€
On clear nights, Finch and his wife Audrey can be found in the front yard of their rural Berkeley County home, after spotting an unusual array of nightly lights since August of 2011.
After first viewing the lights, Finch began to go through the options of what they could be. He said he is familiar with the routes of aircraft over Berkeley County.
“We have two main arteries of travel in our skies,†he said. “One is to our east that goes from south to north-northeast, and the other comes at a slant going from our south-southwest to the north-northeast, which would be slightly to our west.â€
On the night of Sept. 29, 2011, the Finches were in their usual spot in the yard. Around 9:20 p.m., Finch happened to cast a final look to the northern skies before retiring for the night.
“We were heading to bed, and there was no air traffic in the sky,†he said. “We turned around to go inside and I happened to look back about five seconds later and there were eight to 10 flashing lights in the area of the sky that has little to no air traffic in it.â€
Finch said as little as 10 seconds prior there had been no visible traffic overhead.
“The lights were forming a circle if you connected the dots,†he recalled. We looked at them for about two minutes, just sitting up there in the sky; no light was traveling off in any direction.
“They were holding that pattern. No sound whatsoever.â€
Then when what Finch described as an orange fireball fell through the circle of lights.
“It was orange in color and had a tail because of the speed it was coming down,†he said. “It was as large as your thumbnail at arm’s length.â€
When the fireball fell, Finch said that the objects broke formation, with some heading to the east and four heading to the west in the same area above Lake Moultrie.
“We kept looking at those because we would have soon lost view of the ones heading to the east because of trees,†he said.
Shortly thereafter, Finch said he heard two jets coming from the direction of Charleston Air Force Base: “They were at full throttle heading exactly for the blinking objects that went to the north of Lake Moultrie. When the jets were out of sight, though we could still hear them, we looked up to where the blinking formation originally was and another orange fireball fell in the exact location as the first fireball that I described as a meteor.â€
The next day Finch contacted the authorities to report what he had seen, but never heard back from anyone.
He also reported the fireball incident to the National UFO Reporting Center and found out there had been four similar occurrences that night including his, with three of the similar sightings coming from the Myrtle Beach area.
“One of the other sightings also included military jets chasing them,†Finch said.
Nothing ever came of this UFO report and Finch decided to let the issue die but remained mindful in observing the nighttime sky.
Three months later in the early evening of Jan. 18, shortly after 8 p.m. Finch’s vigilance paid off.
“I was out looking again and saw some five or six blinking lights heading our way that matched the description of the first two accounts.â€
That’s when Finch called for his wife and his two grown children, who had been visiting.
“When the lights arrived they seemed to hover and just sit there,†Finch said. “Suddenly, just a little to our northeast, there appeared a perfect orange sphere in the sky. It was perfect in circumference and clear as a bell, meaning the edges of it were without malformation. It was as large as a dime held at arm’s length.â€
The orange ball hovered above the tree line for a few seconds and then disappeared.
“It didn’t come in from any direction,†Finch said. “It just appeared, stayed in the exact same spot, and then disappeared.â€
Finch has since invested more than $1,000 in video recording equipment to capture digitally what he’s seen with the naked eye. Watching the night skies has become a nightly exercise weather permitting.
“I just want to know what’s out there,†he said. “I want to know what others have seen. The more eyes the better.â€