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People who legitimately know things about Area 51 won't talk about it, as they will have signed Non-Disclosure Agreements, punishable by anything from civil suit to treason.

Up in the desert above Las Vegas hides a dusty air base ringed by towering mountains, buffered by an atomic testing preserve and guarded around the clock. It isn't much to look at a knot of hangars, fuel tanks and prefab living quarters beside a dry lakebed and a long runway. The parched ground sprouts little but creosote, scorpion weed and the odd Joshua tree.

But for generations, this lonely outpost has itched some people like a bad case of poison ivy. Secrecy about what goes on there has fueled all manner of speculation: It's a port for visiting spacecraft, or a venue for alien autopsies, or a lab where captured UFOs are reverse-engineered to America's military advantage.

A huge aircraft crashed nearby Area 51 and were picked up by helicopters immediately, but no one knows what.