Area 51 will probably always be a part of science folklore, even if the truth about the legendary site is probably much more boring than many anticipate.
Turns out, when the intelligence community is talking about Area 51, it’s actually referring to a military dining facility, according to years long Freedom of Information Act request with the NSA.
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“3 years to declassify Area 51 Intellipedia entry—and I discover it’s a dining hall at [Fort] Bliss?” the owner of The Black Vault, an online depository of FOIA requests, tweeted on Tuesday.
Intellipedia is essentially the US intelligence community’s internal Wikipedia, and during a typical workday has received about 5,000 contributions, according to a post from the CIA.
“Up until now, Intellipedia has been a quiet revolution,” Sean Dennehy, a CIA officer who helped spearhead the program said in the 2009 post. “At the grassroots level, Intellipedia users have added more and more edits, which adds value. All of this churns and churns in the background until it becomes something that is really valuable. I think that’s where we are now.”
That includes a brief entry on Area 51. According to the document, published by The Black Vault, “Area 51 is a Dining Facility at Fort Bliss, Texas. It is utilized mainly by 2nd Brigade, 1st Armored Division. Breakfast costs $2.45, lunch is $4.50.” Fort Bliss trained thousands of US soldiers during the Cold War, according to Military.com.
The Intellipedia entry has been accessed 1,857 times at the time of the FOIA request, and was last modified back in August 2012, by someone called Alexander Lowe.
Of course, there’s a good chance that this is something of an in-joke among the NSA and IC. The NSA did not respond for a request for comment.
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