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Area 51 - A Personal Account

by V.L. Custer - Part 2

Question: Between Teller and Oppenheimer, what’s your opinion about Oppenheimer......

Answer: Openheimer was railroaded, he was ruined because of the paranoia that was going on during that time. Robert Oppenheimer to me was a hero in the scientific community and the man’s life was ruined because of paranoia.

Question: Teller was kind of a political puppet.

Answer: Edward Teller was the kind of man that would have been loyal to Adolph Hitler or to whoever was the boss, so to speak. I didn’t like the man, I still don’t like the man. He’s arrogant, he was totally unsympathetic to radiation health and safety, he was totally unsympathetic to people’s lives and he still is.

Question: I was noticing your medical ID bracelet, is that related to your work?

Answer: I have MS, I also have degeneration of the retina. It’s probably... the exposure I got, the radioisotopes I have in me, it’s very probable that my medical conditions are because of what I did. But I want to add, I knew what I was doing, I was paid very well for it and I have no regrets.

Question: This is a stupid question but when they exploded that 5 and a half million ton bomb underground, didn’t that make a tremendous noise?

Answer: That was called Box Car, the name of that device was called Box Car. I don’t know how they name those things, they all have these strange names. I was on that test. I was assigned to it. When Box Car was detonated, it was 5500 feet under the surface, 5 and a half million tons of TNT equivalent, a device the size of...that log right there. Maybe a little shorter. Ground zero lifted 400 feet for a half a mile radius straight up in the air. And then came back down. What happened then underground would be, small or large, is a cavern is created at the point where the weapon was detonated, of various sizes depending on the size of the weapon. And then the ground starts to slough in all the way to the top - sometimes. Box Car didn’t because it was too deep, and you have a crater on top. If you were to fly over the Nevada Test Site, it looks just exactly like the moon. Precisely like the surface of the moon. There’s hundreds of craters. To give you an example, one device that was set off right after I got out there, in 1966, actually came out of the ground, on purpose. 6.9 million cubic yards of dirt came out of the ground, created a crater, in less than 2 seconds. That’s a crater a quarter of a mile across and 500 feet deep.

Question: (Unintelligible).

Answer: Yes, that’s Hattiesburg, Miss. At one point we had a project out there called Operation Plow Share. Operation Plow Share was designed to create weapons that were capable digging another canal across the isthmus of Panama. So we dug a canal out at the test site. It’s about a mile long, a hundred yards wide and it’s probably 400 feet deep. We used 5 nuclear weapons buried at shallow depths to create this ditch, instant ditch, that’s what we used to call it. It was Operation Buggy. And not surprisingly, the people of Panama took exception to us wanting to do that so we never did it. But we tested it. That was very popular in the 60’s, we thought we could use nuclear weapons to do industrial things. But we never could get them clean enough, we got them pretty clean but not clean enough. The clean weapon is a neutron bomb. The neutron bomb could be set off up here, 3-4 thousand feet up, we’d all die, the grass is OK, the trees are OK, the cars are OK but we are water bearing creatures and we would absorb so many neutrons that we’d be dead, instantly. The neutron bomb is in place, most of our intercontinental ballistic missiles have neutron bombs. While I was at the test site, Jimmy Carter promised us that... now I happen to be a registered democrat, so I’m not beating up on a democrat here, Jimmy Carter promised during the campaign of ‘76 that if elected President he would never, ever test the neutron bomb or deploy it. What the American people didn’t know was that we’d already tested it. And right after he became President, in the next 4 years, we deployed it all over the world. There’s no reason to lie to people about that because the neutron bomb, if you have to have a bomb, it’s a clean bomb. It doesn’t contaminate, hardly at all, it’s a very efficient killing machine, yet the Federal Government chose to lie about it. I don’t know why.

Question: Can you tell us how the chain of command goes? I mean if it’s not the president who...

Answer: National Security Council, indirectly. The National Security Council includes both the civilian and the military, the National Security Council includes the Joint Chiefs of Staff. We’ve come very close folks, a couple of times, to having a military takeover in this country and I’m not one of those people who goes around saying these things but that’s just a fact. The last one was when Clinton got elected, we almost had a military takeover. The test site was locked down, that’s a term they use, before we had a test they’d lock the site down. You couldn’t go anywhere, for like 2-3 days. And if you were on the test you were locked within a lock down area. After Clinton was elected president that November, the test site was locked down and stayed locked down for 3 or 4 weeks. There was no testing going on. There was some concern about the transference of power during that time from the election to January 27 or whenever it was, January 20th, the inauguration took place. There’s been some pretty scary things happen. The only reason I knew about it is I worked out there. There would be times when we’d be put on alert, security alert, for reasons that were beyond me. There were times when things went the other way. Before we set Box Car off, I called home that morning and told my wife to put a bowl of water on the kitchen table, now this was 160 miles away, I lived in Las Vegas. I said watch it, zero time is at 5 o’clock. I called from the test site, everyone in Vegas knew, they stopped gambling during that time because of the roll of the dice. Vegas shut the casinos down for a few minutes, just the big ones. Box Car was so big, they had to say something about it, so at zero time, after to detonation, about a minute to 2 minutes later, my wife said that bowl of water sitting on the table splashed over and it actually did fall off the table. And that was 160 miles away as a crow flies.

Question: (Unintelligible)

Answer: Everything that goes on at the Nevada Test Site is on a "need to know" basis. There are 3 words that you will hear over and over, every single working day you’re out there, everything is on a "need to know". I was going to bring my security badge with me and I forgot it, I still have it. I had a top secret clearance with sigma’s on it. These sigma’s denoted what informational areas I was privy to and one of those areas was Area 51. I got it as a souvenir when I left, I talked the security people into letting me have it. There are all kinds of people in government that do not have the "need to know" of what’s going on out there, or at least parts of what’s going on out there. And they’re not told. And that includes the President.

The problem right now in this country is that we don’t have an enemy anymore, I only say that half facetiously, we’ll create one, one of these days.

Question: I was wondering about your remarks about Clinton, the National Security Council intelligence arm must be pretty poor if they were concerned about the transfer of power to a man like Clinton who has become such a puppet, it just doesn’t add up some how.

Answer: I don’t mean to sound sarcastic but the term military intelligence is an oxymoron.

Question: (Something about propulsion systems, mostly unintelligible.)

Answer: I can say this, anti-gravity devices exist, where they came from, that’s another matter of speculation. They’re unwillingness to talk about things like that within the government stems partly from human nature. If you’re privy to some information that you hold dear, regardless of what it is, we’re reluctant to share it with other people. That’s part of the problem. The other part of the problem is holding on to the information so it can be used militarily. We have become so used to having an enemy in this country and the need to have an enemy, another nation state, that’s it’s gotten pretty bad.

Question: What are your personal views about the future?

Answer: President Eisenhower warned us about the military industrial complex before he left office in 1960. I personally believe that there’s a reason we moved to the Black Hills of South Dakota. Partially because we’re at the top of the food chain here and the water chain. I like to live in a place where the water isn’t going to be contaminated. I personally feel that there’s a good chance, an excellent chance that there’s going to be limited nuclear war in the next 5-6 years. And whether that escalates into a global confrontation, who knows. But it’s going to happen just as sure as I’m standing here. The temptation to use nuclear weapons is getting more and more, tactical, not strategical nuclear weapons, the tactical nuclear weapons. We spent a lot of time out there testing tactical nuclear weapons, 150 kilo tons, 150,000 tons of TNT and less. Small devices, devices that paratroopers can jump out of planes, with them on their back. I can carry one around in a suitcase and the problem with that is, nuclear devices have become so small, so compact, so efficient, that if terrorists ever get their hands on one, and it’s amazing that they haven’t, absolutely amazing, it’s going to make this thing in Oklahoma City look like a walk in the park. Because the first terrorist group that gets their hands on a nuclear device.....you know we all used to say, well, China can’t do it because they can’t deliver the weapons, that was a bunch of hog wash. You don’t need rockets to deliver nuclear weapons, all you need is a suitcase, it’s that simple. I can give you the address of a company in San Francisco that would be more than happy to send you the blueprints for a nuclear weapon for $19.95.

Question: (Something about crop circles)

Answer: You know, those crop circles are amazing, I don’t know where they’re coming from. We had places out in Nevada, there were no crops, it was sand and low bushes, with crop circles identical to those at the test site.

Question: Were we responsible?

Answer: I can tell you one thing, at the test site, it wasn’t some prank. In England some say it was some pranksters but at the Nevada test site it wasn’t a prank. There are no pranks out there.

Question: No sense of humor?

Answer: You know what, actually there’s a lot of people that work out there that do have a sense of humor. I have friend who has a picture of himself sitting on a nuclear weapon smoking a joint. Now if that were found out, he’d be in really big doggie do-do. But he’s a guy that works for Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in New Mexico.

Question: (Unintelligible)

Answer: You see, the insidious part about what we call reality like radiation... we could be sitting here and right there in that cooler could be a lethal radio isotope of say cesium 137 or strontium 90 and you would never know it. Unless you had an instrument that detected it or if there were enough of it to where you became sick and got radiation sickness, and subsequently died. A lot of what we call reality, what we see, we hear, we smell, we taste, we feel, isn’t quite the way we think it is. From a physics point of view, there is no such thing as color. We’re all sitting around here seeing colors that don’t exist. Light is electromagnetic radiation and it’s colorless. Our brains interpret different wave lengths of color through our optic nerve, what our minds call color, green jacket, brown pants, there is no color there. Your brain is interpreting color, different wave lengths and I call it green and I call it brown. We mostly all agree on these things, generally speaking but we all see different things. There is no color. So you have to stop and think about crazy things you see in the sky at night that may or not be unexplainable. To someone else may be very common, very explainable and very ordinary. I’m just about to walk over the edge here . . . they may not be . . . if you were to see a person, you may not recognize that person as someone you thought might live on the face of this planet. And that’s all I’ll say about that, I swore to God I wasn’t going to say that.

Question: (Unintelligible)

Answer: If a race of beings had the ability to travel from Alpha Centauri to here, they would certainly have the ability to camouflage themselves, either to where we couldn’t detect them or to look like us. We’re a diverse looking race of beings, they could look almost like anything. There’s creatures on this planet that look pretty strange.

I have a healthy respect for and a fear of my Federal Government. Because I’ve seen my Federal Government do some really bad things to people. There were people out at the test site that were the subjects of radiation experiments, I’ve seen them tie animals down in areas that were going to be tested, we had a tower out there, it was called Bren Tower, it was 1300 feet tall and at the top of that tower there was a reactor, unshielded, small reactor and around the base of that tower for a half a mile or so we would put experiments out, live experiments and see how much radiation they could take. How much gamma radiation, how much beta, how many neutrons they could absorb, these were animals.

Question: When we dropped the bomb in Japan in 1945, we didn’t know what the after effects were going to be.

Answer: When we tested the first device in July of 1945, the Trinity device, in Alamogordo, New Mexico, the scientists didn’t know for sure if that wouldn’t cause a never ending chain of reactions and it would absolutely destroy the world. They knew they had x pounds of fissionable material in that trinity device but they didn’t know if that would trigger more reactions or not. They didn’t know what was going to happen. When they dropped the Fat Boy and Little Man on those 2 Japanese cities, they had all this experience of one device. And they dropped those very dirty devices and the war ended. Personally, I happen to believe that was the thing to do because I think a million or more Americans, soldiers would have died and a lot of Japanese people would have died if we had invaded the homeland.

Something else, we have laser weapons now that make nuclear weapons look pretty weak. We tested a lot a laser weaponry out there when I was there in the 70’s, all kinds of laser weapons. Laser weapons are far more selective. A nuclear weapon is just a great big bomb that blows up and you have the radiation and the heat and the wind and all that. They’re not as all destructive as people think they are. The new ones aren’t as dirty as people think they are.

Question: (Unintelligible).

Answer: What I know about anti-gravity devices I’m not at liberty to talk about. Area 51 does not deal with nuclear weaponry.

Physics, folks, is advancing in leaps and bounds, all technology is advancing in leaps and bounds. One of the most dangerous things that’s happening to the human race right now is we’re being left behind. I can’t even run my son’s computer as well as he can and technology is going faster than our ability to keep up with it. And when I say our ability, I’m not talking about just us, I’m talking about the people that build it. We’re a couple of years away from artificial intelligence, computerized, artificial intelligence that has the ability to reason, to think, to comprehend existence. If you stop and think about that, that’s pretty scary. It gets to the point where maybe we become liabilities. When I was a youngster, Buck Rogers and all that stuff was science fiction. And it’s advancing exponentially. My mother who passed away a few years ago rode on a stage coach here in the Black Hills. She also saw men walk on the moon. Now you take another 20 years from now, and when I say it’s increasing exponentially, the graph of scientific knowledge isn’t going up like this, it’s going straight up, practically. We’re talking about now, this Area 51 thing, the government will hang on until the last dog dies before they’ll tell you what’s going on out there. Even after it becomes irrelevant anymore, even after it becomes where it’s no secret. The government still won’t talk about the things that happened in W.W.II, I’m not talking about nuclear things, I’m talking about the Philadelphia Experiment, and I shouldn’t have even mentioned that. The government will not talk about all kinds of things that they already know about.

Question: (Something about all the TV programs about UFO’s, government ready to tell.)

Answer: It isn’t the government loosening up, no. I have friends that work in government security. And they absolutely gnash their teeth at the fact that all these things leak out constantly and they lay awake at night trying to figure out ways to plug leaks.

I think I told you all what I could without laying awake tonight wondering if I told you too much, I hope it was helpful. The best thing you can do to keep the society as free and open as possible is to make sure the politicians we elect to office don’t allow themselves to be sucked into the vortex of secrecy that the government always wants to have. And if you see anything flying around, believe your eyes, and believe it isn’t a weather balloon, if the government says it’s something, it’s pretty safe to disbelieve them.

Part 1 <--