Area 51 is world-famous for its secrets. I believe that is an oxymoron and a fitting one, the world has known about Area 51 for decades. Even the Federal Government finally acknowledged that the base exists back in 2013.

So what good is a Top Secret facility suspected of housing everything from alien craft to advanced warfare tech if everyone knows about it? It's not any good and that is why many suspect, similar facilities were constructed many years ago to house the things the government does not want us to know about.

Where is Area 52? Many people think it's the Tonopah Test Range.

The Tonopah Test Range in Nevada is about 65 miles from Area 51 and many observers and theorists have long referred to the base as Area 52.

According to the Department of Energy, the U.S. Government began testing weapons systems and bombs there in 1956. Today, they say the site is off-limits due to contaminants in the environment and soil as a result of the weapons tests.

In an effort to decontaminate the site, the Department of Energy has been conducting what they call the "Environmental Restoration Project" for many years. In the same public D.O.E. document released in 2008, the Department says they use aircraft like helicopters to map the concentration of radioactive contaminants.

The Department of Energy also has something called the "Soils-Sub Project" to determine soil contamination levels resulting from nuclear weapons tests conducted in 1963. The joint U.S./U.K. atomic test project was called "Operation Roller Coaster."

Just a quick Wikipedia search of Tonopah will tell you all the rock-star aircraft that were once housed or tested there, everything from foreign aircraft like the MiG-17 to the F117A-Nighthawk from the good old U.S. of A. Then out of nowhere in 1992, "very little was published about what aircraft were based there."

The below video is a typical U.S. Government/private sector collaboration video. The video comes from Sandia National Laboratories. Sandia is a contractor for the U.S Government and Sandia National Labs is a Federally Funded Research and Development Center. 

Is Tonopah Area 52? It certainly has all the right ingredients to be. But if this information is so easy to find, it means any secrets worth being kept are no longer there. Maybe there is an Area 53 out there?

READ ON: Weird, wild UFO sightings from throughout history

More From 105.7 The Hawk