Declassified documents reveal real role of Area 51 in Mojave desert

Officially it didn't exist, but for generations it has featured in countless novels, films, comic books and the minds of conspiracy theorists as the place where the US government keeps crashed alien spaceships

It's also where alien autopsies are performed and where the mysterious "men in black" are based, a secret force to keep the earth safe from extraterrestrials.

Government officials have previously only mentioned Area 51 in passing, but now a newly declassified history provides the first official acknowledgement of its existence and provides details of what it has been used for - and it is not what the conspiracy theorists might want to hear.

Instead, it turns out that Area 51, a patch of ground near Groom Lake in the Mojave desert, was used for the rather more mundane purpose of testing ultra- secret military aircraft technology - or so Washington says.

According to the seven-chapter history, the space was used as an aerial testing ground for US government projects. The released documents specifically refer to the U-2 and Oxcart aerial surveillance programmes.

"High-altitude testing of the U-2 soon led to an unexpected side effect - a tremendous increase in reports of unidentified flying objects," or UFOs, according to the documents, which became public through a Freedom of Information Act request by George Washington University's national-security archive.