Stan’s Obligatory Blog

Tonight, Kathleen and I went to the Central Library in downtown Los Angeles for a talk by Annie Jacobsen about her new book, Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base. The format of the talk was a conversation between her and M.G. Lord, author of Astro Turf: The Private Life of Rocket Science. We’d been to one of these events once before, when we went to see John Waters last year.

The talk was very interesting and entertaining. There were even three of her sources in the audience: Ed Lovick, Ken Collins, and Wayne Pendleton. They were engineers and a test pilot on the A-12 “Oxcart” project, which was the CIA precursor to the Air Force’s SR-71 Blackbird spy plane. So as you might imagine, they had some good stories to tell her for the book. Apparently, a lot of this was classified until pretty recently. The fact that the CIA was actively designing stealth aircraft in 1957 was kept secret until the late 1990s.

All told, it was an entertaining evening. And as a little bonus, we got to look across the street from the library and gaze up at the U.S. Bank tower and think about just how much it’s going to hurt when we go to climb the stairs there in September.