10.Existence
The first official mentioning of the base was in a memo sent by then-CIA director Richard Helms regarding a deployment of A-12 reconnaissance planes to Okinawa for the purpose of using them over North Vietnam in 1967. The memo had been redacted like all CIA memos before releasing them to the public, but people who were in charge of it made a mistake and let the mention of Area 51 slip out. Area 51’s existence was officially confirmed in 2013, when the CIA released a heavily redacted 355-page document, detailing the operations conducted in the base since the 1950s, mainly U2 and Oxcart programs.
