"How'd you find your way to the desert?" Phoenix was half-way between the labs in Los Angeles, the labs in New Mexico, and the testing sites in Nevada.
For a young single man, life on the secret bases in Nevada was pretty sweet. All the meals were the same price (steak, lobster, etc), ammunition was cheap, etc. The married guys didn't like it so much, but he was not married at the time.
Ooohhhh... Interesting. There are rumors on the internet about the federal government having extensive underground infrastructure in the western United States. This made sense to me: if you want to hide something, you put it underground. So I asked my passenger about this.
"Oh yeah, but there's way more stuff underground at Area 12 [0], than at Area 51."
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Area_12_(Nevada_N... (Redirect is to "Rainier Mesa", "one of four major nuclear test regions within the Nevada National Security Site (NNSS)".)
I'm partial to the idea that nothing important happens at Area 51 anymore, just your average everyday testing of the latest thermodynamics-compliant military hardware. All the interesting R&D is now done somewhere else.
Ingo Swann [1] said in his Art Bell interview (iirc), w.r.t. his self-published book [2], that the secret program he was involved with, which he couldn't prove, never even got to the point where it needed to be 'classified'.
[1] my earlier comment about Swann: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33295488
[2] Penetration: The Question of Extraterrestrial and Human Telepathy - https://books.google.com/books/about/Penetration_the_Questio...
[edit: added [1] & renumbered links] [edit2: added clarification to wikipedia's redirect link.]