Ep.120 – CIA Station D, Area 51

We are joined by author and Area 51 expert TD Barnes. We hear from TD on secret aviation developments, spy planes and how security was managed in such a highly sensitive environment.

Thornton D. “TD” Barnes, author and entrepreneur, grew up on a ranch at Dalhart,Texas. He graduated from Mountain View High School in Oklahoma and embarked on a ten-year military career. He served as an Army intelligence specialist in Korea and then continued his education while in the US Army, attending two and a half years of missile and radar electronics by day and college courses at night. Barnes deployed with the first combat Hawk missile battalion during the Soviet Iron Curtain threat before attending the Artillery Officer Candidate School, where an injury ended his military career.

Barnes’s career includes serving as a field engineer at the NASA High Range in Nevada for the X-15, XB-70, lifting bodies and lunar landing vehicles; working on the NERVA project at Jackass Flats, Nevada; and serving in Special Projects at the CIA’s Station D – Area 51.

Barnes later formed a family oil and gas exploration company, drilling and producing oil and gas and mining uranium and gold.

Barnes served as the CEO of Startel, Inc and has been actively mining landscape rock and gold in Nevada for 20 years. He serves as the president of Roadrunners Internationale, an association of Area 51 veterans, and is the executive director of the Nevada Aerospace Hall of Fame.