In the mid-1980s, Air Force technician Mark Ely’s job was to inspect secretly acquired Soviet fighter jets.
The work, carried out in hidden hangers known as silent houses, was part of a secret mission in the Nevada desert 140 miles outside Las Vegas at the Tonopah Test Range – also called Area 52. The mission was so secret that Ely said he had to sign a non-disclosure agreement.
“Upholding the national interest was more important than my own life,” Ely told CBS News, and that’s not just talk.
Ely was in his twenties and physically fit when he worked at the secret base. Now 63 and living in Naperville, Illinois, he faces life-threatening consequences from the radiation he says he was exposed to.
For decades, the U.S. government conducted nuclear bomb tests near Area 52. According to a 1975 federal environmental assessment, those tests spread toxic radioactive materials. material close to.
“It scarred my lungs. I developed cysts on my liver. I started getting lipomas, tumors in my body that I had to remove. My lining in my bladder had fallen off,” he said.
All these years later, his service records include many assignments, but not the mission within the Tonopah Test Range, meaning he can’t prove he was ever there.
“There’s a slogan people say: ‘Deny, deny until you die.’ It’s kind of true here,” Ely told CBS News.
Dave Crete says he also worked as a military police officer at the same location. He now has breathing problems, including chronic bronchitis, and had to have a tumor removed from his back.
He has tracked down hundreds of other veterans who worked at Area 52 over the past eight years and said he has seen “all kinds of cancer.”
Although the government’s 1975 review acknowledged toxic chemicals in the area, it stated that halting work was “contrary to the national interest” and that the “costs… were small and reasonable in relation to the benefits received ‘.
Other government workers stationed in the same area, mainly from the Department of Energy, have been helped with $25.7 billion in federal aid, according to publicly available Department of Labor statistics. But those benefits don’t apply to Air Force veterans like Ely and Crete.
“It makes me incredibly angry and it hurts me too because they should have my support,” Ely said. “I had theirs and I want them to have mine.”
When contacted for comment, the Ministry of Defense confirmed that Ely and Crete had served, but would not say where.
