After nearly five decades, guys like James Noce finally get to tell their stories about Area 51. Yes, that Area 51. The one that gets brought up when people talk about secret Air Force projects, crashed UFOs, alien bodies and, of course, conspiracies. The secrets, some of them, have been declassified. Noce, 72, and his fellow Area 51 veterans around the country now are free to talk about doing contract work for the CIA in the 1960s and '70s at the arid, isolated Southern Nevada government testing site. Their stories shed some light on a site shrouded in mystery; classified projects still are going on there. It's not a big leap from warding off the curious 40 or 50 years ago, to warding off the curious who now make the drive to Area 51.

The veterans' stories provide...

Contrary to what you may read on the Internet, the world is not going to end in 2012. A rogue planet named Nibiru is not on a collision course with Earth. And a solar flare won't toast the planet. It's all fiction, though the makers of the film "2012" may lead you to think otherwise. "I don't have anything against the movie. It's the way it's been marketed and the way it exploits people's fears," NASA scientist David Morrison at the Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., told Discovery News.

Morrison has launched a counter-attack through his "Ask An Astrobiologist" online column, which he says has gotten more than 1,000 questions about the end of the world. Scientific misinformation about 2012 has been ramping up for...

After decades of denying the facility's existence, five former insiders speak out. Area 51. It's the most famous military institution in the world that doesn't officially exist. If it did, it would be found about 100 miles outside Las Vegas in Nevada's high desert, tucked between an Air Force base and an abandoned nuclear testing ground. Then again, maybe not— the U.S. government refuses to say. You can't drive anywhere close to it, and until recently, the airspace overhead was restricted—all the way to outer space. Any mention of Area 51 gets redacted from official documents, even those that have been declassified for decades.

It has become the holy grail for conspiracy theorists, with UFOlogists positing that the Pentagon reverse engineers flying saucers...

What’s it like to talk freely about a state secret you’ve been forced to live with for 60 years? “Earl felt like he was out of prison,” recalls Mary Fulford. “He felt like he’d been held for years in a vacuum and finally was released. It was great. The last two years of his life, he was in his glory because he was able to speak up.” Earl Fulford was one of many who went public two years ago, in a book called “Witness to Roswell” by Don Schmitt and Thomas Carey. He was stationed at Roswell Army Air Field in 1947 when he was ordered into the so-called UFO debris field for cleanup detail. Joined by more than a dozen other grunts, and under the hawk-eyed command of MPs, Fulford described gathering more than a dozen foil-like strips of memory metal, which morphed into their original,...

While investigating conspiracies and cover-ups, I wondered if this “conspiracy mania” was happening in America fifty years ago. The push to fluoridate our water supplies began more than fifty years ago. Much of it was a “structural” conspiracy. Scientists working for fluoride polluters would naturally, if largely unconsciously, massage the data to minimize the harm that fluoride caused, and amazingly, produced data showing that fluoride was good for people. Recently, declassified documents show the U.S. government covering up fluoride poisoning, because fluorine was used in the Manhattan Project extensively, and there were industrial fluoride accidents that harmed many people. Even though it turns out that fluoridation luminary Harold Hodge was secretly working to...

A previously unreleased film of President John F Kennedy's motorcade has revealed new details of the final moments before his assassination. The silent film shows the president and his wife Jackie shortly before the fatal shot was fired. Amateur photographer George Jefferies held onto the film for more than 40 years believing it was unimportant. But Dallas museum curator Gary Mack says it is bound to provide new fuel to the conspiracy theorists. The film shows the president's coat bunched up on his back - a detail some will see as evidence that the bullet wounds on the president's body did not match those on his jacket. The film also shows "the clearest, best film of Jackie in the motorcade", says Mr Mack. Also visible is secret service agent Clint Hill,...

In 1968, Robert Kennedy seemed likely to follow his brother, John, into the White House. Then, on June 6, he was assassinated - apparently by a lone gunman. But Shane O'Sullivan says he has evidence implicating three CIA agents in the murder At first, it seems an open-and-shut case. On June 5 1968, Robert Kennedy wins the California Democratic primary and is set to challenge Richard Nixon for the White House. After midnight, he finishes his victory speech at the Ambassador hotel in Los Angeles and is shaking hands with kitchen staff in a crowded pantry when 24-year-old Palestinian Sirhan Sirhan steps down from a tray-stacker with a "sick, villainous smile" on his face and starts firing at Kennedy with an eight-shot revolver. As Kennedy lies dying on the pantry floor,...

For years 'lost' tapes recording data from the Apollo 11 Moon landing have been stored underneath the seats of Australian physics students. A recent search has uncovered them. They were nearly thrown out with the rubbish. But a last minute search instead has scientists in Western Australia dusting off several boxes of 'lost' NASA tapes which record surface conditions on the Moon just after Neil Armstrong stepped into space history on 21 July 1969. After addressing Earth, the American astronaut set up a package of scientific instruments, including a dust detector designed by an Australian physicist. The data collected by the detector was sent back to ground stations on Earth and recorded on magnetic tapes - copies of which are as rare as the 'misplaced'...

Old-fashioned journalists have a term for bizarre, interesting and/or disturbing little articles -- "Hey Mabel" stories, they call them. And the New York Sun's Josh Gerstein had a doozy of a "Hey Mabel" in yesterday's paper. In a new court filing on behalf of alleged dirty bomber Jose Padilla, his lawyers allege that government interrogators forced him to take LSD, Gerstein reported. "Additionally, Padilla was given drugs against his will, believed to be some form of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) or phencyclidine (PCP), to act as a sort of truth serum during his interrogations," he quotes the filing. Now, There are some important details that aren't explained: Padilla's lawyers don't say what effects the prisoner reported to make...

Mount Weather is a top-security underground installation an hour's drive from Washington DC. It has its own leaders, police, fire department - and laws. A cold war relic, it has been given a new lease of life since 9/11. And no one who's been inside has ever talked. 'Actually, you may want to just put those down a minute," Tim Brown is telling me, as I peer through binoculars at a cluster of buildings and antennae on a distant ridge. "The locals might get a bit nervous." A Ford F-150 cruises by, and the two men inside regard us casually as they pass. We are sitting, hazards blinking, in Brown's BMW on a rural road in Virginia's Facquier County, a horsey enclave an hour west of Washington DC. The object of our attention is Mount Weather, officially...