Engineers at Nevada Air Force Base said the CIA found the strange craft in the desert and brought it in for investigation, but later transferred it to another base when they were unable to access its interior.
Eric Taber has been a defense aerospace contractor for 13 years and holds security clearance to work on military aircraft. Now, in an interview with the British newspaper Daily Mail, he revealed the story his late great-uncle Sam Urquhart — who worked as a contractor at Area 51 — told him about a UFO at the mysterious desert base.
Taber testified in May before the Pentagon’s UFO investigation unit, the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), which has been collecting reports of alleged government possession of non-human craft.
The claim — though an unverified story from a now-deceased witness — is part of a long history of rumors about possible extraterrestrial craft or futuristic spacecraft stored at the Nevada desert air base near Groom Lake, north of Las Vegas.
Eric Taber testified before the Pentagon’s UFO office in May about his great-uncle’s story about an egg-shaped, non-human craft at Area 51.
It’s also worth mentioning that this comes shortly after whistleblowers told Congress that the government has a secret program to capture crashed or stranded “non-human” vehicles and has been trying to gain technological knowledge of these alleged otherworldly objects for decades.
Such complaints prompted lawmakers to draft an amendment to the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act to expand such programs. It is currently in the process of being approved by Congress.
The hermetic egg
Taber spoke only about his great-uncle’s story to the Daily Mail, declining to comment on his own work as a defense contractor. He said he became friends with his grandmother’s brother after moving from Mississippi to the West Coast in 2012.
The young engineer said he repeatedly questioned Urquhart about the veracity of the rumors of aliens at Area 51 and he was always evasive. But one day he finally relented.
“My great uncle served in the Air Force for 28 years, E8 (equivalent to first sergeant),” Taber detailed. “He told me he worked at Area 51 from 1997 to 2014.”
Urquhart began his work at Area 51 for defense contractor EG&G, which later partnered with Raytheon to become JT3 LLC and later JT4 LLC.
He was the engineering group’s security chief and data configuration specialist. His group performed radar traverse tests. I kept asking him about UFOs. He said:
“I don’t know anything.” So one day we were on the back porch and he said, ‘Well, I’ll tell you about a ship I heard about.”
According to what he told him in 1997, he had a personal conversation with a senior engineer at EG&G, whose group was in charge of trying to reverse engineer an object that had been brought there by some CIA people in the 1980s. It was supposedly recovered in a remote location in the desert, completely intact.
Taber revealed the story his late great-uncle Sam Urquhart, an Area 51 contractor, told him about a UFO at the mysterious desert base. Taber and Urquhart are pictured together.
“The EG&G senior engineer described to my great uncle that the object was egg-shaped, about the size of an SUV, smooth and unriveted, metallic in appearance, silvery gray in color, with no flight control surfaces, no ailerons, no nose, and no writing or symbols on the outside,” Taber explained.
These are the best and brightest engineers you can imagine. They tried unsuccessfully to figure out what the power source was, how to activate it, and how it worked. They tried to induce electricity into it. X-rays couldn’t penetrate it; it showed up as a solid object on the X-ray. They tried to open it up and penetrate its hull; “They couldn’t,” he continued.
What they were able to do was take some very small samples of the material. “And I’m not a chemistry expert, but I think from the isotope ratio or the mix of elements they concluded that it wasn’t made on Earth.”
Taber testified that Urquhart told him the ship was eventually sent to another base, possibly the White Sands Missile Test Range in New Mexico, and that was the last the engineers heard from it.
There is a photograph of the UFO
But the story didn’t stop there: his great-uncle collected radar data and took it to secure vaults to catalogue and store it. And in one of these rooms, in the main building, nicknamed the Taj Mahal, he claimed to have seen on the wall a color photograph of an object that uncannily matched the description given by the senior engineer.
Taber shared with the Daily Mail images that Urquhart showed him, including a group photo with his fellow Area 51 engineers in a trailer during a break at the base and an emblem designed for his radar analysis group. But the supposed main photo of the egg-shaped object never left the Area 51 vault.
Sam Urquhart with colleagues in a rest trailer at Area 51, taken circa 2000. Urquhart presented Taber with a department badge (inset right) with symbols alluding to his work analyzing radar signals.
“Sam said the American people would probably never see this,” Taber admitted.
Urquhart, a 28-year Air Force veteran who served in the Vietnam and Gulf Wars, died in August last year at age 75. His story was documented by AARO after Taber was interviewed by the team in May.
A memorandum of his account, along with other reports and witness testimony, is expected to be compiled and sent to Congress next year.
Area 51 and Bob Lazar
As an attentive reader will have noticed, this story mentions Area 51 and Groom Lake, names made famous in 1989 when a certain Bob Lazar claimed to have worked there on a reverse-engineered alien flying saucer program – although many elements of his story have since been discredited.
In this regard, Taber noted that his great-uncle told him that he knew Lazar worked at the base, but that much of his story was made up.
“He was only there for a few months and claimed there was a site called S-4 at the base of the Papoose Mountains, with nine hangar sections built into the mountainside, housing nine flying saucers. My great uncle said that was false. The only thing Papoose had was some radio tower equipment. That was his take on the matter,” he concluded.
