San Nicolas Island and the Area 51 Connection, page

An interesting Naval site is the "no civilian access" island of San Nicolas located off the coast of California.

San Nicolas Island

Janet flights to San Nicolas Island

Satellite View

There is also a cable that runs from Pt. Mugu to San nicolas Island

Starts here:
C able Origination
You have to look to the right of the road that branches off from Beach rd. you see a faint line that goes to the ocean. It is a wooden cable trough.


Some documention about the cable line to San Nicolas:
PDF 1
PDF 2
PDF 3
PDF 4







[edit on 23-4-2007 by satcom]

happiness: can you elaborate please?

Here is a neat find on the island:
www.enviro-navair.navy.mil...

I recently found a patch for the San Nicolas Island outlying landing field. In the image, there appears to be two objects in black in the foreground. Can anyone elaborate on what these depict?

i15.ebayimg.com...

Unless there is an obvious meaning to the image in the patch, my observations are:

There looks to be a sunset behind an island. It appears they're inferring night operations with the moonlight reflecting on the water. There's a tall white object behind the island, which may indicate a missile or rocket trajectory originating from nearby Vandenberg AFB. This may be a recovery location for classified test flights deployed from there.

The lower black object appears to be an aerodynamic shape with a descending flight path angle. The edges appear to be linear. There are what look to be streamlines behind the object as it is "falling", which may indicate it is airborne.

I looked into Outlying Landing Fields and found the Wikipedia link about other F/A-18 practice landing strips on the east coast. This may just be that.

en.wikipedia.org...

Is anyone familiar with this patch and if so, what is being depicted?

That patch appears on this page

Here

There is an email to a gentleman on that page that can probably answer any questions about that particular patch.

hilarious!!

I just heard about this bases 15 mins ago and came on google earth and found it.. took a screenshot

i42.tinypic.com...
i42.tinypic.com...

VERY odd.

Whats underground????\\



[edit on 28-1-2009 by xbranscombex]

[edit on 28-1-2009 by xbranscombex]

Threads on another forum have yielded possible evidence of a Lockheed advanced development effort, with a possible connection to the San Nicolas Island operation:

Why is this at Tonopah?

N623BA

N623BA has in the past been used by the Skunk Works (Advanced Development Programs). A few years back it spent most of its days flying back and forth to San Nicolas Island working on a project.

Additionally, other threads in the ATS forum discuss N623BA flight operations involving DET 3:

N623BA Lands at Groom Lake

Lockheed Martin Flight to Groom Lake

Is there a connection with the contrail event off of the southern California coast on November 8, 2010 and San Nicolas Island? The following article suggests there may be:

Secret United States Test of Foreign Missile Might Explain Mysterious Los Angeles Contrail

I ran across this website about San Nicolas Island done by Naval Base Ventura County:

CNIC Naval Base Ventura County - San Nicolas Island

In the website, they state the following:

1) "SNI maintains a 10,000 foot concrete and asphalt runway that can accommodate an aircraft the size of a C-5."

2) Under the 'Newly Assigned' page, "No one is allowed outside of Nicktown for recreational purposes between 30 minutes after sunset and 30 minutes prior to sunrise the next morning." Why is that?

Originally posted by TAGBOARD
I ran across this website about San Nicolas Island done by Naval Base Ventura County:

CNIC Naval Base Ventura County - San Nicolas Island

In the website, they state the following:

1) "SNI maintains a 10,000 foot concrete and asphalt runway that can accommodate an aircraft the size of a C-5."

2) Under the 'Newly Assigned' page, "No one is allowed outside of Nicktown for recreational purposes between 30 minutes after sunset and 30 minutes prior to sunrise the next morning." Why is that?

I spent eight years on San Nicolas Island full-time living there as a federal civilian DoD and retired in 2006. My time on the island goes back some almost 30 years. I can talk about it in general terms but need to avoid specifics in some cases.

During most of my time there were about 20 or so of us "techies" civilian DoD's permanently assigned with the test range and a number of military and contract civilians support personnel up to about 60 or so in number. Some of the roads were tricky and the terrain rough so the evening hour restriction applied to most of those support people who were janitors, cooks, supply people, etc., who were not authorized in restricted areas and were to stay in town in the evenings for safety reasons. My work station, a tracking site, was outside of town and frequently was there around the clock or at odd hours for test operations. Not too mysterious.

Our runway was huge and was an alternate site for shuttle landing but was never needed for that. We also operated F-4 and F16 target aircraft by radio control that were piloted over from the mainland then unmanned for operations around the sea test range then landed on SNI like on a carrier with with arrestor cables. These operations could be dangerous so much of the island personnel were restricted to "Nicktown" during those ops.

A lot of what was mentioned earlier in the thread was done there as well as ops with some of the military's latest whizz-bang toys. For obvious reasons I can't be too specific about those. I can answer some questions anyone might have and can be somewhat specific about many things. We did have some operations go on a couple of times that even I wasn't supposed to see up close and personal when it was on the deck though I did my regular instrumentations stuff with it while flying. I think I am allowed to mention I was primary tracker on the two successful Hyper-X ops when it was reaching mach 7 and almost mach 10.

The OLF SNI patch I still have a couple goodies around like a wine glass and a shot glass with the patch that was a gift at Xmas for our crew. I never gave it too much thought to more meaning, it just depicts the island and some of our instrumentation kind of caricaturized and not much detail. -Eron

There was a media "open house" at SNI on November 20, 2002. I'd imagine there was little out in sight of prying eyes at that time. Perhaps this would include mitigating inadvertent glimpses inside facilities, that would not be possible by overhead assets.

Media Opportunity for San Nicolas Island

Just submitted this as link as a data point.

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