Important Takeaways:
- Vets who served at top-secret Area 52 suffering from serious illnesses and can’t get health insurance
- Air Force veterans who served at top-secret nuclear testing site Area 52 in Nevada say they are being denied health care after their time at the base left them riddled with tumors and other ailments.
- Mark Ely, 63, said he is grappling with a litany of health problems from his assignment 40 years ago inspecting secretly obtained Soviet fighter jets stored in hidden hangars at the Tonopah Test Range, also known as Area 52, CBS News reported.
- “It scarred my lungs. I got cysts on my liver. … I started having lipomas, tumors inside my body I had to remove. My lining in my bladder was shed,” he told CBS.
- Even though a 1975 federal environmental assessment confirmed the presence of toxic radioactive material at the site, Ely said he is unable to get health coverage because his time at Area 52 — which he spent under an NDA — is not on his official service record.
- In the 1975 report, the government reasoned that stopping work at Area 52 was “against the national interest” and that the ultimate “costs … are small and reasonable for the benefits received.”
- “There’s a slogan that people say: ‘Deny, deny until you die.’ Kind of true here,” Ely said.
- He has spent eight years looking for other veterans who worked at the site, and told CBS he came across “all kinds of cancers.”
- While other government employees who were stationed in the area — mostly from the Department of Energy — have received $25.7 billion in federal assistance, Air Force vets like Ely and Crete don’t qualify for that aid because their time at the base is not on record, and they cannot prove they were there.
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