What The Heck Is Going on at United States Air Force Plant 42?

By Jacob Weindling | March 27, 2025 | 3:54pm

Photo by U.S. Air Force

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What The Heck Is Going on at United States Air Force Plant 42?

Back in August, I wrote a deep dive into Chuck Schumer’s UAP legislation that contains the phrase “non-human intelligence” 22 times, among other shocking sentences in an official bill submitted to Congress that Schumer, Sen. Mike Rounds and others are still fighting to pass to this day. In between the two parts I published, a member of the government who I confirmed has worked on UAP investigations reached out to me. They did not provide me with any reportable or particularly detailed info, we just spoke on background, but they did point me in a couple directions of where to dig, stressing that United States Air Force Plant 42 (USAF Plant 42) was one key place to look into. They did not say what the nature of what I should look into was or anything specific about USAF Plant 42, just that it was the direction my investigations should take me.

I have spent the months since digging into it and finding little information I can piece together into a report with any kind of conclusion to it, and I still do not quite know what direction I was pointed in. But there is more than enough weirdness at the base of USAF Plant 42 to write a piece summarizing what we do know, and there is very clearly a mystery ongoing here that is not just limited to USAF Plant 42. If you have information about USAF Plant 42 or on any of these drone incursions into our military bases, please reach out to me at Jacob at Splinter dot com so we can coordinate a secure way to communicate. You can remain anonymous and only speak on background if you would like.

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USAF Plant 42 is located in Palmdale, California. In 1935, the Bureau of Air Commerce built a small airstrip in the desert which could be used by pilots in distress to land on instead of a public road. During World War II, Palmdale Army Airfield was established at the same location, largely functioning as an emergency landing field for the B-25 Mitchell medium bomber. In 1946, it was designated as a surplus facility by the federal government and Los Angeles County purchased it to use as a municipal airport, which is still in use today.

In 1950, the Air Force reactivated the property to use in the assembly and testing of aircraft for the Korean War. They subsequently purchased the land back from Los Angeles County in 1951, and began handing out contracts to goliaths like Lockheed Martin. The famed Skunk Works division of Lockheed that builds our most exotic aircraft relocated to Plant 42 and in 1968, built the hangar it currently maintains. Today, USAF Plant 42 is home to some of the world’s most highly advanced aircraft and their parts built by the United States and our largest defense contractors.

The ownership structure for the base is a Government Owned, Contractor Operated entity (GOCO). The nature of these entities is a bit strange in that they are facilities that the government owns, but the government pays private contractors to operate them. The government owns 85 percent of the 6,600 acres of land that USAF Plant 42 sits on, but just 45 percent of the 4.2 million square feet of floor space. While the structure of GOCOs is such that ultimately, the federal government owns them, the nature of their ownership structure leads a lot to interpret. As Dwight Eisenhower warned us in his farewell address, the line between military contractors and the government is blurring more every day, and if you were to walk on to USAF Plant 42 and demand to speak to the person in charge of everything going on at the sprawling facility, I’m not sure they would be able to produce that for you even if they wanted to (which I can confirm they absolutely do not want to talk about ownership of anything on the base).

But the ownership structure of USAF Plant 42 is far from its most confounding mystery. Occam’s Razor is it’s like all the other GOCOs, but there is a big difference between USAF Plant 42 and say, Sandia National Labs which also is run by GOCO ownership. For one, Sandia National Labs has not been hit with unknown “drone” incursions like USAF Plant 42 has. There are other GOCOs, like Plant 4 in Texas that also manufactures cutting-edge aircraft like the F-35, and there were unknown drone incursions at military facilities in Fort Worth just a ten-minute drive away from it in December. This ocurred during the New Jersey drone hysteria that surely had a very conventional explanation for most of what people saw, but the Department of Defense did confirm afterwards that “there have been a limited number of visual sightings of drones over military facilities in New Jersey and elsewhere, including within restricted air space.”

At the same time my source told me to look at USAF Plant 42, The War Zone reported that it “has seen a wave of mysterious drone incursions in recent months. The incidents have now become serious enough to prompt the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to impose new, if temporary flight restrictions around the sprawling high-security facility.”

Last month, Christopher Sharp of the Liberation Times obtained Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) records of these drone breaches at USAF Plant 42, writing that “the documentation shows official USAF reports describing rotary-wing drones with blinking lights and camera systems repeatedly hovering over sensitive areas, prompting patrol responses, off-base pursuit attempts, and coordination with the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA), with assessments suggesting the drones operated beyond typical hobbyist capabilities.” These FOIA records also revealed that the Commander Reports for USAF Plant 42 state that the “Unmanned X Systems” they called these drones have “appeared to have coordinated arrival, departure and flight paths and times.” One incursion describes a drone hovering motionless for 25 minutes over Site 7 at USAF Plant 42, and another details an off-base pursuit of two drones that yielded no known information about them to Plant 42’s operators.

Does this sound like the kind of investigative results the most powerful military in the history of mankind should be producing? I certainly don’t think so.

Skeptics will rightly point out that USAF Plant 42’s immensely classified work makes it an obvious target for espionage, and these Commander Reports do state that is what these incursions seem to be. Where the skeptics’ “nothing to see here” case falls apart are the reports from Sharp’s FOIA that “throughout all seven nights of drone activity, no countermeasures were operational, leaving the objects completely unchallenged.”

Needless to say, if China or Russia had a confirmed drone just hanging out inside one of America’s most highly classified areas spying on what we were doing, the military would take measures to stop that from happening. Shooting things down in the sky is not as simple as it seems, as something must be classified as a threat first to engage weapons systems with it, and personally, one of the directions I have dug in is that these mystery “drone” incursions happening in sensitive military installations do not seem to be officially classified as threats, despite the fact that all reports are that these “drones” come and go as they please and confound the operators monitoring them. I put “drones” in quotes because sources have confirmed to me that there are differently-sized aircraft breaching our bases, and the term “drone” is something of a catchall term for a diverse array of unknowns. My bet is that the military is being cagey with this term in part because they don’t want to disclose the sources and methods that have informed them about this dynamic, but to hear KLAS’ George Knapp, the legendary UAP reporter, tell it on his podcast Weaponized, “drones” are akin to modern “swamp gas” explanations that amount to the government saying, ‘nothing to see here, move along.’

Palmdale has long been a target for people trying to learn more about this massively secretive base testing the cutting edge of aviation, like the newly released B-21 Raider in the titular photo of this story. In 2022, David Smith, director of Air Force Plant 42, told Breaking Defense that “we are seeing increased incidents of what I will call probing.” Aviation enthusiasts look at this plant as a mythical area similar to Area 51, and USAF Plant 42 set up a “geo-fence” to knock down the drones that locals had been flying into the plant.

USAF Plant 42 is actually connected to Area 51, in that the secretive Janet airline that flies employees to Area 51’s Groom Lake out of Harry Reid International Airport also flies workers to Palmdale. There are six destinations Janet Airlines flies to, and they all have their own mysteries connected to UAPs. In addition to USAF Plant 42 and Groom Lake, it flies to China Lake (which has a history of UAP sightings and also testing U.S. drone swarms), Edwards Air Force Base which also is a UAP sighting hub that tested the UAP-looking Avro Canada VZ-9AV Avrocar prototype in the 1950s, and the Tonopah Test Range located a couple miles west of the Palo Verde Nuclear Generation Station that was swarmed by a mystery “drone-a-palooza” in 2019.

UAP reports around highly classified military facilities are very common, as the vast majority of these reports are people seeing exotic aircraft being tested. My source even told me that the military has long encouraged certain UAP reports since the 1940s as a way to hide the very real human technology that people are seeing in the sky. The mythos around these sites has been built off an avalanche of eminently explainable sightings, but the modern-day unexplained “drone” incursions have thrown all of this into flux.

There is just no way in hell that the most powerful military in the world would let adversarial nations or hobbyists just park their drones inside its most sensitive military facilities, but all known explanations point to that being exactly what is happening. Late last year, the United States Air Forces in Europe said that “small unmanned aerial systems continue to be spotted in the vicinity of and over Royal Air Force Lakenheath, RAF Mildenhall, RAF Feltwell and RAF Fairford since Nov. 20.” Wright Patterson Air Force Base, one of the most important installations we have (and for what it’s worth, long been the subject of rumors that it was where the alleged Roswell crash was taken), shut down their airspace due to unknown drone incursions around the same time that New Jersey was buzzing with activity.

From California to the United Kingdom to New Jersey, this is happening all over the world to the United States. One report recently found “three people with links to Russian military and intelligence sites travelled to stay near top-secret UK air bases where suspicious drones were sighted.” It’s possible this mystery drone activity could be Russian, and anything on the European continent is likely to involve them somehow, but our inability to capture or even understand where these drones come from and leave to raises a whole host of uncomfortable questions about American technological progress if this is Russia or China.

Lakenheath likely holds nuclear weapons right now and many of the others in the UK that have had drone incursions have been suspected to in the past, and this gets to another commonality in the history of UAPs: if there is anything we do know, it’s that their presence shows up time and time again around our nuclear facilities over decades. The famed U.S.S. Nimitz case the New York Times broke in 2017 to usher in this new era of UAP transparency was centered around weeks-long UAP drama surrounding our nuclear-powered aircraft carriers in the Pacific. In my research since August, I have confirmed with multiple sources that the military is curious about these historical patterns of unidentified objects in nuclear facilities.

Plugging “Palmdale” into this UAP report database yields a lot of reports of people seeing the B-1 bomber and other highly classified aircraft built and tested at USAF Plant 42, but there are also a smattering of reports like this from MUFON’s November 1990 journal, where “a security guard and an air traffic controller at Air Force Facility 42 in Palmdale, California, witness a silver flying object and three orb-shaped UFOs during testing of the B1-B bomber. There is also a rumor of an abduction occurring on this date at the same facility.”

USAF Plant 42 is one of those hot spots where legend, government secrecy and unexplained weirdness create a web of confusion that no one has been able to untangle to date.

Here is what we know for certain: something(s) or someone(s) is very interested in our most sensitive facilities like USAF Plant 42, and they are deploying aerial assets to seemingly monitor them and don’t receive much reported pushback. These “drones” are not hobbyists. That I can confirm. Our military would prove themselves to be staggeringly inept if they were, and USAF Plant 42 has measures specifically in place to ensure that curious locals do not peer into whatever is happening inside of it. Something very serious and strange is going on in America’s most secretive military facilities, and we seem either powerless or unwilling to stop it.