Air Force veterans who served at top-secret nuclear testing site Area 52 in Nevada say they are being denied healthcare 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 fourty years ago inspecting secretly obtained Soviet fighter jets stored in hidden hangers 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.
“Upholding the national interest was more important than my own life.”
Dave Crete worked with the Air Force’s security police squadron at Area 52. He told CBS that he now struggles with breathing issues, including chronic bronchitis, as well as a tumor in his back.
He has spent eight years looking for other veterans who worked at the site, and told CBS he came across “all kinds of cancers.”
“The government said they secured the area so there would be no more spread of the contamination,” he said of the contamination at Area 52.
“The way they secured it was with a barbed wire fence. Now I don’t have a PhD in physics, but a barbed wire fence isn’t going to do that,” he suggested.
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.
Last fall, Crete and another Area 52 vet, Pomp Braswell, filed a lawsuit against the federal government hoping to recoup benefits for their health issues, CBS 5 reported at the time.
“The thing is we were all handpicked, to be up there are get that clearance,” Braswell said.
“With that being said we were all at the top of our game, always.”
The Department of Defense did not immediately return The Post’s request for a comment.
