A family have reportedly rejected a $5.2m (£3.4m) bid by the US Air Force to buy land next to Area 51 they say they have owned for generations.

The Sheahan family have broken more than 60 years of silence about what it is like living so close to the top secret site, the existence of which was not officially acknowledged until 2013.

The nearby Groom Mine has been owned by the family for 130 years, ever since family members began mining for silver, lead, copper, zinc and small amounts of gold, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal newspaper, which spoke to the family.

Area 51, which got its name from its map designation, was used to test U2 spy planes during the Cold War.

It has been the source of fascination for many, with conspiracy theories abounding about just what has gone on at the patch of desert in Nevada.

There have been rumours of crashed UFOs, alien bodies and futuristic air force projects.

But for the Sheahan family it has caused nothing but problems.

They want compensation from the Air Force and Department of Energy for what they claim are “abuses and atrocities” that date back to the 1950s.

In an interview with the Review-Journal the family said their ore processing mill has been fire-bombed by a military jet, ending production there, and their property showered by radioactive fallout from above-ground nuclear weapons tests.

Recording #48

Groom Mine co-owner Dan Sheahan said in a separate interview with Las Vegas Now: “First, we really didn’t want to come public, but the Air Force has forced us into it.

“We want ’em to know what they have done over the last 60 years to our family is not acceptable.”

“These were fired over our property.

“The bullets, the cases dropped on the ground right there and then.”

The Review-Journal reports that the Air Force has threatened to take control of the 400-acre property through eminent domain, or a compulsory purchase, on 10 September if the family does not agree to the offer.

The family maintains the land is worth “considerably more” than $5.2m because of the minerals in the mine, the Review-Journal reports.

In a statement, the nearby Nellis Air Force Base said the action was necessary because family’s land has become an “increasingly greater safety and security risk”.

“The Air Force attempted to conduct operations while the owners used the property for decades, much of it amicably,” the release said.

“However, over the past several years the desired activities of the family and operations on the NTTR (Nevada Test and Training Range) have become less and less compatible.

“The property’s location inside the NTTR and the increasing national security demands have made it impossible for the Air Force to test and train securely and safely while civilians are present.”

The statement, which said the family could visit the site in the future, also addressed the incident involving the ore processing mill, saying it was dealt with in the US Court of Claims.

However, the family contends their grandparents only stopped their court action over the incident because they ran out of money.

In response to the statement, Joe Sheahan told the Review-Journal: “We’re interrupting their operations? Really?

“We didn’t parachute into their backyard.

“They parachuted into our backyard.”

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Air Force seeks negotiated settlement for property on test range
8/28/2015 – NELLIS AIR FORCE BASE, Nev. — The Air Force has submitted its final offer to purchase private property within the boundaries of the Nevada Test and Training Range.

The land has become an increasingly greater safety and security risk as demand for test and training opportunities have increased.

The Air Force attempted to conduct operations while the owners used the property for decades, much of it amicably. However, over the past several years the desired activities of the family and operations on the NTTR have become less and less compatible. The property’s location inside the NTTR and the increasing national security demands have made it impossible for the Air Force to test and train securely and safely while civilians are present.

“We are hopeful the family will accept our final offer to purchase roughly 100 acres of owned property and about 300 acres of unpatented mine claims for $5.2 million,” said Jennifer Miller, Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Installations. “We understand the landowners’ connection to the land, but we must also consider the demands of national security.”

This recent offer marks the end of a series of meetings with the land owners in an effort to negotiate a purchase price for the property.

“The Air Force has worked hard to be a responsible neighbor by actively working with the landowners and local neighbors to ensure our evolving missions and communities grew in a compatible, mutually beneficial manner,” said Col. Thomas Dempsey, Commander, Nevada Test and Training Range Wing. “But in this case, the Air Force has exhausted all reasonable options to reach a settlement with the land owners.”

Dempsey said as active stewards of ensuring national security and protecting the environment, purchasing this land will allow them to safely execute the mission and secure the site for the family to continue to visit.

The NTTR supports the Department of Defense advanced composite force training, tactics development and electronic combat testing, as well as DOD and Department of Energy testing, research and development. The range hosts numerous Red Flag and U.S. Air Force Weapons School exercises each year, as well as various test and tactics development missions.

“The Nevada Test and Training range is a unique national asset because the size and remoteness of the area enables military test and training activities that cannot be completed in other national training areas,” Dempsey said. “Over the years, national security demands and technology development have increased demand for the Nevada Test and Training Range assets and the Air Force has developed infrastructure that directly supports range activities that cannot be replicated elsewhere.”

Test and training customers fund manpower, travel and range support costs to execute their planned missions. When those missions are cancelled to address safety and security risks caused by incompatible land use, much of the funding is already spent, but the test or training customer does not execute their mission and must schedule and fund another time on the range, he said. More than 40,000 sorties are flown over the range each year, and national security demands are forecasted to increase that number.

“Mission cancellations on the NTTR due to incompatible land use cost millions of dollars per year,” Dempsey said. “These lost opportunities and delays result in increased national security costs to the taxpayer.”

The NTTR is the largest contiguous air and ground space available for peacetime military operations, occupying 2.9 million acres of land, 5,000 square miles of airspace which is restricted from civilian air traffic over-flight, and another 7,000 square miles of military operating area, which is shared with civilian aircraft.

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Air Force gives ‘last best offer’ for land near Area 51 testing site

LAS VEGAS — The U.S. Air Force is giving an ultimatum to owners of a remote Nevada property now surrounded by a vast bombing range including the super-secret Area 51: Take a $5.2 million “last best offer” by Thursday for their property, or the government will seize it.

The answer: No, at least for now.

The owners, who trace their mining and mineral claims to the 1870s, include descendants of a couple who lost their hardscrabble mining enterprise after the Air Force moved in in the 1940s. Nuclear tests then began in 1951, their mine mill mysteriously exploded in 1954 and they ran out of money to seek reparations from the government in 1959.

“What they really want to buy is our property, our access rights and our view,” said Joseph Sheahan, 54, who has led the fight with his cousin, Barbara Sheahan Manning, on behalf of about 20 property co-owners. Both live in Henderson, Nev.

“We prefer to keep our property, but it’s for sale under the right price at the right conditions,” Sheahan said. “Why don’t they ask themselves what it cost my family over the years in blood, sweat, tears and money?”

The two sides are far apart. And they know condemnation proceedings would lead to a “fair market value” determination that could end up in court for a long time.

The federal government gradually encircled the mine property — totaling fewer than 400 acres — northwest of Las Vegas, making it a private island reachable today only by passing armed guards at security gateposts. The surrounding secure 4,500-square-mile reservation for nuclear testing, military training and other research is almost twice the area of the state of Delaware.

“The land has become an increasingly greater safety and security risk as demand for test and training opportunities have increased,” the government said in an Aug. 28 news release describing the final offer.

Today, Groom Mine overlooks Groom Lake, a site so secret that Col. Thomas Dempsey, a Nellis Air Force Base commander, would only refer to it on Friday as “one of many remote locations within the Nevada Test and Training Range.”

“Nothing you can look up in any Air Force naming convention refers to Area 51,” added Jennifer Miller, deputy assistant Air Force secretary for installations.

But check the Internet or watch TV’s “X-Files” and Area 51 and Groom Lake evoke tales of top-secret aircraft research and testing, CIA programs and maybe extraterrestrials. The Triple-A baseball Las Vegas 51s even poke fun at the legend, with the team name and a mascot character named Cosmo.

Sheahan family members consider themselves good neighbors and patriotic Americans, with generations of decorated military members, Manning and Joe Sheahan said. They don’t tell what they’ve seen.

But Manning, 59, remembers the tales handed down during decades on the porch of a rustic home overlooking Groom Lake.

“We didn’t have much more than a transistor radio and a deck of cards, and no indoor toilet,” she said. “Our grandparents told us the stories.”

For more than 70 years, since the U.S. government moved to that part of southern Nevada, “they have completely disregarded our constitutional rights,” Manning said.

She photographed records at the Lincoln County seat of Pioche showing the first two Groom Mining District mineral patents, filed in May 1876, were signed by President Ulysses S. Grant. With various additions over the years, the rights grew to include six patented claims and 15 unpatented claims.

Sheahan family forebearers mined lead and silver and other minerals for half a century before World War II and the Cold War created an urgent need for a remote place to test nuclear weapons. That brought the government, the military and mushroom clouds to the site some 100 miles northwest of what is now Las Vegas.

The demise of the mining enterprise is told in a 1959 letter from grandparents Daniel and Martha Sheahan to then-U.S. Attorney General William P. Rogers. Radioactive fallout from nuclear tests and the lack of a mill to process ore were to blame, they said. They also blamed disagreements with their own lawyers.

Partly for that reason, Joe Sheahan said, the owners haven’t hired attorneys for the current fight with the government. He said several owners aren’t Sheahan family members.

Manning said her father, Daniel “Bob” Sheahan and an uncle, H. Patrick Sheahan, put the value of the property at some $13.6 million in a May 1986 letter sent to the Air Force as part of an environmental study.

Miller, the Air Force official, said government estimates for property and mineral rights, after assessments in the 1980s and 1990s, were between $1 million and $1.2 million.

Taxpayer money is at stake. But the pending offer was stretched to $5.4 million in an effort reach an amount “reasonable prudent and in the public interest,” Miller said.

“The payment cannot result in a windfall to the owners,” she added.

© 2015 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Air Force decides to condemn private land near Area 51

With no counteroffer on the table, the Air Force let its final $5.2 million offer expire at 3 p.m. Thursday and asked the Justice Department to condemn the Sheahan family’s Groom Mine property and claims near the classified Area 51 installation.

Groom Mine co-owners Joe and Ben Sheahan had sent an email Thursday morning to an Air Force real estate chief saying they “are willing to sit down and negotiate” a counteroffer for sale of their 400 acres of property and mining claims, within sight of the remote Air Force location.

But at 2:18 p.m., David Walterscheid, real estate transactions chief at Lackland Air Force Base, Texas, replied to the Sheahans, saying that according to a July 2014 letter from Joe Sheahan, “the owners did not want to make a counteroffer or grant access to the property” for an appraisal.

“We are not prepared to offer more than $5.2M for the property,” Walterscheid said in his reply Thursday to the Sheahans.

Nellis Air Force Base later released a statement from Jennifer Miller, assistant secretary of the Air Force for installations, saying, “After exhausting all reasonable efforts to negotiate a sale and the landowners’ rejection of the Air Force’s offers, the Air Force requested the Department of Justice file a condemnation action in Federal District Court.”

She said an appraisal wasn’t made because the Air Force wasn’t permitted to enter the property.

“The Air Force will pay just compensation for the claims as determined by the court based on evidence submitted by the parties. We are proceeding in a manner consistent with the law that will strike an appropriate balance in protecting the rights of the landowners while recognizing the demands of national security,” Miller’s statement said.

The facility and airstrip known as Area 51 are where cutting-edge spy planes and stealth jets have been tested for six decades on restricted government land along the remote Groom Dry Lake bed, 90 miles north of Las Vegas.

Joe Sheahan said the family interpreted the Air Force’s Aug. 11 final-offer letter to be “an ultimatum. It didn’t leave us much room for a counteroffer.”

Joe Sheahan has said the family feels the negotiations have been disingenuous since they learned recently that Air Force officials had received authorization to condemn their property before a meeting to discuss a possible sale of it in 2014.

Nellis officials said, however, that wasn’t the case.