Holloman Air Force Base / Alamogordo
32°51′N, 106°06′W
Otero County, New Mexico — Tularosa Basin, adjacent to White Sands
[from the public record]
32.8500, -106.1000 · view on OpenStreetMap →
What's documented
Holloman Air Force Base is a United States Air Force installation in the Tularosa Basin of south-central New Mexico, ~10 miles west of Alamogordo. It opened in 1942 as Alamogordo Army Air Field and was renamed in 1948. The base sits adjacent to White Sands Missile Range and within the same regional restricted-airspace complex as the Trinity Site, where the first nuclear weapon was detonated in July 1945.
Notable & intriguing
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Trinity Site, where the first nuclear weapon was detonated on 16 July 1945, lies inside the same White Sands Missile Range restricted-airspace complex as Holloman, ~95 km north of the base. The site is opened to the public for two days a year.
U.S. Department of Energy National Atomic Museum.
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Project Mogul — the high-altitude balloon train whose 1947 crash at Roswell is the conventional explanation for the “Roswell incident” — launched its instrumented balloon trains from the Alamogordo Army Air Field, the wartime predecessor of Holloman AFB.
USAF, The Roswell Report: Case Closed, 1997.
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Col. John Stapp’s rocket-sled deceleration tests on the Holloman High Speed Test Track in 1954 subjected him to a peak ~46.2 g — for decades the highest g-load ever survived voluntarily by a human; Life magazine called him “the bravest man in the Air Force.”
Life, 11 Sep 1954; Stapp Foundation records.
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Holloman is also the site of an annual Open House and Air Show that has featured public displays of advanced and stealth aircraft, and is home to the only operational F-117 retirement/test fleet (under the “Dark Knights” designation) maintained for tactical training sorties as of mid-2020s reporting.
Aviation Week, March 2022.
Public-record items already documented about this subject. Folklore is labelled. Sources cited where the specificity warrants it.
Public-record imagery
