"Its interesting to contemplatewhat is going on there. It seems as though there is tons of money goingin there and nothing is going out," he said.

In particular, the photosshow a runwaythat is about 3,800 meters (2.36 miles), or about 42 football fields, long.Thats even longer than the runways for the worlds largest commercialaircraft.

The images also show a burgeoninggrowth in the area, including a complete rebuilding and expansion in sizeof the housingcomplex for base personnel over the past 30 years. In addition, thereare new support facilities.

A geometrically-shaped munitionsstorage area is also identified.

Andfour aircraft hangars are visible off the runway. Conspiracy theoristshave long believed that one of these hangars, dubbed Hangar 18, is theholding area for the alien bodies and captured alien technology taken fromcrash sites.

These high-resolution images,captured by Space Imagings IKONOS satellite on April 2, were releasedless than a week after Raleigh, North Carolina-based Aerial Images unfoldedits series of 6.6-foot (2-meter) photos of the mysteriously secretive areaover the Web, crashing the site for days.

Though the publics ravenousappetite for these images was made obvious this past week, Pikes purposefor getting these photos was different.

Pike said the request wasa test to see how long it would take to gain access to these images andhow they may be used by military agencies around the world.

"This is an interesting casestudy that enables us to explore in practical rather than theoretical termsjust what is this 'Brave New World' weve entered into."

This so-called 3.3-foot (1-meter)resolution technology once was available only to intelligence agenciesthrough their own spy satellites. But it has been estimated that by theyear 2003, at least 11 companies in five countries will have high-resolution,remote-sensing cameras in orbit.

That sort of commercial technologyin space worries government officials because they believe such detailedimagery could encourage industrial espionage, terrorism or more cross-bordermilitary attacks in the developing world.

But Pike seemed unfazed bythe impact of this imagery on national security.

Because it took 2 monthsto get the images, he said the technology would only be useful during peacetimefor monitoring specific regions instead of during wartime, when the militarymay need to target a strategic area.

"The war may already be overbefore you get your picture," Pike said.

Space Imagings Mark Brenderargued that obtaining images doesnt always take so long. "We can turnstuff around in 24 hours," he said. When twin tornadoes touched down inTexas on March 28, for example, Brender says that within a few hours theywere evaluating the images and ready to release them to the public within24 hours.

"We can produce images veryshortly for natural disasters and crisis," he said.

Area 51 -- 75 miles (121kilometers) northwest of Las Vegas occupies about 150 square miles (390square kilometers) of a dried up lakebed in the Great Basin Desert, Nevada.It was named after the grid it occupies on an old Nevada map and came intoexistence in 1955 when aerospace company Lockheed Martin landed there totest the U 2, a high-altitude surveillance plane.

The top-secret base laterbecame a proving ground for several generations of high-tech prototypes,including the F 117-A Stealth fighter.

The shroud of secrecy thickenedonce the Air Force bought up about 9,000 acres of land around the baseto prevent the public from getting too close. In August 1994, an Air Forceofficial admitted the base existed, saying the Air Force has "facilitieswithin the complex near the dry lakebed of Groom Lakeused for testing,training technologies, operations and systems critical to the effectivenessof U.S. military forces."

Ufologists have long believedthat unidentified flying objects from other planets are entrenched in undergroundbases in the region and insist alien autopsies are being conducted there.But, conventional wisdom says the base is likely a center for super-secretoperations dealing with sophisticated military aircraft.

Did Pike ever believe thathis request would produce evidence of the existence of aliens?