Secrets of Area 51: Metallic egg-shaped UFO the size of an SUV was kept at the highly-classified Air Force base in the 1980s, whistleblower claims

An egg-shaped metallic UFO was kept at Area 51 in the 1980s, a whistleblower claims in an exclusive interview with DailyMail.com.

Engineers at the Nevada airbase claimed the CIA found the strange craft in the desert and brought it to them for investigation – but later shipped it to another base after they were unable to get inside the object.

Eric Taber has been a defense aerospace contractor for 13 years and has held a security clearance to work on military aircraft.

In an interview with DailyMail.com, he revealed the story his late great uncle Sam Urquhart, an Area 51 contractor, told him about a UFO at the mysterious desert base.

Taber testified in May to the Pentagon's UFO investigation unit, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), who are collecting accounts of alleged government possession of non-human craft.

The claim – though an unverified story from a now-deceased witness – is part of a long history of rumors about potential extraterrestrial craft or futuristic spaceships stored at the Nevada desert airbase near Groom Lake, north of Las Vegas.

The news comes after whistleblowers told Congress the government has a secret program to capture crashed or landed 'non-human' vehicles and has for decades been attempting to glean technological insights from these alleged out-of-this-world objects.

The claims have prompted lawmakers to draft legislation to disclose any such programs, currently working its way through Congress.

Taber spoke to DailyMail.com only about his great uncle's story, declining to comment on any of his own work as a defense contractor.

He said he struck up a friendship with his grandmother's brother after moving to the West Coast from Mississippi in 2012.

The younger engineer said he repeatedly quizzed Urquhart on the truth about rumors of aliens at Area 51, and was always brushed off. But one day Urquhart relented.

'My great uncle served in the Air Force for 28 years, E8 rank [equivalent to a First Sergeant],' Taber told DailyMail.com. 'He told me he worked at Area 51 from 1997 until 2014.'

Urquhart began his job at Area 51 working for defense contractor EG&G, which later partnered with Raytheon to become JT3 LLC and subsequently JT4 LLC.

'He was head of security for his engineering group, and a data configuration specialist. His group did radar cross-section testing.

'I kept asking him about UFOs. He said 'I know nothing'. Then one day we were on his back porch and he said 'Ok, I'll tell you about one craft that I knew of.'

'He said, 'When I first got there in 1997, I had a personal conversation with a senior EG&G engineer whose group was tasked with trying to reverse-engineer an object that was brought there by some CIA people in the 1980s.'

'It was supposedly just found in a remote desert location fully intact.

'The senior EG&G engineer described to my great uncle that it was egg-shaped, about the size of an SUV, smooth and seamless, metallic-looking, silverish gray in color, with no control surfaces, no flaps, no inlet, and no exhaust, and no writing or symbols on the outside.

'These are the best and brightest engineers you can think of. They tried to no avail to figure out what the power source was, how to activate it, and how it works. They tried to induce electricity to it.

'X-rays couldn't penetrate it; it showed up on X-ray as a solid object. They tried to open it and penetrate its hull; they couldn't.

'They said that they were able to take some very small samples of the material. And I'm not an expert in chemistry, but I guess from the isotope ratio or the mixture of elements, they concluded it was not made on Earth.'

Taber said Urquhart told him eventually the craft was shipped to another base, possibly White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, and that was the last the engineers heard about it.

But Urquhart had one more shocking twist in his story.

'My great uncle would collect radar data, and bring it into secure vaults to catalog and store it,' Taber said. 'He was in one of these secure data vault storage rooms in the main control building, nicknamed the Taj Mahal, when on the wall he saw an up-close crystal-clear color photograph of the exact same object that the senior engineer had discussed.'

Taber shared pictures with DailyMail.com that Urquhart showed him, including a group photo with his Area 51 engineer colleagues in a break trailer at the base, and an insignia patch designed for their radar analysis group.

But the alleged smoking gun photo of the egg-shaped craft never left the Area 51 vault.

'Sam said the American people would probably never get to see it,' Taber told DailyMail.com.

Taber admitted he sold his great uncle's patch for $600 on eBay in March when he was strapped for cash – a move he now regrets.

Urquhart, a 28-year Air Force veteran who served in the Vietnam and Gulf wars, died in August last year aged 75.

His story has now been documented by the Pentagon's UFO investigation office AARO, after Taber was interviewed by staff in May.

A memo of his account, along with other reports and witness statements, is due to be compiled and sent to Congress next year.

Taber said the AARO staffers were 'professional' and 'non-threatening', adding: 'I was surprised at how interested they were.'

Taber said he decided to come forward to push for limited disclosure of what he believes is the truth about non-human craft in the government's possession.

'I did this interview in a way that I feel doesn't disclose technical information our adversaries could exploit,' he said.

'Despite what people may think, secrets can be kept. If you're getting paid well, if you have a security clearance, if you've signed a nondisclosure agreement, you're going to be happy, and you're going to work hard, and you're going to keep your mouth shut.

'Disclosure has to be done very carefully. We don't want our enemies to know everything about what we've got. But I do believe wholeheartedly that humanity deserves to know the truth, if we have recovered these non-human objects or craft, which 100% I believe we have.'

Urquhart's former employer EG&G was linked to other claims of a secret government program holding crashed alien craft.

Physicist and intelligence official Dr. Eric Davis allegedly met with then-deputy director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Vice Admiral Thomas Wilson, in the parking lot of an EG&G site in Las Vegas in October 2002, and wrote notes of what Wilson told him.

According to the notes, the Vice Admiral told Davis that in the early 2000s he uncovered – but was denied access to – a secret program run by a defense contractor that retrieved and attempted to reverse engineer UFOs.

The bombshell, controversial documents claim Wilson found discrepancies in budgets that led him to the program run by 'an aerospace technology contractor – one of the top ones in [the] US'.

Notes allegedly written by Davis documenting the conversation were leaked from the estate of late astronaut Edgar Mitchell in 2018.

Davis has declined to publicly confirm their authenticity, though his friend and ex-senior Pentagon official Christopher Mellon wrote on his blog last year that Davis is in fact the author.

Wilson has vociferously denied ever meeting Davis, telling journalist Ross Coulthart that he was in an isolated camp in Maine during October 2002, and had only been to Las Vegas once: a deployment to Nellis Air Force base in 1979 or 1980.

The notes were entered into the congressional record by Wisconsin congressman Mike Gallagher at the historic UFO hearing last year.

Notorious former Area 51 worker Bob Lazar has claimed since his first interview in 1989 that he worked on an alien flying saucer reverse engineering program at Groom Lake – though many elements of his story have now been debunked.

Taber said his great uncle told him he knew Lazar worked at the base, but that much of his story was fabricated.

'He was only there for a few months,' Taber said. 'He states there was a site called S-4 at the base of the Papoose Mountains with nine hangar sections built into the side of the mountain housing nine flying saucers. My great uncle said it's bogus. The only thing Papoose had was some radio tower equipment. That was his take on it.'