Mystique about alien spaceships and little green men at Area 51 took a back seat Thursday to the real men who worked there for the CIA and the spy planes they flew during the Cold War.

In fact, a question about a link between the secret installation 90 miles north of Las Vegas and speculation about flying saucer debris and dead aliens from a 1947 crash site near Roswell, N.M., was glossed over as fiction during a panel discussion at the Atomic Testing Museum.