“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,” the whistleblower said.

Taber said he was told engineers weren’t able to gain access to the object (stock images) (Image: Getty)

A whistleblower has sensationally claimed that an “egg-shaped” metallic UFO was stored at Area 51 in the 1980s, after being discovered by the CIA in a remote desert location.

Engineers at the Nevada airbase claimed the mysterious craft was then brought to them to investigate, but it was later moved to another base after they weren’t able to open up the object.

Eric Taber has worked as a defense aerospace contractor for over a decade and has had security clearance to work on military aircraft.

Speaking to DailyMail.com, he revealed his late great uncle Sam Urquhart, an Area 51 contractor, reluctantly revealed the story.

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

Entrance to top secret government facility Area 51 (Image: Getty)

Urquhart started his role at Area 51 working for EG&G, a defense contractor that later partnered with Raytheon to become JT3 LLC and later JT4 LLC.

He said: “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’s insider relative claimed the craft was discovered by the CIA in the desert (Image: Getty)

Taber said Urquhart told him that the craft was shipped to a different base, which may have been White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, and the engineers heard no more about it.

But there was one more intriguing twist to the tale.

.

“My great uncle would collect radar data, and bring it into secure vaults to catalog and store it,” said Taber.

“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.”

However, the photo his relative claimed to have seen of the egg-shaped spacecraft never left the vault in the top secret government facility.

Urquhart was a 28-year Air Force veteran who had served in both Vietnam the the Gulf.

He sadly died aged 75 in August last year.

Urquart’s story has now been documented by the Pentagon’s UFO investigation office AARO, after it interviewed Taber in May.

A memo detailing the account, as well as other reports and witness statements, is due to be compiled and passed on to Congress in 2024.