Rumor has it that the flight tests that used to be run at Area 51 are now being flown at Dugway Proving Grounds. Dugway is in the middle of nowhere, and is the site of former(?) chemical and biological weapons testing and development. It’s also home to a huge runway supposedly constructed for emergency shuttle landings.
As for the existence of Aurora? Supposedly it does exist but has been renamed.
A number of runways have claimed to be the ‘longest in the world’, but it’s almost a meaningless title, because the biggest runways (outside of the dry lake beds) are all about 15,000 ft long. This is because that was the operational requirement for fully-loaded B-52’s.
The difference between the ‘longest’ and about a hundred other runways is only a matter of a couple of hundred feet, unless there’s a special runway out there I don’t know of.
Groom lake is a ‘hybrid’ runway, in that the runway itself (which is only about 12,400 ft long) blends into a dry lakebed at the end, which makes its total usable length about 25,000 ft. But I don’t think that runway is used any more, and the active runway is about 12,400 ft long, which wouldn’t even rank in the top 100.
