So last week I heard Annie Jacobsen discussing her new book, Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base on Fresh Air with Terry Gross. I don't normally go in for the oogie boogie UFO stuff, so at first I checked what station I was on, wondering if one of the kids had been fooling with the knob and put it on some bizarre AM station. But no, it really was NPR, and that really was Terry Gross calmly discussing some outlandish story in which Nazi scientists build flying saucers for Josef Stalin, crew them with Nazi-engineered mutants, and crash them in the New Mexico desert. A little searching when I got home revealed that Ms. Jacobsen is a legitimate reporter for legitimate newspapers and magazines, and not a writer for the Weekly World News, and that her book was causing a bit of a stir.
Obviously, I bought it. Amazon had it at my door in hardcover for fifteen dollars two days after it was released, once again calling Dr. Cowen's complaint about The Great Stagnation into question.
So, is the book legitimate? Well, let's talk about what the book is about. The overwhelming majority of the book is an interesting, if relatively mundane account of the development of various secret aircraft by the CIA and then the Air Force out at Area 51. The book is full of interesting details about lives lived on a need-to-know basis, and contains some already public but little known facts about some of the more alarming things our government did back in the 1950s and 60s, such as intentionally breaking open a nuclear warhead and dumping plutonium all over the Nevada desert, or using a tunnel in a mountain as a test chamber for a nuclear rocket, letting its exhaust spray out the side of the mountain. All of these details are well-sourced, interesting, and worth reading. None of them would have landed Ms. Jacobsen so many interviews, and hearing them discussed never would have moved me to order the book.
After 350 pages of interesting if ordinary Cold War covert aviation history, we got to the good part. Ms. Jacobsen claims to have interviewed an anonymous engineer with EG&G (which she calls "the most powerful corporation you've never heard of") who received the wreckage of a flying disc that crashed at Roswell in 1947. Along with the disc were two comatose teenagers, grotesquely altered by the Soviets in order to resemble stereotypical aliens- large skulls and eyes, small noses and mouths, slender limbs, the works. Apparently, the plan was to create another War of the Worlds style panic in the United States in order to facilitate a surprise attack, and this crash was the result of a test run.
Supposedly the Horten brothers, Nazi aeronautical engineers, developed a flying disc that was captured by the Soviets, who also did a deal with Josef Mengele, offering him a lab in exchange for his research data and techniques. Once they had Mengele's data, they double-crossed him and he fled for Argentina. Then, having been intrigued by the mass hysteria Orson Welles's radio broadcast had caused in 1938, they put human beings altered to look like aliens into this flying disc and crashed it in New Mexico. The initial news release was correct, but then Army intelligence realized what the Soviets were up to and put out the cover story. The wreckage and the bodies were taken to Wright-Patterson AFB and then, in 1951, moved to a remote area of the Nevada Test Site, which was named for the year it received its most important and most secret materials- Area 51.
It gets allegedly worse. Rather than revealing Stalin's monstrous acts, the U.S. Government decided to emulate them. According to Jacobsen's source, this project, involving the surgical and genetic alteration of human beings along with experimental aviation research, was ongoing as late as the 1980s.
Is any of this true? Well, it's all based on one anonymous source. Ms. Jacobsen says she worked with him for two years, verified everything he said that was publicly verifiable, and trusts him completely. I've decided to break down the claims by what's precedented and what's unprecedented:
Precedented:
-Working with war criminals (see Operation Paperclip and the decision to overlook the Japanese Unit 731's crimes in exchange for their data)
-The U.S. Government performing horrific experiments on unwilling human subjects (the Tuskegee syphilis study and similar studies in Guatemala, the litany of radiation experiments conducted by the AEC, MK-ULTRA)
-Secret aircraft with extraordinary capabilities (the A-12 Oxcart, antecedent of the SR-71 Blackbird, is extensively documented in the book and had, for the time, comic-book-like capabilities, flying at three times the speed of sound 17 miles above the Earth)
Unprecedented:
-The flying disc itself (How did it get to New Mexico? How did it work? Why haven't we seen other applications of the technology since?)
-Such extensive surgical alterations of human beings (How did these altered humans survive surgeries, such as skull removals and reimplantations, that are very experimental even today? How were their eyes enlarged?)
On the whole, I'd say Jacobsen's story is more likely than both the radar balloon official story and the extraterrestrial conspiracy theory; in order I'd rate Jacobsen's account first, followed closely by the radar balloon story, with the extraterrestrial story a very distant third. That doesn't mean I believe it in all the specifics, but I think Jacobsen's account is not so fantastical as it seems at first blush, especially if one approaches it with knowledge of previous U.S. Government scandals in mind.
Is the book worth reading? Well, if you're interested in the Cold War, in aviation history, and in black projects, very much so. But if you're only interested in the Roswell-specific claims, no. Those sensational claims take up about the last thirty pages of a nearly four-hundred-page book. Listen to her Fresh Air interview instead and see what you think about her story of little green commies.
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