Area 51 and Roswell: The Craziest Theory Yet

By Dave Gilson| 
Thu May. 19, 2011
http://motherjones.com/mixed-media/2011/05/area-51-roswell-UFO-stalin-nazi

Area 51, Annie Jacobsen's new exposé of the military's
so-secret-it-doesn't-exist base in the Nevada desert,
is a very odd book. On the one hand, much of it is a
sane, grounded history of the installation's key role
in Cold War nuclear testing and spy-plane R&D, full of
previously undisclosed information based on
declassified records and dozens of interviews with
people who worked there. It's a refreshing antidote to
the popular idea, promoted by ufologists and
screenwriters, that Area 51 is part of a massive cover-
up involving alien autopsies and the reverse
engineering of interstellar spacecraft. Those
associations are understandable, Jacobsen explains:
Area 51 launched its fair share of unidentified flying
objects over the years; after all, it was in the
business of developing flying objects no one
(especially the Soviets) could identify.

Jacobsen sticks to that sensible course for about 90
percent of the book. But the other 10 percent-the parts
that are already getting attention in places like NPR's
Fresh Air and The Daily Show-are kind of, well, nuts.
Things get weird when she links Area 51 to the Roswell
incident, the legendary crash of some kind of flying
object in New Mexico in the summer of 1947. Jacobsen
says the remains and debris from the crash were
eventually brought to Area 51, where they were studied
by one of her sources.

Based on this single, unidentified source, she spins a
truly amazing tale of what really happened in Roswell.
The crash didn't involve a weather balloon, as the Air
Force insisted, or a UFO. Rather, it was a super-duper-
hi-tech remote-control stealth Soviet flying saucer
developed at Stalin's behest, designed by a couple of
ex-Luftwaffe aeronautical-whiz brothers, and manned by
"child-size aviators." These diminutive fliers appeared
to be 13 years old and had oversized heads and
"haunting, oversize eyes." But they weren't little gray
men; they were "biologically and/or surgically
reengineered children" created by.fugitive Nazi doctor
Josef Mengele! The crash, reasons Jacobsen, was staged
as part of a Kremlin plot to send Americans into a fit
of UFO-induced hysteria.

This theory has so many layers of improbability that
it's hard to know where to begin. How did the Soviets
get this flying disc into American airspace, much less
over the Southwest? Why did they never use this type of
stealthy, hovering aircraft again? How did Mengele go
from being at Auschwitz to making mutants unlike
anything ever seen before or since, all in the space of
two years? And why did Stalin then let him head off to
South America to live out his days in obscurity?
Jacobsen does not try to seriously address any of these
obvious questions.

The entire story is based on the word of one anonymous
source who worked as a contractor at Area 51. Jacobsen
insists he should be believed because all the
verifiable information he told her proved to be true.
That's pretty shaky logic, especially when you're
repeating a tale that should be setting off your BS
detector. When Jacobsen asks him for more details, he
tells her, "You don't have a need-to-know." Elsewhere
in the book, she pushes back against this kind of
security-state stonewalling, but here, she accepts it
as proof that she's being told the truth.

This type of thinly-sourced, credulous reporting
wouldn't pass muster at most newspapers. No doubt it
wouldn't fly at the Los Angeles Times, where Jacobsen
works as a contributing editor to its magazine.
Standards are clearly different in the book world,
where an author telling such a tale can confidently
claim on the jacket, "This book is a work of
nonfiction. The stories I tell in this narrative are
real." Well, except for the ones that can't be proved.

Before Area 51, Jacobsen was best known for a story she
wrote in 2004, a first-person account of being on a
domestic flight with a group of Middle Eastern men whom
she thought were behaving suspiciously. Thinking they
were potential terrorists engaged in a "dry run," she
freaked out. Federal air marshals detained the men-a
band of Syrian musicians-and let them go without
finding anything unusual. But Jacobsen is still
sticking by her overhyped version of events. As Kevin
Drum wrote at the time, "Her memory of her panic will
keep her convinced that she was right no matter what
the evidence says, and there will be plenty of people
out there to egg her on."

Ironically, the distorting power of fear is central to
Area 51. Jacobsen's Roswell theory is rooted in the
idea that the Soviets thought the American public would
accept a UFO hoax as truth, distracting them from real
threats and undermining their faith in the government.
That didn't happen, though Americans would eventually
discover Roswell and come to mistrust the government on
their own. Yet in trying to convince us not to buy into
the subversive attractions of alien-government
conspiracy theories, Jacobsen has talked herself into
believing a theory that's just as absurd. Was she
afraid to disappoint a source? Did she think her book
wouldn't sell without a sensational scoop? Or did she
simply, to parahprase Fox Mulder's favorite poster,
want to believe?

Dave Gilson is a senior editor at Mother Jones.

___________________________________________

Portside aims to provide material of interest to people
on the left that will help them to interpret the world
and to change it.

Submit via email: [log in to unmask]

Submit via the Web: http://portside.org/submittous3

Frequently asked questions: http://portside.org/faq

Sub/Unsub: http://portside.org/subscribe-and-unsubscribe

Search Portside archives: http://portside.org/archive

Contribute to Portside: https://portside.org/donate