Alright. Stop the f-ing presses. My head is going to explode.
This week, Annie Jacobsen published her impressive looking tome, Area 51, which purports to detail the goings-on at the largest, most secretive military installation in the United States, the famously officially non-existent Groom Lake range in Nevada, known in popular parlance as Area 51.
The most explosive “revelation” in the volume is a new, alternative explanation for the origin of the Roswell crash mythos. It contends the actual event upon which that cornerstone of UFOlogy is based was a deliberate hoax by Soviet Russia. According to Ms. Jacobsen, in 1947 Joseph Stalin, inspired by America’s panicked response in 1938 to Orson Welles’s radio vérité broadcast of War of the Worlds, issued orders to send a special, secret spy plane into the skies over the US ostensibly to test, spoof and terrify American national defense forces and its public. This “flying disk”(her words in interview) was developed by captured Nazi aeronautical engineers (in the same vein as the genesis of America’s rocket program) and was piloted by similarly Nazi-engineered aircrew. Nazi eugenics monster Joseph Mengele is supposed to have provided Stalin with these genetically modified freaks: "unusually petite for pilots, they appeared to be children. Each was under five feet tall...They were grotesquely deformed, but each in the same manner as the others. They had unusually large heads and abnormally shaped, oversize eyes." The craft was intentionally crashed in New Mexico in early July 1947 and spawned the whole Roswell craze, which, it should be remembered, did not become a craze until three decades later with the publication of the wildly speculative – and successful – The Roswell Incident.
Let’s take a moment and parse this… um… account. DISCLAIMER: I have not read Ms. Jacobsen’s book yet – though I shall. I am responding specifically to the book’s reception in the media and Jacobsen’s own televised statements here, here, and here. I do this because I am a slow reader and I want to nip this in the bud in my own small way, inoculating anyone I can against this patent fraud (or negligence) by a crass self-promoter (or fatuous incompetent). I mean to offer SOME balance to the execrably one-sided media acceptance and credulous reiteration of the account.
First, the rationale. Jacobsen claims that according to her SINGLE, UNNAMED source, Stalin engaged in this bizarre psy op because, at the time, America had all the nuclear weapons in the world and the USSR had none. This hoax was somehow meant to demoralize the United States and test its mood and readiness. A chancy gambit, seeing as discovery of the real facts behind such a hoax would anger the target nation who, as has been stated, had real nuclear weapons with which to retaliate. I think this is too stupid even for Stalin on his drunkest New Years Eve.
Second, the story stands on the self-conflicting premise that in 1947 Russia possessed a practical, deployable, high performance saucer-shaped aircraft, BUT that this aircraft was a captured German Horton Ho 229. The Ho 229 was a jet-powered flying wing and very advanced for its time. But is decidedly NOT a flying disk. The United States had a number of their own captured Ho 229s, and the Soviets knew this. So which was it? The well-understood and identifiable (at least among the people Stalin would have been trying to intimidate) Ho 229? Or a mystery machine with no surrounding development program that has come to light in the years since? No surviving sister ships. No legacy ship developed upon improvements on the same sensitive technology. Yet they intentionally sacrificed this irreplaceable airframe on a propaganda stunt. It is important to note that when a government acquires an advanced, secret technology, they go to great lengths to preserve its secrecy. Examples: the allies’ Norden bombsight, Germany’s Enigma machine, America’s F-117 stealth bomber and (drum roll please) the reason for creating the huge secret testing range AREA 51.
Third, no hint of such an inherently complex, involved operation has come to light in media from Russia in the more than TWO DECADES since the fall of the Soviet Union, this despite huge declassification of Soviet secret policy and projects including things as loony as attempted psychic remote viewing and targeted psychic assassination.
Fourth, the “pilots.” Joseph Mengele did not begin his worthless, abominable “genetic research” until 1943. Even assuming (generously) that his megacephalic-dwarf-alien pilots were born nine months after his first day on the job at Auschwitz-Birkenau, they could only have been about 4 years old at the time of the alleged Roswell Incident. The story claims the occupants were unwilling victims between the ages of 12 and 13, hence born in 1935 when the German eugenics program consisted of nothing more advanced than brutish propaganda and forced sterilization of “undesirables.” At that time Josef Mengele was a 24 year-old punk finishing his PHD in Anthropology. And why go to any great lengths to select mutants matching a description of the “Gray” aliens of modern UFO lore? This social archetype did not exist in 1947. An American citizen seeing one walking down the street would not have stopped and said, “Hey. That looks like an alien.” And mutant Soviet crash victims at Roswell could not have created the archetype: no one knew about Roswell until 1980.
Fifth, the story further claims the drone saucer, or flying wing, whichever it was, was piloted remotely by radio control from a second, separate Soviet plane. Now, aircraft remote guidance is highly sensitive technology. If Soviet technology to remotely pilot aircraft had fallen into American hands, no matter how advanced or primitive, it would have exposed the Russian state of the art, and the US would have gleaned volumes about their secret weapons programs - a catastrophic breach of security.
The history of remote guidance for aircraft has a well-documented, verifiable history. As does the development of airframes, including disk aircraft (which so far have always been abandoned by developers over inherent instability issues) and flying wings. As does the Nazi eugenics program. The yarn put forth in Area 51 asks us to jettison our evidence-based understanding of all these, and of history in general, without a single shred of corroborating evidence of its own.
Which brings me to…
Fatal problem, the sixth: No corroborating evidence. For this most-outlandish claim, Jacobsen keeps her one-person source anonymous, but in promoting her book presents it as credible as any other part of her research. Yet, in all the years since Roswell didn’t happen, no other investigator or eyewitness (despite YEARS of diligent, if-misguided, efforts on the part of the UFO community) has come forward with a tale that even hints at this utterly novel, completely unfounded take on events.
Annie Jacobsen offers no supporting, circumstantial testimony, no substantiating documentation. But is happy to showcase this farce as one of the most compelling features of her book. If she is a journalist of even middling competency, then she knows damn well a story with claims as extraordinary as this demands some corroboration before it is disseminated as even “plausible,” let alone “likely.” If she knows this, but has chosen instead to publish and promote it anyway, then she does so with but one motive: book sales and the enhancement of her own branding in the marketplace, at the expense of public discourse and pandering to public paranoia, which is something we don’t need. Hence, Annie Jacobsen is either a bad journalist or a bad person. There are no reasonable alternatives. And Stalin did not hoax Roswell. On a technical, historical, doctrinal and evidentiary basis, this story is preposterous. Balderdash. Not merely implausible, but an absolutely verifiable fabrication. Spread the word.
