REVIEW: ‘Area 51: An Uncensored History’

A Review of Area 51: An Uncensored History

The Sane Portion of the Book:

This book about the mysterious Area 51 has been written by an L.A. Times reporter named Annie Jacobsen, based on interviews with five top insiders: a former commander of the base, a test pilot who flew experimental aircraft there, a radar specialist, an aircraft fuel specialist, and an engineer.

Area 51 actually served a fairly prosaic Cold War function as a base for testing top-secret experimental aircraft designs, but this simple truth about the area demonstrates how so many wild stories originated. There were plenty of mysterious underground tunnels and other underground facilities, and strange-looking aircraft were tested there. Using unusual designs and materials, the engineers were trying to accomplish many different things, one of which was to circumvent Soviet radar. To this end, many jets were formed in such odd shapes that they might easily be mistaken for alien spaceships, and those eccentric designs were not merely exposed once or twice in the dead of night, but soared through thousands of daytime flights into areas visible by commercial airliners, where they could have been and sometimes were spotted.

When it comes to matters involving experimental aircraft, I was convinced that Jacobsen was thorough in her interviewing and accurate in her conclusions. To the extent which I can verify her assertions, they fit well with the known facts. She also has some great photographs which illustrate her story and back up her claims.

By the way, Area 51 is no longer much of a secret. Just about nothing above the ground can be hidden from all those satellites up there. (Link)

The Crazy Stuff:

Unfortunately, Jacobsen poisoned the worthwhile aspects of her book with some truly nutty connections to the famous Roswell UFO incident. According to one of her sources, the popular Roswell stories are kinda true, but don’t involve aliens. His claim is that Stalin’s Russia created an unpiloted drone aircraft, more like a rocket, full of grotesque humans who had been the subject of horrific Nazi experiments. The Russkies shot this plane/rocket to the USA, where it crashed quite famously in Roswell, New Mexico. The point of the mission was to create a panic, ala War of the Worlds, in the assumption that gullible Americans would assume them to be space creatures.

I’m not quite sure how this panic was supposed to benefit Russia, but I guess we could allow the benefit of the doubt and assume it was a mad idea from the mad Stalin.

But some of this just doesn’t add up.

Of course, there is the fact that former Soviet officials are trying to cash in on tell-all books now that Soviet archives have been declassified. Surely one of them would have brought this kind of material to a publisher, and surely a publisher would have jumped on it.

But that’s not the big problem. There is the matter of the timeline. Area 51 could not be connected to Roswell in any way. The Roswell incident occurred in 1947, but Area 51 was completely abandoned between 1945 and 1955.

Jacobsen also said in her NPR interview, “A flying disc really did crash in New Mexico and it was transported to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, and then in 1951 it was transferred to Area 51, which is why the base is called Area 51.”

That claim is completely unsupportable. The base in 1951 was just as forlorn as in 1947. There was nothing at Groom Lake (aka Area 51) in 1951 except an overgrown airfield that had been abandoned after WW2. According to newly declassified documents about the origin of the site: “In April 1955, LeVier, Johnson, Bissell, and Ritland flew out to Nevada on a two-day survey of the most promising lakebeds, including Groom Lake. The abandoned airfield that Ritland had remembered was sandy, overgrown and unusable, but the three-mile-wide dry lakebed was perfect.”

The alleged 1951 transfer of Roswell artifacts cannot explain how Area 51 got its name. Perhaps those remains existed and exist still. Perhaps they may have gone somewhere near Area 51, but they did not go there because, as Gertrude Stein once famously remarked about Oakland, there was no there there.

Here’s the really weird part of it: Jacobsen would have rejected the statement she made in the NPR interview if she had just read her own book! She took much of her material from the same source I quote above, Roadrunners Internationale. She correctly identifies the origin of the Groom Lake project as 1955, and in a sane portion of her book she interviews a different source who says that the Roswell remains were taken to another area – “Area 22” – in the Nevada desert. That is possible, because Area 22 was actually part of a government testing area in 1951. The mysterious Area 51 was not. At that point it was just abandoned land adjacent to a bomb-testing area, right next to the government’s “Area 15.”

By the way, the same guy who told her about the Roswell remains being the source of Area 51’s name, and about the Nazi/Stalin collaboration, also told her that the USA was performing the same kind of Nazi medical experiments in the USA:

“We were doing the same thing,” he said. “They wanted to push science. They wanted to see how far they could go. We did things I wish I had not done. We performed medical experiments on handicapped children and prisoners.”

“But you are not a doctor,” I said.

“They wanted engineers.”

Yes, you read that right. Her source claimed that he personally committed crimes as heinous as those perpetrated by Dr. Joseph Mengele. Oh those wacky Nazis – they were really just like us! Her source was either a pathological liar or one of the biggest monsters of the 20th century, but she kept talking to him – and quoting him!

What else did he say?

Well…

  • He also claimed that the Soviets not only had mastered hover-and-fly technology in 1947, with the craft moving at incredible speeds, but could also operate the craft remotely from the USSR.
  • He also claimed that he and his team had reverse-engineered that same Russian technology and had conquered hover-and-fly technology way back in 1951. “We figured it out. We’ve had hover and fly technology all this time.”
  • He also mentions that two of the surgically-altered children in the alleged Soviet aircraft were still alive: “Two of the aviators were comatose but still alive, the men would have to transfer them into a Jell-O-like substance and stand them upright in two tubular tanks, attached to a lifesupport system. Sometimes, their mouths opened, and this gave the appearance of their trying to speak. Remember, the engineers were told, these humans are in a comatose state. They are unconscious; their bodies would never spark back to life.”

    That particular source was obviously nutty as a fruitcake, or may have been getting a kick out of pulling Jacobsen’s leg. Either way, she should have realized it, should have discredited every word out of his mouth, and should not have printed any of his demented ramblings. So why did she include his bizarre statements? Given that the sane parts of her book clearly identify 1955 as the beginning of the Groom Lake facility, why did she even include anachronistic 1951 Roswell material in a book that is supposed to be about Groom Lake?

    Well, we can speculate about the answers to those questions at length. My guess is that she thought a dry book about experimental aircraft being tested in the desert was not destined to be a best-seller, but even a little Roswell craziness would sell books, and a wacky Nazi connection would sell a LOT of books.

    But then again I am a cynic. Form your own conclusions.

    Summary:

    The Road to Area 51 is actually two works in one. Part One is a sensible piece of research about a Cold War facility used to test experimental aircraft in secrecy. Part Two is absolute nonsense – historical and scientific gibberish. The second part undoubtedly adds immeasurably to the marketability of the overall project, but it completely undermines the credibility of the first part.

    Reader comment:

    (by Kevin W)

    Enjoyed your take on the Area 51 book. I’m a History PhD student working on the early Cold War, so the NPR interview also piqued my interest. A quick Google search of Jacobsen brings up this Snopes article.

    Seems she’s a bit of an alarmist by trade.

    On the Stalin/Nazi UFO claims, her story is complete shit, as you point out. But I can’t resist offering some fascinating historical context.

    Over the course of 1947, the Council of Foreign Ministers of the Allied powers met several times to negotiate the fate of postwar Germany and other pressing postwar issues. Most historians consider the eventual collapse of these talks to be the definitive start of the Cold War.

    Consider the chronology of how things developed over that summer of 1947. On June 5, George Marshall delivered his famous speech at Harvard offering economic aid to Europe. The Marshall Plan initially included the Soviets and all of the countries they occupied in what would become the Eastern Bloc. The State Department gambled that Stalin would turn down the aid and thus cede the moral high ground to the US in negotiations. That’s exactly what happened when the Soviet delegation walked out at the beginning of the Marshall Plan Conference in Paris. The conference started on July 12,1947.

    To put that in perspective, the Roswell air base held the infamous UFO press conference on July 8, 1947. The crash itself supposedly took place some time in the previous month.

    In other words, according to Jacobsen, some time between Marshall’s speech and the Paris Conference, Stalin green-lighted a mission to send an experimental aircraft full of mutants over the continental US. He apparently developed the technology for this mission in collaboration with Nazi scientists – some of his least favorite people. And, keeping in mind this was two years prior to the Soviet development of an atomic bomb, Stalin apparently thought June 1947 would be the perfect time to provoke the world’s only nuclear power.

    But, to make it even better, don’t provoke them with the Red Army, the world’s largest and most seasoned fighting force and the reason the Allies won the war. No, let’s make some fake aliens and re-create the reaction to some pre-war radio broadcast. That’s the ticket. Never mind that 5 Enola Gays will be over Moscow a couple days later.

    Poking the US with a sharp, fancy stick – while in the middle of deciding the future of Europe – might have been Hitler’s idea of a good time, but Stalin was a bit more coldblooded than that – still a ruthless killer, but in a calculated way.

    Anyway, preaching to the choir, I realize. Sorry for the extended rant, but I feel better now.