Area 51 by Annie Jacobsen

 

Area 51- An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base is the biggest and most detailed book ever written about this most enigmatic and fascinating of locations. Its author, Annie Jacobsen, appeared a few years ago in a TV series I was asked to be in too; the difference is, I declined... see: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2012/10/bbc-conspiracy-road-trip-ufos.html. It includes some unique previously unpublished information and some exclusive interviews with scientists and other personnel who served inside this informational black hole. Some of them have become quite well-known in the UFO community, like TD Barnes who is one of the most experienced Area 51 employees and has worked on the most diverse projects, from captured aircraft... manmade, he assured us!... to nuclear rockets. Richard Mingus is another. He is the "(Pause)... No!" man in the BBC Conspiracy Road Trip programme. He was in charge of security for Project AQUATONE, the highly secretive programme to build a high altitude spyplane, the U2. The book gives a detailed history of Area 51, from its beginnings in 1942 as an auxiliary airfield to its possible future. The CIA took over the Groom Lake area in 1955 which marks the beginning of Area 51 as the location of true secrecy, as it remains today. Here they developed the U2 and later an aeroplane that to this day holds speed and altitude records, ironically named the "A12 Oxcart". There was a lot of rivalry with the US Air Force and the latter built their own version of the Oxcart, the SR71 "Blackbird". Drones were first developed there too, including one of the fastest ever, the D21 which could reach supersonic speeds. The pilots who flew these aircraft took enormous risks as they surveyed distant lands during the Korean and Vietnam wars, the Cuban Missile Crisis and of course the Soviet Union itself during the Cold War. The parallel development of the nuclear weapons programme was close by so Area 51 played a big role in that. No test detonations were carried out at Dreamland itself; they were done at the Nevada Proving Grounds next-door, but the base was the chosen location for much of the science associated with the numerous nuclear explosions both in the open air and underground. Some pilots even had to fly through the mushroom clouds to gather data on radioactive fallout levels. Some were killed in this venture. In fact there were numerous tragedies during the history of Area 51, mostly from experimental aircraft crashing. One man's plane ran out of fuel and he crashed into the sea just a hundred yards short of a runway in the Marshall Islands. Ordinarily he might have swum to the safety, but he was wearing a lead lined suit to protect him from radiation so he sank like a stone. Along with retrieving the pilots' bodies, the Area 51 team had to secure the wreckage of the planes and hide them before anybody else saw it. According to Annie Jacobsen, this could be where the legend of ET crash retrievals originates. She says that behind every conspiracy theory there is an element of truth. Another example of that is when NASA trained the Apollo astronauts in a desert valley not far from Area 51 called Area 20. It is the truth behind the false idea, she asserts, that NASA faked the moon landings and filmed them in a studio at Area 51. There also was an underground railway there at the nuclear arsenal. It was used for transporting the bombs to the test sites where they were lowered into the ground to be detonated. It did not, apparently, run all the way across the country to other secret bases. Most interesting of all, in 1966 the US acquired a Soviet fighter jet from Israel, a MIG 21. It was taken to Area 51 and back-engineered in complete secrecy under the strange codename "Have Doughnut". One of the most astonishing programmes carried out near Area 51 was NERVA, the Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application run partly by NASA. This was predicted to be able to send a man to Mars with less than a year's voyage. In testing this machine they poisoned the surrounding landscape for generations to come. They even deliberately allowed one to meltdown to see how easily it could happen. A lot of the details are still classified to this day, especially the radiation effects the personnel suffered and the damage to the local area, which is still part of the Nevada National Security Site, called Jackass Flats or Area 25. I saw a part of one of these nuclear rocket engines myself at the Las Vegas Atomic Museum, see: https://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2024/01/meadows-revisited.html.
 
Some readers may be disappointed that Annie Jacobsen's Area 51 book makes almost no reference at all to Bob Lazar beyond what is commonly known anyway, at least in the UFOlogy world. She does interview him for the book, but most of her opinions seem to be connected to her central thesis regarding UFO lore, which is almost identical to Mark Pilkington's, see: https://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2012/12/mirage-men-by-mark-pilkington.html. She has found out that this supposed deception trick dates back much further than Mark imagined, to 1942 in fact. This was when the US tested its first jet-propelled military aircraft. At first it had a wooden propeller mounted on its nose. This had no function, it was added simply to make people think the plane had a standard piston engine. After a while somebody had the bright idea of getting the pilot to wear a mask to make his head look like that of a gorilla. This was spotted by another pilot one day, but he never told anybody for years because he didn't want to be ridiculed. This, says Annie, was the original source for all of modern UFO culture; because they got the idea of playing that same ruse again, but with aliens instead of gorillas. This point is my biggest criticism of the book. The notion that UFO's and aliens are some kind of engineered neo-mythology created as psychological warfare to launder more down-to-earth covert projects is not very original and it is in fact somewhat fashionable at the moment. However, I find it totally implausible when you consider how easily and badly it could backfire. Drawing somebody's attention towards something with the ultimate objective of deflecting it away is a very risky gambit, so much so that I think we can reject it on theoretical grounds, except perhaps in very specific circumstances. It's like a bank robber jumping up and down on top of his buried stash in a striped jersey and face mask, and every time a policeman walks past he waves a placard stating: THERE IS NO STOLEN CASH HIDDEN HERE, JUST THE BONES OF A UNICORN! How long would it take for somebody to realize what was really going on? It would be far better just to bury the stash somewhere in the woods and not tell anybody. No, I think what Annie has discovered, although she doesn't realize it, is an elaborate double-bluff. I've addressed this elsewhere in more detail, for example see: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2023/05/mark-pilkington-at-bases-2023.html. If aliens exist and were recovered during the Roswell incident then Area 51 is likely to be the place the bodies and debris were sent; either there or the Technical Data Section at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Operation Have Doughnut shows that Area 51 is the favoured spot for foreign materiel research, and you can't get more foreign that off this planet. Annie even postulates that Area 51 got its name because it took over the project to examine the Roswell crash wreckage from Wright-Pat in 1951; it's not an area, it's a year. You may think Annie is being contradictory here; how can she believe in the Roswell incident and yet be a UFO skeptic? The answer comes at the end of the book and it is one of the most sickening and disturbing theories that I have ever come across. For over eighteen months she spent a lot of time interviewing an anonymous man she calls simply "the EG&G engineer". He told her that during World War II the "Auschwitz angel of death", Dr Joseph Mengele, was taken to the USSR in their own equivalent of Project Paperclip and forced to work for Stalin under an assumed identity. There he continued his human experimentation project that he had begun for Nazi Germany. He took children from orphanages and homes for the mentally handicapped, and subjected them to surgery and other medical treatments which mutilated their bodies beyond all recognition. They had enlarged heads and eyes and were hairless. These children were then put into a saucer shaped aircraft based on the Horten brothers' design and flown by remote control to the USA. It crashed in the desert near Roswell and you can guess the rest. The purpose of this obscenity was revenge by Stalin against the Truman administration for not sharing the secret of the atomic bomb with him at the Potsdam conference. (The success of Soviet spies eventually made that a bit superfluous though, see: https://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2020/01/spies-of-london-part-1.html.) He wanted to create a real War of the Worlds style civil unrest. People accuse conspiratorial UFOlogists like me of wishful thinking. We just want Roswell to be aliens so badly! Well, yeah. If this story in Annie's book is the only alternative, I would indeed prefer it if the crashed craft was ET. Since the Cold War Area 51 continues to be busy and Annie speculates on what it might be used for in the future; such as developing new aircraft, especially drones. She also believes it will play a major role in the increasing weaponization of space. Details of Area 51 by Annie Jacobsen can be found here: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11305364-area-51.
See here for background: https://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2022/12/area-51-portal.html.