By Athena Andreadis, Ph.D.
HuffPost Books
5-20-11 Driving to work earlier this week, I heard Terry Gross of Fresh Air (NPR) interview Annie Jacobsen about her new book,
Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base. Jacobsen is a national security reporter, which means she is used to facing stonewalling and secrecy and therefore well aware that she must triple-check her information. It all sounded like sober investigative reporting, until it got to the coda. Bear with me, grasshoppahs, because the truth is definitely way out there.. . .
. . . To UFO believers, Area 51 is also the facility that analyzed whatever crashed near Roswell in 1947. Which is where Jacobsen's theory comes in, backed by a single anonymous source. She proposes that the Roswell object was neither a weather balloon nor an alien spacecraft but a remotely flown Soviet craft based on prototypes by the Horten brothers, aircraft designers and Nazi party members. This part is old news, since this possibility was already considered in Cold War US investigations.
Jacobsen's addition (asserted with a completely straight face and demanding to be taken seriously) is that this craft contained "genetically/surgically altered" teenagers engineered by Josef Mengele at the command of that other monstrous Joseph, Stalin. The modifications had produced uniform results of "abnormally large heads and eyes" etc. The goal was to scare the US and weaken its defenses by a repetition of the panic created by Orson Welles' War of the Worlds 1938 broadcast.. . .
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