Book Review: “Area 51” by Annie Jacobsen

Area 51 by Annie Jacobsen

Everyone knows about Area 51.  Which is ironic, because it is one of the most secret research and development sites operated by the US government. 

Of course, a lot of what we all know about Area 51 are wild legends about crashed UFOs, aliens, and faked moon landings.  What is really going on there?

Jacobsen documents the real history of Area 51, so far as it can be uncovered.  It isn’t an easy job, because which part of “top, top, top secret” don’t you understand?  She does recount some of the important history up to the turn of the century or so, old enough to be partly declassified and/or accidentally revealed to the public.

So, there was the U2 program, which gave Eisenhower eyes over the iron curtain, and help prevent WWIII.  And there was the Oxcart and the variant SR71 Blackbird, a hypersonic stealth aircraft several decades ahead of its time.  Advanced stealth aircraft were developed there, as well as the first generation of today’s ubiquitous UAV weapons.

In short, Area 51 has been pivotal in the development of advanced aircraft and surveillance technology.  Which is a really good reason why it is very, very, very classified.  You boast about weapons capabilities, but you hide your spying capability. 

The story of these programs reads like a novel or movie.  In fact, fictional thrillers struggle to keep up with the reality here.

Part of the drama is the sheer scale of these ground breaking enterprises.  They were building things that had never been attempted.  At break neck speed.  With huge budgets and the best talent and tools they could obtain.  In total secrecy, despite intense Russian and other interest.

Another part is the nearly comical interagency jousting between the nuclear labs, the intelligence agencies, and the armed forces.  For many years, the Air Force was only interested in armed, crewed aircraft.  Unarmed spy planes are for sissies.  So the CIA managed the development of the U2 and the Oxcart, until they were successful enough for the Air Force to move in to grab the goodies.

Jacobsen discusses how the nuclear weapons program’s super secret status served to shield CIA and military projects from discovery.  Noone would think to look for the CIA developing airplanes on a nuclear test site, which helped keep the work hidden from everyone including congress.

There are many interesting stories in this history.  In early days, things were really wild, with nuclear tests going off weekly.  In fact, one test sequence effectively bombed the CIA’s secret site to the point that it was evacuated. We nuked our own secret base. Sigh.

This site was also the location of where captured Russian aircraft were reverse engineered and the first adversarial training programs were created, leading to the famous top gun school.  We know about this program due to an idiot general who crashed one of the MiGs, potentially exposing even more classified activities in the ensuing publicity.  It was necessary to sacrifice a knight to protect the queen.

What about all the legends of UFOs and so on?

Clearly, we know of plenty of reasons why Area 51 is highly secret.   And we can guess that there are other important secrets we don’t know about.  This secrecy may be bad policy in some cases, but it isn’t in any way mysterious. We expect it to be secret and denied.

It is also likely that the powers that be have been perfectly happy to have reams and reams of stories about UFOs and aliens fill the media and popular imagination.  This distracts attention from the real high technology they are trying to develop in secret. Every news story about alien visitors is a news story that is not about super advanced spy planes.

We know that many of the sightings of UFOs were glimpses of the unprecedented aircraft being developed at Area 51 and related sites. For example, when the U2 began it’s secret air trials, UFO reports skyrocketed in the US.   Oxcart (SR-71 Blackbird) flew much higher and faster than any aircraft ever had, or would for decades, and was almost invisible to radar to boot.  Glints and brief glimpses of these unprecedented aircraft were reported and interpreted as “unidentified flying objects”—which they were.

Most of the book is heavily documented and conforms to public knowledge and scientific and political plausibility.  We know why these programs would exist, and why they would be so secret.

But Jacobsen includes one highly controversial tale, with relatively sketchy sourcing and even less plausibility.

She recounts a tale about the original, Ur-UFO, the Roswell incident.  Her version suggests that there was indeed a “flying disk”, but it was terrestrial in origin.  Specifically, she claims it was a Nazi design built by the Soviets, and somehow unleashed to crash over the heart of the US nuclear program.  Even more surprising, she tells us that there really were odd looking beings on board, tiny bodies with big heads.  These were surgically modified humans, she claims, cosmetically modified to look like aliens.

Huh?

In this story, Stalin used captured German technology, including hideous human modifications, to mock up a fake extraterrestrial visit, supossedly with the goal of creating panic and terror in the US.  The US government in turn is supposed to have covered up the incident in order to avoid embarrassment at the undetected penetration, prevent panic and possibly to conceal secret programs, perhaps related to dangerous experiments on humans.

You can tell that I’m highly, highly skeptical of this crazy story. 

The presentation is sketchy and poorly sourced—Jacobsen leans on an interview with one alleged witness who is now dead.  Decades after the fact, he came to believe this wild tale, as well as vague notions of wide-spread conspiracies and cover ups.  We are all aware of the ability of people to endorse alternate facts, especially when they have decades worth of myth-making to prime their memories.

The story itself has gigantic holes.  The disk allegedly ‘hovered’, though the alleged Nazi original did not hover, and neither the Germans, Russians, Americans or anyone has shown such technology in the decades since. 

The alleged pilots were supposedly cruelly-modified humans, but there is no explanation of how, let alone why this would be done. 

And the alleged flight penetrated thousands of kilometers inside US airspace without detection, and flew by remote control over some of the most sensitive airspace in the US. How did the Russians do this? Where was the mothership?

In any case, even if you think the technology is credible, the whole mission makes little sense. 

OK, things were crazy in those first years of the Cold War.  But there doesn’t seem to be much explanation of why the Russians might do such a thing.  If they had a unique, highly capable remotely piloted aircraft, why would they throw it away on a one-way mission?  And if the point was to sow terror, then where was the propaganda and psychological warfare to go with it?

On the other hand, this story did cover the real nuclear testing and other super secret developments in the area.  In fact, you could hardly do better for a cover up than to release a wild cover story, and then cover up the cover story (i.e., with the widely disbelieved ‘weather balloon’ tale). 

Heck, they might even have created some fake aliens for people to “accidentally” see in the 80s (part of Jacobsen’s evidence).  This could just as well be an elaborate cover story cooked up by the US, designed to conceal real secrets of which there were plenty.

If so, it worked well.

Overall, this book is a great read, full of wonderful techno history.  The Roswell stuff is most likely just wrong.  But that’s only a few pages in the otherwise well sourced and well-reasoned book.

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1. Annie Jacobsen, Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base, New York, Little, Brown and Company, 2011.

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