The Road to Area 51

The Road to Area 51

An L.A. Times reporter named Annie Jacobsen has written some articles and a book on the mysterious Area 51, 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.

The truth is often stranger than all the wild stories, but you can clearly see how all the stories originated. Some of the experimental aircraft were shaped oddly enough to be mistaken for UFOs, and they flew thousands of flights that could have been (and were) spotted by commercial airliners. The engineers kept creating planes in unique shapes that would theoretically be able to circumvent Soviet radar.

And there were plenty of underground tunnels and other underground facilities, as had always been speculated.

When it comes to matters about experimental aircraft, I was convinced that she was thorough in her interviewing and accurate in her conclusions. She has some great pictures and everything seems to fit well with the known facts.

Unfortunately, she poisoned the worthwhile aspects of her book with some truly nutty connections to the famous Roswell UFO incident. According to her, the popular Roswell stories are kinda true, but don't involve aliens. According to the book, 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 help Russia.

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 at all to Roswell. The Roswell incident occurred in 1947, but Area 51 was completely abandoned between 1945 and 1955.

Jacobsen 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. In fact, it appears to be complete bullshit that Jacobsen should have rejected. 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."

Here's the really weird part of it: Jacobsen would have rejected the above statement she made in the NPR interview if she had 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 the testing area, right next to the government's "Area 15." We can add the obvious observation that the alleged 1951 transfer of Roswell artifacts cannot explain how Area 51 got its name, because those bits of evidence did not go there. Those remains may have existed and may still exist, and they may have gone somewhere near Area 51, but they did not go there.

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 we were 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.”

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 operate the craft remotely from the USSR. He also claimed that he and his team had reverse engineered the 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 her leg. Either way, she should have realized it, and should have discredited every word out of his mouth. 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.

Bottom line: 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 immesurably to the marketability of the overall project, but it completely undermines the credibility of the first part.

At any rate, here is the book info:





By the way, Area 51 is no longer a very good secret. There are just too many satellites up there to maintain secrecy about anything above the ground. (See below)



View Larger Map