Stalin, Mengele, Roswell

Six years ago, Annie Jacobsen, a financial columnist, was a passenger on a Northwest Airlines flight marked by bizarre conduct on the part of several Arab passengers. She wrote an interesting, though imperfect book about the experience, arguing that she had witnessed a probing of American defensive measures, aimed at gathering data to refine future terrorist schemes. Maybe she was right, maybe not.

I’m pretty sure that the thesis of her new book, unless the Daily Telegraph’s description utterly mutilates it, is not right:

Area 51, the new book by Annie Jacobsen, is based on interviews with scientists and engineers who worked in Area 51, the top secret test base in the Nevada desert.

It dismisses the alien story and puts forward the theory that Stalin was inspired by Orson Wells’s famous radio adaptation of the HG Wells novel War of the Worlds, which provoked hysteria across America when broadcast in 1938. According to the book, the plot started after the Soviet Union seized from Germany at the end of the war the jet-propelled, single wing Horton Ho 229 – a fighter said to be the forerunner of the modern B2 stealth bomber.

This is where Mengele enters the story. The Nazi doctor, who experimented on prisoners in Auschwitz and fled to South America after the war, was supposedly enlisted to create a crew of “grotesque, child-size aviators” in return for a eugenics laboratory.

The book says that the plane was filled with “alien-like” children, aged 12 or 13, who Stalin wanted to land in America and cause hysteria similar to the 1938 broadcast. But, the plane, remotely piloted by another aircraft, crashed and the Americans hushed up the incident.

Yeah, I can pick out the plotholes, too, but isn’t it much more imaginative and interesting than the UFO enthusiasts’ tale?

Comments

[Dr Martin Meenagh]

I'll hold off on the book until reading, but I am struck by how readily people resort to multiple disnformation. Seymour Hersh publishing that guff in 'Camelot' about Marilyn Monroe and Roswell springs to mind--it certainly blurred the reputation of an otherwise respected national security reporter. I seem to remember a book detailing disinfo too--Project Beta? Maybe the Los Angeles Times writer was too fixated on whatever it was that she had witnessed with the Syrians--or maybe people are just telling tales about Groom Lake. Again.