I just finished Area 51: The Uncensored History of America’s Top-Secret Military Base, Annie Jacobsen’s book about the military base in Nevada which officially doesn’t exist. It is a page-turner of a book for those of us who’ve often wondered what goes on at the base, with former workers discussing what life is like there.
Jacobsen says she got the idea for the book after meeting a retired Area 51 worker at a party, who shared some tales with her because the project he had worked on, the A-12 Oxcart, had recently been declassified.
The Oxcart was the secret, follow-on spy plane after the U-2 program was so abruptly made public and the precursor to the SR-71 Blackbird. Most of the book’s details revolve around this project and the growing rivalry between the CIA and the Air Force for conducting spy missions. It seems the Pentagon became jealous of the high-flying plane and sometimes worked to undermine the CIA’s success.
The accounts of the nuclear testing going on at next door’s Nevada Test Site were also fascinating. If you think you’ve got disruptive neighbors, imagine if your neighbors were setting off nuclear bombs! Area 51 was evacuated during these tests but the accounts of the security personnel who continued to guard the base during the tests offer a terrifying glimpse of nuclear Armageddon.
Jacobsen is a good writer and is at ease with the details of the technology and of the military. There are of course many missing pieces to the Area 51 story – far more than was revealed to her, I’m sure – but Jacobsen does a respectful job at weaving the available pieces into a compelling narrative. Aside from the occasional nuclear blasts rocking the base, one could imagine that Area 51 is essentially a secluded air base where radical new aircraft are tested in secrecy.
But that’s not the whole story of Area 51. Putting aside the rumors of UFOs and aliens that have hung around the base since it entered the public’s consciousness, one has to realize that in the world of classified projects compartmentalization is the rule of the day. Compartmentalization is the security policy where only those with a “need to know” have the details of a particular project. I can imagine that no where else in the U.S. government where compartmentalization would be as important as at Area 51 (a.k.a. “Groom Lake” or “The Ranch”). The vast, remote, secure property of the base provides a perfect testing area unmatched by any other. There are almost certainly many projects going on simultaneously at the base. Chances are there are very few workers who are aware of the ones outside of the ones they are working on. Jacobsen’s book focuses mostly on the declassified projects but it left me wondering what stories have yet to be told about the base.
Just when you think you’ve been convinced that the base is a secret proving ground and little more, Jacobsen drops a nuclear bomb of her own. She quotes a long-time, retired engineer as he tells a story of UFOs and aliens. This struck me as curious since she opens her book by taking a jab at Bob Lazar, the man who in 1989 brought Area 51 into the light by telling the press that UFOs were kept at the base (and who was later caught misrepresenting himself). Jacobsen’s unnamed engineer ups the crazy ante with a bizarre tale that the Roswell UFO was actually sent by the Soviet Union and staffed with child aviators who were surgically deformed to look like aliens by Joseph Mengele acting on Stalin’s orders.
According to Jacobsen, Stalin wanted to sow fear in America with a deliberate crash landing of a UFO with aliens. But if this bizarre tale were true, why would Stalin choose a podunk desert town as the place to launch his terror campaign? Why not someplace like New Jersey, where Orson Welles’s 1938 broadcast of The War of the Worlds caused such panic? Jacobsen doesn’t say.
The other engineers featured in Jacobsen’s book say they felt betrayed by Jacobsen with the inclusion of this far-fetched account, yet the author adamantly stands by her source. To be fair, this is apparently the story engineer was told and he was apparently unwilling to provide a lot of details. Also, as I mentioned before, it’s likely the other engineers were not aware of the other projects taking place at the base.
For me, personally, the “alien” story Jacobsen shared reinforced what I’ve already surmised about the Roswell crash, though I remain unconvinced that whatever did land there was sent by the Commies. And that’s the impression the book leaves with me: it’s a tantalizing look behind the curtain of a mysterious base and the high-flying aircraft developed there, but no book can possibly tell the whole story. These stories are only a fraction of the many secrets of Area 51, many of which will remain buried deeper than the nuclear bombs which once shook the area.