The flying object landed on a ranch near Roswell sometime last week. Not having phone facilities, the rancher stored the disc until such time as he was able to contact the Sheriff’s office, who in turn notified Major Jesse A. Marcel, of the 509th Bomb Group Intelligence Office.
Action was immediately taken and the disc was picked up at the rancher’s home. It was inspected at the Roswell Army Air Field and subsequently loaned by Major Marcel to higher headquarters.
Three hours after Haut dropped off the statement, the commander of the Roswell Army Air Field sent Walter Haut back to KGFL with a second press release stating that the first press release had been incorrect. What had crashed on W. W. Brazel’s ranch outside Roswell was nothing more than a weather balloon. Photographs showing intelligence officer Major Jesse Marcel posing with the weather balloon were offered as proof. The story faded. No one in the town of Roswell, New Mexico, spoke of it publicly for more than thirty years. Then, in 1978, Stan Friedman and his UFO research partner, a man named Bill Moore, showed up in Roswell and began asking questions. “Bill and I went after the story the hard way,” says Friedman. “There was no Internet back then. We went to libraries, dug through telephone records, made call after call.” After two years of research, Friedman and Moore had interviewed more than sixty-two original witnesses to the Roswell incident. Those interviewed included intelligence officer Major Jesse Marcel and press officer Walter Haut.
It turned out that a lot more had happened in Roswell, New Mexico, in the first and second weeks of July 1947 than just a weather-balloon crash. For starters, large numbers of the military had descended upon the town. W. W. Brazel was jailed for almost a week. Some witnesses saw military police loading large boxes and crates onto military trucks. Other witnesses saw large boxes being loaded onto military aircraft. The local coroner received a mysterious call requesting several childsize coffins that could be hermetically sealed. Townsfolk were threatened with federal prison time if they spoke about what they saw. The majority of the stories relayed by the sixty-two witnesses to UFO researchers Friedman and Moore all had two factors in common. The first was that the crash, which included more than one crash site, involved a flying saucer, or round disc. The second assertion was jawdropping. Witnesses said they saw bodies. Not just any old bodies but child-size, humanoid-type beings that had apparently been inside the flying saucer. These aviators had big heads, large oval eyes, and no noses. The conclusion that the majority of the witnesses drew for the UFO researchers was that these child-size aviators were not from this world.
In 1980, a book based on Friedman and Moore’s research was published. It was called The Roswell Incident. The lid was off Roswell, and the floodgates opened. “By 1986 a total of ninety-two people had come forward with eyewitness accounts of what really had happened back in 1947,” Friedman asserts. Ufologists elevated the Roswell incident to sacred status; that is how it became the holy grail of UFOs.
When Bob Lazar went public with his story about flying saucers and a small, alien-looking being at S-4, just outside the base at Area 51, it would seem to follow that Stanton Friedman and his colleagues would champion Bob Lazar’s story. Instead, the opposite happened. “Bob Lazar is a total fraud,” Friedman contends. “He has no credibility as a scientist. He said he went to MIT. He did not. He called himself a nuclear physicist and he is not. I resent that. I got in to MIT and could not afford to go there. You can’t make something like that up and expect to be taken seriously.” Friedman says he does not care what Lazar says he saw. He can’t get past the false statements Lazar made about himself. It was not like Friedman didn’t try to have a face-to-face with Lazar. “I spoke with Lazar on the telephone in 1990. We arranged to have lunch [in Nevada] but he never showed up,” Friedman explains. “Scientists normally have diplomas. They write papers, they appear in directories. I wanted to ask him why none of that applies to Bob Lazar. I tried to believe him. I was not antithetic to his story. He’s obviously a very smart guy and not just because he could put a jet engine on the back of a car. But my conclusion about him is that he’s a total fraud.”
It is unfortunate the two men never had lunch. In talking, they might have realized how close to the truth — something far more earthly and shocking than anyone could have imagined — they both were. The true and uncensored story of Area 51 spans more than seven decades. The Roswell crash is but a thread, and Area 51 itself — the secret spot in the desert — has its origins in places and events far outside the fifty square miles of restricted airspace now known as the Box.
It all began in 1938, with an imaginary war of the worlds.
Chapter Two: Imagine a War of the Worlds
On Halloween eve in 1938, mass hysteria descended upon New Jersey as CBS Radio broadcast a narrative adaptation of Victorianera science fiction novel The War of the Worlds. Listening to the live radio play, many people became convinced that Martians were attacking Earth, in New Jersey, and killing huge numbers of Americans. “Ladies and gentlemen,” the show’s narrator began, “we interrupt our program of dance music to bring you a special bulletin.” A huge, flaming meteorite had crashed into farmland at Grover’s Mill, twenty-two miles north of Trenton, listeners were told.
Frank Readick, playing Carl Phillips, a CBS reporter claiming to be physically on scene, delivered a breaking report: “The object doesn’t look very much like a meteor,” Phillips said, his voice shaky. “It looks more like a huge cylinder. The metal casing is definitely extraterrestrial!” Things quickly moved from harmless to malevolent and Phillips began to scream: “Ladies and gentlemen, this is the most terrifying thing I have ever witnessed! Someone’s crawling out of the hollow top!” Phillips explained that extraterrestrial beings had begun wriggling their way out of the crashed craft, revealing bodies as large as bears’ but with snakelike tentacles instead of limbs. The woods were ablaze, Phillips screamed. Barns were burning down, and the gas tanks of parked automobiles had been targeted to explode. Radio listeners heard wailing and then silence, indicating the newsman was now dead. Next, a man solemnly identified himself as the secretary of the interior and interrupted the report. “Citizens of the nation,” he declared, “I shall not try to conceal the gravity of the situation that confronts the country.” Scores were dead, including members of the New Jersey police force. The U.S. Army had been mobilized. New York City was under evacuation orders. Interplanetary warfare had begun.
Although the 8:00 p.m. broadcast had opened with a brief announcement that the story was science fiction and based on the novel by H. G. Wells, huge numbers of people across America believed it was real. Those who turned their radio dials for confirmation learned that other radio stations had interrupted their own broadcasts to follow the exclusive, live CBS Radio coverage about the Mars attack. Thousands called the station and thousands more called the police. Switchboards jammed. Hospitals began admitting people for hysteria and shock. Families in New Jersey rushed out of their homes to inform anyone not in the know that the world was experiencing a Martian attack. The state police sent a Teletype over their communications system noting the broadcast drama was “an imaginary affair,” but the hysteria was already well beyond local law enforcement’s control. Across New York and New Jersey, people loaded up their cars and fled. To many, it was the beginning of the end of the world.
The following morning, the New York Times carried a page-1, above-the-fold story headlined “Radio Listeners in a Panic Taking War Drama as Fact.” Across the nation, there had been reports of “disrupted households, interrupted religious services, traffic jams and clogged communications systems.” All through the night, in churches from Harlem to San Diego, people prayed for salvation. In the month that followed, more than 12,500 news stories discussed the War of the Worlds broadcast. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) opened an investigation but in the end decided not to penalize CBS, largely on the grounds of freedom of speech. It was not the FCC’s role to “censor what shall or shall not be said over the radio,” Commission
er T. A. M. Craven said. “The public does not want a spineless radio.”
The 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast tapped into the nation’s growing fears. Just two weeks before, Adolf Hitler’s troops had invaded Czechoslovakia, leaving the security of Europe unclear. Rapid advances in science and technology, which included radar, jet engines, and microwaves, left many Depression-era Americans overwhelmed by how science might affect a coming war. Death rays and murderous Martians may have been pure science fiction in 1938 but the concepts played on people’s fears of invasion and annihilation. Man has always been afraid of the sneak attack, which is exactly what Hitler had just done in Czechoslovakia and what Japan would soon accomplish at Pearl Harbor. The weapons introduced in World War II included rockets, drones, and the atomic bombs — were all foreshadowed in Wells’s story. Advances in science were about to fundamentally change the face of war and make science fiction not as fictional as it had once been. World War II would leave fifty million dead.
From the moment it hit the airwaves, the War of the Worlds radio broadcast had a profound effect on the American military. The following month, a handful of “military listeners” relayed their sanitized thoughts on the subject to reporters with the Associated Press. “What struck the military listeners most about the radio play was its immediate emotional effect,” the officials told the AP. “Thousands of persons believed a real invasion had been unleashed. They exhibited all the symptoms of fear, panic, determination to resist, desperation, bravery, excitement or fatalism that real war would have produced,” which in turn “shows the government will have to insist on the close cooperation of radio in any future war.” What these military men were not saying was that there was serious concern among strategists and policy makers that entire segments of the population could be so easily manipulated into thinking that something false was something true. Americans had taken very real, physical actions based on something entirely made up. Pandemonium had ensued. Totalitarian nations were able to manipulate their citizens like this, but in America? This kind of mass control had never been seen so clearly and definitively before.
America was not the only place where government officials were impressed by how easily people could be influenced by a radio broadcast. Adolf Hitler took note as well. He referred to the Americans’ hysterical reaction to the War of the Worlds broadcast in a Berlin speech, calling it “evidence of the decadence and corrupt condition of democracy.” It was later revealed that in the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin had also been paying attention. And President Roosevelt’s top science adviser, Vannevar Bush, observed the effects of the fictional radio broadcast with a discerning eye. The public’s tendency to panic alarmed him, he would later tell W. Cameron Forbes, his colleague at the Carnegie Institution. Three months later, alarming news again hit the airwaves, but this time it was pure science, not science fiction.
On January 26, 1939, the Carnegie Institution sponsored a press conference to announce the discovery of nuclear fission to the world. When the declaration was made that two German-born scientists had succeeded in splitting the atom, a number of physicists who were present literally ran from the room. The realization was as profound as it was devastating. If scientists could split one atom then surely they would be able to create a chain reaction of splitting atoms — the result of which would be an enormous release of energy. Three months later, the New York Times reported that scientists at a follow-up conference were heard arguing “over the probability of some scientist blowing up a sizable portion of the Earth with a tiny bit of uranium.” This was the terrifying prospect now facing the world. “Science Discovers Real Frankenstein” headlined an article in the Boston Herald that went on to explain that now “an unscrupulous dictator, lusting for conquest, [could] wipe Boston, Worcester and Providence out of existence.” Vannevar Bush disagreed with the popular press. The “real danger” in the discovery of fission, he told Forbes, was not atomic energy itself but the public’s tendency to panic over things they did not understand. To make his point, Bush used the War of the Worlds radio broadcast as an example.
Atomic energy, it turned out, was far more powerful than anything previously made by man. Six years and seven months after the announcement of the discovery of fission, America dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, essentially wiping out both of those cities and a quarter of a million people living there. President Roosevelt had appointed Vannevar Bush to lead the group that made the bomb. Bush was the director of the Manhattan Project, the nation’s first true black operation, and he ran it with totalitarian-like control.
When the Japanese Empire surrendered, Vannevar Bush did not rejoice so much as ponder his next move. For eighteen days he watched as Joseph Stalin marched Soviet troops into eastern Asia,
positioning his Red Army forces in China, Manchuria, Sakhalin Island, and North Korea. When the fighting finally stopped, Bush’s response had become clear. He would convince President Truman that the Soviet Union could not be trusted. In facing down America’s new enemy, the nation needed even more advanced technologies to fight future wars. The most recent war might have ended, but science needed to stay on the forward march.
As Americans celebrated peace (after the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, public opinion polls showed that more than 85 percent of Americans approved of the bombings), Vannevar Bush and members of the War Department began planning to use the atomic bomb again in a live test — a kind of mock nuclear naval battle, which they hoped could take place the following summer in the Marshall Islands in the Pacific. There, in a deep lagoon at Bikini Atoll, dozens of captured Japanese and German warships would be blown up using live nuclear bombs. The operation would illustrate to the world just how formidable America’s new weapons were. It would be called Operation Crossroads. As its name implied, the event marked a critical juncture. America was signaling to Russia it was ready to do battle with nuclear bombs.
In less than a year, Operation Crossroads was in full swing on Bikini Atoll, a twenty-five-mile ring of red coral islands encircling a clear, blue lagoon. A July 1946 memo, one of many marked Secret, instructed the men not to swim in the lagoon wearing red bathing trunks. There were barracuda everywhere. Word was that the fanged-tooth fish would attack swimmers without warning.
The natives of Bikini, all 167 of them, were led by a king named Juda, but in July of 1946, none of them were on Bikini Atoll anymore. The U.S. Navy had evacuated the natives to Rongerik Atoll, 125 miles to the east. The upcoming three-bomb atomic test series would make their homeland unsafe for a while, the natives were told. But it was going to help ensure world peace.
On the shores of the atoll, a young man named Alfred O’Donnell lay in his Quonset hut listening to the wind blow and the rain pound against the reinforced sheet-metal roof above him. He was unable to sleep. “The reason was because I had too much to worry about,” O’Donnell explains, remembering Crossroads after more than sixty years. “Is everything all right? Is the bomb going to go off, like planned?” What the twenty-four-year-old weapons engineer was worrying about were the sea creatures in the lagoon. “Let’s say an octopus came into contact with one of the bomb’s wires. What would happen? What if something got knocked out of place?” The wires O’Donnell referred to ran from a concrete bunker on Bikini called the control point and out into the ocean, where they connected to a twenty-three-kiloton atomic bomb code-named Baker. The men in the U.S. Navy’s Task Force One gave the bomb a more colorful name: they called it Helen of Bikini, after the legendary femme fatale for whom so many ancient warriors laid down their lives. A nuclear weapon was both destructive and seductive, the sailors said, just like Helen of Troy had been.
As a leading member of the arming party that would wire and fire the atomic bombs during Operation Crossroads, O’Donnell had a tremendous responsibility, especially for someone so young. “Five years earlier I was just a kid from Boston with a normal life. All I was thinking about for my future was a baseball career,” O’Donnell recalls.
In 1941, when O’Donnell was in high school, he’d been recruited by the Boston Braves, thanks to his exceptional.423 batting average. Then came the war, and everything changed. He married Ruth. He joined the Navy, where he learned radio and electronics. In both subjects he quickly excelled. Back in Boston after the war, O’Donnell was mysteriously recruited for a job with Raytheon Production Corporation, a defense contract company cofounded by Vannevar Bush. What exactly the job entailed, O’Donnell did not know when he signed on. The recruiters told him he would find out more details once he was granted a security clearance. “I didn’t know what a security clearance was back then,” O’Donnell recalls. After a month, he learned that he was now part of the Manhattan Project. He was transferred to a small engineering company named for the three MIT professors who ran it: Edgerton, Germeshausen, and Grier. Later, the company shortened its name to EG&G. There, O’Donnell was trained to wire a nuclear bomb by Herbert Grier, the man who had invented the firing systems for the bombs dropped on Japan.
“The next thing I knew I was asked to go to Bikini in the summer of 1946,” says O’Donnell. “I did not want to go. I’d fought on those atolls during the war. I’d seen bodies of young soldiers floating dead in the water and I swore I’d never go back. But Ruth and I had a baby on the way and she said go, and I did.” He went on, “I missed Ruth. She was pregnant, thank God, but I wondered what she was doing back in Boston where we lived. Was she able to take out the garbage all right?” Forty-two thousand people had gathered on Bikini Atoll to witness Operation Crossroads, and O’Donnell could not sleep because he felt all of those eyes were on him. Thinking about Ruth was how O’Donnell stopped worrying about how well he had wired the bomb.
Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base Page 3