Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base

by Annie M. Jacobsen

  The flying craft that crashed in New Mexico, the myth of which has come to be known as the Roswell Incident, happened in 1947, sixtyfour years before the publication of this book. Everyone directly involved in that incident — who acted on behalf of the government — is apparently dead. Like it does about Area 51, the U.S. government refuses to admit the Roswell crash ever happened, but it did— according to the seminal testimony of one man interviewed over the course of eighteen months for this book. He participated in the engineering project that came about as a result of the Roswell Incident. He was one of the elite engineers from EG&G who were tasked with the original Area 51 wicked engineering problem.

  In July of 1947, Army intelligence spearheaded the efforts to retrieve the remains of the flying disc that crashed at Roswell. And as with other stories that have become the legends of Area 51, part of the conspiracy theory about Roswell has its origins in truth. The crash did reveal a disc, not a weather balloon, as has subsequently been alleged by the Air Force. And responders from the Roswell Army Air Field found not only a crashed craft, but also two crash sites, and they found bodies alongside the crashed craft. These were not aliens. Nor were they consenting airmen. They were human guinea pigs. Unusually petite for pilots, they appeared to be children. Each was under five feet tall. Physically, the bodies of the aviators revealed anatomical conundrums. They were grotesquely deformed, but each in the same manner as the others. They had unusually large heads and abnormally shaped oversize eyes. One fact was clear: these children, if that’s what they were, were not healthy humans. A second fact was shocking. Two of the child-size aviators were comatose but still alive.

  Everything related to the crash site was sent to Wright Field, later called Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, in Ohio, where it all remained until 1951. That is when the evidence was packed up and transported to the Nevada Test Site. It was received, physically, by the elite group of EG&G engineers. The Atomic Energy Commission, not the Air Force and not the Central Intelligence Agency, was put in charge of the Roswell crash remains. According to its unusual charter, the Atomic Energy Commission was the organization best equipped to handle a secret that could never be declassified. The Atomic Energy Commission needed engineers they could trust to handle the work that was about to begin. For this, they looked to the most powerful defense contractor in the nation that no one had ever heard of — EG&G.

  The engineers with EG&G were chosen to receive the crash remains and to set up a secret facility just outside the boundary of the Nevada Test Site, sixteen miles to the northwest of Groom Lake, approximately five and a half miles north of the northernmost point where Area 12 and Area 15 meet. A facility this remote would never be visited by anyone outside a small group with a strict need-to-know and would never have to be accounted for or appear on any official Nevada Test Site map. These five men were told there was more engineering work to be done, and that they would be the only five individuals with a set of keys to the facility. The project, the men were told, was the most clandestine, most important engineering program since the Manhattan Project, which was why the man who had been in charge of that one would function as the director of this project as well.

  Vannevar Bush had been President Roosevelt’s most trusted science adviser during World War II. He held engineering doctorates from both Harvard University and MIT, in addition to being the former vice president and former dean of engineering at MIT. The decisions Vannevar Bush made were ostensibly for the good of the nation; they were sound. The men from EG&G were told that the project they were about to work on was so important that it would remain black forever, meaning it would never see the light of day. The men knew that a secrecy classification inside the Atomic Energy Commission charter made this possible, because they all worked on classified engineering projects that were hidden from the rest of the world. They understood born classified meant that no one would ever have a need-to-know what Vannevar Bush was going to ask them to do. The operation would have no name, only a letter-number designation: S-4, or SigmaFour.

  The problem that the EG&G engineers would face would be highly complex, wide-ranging, without a definite formulation and with no set solution. This wicked problem was wholly without precedent. Solving it would undoubtedly have unintended consequences, because playing the engineering game would change the game. But there were two puzzles to solve, not just one. Two engineering mysteries for the elite group of EG&G engineers to unlock.

  There was the crashed craft that had been sent by Stalin — with its Russian writing stamped, or embossed, in a ring around the inside of the craft. So far, the EG&G engineers were told, no one working on the project when it had been headquartered at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base had been able to discern what made Stalin’s craft hover and fly. Not even the German Paperclip scientists who had been assigned to assist. So the crashed craft was job number one. Reverse engineer it, Vannevar Bush said. Take it apart and put it back together again. Figure out what made it fly.

  But there was the second engineering problem to solve, the one involving the child-size aviators. To understand this, the men were briefed on what it was they were dealing with. They had to be. They were told that they, and they alone, had a need-to-know about what had happened to these humans before they were put in the craft and sent aloft. They were told that seeing the bodies would be a shocking and disturbing experience. Because two of the aviators were comatose but still alive, the men would have to transfer them into a JellO-like substance and stand them upright in two tubular tanks, attached to a life-support 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.

  Once, the children had been healthy humans. Not anymore. They were about thirteen years old. Questions abounded. What made their heads so big? Had their bodies been surgically manipulated to appear inhuman, or did the children have genetic deformities? And what about their haunting, oversize eyes? The engineers were told that the children were rumored to have been kidnapped by Dr. Josef Mengele, the Nazi madman who, at Auschwitz and elsewhere, was known to have performed unspeakable experimental surgical procedures mostly on children, dwarfs, and twins. The engineers learned that just before the war ended, Josef Mengele made a deal with Stalin. Stalin offered Mengele an opportunity to continue his work in eugenics — the science of improving a human population by controlled breeding to increase desirable, heritable characteristics — in secret, in the Soviet Union after the war. The engineers were told that this deal likely occurred just before the war’s end, in the winter of 1945, when it was clear to many members of the Nazi Party, including Mengele, that Nazi Germany would lose the war and that its top commanders and doctors would be tried and hanged for war crimes.

  In Josef Mengele’s efforts to create a pure, Aryan race for Hitler, at Auschwitz and elsewhere, he conducted experiments on people he considered subhuman so as to breed certain features out. Mengele’s victims included Jewish children, Gypsy children, and people with severe physical deformities. He removed parts of children’s craniums and replaced them with bones from larger, adult skulls. He removed and transplanted eyeballs, and injected people with chemicals that caused them to lose their hair. On Mengele’s instruction, an Auschwitz inmate, a painter named Dina Babbitt, made comparative drawings of the shapes of heads, noses, mouths, and ears of people before and after the grotesque surgeries Mengele performed. Another inmate doctor forced to work for Mengele, named Dr. Martina Puzyna, recounted how Mengele had her keep detailed measurements of the shapes and sizes of children’s body parts, casting those of crippled children — particularly their hands and heads — in plaster molds. When Mengele left Auschwitz, on January 17, 1945, he took the documentation of his medical experiments with him. According to his only son, Rolf, Mengele was still in possession of his medical research documents after the war.

  The EG&G engineers were told that par
t of Joseph Stalin’s offer to Josef Mengele stated that if he could create a crew of grotesque, child-size aviators for Stalin, he would be given a laboratory in which to continue his work. According to what the engineers were told, Mengele held up his side of the Faustian bargain and provided Stalin with the child-size crew. Joseph Stalin did not. Mengele never took up residence in the Soviet Union. Instead, he lived for four years in Germany under an assumed name and then escaped to South America, where he lived, first in Argentina and then in Paraguay, until his death in 1979.

  When Joseph Stalin sent the biologically and/or surgically reengineered children in the craft over New Mexico hoping it would land there, the engineers were told, Stalin’s plan was for the children to climb out and be mistaken for visitors from Mars. Panic would ensue, just like it did after the radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds. America’s early-warning radar system would be overwhelmed with sightings of other “UFOs.” Truman would see how easily a totalitarian dictator could control the masses using black propaganda. Stalin may have been behind the United States in atomic bomb technology, but when it came to manipulating the people’s perception, Stalin was the leader with the upper hand. This, says the engineer, is what he and the others in the group were told.

  For months I asked the engineer why President Truman didn’t use the remains from the Roswell crash to show the world what an evil, abhorrent man Joseph Stalin was. I guessed that maybe Truman didn’t want to admit the breach of U.S. borders. For a long time, I never got an answer, just a shaking of the head. Here was the engineer who had the answer to the riddle inside the riddle that is Area 51, but he was unwilling to say more. He is the only one of the original elite group of EG&G engineers who is still alive. He said he wouldn’t tell me more, no matter how many times I asked. One day, I asked again. “Why didn’t President Truman reveal the truth in 1947?” This time he answered.

  “Because we were doing the same thing,” he said. “They wanted to push science. They wanted to see how far they could go.”

  Then he said, “We did things I wish I had not done.” Then, “We performed medical experiments on handicapped

  children and prisoners.”

  “But you are not a doctor,” I said. “They wanted engineers.” “On whose authority did you act?”

  “The Atomic Energy Commission was in charge. And Vannevar Bush,” he said. “People were killed. In this great United States.”

  “Why did we do that?”

  “You do what you do because you love your country, and you are told what you are doing is for the good of the country,” the engineer said. Meaning out at the original Area 51, starting in 1951, the EG&G engineers worked in secret on a nefarious Nazi-inspired black project that would remain entirely hidden from the public because Vannevar Bush told them it was the correct thing to do.

  “It was a long, long time ago,” the engineer said. “I have tried to forget.”

  “When did it end?” I asked. No answer.

  “In 1952?” I asked. Still no answer. “In 1953…1954…?” “At least through the 1980s it was still going on,” he said. “I believe you should tell me the whole story,” I said. “Otherwise,

  once you are gone, you will take the truth with you.”

  “You don’t want to know,” he said.

  “I do.”

  “You don’t have a need-to-know,” he said.

  For many months, I tried to learn more. I got pieces. Slivers of pieces. One-word details. “This” confirmed and “that” reconfirmed, regarding what he had previously said. One day, when we were eating lunch in a restaurant, I recounted back to the engineer everything I knew. I asked for his permission to put it all in this book. He did not say yes. He did not say no. We interviewed for more than one year. Then one day, I asked him how much of the story I now knew.

  “You don’t know half of it,” he said sadly.

  I took a crouton, left over from my lunch, and set it down in the middle of the restaurant’s white china plate. “If what I know equals this crouton,” I said, pointing at the little brown piece of bread, “then is what I don’t know as big as this plate?”

  “Oh, my dear,” he said, shaking his head. “The whole truth is bigger than this table we are eating on, including the chairs.”

  He wouldn’t say more. He said he was hurting. That soon he would die. That, really, it was best that I did not learn any more because I didn’t have a need-to-know. But it is not just me who needs to know. We need to be able to keep secrets, but this kind of secret-keeping— of this kind of secret — is the work of totalitarian states, like the one we fought against for five decades during the Cold War. Fighting totalitarianism was America’s rationale for building seventy thousand nuclear weapons in sixty-five styles. In a free and open democratic society, conducting projects in the name of science is one thing. Keeping forty-year-old secrets from a president even after he tries to find them out is an entirely different problem for a democratic nation. It sets a precedent. It makes it easier for a group of powerful men to set up a program that defies the Constitution and defiles morality in the name of science and national security, all under the deceptive cover that no one has a need-to-know. I believe that even though the engineer didn’t tell me everything, that is why he told me what he did.

  According to my source, the Atomic Energy Commission conducted experiments on humans in a classified government facility in the Nevada desert beginning in 1951. Although this was done in direct violation of the Nuremberg Code of 1947, it is far from the first time the Commission had acted in violation of the most basic moral principle involving voluntary human consent. In 1993, reporter Eileen Welsome wrote a newspaper story stating that the Atomic Energy Commission had conducted plutonium experiments on human beings, most notably retarded children and orphan boys from the Fernald State School, outside Boston, without the children’s or their guardians’ knowledge or consent. After this horrible revelation came to light, President Clinton opened an investigation to look into what the Atomic Energy Commission had done and the secrets it had been able to safeguard inside its terrifying and unprecedented system of secret-keeping. I asked the engineer why President Clinton hadn’t learned about the S-4 facility at Area 51—or had he?

  “I think he might have come very close,” the engineer said about President Clinton. “But they kept it from him.”

  “Who are they?” I asked. The engineer told me that his elite group had been given the keys to the original facility at Area 51. “Who inherited those keys from you five engineers?” I wanted to know.

  “You don’t have a need-to-know” is all he would say.

  EPILOGUE

  In the summer of 2010 a book arrived in the mail from Colonel Leghorn, the father of overhead reconnaissance, age ninety-one. The pages were musty and smelled like an attic. What he had sent was his 1946 Army Air Forces commemorative yearbook from the Operation Crossroads atomic bomb tests. What is most striking is how the story of America’s first postwar nuclear test begins as a “mysterious ArmyNavy assignment” in a “sand-swept town — Roswell.”

  “Roswell… Roswell… Roswell… Roswell… Roswell… Roswell.” The word repeats six times in the first few pages of the government-issued yearbook, making it clear that it was from the Roswell Army Air Field in New Mexico that the first shot in what would be a forty-three-year-old Cold War was fired. And what a colossal opening shot Operation Crossroads was, an unprecedented show of force aimed at letting Joseph Stalin know that America was not done with the nuclear bomb. Forty-two thousand people were present in the Pacific for the two nuclear bomb tests, including Stalin’s spies. The U.S. government spent nearly two billion dollars (adjusted for inflation) to show the world the nuclear power it now possessed.

  “Stalin learned from Hitler,” the EG&G engineer says, “revenge… and other things.” And that to consider Stalin’s perspective one should think about two key moments in history, one right before World War II began and another right before it ended. On August
23, 1939, one week before war in Europe officially began, Hitler and Stalin agreed to be allies and signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, meaning each country promised not to attack the other when war in Europe broke out. And yet almost immediately after shaking hands, Hitler began plotting to double-cross Stalin. Twenty-two months later, Hitler’s sneak attack against Russia resulted in millions of deaths. And then, just a few weeks before World War II ended, Stalin, Truman, and Churchill met in Potsdam, Germany — from July 17, 1945, to August 2, 1945—and agreed to be postwar allies. Just one day before that conference began, America had secretly tested the world’s first and only atomic bomb, inside the White Sands Proving Ground in the New Mexico desert. Truman’s closest advisers had suggested that Truman share the details of the atomic test with Stalin at Potsdam, but Truman did not. It didn’t matter. Nuclear weapons historians believe that Joseph Stalin was already well aware of what the Manhattan Project engineers had accomplished. Stalin had spies inside the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory who had been providing him with bomb blueprints and other information since 1941. By the time the Potsdam conference rolled around, Stalin was already well at work on his own atomic bomb. Despite Stalin and Truman pretending to be allies, neither side trusted the other side, neither man trusted the other man. Each side was instead making plans to build up its own atomic arsenal for future use. When Operation Crossroads commenced just twelve months after the handshakes at Potsdam, the Cold War battle lines were already indelibly drawn.

  It follows that Stalin’s black propaganda hoax — the flying disc peopled with alien look-alikes that wound up crashing near Roswell, New Mexico — could have been the Soviet dictator’s revenge for Truman’s betrayal at Crossroads. His double cross had to have been in the planning stages during the handshaking at Potsdam, metaphorically mirroring what Hitler had done during the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. By July of 1947, Stalin was still two years away from being able to successfully test his own nuclear bomb. The flying disc at Roswell, says the EG&G engineer, was “a warning shot across Truman’s bow.” Stalin may not have had the atomic bomb just yet, but he had seminal hover and fly technology, pilfered from the Germans, and he had stealth. Together, these technologies made the American military gravely concerned. Perplexed by the flying disc’s movements, and its radical ability to confuse radar, the Army Air Forces was left wondering what else Stalin had in his arsenal of unconventional weapons, usurped from the Nazis after the war.