AREA 51 AND ROSWELL CRAZINESS JUST GOT A WHOLE LOT CRAZIER

From Terry Gross's FRESH AIR show on NPR yesterday:

Ms JACOBSEN: 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. And the stunning part about this reveal was that my source, who I absolutely believe and worked with for 18 months on this, was one of the engineers who received the equipment – he refers to it as equipment – and he also received the people who were in the craft. And so…

GROSS: Do you mean the remains of the people in the craft?

Ms. JACOBSEN: The people were – according to the source – the people in the craft who were child-sized pilots, and there’s a lot of debate about how old they were. He believes that they were 13, although other people believe that they may have been older … And what he says is that the child-sized aviators in this craft were the result of a Soviet human experimentation program, and they had been made to look like aliens a la Orson Welles’ “War of the Worlds.” When the Orson Welles radio broadcast “The War of the Worlds” aired in 1938, people on the East Coast actually took actions based on their belief that Martians had landed in New Jersey and were attacking. And this fascinated the American military – I source all this in my book – and led to a lot of behind-the-scenes thinking about what it meant that American citizens could be so moved by something that was fictional – that was science fiction. And across the pond, Hitler also paid attention to “The War of the Worlds.” He referenced it in a speech. And according to my source, Stalin also paid attention to “The War of the Worlds” and was fascinated by American susceptibility toward science fiction. And so his plan, according to my source, was to create panic in the United States with this belief that a UFO had landed with aliens inside of it.

GROSS: Mm-hmm. So you’re saying that these children were surgically altered.

Ms. JACOBSEN: I am repeating what the source told me is that…

GROSS: Right. That he’s saying. I’m sorry. He’s saying that they were surgically altered.

Ms. JACOBSEN: Yeah. Or genetically. It’s unclear. What he is absolutely clear about is that the iconic images that we have now of aliens with the big head and the nose and the eyes, that is actually what the child-size pilots looked like. And what I asked my source over and over again, where my skepticism came in was, why, originally in 1947, when this craft supposedly crashed with these grotesque humans in it, why on earth didn’t President Truman hold a press conference to show what a horrible, evil, abhorrent man Joseph Stalin was, to be working with Dr. Mengele? And the source’s answer – which took a very long time – was ultimately: because we decided to do the same thing. And that the head of the program – who my source says was a man named Vannevar Bush, who had also been in charge of the Manhattan Project, decided that it was important to figure out what the Soviets had done. And so we began our own rogue program with human experiments. And this, says the source, is why it’s all secret.

This dove-tails so neatly with everything I have believed and written about over the last 13 years, it's not even funny. You can listen to the entire interview with author Anne Jacobsen, who seems distressingly qualified and legit, HERE.