Area 51: A big alien hoax perpetrated by the Soviets?

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Area 51: A big alien hoax perpetrated by the Soviets?
May 21, 2011
Nick Eaton
Seattle PI

We all know the folklore of Area 51 – that a secret military base houses the remnants of crashed UFOs, including from Roswell, and that the U.S. government has for years covered up the existence of alien life.
Fake aliens

Were they aliens or (gasp!) Soviet pinko Commies? (Photo by Pierre Andrieu/AFP/Getty Images)

But the truth may be stranger than the science fiction.

Take what Annie Jacobsen, author of the new book “Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base,” told NPR’s Terry Gross this week on “Fresh Air.” For background: Jacobsen’s inside source apparently told her about two Nazi aerospace designers, Walter and Reimar Horten, who may have ended up with the USSR in the aftermath of World War II.

The Horten brothers were involved in the flying disc crash in New Mexico. And that is from a single source. … There was an unusual moment where that source became very upset and told me things that were stunning that’s almost impossible to believe at first read. And that is that 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 of the reveal is that my source, who I absolutely believe and worked with for 18 months on this, was one of the engineers who received the equipment and he also received the people who were in the craft.

The people were, according to the source, were child-sized pilots, and there’s a lot of debate about how old they were. He believes they were 13, although other people believe they may have been older. But this is a firsthand witness to this, and I made a decision to write about this in the very end of the book, after I take the traditional journalist form of telling you everything in the third person, I switch and I kind of lean into the reader and I say, ‘Look, this is not why Area 51 is classified to the point where no one in the government will admit it exists. The reason is because what one man told me.’ And then using the first person, I tell you what I was told. And there’s no doubt that people are going to be upset, alarmed and skeptical of this information, but I absolutely believe the veracity of my source, and I believe it was important that I put this information out there because it is the tip of a very big iceberg.

These “child-sized pilots,” Jacobsen explained, were actually genetically engineered humans made by the Soviets to look like aliens. The idea was, since the Soviets didn’t yet have a nuclear bomb, they would “make a hoax against America involving a UFO and overload our early air-defense warning system, making America vulnerable to an attack,” she told NPR.

In her book, Jacobsen interviewed 74 people with first-hand knowledge of Area 51, including 32 who lived and worked there. Area 51, of course, is said to be part of Edwards Air Force Base in souther Nevada, close to the California border and northwest of Las Vegas.

You can listen to Jacobsen’s entire interview on “Fresh Air” and read some excerpts on NPR’s website.