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

About 50 pages into this, I was bored, and it seemed very similar to another book I had read. Sure enough, turns out Annie Jacobson wrote The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency. I’m just not a fan of her writing, I guess.

The truth is this: Area 51 is pretty boring. It’s basically two things: (1) spy planes, and (2) nuclear bomb tests. There’s a lot in here about the A-12 Oxcart, and nuclear fallout testing during the Cold War. It goes on and on, and drones quite a bit.

And then…

At the very end, she drops a couple bombshells.

1. There was apparently a flying saucer at Roswell, but it was sent by the Soviets, and in it where deformed children, with over-sized heads and eyes, which account for the alien stories over the years. These children were apparently hideous leftovers form Josef Mengele’s experiments during World War II. Stalin apparently ordered the operation to fool Americans into thinking they were aliens and trying to ignite some “War of the Worlds” hysteria. (Seriously, this is what she claims…)

2. She has a source that she interviewed repeatedly for 18 months who maintains that the U.S. government medically experimented on American children at Area 51 for decades, into the 1980s.

Both these claims come at the very end of the book. The second one in the particular is perhaps a little hard to believe. She has one source, and he’s very vague, and frankly comes off sounding like a crackpot.

But, regardless, these two items come at the end of what’s otherwise a really tedious book.