In a World of Speculation

Hallelujah!    Roswell has finally been solved!  Again.  Well that seems to be the main hot item getting splashed across the news services with the release of Annie Jacobsen's book Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base.

Before I say anything else, let me put all my cards on the table.  The book has just come out.  I have not had a chance to read the book (though I will be looking at it as soon as I find a copy - most of the material should be extremely interesting).  Everything I have to say about this one part of the book is based solely upon the numerous news stories that have poured out during this past weekend.  Further, I have no doubt that Annie Jacobsen is a solid reporter, superb investigator, and extremely reliable and insightful writer, irregardless of what either Homeland Security or the U.S. Marshals might think (follow this link to Snopes.com for a pretty concise analysis of her Terror in the Skies story).

In a nutshell, Jacobsen argues that what really happened at Roswell was a psychological warfare attempt by Stalin and the Soviet Union to create mass panic in the U.S. by "invading" the country with deformed children disguised as outer space aliens who were piloted out of South America into New Mexico on a captured Nazi made Horten Ho 229.  The children were made to look unearthly by Josef Mengele who did it in exchange for laboratory space from the Soviets.  Stalin was inspired to try this stunt by the panic in 1938 caused by the Orson Welles broadcast of War of the Worlds.  For all I know, Orson Welles was Joseph Stalin.


Surprisingly enough, this completely harebrained theory has flown through the media without anyone catching the "minor" problems in Jacobsen's thinking.

A.  Nobody really knows if the Soviets ever got their hands on a Horten Flying Wing jet because we were too busy grabbing them for ourselves.  I know a little bit about this because my late father-in-law was a member of the mechanical team whose job it was to dismantle the darn thing for shipment back to the States.

B.  Since it is a safe bet that the Russians knew that we had one of these suckers, you can also be sure that they wanted one for their own research.  If they had one, they would be too busy trying to test and develop the flying wing for their own use.  They would not be wasting the device in pursuit of a half-baked practical joke on Truman.  Stalin can be accused of many things, but stupidity wasn't one of them.

C.  It is extremely unlikely that the Soviets would stage such a stunt in New Mexico.  We had a ton of top secret work going on down there.  The Russians had agents working very hard at basing themselves in the area.  Why would they want to create a wild security scare that would threaten every other operation they had going in the area.  Again, Stalin was not stupid.

D.  Josef Mengele was not available in 1947.  He was busy laying low as a farm-hand in Germany while avoiding arrest by Allied authorities.  He didn't make it to South America until 1949. 

Otherwise, Jacobsen's theory is swell. 

Basically, her thinking sounds like an elaborate reworking of Nick Redfern's book Body Snatchers in the Desert, minus the plausibility.  Redfern's book is a must read.  I don't really buy his theory either, but he works harder at it.  Privately, I suspect that Redfern was being led into a weird dog-and-pony show by several people working together (his inside sources seem to tell the exact same story, which is normally a tip off to most investigative reporters that there is something funny going on).  Likewise, the timeline of events is not at all smooth.  But at least it sounds almost half possible.

So maybe Jacobsen would like to rework the last part of her book.  Then again, maybe not.  She still seems to be convinced that the members of a Syrian rock band on their way to Vegas were really terrorists plotting a hard trip to paradise and still sounds miffed that every federal investigator who dealt with the case said otherwise.

 And you can skip what I said about Orson Welles.  He was much too tall to pose as Stalin.

Update:  Sometimes you need to quit when you are looking as if you are ahead.  Annie Jacobsen has given an interview to Popular Mechanics which pretty much tells you all you need to know about how good her source must be.

1.  Her anonymous single source (which from a journalist perspective is a really bad way to precede) claims he was out there to reverse engineer the Soviet Horten flying wing.  Really?  We already had them.  Why in the heck would we need to reverse engineer the thing?

2.  He learned part of the story from personal conversations with the surviving "child."  Really?  Since the little nipper would not have a thing to do with reverse engineering and since these type of secret projects work on a need to know basis, why was he having these lovely chat fests?  It just doesn't add up.

3.  The project started in 1951 which is why it is called Area 51?  WTF!!??  The origins of Area 51 predates World War One.  It started into extensive use by the US Navy as a secret gunnery range during World War One.  The number 51 was used on the map as they were sectioning off the area for use.

What does this tell us.  Well, it strongly suggests that Annie Jacobsen isn't exactly into research and fact checking and all of that hard stuff.  It also strongly suggests that her single source is either deranged or pulling her leg.  No matter what, this story is a crock. 

Never Give a Sucker an Even Break

There are some extremely intelligent people to be found in the field of UFO and paranormal research. There are many very sincere and honest folks searching for aliens, bigfoot critters, and assorted other things that go bump in the night.

Then there are people like Sean David Morton. OK, I don't normally like to kick a guy while he is down, but the fraud charges brought against him by the Security Exchange Commission comes as no surprise to anyone who has been aware of his very curious career. For the past several decades, Morton has repeatedly made claims that were, at best, wild exaggerations and, in some cases, out right falsehoods. In the past, he has always operated within the context of UFOs and the paranormal and managed to stay within a weird zone in which facts were hard to find and cross referencing is often unheard of and rarely pursued.

For example, he used to claim that he had discovered a mountain peak near Area 51 from which you could see the world's most famous top secret base. OK, actually it was well known already to the locals and he simply heard about it from someone. Likewise, he insisted that the people living near the mountain had named it after him. Nobody had named anything after him and this story was just part of the come on for his guided tour of "Morton Peak." All you had to pay him was $99.99. The only mystery to this racket was the $99.99. Why not just charge a $100. Better still, just pack a lunch and go on your own.

As stupid and expensive as it was, Morton did get the occasional customer. It was about this time that he started calling himself the world's foremost UFO authority. That was how I first heard about him.

As previously related, I had been approached by the original PR person for a company that was looking to release a videotape of an alien under interrogation at Area 51 . Though the provider of the tape was a man who stayed nameless (for fear of presumed government killers - or maybe just the IRS), there was a strange ensemble of characters involved behind the scene in peddling this tape. Aside from Art Bell (who in those days popped up behind every stunt since the Piltdown Man), one of the characters was (to me) an unknown chap with a set of claims about his personal reputation that seemed odd. I had never heard of this "foremost authority" and I figured I better check him out.

That took longer than I had expected. His name was largely unknown in virtually every rational list I could find on UFOs. As I moved deeper into the New Age zone, he was still a pretty unknown figure. Finally, I arrived at the Nevada researchers backstabbing, infighting zone. There, I found his name. A lot of the folks who were involved in "work" near Area 51 (OK, a lot of it consisted of standing around in the dark waiting for lights to buzz overhead) had pretty bad things to say about Morton. In turn, he had bad things to say about them. There was no love being lost in the dry desert air.

But all this told me was that he had a strong ego, a high opinion about himself, and pretty poor skills at public relations. Then I heard back from the PR person. The "boys" (Bell, Morton etc.) were busy trying to sell release rights to the video to several companies at once without telling any of the bidding companies that another company was already involved. Likewise, they were undercutting the PR by selling the rights to a rival British magazine without telling anyone. By the way, they were selling all of these rights without establishing any sign of ownership. The whole thing quickly took a nose dive into business oblivion while the boys were mostly interested in getting lots of people to pay cash up front.

The video, by the way, was undoubtedly bogus. Which is OK. If it were real, then the high handed (and largely dubious) antics from the boys would be appalling. As it was, it merely rounded off the freak show feel to the whole scam.

At the time, I was largely interested in the strange questions concerning Art Bell and his possible connection with the Defense Intelligence Agency (well, his phone system and computer server were obviously hooked up to the DoD system). Morton just appeared to have been a minor grifter with an ego problem. He hadn't yet discovered his psychic skills in investment opportunities. But I am not really surprised by the charges now leveled against him by the S.E.C. These guys have a habit of over reaching.

But at least he made Inside Edition. Finally, he is world famous for something.