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

New York: Little, Brown & Company, 2011. Second Printing [stated]. Hardcover. Very good/very good. xv, [1], 521, [7] pages. Illustrations. Map. Notes. Author Interviews and Bibliography. Index. DJ has slight wear and soiling. Annie Jacobsen is an American investigative journalist, author and 2016 Pulitzer Prize finalist in history. Jacobsen writes about war, weapons, security and secrets. Jacobsen is best known as the author of the 2011 nonfiction book Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base, which the New York Times called "cauldron-stirring." It was on the New York Times bestseller list for thirteen weeks and has been translated into six languages. Jacobsen's 2014 book, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program That Brought Nazi Scientists to America was named "the most comprehensive, up-to-date narrative available to the general public" in a review by the CIA. Operation Paperclip was named one of the Best Books of 2014 by The Boston Globe. The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top Secret Military Research Agency, was chosen as finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in History. The book, based on interviews with scientists and engineers who worked in Area 51, addresses the Roswell UFO incident. It suggests that Josef Mengele was recruited by the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin to produce "grotesque, child-size aviators" to be remotely piloted and landed in America to cause hysteria in the likeness of Orson Welles' 1938 radio drama War of the Worlds, but that the aircraft crashed and the incident was hushed up. Jacobsen writes that the bodies found at the crash site were children. Grotesquely but similarly deformed, aged around 12, each under five feet tall, with large heads and abnormally shaped oversize eyes. "They were ... human guinea pigs", she claims. Jacobsen also interviews Richard Mingus who outlines an incident whereby Area 6 was attacked at gunpoint during the preparation of a nuclear test detonation. The Los Angeles Times called it "highly readable" and "deeply researched...a dream for aviation and military buffs." Derived from a Kirkus review: Weird doings are afoot, aliens are among us and so is Raytheon—all stories that figure in Los Angeles Times Magazine contributing editor Jacobsen's book on that classified of American military installation. Acting on tips and leads by those who were there, Jacobsen set out a few years ago to uncover what could be uncovered about Area 51, the huge military/intelligence base in the desert of southern Nevada. Huge is right—it's "just a little smaller than the state of Connecticut"—and it's carved into subdomains so secret that one agency, whether the CIA or the Air Force or the Atomic Energy Commission, often doesn't know what the next one is doing. Indeed, Vice President Johnson didn't know about Area 51 until after he became president—and we can guess that Joe Biden hasn't been briefed on the odd things that happen there. As Jacobsen notes, Area 51 has been associated with UFOs, and some of the earliest sightings thereof, beginning in 1947, have taken place in or near the facility. Jacobsen's expansive, well-written narrative takes in the sweep of Cold War history, from the Bay of Pigs to Francis Gary Powers to Joe Stalin to Vietnam to the Nazi doctors pressed into service by U.S. and USSR alike—and none of it is pretty. Jacobsen provides an endlessly fascinating—and quite scary—book.