New Book On Area 51

[Bernice Moore]

'Area 51' book stretches truth, ex-workers say....
http://www.lvrj.com/news/-area-51-book-s...77963.html

[Jan Klimkowski]

Here's an excerpt from the review in Bernice's post:

Three of Area 51's former CIA contractors -- T.D. Barnes, Roger Anderson and Harry Martin -- discussed their concerns about the book by Annie Jacobsen with the Las Vegas Review-Journal to "set the record straight."

"To her credit, I think she provided a lot of accurate information in her book, but there are areas that are completely foreign to me," said Anderson, 81, of Las Vegas, a retired Air Force pilot who worked at Area 51's command post in the 1960s.

He said the part that puzzled him most "had to do with human engineering, that sort of thing. When you start talking about (Josef) Mengele and Hitler and Stalin, and you tie these things all together with an incident in New Mexico, to tie all that together it just didn't make any sense to us at all."

Barnes, 74, a retired CIA radar expert who lives in Henderson, said the trio opened doors for Jacobsen by giving her access to once-classified information and putting her in touch with their CIA colleagues.

They thought she was documenting the history of Area 51 and the top-secret development of the A-12 spy plane, known as the Oxcart Project.

Instead, she exaggerated the boundaries of the secret location and changed history by writing that it became the home of the Roswell aliens in 1951, four years before any facilities were built at Area 51, Barnes said.

"They threw us under the bus just to make a story," he said of Jacobsen and the book's publisher, Little, Brown and Company.

"This book stood 100 percent against what we believe in. It did a horrible amount of damage to us," he said. "There's no way people at Nellis (Air Force Base) can be affiliated with what we're charged with, charged with a blanket of sins in the book."

Martin said he was sad that the 523-page book stooped to the level of little green men.

"Parts of the book are very good, I think. But she didn't have to do a hatchet job. There were so many things she could have added to make it what we believed it was going to be," said Martin, 80, of Las Vegas, who was Area 51's fuel super*visor in 1961.

The men belong to Road*runners Internationale, an association of 360 former Area 51 workers. They said their historic roles in developing the predecessor to the Air Force's SR-71 Blackbird spy plane have been fogged by Groom Lake's alien lore.

To make the Roswell-Groom Lake connection, Jacobsen relied on an anonymous source described as a retired engineer who worked for Atomic Energy Commission contractor EG&G.

In the book's final chapter, titled "Revelation," Jacobsen includes a first-person dialogue between her and the engineer, the last living of five EG&G employees who said they had keys to a building where equipment and remains from the Roswell flying disc were kept.

"Everything related to the crash site was sent to Wright Field ... in Ohio, where it all remained until 1951. That is when the evidence was packed up and transported to the Nevada Test Site. It was received, physically, by the elite group of EG&G engineers," Jacobsen wrote. "The engineers were chosen to receive the crash remains and set up a secret facility just outside the boundary of the Nevada Test Site, sixteen miles to the northwest of Groom Lake."

Under Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, she wrote, the flying saucer had been loaded with childlike aviators with large heads and oversized eyes and flown over Roswell in a black-project propaganda operation when it crashed in 1947.

The chapter explains how the EG&G engineers were instructed by Manhattan Project engineer and World War II presidential science adviser Vannevar Bush to figure out what made the saucer fly.

"But there was the second engineering problem to solve, the one involving the child-size aviators," Jacobsen wrote.

"Because two of the aviators were comatose but still alive, the men would have to transfer them into a Jell-O-like substance and stand them upright in two tubular tanks attached to a life-support system. Sometimes their mouths opened, and this gave the appearance of their trying to speak. ... What made their heads so big? ... And what about their haunting, oversize eyes?

"The engineers were told that the children were rumored to have been kidnapped by Dr. Josef Mengele, the Nazi madman who ... was known to have performed unspeakable experimental surgical procedures mostly on children, dwarfs and twins."

Three pages later, Jacobsen asks, "When did it end?"

"At least through the 1980s it was still going on," the EG&G engineer replies.

Jacobsen's book has been on the New York Times best-seller list for eight weeks.

After the book's release in May, Barnes told ABC's "Nightline" there was "absolutely no chance that last chapter is true in any fashion." There were too many well drillers, cooks, medics and support staff who would have had knowledge of such practices to make it a well-kept secret for 60 years, he said.

The anonymous engineer has since been identified by the Roadrunners as test site pioneer Al O'Donnell.

Reached at his Henderson home Thursday, O'Donnell, 89, said, "I can't say anything about that operation whatsoever."

When asked if the events described in the book's last chapter were all true, O'Donnell said: "I would hope so."

He referred further questions to Nicole Dewey, the book publisher's spokeswoman.

"We stand by our author and her reporting in the entire book," Dewey wrote in an email.

When Jacobsen was asked by the Review-Journal if she believed the events in her book really happened, she wouldn't answer "yes" or "no."

"I believe the veracity of my source," she said. "I worked with my source for over two years, and his recollection of events over three decades always proved to be accurate down to the minutia."

As for the Roadrunners' criticism, "everyone is entitled to their opinion," she said.

Aerospace historian Peter Merlin, who is cited in the book, said he read it twice and "found blatant factual errors throughout the whole book. The last chapter is a horror."

Jacobsen, a contributing editor at Los Angeles Times Magazine and an investigative reporter, pointed to an explanation note in the book: "One cannot rule out the possibility that the elite EG&G engineers were given false information as a means of coercing them into a morally reprehensible program; in 1951, there was no greater enemy to the free world than Joseph Stalin. Until Russia opens its UFO archives, Stalin's side of the story will remain unknown."

Barnes, the Roadrunners' president, said he believes the childlike aviator tale was fabricated to give the publisher something "juicy" and "sensational." The anonymous source finally caved in "to just shut her up," he said.

"This is crap," Barnes said. "It would have been 'the' book on Area 51. It was not."

My own judgement remains that Jacobsen's book is a classic limited hangout with elements deliberately added to undermine the veracity even of those parts which are true.

The "Soviet child aviators" story, complete with a dash of Mengele, is utter nonsense.

However, it conveniently distracts attention away from the likely real nature of some of the research undertaken at Groom Lake: namely investigation of Nazi Schwarze Sonne technology.

[Charles Drago]

FWIW, I remain steadfastly in both camps: human technology and VERY high strangeness.

[Gary Severson]

This from Oxford Ph.D Joseph Farrell in his book "Black Sun".

316

In this respect, it is perhaps significant that some contemporary observers of the American space program and its odd thirty-year long "holding pattern" and tapestry of inconsistencies, lies, and obfuscations have long suspected that there are indeed two space programs inside the US government, the "public NASA one, and a quasi-independent one based deep within covert and black projects. In 1970, a curious document based upon the Garrison Investigation's voluminous files, called the "Nomenclature of an Assassination Cabal", otherwise known as the Torbitt document, was circulated, alleging a connection between this secret space program and the murder of President John F. Kennedy. Radio talk show conspiracy theorist Mae Brussel concurred: the secret space program was being run inside and quasi-independently of the public NASA program, and both were being coordinated by Wernher von Braun.
In this connection it is perhaps informative that the last document in the Cantwheel Majestic-12 documents is a Top Secert memo from November 12, 1963, - a scant ten days before the assassination - from President Kennedy to the Director of Counter Intelligence of the Central Intelligence Agency:
SUBJECT: Classification review of all UFO intelligence files affecting National Security. As I had discussed with you previously, I have initiated ???????? and have instructed James Webb to develop a program with the Soviet Union in joint space and lunar exploration. It would be very helpful if you would have the high threat cases reviewed with the purpose of identification of bona fide as opposed to classified CIA and USAF sources. It is important that we make a clear distinction between the knowns and the unknowns in the event the Soviets try to mistake our extended cooperation as a cover for intelligence gathering of their defence (sic) and space programs. When this data has been sorted out, I would like you to arrange a program of data sharing with NASA where Unknowns are a factor. This will help NASA mission directors in their defensive responsibilties. I would like an interim report on the data review no later than February 1, 1964. /s/ John F. Kennedy.[size=12]68 [/SIZE]

[Peter Lemkin]

The Torbitt Doc and the 'research' of Farrell are pretty shaky ground, IMO :what: Both have shreds of truth and gobs of nothingness. One of the standard methods of assassinating the JFK Assassination research has long been via 'ufo' type disinfo...and it comes from the TOP. Please, spare us. :mexican:

[Jan Klimkowski]

The Torbitt Doc and the 'research' of Farrell are pretty shaky ground, IMO :what: Both have shreds of truth and gobs of nothingness. One of the standard methods of assassinating the JFK Assassination research has long been via 'ufo' type disinfo...and it comes from the TOP. Please, spare us. :mexican:

Peter - with respect, Yes and No.

Seamus Coogan and I have been several rounds over the NOMENCLATURE OF AN ASSASSINATION CABAL.

Farrell's LBJ book is also a hotchpotch, commissioned to prove a thesis that Farrell doesn't seem to believe in.

However, Nazi Schwarze Sonne mysticism, and links between Permindex, Clay Shaw and Gladio are real phenomena.

My own view, as stated above, is that products of Schwarze Sonne mysticism may very well have been investigated by Paperclip scientists at bases including the one now known as "Area 51".

[Gary Severson]

The Torbitt Doc and the 'research' of Farrell are pretty shaky ground, IMO :what: Both have shreds of truth and gobs of nothingness. One of the standard methods of assassinating the JFK Assassination research has long been via 'ufo' type disinfo...and it comes from the TOP. Please, spare us. :mexican:

The title of the post was Mae Brussell not UFOs. Why not indict her too as shaky? The new book, Area 51, is not about aliens but about Nazi technology

[Phil Dragoo]

Jacobsen puts CIA next to Area 51, and gives it the mission to prevent war. This in itself is a Richter Six fatal paradox.


Compare to Robert G. Vinson, Flight from Dallas, arriving Roswell, jostling through arcades crowded with hordes of variegated aliens departing for corners of the galaxy.


And the sequentially updated covers for the 1947 Flying Saucer headline, weather balloons, then dummies in flight suits.


Area 51 is a good place to make neat toys in secret.


The A-tests: one LANL scientist remembered ground-surfing, hiding in test bunkers to scare fellow scientists.


One techie describes a new technology to photograph the sky above and project it through the underside skin, presto visual stealth.


Soviets with saucer technology in 1947then why didn't they prevail in Korean airspace.


Jacobsen's isn't even a good George Noory show.


Our former landlord who would come off the hill to grow his chilis ran the 1500-vehicle motor pool for Zia Company the precursor to EG&G. His demise was that of Lee Marvin in Richest Man in Bogota going blind, those little blood vessels in the eyes bursting, but oh no not from radiation.


Jacobsen's assignment is to vacuum up the last curiosity about secret projects, comingle them with the ridiculous, and broadcast the mix onto the fertile hillside of the public imagination.


Take something from one side of the fence and project it through the other. Nothing to see.