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

First and foremost, this was a very enjoyable book. While it is indeed about Area 51, the author gives you a good and necessary background about the Cold War, which had it not happened somehow, there probably would've been no Area 51 as we know it. Reading this book and learning about how groundbreaking aircraft like the U2, OXCART, F-117 etc. were developed and tested helps one understand all the strange things that were reportedly sighted in the sky during the Cold War.

I really tried to see which Area 51 book to pickup that wasn't all about UFOs, I was looking for a book that would give insight as to how things on the base were actually run day to day, the role of the base during key moments and periods of the Cold War. By and large this is that book, but if I have to nitpick, I wish more could've been discussed about the 1980s when stealth technology and other out of this world type stuff would've been developed and tested.

Now for the bad... If you do any searching for Annie Jacobsen and this book, a lot of what you'll find details the biggest claim in this book. That would be what "really" happened at Roswell in 1947. Consider this a *spoiler alert*: what crashed at Roswell was a type of drone aircraft built by the Soviets, apparently manned by deformed children that'd been operated on by Josef Mengele for Stalin. Stalin wanted to recreate the type of panic Orson Welles did with his War of the Worlds broadcast, the deformed children were to be the aliens in this case.

That ridiculous load of crap is the one real complaint I have with this otherwise amazing and exhaustively researched book. An enjoyable read, great insight into a lot of classified projects, great sources, but with just one terrible, crack pot like explanation for Roswell. Maybe the craziest I've heard so far.

The author's history of the U-2 and SR-71 developments are accurate and interesting. Her account of the Roswell "aliens" is a farce. She quotes extensively from an engineer who supposedly knew the real story who in reality was having fun with her gullibility.

I enjoyed this book. I had already read the paperclip scientist, there were 3 at the lab where I worked. Anyhow, it appears that Jacobsen did a through job researching this book like the paperclip scientist, but I felt she left out some important details, let's pick and choose our facts. Finally the theory at the end of the book about Roswell is absurd at best. She should have left that out.... Ranks up there with the Ancient Aliens theories. Otherwise a good read.

What seems for the first nearly 350 pages to be a decent, yet sometimes flawed, book on Area 51 and the conventional technology developed there, is in fact an embarrassing piece of fiction.

How can an author who attempted to use facts and multiple verified sources for 90% of this book suddenly write the last chapter with the evidence of one unconfirmed source? On top of that, it just happens to be the most unrealistic part of the whole book!

Terrible.

Although much has been written regarding the inept research of the author, which some reviewers have defended by referring to the "references" (questionable in their own right) in the back of the book, all credulity was lost to this reader when the author misplaced the Burbank airport in relation to Northridge on the map. Worse still was when she located McCarran Air Field in North Las Vegas. How can one expect to give credence to an investigative reporter who cannot read a map, or worse a GPS system. If the simplest and easiest to verify facts are muffed, how can anything of greater potential significance be taken at face value?

As laughable as much of the crucial historical and factual errors are throughout this book, if one takes an X-files view, then one must ask serious questions:

Why did she write this, what was her goal?
Who supplied her information, and misinformation?
Was there a covert or overt plot that reaches beyond the pages of the book?
Could the CIA, Air Force, and/or other federal government agencies have been involved in providing the author with enough propaganda to dilute any real truth about Area 51 and further confuse an already ill informed public?

I would rather believe that somehow a conspiracy was involved in the production of this book than to believe that I simply wasted a tiny chunk of my life reading this barely more than pulp fiction drivel. It's just too bad for me that I am not a conspiracy theorist.

This is an absolutely fascinating book. Many won't like it because they prefer to be spoon-fed fan fiction and to be soothingly reassured like children that Bob Lazar's fables are genuine; luckily she steers mostly clear of that (despite giving Lazar too much credit in some places as anything other than the clear fraud that he is). I can't vouch for all her claims about specific people, events and places. Some people here who have written detailed reviews critiquing things that she got wrong seem to now a lot more about the history of US aerospace, defense and secret projects than I do, so I'll defer to their knowledge if Jacobsen got any of that stuff wrong but even so, the overall message and the nature and breadth of the programs that have gone on at Area 51 (and the Nevada Test Site) are the important things for me.

Many of the details are straight from the mouths of the people who actually worked there, which was fascinating. However, I did notice that she talked a lot about things that didn't go on in Area 51 itself (like the NERVA tests), and I wonder how long the book would have been if those were excised. Still, I'm glad that they were included because it gives more of a sense for how the region adjoining Area 51 has been involved in highly classified projects and how Area 51 is more properly thought of as part of a larger complex of operations and secrets rather than just something out there by itself. In other words, critiquing the book on the basis that it talked quite extensively about things beyond the jurisdiction of Area 51 is a bit unfair because the NTS is such an integral part of the context and meaning of the base.

Now, where the book fell down for me was with the explanation for Area 51's establishment, as conveyed to her by her source (the EG&G engineer). The problem isn't that she included it, per se. It's that, given that she did, she might as well have expanded more on the other conspiratorial and tin-foil hat dimensions (such as aliens, the Lazar fable, and other such stories) that gives the base such a degree of mystique in the public eye. She does talk about them, but not all that much, and overall she gives the EG&G engineer's story the most attention out of these tin-foil hat stories (to be fair, she had been interviewing the guy for a year). I'm going to just come out and say it: the story conveyed by her source is an absolute pile of crap. We're supposed to believe that Stalin deliberately sent highly classified and radically advanced technology to the US on a silver platter - at a time when the US had a monopoly on the atomic bomb. We're supposed to believe that electromagnetic propulsion was being used in the 1940s - yet that the US and Soviet pilots were trundling around in jet-powered aircraft throughout the entirety of the Cold War instead. Surely, if the Soviets felt they were at liberty to spare one of these super-exotic discs to "send a warning shot over Truman's bow", they would have also felt sufficiently advanced in this area of technology (along with long-range remote control from a plane flying near Alaska to guide the Horten-derived disc it to New Mexico!) to churn these things out on a massive scale. Yet there is zero evidence for such a thing. The Soviets didn't fly spy planes over the US; the opposite was true. The Soviets didn't master stealth technology; the Americans did. The Soviet archives have been opened to the West for decades now and nothing like what her source says has been revealed, which you would think they should have if they got a head start on the technology, were using it, and were just as fanatical about pushing the limits of science and technology to win the Cold War and the Arms Race as the US was.

The Mengele connection was absurd as well. How could Stalin be sure that the US wouldn't simply spill the beans on such an atrocity?

I think that the source was either crazy, delusional or deliberately pulling her leg. As for the "S-4" reference: he clearly got that either from Lazar's story (which he was trying to emulate; Lazar came out with his story in 1989 and it was well known throughout the 90s. Jacobsen interviewed her source in 2010) or he got it from where Lazar probably got it: the "S-4" facility at Tonopah Test Range (which actually does exist, unlike the ridiculous "arms to your side" clown-show that Lazar wants us to believe) that Lazar likely heard from a friend of his who worked at TTR.

I highly recommend this book. I certainly learned a lot.

Hi,

I read through the reviews here. I can understand why the Roadrunners feel betrayed but I feel parts of the book are simply ways of talking about things that one can't talk about openly.

Science and engineering comes at a price. For every leap of technology there is a corresponding human and ecological cost. While one can celebrate nuclear technology, the aviation technology, avionics as great advances - one has to face the fact that a lot of nasty stuff that happened in the process of making these advances.

Today there are strong health and safety norms, this is largely because a lot more is understood about the ill-effects of radiation, chemical and biological exposure. In the days of old - there were no such norms or if they existed people didn't follow them because the enforcement machinery was not in place.

It also makes sense that once the idea of the "born secret" came into use for the physics of nuclear devices, the related notion of compartmented information gained popularity. Information compartmentation is great for secrecy - but not so great for health and safety. Can you really have secret research being conducted in one room and then not tell the people in the next room about the potential for hazardous and life-threatening exposure? That is where as Yeats once said - "things fall apart".

The discussions on Plumbbob, Hardtack, Argus and Dominic are ways of highlighting the ecological costs. These have been discussed at length in other more authoritative accounts - but the real elephant in the room is unethical human experiments. Was there a regime of such experiments that accompanied the advances in aviation, space, nuclear technology?

It is well known that medical norms on vivisection, patient rights etc... didn't converge to their present positions until well into the late 70s and that programs like Paperclip gave Auschwitz and Unit 731 "scientists" an opportunity to continue their brand of "research". The disclosures to the Frank Church committee on activities at Fort Detrick are a clear indicator that this kind of stuff happened in the US too. It is possible that a secret regime of government sponsored unethical human experiments predates the work at Fort Detrick.

It is also curious that most of the classification protocols secure information for periods approaching 150 years. At the present levels of life expectancy - that is equal to the entire lifetimes of two generations (parents and children). If one were to reduce the risk of legal accountability for genetic effects of any experiments, one would seek such a long classification period. By contrast the stuff pertaining to the detailed construction and functioning of nuclear devices is classified in perpetuity.

This is what came to mind when I read the book. I suspect that may be what Annie was trying to say without talking through the painfully difficult details.

It is true that a full disclosure of the details will go a long way in ensuring that this sort of thing does not happen again. But as the only people who could shed some light on this issue are gradually dying - one can only have indirect discussions.

There is another bigger problem which in a decade or so will become the new elephant in the room. It surfaced briefly in discussions about the Carlsbad storage facility and in discussions about the RRW. The fear of technological regression due to expanding ignorance of what was done earlier. As the people who know the details leave us - our ability to "know" what was done before will diminish. If there is a point of time where old information is lost at a greater rate than new information is created - one will approach such the point of technological regression at a faster pace. A disclosure of the details would significantly hedge against it.

A lot of people have pointed out errors in author's text, I agree there are errors but I feel one should avoid missing the wood for the trees.

This is a 'must-read' for anyone who has not worked in a high-security environment as she very capably explains how classified programs tend to lead to strange stuff happening. She does the best - and by that I mean the most accurate - job of any commonly available sources at describing the inside stories of the various programs. She points out how the programs control the press by letting the press run wild with incredible and mostly false stories. It's true; I've seen it. Deny something and the press make up the best cover stories.
She uses security terms in the right way and those who spent their lives in this kind of stuff will recognize it. I personally know one or more of her sources and they know where-of they speak.
There is very little 'woo-woo' in this and she clearly identifies the weaknesses of her information when she goes out on a limb with the story at the end. (You'll have to read it to know what I'm talking about - no plot spoilers.)
It's not a perfect book but it's the best of its kind.

The author gives us the most fantastic explanation I have ever heard for the mysterious crash at Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. Yes, a flying saucer crashed there, and in it were beings with small bodies, large bald heads and huge bulging eyes. But none of it was extra-terrestrial. Stalin, the USSR's dictator, had mastered flying saucer technology with the help of captured Nazi scientists. He then enlisted the help of sadistic Nazi "doctor" Mengele, famous for his numerous "experiments" on concentration camp inmates, to take hapless young pre-teenagers and mutilate them to look like aliens. He then arranged the crash, hoping that the discovery of the "aliens" would start a panic in the US, reminiscent of the 1938 panic following Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds" radio broadcast about a Martian invasion, which the public believed was a real event. And the author has only one "anonymous" source for all this.

One wonders. If the Russians had flying saucer technology, why didn't they use it in the Cold War, and why don't they have it today? Well, it didn't quite work out, technically. And why didn't the US expose the plot at the time? Well, we needed time to figure out the new technology, we didn't want to discuss human experimentation because we were also doing human experiments of questionable ethics, and we didn't want to admit that the enemy had entered our airspace with impunity. Well then, now that it's all well in the past, why doesn't the US government come clean today? No answer.

Entertaining book. No more than that.

Filled with technical and factual errors, and characterized by repetitive and breathless writing. A tedious, eye-rolling read. Save your money.