Bob Lazar -- Annie Jacobsen and the Area 51 Book: Competing Narratives
Bob Lazar -- Annie Jacobsen and the Area 51 Book: Competing Narratives
The Book
| Feature | Detail |
|---|---|
| Title | Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base |
| Author | Annie Jacobsen |
| Published | 2011; Little, Brown and Company |
| Approach | Journalistic; based on interviews with former Area 51 personnel who agreed to speak on the record; research into declassified government documents |
| Reception | New York Times bestseller; widely praised for its investigative journalism on the confirmed history of Area 51's black programs; controversial for its claims about Roswell |
What Jacobsen's Book Claims
Jacobsen's "Area 51" is primarily a serious, well-documented history of the confirmed classified programs at Groom Lake -- the U-2, the A-12, the OXCART program, the SR-71, the D-21 drone, and related programs. This portion of the book is regarded as authoritative and is consistent with subsequently released government documents.
However, the book's final section makes a claim about the Roswell Incident that generated significant controversy: Jacobsen claims to have interviewed a former Area 51 engineer who told her that the "craft" recovered at Roswell was a Soviet aircraft designed with technology derived from captured Nazi scientists, piloted by human children who had been surgically altered to appear non-human by Dr. Josef Mengele. The aircraft was allegedly sent over New Mexico by Joseph Stalin to create a "War of the Worlds" panic in the United States.
Why This Matters for the Lazar Story
Jacobsen's Roswell claim -- which she presents as a single unverifiable source -- represents a competing narrative about what is in the facilities Lazar claims to have worked at. In her framework:
- Area 51 contains recovered Soviet/Nazi experimental technology, not extraterrestrial craft
- The "aliens" associated with recovered craft are surgically altered human children, not extraterrestrial beings
- The government's secrecy is about concealing Cold War activities and war crimes, not ET contact
This narrative is dramatically different from Lazar's and is itself highly controversial. Most Roswell researchers -- including those skeptical of the ET hypothesis -- found the Mengele/Stalin explanation less plausible than either the ET explanation or the Project Mogul explanation.
The Value of the Confirmed History
Despite the controversy over the Roswell section, Jacobsen's research on the confirmed programs provides significant context for Lazar's claims:
- It documents in detail how extreme the security culture at Area 51 has been
- It confirms that the government did officially deny things that were true (aircraft programs, workers' deaths)
- It establishes that extraordinary technology was being developed at Groom Lake throughout the Cold War period
- It provides detailed accounts of the compartmentalization and secrecy that Lazar described
The confirmed history Jacobsen documents is more consistent with Lazar's described experience of the facility than the official government narrative of "just weather research" would be.
