New Book Reports Soviets Behind Roswell UFO Scare 135
jalefkowit writes "A new book by Los Angeles Times Magazine investigative reporter Annie Jacobsen, titled Area 51, reports that that the famous 1947 UFO sightings in Roswell, New Mexico, were actually an attempt by the Soviet Union to demonstrate that they could panic the American population if they wished. According to the book, the UFOs were actually aircraft derived from flying-wing technology, piloted by 'child-size aviators' surgically altered by captured Nazi doctors to appear more frightening. Skeptics note that this account is based on testimony provided to Jacobsen by a single unnamed source, who she describes as one of only five engineers given full access to the crash debris at the top-secret facility in Nevada known as Area 51."
The real headline is (Score:5, Insightful)
The truth will never be known (Score:5, Insightful)
No matter how many people speak out the "truth", there have been so many wildly different stories and claims that everything automatically gets tagged as bullshit in everyone's mind.
Seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm more willing to believe it was an actual UFO.
And I don't believe in Alien UFOs.
This is the most convoluted conspiracy theory I've heard since the "9/11 was perpetrated by the US" and "Obama's Birth Certificate" nutjobs
Re:Whoosh (Score:2, Insightful)
The story is the fact that the organization behind Area 51, the US Department of Energy, can classify information so tightly that no one in the US Government (Including the President) could be deemed to have a "need to know" to see it
Or the DoE has no such ability, and the only reason nobody has ever been able to see this "information" is because there's no such information to see beyond the rather mundane and the now widely reported stories regarding weather/spy balloons. Even if there was still a hidden truth behind this, how do you know what the President or any other high-level official has seen? Right, you don't. Your "real story" is as much a conspiracy theory as the UFO crash itself.
Re:Bullshit, but a kernel of truth there (Score:4, Insightful)
Eyewitness testimony of the Roswell wreckage is consistent with a high-altitude balloon. Witnesses described strange lightweight metal foil and strange strong but lightweight metal (keep in mind that this was before the general public would have encountered much aluminum material in consumer goods). And we know that the top secret Project Mogul was real and was testing nearby in the same time period. We also know that the military imposed a pretty heavy-handed lockdown of the materials not long after the crash and that witnesses were even threatened by MP's not to talk about the materials they had seen.
Now, in that case, what do you think is the simplest, sanest explanation--that a Project Mogul balloon crashed or that the Soviet Union surgically altered humans to look like children and flew them in a strange craft to the middle of the desert, then crashed them, all to instill mild fear in a bunch of local rednecks? Or perhaps you believe that alien creatures capable of crossing the almost unimaginably vast emptiness of interstellar space decided to expend the vast amounts of energy needed to cross hundreds of light years--all just to go the the middle of nowhere out in the desert and buzz some military base (and maybe probe a few rednecks while they were here)?
Re:Bullshit, but a kernel of truth there (Score:2, Insightful)
The story is beyond stupid. The well established history of the advancement in aerodynamics in the US completely disproves the story.
Frankly, aliens are more likely that this bullshit story...and that's saying a lot!