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New Book Reports Soviets Behind Roswell UFO Scare
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."
Silly claims about surgically-altered child-sized navigators aside, there is a connection between the Soviets and Roswell. Project Mogul, a top secret program to spy on the Soviets, was being testing near Roswell in 1947. One of their spy balloons was what crashed in that famous incident (and why there was a subsequent cover-story and cover-up by the local military).
In fact, if you look at the mass of "UFO" incidents, you'll notice a pretty consistent pattern. They almost always took place near secret U.S. air bases during the height of the Cold War. Doesn't take a genius to figure out that the strange lights, mysterious craft, and "men in black" that people were seeing had a lot less to do with little green men than with Cold War secrecy, paranoia, and spycraft.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
An obscure journalist attempts to demonstrate that she can capture the attention of the media by publishing yet another a crackpot conspiracy theory.
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.
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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
You see, without that little doohicky, the universe stops.
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An actual alien crash landing is almost more believable than this "explanation".
She was on the daily show last week; she seemed pretty sane, even if her story doesn't... Judge for yourself.
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This narrative doesn't make sense for any of the players involved. The only way you see the plastic-surgeried child pilot is if you're deliberately crashing the thing - at which point it is clear to the people picking it up it's "normal" technology and the child is clearly a clumsily mutilated (even modern plastic surgery is not going to conceal this kind of thing) human. It would have also been immediately clear who did it, why it isn't scary aliens, and it would have been reasonably hard to do (requires launching a plane deep into the US). It also wouldn't make much sense to keep secret - the message is simple: the Russians are weird douchebags who sent a over a plane with a dead kid.
Contrast that with another, significantly-less-crazy-but-still-pretty-crazy plan that could have actually worked: Have a weird formation of small planes with blinking lights. Send them around at night to New York. If you want, maybe blow up the Statue of Liberty with an unconventional mix of explosives while shining a big light on it or something. Get a whole bunch of weird coincidence stuff going too, broadcast strange radio messages and have it happen in correspondence with some astrological phenomenon. Then get out real fast before they can find your planes, and see that they have conventional propulsion systems and human pilots.
Anyways, I'm sure you or I could do better than the above stupid plan with a little time to think it out (heck, a rope and a cornfield works pretty good). Imagining that the Russians, with plenty of time to think through a plan that required significant commitment, couldn't do better than mutilated kid crashing a plane in the desert... is just so very dumb. I think the only people dumb enough to accept it would be the morons who already have an "explanation" (ie. those who believe it was aliens).
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
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CLearly she stopped applying all thought when she talked about child altered surgically and/or genetically.
In fact, in order to use emotions to make her claims more believable, she changes from a proper journals 3rd person writting to a 1 person writing.
IT's crap. Complete hearsay. She also made the classic blunder of people who start to buy in to this kind of lunacy: Made up security clearances.
At one point she said:
My source remains anonymous because he is afraid of what will happen. He is the last remaining engineer on a 5 man tame.
As if that wouldn't give him away to the very people she claims he is afraid of.
"Gosh Bob, we would shut this person up, be he is anonymous. We do know he was on the uber top secret project with pal;id levels security, and we know he's the only surviving member. But Who can it be?"
When pressed she started making up crazier and wider reaching 'theories'. I mean she was told by some guy who claim to have been on some project, and then uses the Ad ignorantiam ad the 'argument from authority' logical fallacies.
IT';s kind of sad. Watching a good journalist get sucked in like that.
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Ah yes, the good old Cuban Missile Crisis of 1947. I remember it well.
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
I recently heard an interview with Annie Jacobsen and this book is a huge load of crap. It's all based on third-hand information ("I was told by someone, who was told by someone...."). She claims that the aircraft was being remotely piloted by the Soviets and contained people, who appeared to be 12-13 years old, who had been genetically engineered by Josef Mengele (who went to work for the Soviets after the end of WWI) to look like aliens.. Of course she had no explanation of how Mengele genetically engineered a few 12-13 year old people in the 2 years between the end of WWII and the crash at Roswell. Not to mention the fact that the knowledge and technology for genetic engineering didn't exist at that time. She never did answer questions about the people in the aircraft -- did the US recover them? Were they alive? Were they dead? She just changed the subject and started talking about something else.
The entire interview was nothing but weasel words and lots of backpedaling whenever she was asked about specific details.
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.
Well, yes. We should just ignore history. After all, today's in-use technologies, political conflicts, and possible conspiracies had nothing to do with what happened in the past.
I could buy that if it wasn't for the "altered by captured Nazi doctors to appear more frightening" part :P
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I remember i once read an article in a magazine that someone had recovered a piece of metal from the Nevada desert and had it analyzed. The author claimed this particular alloy was unknown on earth and gave the composition, i remember it had a particularly high nickel content.
My father was a mechanical engineer and I consulted his data books (this was around 1980, no wikipedia or google). I found an alloy that was very close to what was printed in that article, it happened to be a stainless steel designed for use in high temperatures.
So, the guy found a piece of a broken jet turbine near an air force proving grounds, went to all the trouble to have it analyzed, only to conclude it came from aliens...
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