Journalist Annie Jacobsen: The Roswell Crash Was a Communist Black Propaganda Campaign

I'm excited to talk to you. I'm super excited to talk to you about several subjects, but this one, thank you very much for this first edition copy of your Area 51 and Uncensored History of America's top secret military base book. I'm super excited about this. I heard through the grapevine you were a fan. I'm a freak when it comes to this stuff. What do you think is going on up there? I mean same thing that's going on all over the place when it comes to military secrets, which is stuff that you want to know about, very few people know about, and every now and then a journalist gets a hint at it. Yeah. Do you think there's any alien stuff up there? I write in the book all about that. Yeah. Well tell me. Last 12 pages. You want me to- Want me to go to the last 12 pages? What do you think? So Area 51 was this secret test base where the CIA was running spy plane programs, right? So interestingly, my new book is about ground branch, guys on the ground. That's about air branch, what we were doing in the air. And it was this idea that we should spy on the enemy, okay? But if you go back in time why Area 51 really started, you learn that it was a base hidden inside of a base, nuclear weapons, and it was all about beating Stalin at his black propaganda campaign, since I write in the book, to hoax Americans in a war of the world type scenario, whereby little men who looked like aliens would get out of an aircraft and the government would go crazy about it. And then Stalin would say, look, not only do we have technology better than you, but we have a better propaganda department than you. Really? Joe, you got to read the whole book. This is a tough opening. You got me on the spot. It is a tough opening, but it's a good spot. Right? It's a good spot. So Stalin just hired short people? What did he do? All right, I'm going to make you save that. I'm going to make you earn that. Save it? Yeah. How's that? I mean, you want me to talk about that right now, right off the bat. Why is that? I'm sweating. We're going to get to surprise kill vanish as well. But I want to just, yeah, why does it make you sweat? Oh my God, it's such an incendiary topic. I mean, people want to believe they're aliens. Right. Okay. I mean, I've spent five books dealing with the mythology of Area 51, which is phenomenal in its own way, because it speaks so much to power, to morality, to information, to people's desire to know what's going on and the government's desire to keep things hidden. So this topic is always coming up because a lot of people want to believe that there were aliens in that craft. And my source, who I write about in the book, told me otherwise that they were genetically, you know, that they- Let me stop you right there. Because when you say that craft, what you mean is the supposed UFO wreckage that crashed in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. That's what you mean, right? Yes. But that was never supposedly taken to Area 51. It was supposed to be taken to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. The legend has it that Truman flew there to meet them and- Right? That's one legend. Yeah. So in my book, I interview a man who worked for the Atomic Energy Commission, who tells a different story, tells the story of receiving that craft at Area 51 in 1951, which is why the base is called Area 51. And that inside the craft were humans who had been altered, surgically altered to look like aliens in a plan for Stalin to sort of twist Truman's arm. Because at that time, we had the atomic bomb. When Roswell happened, we had the atomic bomb and the Soviets did not. Can I stop you there? When you say humans that were surgically altered to look like aliens, do you mean- So this is 1951. So you're talking about four years after this supposed crash. Yes. So what was left- They had the bodies, they kept the bodies. They kept the bodies. In what? From Albeheim? Yes. And also because the idea was, and remember, or I can't say remember because you haven't read the book yet. Right. And I wrote this book eight years ago. But it did really impact a lot of my thinking and working on government secrecy projects because it makes you really consider what a hoax means and what it means to a population of people and how the government begins to work with disinformation versus cover stories and all of that. But going back to answer your question, that is what I was told by the source that- But how reliable is this source? This is a very incendiary idea to rely upon one individual's recollection of it. Which is why the book went through the roof in terms of people being upset about it. I mean- Were they? Oh my God, I interviewed 79 CIA guys, Air Force guys, spy pilots, engineers. I mean- Who was mad at you? The conspiracy theorists were mad at me because they said, this woman is bananas. They were aliens. Well, even if they weren't aliens, right, there's also, there's accounts that it was some sort of a test vehicle and that there were actually just dummies inside there, crash test dummies that they used. There's been a bunch of different versions of it, but the most compelling version of the Area 51 alien myth to me is Bob Lazar. Did you get into that? Yeah, he plays a huge role in Area 51. I mean, before Bob Lazar went public, no one even knew about Area 51. Well, people knew. It was common folklore, but there was no definitive proof that there was something going on over there other than some weird VHS footage of things flying around in the desert that seemed to be behaving in a way that modern aircrafts are not totally capable of, at least modern piloted aircrafts are not totally capable of. I mean, which brings me to another book I wrote called The Pentagon's Brain, which, you know, sort of off this idea was like, wait a minute, what kind of technology is the government capable of? Right. And the whole department for that reason called DARPA, which looks at weapons systems 25 years out. So the idea that you and I don't know what the military is capable of in the air, underwater, wherever it may be, is because we're not thinking 25 years out and they are, and they're developing weapons systems, the great weapons systems of the future. That's what they call them. Right. Like how they developed the stealth bomber. And that was all out in Area 51 in Groom Lake.