On NPR this evening, I happened upon an interview with Annie Jacobsen, author of the new book: Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base. She asserts that she has access to numerous disgruntled former Area 51 scientists who know all about the famous Roswell crash that all the tinfoil-hat crowd is so up in arms about. So she says, there really was a flying saucer crash that happened in Roswell, and that it was piloted by (spoiler alert!) Russian kids genetically or plastic-surgically modified to look like extra-terrestrials. You see, the whole thing was a big propaganda stunt pulled by the Ruskies to make all Americans panic like we did during Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds radio broadcast. Those dirty commies heard about that, and they wanted to watch us all scream like sissies and stuff. But the joke’s on them, apparently we just hid the facts and decided to fake flying saucers and extra-terrestrials to make fun of hippies and stuff. It’s all true!
Or is it? I can’t imagine this is anything but a load of hogwash. Seriously, if this was really a commie plot, how the hell did a couple of 13-year-old plastic surgery disasters fly a saucer (a notoriously difficult shape to navigate successfully in the air!) all the way to New Mexico to crash in the first place? My guess is that these “scientists”, her secret sources, are doing something referred to scientifically as “pulling her leg”. I can see them now, all meeting in a bar to tell each other what bullshit they fed her: The first guy says: “I couldn’t believe it! I told her the crashed flying saucer was real, and she believed it!” And they all go: “Ha ha ha ha ha ha!” So then the second guy says: “Oh yeah? That’s nothing! I told her that the whole thing was a commie plot ordered by Stalin, and she ate it up!” And they all go: “Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!” And the third guy goes: “You think that’s funny? I told her that there were little aliens in the crashed flying saucer, but that they weren’t real aliens; they were little Russian kids genetically modified by that Nazi doctor Josef Mengele!” And then they all fall down crying laughing, pounding the floor in a delirium of hilarity.
(OMG: As I am finishing up writing this very post, Annie Jacobsen herself is coming on The Daily Show on the TV set behind me!)
