BLOOMBERG: Citing interviews with a single unnamed former engineer from government contractor EG&G — now part of URS Corp. (URS) — Jacobsen purports to lift the veil on what really crashed near Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947 and what happened to the wreckage when it got to Nevada. The craft, she writes, wasn’t an alien spaceship, as many have since theorized, nor was it a weather balloon, as the U.S. military alleged in its clumsy cover story. It was, according to Jacobsen, a Nazi-inspired Soviet spy plane with Cyrillic letters embossed on the hull, crewed by malformed adolescents, two of whom survived the crash. Stalin used captured Nazi aircraft designs to build the plane, according to Jacobsen. She says he had Mengele provide surgically altered “grotesque child-sized aviators” who were supposed to climb out of the aircraft and be mistaken for visitors from Mars — to sow the kind of confusion in the U.S. created by Orson Welles’s 1938 “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast. The wreckage and the comatose survivors found their way to the Nevada test site, where Area 51 engineers may have experimented on them for decades, Jacobsen says. MORE
ANNIE JACOBSEN ON FRESH AIR: “There was an unusual moment where that source became very upset and told me things that were stunning that’s almost impossible to believe at first read. And that is that a flying disc really did crash in New Mexico and it was transported to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, and then in 1951 it was transferred to Area 51, which is why the base is called Area 51. And the stunning part of the reveal is that my source, who I absolutely believe and worked with for 18 months on this, was one of the engineers who 
received the equipment and he also received the people who were in the craft. “The people were, according to the source, were child-sized pilots, and there’s a lot of debate about how old they were. He believes they were 13, although other people believe they may have been older. […] The child-sized aviators in this craft [that crashed in New Mexico] were the result of a Soviet human experimentation program, and they had been made to look like aliens a la Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds […] What is firsthand information is that [my source] worked with these bodies [of the pilots] and he was an eyewitness to the horror of seeing them and working with them. Where they actually came from is obviously the subject of debate. […] The plan, according to my source, was to create panic in the United States with this belief that a UFO had landed with aliens inside of it. And one of the most interesting documents is the second CIA director, Walter Bedell Smith, memos back and forth to the National Security Council talking about how the fear is that the Soviets could make a hoax against America involving a UFO and overload our early air-defense warning system, making America vulnerable to an attack.” MORE
AUDIO: Annie Jacobsen on Fresh Air
TIME: Her accounts are strong and believable, but many of the documents nonetheless remain classified, meaning that it’s hard to know whether her theory is reliable or just mere speculation. MORE
RELATED: Dr. Mengele And The Land Of Twins
PREVIOUSLY: [Annie Jacobsen] survived a flight with 14 harmless Syrian musicians — then spread 3,000 bigoted and paranoid words across the Internet. […] The piece in question, “Terror in the Skies, Again?” is the work of Annie Jacobsen, a writer for WomensWallStreet.com. Jacobsen shares the account of the emotional meltdown she and her fellow passengers experienced when, aboard a Northwest Airlines flight from Detroit to 
Los Angeles, a group of Middle Eastern passengers proceeded to act “suspiciously.” […] Intriguing, no? I, for one, fully admit that certain acts of airborne crime and treachery may indeed open the channels to a debate on civil liberties. Pray tell, what happened? Gunfight at 37,000 feet? Valiant passengers wrestle a grenade from a suicidal operative? Hero pilots beat back a cockpit takeover? Well, no. As a matter of fact, nothing happened. Turns out the Syrians are part of a musical ensemble hired to play at a hotel. The men talk to one another. They glance around. They pee. That’s it? That’s it. Now, in fairness to Jacobsen, I’ll admit that in-flight jitters over the conspicuous presence of a group of young Arabs is neither unexpected nor, necessarily, irrational. […] Jacobsen’s folly is in not being able to step back from that jumpiness — neither during the flight itself, at which point her worry and behavior are at least excusable, nor well after touching down safely. Speaking as a pilot, air travel columnist, and American, I find Jacobsen’s 3,000-word ghost story of Arab boogeymen among the most overwrought and inflammatory tracts I’ve encountered in some time. MORE
RELATED: Snopes Vets Annie Jacobsen’s “Terror In The Skies, Again?” Article
The Daily Show – Annie Jacobsen
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