Sucked Back In

After a few years away, I've been sucked back into the vortex of black ops, government conspiracies, and UFO's.

My fascination started when I was a kid, looking through my parents' copy of "Chariots of the Gods," which asks questions such as, "Did astronauts visit the Earth 40,000 years ago?" and "Did extraterrestrial beings help set up the giant stone faces that brood over Easter Island?"

I don't remember the answers, or frankly reading that much of it, but the pictures were cool and made me think about ancient civilizations and wonder whether it was possible that aliens had visited, say, the Incas.

I, like so many kids of my generation, was very taken by Steven Spielberg's "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," some of which I'm watching as I type this sentence. Thanks Retroplex!

Anyway, it's not like I obsessed about UFO's when I was a kid, but when I got into college I began thinking about them more. I wrote a short story in my 20s about two young brothers who see an alien space ship. The younger brother wants to tell their family, friends and the world about it, because he's just so fascinated by it. The older brother believes that if they talk about it in public, people will think they're crazy. I don't remember the exact ending, but it definitely gave the younger brother (basically me) the upper hand.

Of course, later in my 20s I got into "The X-Files." I loved the one-off episodes, which dealt with all sorts of odd characters and spooky sightings, more than the government conspiracy aspects that took over, and eventually ruined, the show.

I read Whitley Strieber's Communion, in which the man known up to that point for horror novels The Wolfen and The Hunger details his alleged encounter with extraterrestrials.

And several years ago I began writing a concept album about UFO's, which I have subsequently used as an outline of sorts for a novel with the working title "Area 51 Is for Lovers." My plan is to complete both an album and the novel and market them together in digital form.

So I think it's safe to say I've put more thought into the extraterrestrial phenomenon than most people my age. But of late I'd taken AboveTopSecret.com and other conspiracy web sites off my regular browsing list. I spent my time a little more constructively: finishing my collection of short stories, trying to launch myself as a children's book writer, raising my kids, coaching Owen's baseball team, etc.

OK, I did discuss UFO's with my buddy Jay Kumar for his excellent podcast, Completely Conspicuous, back in February 2010. You can check it out here.

But, seriously, I've not given much thought to alien spacecrafts and nefarious government plots for quite some time. But I just finished reading Annie Jacobsen's "Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base," so now I'm back on-line, both in the sense of wanting to know what's up with top-secret military projects and possible alien incursions, and in checking out some of my old favorite web sites.

I used to be positive that Earth had been visited by aliens. In the galaxy, with its billions of stars, I figured, there must be at least one planet out there with a civilization advanced enough to locate another planet with advanced beings, and to figure out how to travel through space to get here.

But after having finished "Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base," by Annie Jacobsen, I believe that a lot of what gets reported as UFO's are actually secret government projects. Area 51 is the place where the CIA and the Air Force developed spy planes and drones. Nearby locations that are part of the Nevada Test Site have seen hundreds of nuclear bombs detonated over the last half century.

Jacobsen does a great job documenting the history of the super-secret site, which the U.S. government has never acknowledged. Or it has, depending on whom you ask. She talked to numerous former employees of the CIA and the military who worked at the site starting in the '50s. The stories about the Cold War, and overhead reconnaissance, nuclear testing, spy projects and the like are fascinating enough.

But then at the end of the book (SPOILER ALERT!!) Jacobsen drops the biggest bombshell of them all: the only unnamed source in her book claims that he was one of five engineers (and the only surviving one) to have worked to reverse engineer the infamous UFO that crashed in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947.

He claims the craft had Russian writing inside, and that the "alien beings" that have long rumored to have been inside were actually genetically or biologically altered, child-sized humans. The engineer claims that his team was told that Soviet leader Joseph Stalin had recruited the most heinous Nazi doctor of them all, Josef Mengele, to aid the Russians in their effort to pull off a UFO hoax that would throw the United States into a "War of the Words"-type panic. Mengele, known for his demonic surgeries and medical abuses of twins, Gypsies, Jews and other minorities in Germany, provided the Russians with children, or very small adults, with enlarged hears and saucer-like eyes, the book claims.

The aircraft that they landed in was controlled remotely, goes the argument, and the Russians' hope was that when they landed on U.S. soil, the government and people who think we'd been invaded by aliens and that all hell would break loose.

The engineer also claims that his team and subsequent ones not only worked to reverse-engineer the craft, but also performed tests on humans similar to what Mengele and the Russians had done.

I don't know what to think about all of this. Last week I went online and found reports citing many of Jacobsen's named sources, and they say she's way off with this claim, and that she included it only to sell books. Of course, taking the word of men who spent their entire adult lives keeping secrets for the government is rather difficult to do. Are they helping to perpetuate what Jacobsen claims is the real reason that Area 51 has never been acknowledged? That rather than as a way to keep all their airplane and bomb technology in the black, that what the government really is doing is hiding the fact that we engaged in unspeakable human testing in the name of fighting the Cold War?

Frankly, just about any scenario seems possible to me. I believe that during the Cold War, paranoid men did crazy things. Some of these actions were necessary, sure. Preventing the Soviets from putting nuclear missiles on Cuba was a must-do. I condone spy planes and satellites, although I wish they weren't necessary.

But the number of nuclear bombs that the U.S. government detonated -- in Nevada, in the Pacific -- is just ridiculous. Those events caused damage to the environment and surely to humans and animals in the area. Others were just purely evil in their disregard for what might happen. For instance, the Atomic Energy Commission (now the Department of Energy) detonated a thermonuclear device in the atmosphere, despite protestations from the scientific community that doing so could possibly set the planet's ozone layer on fire.

Reading Jacobsen's book makes we wonder what's been going on at Area 51 for the last 30 years or so. She doesn't cover that time period, because the government hasn't declassified anything since the late '70s. The technology that has come out of Area 51 is amazing: stealth bombers, which were in the works since the late '60s but didn't get perfected until the late '70s; drones, which are now commonplace in our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but which were first envisioned in the '50s; bunker-buster bombs; the march of military hardware goes on.

So I have to think that whatever's been in the works out in the Nevada desert for the last few decades has got to be pretty incredible. Do the current projects relate to cyber wars? Biologial warfare? Battle field cyborgs? Who the hell knows?

In the course of writing this, I did some online research and learned about Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, which some folks in the conspiracy industry call "Area 52." These folks, including the dudes from History Channel's "UFO Hunters," say that since Area 51 was exposed in the '80s as the place where so much military-industrial-espionage work goes on, much of the black ops works has shifted to Dugway.

So now I've got another place to obsess over. Great.

I'll use my newfound momentum to finish my album and novel. And maybe some day I'll take a trip out west to see these top-secret locations, and camp out in hopes of seeing some crazy, unidentified lights or space ships, all the time wondering if anybody will ever discover the truth that's out there.