The newspaper continued: “Contrary to information from American and other sources, Second Lieutenants Brobs and Tyllenson … report the flying discs have landed in the polar regions several times.”
Area 51 The Revealing Truth of Ufos, Secret Aircraft, Cover-Ups & Conspiracies
Unbeknownst to the rest of the world, the people at United Labs have found evidence of alien life on a faraway world they call Theta. The staff even have one of their Thetans, which is held secretly in the company’s facility. The United Labs people have no idea of the real agenda of the Thetans: are they friendly, hostile, or somewhere in between? The questions are many. The answers are nowhere in sight, so a decision is taken to turn the Thetans against us, the human race, in a very strange and alternative way.
Such is the advanced nature of the technology at United Labs that they have the ability to surgically alter human beings and transform them into the identical form of a Thetan. The plan is to have one of the employees surgically altered to resemble a Thetan, then reveal the Thetan to the world and the plans that the aliens have for our world: destruction. Of course, no one knows if the Thetans really are hostile, but making it look like that is the primary goal.
The secret, manipulative program begins when the highest echelons of United Labs get together to decide which one of them will be the man to undergo the radical surgery to turn him into something less than human—or maybe even more than human. Upon drawing lots, the man for whom life will never again be as it was is Dr. Allen Leighton (played by Culp).
A great deal of planning goes into the project. Dr. Leighton—a physicist— is naturally crushed by the bleak fact that the time will come very soon when he will never see his wife, Yvonne (actress Geraldine Brooks), again. That much is very clear: the top-secret project requires for Dr. Leighton to be killed in a plane crash. Of course, no plane has crashed. Rather, that is the cover story that is given to Yvonne and the press. Now, behind closed doors, the mutation of Dr. Leighton can begin without intrusion—or so it seems, at first.
Dr. Leighton is subjected to a series of bizarre medical procedures—some of which will physically alter his appearance to a significant degree. Other aspects of the plan to turn a man into an alien involve grafting alien tissue onto and into Dr. Leighton but with a terrible side effect: Dr. Leighton’s mind begins to change, too. His normal, human thought processes—even his very character— start to fragment, and he becomes far more like a real Thetan than he does a member of the human race. Add to that the fact that Yvonne astutely comes to realize that something is profoundly suspicious about the nature of her husband’s death, and we quickly get to see how things are in danger of unraveling. On top of that, Yvonne finds herself pregnant, something that Dr. Leighton—or what is left of him—quite understandably cannot forget, so the plan has to go forward and quickly if it is to work and prevent the destruction of the planet by the superpowers.
The United Labs staff creates a high-tech vehicle that it hopes will be assumed by the governments of our world to be an alien spacecraft. In reality, though, it’s one of ours. The plan is for the “alien spaceship” to land outside the UN headquarters in New York. Dr. Leighton will by then be completely alien in appearance and character. He will also be armed with a highly destructive weapon. The team hopes that when Leighton makes it clear to the elite of the United Nations that war with the Thetan race is all but inevitable, all of the powerful countries of our world will come together as one and fight the alien foe. It’s a brilliant idea—and a brilliant ruse, too. Unfortunately for United Labs, it doesn’t work as it should. In fact, it all ends in complete and utter disaster.
The craft is not quite as reliable as the scientists assume. The result is that it crashes back to Earth very near United Labs and nowhere near the United Nations. Dr. Leighton—in alien form—exits the crashed craft and stumbles through the surrounding woods, where he is attacked and shot by a trio of terrified hunters. Severely injured, he makes his stumbling way toward the place where the whole sinister plot began: United Labs. Yvonne, perhaps using a more-than-liberal degree of psychic power, still suspects that her husband did not die in a plane crash and makes her way to the labs, demanding to know the truth of what really happened to him.
As fate would have it, both Yvonne and what was once Dr. Allen Leighton arrive at the labs at pretty much the same time. As Allen Leighton dies in the lab, Yvonne realizes to her eternal horror that the alien monster before her is actually her beloved husband. One man is dead, a wife is in a state of turmoil, a secret project has quite literally come crashing down, and the threat of nuclear war is as likely as it was before the strange operation was initiated.
Undoubtedly, the story told by Alfred O’Donnell contains certain key ingredients of the story that, in anonymous fashion, he shared with Annie Jacobsen. O’Donnell assured Jacobsen of (a) the plan to physically alter the appearance of human beings and make them appear far more extraterrestrial- like; (b) an idea to try to further ensure that the deceptive plot works by constructing a futuristic-looking aircraft; and (c) the catastrophic malfunction of the aircraft and its crash to Earth.
It’s fair to say that these deep similarities may not be down to coincidence.
Those who are supportive of the story told to Jacobsen might say that the writers and producers of The Outer Limits somehow learned of Joseph Stalin’s secret plan and decided to turn it into an episode of the show. A far more likely scenario, however, suggests that O’Donnell—whether acting alone or with personnel at Area 51—fed Jacobsen an unlikely tale of the mutation of young children as a means to frighten the U.S. government into thinking that an alien– human war was about to erupt.
Moving on, let’s see what kind of evidence exists to support the “Nazi saucer” angle of all this.