Festivals, Stalin, and the Children
Amidst the souvenir shops and tourist museums in and around Roswell, city officials opened an official place of study, the International Museum and Research Center, in 1992. Four years later, vintage photographs of a deceased alien that were a highlight of the September 1996 issue of Penthouse magazine turned out to show a prop from the Roswell museum; the item appeared in the magazine without the museum’s knowledge. This sort of foolishness gives the amiable town of Roswell some free, unasked-for publicity but does harm to UFOlogy, trivializing the discipline and suggesting that believers are dupes or dopes, or both. Roswell itself, though, seems invulnerable.
Today a community of fifty thousand people, it gaily hosts the summertime Roswell Festival, an annual, four-day flying saucer-ET celebration that is the recurring climax of the town’s determination to link itself to events of 1947.
Hotels and motels for miles around are booked solid. Locals rent rooms and coax paying visitors to park on their lawns. A literal parade of celebrants (pets included) dressed and painted as extraterrestrials personifies the American sense of fun. Festival organizers offer live entertainment, book signings, guest speakers (Stanton Friedman and the indefatigable Don Schmitt led those who showed up in 2015), and a 10K alien-chase run. Families enjoy craft tables, a bicycle parade, and a carnival. Vendors sell unimaginable numbers of sno-cones, cotton candy, and tacos; T-shirts, toys, balloons, and innumerable other tchotchkes. Roswell is all about moneymaking and fun.
In 2011, though, a particularly bold Roswell-Area 51 narrative emerged. While its essentials are earthbound rather than extraterrestrial, the story is unimaginably disturbing. At the close of World War II, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin experienced an understandably bad reaction to the destructive power of the American atomic bombs. Although Soviet spies in the United States had given Stalin advance knowledge of the Manhattan Project, the dictator nevertheless struggled to reconcile America’s potential for undreamt-of violence with his own nation’s relative helplessness. As the U.S. and USSR jockeyed during 1945–46 to get their hands on the top German rocket scientists, notes, and prototypes, Stalin had an idea: lacking atomic weaponry, the USSR might be able to panic America with a demonstration of another sort of technology, a flying disc built with “electromagnetic frequency” (EMF) technology explored by Germany’s Horten brothers during World War II. Even better, the craft would land on U.S. soil, with an extraterrestrial crew. According to investigative journalist Annie Jacobsen, the disc that crashed near the Roswell, New Mexico, airbase in July 1947 was Soviet, and even sported Cyrillic characters around its perimeter. Inside was a crew (perhaps three or four, Jacobsen does not specify), including two that were comatose but alive. Although the child-sized crew members were humanoids with queerly enlarged heads and eyes, their origin was not extraterrestrial.
Jacobsen elected to close her 2011 book Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base with the tale summarized above. Coming at the end of a generally smart and very well researched study, the story feels tacked on and gratuitous. Its tone is certainly at odds with the feel of everything that precedes it.
The account of the Soviet saucer comes from a single witness—an unnamed American engineer employed by defense contractor EG&G, a company enlisted in 1947 to help reverse-engineer the captured Soviet craft. By the time Annie Jacobsen first spoke with the man in 2009, he was the last living EG&G engineer (of five) with direct knowledge of the project. The weight of the truth, Jacobsen says, motivated the man to speak to her, and while that’s dramatic and even a little heart-tugging, the man’s remarks are, unfortunately, uncorroborated.
Not long after the book’s publication, the Web vibrated with speculation about the identity of Jacobsen’s witness. (Commonly invoked names were Ben Rich, Clarence “Kelly” Johnson, Boyd Bushman, and Don Phillips, former Lockheed Skunk Works engineers that claimed to have seen and even reverse-engineered alien spaceships at Area 51.)
Excitement in UFO circles over Jacobsen’s claim grew not just because of the purported Soviet connection to advanced technology, but because of the nature of the saucer’s crew. All of them were child-sized because, they were, in fact, children. Human children. How could this be? According to the witness, the fiendish German extermination-camp doctor Josef Mengele contacted Stalin as the war ground to a conclusion. Mengele told Stalin he had performed surgical experiments, based in gene research and eugenics, on camp inmates. Perhaps, Mengele slyly suggested, Stalin might be interested in similar work performed by Mengele in a sanctuary inside the USSR. As Jacobsen’s witness told the story, Stalin agreed, and put Mengele to work on an “extraterrestrial” crew.
Stalin’s objective was to stun American officials with a demonstration of hugely advanced “alien” technology and precipitate a panic, à la the one that supposedly occurred following the 1938 Orson Welles War of the Worlds broadcast.
The United States did not accept the saucer’s supposed extraterrestrial origin, so Stalin’s scheme failed. According to Jacobsen, the craft’s technology was nevertheless carefully studied and duplicated. Subsequent “alien UFO” tales from Roswell may have been concocted by the government to deflect attention from the Soviet ship.
The child crew (some may have been as old as twelve or thirteen) did not fly the saucer but were guided to New Mexico by remote control. The children’s craniums and eye orbits had been surgically enlarged. The two survivors, clinically dead, spent their final days upright and insensate in gel-filled tubes at Edwards Air Force Base.
And here is the greatest shock of all: according to the former EG&G engineer, the “child” flyers’ existence went unrevealed because the United States used them as templates for hideous surgical experiments conducted on children and convicts at Area 51 well into the 1980s.
Nazis, Stalin, Mengele, iron-era saucer technology, Roswell, violated children, subterfuge—what a tale. Even cursory consideration, though, reveals impossibilities. Although Mengele did surgical procedures and experiments on children (mainly twins) and other extermination-camp prisoners, he lacked the surgical skill necessary to do as the Soviets allegedly wished. Also, Mengele’s immediate postwar whereabouts—when he supposedly traveled to the Soviet Union—are well known: disguised, he labored as a field hand at farms in Germany. (He settled in South America later.)
Also:
- If Stalin intended that the Americans mistake the saucer for an extraterrestrial craft, its rim would not have carried Cyrillic letters.
- In 1947, no nation had the technology needed to remotely pilot an aircraft, over thousands of miles, to a target.
- No solid evidence exists that Germany’s Horten brothers, who made great strides with flying wing design, created a flying disc.
- Assuming that the USSR had created the disc, sharing its design and the secrets of its fuel/propulsion systems with the West would have been the last thing Stalin wanted.
- Although erroneous reports of mass panic caused by the Welles broadcast had filtered to the USSR, Stalin had no reason to hope that his faked alien saucer would precipitate another one—not least because the U.S. military would surely keep the craft under wraps.
- Numerous Area 51 veterans who met Jacobsen and spoke with her about secret (but standard) weapons and avionics development were blindsided by the Stalin-Mengele-Roswell story, and denounced it loudly.
- In a 2011 Popular Mechanics article, tech writer Earl Swift reminds us that the big-head, huge-eyed alien conception did not surface until long after 1947. Jacobsen’s witness, then, probably worked backwards from latter-day notions of ETs to describe the disfigured children he claimed to have seen.
- Swift wonders what happened to the saucer’s (vaguely noted) EMF technology; if it existed, the world would have given up long ago on “old- school, fuel-chugging planes.”
Mr. Swift is a sharp cookie, and he gets a gold star for his thoughts. He gets two gold stars for this discovery: in “Tomb Tapper,” a 1956 short story by famed science fiction writer James Blish, locals in upstate New York can’t determine whether a crashed saucer is from outer space or the USSR; when they force open the cockpit in an attempt to find out, they discover the body of a little girl, blonde and not more than eight years old.
People inclined to believe Annie Jacobsen’s anonymous witness may say that Blish somehow got wind of the real events at Roswell, and wove it into his story. Yes, they might say that.