Area 51 The Revealing Truth of Ufos, Secret Aircraft, Cover-Ups & Conspiracies
Almost certainly as a result of his work alongside the PWD on Death Mills, in 1955 the special-effects expert in question was contacted by psychological warfare planners in the U.S. Air Force and offered a lucrative contract: to use his cinematic skills to create what can best be described as faked alien bodies. Given the time frame (namely, the mid-1950s), it would be wholly reasonable to expect that the Air Force would have wanted something to reflect the pop culture of the day—the bug-eyed, Hollywood aliens of This Island Earth variety; the Krell of Forbidden Planet; or the “Martian mutants” of Invaders from Mars—but they didn’t.
The man was asked to design and create eight “alien bodies” but with just one proviso: they all had to be very lifelike, dwarfish, hairless, and topped off with huge heads. Reportedly, the grandson told me, his grandfather was paid very handsomely for approximately three months of work, which was undertaken in a specially modified trio of rooms at a military base “in southern California.” It doesn’t take a genius to guess that the man asked why on earth the Air Force wanted him to fabricate a number of extraterrestrial corpses. He could understand the military taking an interest—and a very deep interest—in real alien bodies, but faked ones constructed by a Hollywood special-effects expert? What was the point? Well, the point, it seems, was a fascinating one.
The scuttlebutt rumor that reached the man’s attention suggested that a fantastic operation was at work. In fact, it was an operation that was twofold in nature. First, the military had a bizarre plan to photograph the “bodies,” strategically laid out on gurneys or slabs, then have the images sent anonymously to the Russian Embassy in Washington, D.C. Along with the photos would be a long and winding, fabricated letter—one supposedly written by a communist sympathizer in the U.S. military—warning the Soviets that the U.S. government had gotten its hands on alien bodies and technology and was well on its way to perfecting that same technology. The latter issue echoes the Philip Corso saga, which surfaced in 1997 in The Day after Roswell and also revolved around claims concerning the secret back-engineering of alien technology.
It was a strange example of Cold War-era psychological-warfare proportions, an example designed to scare the hell out of the Russians and have them waste their time chasing down what were really nonexistent aliens.
However, the story had a second part to it.
At the time, people suspected that at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, several employees were selling secrets to the Soviets, particularly secrets born out of the work of Wright-Patterson’s Foreign Technology Division (FTD), so a plan was formulated to carefully expose those same commie-loving characters to a couple of “alien bodies,” strategically placed in a vault or bunker, and have them believe that Uncle Sam had recovered a crashed UFO, or several, along with their deceased crews.
Then, it was a case of keeping an eagle eye on all of those under suspicion and see which of them—if any, of course—might be prompted to do something out of the ordinary, such as make a phone call to a man named Ivan or meet in a local park with a trenchcoat-wearing character with a foreign-looking appearance. It was, then, a program designed to ferret out Soviet sympathizers in the military by exposing them to a huge secret that, in reality, was a huge ruse.
While it all sounds rather bizarre, if you think about it carefully, it also makes a lot of sense. After all, what better way to mess with the Soviet mind— and to root out dastardly Reds in the United States—than by (a) dangling a fabricated carrot and (b) reeling in the enemy without any real secrets ever being compromised?
If true, this saga may very well help to explain some of the controversial stories where military personnel have reportedly been exposed to alleged alien bodies in underground rooms (such as the Hangar 18 legends attached to Wright- Patterson Air Force Base) under “convenient” circumstances that many skeptical researchers think are just too good to be true. They just might be, but not for the reasons that the skeptics think.
The reason: the eyewitnesses may have been set up as a test of their loyalties. It may have been intended all along for them to see the “bodies” (or, more correctly, the dummies). If they kept quiet about what they saw, they were good soldiers and trustworthy. If they told their wives or girlfriends, they were potential security risks and perhaps needed to be watched carefully in the future, and if they ran to a Soviet handler, it was jail time.
This, of course, leaves us with a pair of highly thought-provoking questions: if the story told above was 100 percent accurate, does that mean that all the stories of “alien bodies in the morgue” are born out of this long-gone Cold War operation/deception, or does the government have real extraterrestrial corpses on ice, and, if so, is it using the “dummy” angle just to confuse things even more?
These are very important questions, ones that may have a significant impact on the story of what it was that Bob Lazar briefly saw at Area 51 back in the late 1980s. Dummy, doll, or alien? The jury is still out.