Annie Jacobsen's book "Area 51"

[blackstar]

I'm not sure that this thread belongs in The Bar, because it's serious. But I think we should have a thread for posting reviews of Jacobsen's book. Mine is going to appear on Sunday, and I know of at least one other one in the works. Here is a recent one:

Richard Rhodes ("The Making of the Atomic Bomb") reviews the book:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/annie-jacobsens-area-51-the-us-top-secret-military-base/2011/05/26/AGIZPLIH_story.html

"Annie Jacobsen, a Los Angeles-based independent journalist, does an adequate if error-ridden job of reporting on these black-budget projects and several others besides, using the classic investigative method of interviewing dozens and dozens of worker bees from engineers to security guards and piecing their stories together. Then, like a test pilot who pushes her plane too far, she crashes and burns on the grisly tales of an unnamed single source, supposedly an Area 51 engineer and Manhattan Project veteran who leads her on a wild goose chase of honking absurdity straight down the UFO vapor trail into the very heart of conspiratorial darkness. There Jacobsen is told that Auschwitz butcher Dr. Josef Mengele, the German aircraft-designing brothers Walter and Reimar Horten and Soviet dictator Josef Stalin conspired back in the late 1940s to scare America silly with a Nazi-Soviet flying saucer crowded with wobbly 13-year-olds with large, surgically altered heads. Except that the thing crashed. In a barren corner of New Mexico. Really."

 

[Nik]

ROFL !!

Can't she spell 'D-I-S-I-N-F-O-R-M-A-T-I-O-N' ??

 

[blackstar]

ROFL !!

Can't she spell 'D-I-S-I-N-F-O-R-M-A-T-I-O-N' ??

I think that there are several possible explanations for why this source gave her this story. They're not all mutually exclusive:

-he read it somewhere and believes it
-he read it somewhere and told it to her because he wanted to give her a good story for her book (Nightline quoted him as saying that his purpose was "to help Annie's book")
-he told it to her so that it would discredit her work

Now I think that the last one would be credible except that any normal writer would hear such a nutty story, do some research and learn that it's crazy, and then not print it. If I was trying to spread disinformation on the subject, I'd come up with a better story than this one. It's too outlandish. But the surprising thing is that she reprinted it! Why? I think there are several possible reasons for that as well:

-she's incredibly gullible
-she's simply incompetent
(Rhodes: "In attributing the stories she reports to an unnamed engineer and Manhattan Project veteran while seemingly failing to conduct even minimal research into the man’s sources, Jacobsen shows herself at a minimum extraordinarily gullible or journalistically incompetent.")

or

-she added it as a "hook" in order to sell books, i.e. a fantastic story to tell to all the people who interview her

I don't like this last explanation, because that is the kind of crazy story that discredits a book, not the kind that gets you interviews. Saying "Nazi mutant teenagers flying Stalin's airplane" is not much better than saying "UFOs."

 

[Stargazer]

Very well summarized. I would tend to think that she is, indeed, extremely gullible. But the fact that she went for that story is also related to the fact that her source was considered as extremely reliable on other topics. Perhaps the source in question decided after all that she was a fool and decided to see to what extent.

Of course, one should not exclude the possibility that this is part of an elaborate plot to make the whole Area 51 thing sound like a hoax to people so that interest in it vanishes. When the wheat grows with the chaff, you can't tell them apart.

 

[blackstar]

Very well summarized. I would tend to think that she is, indeed, extremely gullible. But the fact that she went for that story is also related to the fact that her source was considered as extremely reliable on other topics. Perhaps the source in question decided after all that she was a fool and decided to see to what extent.

Her source could have caused a lot more damage by retracting the story after the book got printed. If he said "I was pulling the wool over her eyes" she comes out looking even stupider than she does now.

I tend to think that her source--who is 88 years old--has started to believe this story himself, and she's just too naive, and too damned lazy as a researcher (note that she never once cited "The Roswell Report" or "Roswell: Case Closed") to chase down the real story.

 

[OM]

-she's incredibly gullible
-she's simply incompetent

...Or, according to some of her journalistic peers I've been in touch with of late, she's got some personal problems which tend to cloud her judgment as to whether or not someone's giving her straight facts or complete and utter bullshit. Personally, I think she may have part of the story of Area 51 right insofar as the area's saturated with fallout from being a battlefield tacnuke test site. But the whole Mengele/Nazi psychowarfare weapon bit? And here I thought Col. Breen was killed in Quatermass' Pit.

[Edited by admin - removed specifics]

 

[royabulgaf]

Have you ever thought these people were just yanking her chain for fun?

 

[quellish]

I have been reading the book, and nearly every page is littered with easily correctable factual errors. Unfortunately, there will be people reading it and taking it as face value as truth.

 

[blackstar]

I have been reading the book, and nearly every page is littered with easily correctable factual errors. Unfortunately, there will be people reading it and taking it as face value as truth.

One surprising aspect of the book is that she gets things wrong even when she cites a source with the correct information. For instance, she states that personnel from NPIC were briefed about the Groom Lake facility in 1955, even though NPIC was not created until 1961. In the back of the book she cites a 1991 publication titled "Thirty and Thriving: The National Photographic Interpretation Center."

That's a sign of a really sloppy and careless writer.

 

[OM]

That's a sign of a really sloppy and careless writer.

...And let's not forget to add the editor and whoever's pretending to proofread this mess. Both are just as culpable in this as the writer herself was.

 

[dannydale]

K bros, when AOL tells all about your own sources saying you're cuckoooooo in the cuckoo clock crazy, it's time to pack it up and go home! █▄ █▄█ █▄ ▀█▄

 

[fightingirish]

See for yourself! :
June 06, 2011 C-SPAN, taped by "Moxnews.com"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bS3Rg0tt_I
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pew09uD1c7A
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRoCMbYUeg4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPyOrMKR5Qk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6xW_13br5I&feature=channel_video_title

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bS3Rg0tt_I
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pew09uD1c7A
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRoCMbYUeg4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPyOrMKR5Qk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6xW_13br5I&feature=channel_video_title

 

[blackstar]

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1862/1

Roswell that ends well, part 2
by Dwayne A. Day
Monday, June 13, 2011

When I was a kid, probably around age 10–11, I went through a phase where I was interested in pseudo-science. I would go to my school and local libraries and check out every book I could find about UFOs, Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, the Philadelphia Experiment, ghosts, extraterrestrials, and (my favorite) the Bermuda Triangle.

Maybe it’s just my wistful wishful thinking, but I don’t think I believed a word of it.

[snip]

This brings me, albeit by the scenic route, to Annie Jacobsen’s book Area 51, which I wrote about in this space two weeks ago. (See “Roswell that ends well”, The Space Review, May 31, 2011) Jacobsen got a burst of publicity that probably tickled her publisher and may have sold some books (I don’t know, is there such a thing as bad publicity in the book publishing world?). But after the initial round, the publicity is turning sour. Nightline did an expose that made Jacobsen look, well, dimwitted. My own review in the San Francisco Chronicle is not positive, and I know of at least another negative one in the works. And then there’s this review by Richard Rhodes (author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb) that just appeared in the Washington Post:

 

[blackstar]

My San Francisco Chronicle book review is now online:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/06/12/RVIM1JPGHG.DTL

Area 51
An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military BaseBy Annie Jacobsen
(Little, Brown; 523 pages; $27.99)
"Out in a remote expanse of the Nevada desert, a few hours' drive from Las Vegas, lies a vast area of government-owned restricted land where the military and the CIA have conducted a lot of very secret tests since the end of World War II. Now, Annie Jacobsen, a contributing editor at the Los Angeles Times Magazine, has written "Area 51," a deeply flawed, amateurish and at times downright nutty book about it."

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/06/10/RVIM1JPGHG.DTL#ixzz1PGcJNWe7

 

[Stargazer]

"There's an old saying that when you hear hooves, think horses, not zebras. Jacobsen seems to have heard hooves, thought unicorns, and does not seem to be aware of the existence of horses."

Great way to summarize it all!

 

[blackstar]

Re the last video posted:

"They declassified the A-12 OXCART in 2007 and I don't know why."

Sheesh, what BS. When does she think all those A-12s went to museums?

 

[Stargazer]

Re the last video posted:

"They declassified the A-12 OXCART in 2007 and I don't know why."

Sheesh, what BS. When does she think all those A-12s went to museums?

That being said, addition to a museum does NOT signify a program has been declassified. Look at TACIT BLUE for instance. It has been in a museum for a while, but most of the program's data is still classified. The prototype itself has been deprived of its special coating, the cockpit has been made opaque, etc. Same goes for BIRD OF PREY, SPIRIT and quite a few more. Museum material, but still pretty much classified. Of course we know a whole lot more about OXCART, though.

 

[blackstar]

Re the last video posted:

"They declassified the A-12 OXCART in 2007 and I don't know why."

Sheesh, what BS. When does she think all those A-12s went to museums?

That being said, addition to a museum does NOT signify a program has been declassified. Look at TACIT BLUE for instance. It has been in a museum for a while, but most of the program's data is still classified. The prototype itself has been deprived of its special coating, the cockpit has been made opaque, etc. Same goes for BIRD OF PREY, SPIRIT and quite a few more. Museum material, but still pretty much classified. Of course we know a whole lot more about OXCART, though.

But she uses the term "declassified" as if it is a black/white issue. It's not. There are levels of classification/declassification. The existence of the A-12 was declassified a long time ago, and major amounts of information on it were declassified starting in the 1990s. She wrote in the book that the U-2 was "declassified" in 1998, when that was simply the date of a CIA U-2 symposium. Significant amounts of information on the U-2 had been released decades before. And it is also worth noting that some aspects of the U-2 are still classified in order to maintain operational security.

Her problem is that she doesn't understand that it is wrong to simply say that a program has been "declassified."

 

[InvisibleDefender]

Hey - where is that list that was compiled of all of the errors in the book? I can't seem to find it .... thx!

 

[Gridlock]

Re: Was "Area 51" book, now cesium additives in JP-7