Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base

An incredible history! Unbelievable and yet researched and documented. Impressively dense with facts and sheer story it is absolutely readable and engaging. I’ll be reading this book again and again because there is so much to it.

Great read

This is an absolutely fascinating book. Many won't like it because they prefer to be spoon-fed fan fiction and to be soothingly reassured like children that Bob Lazar's fables are genuine; luckily she steers mostly clear of that (despite giving Lazar too much credit in some places as anything other than the clear fraud that he is). I can't vouch for all her claims about specific people, events and places. Some people here who have written detailed reviews critiquing things that she got wrong seem to now a lot more about the history of US aerospace, defense and secret projects than I do, so I'll defer to their knowledge if Jacobsen got any of that stuff wrong but even so, the overall message and the nature and breadth of the programs that have gone on at Area 51 (and the Nevada Test Site) are the important things for me. Many of the details are straight from the mouths of the people who actually worked there, which was fascinating. However, I did notice that she talked a lot about things that didn't go on in Area 51 itself (like the NERVA tests), and I wonder how long the book would have been if those were excised. Still, I'm glad that they were included because it gives more of a sense for how the region adjoining Area 51 has been involved in highly classified projects and how Area 51 is more properly thought of as part of a larger complex of operations and secrets rather than just something out there by itself. In other words, critiquing the book on the basis that it talked quite extensively about things beyond the jurisdiction of Area 51 is a bit unfair because the NTS is such an integral part of the context and meaning of the base. Now, where the book fell down for me was with the explanation for Area 51's establishment, as conveyed to her by her source (the EG&G engineer). The problem isn't that she included it, per se. It's that, given that she did, she might as well have expanded more on the other conspiratorial and tin-foil hat dimensions (such as aliens, the Lazar fable, and other such stories) that gives the base such a degree of mystique in the public eye. She does talk about them, but not all that much, and overall she gives the EG&G engineer's story the most attention out of these tin-foil hat stories (to be fair, she had been interviewing the guy for a year). I'm going to just come out and say it: the story conveyed by her source is an absolute pile of crap. We're supposed to believe that Stalin deliberately sent highly classified and radically advanced technology to the US on a silver platter - at a time when the US had a monopoly on the atomic bomb. We're supposed to believe that electromagnetic propulsion was being used in the 1940s - yet that the US and Soviet pilots were trundling around in jet-powered aircraft throughout the entirety of the Cold War instead. Surely, if the Soviets felt they were at liberty to spare one of these super-exotic discs to "send a warning shot over Truman's bow", they would have also felt sufficiently advanced in this area of technology (along with long-range remote control from a plane flying near Alaska to guide the Horten-derived disc it to New Mexico!) to churn these things out on a massive scale. Yet there is zero evidence for such a thing. The Soviets didn't fly spy planes over the US; the opposite was true. The Soviets didn't master stealth technology; the Americans did. The Soviet archives have been opened to the West for decades now and nothing like what her source says has been revealed, which you would think they should have if they got a head start on the technology, were using it, and were just as fanatical about pushing the limits of science and technology to win the Cold War and the Arms Race as the US was. The Mengele connection was absurd as well. How could Stalin be sure that the US wouldn't simply spill the beans on such an atrocity? I think that the source was either crazy, delusional or deliberately pulling her leg. As for the "S-4" reference: he clearly got that either from Lazar's story (which he was trying to emulate; Lazar came out with his story in 1989 and it was well known throughout the 90s. Jacobsen interviewed her source in 2010) or he got it from where Lazar probably got it: the "S-4" facility at Tonopah Test Range (which actually does exist, unlike the ridiculous "arms to your side" clown-show that Lazar wants us to believe) that Lazar likely heard from a friend of his who worked at TTR. I highly recommend this book. I certainly learned a lot.

I bought this book because I am interested in Area 51 and the reviews were scored quite well for it. Now I am letting you know the truth, this book is an incredible read!! It should have six stars! I'm reading this book around the clock. I can't put it down! It has the right details, the right method of delivering the story, everything needed to make a great reading experience. If you're not interested in the subject matter, don't worry. As the story unfolds, you will keep reading until the end. It's that good.

Hi, I read through the reviews here. I can understand why the Roadrunners feel betrayed but I feel parts of the book are simply ways of talking about things that one can't talk about openly. Science and engineering comes at a price. For every leap of technology there is a corresponding human and ecological cost. While one can celebrate nuclear technology, the aviation technology, avionics as great advances - one has to face the fact that a lot of nasty stuff that happened in the process of making these advances. Today there are strong health and safety norms, this is largely because a lot more is understood about the ill-effects of radiation, chemical and biological exposure. In the days of old - there were no such norms or if they existed people didn't follow them because the enforcement machinery was not in place. It also makes sense that once the idea of the "born secret" came into use for the physics of nuclear devices, the related notion of compartmented information gained popularity. Information compartmentation is great for secrecy - but not so great for health and safety. Can you really have secret research being conducted in one room and then not tell the people in the next room about the potential for hazardous and life-threatening exposure? That is where as Yeats once said - "things fall apart". The discussions on Plumbbob, Hardtack, Argus and Dominic are ways of highlighting the ecological costs. These have been discussed at length in other more authoritative accounts - but the real elephant in the room is unethical human experiments. Was there a regime of such experiments that accompanied the advances in aviation, space, nuclear technology? It is well known that medical norms on vivisection, patient rights etc... didn't converge to their present positions until well into the late 70s and that programs like Paperclip gave Auschwitz and Unit 731 "scientists" an opportunity to continue their brand of "research". The disclosures to the Frank Church committee on activities at Fort Detrick are a clear indicator that this kind of stuff happened in the US too. It is possible that a secret regime of government sponsored unethical human experiments predates the work at Fort Detrick. It is also curious that most of the classification protocols secure information for periods approaching 150 years. At the present levels of life expectancy - that is equal to the entire lifetimes of two generations (parents and children). If one were to reduce the risk of legal accountability for genetic effects of any experiments, one would seek such a long classification period. By contrast the stuff pertaining to the detailed construction and functioning of nuclear devices is classified in perpetuity. This is what came to mind when I read the book. I suspect that may be what Annie was trying to say without talking through the painfully difficult details. It is true that a full disclosure of the details will go a long way in ensuring that this sort of thing does not happen again. But as the only people who could shed some light on this issue are gradually dying - one can only have indirect discussions. There is another bigger problem which in a decade or so will become the new elephant in the room. It surfaced briefly in discussions about the Carlsbad storage facility and in discussions about the RRW. The fear of technological regression due to expanding ignorance of what was done earlier. As the people who know the details leave us - our ability to "know" what was done before will diminish. If there is a point of time where old information is lost at a greater rate than new information is created - one will approach such the point of technological regression at a faster pace. A disclosure of the details would significantly hedge against it. A lot of people have pointed out errors in author's text, I agree there are errors but I feel one should avoid missing the wood for the trees.

Update: May 23, 2020. Now that I've finished the book, it's an enjoyable read, but someone high up the military/black-ops chain played Annie Jacobson like a fiddle. What happened to you, Annie, is called "disinformation." I know that you know what it means... What she's asking is that we entertain as factual a plan where not only did the Soviets create (or steal from the NAZIs) anti-gravity flying discs after WW2--this during an era when all the NAZIs could accomplish technically achieve was lob fire-and-forget bombs over the channel in hopes of hitting a population center in England--but they also auto-piloted those discs (did I mention we're the 40s?), and--the good part--filled them with human genetic freaks, children genetically cobbled together like Frankenstein in some kind of eugenics horror show gone insane. And Mengele was involved, of course. On top of that, we kept this top secret for decades. Eugenics, mind you, is somehow a "born classified" level secret. And she thinks that's what crashed in New Mexico. Meanwhile, the good name of Bob Lazar (whose account to this day rings true) is branded as a liar or a fool. So the odds are greater that the Soviets sent over elephant man-like, comatose kids in flying discs, rather than Lazar, who gives intimate descriptions of how these discs did not originate from Earth. We're to believe Annie over several bona-fide, whistle blowers like Corsi who've not only blown the lid on Roswell but also on the vast space program currently underway and on how we integrated discoveries of ET tech into our own. (Night vision, silicon chips, etc.) Annie, you were played. Original review: The author needs to read The Day After Roswell and perhaps do a little more research. Her biased attempt to brush off the UFO phenomenon is a joke. Apparently, according to her, every UFO sighting in history was actually a U-2 spy plane (or a pilot wearing a gorilla mask). She now has a credibility problem, and I've stopped reading.

I found the book very interesting reading. I find the negative reviews just as fascinating. We have some very passionate people upset about this book. It makes me wonder if they themselves are UFO believers, because they are most upset about the saucer crash at Roswell possibly being from the Soviet Union. I think having an open mind when reading any book is best. Some of the negative reviews were such minute things to be upset over. Either way the book was a good read, the information was just enough to put into the back of your mind and listen for anything else that could connect the dots or deny any other theories out there. For those with the negative reviews, your faith and trust in our government is very commendable, but I hope that you are not crushed when more things are revealed as time passes by. Just like our government didn't do STD experiments on people down south. These things were just brought out this last month by the way. How about the mentally ill people in South America. etc. It does in fact happen, and probably much worse! Oh, and those eperiments were conducted by "scientists". So I don't know why anyone would be so upset at this authors ideas based on interviews and research that she did. (even if she got the speed of sound time incorrect in one paragraph describing an after shock from a bomb!) It was a very easy read compared to some technical books, and war books that "bores" a person to death with measurements of minute deatail. Maybe this book is not for the scientist that speaks in binary systems.

I enjoyed this book. In fact, I couldn't put it down. I think it was well written, contains the findings of a lot of time-consuming research, and the topics easily held my interest. There were errors, as other reviewers have pointed out, but all in all I thought this book was well worth the money. In writing the book, the author, Annie Jacobsen, an investigative reporter, chose several interesting topics as chapter headings and, of course, topics that provide a good chronological history of Area 51. She starts at the beginning way back in the forties, and brings you right up to date with chapter headings like: The Riddle of Area 51, Imagine a War of the Worlds, The Secret base, Atomic Accidents, Wizards of Science, Technology, and Diplomacy, Drama in the Desert, Operation Black Shield and the Secret History of the USS Pueblo, The MiG's of Area 51, The Lunar Landing Conspiracy and Other Legends of Area 51, and From Camera Bays to Weapons Bays, as the Air Force Takes Control. The USS Pueblo, atomic bomb accidents, advanced aircraft design like the U2 and the super fast Black Hawk, and other technological marvels are covered in some detail. But what you won't find is a definitive answer to the crashed flying saucer of Roswell, or the lost aliens. Although she does discuss the subject, but that's really not what this book is about. So UFO buffs probably won't like this book. For me, however, it all worked to create an interesting history of the most secret piece of real estate on the Unite States mainland, Area 51. Besides the errors, my only real criticism of the book is that the author approached many of her topics in a sort of "gotcha" style more reminiscent of the Washington DC paparazzi rather than an objective reporter. Her slant on the subjects seemed to highlight everything that's wrong with our secret programs and their management, rather than just reporting the facts. But this is a small thing, and whether that's bad or good, or neutral, is up to the reader. As I said earlier, overall, I liked the book.

Good

This is very interesting and informative, I enjoyed reading it very much, and learnt some things I didn't know. Very well researched and written.

If you want to know something true about Area 51, read this book. No false claims, no fantasies, no dream.

Aunque por el título pueda parecer un libro sobre OVNIS, nada más lejos de la realidad (aunque cada uno pueda sacar las conclusiones que le parezcan). Detalla todo el desarrollo de los aviones espía (U-2 y Stealth), espionaje aéreo y su involucración en las crisis más importantes que hemos vivido, así como todo lo desclasificado sobre el área 51, incluyendo los sorprendentes ensayos nucleares ocultos durante los tratados que los prohibían y sobre nuestras cabezas, tanto de los Estados Unidos como de la Unión Soviética. Imprescindible para quienes deseen estar informados sobre algunas de las cosas que se llevan a cabo a nuestras espaldas. Y para aquellos a quienes les haya interesado recomiendo leer a continuación "Nuclear War" y "The Pentagon's Brain", los tres muy entrelazados.

A well written book. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️