engineers to unlock.
There was the crashed craft that had been sent by Stalin — with its Russian writing stamped, or embossed, in a ring around the inside of the craft. So far, the EG&G engineers were told, no one working on the project when it had been headquartered at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base had been able to discern what made Stalin’s craft hover and fly. Not even the German Paperclip scientists who had been assigned to assist. So the crashed craft was job number one. Reverse engineer it, Vannevar Bush said. Take it apart and put it back together again. Figure out what made it fly.
But there was the second engineering problem to solve, the one involving the child-size aviators. To understand this, the men were briefed on what it was they were dealing with. They had to be. They were told that they, and they alone, had a need-to-know about what had happened to these humans before they were put in the craft and sent aloft. They were told that seeing the bodies would be a shocking and disturbing experience. Because two of the aviators were comatose but still alive, the men would have to transfer them into a JellO-like substance and stand them upright in two tubular tanks, attached to a life-support system. Sometimes, their mouths opened, and this gave the appearance of their trying to speak. Remember, the engineers were told, these humans are in a comatose state. They are unconscious; their bodies would never spark back to life.
Once, the children had been healthy humans. Not anymore. They were about thirteen years old. Questions abounded. What made their heads so big? Had their bodies been surgically manipulated to appear inhuman, or did the children have genetic deformities? And what about their haunting, oversize eyes? The engineers were told that the children were rumored to have been kidnapped by Dr. Josef Mengele, the Nazi madman who, at Auschwitz and elsewhere, was known to have performed unspeakable experimental surgical procedures mostly on children, dwarfs, and twins. The engineers learned that just before the war ended, Josef Mengele made a deal with Stalin. Stalin offered Mengele an opportunity to continue his work in eugenics — the science of improving a human population by controlled breeding to increase desirable, heritable characteristics — in secret, in the Soviet Union after the war. The engineers were told that this deal likely occurred just before the war’s end, in the winter of 1945, when it was clear to many members of the Nazi Party, including Mengele, that Nazi Germany would lose the war and that its top commanders and doctors would be tried and hanged for war crimes.
In Josef Mengele’s efforts to create a pure, Aryan race for Hitler, at Auschwitz and elsewhere, he conducted experiments on people he considered subhuman so as to breed certain features out. Mengele’s victims included Jewish children, Gypsy children, and people with severe physical deformities. He removed parts of children’s craniums and replaced them with bones from larger, adult skulls. He removed and transplanted eyeballs, and injected people with chemicals that caused them to lose their hair. On Mengele’s instruction, an Auschwitz inmate, a painter named Dina Babbitt, made comparative drawings of the shapes of heads, noses, mouths, and ears of people before and after the grotesque surgeries Mengele performed. Another inmate doctor forced to work for Mengele, named Dr. Martina Puzyna, recounted how Mengele had her keep detailed measurements of the shapes and sizes of children’s body parts, casting those of crippled children — particularly their hands and heads — in plaster molds. When Mengele left Auschwitz, on January 17, 1945, he took the documentation of his medical experiments with him. According to his only son, Rolf, Mengele was still in possession of his medical research documents after the war.
The EG&G engineers were told that part of Joseph Stalin’s offer to Josef Mengele stated that if he could create a crew of grotesque, child-size aviators for Stalin, he would be given a laboratory in which to continue his work. According to what the engineers were told, Mengele held up his side of the Faustian bargain and provided Stalin with the child-size crew. Joseph Stalin did not. Mengele never took up residence in the Soviet Union. Instead, he lived for four years in Germany under an assumed name and then escaped to South America, where he lived, first in Argentina and then in Paraguay, until his death in 1979.
When Joseph Stalin sent the biologically and/or surgically reengineered children in the craft over New Mexico hoping it would land there, the engineers were told, Stalin’s plan was for the children to climb out and be mistaken for visitors from Mars. Panic would ensue, just like it did after the radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds. America’s early-warning radar system would be overwhelmed with sightings of other “UFOs.” Truman would see how easily a totalitarian dictator could control the masses using black propaganda. Stalin may have been behind the United States in atomic bomb technology, but when it came to manipulating the people’s perception, Stalin was the leader with the upper hand. This, says the engineer, is what he and the others in the group were told.
For months I asked the engineer why President Truman didn’t use the remains from the Roswell crash to show the world what an evil, abhorrent man Joseph Stalin was. I guessed that maybe Truman didn’t want to admit the breach of U.S. borders. For a long time, I never got an answer, just a shaking of the head. Here was the engineer who had the answer to the riddle inside the riddle that is Area 51, but he was unwilling to say more. He is the only one of the original elite group of EG&G engineers who is still alive. He said he wouldn’t tell me more, no matter how many times I asked. One day, I asked again. “Why didn’t President Truman reveal the truth in 1947?” This time he answered.
“Because we were doing the same thing,” he said. “They wanted to push science. They wanted to see how far they could go.”
Then he said, “We did things I wish I had not done.” Then, “We performed medical experiments on handicapped
children and prisoners.”
“But you are not a doctor,” I said. “They wanted engineers.” “On whose authority did you act?”
“The Atomic Energy Commission was in charge. And Vannevar Bush,” he said. “People were killed. In this great United States.”
“Why did we do that?”
“You do what you do because you love your country, and you are told what you are doing is for the good of the country,” the engineer said. Meaning out at the original Area 51, starting in 1951, the EG&G engineers worked in secret on a nefarious Nazi-inspired black project that would remain entirely hidden from the public because Vannevar Bush told them it was the correct thing to do.
“It was a long, long time ago,” the engineer said. “I have tried to forget.”
“When did it end?” I asked. No answer.
“In 1952?” I asked. Still no answer. “In 1953…1954…?” “At least through the 1980s it was still going on,” he said. “I believe you should tell me the whole story,” I said. “Otherwise,
once you are gone, you will take the truth with you.”
“You don’t want to know,” he said.
“I do.”
“You don’t have a need-to-know,” he said.
For many months, I tried to learn more. I got pieces. Slivers of pieces. One-word details. “This” confirmed and “that” reconfirmed, regarding what he had previously said. One day, when we were eating lunch in a restaurant, I recounted back to the engineer everything I knew. I asked for his permission to put it all in this book. He did not say yes. He did not say no. We interviewed for more than one year. Then one day, I asked him how much of the story I now knew.
“You don’t know half of it,” he said sadly.
I took a crouton, left over from my lunch, and set it down in the middle of the restaurant’s white china plate. “If what I know equals this crouton,” I said, pointing at the little brown piece of bread, “then is what I don’t know as big as this plate?”
“Oh, my dear,” he said, shaking his head. “The whole truth is bigger than this table we are eating on, including the chairs.”
He wouldn’t say more. He said he was hurting. That soon he would die. That, really, it was best that I did not learn any more because I didn’t have a need-to-know. But it is not just me who needs to know. We need to be able to keep secrets, but this kind of secret-keeping— of this kind of secret — is the work of totalitarian states, like the one we fought against for five decades during the Cold War. Fighting totalitarianism was America’s rationale for building seventy thousand nuclear weapons in sixty-five styles. In a free and open democratic society, conducting projects in the name of science is one thing. Keeping forty-year-old secrets from a president even after he tries to find them out is an entirely different problem for a democratic nation. It sets a precedent. It makes it easier for a group of powerful men to set up a program that defies the Constitution and defiles morality in the name of science and national security, all under the deceptive cover that no one has a need-to-know. I believe that even though the
