engineer didn’t tell me everything, that is why he told me what he did.
According to my source, the Atomic Energy Commission conducted experiments on humans in a classified government facility in the Nevada desert beginning in 1951. Although this was done in direct violation of the Nuremberg Code of 1947, it is far from the first time the Commission had acted in violation of the most basic moral principle involving voluntary human consent. In 1993, reporter Eileen Welsome wrote a newspaper story stating that the Atomic Energy Commission had conducted plutonium experiments on human beings, most notably retarded children and orphan boys from the Fernald State School, outside Boston, without the children’s or their guardians’ knowledge or consent. After this horrible revelation came to light, President Clinton opened an investigation to look into what the Atomic Energy Commission had done and the secrets it had been able to safeguard inside its terrifying and unprecedented system of secret-keeping. I asked the engineer why President Clinton hadn’t learned about the S-4 facility at Area 51—or had he?
“I think he might have come very close,” the engineer said about President Clinton. “But they kept it from him.”
“Who are they?” I asked. The engineer told me that his elite group had been given the keys to the original facility at Area 51. “Who inherited those keys from you five engineers?” I wanted to know.
“You don’t have a need-to-know” is all he would say.
EPILOGUE
In the summer of 2010 a book arrived in the mail from Colonel Leghorn, the father of overhead reconnaissance, age ninety-one. The pages were musty and smelled like an attic. What he had sent was his 1946 Army Air Forces commemorative yearbook from the Operation Crossroads atomic bomb tests. What is most striking is how the story of America’s first postwar nuclear test begins as a “mysterious ArmyNavy assignment” in a “sand- swept town — Roswell.”
“Roswell… Roswell… Roswell… Roswell… Roswell… Roswell.” The word repeats six times in the first few pages of the government-issued yearbook, making it clear that it was from the Roswell Army Air Field in New Mexico that the first shot in what would be a forty-three-year-old Cold War was fired. And what a colossal opening shot Operation Crossroads was, an unprecedented show of force aimed at letting Joseph Stalin know that America was not done with the nuclear bomb. Forty-two thousand people were present in the Pacific for the two nuclear bomb tests, including Stalin’s spies. The U.S. government spent nearly two billion dollars (adjusted for inflation) to show the world the nuclear power it now possessed.
“Stalin learned from Hitler,” the EG&G engineer says, “revenge… and other things.” And that to consider Stalin’s perspective one should think about two key moments in history, one right before World War II began and another right before it ended. On August 23, 1939, one week before war in Europe officially began, Hitler and Stalin agreed to be allies and signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, meaning each country promised not to attack the other when war in Europe broke out. And yet almost immediately after shaking hands, Hitler began plotting to double- cross Stalin. Twenty-two months later, Hitler’s sneak attack against Russia resulted in millions of deaths. And then, just a few weeks before World War II ended, Stalin, Truman, and Churchill met in Potsdam, Germany — from July 17, 1945, to August 2, 1945—and agreed to be postwar allies. Just one day before that conference began, America had secretly tested the world’s first and only atomic bomb, inside the White Sands Proving Ground in the New Mexico desert. Truman’s closest advisers had suggested that Truman share the details of the atomic test with Stalin at Potsdam, but Truman did not. It didn’t matter. Nuclear weapons historians believe that Joseph Stalin was already well aware of what the Manhattan Project engineers had accomplished. Stalin had spies inside the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory who had been providing him with bomb blueprints and other information since 1941. By the time the Potsdam conference rolled around, Stalin was already well at work on his own atomic bomb. Despite Stalin and Truman pretending to be allies, neither side trusted the other side, neither man trusted the other man. Each side was instead making plans to build up its own atomic arsenal for future use. When Operation Crossroads commenced just twelve months after the handshakes at Potsdam, the Cold War battle lines were already indelibly drawn.
It follows that Stalin’s black propaganda hoax — the flying disc peopled with alien look-alikes that wound up crashing near Roswell, New Mexico — could have been the Soviet dictator’s revenge for Truman’s betrayal at Crossroads. His double cross had to have been in the planning stages during the handshaking at Potsdam, metaphorically mirroring what Hitler had done during the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. By July of 1947, Stalin was still two years away from being able to successfully test his own nuclear bomb. The flying disc at Roswell, says the EG&G engineer, was “a warning shot across Truman’s bow.” Stalin may not have had the atomic bomb just yet, but he had seminal hover and fly technology, pilfered from the Germans, and he had stealth. Together, these technologies made the American military gravely concerned. Perplexed by the flying disc’s movements, and its radical ability to confuse radar, the Army Air Forces was left wondering what else Stalin had in his arsenal of unconventional weapons, usurped from the Nazis after the war.
“Hitler invented stealth,” says Gene Poteat, the first CIA officer in the Agency’s history to be assigned to the National Reconnaissance Office, or NRO. Gene Poteat’s job was to assess Soviet radar threats, and to do this, he observed many spy plane tests at Area 51. “Hitler’s stealth bomber was called the Horten Ho 229,” Poteat says, “which is also called the Horten flying wing. It was covered with radar-absorbing paint, carbon embedded in glue. The high graphic content produced a result called ‘ghosting,’ which made it difficult for radar to see.”
The Horten Ho 229 to which Poteat refers was the brainchild of two young aircraft designers who worked for Hitler’s Luftwaffe, Walter and Reimar Horten. These are the same two brothers who, in the fall of 1947, became the subject of the U.S. Army Intelligence’s massive European manhunt called “Operation Harass”—the search for a flyingsaucer-type aircraft that could allegedly hover and fly.
Whatever happened to the Horten brothers? Unlike so many Nazi scientists and engineers who were recruited under Operation Paperclip, Walter and Reimar Horten were originally overlooked. After being captured by the U.S. Ninth Army on April 7, 1945, at their workshop in Gцttingen, they were set up in a guarded London high-rise near Hyde Park. There, they were interrogated by the famous American physicist and rocket scientist Theodore Von Kбrmбn, who decided the Horten brothers did not have much to offer the U.S. Army Air Forces by way of aircraft technology — at least not with their flying wing. After being returned to Germany, Reimar escaped to Argentina, where he was set up in a beautiful house on the shores of Villa Carlos Paz Lake, thanks to Argentinean president and ardent Nazi supporter Juan Perуn. Walter lived out his life in Baden-Baden, Germany, hiding in plain sight.
The information about the Horten brothers comes from the aircraft historian David Myhra, who, in his search to understand all-wing aircraft, industriously tracked down both Horten brothers, visited them in their respective countries in the 1980s, and recorded hundreds of hours of interviews with them on audiotape. These tapes can be found in the archives of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum.
“Reimar had me agree to two restrictions before I went to South America to interview him,” Myhra explains. “One was that I couldn’t ask questions about Hitler or the Third Reich.” And the second was that “he said he didn’t want to talk about the CIA. Reimar said there was this crazy idea that he’d designed some kind of a flying saucer and that the CIA had [supposedly] been looking for him.” Myhra says Reimar Horten was adamant in his refusal to discuss anything related to the CIA. “The subject was off-limits for him,” Myhra says. The conversation with Reimar Horten that Myhra refers to took place in the decade before Army Intelligence released to the public its three- hundred-page file on Operation Harass. This is the file that discusses the U.S. manhunt for the Horten brothers and their so-called flying disc. The Operation Harass file makes clear that someone from an American intelligence organization made contact with Reimar in the late 1940s to interrogate him about the flying disc. More than forty years later, Reimar Horten still refused to talk about what was said. A 2010 Freedom of Information Act request to the Department of the Army, Office of the General Counsel, Army Pentagon, issued a “no records response.” A secondary appeal was also “denied.”
If Stalin really did get the Horten brothers’ flying disc, either from the brothers themselves or from blueprints they had drawn, how did Stalin get their flying disc to hover and fly on like that? What became of the craft’s hover technology, powered by some mysterious power plant, which was also so fervently sought by Counter Intelligence Corps agents during Operation Harass? The EG&G engineer says that while he does not know what research was conducted on the “equipment” when it was at Wright-Patterson, beginning in 1947, he does know about the research conducted on the “power plant” after he received the “equipment,” in Nevada in 1951.
“There was another [important] EG&G engineer,” he explains. That engineer was assigned the task of learning about Stalin’s hover technology, “which was called electromagnetic frequency, or EMF.” This engineer “spent an entire year in a windowless room” inside an EG&G building in downtown Las Vegas trying to
