Jacobsen hypothesis
The Jacobsen hypothesis is the claim, advanced by the journalist Annie Jacobsen in Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base (2011) on the word of one anonymous retired EG&G engineer, that the disc recovered near Roswell, New Mexico in July 1947 was a remotely piloted Soviet flying saucer built on the flying-wing work of the Horten brothers and crewed by roughly thirteen-year-old children whom Josef Mengele had surgically altered to pass for visitors from Mars, sent over New Mexico on Joseph Stalin's order to start a panic like the one that followed the 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast. According to the engineer, two of the child-size aviators were still alive, comatose, when the Army recovered them, and the wreck and the bodies went from Wright Field in 1951 to a secret EG&G facility in Nevada, S-4.
The hypothesis is one reading under the Roswell incident (the parent event), set beside the Air Force's Project Mogul account, Joseph P. Farrell's Nazi-origin reading in Roswell and the Reich and the readings that take the Roswell vehicle occupants to be non-human intelligent beings (siblings, each a competing explanation of the same July 1947 debris and bodies). It differs from them in naming the Soviet Union as the sender and a deliberate provocation as the purpose, and in resting on a single unverified witness; Roswell takes about thirty of the book's 544 pages. The historian Richard Rhodes, reviewing the book in The Washington Post, concluded that Jacobsen "shows herself at a minimum extraordinarily gullible or journalistically incompetent" and that every claim the engineer makes already circulated in the UFO literature, while the historians Robert S. Norris and Jeffrey T. Richelson hold that Project Mogul and the later anthropomorphic-dummy balloon tests already account for the debris and the bodies. The researcher Donald Schmitt, who holds the bodies to be non-human, says the Army brought Paperclip scientists to Roswell and Wright-Patterson to establish that the wreck and bodies were not a German experiment, and mentions bodies made "to look almost alien" as something "theorized by some authors".
The alleged events
Stalin, Mengele and the Horten designs
The engineer says the crew was the product of a bargain the engineers were told of: Stalin offered Mengele a laboratory in which to continue his eugenics work if he would create a crew of "grotesque, child-size aviators", most likely in the winter of 1945 as the Reich collapsed. Mengele supplied the crew; Stalin never gave him the laboratory, and Mengele lived for four years in Germany under an assumed name before escaping to South America. The engineers were told only that the children were "rumored to have been kidnapped" by Mengele; whether their heads and eyes were altered surgically or were genetic deformities was a question they were left to ask.
The aircraft was a Soviet development of the Hortens' work. Jacobsen reconstructs the German side from Counter Intelligence Corps files released to the researcher Timothy Cooper: Walter and Reimar Horten, designers of the flying-wing Horten IX, were captured by the U.S. Ninth Army in April 1945 and interrogated in London by Theodore von Kármán, who judged their flying wing of little use to the Army Air Forces; Reimar went to Argentina and Walter stayed in Germany. Informants such as the former Messerschmitt test pilot Fritz Wendel told Army investigators that the brothers had worked on a half-moon, tailless saucer-shaped craft at Heiligenbeil, East Prussia, and that radio control of such a craft was being experimented with in Berlin.
Recovery and the Horten manhunt (1947–1948)
The Joint Chiefs of Staff, in Jacobsen's reconstruction, put the Army's G-2 intelligence staff in charge of a secret project called Operation Harass, and hundreds of Counter Intelligence Corps officers searched Germany for the Hortens' relatives, colleagues and professors from the autumn of 1947. A March 1948 memo reported the brothers "located and interrogated", Walter Horten's opinion being that Russian troops may have found the Horten IX blueprints at the Gotha railroad car factory; on 12 May 1948 a further memo noted that "Walter Horten has admitted his contacts with the Russians", the last mention of the brothers in the declassified record. The engineer says the disc was piloted remotely from a larger aircraft and "came down over Alaska".
At Roswell the responders from the Roswell Army Air Field found two crash sites, and bodies beside the crashed craft. The craft carried Russian writing stamped in a ring around its inside. Jacobsen reads the late Walter Haut's sworn affidavit, which describes small bodies with disproportionately large heads at a second crash site, as a description of the same child-size aviators.
S-4 and the five engineers (1951)
Everything from the crash went to Wright Field, where it stayed until 1951. The Atomic Energy Commission, not the Air Force or the CIA, was then put in charge, and five EG&G engineers received the remains at a facility sixteen miles northwest of Groom Lake, with Vannevar Bush directing the work. Their task was to reverse-engineer the disc and to care for the two living children, who were stood upright in tanks of a Jell-O-like substance attached to life support, their mouths sometimes opening as if to speak. A second EG&G engineer spent a year in a windowless room in a Las Vegas EG&G building working out how the disc's electromagnetic propulsion operated; "We figured it out," the engineer says, "We've had hover and fly technology all this time." The engineer says the S-4 that housed the Roswell equipment continued for decades, a timeline that Jacobsen finds consistent with Bob Lazar's 1988–1989 account of working at S-4. The book dates the engineers' receipt of the remains to 1951; a Telegraph report of the book says the engineer was put on to the Roswell project in 1978.
Why the disc was not disclosed
Jacobsen asked the engineer for months why President Truman did not use the remains to expose Stalin. His answer, on the engineer's telling, was that "we were doing the same thing": the engineer says the United States conducted medical experiments on handicapped children and prisoners, and that Bush oversaw that program. Norris and Richelson report the engineer's further statement that the program was "still going on" through the 1980s. In a podcast discussion of the book, the host Danny Jones gives the same exchange as the engineer saying that the reason the story was not exposed was that EG&G "started doing the same exact thing with children".
Publication and reception
The book appeared in May 2011 and was reported at once in the British and American press, a United States Air Force spokesman telling the Telegraph that the service had not yet read it. Reviewers took the Roswell chapters differently from the rest of the book: the New York Times reviewer Janet Maslin called the thesis "a hasty-sounding addendum to an otherwise straightforward investigative book", the Los Angeles Times reviewer Scott Martelle praised the book as deeply researched, and the Christian Science Monitor reviewer Kevin Moran advised readers to skip the UFO chapters, noting that every account of the theory rests on one anonymous engineer and that some endnotes cite "educated speculation".
Criticism and Jacobsen's responses
The single source
Rhodes, Moran and the author Leslie Kean object that the whole Roswell thesis rests on one unnamed man; Kean said she would never report anything about UFOs on a single unnamed source. Jacobsen answers that he is the last survivor of the five engineers, that all five held top secret clearances under a strict need-to-know, that getting the account took months, and that "he had nothing to gain and everything to lose by telling me"; she told Boyle it was a matter of conscience for him. Norris and Richelson, relying on a report by ABC News, call the engineer "contradictory and confused" when interviewed off-camera. The book does not name the engineer. A guest on a podcast discussing the book supplied the name Alfred O'Donnell.
The Air Force reports and the terrestrial explanation
Norris and Richelson hold that Jacobsen does not mention the roughly thousand-page Air Force reports on Roswell, which attribute the debris to Mogul flight number 4 and the bodies to anthropomorphic dummies of the HIGH DIVE and EXCELSIOR parachute tests, and that she "never examines, or even acknowledges the existence of" that terrestrial explanation. Jacobsen's own reading of the S-4 material draws on a deception precedent: she compares the engineers' belief that they were handling alien beings with the 1942 episode in which the Bell test pilot Jack Woolams wore a gorilla mask in a propeller-less aircraft, and suggests the Atomic Energy Commission "had taken a page out of the CIA's playbook on deception campaigns" and that later S-4 staff, including Lazar, may have been told they were working on alien beings.
The Horten brothers, Mengele and Stalin
Rhodes holds that the Hortens were interrogated by von Kármán after capture and judged of little use, a fact he says Jacobsen notes but does not seem to understand, and asks why, if the engineer's hover technology was figured out, the United States still flies conventional wings. Norris and Richelson add that no reputable source shows Stalin knew of the Welles broadcast and that Mengele never lived in the Soviet Union. In the engineer's telling Mengele supplied the crew and Stalin withheld the laboratory he had promised. The Army's own 1948 memos, which she cites, record Walter Horten's admission of contacts with the Russians.
The debris and the bodies
Researchers who hold the Roswell craft to be extraterrestrial point to the debris described by Mac Brazel, Jesse Marcel and other witnesses, a foil-like material that returned to its shape and lightweight beams bearing symbols, as beyond anything a 1947 Soviet aircraft could be built from.[citation needed] Researchers who hold the Roswell occupants to be non-human reject the children reading on the physiology reported by the Army's medical consultants. Philip Corso relates reports from Walter Reed doctors that the beings had a combined blood and lymphatic system and "no digestive or waste systems", nutrient and waste exchange taking place through the skin or outer covering. Leonard Stringfield's medical sources are also said to have reported the same absence.[citation needed] Schmitt gives the Army's German-experiment inquiry as the reason Paperclip scientists were brought to Roswell and Wright-Patterson, and concludes that the Army "came up empty handed" on what the craft was.
The account as a managed release
Some Roswell researchers read the account itself as disinformation, or as a permitted release by the same structure that guards the S-4 material, steering attention from non-human evidence to a story that keeps the incident inside Cold War human agency.[citation needed] Jacobsen's own closing reading of the S-4 material, that the engineers may have been fed a false belief in alien beings, is consistent with that kind of operation, though she does not frame it as one.
References
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