Book of the week: Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base by Annie Jacobsen

(Little, Brown, $28)

Area 51, in southern Nevada, remains “America’s most mysterious military installation,” said Janet Maslin in The New York Times. The supposed site of a grand UFO cover-up, the base doesn’t even officially exist, according to the U.S. government. But Los Angeles Times reporter Annie Jacobsen claims to have unlocked many of the installation’s deepest secrets, largely due to a stroke of luck. Four years ago, she reports, she was seated at a family dinner near her “husband’s uncle’s wife’s sister’s husband” when the 88-year-old leaned toward her and said, “Have I got a good story for you.” The man, a physicist who had worked at Area 51, introduced her to a network of elderly scientists and engineers with ties to the base. Jacobsen has combined their stories into a “levelheaded” investigative account of the site’s history—except for her UFO story, which is a doozy.

Jacobsen’s UFO theory, which closes the book, “has shocked even the most devoted conspiracy theorists,” said Marina Watson Peláez in Time.com. She claims that a source told her that a saucer-shaped aircraft really did crash in 1947 in nearby Roswell, N.M., just as UFO enthusiasts have long suspected. Her source, whom she identifies as someone who worked at Area 51 on wreckage from the craft, told her that the saucer was not a spaceship but a Soviet craft that had been sent to stir panic about an alien invasion. The tale gets “even more bizarre,” said Thomas Harding in the London Telegraph. The ship was supposedly occupied by disfigured, child-size adolescents, the products of a diabolical experiment perpetrated by Joseph Stalin and the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele. Two of those “alien-like” youngsters allegedly survived the crash.

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That “outrageous—and thinly sourced—tale” distracts from the rest of Jacobsen’s rigorously researched book, said Andrew Dunn in Bloomberg.com. Her initial source and his former colleagues, emboldened by recent declassifications of top-secret information, revealed much about the espionage and weapons programs that apparently formed the bulk of the work at Area 51 throughout the Cold War. Area 51 scientists reportedly helped to develop the U-2 spy plane, reverse-engineered captured Soviet fighter planes, and later created the drones now flying above Afghanistan and Pakistan. Talk of “deformed Nazi kids sent by Stalin” might be good for selling books, but it’s the other stuff that’s most worth reading.