Area 51

Early on, I was going to give this book 4 stars. The opening chapters are exciting and while they may or may not be true, they inspire a sense of the mystery that has surrounded Area 51.

Unfortunately, the wheels begin to come off in the middle of the book.

Jacobsen's treatise on Area 51's use as a nuclear testing facility during the cold war - via former Nazi engineers relocated to the U.S. during the ultra-secret Operation Paperclip - is fairly riveting. However, the next several chapters - which detail the development of spy planes (such as the Oxcart) at Area 51 - follow the same weary pattern: a plane is tested, it crashes somewhere, and "The Agency" rushes out to collect the remains before anyone could find out. I know that I shouldn't be so callous, but that gets extremely boring after a while.Throughout the book, Jacobsen alludes to "the dark purpose of Area 51" - however, it takes until the very last chapter for her to about-face and actually confront a very intriguing scenario: that the UFOs that crashes in Roswell were Russian-made remote-controlled hover drones, and that their "alien" pilots were actually genetically-altered humans designed to inspire fear in the American public (similar to the War of the Worlds radio broadcast).*This* is the kind of exciting stuff that I think about when pondering Area 51. Late in the book, Jacobsen details a discussion with one of her chief informants, who tells her that these kinds of genetic experiments are still going on at Area 51, and that if a crouton detailed what the public knew about Area 51, its entire truth would be the size of a long dining table and chairs. Wow, right?Sadly, Jacobsen's floundering writing style - which jumps around far too much to inspire intrigue - and an seeming obsession with the elements that of Area 51 that, today, are common knowledge (Predator drones, the SR-71 and F-117, etc.) just don't shed much light into the story of Area 51.

For what could have been and what ended up being: 2 stars.

I am astonished. I fully expected this book to be filled with conspiracy theories. Instead, it was focused debunking with what bits of the truth are known. Through these stories, you learn about the people behind the projects as well as a timeline of events. To think this is book tells only a small fraction of what's gone on at the base for several decades...