Last night’s Nightline featured a confrontation between Annie Jacobsen, the author of the controversial book about Area 51 making worldwide headlines, and ABC reporter, Bill Weir. Jacobsen arranged to have Weir talk to the anonymous witness of one of the most contentious claims of her book, regarding Stalin’s involvement with the Roswell UFO crash in 1947. However, Weir says the witness told him that he did not make all of the claims laid out in the book, and described the gentleman as “in his late eighties, seemed obviously confused and conflicted.”
In her book, Jacobsen claims that a retired EG&G engineer, who wished to remain anonymous, had told her that he had witnessed the parts and bodies from the alleged crashed UFO near Roswell, NM in 1947. He says they were brought to Area 51 after being stored at Wright Patterson Field in Dayton, Ohio. The reason the base is called Ares 51, Jacobsen claims, is because these materials arrived in 1951.
In the book, the witness says he found that the craft was actually a version of an advanced German aircraft, called a Horton Flying Wing, and that the bodies were children that had been mutilated by Josef Mengele, the infamous Nazi physician who had performed gruesome human experiments in concentration camps during World War II. Stalin had flown this craft over the U.S. , with the mangled children, in order to trick the Americans into thinking this was a spacecraft flown by extraterrestrials inciting a mass panic similar to the one caused by the airing of the radio program, The War of the Worlds.
Jacobsen says that UFO researchers and skeptics alike have had a hard time buying her story, but she stood by the credibility of her witness, and thus far faced little derision by the media. That was until last night, when Weir asked her about the discrepancies and appeared flabbergasted that Jacobsen still stood by every bit of the story.
Other engineers in her book were also given a chance to speak out, many of them feeling “snookered”. They feel the information about Roswell may have been added just to sell books, jeopardizing their chance to share their real life experiences.