Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base

by Annie Jacobsen

Had the original UFO cover-up—the crash of the Horten brothers’ flying disc at Roswell—created this Hydra-like monster? Had maintaining secrecy around the follow-up program, which had been clandestinely set up in the Nevada desert just outside Area 51, resulted in such endemic paranoia among analysts at the CIA that these individuals sensed they were being lied to? That the dark secret the government was hiding was that UFOs really were from outer space? Or was an elite group with a need-to-know allowing—perhaps even fostering—exactly this kind of conjecture among analysts because it was better to have insiders on a wild-goose chase than to have them on the trail leading to the original enigma of Area 51?

the most popular conspiracy Web site based in America is AboveTopSecret.com. According to CEO Bill Irvine, the site sees five million visitors each month. AboveTopSecret.com has approximately 2.4 million pages of content, including 10.6 million individual posts. The Web site’s motto is Deny Ignorance, and its members say they are people who “rage against the mindless status-quo.”

Approximately six hundred million pages of information about the government’s postwar use of Nazi criminals’ expertise remains classified as of 2011. Many documents about Area 51 exist in that pile.