Not sure if this belongs in GQ, GD, or CS, but I supposed it can start here. There are factual questions to discuss, though I can see it becoming a debate. At its heart, I am discussing a book, so maybe this belongs in CS.
I discovered an NPR news article reviewing a book about “Area 51”. The article includes an excerpt from the book, one paragraph of which I quote below:
from Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base**, **By Annie Jacobsen
[ol]
[li]$28 trillion dollars? Really? And no one had anything to say about that? It seems that is an awfully large number (even in 1940’s dollars) for no one in Congress to have noticed that, even with a huge war going on.[/li][li]No one in Congress knew of the Manhattan Project? Did any elected official in the legislative or executive branches know of this expensive and pivotal project? Someone had to okay this.[/li][li]Is this just another crackpot book about woo woo stuff in Nevada? If so, why is NPR paying attention to it?[/li][/ol]
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The author was on The Daily Show today promoting the book. The choice excerpt was some kind of lunacy whereby in 1947, Stalin had a Russian flying saucer flown to Area 51.
That’s billions, not trillions. In the middle of a world war, it wouldn’t be so hard to bury 28 billion dollars today. That’s only about 4% of the current defence budget, after all.
Truman was indeed not briefed on the project until he became president. Stalin probably knew more about it than nearly anybody in the US government. Weird, but true.
[edit] None of which is to say that the book is serious. Just being nitpicky. Sorry
The book may or may not be crap but I wouldn’t judge it based on your selected text alone. $28 billion isn’t that much to hide especially during a time of world war when money is being spent like crazy and there are lots of other things to worry about. The basic point about most members of Congress not knowing military secrets is true even today. Being a member of Congress doesn’t mean you get to know everything.
I started a thread under a similar topic once that got some good responses.
This woman must have the best agent on the planet. Her book is obvious tripe (either her source is messing with her or he doesn’t exist), but she somehow managed to get on both Fresh Air and the Daily Show.
As to the OP, the bit about Truman not knowing about the bomb is true but
Isn’t. Truman chaired the commitee as a Senator, before he became VP. Indeed, his work with the Committee is how he rose to prominence and thus probably how he caught the attn of FDR and so was selected his runningmate for the '44 election.
IIRC, the Truman committee actually did start to investigate where the Manhatten Project money was going, but agreed to turn a blind eye when the administration asked them to knock it off.
Twenty eight billion dollars is plausible. This site says $21,570,821,000 in 1996 dollars. And I’ve read that the Manhattan Project consumed 1/12 of the entire American war budget.
She mentioned the Horton brothers, two actual aircraft designers who developed a flying wing for the Nazis, as the guys who designed Stalin’s disk, as she called it. She also said it was crewed by dwarves.
Wiki says one brother moved to Argentina after the war and lived there until his death. The other brother stayed in Germany and became an officer in the post-war Luftwaffe. It doesn’t say whether it was East or West. Did both East and West air forces have the same name?
Apparently, the woman is also the same cool headed individual that caused a minor national freakout when she wrote a magazine article a few years back claiming that she witnessed a group of arab gentleman on a plane she was on preparing a “dry run” for a planned terrorist attack (the men turned out to be a band of Syrian musicians).
I can’t speak on how much Congress may have known at the time, but I don’t have much a problem with the notion that the Manhattan project was effectively kept secret to nearly everyone not participating in the project itself. Despite how huge it was, much of the industrial development associated with it was either so banal or so arcane that while surely many people know that large construction projects were going on, very few could have accurately guessed what exactly they were for. OTOH, the direct development of the first nuclear weapons appears mostly to have taken place at relatively isolated locations with not much chance for interaction by the engineers and scientists (and their families) with the outside world.
Meanwhile, the veracity of the book supposedly rests on the author having interviewed more than 80 persons who worked lengthy periods at Groom Lake, and appears to concentrate mainly on the 50’s-'60s period as more recent activities remain heavily classified. I may read it, as I’ve had a long-time interest in the various legends surrounding the site, and some more good stories about the U-2 and SR-71 programs are always welcome, but even before doing so I can see two possible problems:
I’m not sure the author has a clear understanding of the differences between the nuclear test program conducted at the Nevada Test Range and the aviation projects worked on at Groom Lake,
The entire bit about the Russians having somehow flown a German-desigend flying disk to a (deliberate?) crash in new Mexico seems utterly preposterous on its face.
There almost certainly were German-sourced basic designs for disc-shaped aircraft developed during the later stages of WWII, but there seems to be effectively no evidence that any of these designs ever resulted in manned flying prototypes, much less operational aircraft. Likewise for notional Soviet-developed aircraft based on the German designs. Even if such craft had been built and flown, what would be a plausible reason that no evidence of their existence seems to, er, exist today? Such discs would almost certainly not be magical devices anyway. It’s fairly certain they would have to use now-conventional jet propulsion and well-known aerodynamic principles for flight, so what exactly would be the big secret about such designs that keeps them hidden?
A successful flying disc design might result in relatively high-performance aircraft with more or less vertical takeoff and landing capability, but this clearly seems to have reached a technical dead end: otherwise, why would our air forces not be making widespread use of such craft? Why would the Soviets and the US spend massive amounts on the development of VTOL fast jet aircraft, such as the Harrier and F-35, if a flying disc could meet or exceed the speed, range or payload capabilities of such aircraft? If disks could provide an attractive airlift capability, why expend so much effort on the ridiculously complex and expensive V-22 Osprey?
As for names like the Horten Brothers and Joseph Mengele showing up in the legend, that just seems like so much name-dropping.
Sorry, just my opinion. I’ll listen to any others who weigh in.
With a crew of genetically engineered midgets, IIRC.
And as I mentioned in another thread here in GQ that I started, on the Daily Show she also talked about how the Clinton administration had to petition some government agency to find out about what was going on at Area 51. A lot of what happened there was on a “need-to-know” basis and whoever was in charge of those activities apparently felt there the president didn’t need to know.
ETA: Ah, I see Boyo Jim already mentioned the midgets.
I think the idea that nobody in congress knew about the Manhattan project is a little misleading. Plenty of people knew something was going on, just not the specific details of why there were large construction projects and technicians and scientists gathering for projects. And there must have been some conjecture about a secret weapon (radar was a secret weapon too). Most people didn’t have an inkling of what fission was, or know that it could be used to produce an explosive bomb, so even if they heard a story it might have seemed less probable than the cover stories used.
My best guess for Stalin’s disk is that its an obfuscation planted to make the rest of the claims about area 51 seem improbable, in case any of them are true.
She also claimed on the Daily show that the stuff she mentioned on air was now made available via the Freedom of Information Act. We should at least be able to check those claims.
But she also stated she got a lot of her stuff from eye witness accounts–and you know how unreliable those can be.
My recollection of her account on The Daily Show was that she claimed to have interviewed large numbers of people (74?) for the book generally, but Stewart was most interested in the claim that President Clinton was told he could not be informed about the goings on at Roswell because it had a need to know policy and he didn’t.
She seemed pretty clear that only one source told her about the Stalin story, and she prefaced it with a claim that a UFO conspiracy group from the UK contacted her, said they’d read her book, and said they didn’t believe it. When you can’t even persuade conspiracy nuts, you’ve got a thin tale.
It’s a shame that she chose to include the unbelievable tale about Stalin, Mengele and the Roswell incident. It’s all anybody is going to talk about, and it completely undermines the credibility of what seems to be an important and exhaustively researched book about the history of atomic testing and experimental aircraft development.
Editors knew that the crazy story would get a lot of publicity, but in the long run I think it makes everyone dubious about the other 99% of the book.
I haven’t read the book. But from what people are saying it sounds like a classic “good and unique” situation - the parts of the book that are good aren’t unique and the parts that are unique aren’t good.