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.