The EG&G engineers were told that part of Joseph Stalin’s offer to Josef Mengele stated that if he could create a crew of grotesque, child-size aviators for Stalin, he would be given a laboratory in which to continue his work. According to what the engineers were told, Mengele held up his side of the Faustian bargain and provided Stalin with the child-size crew. Joseph Stalin did not. Mengele never took up residence in the Soviet Union. Instead, he lived for four years in Germany under an assumed name and then escaped to South America, where he lived, first in Argentina and then in Paraguay, until his death in 1979.
When Joseph Stalin sent the biologically and/or surgically reengineered children in the craft over New Mexico hoping it would land there, the engineers were told, Stalin’s plan was for the children to climb out and be mistaken for visitors from Mars. Panic would ensue, just like it did after the radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds. America’s early-warning radar system would be overwhelmed with sightings of other “UFOs.” Truman would see how easily a totalitarian dictator could control the masses using black propaganda. Stalin may have been behind the United States in atomic bomb technology, but when it came to manipulating the people’s perception, Stalin was the leader with the upper hand. This, says the engineer, is what he and the others in the group were told.
For months I asked the engineer why President Truman didn’t use the remains from the Roswell crash to show the world what an evil, abhorrent man Joseph Stalin was. I guessed that maybe Truman didn’t want to admit the breach of U.S. borders. For a long time, I never got an answer, just a shaking of the head. Here was the engineer who had the answer to the riddle inside the riddle that is Area 51, but he was unwilling to say more. He is the only one of the original elite group of EG&G engineers who is still alive. He said he wouldn’t tell me more, no matter how many times I asked. One day, I asked again. “Why didn’t President Truman reveal the truth in 1947?” This time he answered.
“Because we were doing the same thing,” he said. “They wanted to push science. They wanted to see how far they could go.”
Then he said, “We did things I wish I had not done.”
Then, “We performed medical experiments on handicapped children and prisoners.”
“But you are not a doctor,” I said.
“They wanted engineers.”
“On whose authority did you act?”
“The Atomic Energy Commission was in charge. And Vannevar Bush,” he said. “People were killed. In this great United States.”
“Why did we do that?”
“You do what you do because you love your country, and you are told what you are doing is for the good of the country,” the engineer said. Meaning out at the original Area 51, starting in 1951, the EG&G engineers worked in secret on a nefarious Nazi-inspired black project that would remain entirely hidden from the public because Vannevar Bush told them it was the correct thing to do.
“It was a long, long time ago,” the engineer said. “I have tried to forget.”
“When did it end?” I asked.
No answer.
“In 1952?” I asked. Still no answer. “In 1953…1954…?”
“At least through the 1980s it was still going on,” he said.
“I believe you should tell me the whole story,” I said. “Otherwise, once you are gone, you will take the truth with you.”
“You don’t want to know,” he said.
“I do.”
“You don’t have a need-to-know,” he said.
For many months, I tried to learn more. I got pieces. Slivers of pieces. One-word details. “This” confirmed and “that” reconfirmed, regarding what he had previously said. One day, when we were eating lunch in a restaurant, I recounted back to the engineer everything I knew. I asked for his permission to put it all in this book. He did not say yes. He did not say no. We interviewed for more than one year. Then one day, I asked him how much of the story I now knew.
“You don’t know half of it,” he said sadly.
I took a crouton, left over from my lunch, and set it down in the middle of the restaurant’s white china plate. “If what I know equals this crouton,” I said, pointing at the little brown piece of bread, “then is what I don’t know as big as this plate?”
“Oh, my dear,” he said, shaking his head. “The whole truth is bigger than this table we are eating on, including the chairs.”
He wouldn’t say more. He said he was hurting. That soon he would die. That, really, it was best that I did not learn any more because I didn’t have a need-to-know. But it is not just me who needs to know. We need to be able to keep secrets, but this kind of secret-keeping—of this kind of secret—is the work of totalitarian states, like the one we fought against for five decades during the Cold War. Fighting totalitarianism was America’s rationale for building seventy thousand nuclear weapons in sixty-five styles. In a free and open democratic society, conducting projects in the name of science is one thing. Keeping forty-year-old secrets from a president even after he tries to find them out is an entirely different problem for a democratic nation. It sets a precedent. It makes it easier for a group of powerful men to set up a program that defies the Constitution and defiles morality in the name of science and national security, all under the deceptive cover that no one has a need-to-know. I believe that even though the engineer didn’t tell me everything, that is why he told me what he did.