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i wouldn't be here if i didn't have that sense of curiosity. what i am going to start with. on and going to actually read you two paragraphs from bible but i am going to set the stage a little bit first and let you know where area 51 is other than people's imaginations because it really does exist and it is

located in southern nevada about 70 miles north of las vegas. it is in a much bigger parcel of land that is the largest federal restricted piece of real estate in the united states. it is about the size of connecticut and is called the nevada test and trading range. inside the nevada test and trading range there's a 1,350 square-mile parcel called the nevada test site which is divided into quadrants. the quadrant numbers have changed and shifted and gone underground over the years but in essence they are 1 through 30 with some mysteriously missing. area 51 sits just outside the nevada test site but inside the greater land parcel that is the nevada test and trading range and it is there that many -- that my book, the basis of my

book centers and that is where many of the most secret and alarming national security projects took place but also many of the most fantastic ones that kept us all safe, arguably kept us out of world war xxiii with the russians and help our pilots in vietnam. really great things went on. i will read two paragraphs that really speak to what the book is and when i was researching the book i was able to interview a total of 74 men who had rare unprecedented access to area 5132 of whom lived at the base for extended periods of time and 20 of them i told their story, their characters in my book. one of them that i will be

reading about is the pilot. us cia pilot named kent collins. he is flying the a 12 off carte which was the cia's original spy plane that flew at 90,000 feet. some top 3 is 3 times the speed of sound and 90,000 feet is about 17 miles up. this was in the 1960s so it was radical science and technology and the spy plane was built to take over after the youth 2 spy plane program was outed when gary powers was shutdown over the soviet union. so i write columns pushed to the aircraft through mock 2.. and another 45 seconds he would be out of the dangers of.

near 85,000 feet, the inevitable tiny black dots began to appear on the aircraft windshields, sporadic at first like the first drops of summer rain. only if you month earlier scientists at area 51 had been baffled by those black dots. they were eating with some kind of high atmosphere corrosion until the mystery was solved in the lab. it turned out they were dead bugs that recycling around in the upper atmosphere blasted into the jet stream by the world's two superpowers's rally of thermonuclear bomb is. they were killed in the bomb blast and sent aloft to 90,000 feet in the ensuing mushroom cloud as they gained orbit. when i first came across that detail of found it incredible. i thought to myself what on earth, or that high up, are dead bugs doing circling around?

i didn't really understand being 43 years old, not having lived through the cold war, the extent many of my sources did. i was 40 when i started the book. i wondered -- it didn't make much sense to me while those bugs were there. in essence it is a bit of an analogy of what area 51 is. it was set up to conduct espionage on the soviet union. the cia began building its base there in 1955 with the youth 2 spy plane because the cia wanted to spy on russia and see what they were doing. one of the other men i interviewed was pretty stockman. he had two month ago, really interesting side note that the men that i interviewed are really in the last chapter of their lives. but her be stockman explain to

me what it was like to be the first man to fly over the soviet union in u2. he agitated nikita khrushchev greatly and there was a lot of fallout between the eisenhower administration and the soviets over this buying that was going on. but at the same time, what stockman brought back in the film canisters of his u2 was over 400,000 square feet of film of spy footage, about what was going on in the soviet union. as he said to me, the cia was able to learn and understand that in fact the soviets were not lining up for world war iii as many members of the air force wanted to believe. certainly general lemay who is a character in my book as well. you might call him the antagonist. when you consider that the cia's

job is to present intelligence to the president based on facts, not fiction, not speculation, that is what the u2 spy plane certainly did for us and that was an important notion. but at the same time, there were other elements of the government that were really pushing science as i right in the book and here is what i get into some of the more dangerous areas and the questions that i would like leaders to be able to ask of themselves about whether or not pushing science is necessarily a good thing. right around that same time, or if you back up a little bit, for a while after world war ii we had an atomic bomb. then when we found out the russians also had an atomic bomb in 1949 there was a big movement

towards creating a bigger bomb, but thermonuclear bomb which is how these bugs got so high up. robert oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb really opposed that on moral grounds. he said it was not a good idea to create a weapon that was larger than its target. in other words, these thermonuclear bomb is so big that it would not wipe out a military installation, it would wipe out a whole city. the thermonuclear bomb that sent the bugs aloft that ken calls flew through with the thermonuclear bomb that was 10 megatons. that thermonuclear bomb is big enough if it is dropped on manhattan would wipe all five borrows and would kill 75% of the population down to washington d.c. overtime. obviously that is a bomb that is bigger than its target. in my book, one of the more interesting analogies that i

came across was at area 51 here we were trying to prevent war, that is what the cia was doing with their espionage platform and on the other side of the fence at the atomic bombing range of the nevada test site the atomic energy commission and the department of defense were practicing how to have a nuclear war. the spy plane ken:was by it was called the foxcart. most people never heard of it because it was only declassified by the cia in 2007, 50 years after its drawings and one of the characters in my book is the physicist who did the original drawings and helped to build for the cia. but this idea that you could have these two notions working at once is a little bit complicated. preventing a war but practicing to have one. the point i was making about the

oxcart is you have never seen it or heard of it may be but its cousin is very famous and that is -- i don't know if this is a military crowd but it is the sr-71, the air force's famous black bird that went mach 3. it is interesting because it stood for originally reconnaissance strike. but president johnson when he announced that bundled it and they didn't want to correct the president so they corrected the plane. reconnaissance strike meaning so that when the air force decided to take over the cia's espionage program their idea was to have it be a spy plane that could go in and photograph post nuclear sites to figure out what to follow up the bombing with.

and think that is one of the more interesting parts or perhaps more evocative parts of my book that i hope people will read and think about which is how these different federal organization that we have worked together, fight with one another on the secret programs, that on balance perhaps keep us safe and more nationally secure but sometimes enter into the area of recklessness. and i right about that in the book also. some of the weapons tests that we did out there were in my opinion reckless, one of which there was a program that we had called project 57. i told story through the eyes of the security guard who worked on that program. he was the first security guard at area 51 during the kabul -- u2 program. the working overtime to buy a

new car he agreed to moonlight on project 57 which was the idea that the defense department had. what would happen in america, this is 1957, what would happen if one of our planes carrying a nuclear weapon were to crash on american soil? would it have an actual explosion? would it created 30 bonn environment? they didn't know and they wanted to find out. so at the very edges of area 51 in a land parcel called area 13 they decided to a safety test. in essence they set off a dirty bomb out there and contaminated it hundred ninety five acres with plutonium that is still contaminated out there. so the idea of what is keeping a safe and what is pushing science and what is reckless and what is important all kind of comes

together in what i think is the in a glut of area 51. i could go on for a long time. i wrote a 500 page book filled with stories may be to keep me on track. i will take questions from the audience and maybe we can start a dialogue. >> we have questions coming up. this is interesting because it goes to the heart of your book a lot of which is about secrecy and how off budget this operation was. what percentage of the cia budget was very 51 and how was it justified? but you write in your book that the cia is certainly running area 51. a large part of this, that is most controversial things comes from the atomic energy commission. >> that is right. the atomic energy commission is now known as the department of energy. they changed their 9 four times over the years, maybe people

will forget about it. the original part of your question that i want to speak on is interesting. one of the people in my book that i write about at length although he has passed so everything and everyone is from archives but he was the sort of first man to run area 51 for the cia. his name was richard kissel. he is famous in cia legend and lore for a number of things but he ultimately had to step down for taking all the blame for the bay of pigs. in my book i explain a little bit that he got the bad rap on the bay of pigs. so it goes when you work in that kind of business. asking about where the budget came from, i found out in my research richard kissel was a brilliant economist, he was a yale graduate. he became the executor of finance for the marshall plan after world war ii.

there were $13 billion at the disposal of richard kissel to help rebuild europe and a friend came knocking at his door one night in washington d.c.. command by the name of frank would never. they sat in front of his fireplace and he said we need money for this group we have at the cia. because they have a mutual friend in april heaven, fizzled knew better than to as many more questions and just kind of agreed that would be all right. those funds were diverted over from the marshall plan to the cia about two years later. kissel became the support net to allen dulles. director of the cia. and area 51 was up and running. >> okay. several people want you to cut

to the little men. i told annie jacobsen before we started that last time i saw -- he complained to me he wrote and it is -- a chance to read it a brilliant book on the history of the civil-rights movement and all anyone wanted to ask about was one sentence about martin luther king's personal life. there are seven pages in this book and here come the bunch of questions. what were the little men that were seen at roswell? can you comment on the ufo connection to area 51? what about the ufos and aliens? what about ufos? go for it. >> curious crowd. no one wants to hear about war weapons when there are a little green men to talk about. first i want to say something about my sources because this is important to me and important to me as a journalist. i interviewed a lot of men for this book.

the largest number of men that have ever gone on record about area 51 and they go on record using their names. there is one exception and that is the source that i write about in the last seven pages of my book that many people want to know about. this source remains anonymous for reasons of safety and security and also because that program, the program he discussed with me has not been declassified per se. it is an interesting distinction as the journalist to make between being able to source your sources information up against the classified documents as i did with the first three hundred sixty-seven pages of my book. national archives, library of congress, declassified documents of the cia and the atomic energy

commission and department of defense and intelligence agency, i could go on and on. a lot of late night looking at documents. and then there is a point in the book where i make a shift in the way i wrote the book. everything in the beginning is written in traditional journalists form where you anna take everything and make clear where your sources came from. in the very end of the book i lean in to the reader who i trust has read my whole book and i say ok, but that is not why area 51 is still classified. area 51 has never been admitted to by any organization in the government and that is the fact. to declassify documents have the word area 51 blacked out or redacted. sometimes they referred to as the test facility or the sight. but it is only ever located in print twice by me and i believe

those were obviously errors. so why keep this base secret? eileen in to my reader and say here's why i think the base is secret. this came to me from a source. in the last seven pay does that tell you what the source said to me and i am very clear to make clear that there is no document to fact check this against. while i did get some very what i consider to be corroborating suggestive evidence in the archives, the actual story is from one man's oral history. this force was an engineer for e eg&g which meant he had cleared for handling nuclear secrets. i examined the source's medical records, his war records, i looked at the documents, certificates and awards he was

given by the atomic energy commission, you worked for the commission across three decade that the contractor, he was a member of the manhattan project, and the source told me that in 1951 he was one of five engineers that was asked to solve what is called a wicked engineering problem. wicked engineering problem means that it is something no one has figured out and needs to be solved. but solving that problem will create its own new set of problems. the source told me that he was one of five people who received the equipment from wright-patterson air force base and that was originally what crashed in roswell. and it was a flying circular shape aircraft. it was not from mars. it was from russia. it was actually originally a

third reich design. much of what i write about in the book discusses our program called operation paper clip was put into affect after the war where america pillage third reich scientists to head up our aerospace programs and much of our military programs. turner von braun is the best example. redesigned the the 2 rocket for hitler and the apollo rockets for kennedy. but russia also did the same thing. they pillaged the scientists they could get their hands on. so this flying disc according to the engineer was something that had crashed in new mexico and the intent was for it to be a hoax. that stalin in 1947 when we are talking about the roswell crash, 1947 stalin did not yet have an atomic weapon.

truman did. they were bitter rivals. so stalin made a move. fired a warning shot over truman's ball to say you may have the atomic bomb but i have psychological warfare. he wanted to send this flying disc to land in new mexico and have people come out that looked like aliens. the engineer told me that the child's eyes pilots inside were the result of deftly human experiments in the soviet union. and that is what he told me. i repeat it in my book because i wrote the uncensored history of area 51, not be censored history. many people take umbrage. a couple people in my book and not happy and i understand why. as they said to me we were john wayne out there saving the free

world. no one likes to hear about this kind of possibly this kind of ghastly going on in the desert. but this is what my source told me. i absolutely stand by his veracity and it is what i wrote in the book and it is what a lot of people are very skeptical of and at the same time want to know more about. >> let me ask one follow-up for you. the next one. so the reason, if it was not aliens, keeping this the deep dark secret would have been what? >> the reason for keeping the program secret? >> keeping this program and reverse engineering this disk, the idea of the russians were caught red handed, why keep it a secret? look how awful stalin is and look what they have done. there was ever as he took some of the papers that were from

joseph michelob, this would have been agreed propaganda victory. >> absolutely. that the question asked my source repeatedly. i interviewed him for 100 hours across 18 months. now it has been more than two years. we would discuss nuclear weapons. we would discuss lots of things which i would go fact check and at the end of our several hours interview i would say can i ask you another question about the subject we are not allowed to talk about, and he would say yes. that was one question asked often. keep in mind that this individual also participated in the program, so he was according to him a firsthand witness, reverse engineered this craft to receive the people who were the child's eyes aviators. he finally gave me an answer

which i right in the book. he said because we were doing the same thing. the idea that the american scientists wanted to also push science, they didn't want the soviets ahead of us in any program, whatever it may be. i want to say a note on that. another journalist said to me how dare you accuse the united states government of such horrible things. my answer to it was a spent quite of time writing about this in my book, while i don't claim to be able to speak for the technology and the flying craft or the kind of medical experiments that would create that kind of alien looking person, what i do speak to and what i do write about and fact check and force is what the atomic energy commission did during its tenure, and the

reckless human experimentation, president clinton put together a commission in the 1990s after a reporter nat named eileen wilson reported that the atomic energy commission had been injecting retarded children with plutonium at a state school in massachusetts. i see all the faces. how horrible! people don't want to hear about that and they turned the other way and they say is that is horrible and kind of go on. i felt as a journalist that what my source told me, i believe what he told me, the reason he told me was it was a matter of conscience. the other four engineers are dead. so it is just him. he was very clear about that. if a debate or a discussion ensues, as to whether or not this kind of program could go on, how long it went on for i feel that is an important

discussion. that is why i chose to write about it in my book. >> you are listening to commonwealth public radio program. our guest is annie jacobsen, author of a new book detailing her investigation of the legendary military base known as area 51. question from the audience. of the contents and activities of area 51 are less shocking than the speculation all these years why do you think the government maintains so much secrecy about it? >> we touched upon that as well. eyewall so say that i take the reader all the way up through the 80s. one of the last program that i write about was the f 117 bomber that sort of diamond shaped stalin bomber that became famous in gulf war i developed at area 51 after the air force took over and sort of replaced camera obeys with weapons base. what is going on since the war

on terror began is certainly out of might need to know and none of that, i didn't have any sources tell me what is going on there now because that really is obviously a national security concern because we are fighting the war on terror but it is a place where the drones are test flown and i write another interesting story from right around 1998, went drones, everyone is familiar with them now because they are used in pakistan but they began as espionage platforms that only carried cameras. they were used in the serbian bosnian conflict and they were kind of not interesting to many people other than the cia. around the late 90s this a known terrorist named osama bin laden appeared on the scene and the cia wanted to -- they were considering assassinating him with a drone. the way they would do it is they

would attack missiles to the drone and this was a radical idea. they got together. the cia and the air force, and they decided to engineers these hellfire missiles. the missiles are so accurate the hellfire comes -- push a button and it goes. the president's concern at the time was this a osama bin laden character is known to do a lot of falcon hunting with members of various middle eastern royal families. what if somebody important is at his compound when we attack with this predator grown carrying a hellfire missile that we don't know much about that haven't used yet? they built a mock up of bin laden's afghanistan farm where they practiced how to possibly assassinate him without collateral damage. this is before 9/11. but at the end of the experiment, the state department

got involved and there were lots of legalities about assassinating someone so they decided not to do it. >> how could area 51's secrets be kept from american presidents? >> that is a very tricky and uncomfortable question for this journalist. in the very beginning of the book i explain to you that something that i found really pretty shocking when i learned it in researching this book, that the atomic energy commission actually has a system of secret keeping that runs parallel to the president's system of secret keeping which is the national security system. that is not the way the constitution was written, but it is when the atomic energy act of 1946 allowed. so when the charter was written right after world war ii for the atomic energy commission they created a system of secret

keeping which the slave for it is called born classified. scholars who have looked into this secret keeping system say that it allows them to have unanswerable authority. that is the case and was the atomic energy commission is able to do so many things. the bug is up to 90,000 feet, that thermonuclear bomb tests involve 12,000 people in the middle of the pacific ocean. no one knew it was going on when it went on. so secret keeping is an important part of area 51 for some reason but also not a good situation for other reasons. it is the source who tells me the story in the end who told me that -- i asked him, president clinton looked into the crimes

of the atomic energy commission. how come he didn't find out about this rogue program at area 51 that involved roswell? what he said to me was he almost found out about it but he didn't have a need to know. >> question that goes back to the ufo story. why would stalin sent a craft to roswell, new mexico instead of the more populated area? >> that is not an answer i have. i will ask the source. i was kidding. the thing i right in the end of the book is i am very clear about saying he said this, and according to the engineer. there are some places in the epilogue where i speculate about some things, i go to some of my other sources and ask them. i ask a physicist, could we really have had a stealthy

flying disc? the physicist who invented stealth, the cia had an interesting answer. he recalled in the 1950s kelly johnson, head of scope works who invented and built those planes for the cia, had rate our tests of round shaped aircraft and at the end of the day they decided it just wasn't appropriate for a pilot to fly. it was a dangerous thing for a pilot to fly. i have as many questions as i have answers and more questions than answers but i don't have answers to that one. >> you write in the book roswell base, air base was an important base and white sand, loss alamosa. that was not an important area for national security. >> the most import dairy in the united states. loss alamosa is revenue clear scientists are working.

roswell was the base of the 509 which is the bomber group. one of the guys i interview in the book, an amazing legend, colonel richard leghorn. he is 92 now and he is writing according to his secretary, writing a paper on my book. he just did an interview with the cape cod times talking about his role in my book. he is credited in general with inventing the concept of overhead. our first post nuclear -- postwar nuclear test was in 1946 in the pacific. was called operation crossroads. colonel leghorn was in charge of photographic those bombs from the air. in my interview with him it was amazing because he explained to me all about how the base from which they left with all the camera equipment was the roswell army air base because at the

time that was the only military base in the country that had bombers that could actually carry nuclear weapons. that area of new mexico couldn't have been more important to national security in 1947. >> someone wants to know if it is possible that many you f os were actually -- u.s. military aircraft of the united states has been lying about? >> absolutely. one thing i was able to source was the cia's obsession with ufos starting in the 1950s. they created their own ufo department and this was based on declassified documents. it is funny to read through them because the guys at the cia in the 1950s were still gentleman spies. they fancied themselves on the ground spies and the idea of

science and technology with a bit plebeian to them so you see in these memos when they have to deal with u f os why can't the air force handle this? but in fact out at area 51, the u2 spy plane accounted for 50% of all you have those sightings on the west coast. it flew at 70,000 feet which is about 13 miles up and when it was flying up in the sky it looked like a giant silver -- you can imagine seeing something up that high people would wonder. the same thing happened in the 1960s when this incredible cia spy plane called the oxcart was flying at mach 3. even higher up. there are a couple ways -- great accounts from the guys in my book. colonel slater is a real cold war hero who i write about. he was commander of the base for a number of years in the 60s and he explained to me how often

commercial airline pilots would be flying on the west coast but say at dusk at 30,000 feet and they would see the oxcart fly overhead at 90,000 feet at mach 3 and people in the plane would see it as well and the pilots would radio in ufo, and colonels later would have to send the fbi to wherever it was the plane was landing and make the pilots and the people sign inadvertant disclosure forms letting them know they would be in serious trouble if they told anyone about that. these kinds of things only added to the ufo more and mythology. >> you have five oxcarts that crashed and as they went out to get the titanium covers and all of that, obviously these kinds of secret people went out in the desert. it all looked like they regarding something very secret

which was but not a flying saucer. which brings us to somebody asking why in your opinion has area 51 in your opinion become such a popular element in u.s. and global popular culture? >> most assuredly because of the conspiracies that are attached to it. we talked about the ufos and the aliens but there are two of big conspiracy theories that are sort of embedded in area 51. they are that the lunar landing was a fake and filled at area 51. that is a big one. i interviewed a lot of conspiracy theorists for my book. also interviewed buzz aldrin, the second man on the moon and found his testimony to be a little bit more believable than the other people but that is just a journalist in me.

the link is at the nevada test site, there are these giant craters from the atomic bombs. i was lucky enough to go there with a couple of the guys in my book. and z's atomic bomb craters, giant, cavernous things that look very much like the surface of the moon. i interviewed a man named ernie williams who actually was the tour guide for the apollo astronauts in the late 60s and 70s. they would go out to the nevada test site and put mockups on their backs that they would wear on the moon when they went there. the point was to kind of rome around the geology of the lunar landscape. i have some great photographs in the book of that. but i think this gave way to some of the conspiracies about the lunar landing. another one i will touch upon was a lot of conspiracy

theorists told me that area 51 is filled with underground tunnels and that these totals connect to other military bases across the country. what i found out is there are a lot of underground tunnels. certainly at the nevada test site under area 12 and 11. one of the tunnels is 4,500 feet deep. that is very deep. starting in the late 1950s the department of defense and atomic energy commission would use these underground tunnels to explode nuclear weapons to see what would happen to different pieces of military equipment, to see what could survive. that is where a lot of that mythology comes from. >> there's something you write in the book that no one will last about unless they read the book but is important. when we are talking about scientific recklessness something i never heard of

before was we did a high altitude thermonuclear test that they knew in advance might endanger the ozone layer but wanted to see what would happen. true? >> when i first heard about this it made me wonder what i was growing up in the 70s we were told we couldn't use aerosol deodorant because it was wearing away the ozone and when i heard this side don't think it is the deodorant. what is interesting is i heard this story from the nuclear weapons engineer who actually wired this bomb. but there were two nuclear tests code-named teak and orange. they took place in johnston island in the pacific, not at area 51. but the crew that worked regularly at area 51 wiring nuclear bombs went down there. the idea, the president's science adviser named james

killian had such power and persuasion with the president that anything he did he did not have to report to congress. later in his memoirs he admits that maybe that wasn't a good idea. but at the time, james killian authorized this two headed nuclear-weapons tests. megaton thermonuclear bomb is. one was set off 28 miles up. the other was set up 58 miles up. but 28 miles up is right around where the ozone layer is. at the time, hy found in the declassified documents there was discussion among the scientists what might happen and could we make a hole in the ozone layer? this was an actual discussion. and the answer was yes, we could, but we believe the bomb turbulence would then close back up that hole if it were made. so they went ahead with the

test. >> a couple questions from the audience about sources. the first is if everyone interviewed is sworn to secrecy how is anything they say valuable or believable and a variation on that, do you have top-secret clearance and if not what makes you think these people you interviewed told you the truth? >> what is interesting is some of the things i have been talking about like project 57, the dirty bomb test that spread plutonium over 895 acres up there. people have said to me -- i ask that exact question. that is actually not classified. those documents are located in the atomic energy commission archive. i even located photographs. but it didn't look to me like anyone else had looked at them and i had a really difficult time trying to find them. but once i was able to find

someone who had knowledge of that and knew anything declassified, i was able to talk freely with him about that program and he was able to give me some key words that allowed me to look up the program and access it. the program is called project 57 but everything is classified under 57 project. organized. so all of the problems are talk about except the program in the end have actually been declassified. it is just that a lot of them are kind of hidden or perhaps people were not interested in them in and of themselves. part of what makes my book interesting is that i try to give you the whole landscape of area 51 and its nearest neighbors and what was going on. >> another one about the aliens who were according to your

source not aliens at all. were there autopsy's done on the roswell victims? two live but where in a coma? and why would there remains still remain classified? >> the first part of the question? >> first part of the question is were there autopsy is. >> i don't know. they arrived as bodies when they arrived according to my source at area 51 and they were comatose but still breathing. one of them died shortly thereafter according to one source. and the reason why the program is still classified according to my source is what we touched upon earlier, that the government decided to embark upon its own program. what i am going to say at this point, one of the most interesting and disturbing pieces of information must force

shared with me is the individual who was the head of the program named than a bar. --vanibar bush was the president's science advisor on the manhattan project and was in charge of this program that is the mother of all black operations, the manhattan project. all other black operations trickle-down from the original idea in both analogy and secrecy. >> you also point out for people who wonder whether something could be kept secret, the manhattan project, the size and budget amount and even the vice president had no idea the manhattan project was underway. what was the budget? >> it is in the book. it was huge. plutonium or uranium at the time

was being processed in tennessee. that out fit pooled more power off of the united states electrical grid on any given night than the entire city of new york city. and yet no one knew it was fair. that is how powerful a black operation can be. vice president you are referring to when the manhattan project was originally going on was harry truman. he had no idea about the nuclear weapon until he became president. the person who told him was. vanibar bush. >> y area 51? are there 1 through 50? >> a lot of people, even a lot of mine named sources say that was just what they came up with but according to my source in the end of the book he reasoned it was named area 51 because in

1951 the or original equipment and remained of the roswell crash came there. >> have you been called a conspiracy theorist? the net of conspiracy theories is so wide it includes investigative reporters such as yourself. do you get thrown in with them? >> i will let you decide that. i have been accused of being part of the government conspiracy to hide aliens because my theory does not push the idea that aliens have visited earth. i did get a letter from a group -- an e-mail from a group in the u.k. furious with me last week when my book was first published. they said even we don't believe you. >> the truth is still out there,

not here. why did area 51 show up in the wiki leaks document? was it only due to weapons testing or about alien life or what? >> that is news to me. i don't know about that. see me afterwards. >> we talk about reverse engineering. it comes up talking about roswell and things. one of the most significant parts of the book was reverse engineering the made --mig that was hand delivered by an iraqi pilot. >> it is a great story that i told through the eyes of td barnes was engineer who worked at area 51 on a number of projects. 1966, the story you are talking about made headlines when an iraqi air force colonel defected from iraq to israel in a soviet m

mig. no member of the western world had ever had their hands on one. it is what all the arab nations flu and what the soviet communist countries flew. so he got ahold of it. it was a very big deal to them. it helps them win the six day war. what didn't make the news was a deal with the cia to bring it to area 51. td barnes was on the team that reverse engineered it. they took it down to its nuts and bolts and looked at it to figure out what made it fly. at the time we were engaged in the vietnam war and our pilots over there were getting shot down in this terrible ratio of 9:1. we were losing. the soviets were for supplying the north vietnamese so there

was a halt on the dogfights over vietnam while the engineers worked on the big --mig. after the reverse engineered it it was called a technical phase and then they began the tactical phase. they put it back together and began flying in dogfights to how to the mig in hand-to-hand combat. what is the only known to the men who worked on that program is that was actually the birth of the famous top gun fighter school. >> another thing comes of mig being there that almost outs area 51 in top-secret projects when a general besides basically to good lawyer writing in the mig. >> a pretty controversial store. there was a general in charge of

the f 117 bomber program going on at area 51 and he became enamor with the mig according to sources and he wanted to take it for a flight and he did. the mig went out of control and crashed in area 25 next door -- 20 miles from area 51. where he crashed was right into a place where another secret program was going on, surprised, surprise. so at the time we had the mig program and the f 117 program, we have area 51, and a general who is dead. newspaper reporter was leaked information that the general had been flying the mig and that program was out in that way and allow the other secrets to

remain hidden. >> a number of questions about the advanced technology created area 51 such as mach 3 speed aircraft and why this has not been released commercially. the questionnaire says it is odd that current commercial aircraft can only travel a fraction of the speed compared to with area 51 technology had half a century ago. >> commercial aircraft? i am not an aircraft expert. i interviewed robert abernathy who developed the mach 3 engine and it was interesting talking to him about that. my understanding would be and it is limited, but it takes so much jet fuel to fly mach 3 that the oxcarts are plain is basically a flying fuel tank. it had dealt the shaped wind filled with fuel. it could get from one coast to the other coast in a little over 60 minutes. so i don't think that would be

cost-effective on a commercial airline. you would not have any place to put your bags. >> plus all that mid-air refueling. >> mid-air refueling is tricky too. >> a couple planes were lost. stories you tell in the book. >> i will say one other thing. i became a big fan of the cia's science and technology department because the things that they did out there than they did in total secrecy without getting any credit for it but to refuel the oxcart was such an incredibly fast flying plane. the oxcart at its slowest speed and a fuel tanker had to fly at its fastest speed at the same time. the oxcart would sometimes almost stalled. that is how slow it had ago. >> somebody in the audience is

why was the government prompted to declassify this and provide great stuff for your book? >> that is an interesting question. they didn't declassify all this stuff. they declassified the oxcart in 2007 and are don't know why. i have asked some people at langley why and they have different answers, none of which answer the question. because if you are trying to keep a base secret it would make sense not to declassify one of the major programs there. but that is how i was able to speak to the original source, that is how high was introduced to the next and the next and the different sources who make up the narrative of my book and to whom i am very grateful because it was an honor and privilege to be able to talk to these men who are really a group of cold war heroes. scientists, spies, engineers,

physicists who were only known among themselves and now i think in reading the book you are able to have a really interesting window into what it is like to be someone who does all this work for absolutely no glory. >> there is a story you tell in the book that is the most frightening, there are many frightening parts of the book. it is a staged attack on area 51 to test the perimeters for security even though it was secret to many americans. the russians had known about this place since forever and watched it by satellites. so they decided to test the security. if i understand it in the book correctly without telling anybody there is area 51 and during the time of the nuclear test. >> the way i was able to put that story together was interesting because the actual

mock attack on the guard gate at area 51 by security guards is still classified. what is unclassified is the fact that these nuclear weapons test engineers on the other side of the fence were working to get a nuclear bomb down into a shaft so they could explode it on a weapons test. so the story came from the guys on the other side of the fence who were working on the bomb. what happened was there was this weapons test going on and they measure -- the system of measurement to get a bomb into a toll is x number of yards means this. it has to get to a certain depth before it is considered secure. otherwise it could still in essence be hijacked. there are different layers of security watching this bomb go down and the gentleman who was in charge of the program, my source in the book was in charge

of it and waiting for the thing to get down, the nuclear bomb to get down the hole and he hears suddenly we are under attack. and they had to treat that as if the russians were attacking or an enemy force with attacking because it made no sense otherwise. as it turned out, with the test by the security people who wanted to see what it would be like, how the guards at the area 51 gate would respond to an attack so they flew helicopter over the guard gate and were mock shooting at it. the alert went all the way to the white house and according to the source the nuclear subs on the west coast were also put on alert. >> i sleep better hearing that. with a live nuclear weapon at the hole at the time. >> and the test went on by the way. >> a n