The space aliens at Area 51

Long ago, on NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross, the book editor who wrote Ronald Reagan's "autobiography" discussed Reagan's dishonesty. Reagan didn't want the book to mention his first marriage. The writer told him they couldn't leave it out or people wouldn't believe anything he said. Then Reagan said he wanted to be sure to include his best story----the time he went to Europe during World War Two to film the liberation of Nazi concentration camps. The writer said they would have to leave that out because it never happened.

But the writer---I don't remember his name---didn't judge Reagan too harshly. He explained that old people often put themselves into stories that happened to someone else. He started doing it himself as he got older.

I've seen this myself with elderly relatives, so maybe it's true.

So now we have this new book about Area 51. I suppose most of it is true. Until we get to the space aliens.

I listened to the author of this new book, also on Fresh Air. She said that one of her geezer sources told her that there had indeed been a crashed flying saucer. And there had been some child-sized pilots killed. He worked with both the "equipment" and the dead pilots. And---now here's the creepy part----he claimed that the pilots were "child sized" because they were actual children. He thought they were about 13. They had, he said, been made to look like space aliens, with big heads and the funny eyes and noses. He said they were either surgically or genetically altered.

This happened, the source said, in 1947. And, he claimed, this was the work of the Soviets. The flying disk had been a Nazi secret weapon and the children had been created by Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor. The purpose of this was to make Americans think they were being visited by Martians, to create a panic like that created by the radio play War of the Worlds.

Of course, if they were "genetically altered" and 13-years-old in 1947, then they were born in 1934, four years before the broadcast of War of the Worlds. When was Mengele supposed to have started this? He couldn't have done it anyway. He wasn't an evil genius---he was just evil. He was an evil below average doctor. Nothing he did had any scientific value. And according to Wikipedia, he didn't get a medical degree until 1938.

In any case, Mengele never worked with the Soviets. We know what he did after the war---he fled to South America. And even if Mengele had done this, how would the Americans have known?

In fact, the Soviets were better about these things than the Americans. The U.S. allowed Japanese war criminals who performed ghastly medical experiments on people in Manchuria to go free in exchange for their files on biological warfare. These were war criminals who performed experiments on American POWs. Japanese war criminals who were captured by the Soviets were tried for their crimes and executed.

The story is creepy but mercifully false. My guess is that the source who told this story had heard it as a rumor at the time, decided to share it, and, as old people do, made the story about himself.