Eva Mendes in see-through panties

A Review of Area 51: An Uncensored History

The Sane Portion of the Book:

This book about the mysterious Area 51 has been written by an L.A. Times reporter named Annie Jacobsen, based on interviews with five top insiders: a former commander of the base, a test pilot who flew experimental aircraft there, a radar specialist, an aircraft fuel specialist, and an engineer.

Area 51 actually served a fairly prosaic Cold War function as a base for testing top-secret experimental aircraft designs, but this simple truth about the area demonstrates how so many wild stories originated. There were plenty of mysterious underground tunnels and other underground facilities, and strange-looking aircraft were tested there. Using unusual designs and materials, the engineers were trying to accomplish many different things, one of which was to circumvent Soviet radar. To this end, many jets were formed in such odd shapes that they might easily be mistaken for alien spaceships, and those eccentric designs were not merely exposed once or twice in the dead of night, but soared through thousands of daytime flights into areas visible by commercial airliners, where they could have been and sometimes were spotted.

When it comes to matters involving experimental aircraft, I was convinced that Jacobsen was thorough in her interviewing and accurate in her conclusions. To the extent which I can verify her assertions, they fit well with the known facts. She also has some great photographs which illustrate her story and back up her claims.

By the way, Area 51 is no longer much of a secret. Just about nothing above the ground can be hidden from all those satellites up there. (Link)

The Crazy Stuff:

Unfortunately, Jacobsen poisoned the worthwhile aspects of her book with some truly nutty connections to the famous Roswell UFO incident. According to one of her sources, the popular Roswell stories are kinda true, but don’t involve aliens. His claim is that Stalin’s Russia created an unpiloted drone aircraft, more like a rocket, full of grotesque humans who had been the subject of horrific Nazi experiments. The Russkies shot this plane/rocket to the USA, where it crashed quite famously in Roswell, New Mexico. The point of the mission was to create a panic, ala War of the Worlds, in the assumption that gullible Americans would assume them to be space creatures.

I’m not quite sure how this panic was supposed to benefit Russia, but I guess we could allow the benefit of the doubt and assume it was a mad idea from the mad Stalin.

But some of this just doesn’t add up.

Of course, there is the fact that former Soviet officials are trying to cash in on tell-all books now that Soviet archives have been declassified. Surely one of them would have brought this kind of material to a publisher, and surely a publisher would have jumped on it.

But that’s not the big problem. There is the matter of the timeline. Area 51 could not be connected to Roswell in any way. The Roswell incident occurred in 1947, but Area 51 was completely abandoned between 1945 and 1955.

Jacobsen also said in her NPR interview, “A flying disc really did crash in New Mexico and it was transported to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, and then in 1951 it was transferred to Area 51, which is why the base is called Area 51.”

That claim is completely unsupportable. The base in 1951 was just as forlorn as in 1947. There was nothing at Groom Lake (aka Area 51) in 1951 except an overgrown airfield that had been abandoned after WW2. According to newly declassified documents about the origin of the site: “In April 1955, LeVier, Johnson, Bissell, and Ritland flew out to Nevada on a two-day survey of the most promising lakebeds, including Groom Lake. The abandoned airfield that Ritland had remembered was sandy, overgrown and unusable, but the three-mile-wide dry lakebed was perfect.”

The alleged 1951 transfer of Roswell artifacts cannot explain how Area 51 got its name. Perhaps those remains existed and exist still. Perhaps they may have gone somewhere near Area 51, but they did not go there because, as Gertrude Stein once famously remarked about Oakland, there was no there there.

Here’s the really weird part of it: Jacobsen would have rejected the statement she made in the NPR interview if she had just read her own book! She took much of her material from the same source I quote above, Roadrunners Internationale. She correctly identifies the origin of the Groom Lake project as 1955, and in a sane portion of her book she interviews a different source who says that the Roswell remains were taken to another area – “Area 22” – in the Nevada desert. That is possible, because Area 22 was actually part of a government testing area in 1951. The mysterious Area 51 was not. At that point it was just abandoned land adjacent to a bomb-testing area, right next to the government’s “Area 15.”

By the way, the same guy who told her about the Roswell remains being the source of Area 51’s name, and about the Nazi/Stalin collaboration, also told her that the USA was performing the same kind of Nazi medical experiments in the USA:

“We were doing the same thing,” he said. “They wanted to push science. They wanted to see how far they could go. We did things I wish I had not done. We performed medical experiments on handicapped children and prisoners.”

“But you are not a doctor,” I said.

“They wanted engineers.”

Yes, you read that right. Her source claimed that he personally committed crimes as heinous as those perpetrated by Dr. Joseph Mengele. Oh those wacky Nazis – they were really just like us! Her source was either a pathological liar or one of the biggest monsters of the 20th century, but she kept talking to him – and quoting him!

What else did he say?

Well…

• He also claimed that the Soviets not only had mastered hover-and-fly technology in 1947, with the craft moving at incredible speeds, but could also operate the craft remotely from the USSR.
• He also claimed that he and his team had reverse-engineered that same Russian technology and had conquered hover-and-fly technology way back in 1951. “We figured it out. We’ve had hover and fly technology all this time.”
• He also mentions that two of the surgically-altered children in the alleged Soviet aircraft were still alive: “Two of the aviators were comatose but still alive, the men would have to transfer them into a Jell-O-like substance and stand them upright in two tubular tanks, attached to a lifesupport system. Sometimes, their mouths opened, and this gave the appearance of their trying to speak. Remember, the engineers were told, these humans are in a comatose state. They are unconscious; their bodies would never spark back to life.”

  That particular source was obviously nutty as a fruitcake, or may have been getting a kick out of pulling Jacobsen’s leg. Either way, she should have realized it, should have discredited every word out of his mouth, and should not have printed any of his demented ramblings. So why did she include his bizarre statements? Given that the sane parts of her book clearly identify 1955 as the beginning of the Groom Lake facility, why did she even include anachronistic 1951 Roswell material in a book that is supposed to be about Groom Lake?

  Well, we can speculate about the answers to those questions at length. My guess is that she thought a dry book about experimental aircraft being tested in the desert was not destined to be a best-seller, but even a little Roswell craziness would sell books, and a wacky Nazi connection would sell a LOT of books.

  But then again I am a cynic. Form your own conclusions.

  Summary:

  The Road to Area 51 is actually two works in one. Part One is a sensible piece of research about a Cold War facility used to test experimental aircraft in secrecy. Part Two is absolute nonsense – historical and scientific gibberish. The second part undoubtedly adds immeasurably to the marketability of the overall project, but it completely undermines the credibility of the first part.

  Reader comment:

  (by Kevin W)

  Enjoyed your take on the Area 51 book. I’m a History PhD student working on the early Cold War, so the NPR interview also piqued my interest. A quick Google search of Jacobsen brings up this Snopes article.

  Seems she’s a bit of an alarmist by trade.

  On the Stalin/Nazi UFO claims, her story is complete shit, as you point out. But I can’t resist offering some fascinating historical context.

  Over the course of 1947, the Council of Foreign Ministers of the Allied powers met several times to negotiate the fate of postwar Germany and other pressing postwar issues. Most historians consider the eventual collapse of these talks to be the definitive start of the Cold War.

  Consider the chronology of how things developed over that summer of 1947. On June 5, George Marshall delivered his famous speech at Harvard offering economic aid to Europe. The Marshall Plan initially included the Soviets and all of the countries they occupied in what would become the Eastern Bloc. The State Department gambled that Stalin would turn down the aid and thus cede the moral high ground to the US in negotiations. That’s exactly what happened when the Soviet delegation walked out at the beginning of the Marshall Plan Conference in Paris. The conference started on July 12,1947.

  To put that in perspective, the Roswell air base held the infamous UFO press conference on July 8, 1947. The crash itself supposedly took place some time in the previous month.

  In other words, according to Jacobsen, some time between Marshall’s speech and the Paris Conference, Stalin green-lighted a mission to send an experimental aircraft full of mutants over the continental US. He apparently developed the technology for this mission in collaboration with Nazi scientists – some of his least favorite people. And, keeping in mind this was two years prior to the Soviet development of an atomic bomb, Stalin apparently thought June 1947 would be the perfect time to provoke the world’s only nuclear power.

  But, to make it even better, don’t provoke them with the Red Army, the world’s largest and most seasoned fighting force and the reason the Allies won the war. No, let’s make some fake aliens and re-create the reaction to some pre-war radio broadcast. That’s the ticket. Never mind that 5 Enola Gays will be over Moscow a couple days later.

  Poking the US with a sharp, fancy stick – while in the middle of deciding the future of Europe – might have been Hitler’s idea of a good time, but Stalin was a bit more coldblooded than that – still a ruthless killer, but in a calculated way.

  Anyway, preaching to the choir, I realize. Sorry for the extended rant, but I feel better now.

“Endangered species can be saved if they’re eaten.”

At last, somebody who supports my restaurant! A professional economist! Never mind that this economist looks suspiciously like a Bond villain, I feel he’s truly wise and a great humanitarian, as am I.

At Scoopy’s Politically Incorrect restaurant, our most popular entree is a juicy manatee steak. Before you dig in to the main course, I recommend the spotted owl wings – Buffalo-style, of course.

And by that I mean that the sauce is made from real bison!

Unlike the Native Americans, we do NOT use every part of the buffalo. We use only the flanks to make our sauce, then dump the gigantic, stinking carcass out of town, near the interstate.

When I wrote about the prime directive, two people e-mailed me to ask about the other movie rules I used to write about. Thanks for asking.  As a man who has probably seen more bad movies than anyone else in history, I don’t know the first thing about making good movies, but I think I can tell you everything you need to know to avoid making a really bad one:

The Prime Directive. If you are filming a movie that will get you an R rating for violence and language, load up on breasts.  You can’t get an NC-17 just for breasts (Dancing at the Blue Iguana has breasts non-stop, wall-to-wall, and is rated R), so if you add breasts you will still get an R rating.  As Johnny Cochrane might have said, “If the R is for V, the knockers are free.”

The Alma Mahler rule. If you are going to film a story about real people, that does not absolve you from the requirement to make the movie entertaining. Movies are movies, not history lessons. Alma Mahler was a fascinating woman, but that is no guarantee that your biopic will be as fascinating unless it has some good reason to exist on its own. You have to make it good enough so that people will like it even if they think the characters are fictional.

Sub-rule: You may as well make it entertaining, because we know it’s not going to be true. All movies based on true stories are full of lies and fabrications. There are many reasons for this. One is that we don’t want people to be the way they really were, but rather the way we want them to be, so documentaries and historical films are really about the filmmaker, not the subject. Another is that people are too complicated, and too much happens to them in a lifetime, to summarize in 100 minutes. If you have to make a historical movie, choose an interesting event in someone’s life, not the entire life.

Sub-rule 2: At least do some homework. There is no historical personage named Brandi of Equitaine, and if there were, she would not have dotted her “i’s”with little hearts.

The Ian Fleming rule. Your bad guys must kill the good guys immediately if (a) it is necessary to their evil plot, and (b) they have the opportunity. They must not tie them up to kill later or, worse yet, tie them up so they can tell them the plot.

The definition rule. The words “horror” and “comedy” have certain definitions. A horror movie is supposed to be scary, and a comedy is supposed to be funny. If you make an erotic thriller, it must be (at minimum) either erotic or thrilling. Preferably both.

The comedy heirarchy rule. As you look for your comedy model, the farther you go down the heirarchy, the less likely is the comedy to be funny. Model your comedy after the top of the heirarchy, not the bottom. The Allen heirarchy is: Early Woody, Steve, Late Woody, Fred, Tim, Marty, Krista. The Marx heirarchy of comedy is as follows: Groucho, Chico, Harpo, Karl, Gummo, Zeppo. I’ve never actually seen Gummo. I just assume he’d have to be funnier than Zeppo, since even Erasmus of Rotterdam and the prophet Jeremiah were funnier than Zeppo. Possibly he was funnier than Karl as well.

The Dudley Moore rule. Sometimes it’s just a generation thing, and can’t be explained. Make movies for your generation, rather than copying the past. Look, if you’re 25 years old, I can’t explain to you why anyone ever thought Dudley Moore was funny. Nobody knows. When you’re my age, let’s hear you explain Colin Quinn to your kids, wise guy.

The John Cleese Rule. There is no John Cleese rule.

The Kieslowski rule. Were you thinking of having them wake up and it was all a dream? Or maybe part of a mysterious double life that can’t be explained? Don’t even contemplate it unless you are a famous Polish auteur with a last name beginning with K.

The Interview with a Blade Runner rule. Thinking of making a vampire movie narrated in voice-over? That’s the first step toward a rewarding career in the fast food industry.

The Marquez rule. I know they give all kinds of important prizes to people who write Magical Realism. Now that I’ve admitted that, if you write a gritty John Steinbeck piece for an hour and a half, and then in the last ten minutes the hero escapes his life by sprouting wings and flying away from the cannery, or if the hero makes the evil slave-driving boss into a nice man by cooking him a meal salted with the workers’ tears, I’ll have to send your home address to Hannibal Lecter.

The Ben Affleck rule. Not everyone has to agree. For example, I think that Ben Affleck’s acting  “sucks,” but others disagree. Some feel that he “blows,” others that he “bites,” and there are some radical thinkers who think that he “munches.” It’s OK to hold these other opinions. This freedom to disagree is the basis of democracy.

The body doubles rule. “Scale” actresses don’t get body doubles, because that costs double – scale for the actress, scale for the double – and that defeats the purpose of hiring a scale actress in the first place. Needless to say, instead of paying two scales, hire another scale actress willing to do the nudity. Believe me, there are thousands to choose from.

The “Captain Corelli” rule. A resurrection is an indication of a bad movie, whether it involves Jesus, zombies, or people presumed dead. There has never been a good movie with more than one resurrection.

The “Rules of Engagement” rule. Don’t give us those “whatever happened to them after the story” word captions before the closing credits unless they are necessary. How might they be necessary? (A) If it’s a comedy, and the fate of the characters is a good laugh. (B) If they are real people, and you can tell us what their lives were like before or after the story we just saw. But don’t give us more imaginary tidbits about imaginary people. If it’s worth including, include it. If it isn’t worth including, it isn’t worth mentioning either.

The “Lost World” rule. Creatures in movies which move faster than the creatures they pursue must catch them in the proper amount of time. People run about 20 feet per second. Cheetahs cover about 100 feet per second. Therefore, if a Cheetah is 20 feet behind you, it will catch you in a quarter of a second.

The “Frankenstein” rule. Creatures in movies which move slower than the creatures they pursue must lose them appropriately. You run about 20 feet per second. A guy lumbering along with his knees locked will cover about three feet per second. Therefore, if he chases you for five minutes, he will be a mile away, and you can safely stop at a pub for a pint and a smoke, because it takes him about half an hour to cover a mile.

The “Nightbreed” rule (aka the Prime Directive of Fantasy/Horror). A grotesque, heavily made-up creature, glimpsed fleetingly in the shadows, can be intensely frightening. A long close-up of the same creature will probably start to provoke giggles.

The MPD/amnesia rule. Don’t use multiple personality disorder or amnesia to explain otherwise inexplicable plot twists. Don’t have the murderer try to frame someone with multiple personality disorder or amnesia.

The obvious rule. A word to the dumb – I shouldn’t have had to mention this, but no EVIL TWINS or EVIL DWARVES, and especially no cases where the twin we think is the good one is really the evil one.

The instant genius rule. Children who begin a movie presumed to be mute or retarded should not end the movie chattier than Katie Couric and smarter than Steven Hawking. If they do have some kind of realistic breakthrough, they should not die tragically immediately afterward.

The Gilbert Roland rule. It is not possible to make a good movie where the good guy is deep diving and the bad guy is operating the air line.

The Chabrol rule. It is not possible to make a good movie where the good guy has to drive a car down a winding mountain road, and the bad guy is his brake-and-steering mechanic.

The McCloud rule. No renegade cops. Let me guess what’s in your script. He’s a good cop, but he doesn’t always play by the rules, he doesn’t stay within his budget, and he doesn’t like to fill out his paperwork. Sometimes his lieutenant has to chew him out for going too far over the line, breaking too many rules, and destroying too much property to bring in that mass murderer, but then the boss winks and says, “Good work, McCloud”

The catch-all rule. Scoopy will add, subtract or modify rules whenever the hell he pleases. There may even be a John Cleese rule someday, although I doubt it. There is a greater chance that I will write a script where the vampire wakes up and it was all a dream induced by a serum prepared by his evil twin, who is currently a renegade cop.

College pigskin round-up

The top six teams all won, but Ohio State escaped with a rally (against another top ten team), and Clemson had trouble with unranked Syracuse

#8 Notre Dame crushed #7 Stanford, 38-17.

The two items above represent double good news for Notre Dame. They want the Orange to seem very strong, because they will play Syracuse later in the year. If they can destroy them while staying undefeated, they will have staked a solid claim to make the college playoffs …

… and lose to Alabama by 40

but still …

#9 Penn State barely lost to #4 Ohio State

Kentucky (#17) won again, proving they are no fluke with a solid win over South Carolina.

#22 Duke lost, but nobody with any sense though Duke belonged in the top 25 to begin with. I reckon they will lose several more before the season ends.

The rest of the week went more or less according to script.

Camila Cabello’s right breast is clearly visible in this outfit

Here is her Wikipedia page

Heidi was almost topless in this older B&W

Claudette Colbert in The Sign of the Cross (1934)

Because there was no nudity in American productions for some three decades, including the pre-teen years for us early baby boomers, most people don’t realize that there was some nudity in Hollywood in the early talkies.

There were censorship standards set way back in the silent era, established as early as 1922, but the original rules were voluntary and thus often ignored. The so-called “Hays Code,” an elaborately detailed production code consisting of rules for what could and could not be portrayed on screen, was formalized in 1930, but originally lacked any teeth for enforcement.

The voluntary compliance (wink-wink!) era came to an end in 1934 when the American Catholic Church announced the creation of the Legion of Decency, which encouraged the production of moral films and promptly condemned any film with an immoral message or content. The Legion’s activism hit the film industry in two vulnerable areas. First, the Legion threatened to boycott objectionable films, which went directly for the purse strings. Second, the Legion threatened to lobby the federal government for official censorship. The industry’s leaders saw the handwriting on that wall. They knew the Legion could exert a powerful influence over politicians, and they realized that self-censorship was a far more attractive alternative to draconian government interference, so they created a formal procedure to administer the code. All films released after July 1, 1934, had to get script approval before production could begin, and each film was later required to obtain a “seal of approval.” Failure to comply resulted in a $25,000 fine for the studio, and a distribution ban upon the non-compliant film. Joseph Breen, new head of the Production Code Administration (which later became the MPAA), was assigned to oversee the process.

The Production Code basically kept nudity out of American movies for approximately the next thirty years. The Legion did not begin to lose its grip on Hollywood until the early sixties when an unfinished 1962 film, Something’s Got to Give, was to have taken on the Code by featuring a skinny dip from Marilyn Monroe. Marilyn’s death temporarily scotched the snake of mainstream nudity, but other films soon took up the baton. Cleopatra featured a modest look at Liz Taylor’s bum in 1963, and The Pawnbroker managed to sneak fairly substantial nudity into arthouse theaters in 1964 despite a “condemned” rating from the Legion. Despite these efforts and a rapidly liberalizing culture in the mid sixties, it was not until 1968 that the Production Code was officially replaced with the first version of the current rating system.

But that’s a story for another day. Today’s tale concerns not post-Code nudity, but the bit of flesh that snuck in here and there between the adoption of the toothless Code in 1930 and its acquisition of teeth in July of 1934, a period representing four years of leftover 1920s hedonism. There were the notorious Fay Wray scenes in King Kong (1933), Myrna Loy’s bath in The Barbarian (1933), full frontal and rear underwater nudity from Maureen O’Sullivan’s body double in Tarzan and his Mate (1934), Hedy Lamarr’s notorious frontal nude scenes and breast close-ups in the Czech-made Ecstasy (1932), Delores Del Rio’s shapely bum in Bird of Paradise (1932), and Claudette Colbert’s breasts in The Sign of the Cross (1932), as portrayed in the link above.

Abandoned States: Places In Idyllic 1960s Postcards Have Transformed Into Scenes Of Abandonment

The author did a wonderful job of morphing the old images with his own modern ones, thus truly bringing the transformation to life.

If you grew up in NY or the surrounding states, you may have spent a summer or two in the Poconos or The Catskills, particularly if your family was Jewish. The resorts there were places where entire families took long summer vacations together. They featured modern facilities, good food, top-drawer entertainment (this was the famed “Borsch Belt”), and all sorts of healthy recreation. It was that era’s version of a Caribbean cruise, with just a hint of today’s Las Vegas.

I never spent a summer at any of these places, but my family always stopped to eat some of the famed deli cuisine when we traveled from Lake Ontario to the urban caverns of The City. Route 17 was our Yellow Brick Road even if The City boasted no emerald glow.

Nobody from upstate called that city “New York” then, because we were all from New York, even the upstate rubes. One simply said “The City,” and the meaning was clear to everyone. Boston and Detroit were cities, and I lived in a city, but those in the center of the world lived in THE City. Some of my teachers were from The City, and they felt it cast them in a superior mold to that which formed us locals because their city was tougher, smarter, and more energetic than any experience we or any outsider had known. The City was coarser, yet somehow also more refined, than our humble origins. Some of those men bragged of hard childhoods in Hell’s Kitchen or comfy ones on the Upper East Side, but most of those tough, quick-tempered grandsons of Erin were forged in the fires of the Outer Boroughs.

That yellow brick road of my childhood is brown and crumbling today. The most imposing resorts were shuttered long ago, but they were glorious in their day. Grossinger’s, the most famous resort in the area, and supposedly the inspiration for “Dirty Dancing,” had its own golf course, many tennis courts, a ski area with a snow-making machine, indoor and outdoor pools, and a massive theater. Elizabeth Taylor married Eddie Fisher there; Jerry Lewis performed there; Jackie Robinson went there to relax.

Today? The reflective moments of “Dirty Dancing” accurately predicted the demise of the Catskill family resorts:

“It’s not the changes so much this time. It’s that it all seems to be ending. You think kids want to come with their parents and take fox-trot lessons? It feels like it’s all slipping away.”

And slip away it did. Like the resorts, that “way of life is fall’n into the sere.”

The Grossinger golf course is still functioning, but …

Gothamist explains:

“Today, Grossinger’s still has everything you’re looking for—if what you’re looking for is exquisite decay.

The drive there is is a beautiful, albeit sad, experience. State route 17 winds through the Catskills, past boarded up summer camps, through predominantly Orthodox Jewish communities and down near-abandoned main streets. Up a hill and past a guard shack plastered with “no trespassing” signs, Grossinger’s appears on the horizon.

Much of the resort has been demolished; what’s left has been thoroughly picked through over the years. The cabins and cottages that dot the grounds are unsafe to enter, their floors badly rotted, their roofs a deluge of splintered wood. Nobody is home at the Jennie J hotel, which has been thoroughly torn apart. Every bit of copper and steel plucked from its walls, every bathroom smashed apart.”

(That article in Gothamist has many pictures of the former resort’s current state of decrepitude.)

“I’m gonna start at 11, then I’m gonna take it to 15 real quick!”