'Project Blue Book' Season 2 Episode 2: Story of disfigured children's bodies from Annie Jacobsen's 'Area 51'
This article contains spoilers for season 2, episode 2: 'The Roswell Incident - Part II'
On the most recent episode of History's alien drama based on real events, 'Project Blue Book' Season 2, we see General Hughes address the long-overdue explanation behind the alleged alien spottings in 1947, in the town of Roswell in New Mexico. In the previous episode, we saw General Harding confirm the cover-up that the titular investigation by the air force carried out to hide their spy balloons of Project Mogul, but this time, they finally reveal what these "aliens" were, that the town's residents claim to have spotted when the flying saucers or prospective UFO's crashed at the site.
After a full drawn-out episode with Duncan Booker claiming that he and his wife Judy saw aliens come out of one of those spaceships, and almost televising it to the rest of the nation in an ambush involving General James Harding, we see General Hugh Valentine asking Harding not to fall for the same trap that the Soviet had set up for them. Hugh talks about a Russian doctor called Joseph Mengele and how he left "disfigured" children around the area to cause widespread panic amongst the American citizens in the wake of the ongoing Cold War.
This reminds us of Annie Jacobsen's book 'Area 51', where the author details interviews with local experts from the Roswell, New Mexico, area, who believe that instead of actual aliens, the bodies that were found at the crash site in 1947, belonged to kids that the Nazi doctor - Mengele - used to experiment on, and place in the area to give rise to paranoia. Jacobsen's book debunks the idea that the bodies or creatures in the crash-site were alien, or extraterrestrial in any form. Instead, the accounts of scientists and engineers present there back in the day, puts forth the theory that the infamous Nazi doctor, Mengele, experimented on prisoners in Auschwitz and later fled to South America in the post World War II scenario. There he was enlisted to create “grotesque, child-size aviators” in exchange for a eugenics laboratory, details the book.
It further adds that the plane had an entire crew of “alien-like” children, aged 12 or 13, who the villainous Russian dictator Josef Stalin wanted to land in America and cause widespread hysteria akin to Orson Wells' 1938 radio adaptation of the H. G. Wells book 'War of the Worlds'. According to theories presented by Jacobsen's book, this supposed plane crashed at Roswell and the American government tried hushing it up - aka the alleged cover-up we see on the History show.
Jacobsen’s sources included a retired engineer from the former defense company EG&G, who claimed he was onboard the Roswell project back in Area 51 in 1978. In the book, Jacobsen writes: "They found bodies alongside the crashed craft. These were not aliens. Nor were they consenting airmen. They were human guinea pigs. Unusually petite for pilots, they appeared to be children. Each was under five feet tall. They were grotesquely deformed, but each in the same manner as the others. They had unusually large heads and abnormally shaped oversize eyes.” According to the book, two of these alien-like children were found "comatose but still alive”. The EG&G engineers were told “that seeing the bodies would be a shocking and disturbing experience”.
'Project Blue Book' Season 2 airs on Tuesdays at 10 p.m. only on History.