Who goes there?

This book will not make Fox Mulder very happy.

Reading Annie Jacobsen’s “secret” history of UFOs, Area 51, the dogged FBI investigator would find himself being told that aliens don’t exist; they’re merely a cover story concocted by shadowy government agencies to conceal secret aircraft technology in a Nevada desert.

The X-Files character bet his career on the existence of little green men. But for every guy in a black suit or Smoking Man skulking in a dark room, LA Times writer Jacobsen comes up with a very different conclusion from Mulder’s: the US government is messing with your mind, dude, making you believe in UFOs. Because believing in UFOs steers people away from “the truth.”

And as we know, “the truth is out there.” Way out there. Jacobsen tapped some 75 sources who once worked at Area 51 (some were pilots, others mechanics or delivery people) as well as reams of recently declassified CIA files to paint a picture that is somewhat sketchy and incomplete, yet certainly stirs up debate. It’s the kind of book that vindicates those who don’t believe in UFOs, and will enrage those who do.

It’s also full of great anecdotes. One is about gorilla masks. Back in 1942, while testing the US Air Force’s new Bell XP-59A jets, other pilots in the sky would spot them streaming by at unheard-of speeds (jet engines were new then; people still flew propeller planes). The jet pilots, wanting to keep their new aircraft under wraps, came up with an idea: they began wearing gorilla masks during test flights. When other pilots caught a glimpse of the jets, they were convinced the planes were being piloted by gorillas! Of course, when they told other people their story, they were dismissed as drunk or crazy.

The government learned a valuable lesson there about cover stories: the wilder the better.

The story actually starts at the end of World War II, in a vast 4,678-square-mile test firing range in Nevada, where the Manhattan Project was being hatched in secret: the world’s first atomic bomb. This undercover operation gave the US government a template for later secret projects, when the Cold War started up. The US government bought up thousands of miles of land surrounding this testing site, and at the upper right corner was Area 51: the most secret piece of real estate in America. So secret that even US presidents aren’t allowed to visit there or access information. In 1994, when President Bill Clinton requested info about Area 51 to complete files about the Atomic Energy Commission, he was told he didn’t have “need-to-know” clearance. That’s how secretive the area is.

But Jacobsen got a lot of people to talk. What emerges, though, are fleeting glimpses, never a full-on view of activities in this black ops world. There is the Roswell, New Mexico incident of 1947, for instance. What was recovered from the Roswell desert crash site was a metal disc, something never made public since then; supposedly some small bodies were also glimpsed by witnesses before being whisked away. What Jacobsen posits is that this disc was likely the work of the Horten brothers, two German scientists who were headhunted by the Soviet Union shortly after WWII ended. The US conducted similar headhunting efforts, recruiting German scientists like Wernher Von Braun to help out with missile programs. Why recruit people who had worked for Hitler? Shouldn’t they have been locked up instead? Apparently, both the US and the USSR thought it best to hire Nazi scientists, rather than lock them away.

Jacobsen subscribes to the belief that the “flying discs” were actually designed by Reimar and Walter Horten for Josef Stalin’s military — a kind of “love letter” from Russia to the US. And those strange little figures inside? Jacobsen concludes they were dwarf-size Russian test pilots whose limbs and heads had been surgically altered to fit the small aircraft. (That’s where other Nazi skills came in handy, apparently.)

Why? The theory is that Americans would be thrown into chaos and panic if the “little green men” were revealed to the public. He thought it would cause America to collapse in anarchy.

A version of the Horten brothers’ “parabola” flying disc. A single pilot flies it, lying facedown on his stomach. For years, US engineers couldn’t figure out how the recovered disc could hover and travel so fast.

It’s a wild story, and who knows if it’s true. But what resulted out of this initial jolt from the air was a full-on secret Cold War: the US delegating more power and a vast secret budget (taxpayer money, of course) to the CIA and the Air Force to carry out decades of audacious nuclear tests, including upper-atmosphere hydrogen bomb explosions over Honolulu in 1958 that nearly blew a hole in the ozone layer (“Whoops, our bad!”), but eventually resulting in new technology such as the Nighthawk (the first stealth fighter) and flying drones that were eventually used in strikes against Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. Then there were expensive test planes like the Oxcart developed in the ‘50s that could fly at speeds of 2,300 miles per hour and were half a century ahead of existing technology.

So who runs Area 51? Jacobsen says it’s not the CIA and it’s not the US Air Force (though personnel and agents from both have limited access). Rather, it’s a shadowy agency originally called the Atomic Energy Commission in the early ‘50s but which since has undergone four name changes: it’s now called the National Nuclear Security Administration, though you won’t find it listed in the Yellow Pages.

In actuality, the very existence of planes like the Oxcart or Nighthawk is just as eerie as little green men: imagine planes that can fly at 90,000 feet, far beyond radar systems, swooping across America in an hour. Those are the kinds of jets that were routinely being tested at Area 51, and it’s not surprising that civilians who spotted them immediately thought “UFO.”

It turns out the US government encouraged this belief. After initially claiming early test crashes had been “weather balloons,” the CIA began monitoring stories about UFOs in the media and, in some cases, validating them. It was a great cover: those who cried “flying saucer” were looked upon as loonies. And popular culture — from George Pal’s War of the Worlds and Close Encounters to Independence Day and the recent spoof Paul — helped to fuel a public fascination with little green men.

And yet, despite Jacobsen’s earnest “exposé,” the truth is that few know even a fraction of what really goes on at Area 51. Much of its history and files remain classified to this day, and will probably only see the light of day in dribs and drabs, 40 or 50 years from now.

Maybe around the time we find out who actually killed JFK.