Roswell and Area 51 have long been the focus of alien-hunting conspiracy theorists—and a new book's theory is likely to disappoint them. Annie Jacobsen's Area 51, a history of the top-secret base based on interviews with scientists and engineers who worked there, presents an explanation for the famous "flying disc" that crashed in Roswell in 1947—and it's nearly as crazy as the UFO theory. Jacobson writes that Josef Stalin was inspired by Orson Welles' famous 1938 radio broadcast of War of the Worlds, and wanted to throw the United States into a similar panic.
So Stalin enlisted Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, who had fled to South America after World War II, to create a crew of "grotesque, child-size aviators" to fly in a Horton Ho 229 plane the Soviets had seized from Germany; in exchange, he would get a eugenics lab. Actually, children, ages 12 and 13 and described by Jacobsen as having "unusually large heads and abnormally shaped oversize eyes," did not fly the plane; instead it was piloted remotely. But the Horton crashed in the New Mexico desert and authorities decided to hush up the incident, according the Telegraph. (More Roswell stories.)
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