‘Information classified TS/SCI ensures outsiders don’t know what they don’t know and insiders know only what they have a need-to-know.’ Very Rumsfeld. So here’s some of what you don’t know you don’t know and you definitely don’t have a need-to-know: Area 51, Area 52, CIA, skunk works, AEC, Oxcart, NACA, extinguished, NPIC, NRO, Black Shield, NSA, German Paperclip, SDI, safety test, EG&G, Groom Lake, iodine-131, U-2, A-12, ECCM, Project 57, JCS, Janet, S-4, human experimentation, Tikaboo mountain, Roswell, RS-71, SR-71,Tall King, MBD, XW-25, war criminal, OPC, Aquatone, PSB, Watertown, TS/SCI, NII-88, Grass Tetany, UFO, WWIII, REECo, Hopeless Diamond, alien. I guess you do need to know that  ‘safety test’ means nuclear-bomb-exploded-deliberately-and-near-Las-Vegas-to-see-what-it’ll-do. And maybe that ‘human experimentation’ involves US citizens with below par mental faculties. You might not want to know that, but likely you do need to.

Area 51 was, and probably still is, a denied but not deniable secret base for the development and testing of high-flying fast reconnaissance aircraft, stealth aircraft and drones. And probably lots of other secret stuff. It’s around 75 miles from Las Vegas within the boundaries of the Nevada nuclear bomb testing site. Roswell is somewhere else entirely, over in New Mexico. Roswell is where the flying saucer crashed in 1947 and the live aliens were found. Or according to this book where the Russian flying crescent craft crashed together with the deformed child pilots created for them by Josef Mengele.

The wreckage from Roswell was shipped over to Area 51 for study and reverse engineering. Or not. If it existed. But stories about the secret base are intertwined with stories from Roswell and Annie Jacobsen makes a valiant attempt to disentangle them. Unless she’s a CIA disinformation specialist who’s busily adding more muddle and confusion and helping those conspiracy theorists along to yet more sleepless, paranoid nights. Or not. Whatever.

It’s a great little read about the activities of the CIA and the creation of the spy planes that all by themselves turned the luke-warm war into the frigidly cold war and came that close to causing a very hot war indeed. Fortunately the Russians held back and the CIA leader self-imploded with the Bay of Pigs. The history, such as is known, of the US nuclear weapons test programmes is fascinating too.

How the Russians have managed to keep secret a fleet of aircraft supposedly developed for the Luftwaffe in WW2, so advanced that they could overfly New Mexico in 1947, and why they never developed them further remains unexplained. As does the fate of the Roswell child-alien pilots.

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