"These were not aliens. Nor were they consenting airmen. They were human guinea pigs."

--Annie Jacobsen, the author of an upcoming book on Area 51 and the so-called "Roswell Incident." According to The Telegraph, Jacobsen puts forth a radical theory about what really happened in New Mexico, one simultaneously both more mind-boggling and more believable than any number of theories about aliens. Here's the gist: Josef Stalin is inspired by Orson Wellss's famous War of the World's radio broadcast in 1938, which provoked hysteria in the United States. Stalin enlists the notorious Nazi doctor Joseph Mengele to assemble a group of "grotesque, child-size aviators" on a secretive plane to land in the United States and cause hysteria a la Welles. But the remotely-piloted plane crash lands somewhere in New Mexico and a million and one conspiracies are born.

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Eli Rosenberg