While some conspiracy theories are blatantly ludicrous (such as, the U.S. government has dug a secret railroad tunnel from Nevada to Ohio), they often have appeal.
We don’t want to believe the world is full of chance events that have monumental consequences. Could a lone, random shooter really have killed President Kennedy in 1963? There had to be more of a reason than that, we think.
Another reason we might be drawn to conspiracy theories is that we don’t want to look like fools. We want to think we won’t fall for a fabrication, a lie, a deception. We want to believe that we are smart enough to recognize when someone is trying to trick us.
Of course this impulse can go both ways. We could be deceived the government, or we could be deceived by a theory that the government is lying.
All this brings us to Area 51, the top-secret region in Nevada owned by the U.S. government. Annie Jacobsen’s book by that name details the spy planes and other weapons testing that has gone on there and nearby over the last eighty years.
Much is now known due to many documents which have recently been declassified. We learn, for example, that the use of drones is not a new phenomenon. The Air Force has been deploying them since World War II. Little has been declassified about nuclear testing, however. And there are some documents which despite repeated efforts, both by citizens and government officials, have never been declassified.
One of the questions I have is, Why? Technology from eighty years ago is completely out of date. Why hide it? Some conspiracy theorists believe the government is covering up how it faked the moon landings at Area 51 fifty-five years ago despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Others think it is hiding evidence of alien landings beginning with Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947.
The author’s explanation for what the government called a weather balloon that crashed at Roswell is certainly more believable than aliens. What crashed, says Jacobsen, was a Soviet spy plane built with the help of Nazi scientists taken after the war. But many questions remain. Why have we never seen equivalent technology from the Russians since then? Why keep it secret even decades later?
Perhaps government agencies find an advantage in allowing conspiracy theories about UFOs and thousand-mile tunnels to run rampant. It keeps attention off what they actually have done and are doing.
At the end of the book the author presents (admittedly, with the least documentation of anything in the book), perhaps the most disturbing speculation as to why some government activities have never come to light—and it has nothing to do with secret technology. According to the author, the government has been engaged in what would be universally condemned by Americans and by the international community—human experimentation.
No one wants to be made a fool. Jacobsen reminds us several times that one of the best strategies to follow is Occam’s razor—the simplest explanation tends to be the best. A good reminder when we’re not sure what to believe.
