Body Snatchers in the Desert: The Horrible Truth at the Heart of the Roswell Story [Paperback]

Nick Redfern (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 21, 2005

IT WAS A CONSPIRACY TO HIDE A SECRET EXPERIMENT

"RAAF captures flying saucer on ranch in Roswell region." Ever since this provocative headline appeared on July 8, 1947, conspiracy theorists have sincerely believed that the U.S. government has maintained an extensive operation of cover-up-and-denial regarding its knowledge of alien life. But there was, in fact, no UFO crash with dead alien bodies. What really happened on that fateful day is much more sinister. The persistent rumors surrounding the UFO crash in Roswell, New Mexico, are part of a bigger conspiracy -- one orchestrated and fostered by the government itself as a smokescreen to bury a truth that is much darker, and disturbingly, far more believable.

Now, through never-before-revealed testimony from military whistleblowers, eyewitness intelligence reports, and an astonishing body of corroborative evidence, Nick Redfern lays out a shockingly plausible new theory on the Roswell incident: that the crash-site discovery of prototype military aircraft would expose a damning secret -- a highly confidential, U.S. government-sanctioned program to conduct medical experiments on deformed, handicapped, disfigured, and diseased Japanese POWs, exploited as "expendable" victims by their captors.

An important account that forces us to take a closer look at both the Roswell story and post-war American history, BODY SNATCHERS IN THE DESERT casts a startling, new light on a shocking conspiracy more than half a century in the making.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Nick Redfern began his writing career in the 1980s on Zero -- a British-based magazine devoted to music, fashion, and the world of entertainment. He has written eight books, including Body Snatchers in the Desert: The Horrible Truth at the Heart of the Roswell Story, and has contributed articles to numerous publications, including the London Daily Express, Eye Spy magazine, and Military Illustrated. He lives in Dallas, Texas.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction

In the summer of 1947, something crashed to earth in the blisteringly hot and barren deserts of New Mexico. The event has been the subject of many books, official investigations undertaken by both the government and the military, numerous television documentaries, a movie, intense media coverage and speculation, and has left in its wake a legacy of controversy and a web of intrigue that continue to reverberate nearly sixty years later. It has come to be known as the Roswell Incident.

It is a matter of record that in early July 1947, the then Army Air Forces announced that it had recovered the remains of a "flying disc" that had been found on a ranch near the town of Roswell, New Mexico. The intense media frenzy that followed was only brought to a swift and conclusive halt when the AAF hastily retracted its statement: the flying disk story was a huge mistake and the crash "remains" were actually nothing more than a weather balloon. Today, the United States Air Force tells a different story: that the debris found at Roswell came from a top-secret balloon project designed to monitor Soviet nuclear tests and that claims of unusual-looking or "alien" bodies found at the site were, in reality, based upon witnesses remembering having seen "crash-test dummies" utilized in parachute experiments.

Those who champion the idea that something truly anomalous occurred at Roswell scoff at the ever-mutating assertions of the Pentagon and maintain that a conspiracy of truly cosmic proportions exists at the highest level to hide the out-of-this-world truth of the affair and its alien origins.

But what if there was another, distinctly darker explanation behind the Roswell legend -- one that summarily dismissed the balloon and crash-test dummy claims but that also laid to rest the theories that extraterrestrials met their deaths in the New Mexico desert? From 1996 to 2004, I spoke with a number of military and intelligence whistle-blowers, all of whom related to me the details of a series of shocking post-World War II experiments undertaken on American soil. I confess that I did not initially pay much attention to the claims. But as time progressed and additional and corroborative data and testimony began to surface, the horrible truth behind the legend of Roswell became apparent. This controversial body of data and never-before-revealed testimony forms the crux of Body Snatchers in the Desert.

Copyright © 2005 by Nick Redfern

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Paraview Pocket Books (June 21, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743497538
• ISBN-13: 978-0743497534
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #440,658 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #42 in Books > History > Military > Prisoners of War

More About the Author

Nick Redfern is a full-time author and journalist specializing in a wide range of unsolved mysteries, including Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, UFO sightings, government conspiracies, alien abductions and paranormal phenomena. He writes regularly for the London Daily Express newspaper, Fortean Times, Fate, and UFO Magazine. His previous books include Three Men Seeking Monsters, Strange Secrets, Cosmic Crashes, and The FBI Files. Among his many exploits, Redfern has investigated reports of lake monsters in Scotland, vampires in Puerto Rico, werewolves in England, aliens in Mexico, and sea serpents in the United States. Redfern travels and lectures extensively around the world. Originally from England, he currently lives in Dallas, Texas.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

37 of 43 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Japanese midget prisoners with progeria?, February 22, 2006

By 

Paranoid Reviews - See all my reviews

This review is from: Body Snatchers in the Desert: The Horrible Truth at the Heart of the Roswell Story (Paperback)

The authors aim was to offer a prosaic explanation for the Roswell UFO crash. However, the author creates or hangs his explanation on a maze of speculation and hearsay, best summarised in two parts.

[1]. CAUSE: Four Chinese or Japanese midget prisoners with progeria are transfer from the Japanese 731 Unit (Japan's Secret Biological Warfare Unit) in Manchuria to the United States (all secret). These progeria midgets are taught to pilot a Japanese version of the German Horten glider suspended below a Fugo balloon hybrid type flying device. The midgets on this occasion are sent up by the US to study something, in the upper atmosphere, nuclear energy for propulsion aircraft, radiation experiments, I don't know? But the hapless crew are sent up by the US Army (more secrets), their glider starts to spin and breaks up, one of the Chinese/Japanese progeria midgets is sucked out of the glider and... Oh I have to stop!!!!

[2]. SOURCE - Well would you believe 4 anonymous people. The primary tail tellers are called the "Black Widow" and an army "Colonel"? That's it!

The author attempts to link the whole scenario with official documents but fails badly. I wonder how the editor of this abomination kept a straight face. In fact the `crash alien space craft' story had a better chance of being real than this account. Look for better sourced material on the Roswell incident.

Down in flames. Save your money.

(Digital Version)

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Something There IS---That Doesn't Love a Mystery., November 1, 2009

By 

Cassandra A. Morrison "The Shadow's Girl" (Minneapolis, MN) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Body Snatchers in the Desert: The Horrible Truth at the Heart of the Roswell Story (Paperback)

I like Nick Redfern. We've exchanged emails over the years and have a similar slant on Cryptids and Crowley and everything that begins with a "C"....but Nick starts this off with the words I MOST hate to read:"Because she does not want her identity revealed, for reasons that will shortly become apparent*, I will refer to her as the Black Widow."

This annoys me for the same reason it annoys Colin Wilson...it means I can't check your facts. So all we have to start us off is Nick saying "I met this lady back in 2001, she was nearly 80 (NEARLY??? What was she, a pre-pubescent bobbysoxer when she was doing all this super secret work at Oak Ridge, Nick?) I'm not going to tell you her name or anything about her but here's her story...."

And off we go on a Conspiracy Theory Can-Can.

To all authors of future books on weird things: we need to be able to check your facts---even when we trust and like you. Some batty old lady tells you some story but how are we the readers supposed to believe it? We can't check her bona fides. We don't know that she EVER worked for Oak Ridge---or even if she DID that she didn't have some sort of mental breakdown and come to believe some absolutely goofy paranoid delusion.

We only have YOUR word that this old lady even exists (or, at least, that she existed in 2001).

Not good enough, Nick. Now I trust you...but save the "anonymous" stories for the appendices from now on...give me facts I can CHECK.

Before I start believing you're the reincarnation of Frank Edwards.

Okay, Nick?

* Incidentally---the reason never becomes apparent. What is the government going to do to her for telling Nick this story? Court publicity for her story by charging her with violating the Official Secrets Act? It'd be all over Coast to Coast with George Noory a day later and we all know it.

9 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Even believers in space aliens aren't necessarily open-minded, July 3, 2007

By 

Tom Huston (Lenox, MA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Body Snatchers in the Desert: The Horrible Truth at the Heart of the Roswell Story (Paperback)

I've always been hesitant to believe the ET explanation for Roswell for the same reason that the grandmaster of ufology, Jacques Vallee, is: the ufonauts seem too damn sophisticated to "crash" accidentally--and leave bodies behind, besides. So if what happened at Roswell in the first week of July '47 really did involve aliens (whether interdimensional or extraterrestrial), then it seems likely that it would had to have been done entirely intentionally, to see how we'd respond (or for some similar purpose).

It's also always seemed unlikely to me that the US military actually knows what's going on better than serious civilian ufologists, and far more likely that since 1947 they've been committed to presenting an appearance of knowing far more than they actually do (so that the general populace thinks the UFO phenomonon is either completely bogus, or that the military knows what's up and keeping it under wraps; in either case, the impression will be that everything is under control, and we won't have to worry that our powerful leaders are actually as much at a loss as anyone else). The "leaked" documents over the past few decades (MJ-12, etc.), the hype around Area 51, and the transparently absurd "crash dummies" explanation the USAF gave in 1997 for the Roswell bodies seem to support this idea--that elements of the government want us to think they've actually got space aliens to hide. It would work to their advantage in many ways--particularly in keeping classified projects hidden under the mask of "ET spaceships," which keeps the UFO believers happy and the UFO disbelievers scoffing at any such assertions. Meanwhile, advanced military technology can quietly go about its business, either believed to be something it's not or dismissed outright as not worth paying attention to, but in neither case examined more closely for what it actually is.

I think Nick Redfern's "Body Snatchers" is a tremendous contribution to the Roswell mythos, despite Stanton Friedman's scathing review (on his website) to the contrary. Friedman is a hero of mine (his Roswell books "Crash at Corona" and "Top Secret/Majic" are some of the best-researched, sensible approaches to this mystery out there), so I'd initially sided with him on his analysis of this book when it first came out. But last year I decided to take a closer look at Redfern's work myself, and I'm glad I did. Redfern's explanation, while perhaps a bit hard to believe itself, seems to present the most plausible explanation yet for what happened at Roswell. Ufologists say, "If it was just a Project Mogul balloon train, as the air force insists, then why all the military secrecy and panic around the time of the incident? What of the Ramey memorandum, the eyewitness accounts of small "Oriental" bodies, etc.? And why did the Roswell Army Air Field seem to not know anything about it beforehand?" But if, as Redfern contends, it was a top-secret high-altitude military experiment launched from Los Alamos, NM, involving deformed Japanese POWs, then the heinous nature of such an experiment-gone-awry is reason enough for the decades of secrecy, and it explains both the panic, confusion, and the Asian bodies in a way that makes a great deal of sense without invoking our friendly neighborhood visitors. Redfern's explanation for the origin of Majestic 12 was another clincher for me; it made total sense and smacked of exactly the kind of humor certain members of the US intelligence agency have no doubt been delighting in--and taunting sincere ufologists with--for decades (shameless bastards that they are).

Read it, open your mind, and think for yourself... I still don't know what actually happened, but I have a better overview of the possibilities thanks to Redfern, and for that I'm grateful for his efforts.