About the book
“Inside the Real Area 51 — the Secret History of Wright Patterson” by Thomas J. Carey and Donald R. Schmitt (New Page Books, 288 pages, $16.99)
Do you believe that visitors from outer space crashed in their spaceship at Roswell, New Mexico in 1947? Do you think that our government has been concealing the truth about what really happened? Does physical proof exist? Was it hidden away at Wright Patterson Air Force Base? If you feel these are legitimate questions, then I have just the book for you.
On the back cover of “Inside the Real Area 51 — the Secret History of Wright Patterson” by Thomas J. Carey and Donald R. Schmitt readers are warned to “be prepared… the real Area 51 — Wright Patterson’s vault — is about to be opened.”
The first chapter; “Wright Patterson AFB: Even Secret Locations Have A History,” provides readers with an overview of the history of WPAFB. On the first page, they state that: “It’s where Orville and Wilbur Wright risked life and limb on an 84-acre stretch of land known then as the Hoffman Prairie Flying Field back in 1904.”
Did you notice their error? They wrote Hoffman instead of Huffman.
Reputable writers employ proofreaders and fact-checkers. This fact-checking blunder made this reviewer a bit wary of the content that was to follow.
According to the authors WPAFB is filled with secrets. A Navy veteran claimed that his grandfather told him “he saw — he stated to me on his deathbed — what appeared to him to be the wreckage of a comparatively small, circular craft.” Was it a flying saucer? We’ll never know, the man who supposedly witnessed that deathbed revelation is now dead, too.
In 1992, the authors interviewed Sergeant William C. Ennis, a retired Air Force flight engineer. He was at Roswell in 1947 but denied knowing about any alien craft. They talked to him again in 2008. His story had changed. Then Ennis told them: “it was a spaceship… and after all these years, I still don’t know how that ship flew. There was no engine!” Ennis is also now deceased.
In Chapter Six, “Aliens on Ice” it is suggested that the bodies of the aliens that were recovered from the crash site ended up at Wright Field. A woman named Norma Gardner was working at Wright-Pat in 1959 when she saw two bodies being moved: “she said they were small, about four feet tall, but with large heads and slanted eyes, and obviously ‘were not human.’”
The authors speculate that there are massive underground storage areas at WPAFB where the evidence of alien visitors could have been concealed. They add that “for the record, Wright-Patterson denies that any such underground levels even exist — neither today nor ever before.”
This book is dedicated to a longtime Dayton TV newsman, the late Carl Day. Day was intrigued by revelations about a “Martian dental arch”, “the jawbone of something that was not human stored there” (at WPAFB).
There will be readers who believe every word in this book. While this reviewer thinks it is possible that an alien craft crashed at Roswell in 1947, there was nothing new in this book to convince him that any of these things ever really happened.
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