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AREA 51 THE TRUTH 55 "He was in his office at the Pentagon. The emotion in his voice, on his face, was unmistakable." "How do you know he wasn't crazy?" "A military officer, in the Pentagon?" my friends asked in surprise. "Thousands of people work inside the Pentagon. Just because they have a desk there doesn't mean they're not crazy. The world is full of strange people telling weird stories. Every profession has its share of unbalanced minds, and some of them are in uniform." We never resolved the issue that day, and I decided to reserve judgment on the whole question until some new facts emerged. HORRIBLE I never did find out who took care of the trash for our alien guests. But the stories about the Grays and Area 51 kept intensifying, drawing more and more rational people into a net of mystery, half-documented revela- tions, and hushed-up suggestions that became increasingly ominous. On December 29,1987, John Lear issued a statement that reminded the reader: "Germany may have recovered a flying saucer as early as 1939. General James M. Doolittle went to Sweden in 1946 to inspect a flying saucer that had crashed in Spitzbergen." And he went on: The horrible truth was known by only a very few persons; they were indeed ugly little creatures, shaped like praying mantises, and who were more advanced than us by perhaps a billion years. Of the original group that were the first to learn the “horrible truth," several committed suicide, the most prominent of which was General James V. Forrestal, who jumped to his death from a sixteenth-story hospital window. . . . President Truman quickly put a lid on the secret and turned the screws so tight that the general public still thinks that flying saucers are a joke.