Entry 65: The Macho Man, PEDs, a Gay Man, and Aliens

[The Macho Man.]

[Macho Man, about to deliver his patented elbow-off-the-top-rope on an opponent who appears to be Hulk Hogan.]

Randy “Macho Man” Savage died in a car crash yesterday -- so passes another professional wrestler at a relatively young age and so arises another reason for me to talk about WWF (now WWE) on this blog.

Macho Man was what I would call a second-tier wrestler in terms of popularity. He wasn’t on the level of Hulk Hogan or Andre The Giant or The Rock, but he was just below that level, with guys like Ric Flair and Rowdy Roddy Piper. Many non-wrestling fans knew Macho Man from the awesome Slim Jim commercials he did in the ‘90s.



During his tenure in the WWF, he rotated between hero and heel and for many years was accompanied ringside by his real-life wife the lovely Miss Elizabeth. After Macho Man and Elizabeth split (in real-life and in the WWF script) she became the live-in girlfriend of another wrestler named Lex Luger and died of a drug overdose in 2003.

[The lovely Miss Elizabeth.]

It wouldn’t surprise me if drugs were involved in Savage’s death. Pro wrestling was (and possibly still is) an extremely sordid business. Although it’s over ten years old now, I recommend the documentary Beyond the Mat for anybody interested in this type of thing. I also recommend the (fictional) movie The Wrestler. The sportswriter Bill Simmons wrote an article a few years ago about The Wrestler and why it resonates with old pro wrestling fans. Here’s an excerpt.

Of course, The Wrestler resonates for a more sinister reason, too. Pro wrestling chews up and spits out its athletes with grueling schedules, brutal physical punishment and a tacit understanding that performance enhancers are okay—as are greenies, sleeping pills and painkillers. These guys destroy their bodies, then their hearts give out and they die. Google the phrase "dead wrestlers," and your computer will start to smoke like an overtaxed car engine.

In more legitimate sports news, Tyler Hamilton, a former teammate of Lance Armstrong is being reported as saying, in no uncertain terms, that the cycling great did in fact use banned performance enhancers during his stretch of sevn consecutive Tour de France victories (1999-2005).

I think Lance did cheat. There is just too much evidence mounting against him. He emphatically denies the allegations, but so did/does Mark McGwire, Rafael Palmerio, Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, and in the cycling world Floyd Landis. All these people have either been forced to come clean or they have essentially been outed as liars as stronger and stronger evidence comes out against them. It will be interesting to see how Lance plays it from here. Will it be more denial or will we see a grand mea culpa?

So, also in the sports world, Phoenix Suns executive Rick Welts has announced he’s gay, which is a story because… well, I’m not sure exactly why it’s a story, but a lot of people were talking and writing about it this week. The thing is, most people, even diehard sports fans, have never heard of Rick Welts. He’s just a behind-the-scenes suit, it’s not like he’s a player or anything.

I guess it’s just because he works in pro sports and pro sports is perceived as being a largely homophobic milieu, but still this seems like a non-story to me. Imagine passing this news on to a non-sports fan.

“Hey have you heard of the Phoenix Suns?”
“Not really.”
“Well, you know the NBA, right? Basketball?”
“Yeah”
“Well there’s a team in the league call the Phoenix Suns.”
“OK”
“And get this… one of their employees, not a player or a coach or anything, just a guy who works in their front office… he’s gay!”
“…”

When a player comes out, especially a big name player, then you’ve got something. And by the way, isn’t it about time for this to happen? The climate is right. I think the public support an openly gay male athlete would receive (he-he receive) would be far outweigh the negativity. Also, as Charles Barkley has recently pointed out, the locker room isn’t nearly as homophobic as people perceive it to be. It’s not like athletes don’t know, or at least suspect, guys are gay already. My favorite thing Barkley said about this issue (I’m paraphrasing): “Nobody cares if gay guys are on their team. You know what type of guy you don’t want on your team? Guys who suck at their sport.” Beautifully put.

Anyway, the aforementioned Bill Simmons predicts that by the end of 2012 a male athlete in a major professional sport will come out of the closet. We shall see.

So, the last thing I wanted to touch on has nothing to do with sports. It has to do with aliens, or at least the appearance of aliens. I heard an interview recently on Fresh Air with Terry Gross with a woman named Annie Jacobsen who wrote a book called Area 51 ‘Uncensored’.

During the interview, Terry asked Annie about The Roswell UFO Incident. The conversation got really weird and legitimately creeped me out. I was listening to it in bed late at night and it was reminiscent of nights as a kid when I used to watch the great show Unsolved Mysteries hosted by Robert Stack.


I won’t even attempt to relay any of the interview in my own words. I’ll just post the transcript of the creepy part. It’s a little long, but worth the read if you are a fan of disturbing shit.

GROSS: My guest is Annie Jacobsen, author of the new book "Area 51," about the secret military research facility located within the Nevada Test and Training Range. The book is based in part on interviews with people who worked at Area 51. The base's secrecy has made it fertile ground for conspiracy theories. When we left off, we were talking about the conspiracy theory alleging a cover-up of a UFO that crash-landed in Roswell, New Mexico. One of her sources told her that a flying disc did crash at Roswell in 1947, but it wasn't an alien spaceship. The military believed the flying disc was created by two German aerospace engineers, Reimar and Walter Horten.

Now this source that you have told you some amazing things that are kind of hard to believe, and I don't know what to make of it, honestly. So, the most extraordinary stuff I think that he told you has to do with who was in this flying disc. So tell us what he told you.

Ms. JACOBSEN: Well, I want to back up for one moment, and just speak about my sources, because it's important that I distinguish the fact that all of the sources came to me from one another. Everyone came by referral. They are part of a formerly secret group of scientists, engineers and physicists who were out in the desert working on these various projects. And they all had different levels of need to know on different projects, so what one knew the other did not know. And out of all of the sources, as I write in the book, they would often say to me, I can't discuss that. That's classified.

And I had this unusual, extraordinary moment when one of the sources began to become very upset and told me some things that were stunning, and this is what you're talking about in the end of the book that's almost impossible to believe at first read. And that is that a flying disc really did crash in New Mexico. And that it was transported to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, and then in 1951 it was transferred to Area 51, which is why the base is called Area 51. And the stunning part about this reveal was that my source, who I absolutely believe and worked with for 18 months on this, was one of the engineers who received the equipment - he refers to it as equipment - and he also received the people who were in the craft. And so...

GROSS: Do you mean the remains of the people in the craft?

Ms. JACOBSEN: The people were - according to the source - the people in the craft who were child-sized pilots, and there's a lot of debate about how old they were. He believes that they were 13, although other people believe that they may have been older. But this is a firsthand witness to this and, you know, I made a decision to write about this in book at the very end of the book, after I take the traditional journalist form of telling you everything, all the stories in the third person, I switch and I kind of lean in to the reader and I say, look, this is not why Area 51 is classified to the point where no one in the government will admit it exists. The reason is, because of what one man told me. And then using the first person, I tell you what I was told. And there is no doubt that people are going to be upset, alarmed and skeptical of this information, but I absolutely believe the veracity of my source, and I believe that it was important that I put this information out there as relayed to me by him, because it is the tip of a very big iceberg.

And what he says is that the child-sized aviators in this craft were the result of a Soviet human experimentation program, and they had been made to look like aliens a la Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds."

GROSS: So if your source is right and if there were human beings engineered to look like aliens within this aircraft that crash-landed at Roswell, what was the point? Why would the Russians want to send a vehicle with humans engineered to look like space aliens?

Ms. JACOBSEN: When the Orson Welles radio broadcast "The War of the Worlds" aired in 1938, people on the East Coast actually took actions based on their belief that Martians had landed in New Jersey and were attacking. And this fascinated the American military - I source all this in my book - and led to a lot of behind-the-scenes thinking about what it meant that American citizens could be so moved by something that was fictional - that was science fiction. And across the pond, Hitler also paid attention to "The War of the Worlds." He referenced it in a speech. And according to my source, Stalin also paid attention to "The War of the Worlds" and was fascinated by American susceptibility toward science fiction. And so his plan, according to my source, was to create panic in the United States with this belief that a UFO had landed with aliens inside of it.

And Terry, one of the most interesting documents that I encourage people to look at is the second CIA director, General Walter Bedell Smith, memos back and forth to the National Security Council in the early '50s, talking about how the fear is that the Soviets could make a hoax against America, involving a UFO, and overload our early air defense warning system, making America vulnerable to an attack. My read of General Walter Bedell Smith's documents are that it was actually another hoax.

GROSS: So the goal was to just - make it seem like there really were UFOs? Is that what you're saying?

Ms. JACOBSEN: Yes. That is according to the source.

GROSS: Okay, now here's something in the story that makes no sense to me. What you write is that the 13-year-old or older pilots who were basically genetically designed to look like children - to not really grow, and to look like aliens - that this was part of an experiment by the Nazi Dr. Josef Mengele, and Stalin made a deal with him after the war that Mengele could continue to work on eugenics programs, on his crazy human experiments, but do it for the Soviet Union. Now, since this takes place in 1947, how would Mengele have had time to create even a 13-year-old? That would go back to 1934, that he would have had started working on this in 1934.

Ms. JACOBSEN: Well, I would beg to differ on that, because I - and the reason that I say genetically/surgically altered is because my source is unclear, because remember that's secondhand information to him. What is firsthand information is that he worked with these bodies, and he was an eyewitness to the horror of seeing them and working with them. Where they actually came from is obviously the subject of debate. But if you look at the timeline with Mengele, he left Auschwitz in January of 1945 and disappeared for a while. And the suggestion by the source is that Mengele had already sort of cut his losses with the Third Reich at that point and was working with Stalin.

GROSS: Mm-hmm. So you're saying that these children were surgically altered.

Ms. JACOBSEN: I am repeating what the source told me is that...

GROSS: Right. That he's saying. I'm sorry. He's saying that they were surgically altered.

Ms. JACOBSEN: Yeah. Or genetically. It's unclear. What he is absolutely clear about is that the iconic images that we have now of aliens with the big head and the nose and the eyes, that is actually what the child-size pilots looked like. And what I asked my source over and over again, where my skepticism came in was, why, originally in 1947, when this craft supposedly crashed with these grotesque humans in it, why on earth didn't President Truman hold a press conference to show what a horrible, evil, abhorrent man Joseph Stalin was, to be working with Dr. Mengele?

And the source's answer - which took a very long time - was ultimately: because we decided to do the same thing. And that the head of the program - who my source says was a man named Vannevar Bush, who had also been in charge of the Manhattan Project, decided that it was important to figure out what the Soviets had done. And so we began our own rogue program with human experiments. And this, says the source, is why it's all secret.

GROSS: My guest is Annie Jacobsen, author of the new book "Area 51."

We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Annie Jacobsen. She writes about national security for the LA Times, and she's the author of the new book "Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base."

Now, I have to ask you, your book seems so credible when talking about nuclear tests and tests on new surveillance planes and all the secrecy and the lack of oversight at Area 51 and the nuclear testing ground. And then you get to this - this source at the end who tells you things that seem just really out there. And I guess I'm wondering: Did it - did you ever think about not including that, thinking that if you did include it, people might question your credibility because that part is so incredible-sounding?

I mean, it just - and it just adds, in a way, to the whole conspiracy theory, though it's not a conspiracy theory about aliens from outer space, but it is a conspiracy theory of Stalin and Mengele and a cover-up in the U.S. because we started to do crazy experiments, kind of mutating humans.

Ms. JACOBSEN: Absolutely. I thought through all of those things. I mean, those are serious concerns that any serious journalist would have. But I had to balance that with my job as a journalist, which is to tell the citizens the truth. And I believe this man is telling the truth. Abs--

GROSS: Why do you believe him?

Ms. JACOBSEN: I worked with him for 18 months, as I write in the book, but now it's been over two years. And he had a Q clearance. He had a top-secret clearance. He was a member of the Manhattan Project. His credentials are impeccable to me. Working with him for two years, hundreds of hours of interviews, I fact-checked every other fact that he ever gave me. I accessed his medical records. I accessed his war records. I accessed his full military record. He worked for the Atomic Energy Commission across three decades. The source is legitimate, in my opinion, and I felt that if I were to leave it out, it would be a disservice to why I believe he told me what he told me in the first place.

Terry, he has absolutely nothing to gain and everything to lose. I keep him anonymous, and I hope he remains that way. But he's the last of the five engineers who worked on this horrific rogue program, and he's a real patriot and he did amazing things for American national security. But he knows that this rogue program was wrong, and I made a decision to put that information on the record.

GROSS: So you've taken a lot of stuff from your sources that was not supposed to be revealed and you've revealed it. Why do you think it's important to take the classified information that you were able to access and make it public?

Ms. JACOBSEN: Because if we really did have a program that involved experimenting on humans and the result was death, that needs to be made public. And one of the things that people may say is, you know, how could you accuse the Atomic Energy Commission of such things? And I do make very clear, because my source told me this, that it's the Atomic Energy Commission that has the original files on Roswell and it's specifically the defense contractor EG&G, and those files are protected from even the president by the national security-keeping system at the Atomic Energy Commission enjoys. But the Atomic Energy Commission, as I write in the book, Terry, has a long history of experimenting on humans. And this has been written about publicly, and many people kind of turn the other way when they hear about these things.

No one wants to hear about retarded children in Massachusetts who have been injected with plutonium, as the reporter Eileen Welsome reported in the 1990s, which set about President Clinton investigating the crimes of the Atomic Energy Commission. And no one wants to hear about those things. Why? I don't know.

Hillary Clinton apologized to the Guatemalans just in October of last year for the fact that our scientists went into mental institutions in Guatemala, pulled people out and infected them with syphilis so that we could see what would happen. Now, these are horrific human experiments, and we have done them. And in my opinion, people sort of pay attention to it, and then go on with their lives. And maybe this one might make people think a little more clearly about this, because it is such a high-profile subject, because so many people are concerned with all these different theories about Roswell.

GROSS: Do you know what Area 51 is being used for now?

Ms. JACOBSEN: Well, my understanding is that Area 51 is now the place where our most important drones and our overhead espionage platforms are being developed. And in the most interesting way that brings my story full circle is that these eyes in the skies, this idea which began right after World War II that overhead espionage would keep us out of war, they've now merged with weaponry, because as we know from the Predator drone and the Reaper drone, the eyes in the skies now also shoot missiles.

And it's also interesting that our director of Central Intelligence is going to be the secretary of defense. And one of the top men in Afghanistan is going to go over to the CIA. So you see, in the 21st century, how these two organizations are overlapping and working together.

GROSS: Annie Jacobsen, thank you so much for talking with us.

Ms. JACOBSEN: Thank you for having me.