Nick Redfern - Body Snatchers in the Desert: The Horrible Truth at the Heart of the Roswell Story

It is a fact of life that people cant keep secrets. They wait for the right moment and the right person to tell their secrets to. As a full-time investigative author and journalist who has spent more than twenty years delving deeply into the murky world of official secrecy and probing the innermost workings of the intelligence community, I have often been that person. But never have I been told anything as shocking as what an elderly lady told me after a speaking engagement in Los Angeles in July 2001.

Because she does not want her identity revealed, for reasons that will shortly become apparent, I will refer to her as the Black Widow. When I met her, she was nearly eighty years of age. From the mid-1940s to the early 1950s, she had been assigned to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee, and she said she had firsthand knowledge of the Roswell mystery that I might find interesting. I had heard many Roswell revelations before, but what she was about to tell me was unlike anything I had ever heard.

A sprightly character, the Black Widow smiled and laughed a lot as she spoke. But behind that facade I detected a distinct air of anxiety, and she possessed the sad and somewhat sunken eyes of a person with the weight of the world on her shoulders. She was clearly looking for someone to speak with; but equally, she was very concerned about the ramifications of doing so, if the government finds out.

I reassured her that since the government and military asserted strenuously that nothing more unusual than a balloon crashed to earth in New Mexico in 1947, they were hardly in a position to take action against her for what they claimed was largely a nonevent. She smiled, nodded, and a look of relief spread across her facemomentarily, at least. We agreed to meet the following morning for breakfast at a nearby diner. And so it was that she revealed her dark and disturbing tale.

Spread out along broad valleys cut by the Clinch River and framed by the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, Oak Ridge seems an unlikely setting for events that changed the course of history. In early 1942, the Army Corps of Engineers designated a 59,000-acre swatch of land between Black Oak Ridge to the north and the Clinch River to the south as a federal reserve to serve as one of three sites nationwide for the development of the atomic bomb.