I'm about to disappoint a few hardened alienists here, though I'm trying to do it with the finest of intentions.

For I've just learned of a new book called "Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base." It offers a radically different theory as to what happened that strange, stormy day in Roswell, N.M., in 1947.

Stories of the hush-hushedness of America's reaction have created legends that will live forever. That these were aliens crash-landing into our lives is, perhaps, the most beloved explanation of a strange phenomenon in all of science fiction.

However, this book--written by Annie Jacobsen, a respected investigative reporter--offers such a contrasting explanation for the Roswell mystery that I suggest you clutch something solid right now.

For, according to the Telegraph, Jacobsen suggests that the flying object that crashed was an earthly machine. She also reportedly suggests it was sent by Stalin.

For myself, I have little affection for a man who locked my own parents up in Siberian labor camps. I'm not even slightly moved by recent supposed evidence that offers he was a manic depressive. Indeed, Jacobsen's Roswell tale offers something that is so sick and twisted that it becomes entirely believable.

Jacobsen says she had access to eyewitnesses and previously classified documents. On this basis, she explains that Stalin wanted to create the kind of panic in the USA that Orson Welles' radio adaptation of "War of the Worlds" created when the innocent and naive first heard it.

He was inspired further when the Soviet Union captured a German fighter called the Horton Ho 229. This plane was, so the book reportedly relates, full of alienlike children, created in a eugenics experiment by a Nazi who equalled the evil of Stalin himself, Joseph Mengele.

Stalin apparently believed he could send a plane full of these children--created with the already-exiled Mengele's help--over to the U.S. in order to create mass hysteria. However, the remotely piloted plane (which wasn't a flying saucer) crashed.

The words of Jacbosen's book make for splendidly disturbing reading. Speaking of the children, she writes that they were "unusually petite for pilots, they appeared to be children. Each was under five feet tall...They were grotesquely deformed, but each in the same manner as the others. They had unusually large heads and abnormally shaped, oversize eyes."

Now, if cell phone cameras had been around in those days, you just know that images of these alleged flying children would have immediately emerged. You also just know that some would claim they were Photoshopped, while many would be flying and driving toward Roswell in the hope of catching a glimpse. The Weekly World News, or perhaps Fox, would have already claimed the first interview.

It could be that this tale--reportedly based on a chat with an engineer who worked for EG&G, a company that dealt with quite a few sensitive topics for the government--happens to have some truth. In which case you might wonder why, after all these years, the government hasn't just owned up and sold the rights to Warner Bros.

At least we might be spared any more bad alien movies and comics. We might also enjoy watching Brad Pitt utter the line to President George Clooney: "These kids...they really are like that little guy from the movie 'Paul.'"