The UFO crash at Roswell was actually Josef Stalin’s “War of the Worlds” stab at mass panic using German flying “discs” carrying deformed children aviators engineered by Nazi mad doctor Josef Mengele, a new book contends.

And that, writes U.S. investigative journalist Annie Jacobsen in her meticulously researched and carefully documented history, is why officially non-existent Area 51 is still top secret.

“I felt it was important to report that,” Jacobsen told the Star on Wednesday, the day after publication of her book Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base.

What her source told her, she believes, “was just the tip of the iceberg.” The U.S. would go on to conduct equally gruesome military medical experiments, he said.

A contributing editor to the Los Angeles Times Magazine, Jacobsen devotes a quarter of the book to her notes and resources.

The book draws on 74 sources, 32 of whom lived and worked at the base from the 1950s, when it was a cauldron of Cold War technology and engineering. But her disclosures about the notorious Roswell Incident rely on one source, a former engineer with EG&G, the most powerful defence contractor in the United States.

“I trust the veracity of that source completely.”

In a deal with Stalin after World War II, Dr. Josef Mengele plied his Auschwitz-honed black medical arts to turn 13-year-olds into alien-looking aviators who would pilot a version of the German Horten brothers’ boomerang-shaped craft into U.S. airspace, the engineer told Jacobsen.

The idea was to replicate the national hysteria sown by an Orson Welles radio broadcast of a purported Martian invasion, War of the Worlds.

Stalin reneged on the deal and Mengele escaped from Germany to Buenos Aires in 1949. The craft crashed in New Mexico in 1947. Four years later — hence the name Area (19)51 — the debris arrived in a desolate Nevada testing area for reverse engineering: Take it apart and put it back together to see how it works.

That testing area also gave birth to the first test flights of the U2, a spectacular high-flying spy plane that spawned many of the UFO sightings, engineers and pilots told Jacobsen.

Former U2 pilot Hervey Stockman described his nerve-wracking stealth flight over 400,000 square miles of the Soviet Union in 1956, which brought back vital information that the Soviets were neither preparing for nor capable of World War III.

Millions of pages of classified documents remain secret and need to be revealed, said Jacobsen. But her years of research have convinced her much secrecy at the time was necessary.

“Absolutely. There were amazing Cold War projects that went on at Area 51. They kept us out of a war with the Soviets. The times were really tense.”

How did she get so many Cold Warriors who’ve kept secrets for decades to talk?

“A lot of the documents are actually declassified now,” she said. Project 57, the explosion of a dirty bomb at Area 51 that security guard Richard Mingus actually drove through and lived, is one of them.

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In 2007, the CIA began declassifying the A-12 Oxcart program, another secret aircraft often mistaken for a UFO.

The idea for Jacobsen’s book started with a chance encounter with Edward Lovick, the now 92-year-old “Radar Man” recruited to Area 51 to develop stealth technology by the legendary Skunk Works engineer Kelly Johnson. She would also meet Mingus by accident, in an archive.