A figure on horseback rounded the bend, the terrified rider hanging on for dear life as her horse galloped out of control, reins dangerously askew. Halfway into our outing, as we were riding along in the otherwise quiet forest, we heard screaming-unmistakably a woman’s voice. One interview took place on horseback up in the mountains, an off-the-grid location where that particular source felt comfortable speaking.

Some interviews took place in sources’ homes, others in the anonymity of roadside diners. In reporting this book I sat for hundreds of hours with sources who recounted to me situations of sheer pandemonium and chaos entwined with the human will to survive and the intellectual challenge of not giving up hope. “I believe that what the source told me is true, to him.This is a nonfiction book about complex individuals working in treacherous environments populated with killers, connivers, and saboteurs. Jacobsen later refused to name her sole source for this cockamamie story and not-so-cleverly insisted, This is a book in which she claims that an unidentified flying object cited in 1948 was actually a flying saucer sent by Joseph Stalin and flown by mutant, bug-eyed teenagers created by the notorious Nazi death camp doctor Josef Mengele. Dick Teresi critically reviewed Jacobsen’s “Phenomena,” a silly book about the paranormal, and archly observed that “Jacobsen’s sources should have used mind control to get her a more receptive Times reviewer.” Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Richard Rhodes called one of her books (“Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base”) an “error-ridden job of reporting” and accused her of being “at a minimum extraordinarily gullible or journalistically incompetent.” Rhodes was being gentle. Her topics - Nazi scientists, UFOs, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the history of government-financed investigations of the paranormal - must appeal to some readers’ desire for astounding revelations.

Annie Jacobsen has a history of publishing sensational, conspiracy-driven books that sell well.

Surprise kill vanish