73+ Annie Jacobsen's Impactful Quotes on Military Affairs and National Security

Annie Jacobsen is an investigative journalist and author known for her expertise in uncovering classified information related to national security and military affairs. She has delved into topics such as nuclear war, modern warfare, and identity dominance, shedding light on the intricate workings of these secretive realms. Her career is marked by a commitment to revealing the hidden truths behind government operations and military strategies. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Annie Jacobsen on military, journalism, security.

Top 10 Annie Jacobsen Quotes

1. What might sound like science fiction elsewhere in the world at DARPA was future science.
2. I do believe that the truth gets out.
3. The past is a foreign country.
4. With stealth technology, the U.S. could spy on its Cold War adversaries without running the risk of getting caught.
5. Many of the engineers I interviewed worked on reverse-engineering technology.
6. I'm not an aviation historian, I'm not an Air Force aficionado, and I'm definitely not a ufologist.
7. Located 35 miles east of downtown Los Angeles, the airport served only two carriers, Western and Bonanza.
8. TIA was a system of information systems that could read everything without reading everything. It was a system of systems that could observe and then connect everything the human eye could not see.
9. The CIA teamed up with Army, Air Force and Naval Intelligence to run one of the most nefarious, classified, enhanced interrogation programs of the Cold War.
10. Everything that goes on at Area 51 is classified 'top secret' when it's going on.

Annie Jacobsen Short Quotes

• There's always a euphemism for it - like 'the test facility' or 'the base' - but never 'Area 51.'
• As far as I know, all the presidents know about Area 51.
• Dayton had no civilized culture.
• Who would have thought that in the 1950s, Burbank was a hotbed of international espionage?
• You can absolutely drive through an atmospheric bomb test and not be affected.
• Disguise, distortion, and deception were accepted as reality.
• Its objective? To develop a liquid-hydrogen-powered spy plane.
• The men who ran the Manhattan Project wrote the rules about black operations.
• Area 51 is located in southern Nevada desert about 75 miles north of Las Vegas.
• It's a hallmark of Area 51.

Annie Jacobsen Quotes About War

The Cold War had become a battlefield marked by doublespeak. — Annie Jacobsen

Since 9/11, the Justice Department has been widely criticized for one particular tactic it uses in fighting the War on Terror: it detains suspicious persons for long periods of time and puts them under heavy questioning before they are ever even charged with a crime. — Annie Jacobsen

At the height of the Cold War, they cultivated anonymity while pursuing some of the country's most covert projects. — Annie Jacobsen

Annie Jacobsen Famous Quotes And Sayings

We still don’t have a clue about what’s going on in the human brain. We have theories; we just don’t know for sure. We can’t build an electrical circuit, digital or analogue or other, that mimics the biological system. We can’t emulate the behavior. One day in the future, we think we can. — Annie Jacobsen

Ten years earlier, participants from the same movement had fought to kick the French out, and had succeeded. Now they were fighting for the same cause. The insurgency was not an insurgency to the locals. It was a nationalist struggle on behalf of the people of Vietnam. — Annie Jacobsen

To jog the prisoners’ memories back to the reality of their grave situation we decided to show them atrocity films taken at Buchenwald. Colonel Andrus assembled his fifty-two Nazi prisoners in one room. Before the film began, he addressed them with the following words: You know about these things and I have no doubt many of you participated actively in them. We are showing them to you not to inform you of what you already know, but to impress on you the fact that we know of it, too. — Annie Jacobsen

Himmler offered Blome a medical block at a concentration camp like Dachau where he could complete this work. Blome said he told Himmler he was aware of strong objections in certain circles to using humans in experimental vaccine trials. Himmler told Blome that experimenting on humans was necessary in the war effort. To refuse was the equivalent of treason. — Annie Jacobsen

Over the next five years, DARPA’s biohybrid programs advanced at an astonishing pace. Microprocessor technology was doubling in capacity every eighteen months. By June 29, 2007, when Apple rereleased its first-generation iPhone, Americans could now carry in their pockets more technology than NASA had when it sent astronauts to the moon. — Annie Jacobsen

I examined a lot of CIA declassified UFO files, which are fascinating, because there was a huge UFO craze going on in America. — Annie Jacobsen

Passengers could catch regional flights to San Francisco, Sacramento, Las Vegas, Palm Springs, Phoenix and Los Angeles, and that was about it. — Annie Jacobsen

In 2001, Katie Couric told 'Today Show' audiences that 7 percent of Americans doubt the moon landing happened - that it was staged in the Nevada desert. — Annie Jacobsen

One of the first things Colonel Slater did after taking command of the base was to hang a sign over the House-Six bar that listed Slip Slater’s Basic Rules of Flying at Groom Lake. There were only three rules. Try to stay in the middle of the air. Do not go near the edges of it. The edges of the air can be recognized by the appearance of ground, buildings, sea, trees and interstellar space. It is much more difficult to fly there. — Annie Jacobsen

Because liquid hydrogen is incredibly volatile, early experiments were conducted inside a bomb shelter with eight-foot-thick walls. — Annie Jacobsen

What we have in mind for that agency, was an entity that would handle all satellite and space research and development projects but also have a function that extends beyond the immediate foreseeable weapons systems of the current or near future. An agency that could visualize the nation’s needs before those needs yet existed, he said. An agency that could research and develop the vast weapons systems of the future. — Annie Jacobsen

On October 30, 1961, the Soviet Union detonated the largest, most powerful nuclear weapon the world had ever known. Called the Tsar Bomba, the hydrogen bomb had an unbelievable yield of fifty megatons, roughly ten times the amount of all the explosives used in seven years of war during World War II, including both nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. — Annie Jacobsen

We walk through another part of the building. While we wait for an elevator, Dr. Kenyon unfolds a dinner-size napkin and holds it up in the air in front of his forehead. This is about the size of your brain, spread out, he says. The part that matters. The cerebral cortex. The 100 billion neurons there are also known as the brain’s gray matter. And the human brain does things beyond anyone’s comprehension. Evolution created the smartest machine in this world. — Annie Jacobsen

Well, we have found salamanders are very resistant to cancer. Inject a carcinogen into a salamander and it regulates the growth and turns it into an extra limb. — Annie Jacobsen

Urban legend has it that Area 51 is connected by underground tunnels and trains to other secret facilities around the country. — Annie Jacobsen

It's set inside a greater land parcel that's about the size of the state of Connecticut that's called the 'Nevada Test and Training Range.' — Annie Jacobsen

Back in the 1950s, there was a top-secret program code-named SUNTAN being conducted at a top-secret facility called Skunk Works. — Annie Jacobsen

The idea that Area 51 was this test facility working to move science and technology faster and further than any other nation is true and is one of the great hallmarks of Area 51. — Annie Jacobsen

DARPA’s original autonomous robot designs were developed as part of DARPA’s Smart Weapons Program decades ago, in 1983. The program was called Killer Robots and its motto offered prescient words: The battlefield is no place for human beings. — Annie Jacobsen

I believe it is called 'Area 51' because of a project, the very first project that went on out there, in 1951. — Annie Jacobsen

In many previously classified documents relating to activities at the base, the words 'Area 51' are conveniently blacked out. — Annie Jacobsen

By contrast, Dresher and Flood found that the minority of game players who refused to testify against their criminal partner were almost always of the liberal persuasion. These individuals were willing to put themselves at risk in order to get the best possible outcome for both themselves and a colleague – just a single year’s jail time. — Annie Jacobsen

The war in Europe was over. Germans called it die Stunde Null, zero hour. Cities lay in ruins. Allied bombing had destroyed more than 1.8 million German homes. Of the 18.2 million men who had served in the German army, navy, Luftwaffe, and the Waffen-SS, a total of 5.3 million had been killed. Sixty-one countries had been drawn into a war Germany started. Some 50 million people were dead. The Third Reich was no more. — Annie Jacobsen

One of the few things the Air Force did admit to me existed out there presently without admitting that it was Area 51 is this drone called the 'Beast of Kandahar' which does not fire missiles, unlike the Predator and the Reaper, but just conducts surveillance. — Annie Jacobsen

Conspiracy theories were left to popular imagination. — Annie Jacobsen

The atomic bomb was the mother of all black projects, and it is the parent from which all black operations have sprung. — Annie Jacobsen

If a mentally superhuman race ever develops, its members will resemble Johnny von Neumann. If you enjoy thinking, your brain develops. And that is what von Neumann did. He enjoyed the functioning of his brain. — Annie Jacobsen

The name came from the fact that prisoners could be concentrated in a group and held under protective custody following Nazi law. Quickly, this changed. Himmler made concentration camps legally independent administrative units outside the penal code and the ordinary law. Dachau. — Annie Jacobsen

Everyone knows that a gorilla can’t fly an airplane. Whether or not the psychiatrist really did get involved – and if he did, whether he was aware of the gorilla masks – remains ambiguous to Dr. Craig Luther. But for the purposes of a strategic deception campaign, the point is clear: no one wants to be mistaken for a fool. — Annie Jacobsen

The problem is the myths of Area 51 are hard to dispute if no one can speak on the record about what actually happened there. — Annie Jacobsen

Albert Einstein was the most esteemed figure to publicly denounce Operation Paperclip. In an impassioned letter, written on behalf of his FAS colleagues, Einstein appealed directly to President Truman. We hold these individuals to be potentially dangerous... Their former eminence as Nazi Party members and supporters raises the issue of their fitness to become American citizens and hold key positions in American industrial, scientific, and educational institutions. — Annie Jacobsen

These systems are the product of evolution, optimized by evolution for a world which no longer exists; it is not surprising then that, however capable our cognitive apparatus is, it too often fails when challenged by tasks completely alien to its biological roots. — Annie Jacobsen

In 1957, with the arms race in full swing, the Department of Defense had decided it was just a matter of time before an airplane transporting an atomic bomb would crash on American soil, unleashing a radioactive disaster the likes of which the world had never seen. — Annie Jacobsen

By the end of January 1946, 160 Nazi scientists had been secreted into America. The single largest group was comprised of the 115 rocket specialists at Fort Bliss, Texas, led by Wernher von Braun. — Annie Jacobsen

There are other areas of the base that are controversial - but they both exist simultaneously - out there in the desert. — Annie Jacobsen

Truth was promised in a serum. — Annie Jacobsen

The warships below were tossed up into the air like bathtub toys. The Japanese battleship Nagato, formerly the flagship of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the man responsible for planning the attack on Pearl Harbor, was thrown four hundred yards. — Annie Jacobsen

The oil under Libya is the champagne of oil, drop for drop the world's most valuable. — Annie Jacobsen

In the winter of 1973, the American POWs held captive in Vietnam were released according to the terms of the Paris Peace Accords. — Annie Jacobsen

To understand how black projects began, and how they continue to function today, one must start with the creation of the atomic bomb. — Annie Jacobsen

McNamara’s electronic fence, which the Jasons called an anti-infiltration barrier, was constructed along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, at a cost of $1.8 billion, roughly $12 billion in 2015. It had very little effect on the outcome of the Vietnam War and did not help the United States achieve its aim of cutting off enemy supplies. — Annie Jacobsen

In the late 1960s, Ontario Airport was a throwback to a bygone era. — Annie Jacobsen

President Eisenhower was fed up with the interservice rivalries. Having commanded the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces in Europe during World War II, he held deep convictions regarding the value of unity among the military services. As president, he had been a crusader against the excessive waste of resources that came from service duplication. — Annie Jacobsen

The area out at Area 51 that was part of the Operation Plumbbob test continues to be contaminated. — Annie Jacobsen

Zasloff and Donnell said that in their POW interviews they had learned that very few fighters understood what communism meant, what it stood for. Hardly any of the Vietcong had even heard of Karl Marx. It was a fact that the Vietcong had patrons among the Chinese communists and that the same patrons had been helping the North Vietnamese, giving them weapons and teaching war-fighting techniques. But what the local people were after was independence. — Annie Jacobsen

The activities that went on at Camp King between 1946 and the late 1950s have never been fully accounted for by either the Department of Defense or the CIA. — Annie Jacobsen

For decades, the men at Area 51 thought they'd take their secrets to the grave. — Annie Jacobsen

Building the bomb was the single most expensive engineering project in the history of the United States. It began in 1942, and by the time the bomb was tested, inside the White Sands Proving Ground in the New Mexico high desert on July 16, 1945, the bomb’s price tag, adjusted for inflation, was $28,000,000,000. The degree of secrecy maintained while building the bomb is almost inconceivable. — Annie Jacobsen

The Operation Hardtack II nuclear test series would prove even bigger than Plumbbob, in terms of the number of tests. From September 12 to October 30, 1958, an astonishing thirty-seven nuclear bombs were exploded – from tops of tall towers, in tunnels and shafts, on the surface of the earth, and hanging from balloons. Areas 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 12, and 15 served as ground zero for the detonations, all within eighteen miles of Area 51. — Annie Jacobsen

Health Alteration Committee. — Annie Jacobsen

Life Lessons by Annie Jacobsen

1. Seek Truth: Embrace curiosity and dig deep to uncover hidden realities, challenging conventional narratives.
2. Question Authority: Encourage critical thinking and skepticism towards official information, fostering a culture of accountability.
3. Value Transparency: Advocate for openness and transparency in governance and decision-making processes, promoting trust and integrity.