The_Info_Web/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Annie Jacobsen.md

category	aliases	created	updated	tags	summary	born	location	relations
Authors & Journalists	Annie M. Jacobsen Annie Jacobsen	2025-08-05	2026-10-05	Person Journalist Author Area51 OperationPaperclip DARPA Stargate CIA	American journalist and author of Area 51 (2011), Operation Paperclip (2014), The Pentagon's Brain (2015), Phenomena (2017), Surprise, Kill, Vanish (2019) and Nuclear War: A Scenario (2024); 2016 Pulitzer Prize finalist in History.	1967-06-28	Los Angeles, California	type with role fn employed_by Los Angeles Times contributing editor, Los Angeles Times Magazine 1

Annie Jacobsen is an American journalist and author. A graduate of Princeton University, she was a contributing editor at the Los Angeles Times Magazine and lives in Los Angeles.¹ Her books on American secret programs are Area 51 (2011), Operation Paperclip (2014), The Pentagon's Brain (2015), Phenomena (2017), Surprise, Kill, Vanish (2019) and Nuclear War: A Scenario (2024); The Pentagon's Brain was a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in History.¹²

Northwest Airlines Flight 327, 2004

On June 29, 2004, Jacobsen, her husband and their son were passengers on Northwest Airlines Flight 327 from Detroit to Los Angeles, on which 14 Middle Eastern men were also traveling. On July 12, 2004 she published an account on the website WomensWallStreet.com, "Terror in the Skies, Again?," describing consecutive use of the lavatories, a McDonald's bag passed between men, and, as the plane prepared to land, seven men entering lavatories in turn; she wrote that one man drew a forefinger across his neck and mouthed "No." On arrival, the plane was met by officers of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Los Angeles Police Department, the Federal Air Marshal Service and the Transportation Security Administration.³⁴ Dave Adams, head of public affairs for the Federal Air Marshal Service, told her the 14 men were Syrian musicians hired to play at a casino, had been questioned at length by the air marshals, the FBI and the TSA, had no arrest records and were not on the FBI no-fly or most wanted terrorist lists. Asked why marshals had not acted, he said, "Our FAM agents have to have an event to arrest somebody."⁴ The story circulated widely and she expanded it in Terror in the Skies: Why 9/11 Could Happen Again (Spence Publishing, 2005), which the writer Anne Morse of National Review reviewed in October 2005, reporting that Jacobsen received more than 5,000 e-mails after the article, that her persistence angered higher-ups in the Federal Air Marshal Service, and that it led to her testimony to the House Judiciary Committee.³

The Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General investigated the flight for about two years. A redacted report released in May 2007 after a Freedom of Information Act request by the Washington Times stated that the Syrians (12 musicians and their Lebanese-born promoter) were traveling on expired visas that had been extended a week after the flight, that a June 18, 2004 FBI National Crime Information Center check returned "positive hits" for criminal records or suspicious behavior for eight of the 12, and that the promoter was in a separate FBI database for acting suspiciously on a flight in January 2004. It found TSA's follow-up on the incident "inadequate" and said logging the matter with the Homeland Security Operations Center only after a July 22, 2004 Washington Times article undercut TSA's statement that it had been "determined to be unfounded, and not a terrorist threat."⁵

Area 51, 2011

Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base (Little, Brown, 2011), according to its publisher, rests on interviews with nineteen men who served at the base and fifty-five other military, intelligence, scientific and aviation personnel, thirty-two of whom lived and worked there, covering nuclear testing, supersonic aircraft and the war on terror. The New York Times review called it "cauldron-stirring" and "an assertive account."⁶ The book proposes that the 1947 Roswell Incident involved a Soviet aircraft crewed by surgically altered human children. Publishers Weekly (May 16, 2011) wrote that Jacobsen "demolishes her own credibility by proposing a novel conspiracy theory, sourced mainly to a nameless engineer," linking Roswell to Soviet-built flying saucers and a hoax in which "the 'aliens' were human children created by Josef Mengele," and concluded: "Let the reader beware."⁷

Operation Paperclip, 2014

Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program That Brought Nazi Scientists to America (Little, Brown, 2014) follows more than a dozen German scientists through their postwar lives, drawing on interviews with Paperclip family members, colleagues and interrogators, German archival documents, Freedom of Information Act files and dossiers found at Harvard University. The book is covered on the page for Operation Paperclip.⁸

The Pentagon's Brain, 2015

The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top Secret Military Research Agency (Little, Brown, 2015) is a history of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The Pulitzer Prize board named it a finalist in History for 2016.²

Phenomena, 2017

Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis (Little, Brown, 2017, 527 pages) treats government interest in ESP and PK, among them the Andrija Puharich theory, the Uri Geller testing at Stanford Research Institute, the physicists Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff, remote viewing and the GRILL FLAME and Stargate Project programs of the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency. Its chapter list includes a chapter on skeptics and the CIA, and the publisher's description states that it describes Soviet interest in the field, including the microwave bombardment of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow.⁹

Surprise, Kill, Vanish, 2019

Surprise, Kill, Vanish: The Secret History of CIA Paramilitary Armies, Operators, and Assassins (Little, Brown, 2019, 545 pages) concerns the Special Activities Division of the CIA, based on her interviews with members of its Senior Intelligence Service, counterterrorism chiefs, targeting officers and Ground Branch operators. J. R. Seeger, reviewing it in the CIA's Studies in Intelligence (September 2019), wrote that it presents vignettes of special operations from World War II to the present and that its biographical threads follow Billy Waugh and Lewis Merletti; he also wrote that Jacobsen places the British Special Operations Executive inside the Secret Intelligence Service in her first chapter, and that in fact the two were entirely separate.¹⁰

Nuclear War: A Scenario, 2024

Nuclear War: A Scenario (Dutton, 2024) presents a minute-by-minute account of a hypothetical nuclear missile launch against the United States and the response decisions, based on interviews with military and civilian experts.¹¹

Footnotes

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1. "Annie Jacobsen," Hachette Book Group contributor page and "Area 51" title page, author biography ("A graduate of Princeton University"; "contributing editor at the Los Angeles Times Magazine"). https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/contributor/annie-jacobsen/ ↩︎

2. Hachette Book Group, "Area 51" title page, author biography ("the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Pentagon's Brain"). https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/annie-jacobsen/area-51/9780316202305/ ↩︎

3. Anne Morse, "Could It Happen Again?," National Review Online, October 26, 2005 (reprinted by CBS News), reviewing Annie Jacobsen, Terror in the Skies: Why 9-11 Could Happen Again (Spence Publishing, 2005). https://www.cbsnews.com/news/could-it-happen-again ↩︎

4. Daniel Pipes, "Those Fourteen Syrians on Northwest Airlines Flight #327," July 13, 2004, quoting Annie Jacobsen, "Terror in the Skies, Again?," WomensWallStreet.com, and her conversation with Dave Adams of the Federal Air Marshal Service. https://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2004/07/those-fourteen-syrians-on-northwest-airlines ↩︎

5. "Report Confirms Terror Dry Run; Government Handling Hit," Washington Times, May 31, 2007, reprinted by Aviation Pros, reporting the redacted Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General report on Northwest Flight 327. https://www.aviationpros.com/home/news/10388457/report-confirms-terror-dry-run-government-handling-hit ↩︎

6. Hachette Book Group, "Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base," description and praise (quoting the New York Times). https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/annie-jacobsen/area-51/9780316202305/ ↩︎

7. Review of Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base, Publishers Weekly, reviewed May 16, 2011. https://publishersweekly.com/9780316132947 Sole source for the passages so cited on the Roswell proposal as characterized. ↩︎

8. Hachette Book Group, "Operation Paperclip" title page (description and sources). https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/annie-jacobsen/operation-paperclip/9780316221054/ ↩︎

9. Annie Jacobsen, Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis (Little, Brown, 2017), publisher's description and table of contents as catalogued by library records and Publishers Weekly. https://catalog.sbplibrary.org/Record/34646 ↩︎

10. J. R. Seeger, review of Surprise, Kill, Vanish, Studies in Intelligence 63, no. 3 (extracts, September 2019), p. 73 ff. https://cia.gov/resources/csi/static/Review-Surprise-Kill-Vanish.pdf ↩︎

11. Annie Jacobsen, Nuclear War: A Scenario (Dutton, 2024), publisher and library descriptions. https://catalog.washoecountylibrary.us/Record/757603 ↩︎