Message posted by Mark Lincoln on August 13, 2011 at 23:20:21 PST:

Peter once, a net-life ago, we had an e-conversation over the unfortunate death of a cow outside Albuquerque and the litter which remained decades later.

I think that a sound volume upon 'Area 51' (how I cringe to type that) is necessary.

if there is anyone who has the connections, background and proclivity to write a sound volume upon the most floridly exaggerated space in the United States is is probably you.

Yet I could write about things which I am intimately aware of, but was never 'cleared' to know. Or worse, not write about something I could not.

The problem of classification, and thus one's ability to expose, is ALWAYS limited until some vague, undefined, time long after things are 'declassified.'

I think you are too young and too much the hope for an eventual factual and unrestrained history of the ranch to risk anything now.

As a reader of Ted Gup's "The Book of Honor" I know from personal knowledge that he has it sometimes wrong about John Merriman. That there are even things intimately involved people told him which were wrong, misleading, or even deceptive.

The best you or anyone can do now is to keep as much of the truth in print and alive as to allow future historians to see beyond the obfuscation and self-aggrandizement of those more or less involved, towards some truth.

And there are lessons yet unlearned or even known, which today and the recent past must answer.

Post Script for Ted Gup and those interested.

John Merriman did not design "Pagan." He did make changes to suit himself.

Bruce's career was not truthfully represented.

Nor did John's father rip into Lyndon Johnson, it was, according to Gaither Merriman, John's wife Val who was the tigress.

This 'evidence' is provided to provide leads for those who might investigate and far more as a caution to those who fail to understand the elusive nature of 'history' and how personal and subjective it must become for someone too closely aligned with the events in question.

Peter Merlin is an astoundingly fine historian. His greatest limitation is his greatest asset. The closeness which has grown between him and his subject.

In Reply to: Re: Area 51 Book... next? posted by Peter Merlin on August 13, 2011 at 15:42:52 PST:

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