A new book by an U.S. investigative reporter claims that the supposed alien crash landing at Roswell was a plan hatched by former Soviet leader Joseph Stalin to scare Americans.

The 1947 incident in the desert of New Mexico prompted one of the greatest alien conspiracy theories in history that an alien spacecraft crashed there and that the U.S. government covered up the recovery of extraterrestrial bodies.

Annie Jacobsen‘s book “Area 51, an Uncensored History” offers an even more bizarre theory suggesting it was not aliens who landed in Roswell, but a group of mutant child-like pilots engineered by Dr Mengele and orchestrated by Joseph Stalin, Daily Mail and Telegraph reported.

The book by a journalist with the Los Angeles Times is based on interviews with scientists and engineers who worked in the top-secret test base in the Nevada Desert.

It dismisses the alien story and puts forward the theory that Stalin was inspired by Orson Welles‘s famous radio adaptation of the H.G. Wells novel The War of the Worlds, which provoked hysteria across America when broadcast in 1938, according to the reports.

Using a captured, single wing Nazi jet fighter called the Horton HO 229, Stalin planned to land the plane in the U.S. with ’grotesque child like aviators’ on board.

Jacobsen claims that the landing was meant to scare Americans witless.

To create his monstrous creatures however, he enlisted the help of Dr Mengele.

Known as the “Angel of Death” for his horrific experiments on concentration camp inmates - Stalin called upon Mengele’s expertise to create his child-like monsters in return for a eugenics laboratory.

Mengele at the time was in hiding in South America having fled Germany after World War Two. He deemed the project worth risking his safety for.

“They found bodies alongside the crashed craft. These were not aliens. Nor were they consenting airmen. They were human guinea pigs. Unusually petite for pilots, they appeared to be children,” Jacobsen writes.

“Each was under five feet tall. They were grotesquely deformed, but each in the same manner as the others. They had unusually large heads and abnormally shaped oversized eyes.” “Two were supposedly found ‘’comatose but still alive.” (From news reports)