Unless you have culturally been living under a rock, you have heard of Area 51 - Roswell, New Mexico.   Supposedly an alien spacecraft came down there in 1947 and a vast government conspiracy sprung up to build the thing and keep it secret for nearly 70 years.

Annie Jacobsen, journalist and contributing editor at the LA Times (they are thrilled about that plug) says the UFO was just a Soviet spy plane that came down due to weather.    But that isn't the end of it.    The Soviets, no strangers to eugenics, had staffed it with genetically engineered pilots, 'alien-like' children aged 12 or 13 and Stalin hoped to cause some panic in the U.S., a la the Orson Welles radio broadcast of "War of the Worlds" in 1939.

“They were grotesquely deformed, but each in the same manner as the others. They had unusually large heads and abnormally shaped oversize eyes,” Jacobsen quotes a retired engineer from the former defense company EG&G who claimed to have been put on to the Roswell project in Area 51 in 1978.

Well, that's just what they want you to think isn't it?   Blame the dead homicidal commie dictator.

Still, there is no good story from the period unless it involves a Nazi and the Soviets certainly acquired a few of those.   One was Josef Mengele, Jacobsen says, the SS officer known as the 'Angel of Death' for his twisted experiments at the Auschwitz concentration camp.   

Well, the timeline fits.   Mengele did not escape to South America until 1949 and he was believed to be in Bavaria but suspension of disbelief about obvious facts is the basis of all fiction, and this is certainly fiction.    People in fiction also tended to anthropomorphize aliens at the time because it made them more believable and once science fiction got renewed popularity, so did renewed sightings of human-like aliens and saucers.

See Jon Stewart on "The Daily Show" trying to suspend his disbelief below: