Part 1 : The Day After Roswell...The Roswell Desert...Convoy to Fort Riley...The Roswell Artifacts...Inside the Pentagon at the Foreign Technology Desk

The Day After Roswell

Col. Philip J. Corso 

With

William J. Birnes

Foreword 

Senator Strom Thurmond 

When I was first elected to the United States Senate in 1954, the United States and democratic Western governments were locked in a bitter, and sometimes deadly, Cold War with totalitarian Communist governments that sought to expand their bankrupt-ideology throughout the world. Though those who did not live during this era have a hard time picturing it, the 1950s and 1960s were a period in our history when there was a very real need to be concerned about a Communist, especially Soviet, threat to our security and institutions.[now that I think about it, as far as isms go,since 2008 here in America now with China DC] 

As a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, I took a lead role in seeking out those in our government who sought to muzzle military personnel who wanted to alert Americans to the threats we faced from our Communist enemies and to speak out against some of the plainly misguided, incorrect and, frankly, dangerous policies of the United States in dealing with the Soviets and Red Chinese. Distinguished officers and patriotic men such as Admiral Arleigh Burke and General Arthur Trudeau were essentially censored by their own government because of the views they espoused about the state of the world and the nature of the threat before our nation. As a veteran of World War II, a commissioned officer in the United States Army Reserve, and a proponent of a strong and comprehensive military, I could not sit idly by and watch our military be undermined by people in government who were sympathetic to Communism. 

During this period, the Armed Services Committee held extensive hearings into this matter. It seemed an alien concept that in a nation that protects and cherishes free expression, the men who risked their lives to keep us free and best understood how we should confront our enemies would be ordered silent. It was under these circumstances that I came to know Philip Corso, then a colonel in the United States Army, who was equally disturbed about the muzzling of our military, and who shared my concern about the future of our military forces. 

As the members of the Armed Services Committee worked diligently to discover who was working to quiet our soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen, Colonel Corso was brought to my attention by two of my former staff members. The colonel had a great deal of credibility and expertise not only as a military officer but also in the fields of intelligence and national security. A veteran of World War II and Korea, Corso had also spent four years working at the National Security Council. In short, he was very familiar with issues that concerned me and my colleagues on the Senate Armed Services Committee, and he very quickly became a valued source of bountiful information that was insightful and, most important, accurate. As a matter of fact, the material he provided was invaluable in helping us prove that the stifling of American military officers was being ordered by individuals in high ranking positions within our own government. 

In 1963, when I learned of Colonel Corso’s impending retirement from the army, I thought that having a man with his background and experiences on my staff would be of great benefit. So after offering him a position that promised nothing more than long hours of hard work at a modest salary, Philip Corso once again willingly went to work serving and protecting the United States, this time as an aide in my office. 

There is no question that Philip Corso has led a full and adventurous life, and I am certain that he has many interesting stories to share with individuals interested in military history, espionage, and the workings of our government. We should all be grateful that there are men and women like Colonel Corso - people who are willing to dedicate their lives to serving the nation and protecting the ideals we all hold dear - and we should honor the sacrifices they have made in their careers and in their lives. 

👽INTRODUCTION 

My name is Philip J. Corso, and for two incredible years back in the 1960s while I was a lieutenant colonel in the army heading up the Foreign Technology desk in Army Research and Development at the Pentagon, I led a double life. In my routine everyday job as a researcher and evaluator of weapons systems for the army, I investigated things like the helicopter armament the French military had developed, the tactical deployment complexities of a theater anti-missile missile, or new technologies to preserve and prepare meals for our troops in the field. 

I read technology reports and met with engineers at army proving grounds about different kinds of ordnance and how ongoing budgeted development projects were moving forward. I submitted their reports to my boss, Lt. Gen. Arthur Trudeau, the director of Army R&D and the manager of a three thousand plus man operation with lots of projects at different stages. On the surface, especially to congressmen exercising oversight as to how the taxpayers’ money was being spent, all of it was routine stuff. 

Part of my job responsibility in Army R&D (research and development), however, was as an intelligence officer and adviser to General Trudeau who, himself, had headed up Army Intelligence before coming to R&D. This was a job I was trained for and held during World War II and Korea. At the Pentagon I was working in some of the most secret areas of military intelligence, reviewing heavily classified information on behalf of General Trudeau. I had been on General Mac Arthur’s staff in Korea and knew that as late as 1961 - even as late, maybe, as today - as Americans back then were sitting down to watch Dr. Kildare or Gunsmoke, captured American soldiers from World War II and Korea were still living in gulag conditions in prison camps in the Soviet Union and Korea. Some of them were undergoing what amounted to sheer psychological torture. They were the men who never returned. 

As an intelligence officer I also knew the terrible secret that some of our government’s most revered institutions had been penetrated by the KGB and that key aspects of American foreign policy were being dictated from inside the Kremlin. I testified to this first at a Senate subcommittee hearing chaired by Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois in April 1962, and a month later delivered the same information to Attorney General Robert Kennedy. He promised me that he would deliver it to his brother, the President, and I have every reason to believe he did. It was ironic that in 1964, after I retired from the army and had served on Senator Strom Thurmond’s staff, I worked for Warren Commission member Senator Richard Russell as an investigator. 

But hidden beneath everything I did, at the center of a double life I led that no one knew about, and buried deep inside my job at the Pentagon was a single file cabinet that I had inherited because of my intelligence background. That file held the army’s deepest and most closely guarded secret: the Roswell files, the cache of debris and information an army retrieval team from the 509th Army Air Field pulled out of the wreckage of a flying disk that had crashed outside the town of Roswell in the New Mexico desert in the early morning darkness during the first week of July 1947. 

The Roswell file was the legacy of what happened in the hours and days after the crash when the official government cover-up was put into place. As the military tried to figure out what it was that had crashed, where it had come from, and what its inhabitants’ intentions were, a covert group was assembled under the leadership of the director of intelligence, Adm. Roscoe Hillenkoetter, to investigate the nature of the flying disks and collect all information about encounters with these phenomena while, at the same time, publicly and officially discounting the existence of all flying saucers. This operation has been going on, in one form or another, for fifty years amidst complete secrecy. 

I wasn’t in Roswell in 1947, nor had I heard any details about the crash at that time because it was kept so tightly under wraps, even within the military. You can easily understand why, though, if you remember, as I do, the Mercury Theater “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast in 1938 when the entire country panicked at the story of how invaders from Mars landed in Grovers Mill, New Jersey, and began attacking the local populace. The fictionalized eyewitness reports of violence and the inability of our military forces to stop the creatures were graphic. 

They killed everyone who crossed their path, narrator Orson Welles said into his microphone, as these creatures in their war machines started their march toward New York. The level of terror that Halloween night of the broadcast was so intense and the military so incapable of protecting the local residents that the police were overwhelmed by the phone calls. It was as if the whole country had gone crazy and authority itself had started to unravel. 

Now, in Roswell in 1947, the landing of a flying saucer was no fantasy. It was real, the military wasn’t able  to prevent it, and this time the authorities didn’t want a repeat of “War of the Worlds. “ So you can see the mentality at work behind the desperate need to keep the story quiet. And this is not to mention the military fears at first that the craft might have been an experimental Soviet weapon because it bore a resemblance to some of the German designed aircraft that had made their appearances near the end of the war, especially the crescent shaped Horton flying wing. What if the Soviets had developed their own version of this craft? 

The stories about the Roswell crash vary from one another in the details. Because I wasn’t there, I’ve had to rely on reports of others, even within the military itself. Through the years, I’ve heard versions of the Roswell story in which campers, an archeological team, or rancher Mac Brazel found the wreckage. I’ve read military reports about different crashes in different locations in some proximity to the army air field at Roswell like San Agustin and Corona and even different sites close to the town itself. All of the reports were classified, and I did not copy them or retain them for my own records after I left the army. 

Sometimes the dates of the crash vary from report to report, July 2 or 3 as opposed to July 4. And I’ve heard different people argue the dates back and forth, establishing time lines that vary from one another in details, but all agree that something crashed in the desert outside of Roswell and near enough to the army’s most sensitive installations at Alamogordo and White Sands that it caused the army to react quickly and with concern as soon as it found out. 

In 1961, regardless of the differences in the Roswell story from the many different sources who had described it, the top-secret file of Roswell information came into my possession when I took over the Foreign Technology desk at R&D. My boss, General Trudeau, asked me to use the army’s ongoing weapons development and research program as a way to filter the Roswell technology into the main stream of industrial development through the military defense contracting program. 

Today, items such as lasers, integrated circuitry, fiber optics networks, accelerated particle beam devices, and even the Kevlar material in bulletproof vests are all commonplace. Yet the seeds for the development of all of them were found in the crash of the alien craft at Roswell and turned up in my files fourteen years later. 

But that’s not even the whole story. 

In those confusing hours after the discovery of the crashed Roswell alien craft, the army determined that in the absence of any other information it had to be an extraterrestrial. Worse, the fact that this craft and other flying saucers had been surveilling our defensive installations and even seemed to evidence a technology we’d seen evidenced by the Nazis caused the military to assume these flying saucers had hostile intentions and might have even interfered in human events during the war. 

We didn’t know what the inhabitants of these crafts wanted, but we had to assume from their behavior, especially their interventions in the lives of human beings and the reported cattle mutilations, that they could be potential enemies. That meant that we were facing a far superior power with weapons capable of obliterating us. At the same time we were locked in a Cold War with the Soviets and the mainland Chinese and were faced with the penetration of our own intelligence agencies by the KGB. 

The military found itself fighting a two-front war, a war against the Communists who were seeking to undermine our institutions while threatening our allies and, as unbelievable as it sounds, a war against extraterrestrials, who posed an even greater threat than the Communist forces. So we used the extraterrestrials’ own technology against them, feeding it out to our defense contractors and then adapting it for use in space-related defense systems. 

It took us until the 1980s, but in the end we were able to deploy enough of the Strategic Defense Initiative, “Star Wars, “ to achieve the capability of knocking down enemy satellites, killing the electronic guidance systems of incoming enemy warheads, and disabling enemy spacecraft, if we had to, to pose a threat. It was alien technology that we used: lasers, accelerated particle-beam weapons, and aircraft equipped with “Stealth” features. And in the end, we not only outlasted the Soviets and ended the Cold War, but we forced a stalemate with the extraterrestrials, who were not so invulnerable after all. 

What happened after Roswell, how we turned the extraterrestrials’ technology against them, and how we actually won the Cold War is an incredible story. During the thick of it, I didn’t even realize how incredible it was. I just did my job, going to work at the Pentagon day in and day out until we put enough of this alien technology into development that it began to move forward under its own weight through industry and back into the army. 

The full import of what we did at Army R&D and what General Trudeau did to grow R&D from a disorganized unit under the shadow of the Advanced Research Projects Agency, when he first took  command, to the army department that helped create the military guided missile, the anti-missile missile, and the guided missile launched accelerated particle beam firing satellite killer, didn’t really hit me until years later when I understood just how we were able to make history. 

I always thought of myself as just a little man from a little American town in western Pennsylvania, and I didn’t assess the weight of our accomplishments at Army R&D, especially how we harvested the technology coming out of the Roswell crash, until thirty-five years after I left the army when I sat down to write my memoirs for an entirely different book. 

That was when I reviewed my old journals, remembered some of the memos I’d written to General Trudeau, and understood that the story of what happened in the days after the Roswell crash was perhaps the most significant story of the past fifty years. So, believe it or not, this is the story of what happened in the days after Roswell and how a small group of military intelligence officers changed the course of human history. 

CHAPTER 1 

The Roswell Desert 

THE NIGHT HUGS THE GROUND AND SWALLOWS YOU UP AS YOU drive out of Albuquerque and into the desert. As you head east along 40 and then south along 285 to Roswell, there’s only you and the tiny universe ahead of you defined by your headlights. On either side, beyond the circle of light, there is only scrub and sand. The rest is all darkness that closes in behind you, flooding where you’ve been under a giant ocean of black, and pushes you forward along the few hundred feet of road directly ahead. 

The sky is different out there, different from any sky you’ve ever seen before. The black is so clear it looks like the stars shining through it are tiny windows from the beginning of time, millions of them, going on forever. On a hot summer night you can sometimes see flashes of heat lightning explode in the distance. Somewhere it is light for an instant, then the darkness returns. But summer is the rainy season in the New Mexico desert, and thunderstorms assemble over you out of nowhere, pound the earth with rain and lightning, pummel the darkness with crashes of thunder, shake the ground until you feel the earth is breaking apart, and then disappear. The ranchers out there will tell you that the local storms can go on all night, bouncing off the arroyos like pinballs in play until they expend themselves over the horizon. That’s what it was like fifty years ago on a night much like this. 

Although I wasn’t there that night, I’ve heard many different versions. Many of them go like this: Base radar at the army’s 509th airfield Outside the town of Roswell had been tracking strange blips all night on July 1, 1947. So had radar at nearby White Sands, the army’s guided missile base where test launches of German V2 rockets had been taking place since the end of the war, and at the nuclear testing facility at Alamogordo. The blips would appear at one corner of the screen and dart across at seemingly impossible speeds for aircraft, only to disappear off another corner. Then they’d start up again. No earthly craft could have maneuvered at such speeds and changed direction so sharply. It was a signature no one could identify. 

Whether it was the same aircraft, more than one, or simply an anomaly from the violent lightning and thunderstorms was anybody’s guess. So after the operators verified the calibrations of the radar equipment, they broke down the units to run diagnostic checks on the circuitry of the screen imaging devices to make sure their radar panels were operating properly. Once they’d satisfied themselves that they couldn’t report any equipment malfunction, the controllers were forced to assume that the screen images were displays of something that was truly out there. 

They confirmed the sightings with radar controllers at White Sands, but found they could do little else but track the blips as they darted across the screen with every sweep of the silent beacon. The blips swarmed from position to position at will, operating with complete freedom across the entire sky over the army’s most secret nuclear and missile testing sites. 

Throughout that night and the following day, Army Intelligence stayed on high alert because something strange was going on out there. Surveillance flights over the desert reported no sightings of strange objects either in the sky or on the ground, but any sighting of unidentified aircraft on radar was sufficient evidence for base commanders to assume a hostile intent on the part of “something. “ And that was why the Army Intelligence in Washington ordered additional counter intelligence personnel to New Mexico, especially to  the 509th, where the activity seemed to be centered. 

The radar anomalies continued into the next night as Dan Wilmot, owner of a hardware store in Roswell, set up chairs on his front porch after dinner to watch the streaks of lightning flash across the sky in the distance. Shortly before ten that evening, the lightning grew more intense and the ground shook under the explosions of thunder from a summer storm that pounded the chaparral off in the northwest of the city. Dan and his wife watched the spectacle from beneath the dry safety of their porch roof. It was as if each new bolt of lightning were a spear that bent the heavens themselves. 

“Better than any Fourth of July fireworks,“ the Wilmots must have been remarking as they watched in awe as a bright oval object streaked over their house and headed off into the northwest, sinking below a rise just before the horizon where it was engulfed in darkness. The sky again became pitch black. By the time the next bolt of lightning shot off”, the object was gone. A most unusual sight, Dan Wilmot thought, but it was gone from his sight and gone from his thoughts, at least until the end of the week. 

Whatever it was that passed over the Wilmot house in Roswell also flew over Steve Robinson as he drove his milk truck along its route north of the city. Robinson tracked the object as it shot across the sky at speeds faster than any airplane he’d ever seen. It was a bright object, he noted, elliptical and solid rather than a sequence of lights like the military aircraft that flew in and out of the 509th airfield on the city’s outskirts. It disappeared behind a rise off” in the west toward Albuquerque, and Steve put it out of his mind as he pushed forward on his route. 

To the civilians in Roswell, nothing was amiss. Summer thunder storms were common, the reports of flying saucers in the newspapers and over the radio were simply circus side show amusements, and an object streaking across the sky that so attracted the Wilmots’ attention could have been nothing more than the shooting star you make a wish on if you’re lucky enough to see it before it disappears forever in a “puff” of flame. Soon it would be the July 4th weekend, and the Wilmots, Steve Robinson, and thousands of other local residents were looking forward to the unofficial start of the summer holiday. But at the 509th there was no celebrating. 

The isolated incidents of unidentified radar blips at Roswell and White Sands continued to increase over the next couple of days until it looked like a steady stream of airspace violations. Now it was becoming more than serious. There was no denying that a traffic pattern of strange aircraft overflights was emerging in the skies over the New Mexico desert where, with impunity, these unidentifiable radar blips hovered above and then darted away from our most secret military installations. By the time the military’s own aircraft scrambled, the intruders were gone. 

It was obvious to the base commanders that they were under a heavy surveillance from a presence they could only assume was hostile. At first, nobody gave much thought to the possibility of extraterrestrials or flying saucers, even though they’d been in the news for the past few weeks that spring. Army officers at the 509th and White Sands thought it was the Russians spying on the military’s first nuclear bomber base and its guided-missile launching site. 

By now Army Counter intelligence, this highly secret command sector which in 1947 operated almost as much in the civilian sector as it did in the military, had spun up to its highest alert and ordered a full deployment of its most experienced crack World War II operatives out to Roswell. CIC personnel had begun to arrive from Washington when the first reports of strange radar blips were filed through intelligence channels and kept coming as the reports continued to pile up with increasing urgency over the next forty eight hours. Officers and enlisted men alike disembarked from the transport planes and changed into civilian clothes for the investigation into enemy activities on the area. They joined up with base intelligence officers like Maj. Jesse Marcel and Steve Arnold, a Counter intelligence noncom who’d served at the Roswell base during World War II when the first nuclear bombing mission against Hiroshima was launched from there in August 1945, just about two years earlier. [so you see,its not like Roswell was some it fell from the sky moment,clearly we have days of lead up to it DC]

On the evening of July 4, 1947 (though the dates may differ depending on who is telling the story), while the rest of the country was celebrating Independence Day and looking with great optimism at the costly peace that the sacrifice of its soldiers had brought, radar operators at sites around Roswell noticed that the strange objects were turning up again and looked almost as if they were changing their shapes on the screen. 

They were pulsating - it was the only way you could describe it - glowing more intensely and then dimly as tremendous thunderstorms broke out over the desert. Steve Arnold, posted to the Roswell airfield control tower that evening, had never seen a blip behave like that as it darted across the screen between sweeps at speeds over a thousand miles an hour. All the while it was pulsating, throbbing almost, until, while the skies over the base exploded in a biblical display of thunder and lightning, it arced to the lower left hand  quadrant of the screen, seemed to disappear for a moment, then exploded in a brilliant white fluorescence and evaporated right before his very eyes. 

The screen was clear. The blips were gone. And as controllers looked around at each other and at the CIC officers in the room, the same thought arose in all their minds: An object, whatever it was, had crashed. The military response was put into motion within seconds: This was a national security issue - jump on that thing in the desert and bring it back before anyone else could find it. 

Even before the radar officer called the 509th base commander, Col. William Blanchard, reporting that radar indicated the crash of an unidentified aircraft to the north and west of Roswell, the CIC dispatch team had already mobilized to deploy an immediate-response crash-and-retrieval team to locate and secure the crash site. They believed this was an enemy aircraft that had slipped through our radar defense system either from South America or over the Canadian border and had taken photos of top-secret military installations. They also wanted to keep civilians away just in case, they said, there was any radiation from the craft’s propulsion system, which allowed it to make hairpin turns at three thousand miles an hour. 

Nobody knew how this thing was powered, and nobody knew whether any personnel had ejected from the aircraft and were wandering around the desert. “Bull” Blanchard green-lighted the retrieval mission to get out there as soon as possible, taking with them all the night patrol equipment they could scare up, all the two-and-a-half-ton trucks that they could roll, and the base’s “low-boy” flatbed wreckers to bring the aircraft back. If it was a crash, they wanted to get it under wraps in a hangar before any civilian authorities could get their hands on it and blab to the newspapers. 

But the air controllers at the 509th weren’t the only ones who thought they saw an aircraft go down. On the outskirts of the city, ranchers, families camping in the desert, and residents saw an aircraft that exploded in a bright light in between flashes of lightning and plummeted to earth in the direction of Corona, the neighboring town to the north of Roswell. 

Chavez County sheriff George Wilcox started receiving calls in his office shortly after midnight on the morning of the fifth that an airplane had crashed out in the desert, and he notified the Roswell Fire Department that he would dispatch them as soon as he had an approximate location. No sense pulling fire apparatus out of the station house to chase something through the desert unless they knew where it was. Besides, Wilcox didn’t like rolling the trucks out of town just in case there was a fire in the city that needed all the apparatus they could throw at it, especially the pumpers. However, finding the crash site didn’t take long. A group of Indian artifact hunters camping in the scrub brush north of Roswell had also seen the pulsating light overhead, heard a hurtling hiss and the strange, ground shaking “thunk” of a crash nearby in the distance, and followed the sound to a group of low hills just over arise. Before they even inspected the smoking wreckage, they radioed the crash site location into Sheriff” Wilcox’s office, which dispatched the fire department to a spot about thirty-seven miles north and west of the city. 

“I’m already on my way, “ he told the radio operator at the firehouse, who also called the city police for an escort. 

And by about four-thirty that morning, a single pumper and police car were bouncing through the desert taking Pine Lodge Road west to where Sheriff Wilcox had directed them. Neither the sheriff nor the fire department knew that a military retrieval team was also on its way to the site with orders to secure the location and, by any means necessary, prevent the unauthorized dissemination of any information about the crash. 

It was still dark when, from another direction, Steve Arnold, riding shotgun in one of the staff cars in the convoy of recovery vehicles from the 509th, reached the crash site first. Even before their trucks rolled into position, an MP lieutenant from the first jeep posted a picket of sentries, and an engineer ordered his unit to string a series of floodlights around the area. Then Arnold’s car pulled up, and he got his own first glimpse of the wreckage. But it wasn’t really wreckage at all - not in the way he’d seen plane crashes during the war. From what he could make out through the purple darkness, the dark skinned craft seemed mostly intact and had lost no large pieces. Sure, there were bits and pieces of debris all over the area, but the aircraft itself hadn’t broken apart on impact the way a normal airplane would. And the whole scene was still shrouded in darkness. 

Then, the staff cars and jeeps that had accompanied the trucks lined up head on to the crash and threw their headlights against the arroyo to supplement the floodlights that were still being strung by the engineers. In the sudden intersecting beams of headlights, Arnold could see that, indeed, the soft cornered delta shaped eggshell type of craft was essentially in one piece, even though it had embedded its nose hard into the embankment of the arroyo with its tail high in the air. Heat was still rising off the debris even though, according to the base radar at the 509th, the crash probably took place before midnight on the 4th. 

Then Arnold heard the brief sizzle of a battery charging up and the hum of a gasoline generator. That’s when the string of lights came up, and the whole site suddenly looked like a baseball field before a big night game. 

In the stark light of the military searchlights, Arnold saw the entire landscape of the crash. He thought it looked more like a crash landing because the craft was intact except for a split seam running lengthwise along the side and the steep forty-five-plus-degree angle of the craft’s incline. He assumed it was a craft, even though it was like no airplane he’d ever seen. It was small, but it looked more like the flying wing shape of an old Curtis than an ellipse or a saucer. 

And it had two tail fins on the top sides of the delta’s feet that pointed up and out. He angled himself as close to the split seam of the craft as he could get without stepping in front of the workers in hazardous material suits who were checking the site for radiation, and that was when he saw them in the shadow. Little dark gray figures - maybe four, four and a half feet in length - sprawled across the ground. 

“Are those people?” Arnold heard someone say as medics rushed up with stretchers to the knife like laceration along the side of the craft through which the bodies had either crawled or tumbled. 

Arnold looked around the perimeter of light and saw another figure, motionless but menacing nevertheless, and another leaning against a small rise in the desert sand. There was a fifth figure near the opening of the craft. As radiation technicians gave the all clear and medics ran to the bodies with stretchers, Arnold sneaked a look through the rip in the aircraft and stared out through the top. Jehosaphat! It looked like the sun was already up. Just to make sure, Steve Arnold looked around the outside again and, sure enough, it was still too dark to call it daylight. But through the top of the craft, as if he were looking through a lens, Arnold could see an eerie stream of light, not daylight or lamplight, but light nevertheless. 

He’d never seen anything like that before and thought that maybe this was a weapon the Russians or somebody else had developed. 

The scene at the crash site was a microcosm of chaos. Technicians with specific tasks, such as medics, hazardous material sweepers, signalmen and radio operators, and sentries were carrying out their jobs as methodically and unthinkingly as if they were the Emperor Ming’s brainwashed furnace stoking zombies from the Flash Gordon serials. But everyone else, including the officers, were simply awestruck. They’d never seen anything like this before, and they stood there, overpowered, it seemed, by simply a general sense of amazement that would not let them out of its grip. 

“Hey, this one’s alive, “ Arnold heard, and turned around to see one of the little figures struggling on the ground. With the rest of the medics, he ran over to it and watched as it shuddered and made a crying sound that echoed not in the air but in his brain. He heard nothing through his ears, but felt an overwhelming sense of sadness as the little figure convulsed on the ground, its oversized egg shaped skull flipping from side to side as if it was trying to gasp for something to breathe. That’s when he heard the sentry shout, “Hey, you!” and turned back to the shallow rise opposite the arroyo. “Halt!” the sentry screamed at the small figure that had gotten up and was trying desperately to climb over the hill. 

“Halt!” the sentry yelled again and brought his Ml to bear. Other soldiers ran toward the hill as the figure slipped in the sand, started to slide down, caught his footing, and climbed again. The sound of soldiers locking and loading rounds in their chambers carried loud across the desert through the predawn darkness. 

“No!” one of the officers shouted. Arnold couldn’t see which one, but it was too late. 

There was a rolling volley of shots from the nervous soldiers, and as the small figure tried to stand, he was flung over like a rag doll and then down the hill by the rounds that tore into him. He lay motionless on the sand as the first three soldiers to reach him stood over the body, chambered new rounds, and pointed their weapons at his chest. 

“Fuck, “ the officer spit again. “Arnold. “ Steve Arnold snapped to attention. “You and your men get out there and stop those civilians from crossing this perimeter. “ He motioned to the small convoy of emergency vehicles approaching them from the east. He knew they had to be police or county sheriff. Then he called out, “Medics."

Arnold jumped to at once, and by the time the medics were loading the little creature on a stretcher, he was already setting up a perimeter of CIC personnel and sentries to block the site from the flashing lights and churning sand far in the distance to the south of them. He heard the officer order the medics to load the bodies on stretchers, pack them in the back of whatever two-and-a-half-ton CMC he could pull off the line, and drive them back to the base immediately. 

“Sergeant, “ the officer called out again. “I want your men to load up everything that can be loaded on these deuce-and-a-halfs and sway that damn . . . whatever it is” - he was pointing to the delta shaped object - “on this low-boy and get it out of here. The rest of you, “ he called out. “I want this place spotless. Nothing ever happened here, you understand? Just a nothing piece of scrub brush like the rest of this desert. “ 

As the soldiers formed an arm in arm “search and rescue” grid, some on their hands and knees, to clean the area of any pieces of debris, devices, or chunks of wreckage, the huge retrieval crane that had been deployed from the air base hoisted the surprisingly light flying object out of its impact crater in the arroyo and swayed it above the long flatbed Ford that accompanied the convoy of army trucks. A small squad of MPs were deployed to face the civilian convoy of emergency vehicles quickly approaching the site. They fixed bayonets and lowered their Ml barrels at the whirlwind of sand directly in front of them. 

On the other side of the skirmish line, Roswell firefighter Dan Dwyer, the radioman riding shotgun on the red Ward LaFrance pumper the company rolled that night along with the tanker, could see very little at first except for an oasis of white light in the center of darkness. His small convoy had been running lights but no sirens as they pulled out of the firehouse in the center of Roswell, rendezvoused with the police car north of town, and headed out to the site to rescue what he had been told was a downed aircraft. 

As he approached the brightly lit area of floodlights off in the distance - it looked more like a small traveling amusement park than a crash site - he could already see the soldiers in a rough circle around an object that was swinging from the arm of a crane. As the LaFrance got closer, Dwyer could just make the strange deltoid shape of the thing as it hung, very precariously, from the arm, almost dropping once or twice under the very inexperienced control of the equipment operator. Even at this distance, the sound of shouting and cursing was carrying across the sand as the crane was raised, then lowered, then raised as the object finally sat over the Ford flatbed trailer. 

The police unit ahead of the fire truck suddenly shot out toward the brightly lit area as soon as the driver saw the activity, and immediately the area was obscured from Dwyer’s vision by clouds of sand that diffused the light. All he could see through the thicket of sand were the reflections of his own flashing lights. When the sand cleared, they were almost on top of the site, swinging off to one side to avoid the army trucks that had already started hack down the road toward them. Dwyer looked over his shoulder to see if any more military vehicles were headed his way, but all he saw were the first pink lines of sunlight over the horizon. It was almost morning. 

By the time Dwyer’s field truck pulled around to the area the soldiers had pointed out, whatever it was that had crashed was sitting on the flatbed, still clamped to the hovering crane. Three or four soldiers were working on the coupling and securing the object to the truck with chains and cable. But for something that had dropped out of the sky in a fireball, which was how the police described it, Dwyer noted that the object looked almost unscathed. He couldn’t see any cracks in the object’s skin and there were no pieces that had broken off. Then the soldiers dropped an olive tarp over the flatbed and the object was completely camouflaged. An army captain walked over to one of the police units parked directly in front of the fire truck. And behind the officer stood a line of bayonet wielding soldiers sporting MP armbands. 

“You guys can head on back, “ Dwyer heard the captain tell one of the Roswell police officers on the scene. 

“We’ve got the area secured. “ 

“What about injuries?” the police officer asked, maybe thinking more about the incident report he had to fill out than about what to do with any casualties. 

“No injuries. We have everything under control, “ the captain said. 

But even as the military was waving off the civilian convoy, Dwyer could see small bodies being lifted on stretchers from the ground into army transport trucks. A couple of them were already in body bags, but one, not bagged, was strapped directly onto the stretcher. The police officer saw it, too. This one, Dwyer could tell, was moving around and seemed to be alive. He had to get closer. 

“What about them?” he asked.

“Hey, get those things loaded, “ the captain shouted at the enlisted men loading the stretchers into the truck. 

“You didn’t see anything here tonight, Officer, “ he told the driver of the police unit. “Nothing at all. “ 

“But, I gotta ... "

The captain cut him off. “Later today, I’m sure, there’ll be someone from the base out to talk to the shift; meanwhile, let this one alone. Strictly military business. “ 

By this time Dwyer thought he recognized people he knew from the army airfield. He thought he could see the base intelligence officer, Jesse Marcel, who lived "off" the base in Roswell, and other personnel who came into town on a regular basis. He saw debris from whatever had crashed still lying all over the ground as the flatbed truck pulled out, passed the fire apparatus, and rumbled off through the sand back on the road toward the base. 

Dwyer took off his fire helmet, climbed down from the truck, and worked his way through the shadows around the flank of the line of MPs. There was so much confusion at the site Dwyer knew no one would notice if he looked around. He walked around in back of the truck, across the perimeter, and from the other side of the military transport truck walked up to the stretcher. He looked directly down into the eyes of the creature strapped onto the stretcher and just stared. 

It was no bigger than a child, he thought. But it wasn’t a child. No child had such an oversized balloon shaped head. It didn’t even look human, although it had human like features. It’s eyes were large and dark, set apart from each other on a downward slope. It’s nose and mouth were especially tiny, almost like slits. And its ears were not much more than indentations along the sides of its huge head. In the glare of the floodlight, Dwyer could see that the creature was a grayish brown and completely hairless, but it looked directly at him as if it were a helpless animal in a trap. 

It didn’t make a sound, but somehow Dwyer understood that the creature understood it was dying. He could gape in astonishment at the thing, but it was quickly loaded onto the truck by a couple of soldiers in helmets who asked him what he was doing. Dwyer knew this was bigger than anything he ever wanted to see and got out of there right away, losing himself amidst a group of personnel working around a pile of debris. 

The whole site was scattered with articles that Dwyer assumed had fallen out of the craft when it hit. He could see the indentation in the arroyo where it looked like the object embedded itself and followed with his eyes the pattern of debris stretching out from the small crater into the darkness beyond the floodlights. The soldiers were crawling all over on their hands and knees with scraping devices and carrying sacks or walking in straight lines waving metal detectors in front of them. 

They were sweeping the area clean, it seemed to him, so that any curiosity seekers who floated out here during the day would find nothing to reveal the identity of what had been here. Dwyer reached down to pick up a patch of a dull gray metallic cloth like material that seemed to shine up at him from the sand. He slipped it into his fist and rolled it into a ball. Then he released it and the metallic fabric snapped hack into shape without any creases or folds. He thought no one was looking at him, so he stuffed it into the pocket of his fire jacket to bring back to the firehouse. 

He would later show it to his young daughter, who forty-five years later and long after the piece of metallic fabric itself had disappeared into history, would describe it on television documentaries to millions of people. But that night in July 1947, if Dwyer thought he was invisible, he was wrong. 

“Hey you, “ a sergeant wearing an MP armband bawled. “What the hell are you doing out here?” 

“I responded with the fire company, “ Dwyer said as innocently as possible. 

“Well, you get your civilian ass back on that truck and get it the hell out of here, “ he ordered. “You take anything with you?” 

“Not me, Sergeant, “ Dwyer said.  

Then the MP grabbed him as if he were under arrest and hustled him off to a major, who was shouting orders near the generator that was powering the string of floodlights. He recognized him as Roswell resident Jesse Marcel. 

“Caught this fireman wandering around in the debris, sir, “ the sergeant reported. Marcel obviously recognized Dwyer, although the two weren’t friends, and gave him what the fireman only remembered as an agonized look. “You got to get out of here, “ he said. “And never tell anyone where you were or what you saw. “ 

Dwyer nodded. 

“I mean it, this is top security here, the kind of thing that could get you put away, “ Marcel continued. “Whatever this is, don’t talk about it, don’t say anything until somebody tells you what to say. Now get your truck out of here before someone else sees you and tries to lock the whole bunch of you up. Move!” He faced the helmeted MP. “Sergeant, get him back on that fire truck and move it out. “ 

Dwyer didn’t need any more invitations. He let the sergeant hustle him along, put him back on the truck, and told his driver to bring it back to the station. The MP sergeant came up to the driver’s side window and looked up at the fireman behind the wheel. 

“You’ve been ordered to evacuate this site, “ the MP told the driver. “At once!” 

The Roswell police unit had already made a U-turn on the sand and was motioning for the truck to back up. The driver dropped the truck into reverse, gently fed it gas as its wheels dug into the sand, made his U-turn, and headed back for the firehouse in Roswell. The Ford flatbed had already passed through the sleeping town in the moments between darkness and light, the sound of its engines causing no alarm or stir, the sight of a large tarpaulin covered object on the back of an army vehicle rolling along the main street of Roswell against the purple gray sky raising nobody’s eyebrows because it was nothing out of the ordinary. But later, by the time Dwyer backed his field truck into the station house, the sun was already up and the first of the CMC transport trucks was just reaching the main gate at the 509th. 

Plumbing subcontractor Roy Danzer, who had worked through the night at the base fitting pipe, knew something was up from the way the trucks tore out of the compound through the darkness. He had just walked out of the base hospital to grab a cigarette before going back to work. That’s when he heard the commotion over at the main gate. Danzer had cut his hand a few days earlier cutting pipe, and the infirmary nurse wanted to keep checking the stitches to make sure no infection was setting in. So Danzer took the opportunity to get away from the job for a few minutes while the nurse looked over her work and changed his bandage. Then, on his way back to the job, he would grab a cup of coffee and take an unscheduled cigarette break. But this morning, things would be very different. 

The commotion he heard by the main gate had now turned into a swirling throng of soldiers and base workers shoved aside by what looked like a squad of MPs using their bodies as a wedge to force a pathway through the crowd. There didn’t even seem to be an officer giving orders, just a crowd of soldiers. Strange. Then the throng headed right for the base hospital, right for the main entrance, right for the very spot where Roy was standing. 

Nobody moved him out of the way or told him to vacate the area. In fact, no one even spoke to him. Roy just looked down as the line of soldiers passed him, and there it was, strapped tightly to a stretcher that two bearers were carrying into the base hospital right through the main door. Roy looked at it; it looked at Roy, and as their eyes met Roy knew in an instant that he was not looking down at a human being. It was a creature from somewhere else. 

The pleading look on its face, occupying only a small frontal portion of its huge watermelon sized skull, and the emotion of pain and suffering that played itself behind Roy Danzer’s eyes and across his brain while he stared down at the figure told Roy it was in its final moments of life. It didn’t speak. It could barely move. But Roy actually saw, or believed he saw, an expression cross over its little circle of a face. And then the creature was gone, carried into the hospital by the stretcher bearers, who shot him an ugly glare as they passed. Roy took another drag on the cigarette butt still in his hand. 

“What the hell was that?” he asked no one in particular. Then he felt like he’d been hit by the front four of the Notre Dame football team.  

His head snapped back against the top of his spine as he went flying forward into the arms of a couple of MPs, who slammed him against an iron gate and kept him there until an officer - he thought it was a captain - walked up and stuck his finger directly into Danzer’s face. 

“Just who are you, mister?” the captain bellowed into Danzer’s car. Even before Danzer could answer, two other officers walked up and began demanding what authorization Danzer had to be on the base. These guys weren’t kidding, Danzer thought to himself; they looked ugly and were working themselves up into a serious lather. For a few tense minutes, Roy Danzer thought he would never see his family again; he was that scared. But then a major approached and broke into the shouting. 

“I know this guy, “ the major said. “He works here with the other civilian contractors. He’s OK. “ 

“Sir, “ the captain sputtered, but the major - Danzer didn’t know his name - took the captain by the arm right out of earshot. Danzer could see them talking and watched as the red faced captain gradually calmed down. Then the two returned to where the MPs were holding Danzer against the wall. 

“You saw nothing, you understand?” the captain said to Danzer, who just nodded. “You’re not to tell anybody about this, not your family, not your friends - nobody. You got that?” 

“Yes, sir, “ Danzer said. He was truly afraid now. 

“We’ll know if you talk; we’ll know who you talk to and all of you will simply disappear. “ 

“Captain, “ the major broke in. 

“Sir, this guy has no business here and if he talks I can’t guarantee anything. “ The captain complained as if he were trying to cover his ass to a superior who didn’t know as much as he did. 

“So forget everything you saw, “ the major said directly to Danzer. “And hightail it out of here before someone else sees you and wants to make sure you stay silent. “ 

“Yes, SIR, “ Danzer just about shouted as he extricated himself from the grip of the MPs on either side of him and broke for his pickup truck on the other side of the base. 

He didn’t even look back to see the team of soldiers carrying the body bags of the remaining creatures into the hospital where, before there were any other briefings, the creatures were prepared for autopsy like bagged game waiting to be dressed. 

The rest of the story about that week has become the subject of history. First, 509th base commander Bull Blanchard authorized the release of the “flying saucer” story that was picked up by news services and carried around the country. Then General Roger Ramey at 8th Army Air Force headquarters in Texas ordered Maj. Jesse Marcel to go back before the press and retract the flying saucer story. This time, Marcel was ordered to say that he’d made a mistake and realized the debris had actually come from a weather balloon. Swallowing a story he himself never believed, Jesse Marcel posed with some faked debris from an actual balloon and confessed to an error he never could have made, even on a bad day. It was a confession that would haunt him the rest of his life until, decades later and shortly before he died, he would retract his public story and restate that he had actually retrieved an alien spacecraft that night in the Roswell desert. 

Meanwhile, in the days and weeks after the crash and retrieval, Army Intelligence and CIC personnel fanned out through Roswell and neighboring communities to suppress whatever information they could. With ill-advised threats of violence, actual physical intimidation, and, according to some of the rumors, at least one homicide, army officers bludgeoned the community into silence. Mac Brazel, one of the civilians near whose property the crash took place and one of the visitors to the site, was allegedly bribed and threatened. He suddenly became silent about what he had seen in the desert even after he had told friends and news people that he’d retrieved pieces from a downed spacecraft.  

Officers from the Chavez County Sheriffs Department and other law enforcement agencies were forced to comply with the army edict that the incident outside of Roswell was a matter of national security and was not to be discussed. “It never happened, “ the army decreed, and civilian authorities willingly complied. Even the local Roswell radio station news correspondents, John McBoyle from KSWS and Walt Whitmore Sr. from KGFL, who’d conducted interviews with witnesses to the debris field, were forced to submit to the official line that the army imposed and never broadcast their reports. 

For some of the civilians who claimed to have experienced intimidation from the army officers who flooded into Roswell after the crash, the trauma remained with them for the rest of their lives. One was Dan Dwyer’s daughter, who was a young child in July 1947, and who endured the sight of a huge, helmeted army officer, his expression obscured by sunglasses, looming over her in her mother’s kitchen and telling her that if she didn’t forget what she had been told by her father, she and the rest of her family would simply disappear in the desert. 

Sally who had played with the metallic fabric her father had brought back to the firehouse that morning and had heard his description of the little people carried away on stretchers, quaked in terror as the officer finally got her to admit that she had seen nothing, heard nothing, and handled nothing. “It never happened, “ he hissed at her. “And there’s nothing you will ever say about it for the rest of your life because we will be there and we will know it, “ he repeated over and over again, slapping a police baton into his palm with a loud crack at every word. 

Even today, tears form at the corners of her eyes as she describes the scene and remembers the expression of her mother, who had been told to leave the kitchen while the officer spoke to Sally. It’s tough for a kid to see her parents so terrorized into silence that they will deny the truth before their eyes. Roy Danzer’s daughter, too, was frightened at the sight of her father when he came home from the base that morning on July 5,1947. He wouldn’t talk about what had gone on there, of course, even though the town was abuzz with rumors that creatures from outer space had invaded Roswell. Wasn’t it true that all the children in town knew about it and there’d been stories about flying saucers in newspapers for weeks? It was even on the radio. But Roy Danzer wouldn’t say a word in front of his daughter. She heard her parents talking through the closed door of her bedroom at nights and caught snippets of conversations about little creatures and “they’ll kill us all. “ But she buried these in a part of her memory she never visited until her father, shortly before his death, told her what really happened at the base that day in July when the convoy arrived out of the desert. 

Steve Arnold stayed in Roswell, finishing out his official re-enlistment with the army and, without his direct knowledge, remaining apart of my own team right through the 1960s. Some say he works for the government still, carrying out a job that fell to him right out of the New Mexico skies, pumping out disinformation from the army or the CIA or whomever, perpetuating a camouflage story that, fifty years later, has taken on a life of its own and goes forward, like a tale out of a Dickens novel, simply on inertia. You can see Steve today walking around Roswell, visiting old friends from his army days, giving interviews on television to the news crews that periodically pay visits to the folks at Roswell who want to talk about those days in the summer of 1947. 

As for the debris retrieved out of the desert that July, it had another destiny. Shipped to Fort Bliss, Texas, headquarters of the 8th Army Air Force, and summarily analyzed for what it was and what it might contain, all of it was transferred to the control of the military. As quickly as it arrived, some of the debris was flown to Ohio, where it was put under lock and key at Wright Airfield - later Wright - Patterson. The rest of it was loaded onto trucks and sent up to a rest stop at Fort Riley in Kansas. The 509th returned to its daily routine, Jesse Marcel went back to work as if he’d never held the wreckage from the strange craft in his own hands, and the contractors returned to their work on the pipes and doors and walls at the base just as if nothing had ever arrived there from the desert. 

By the time the first week of July 1947 was over, the crash outside of Roswell might as well have never taken place. Like the night that engulfs you as you drive through the expanse of desert and chaparral toward Roswell, so the night of silence engulfed the story of Roswell itself for over thirty years. 

These are the stories as I heard them, as people later told them to me. I wasn’t there at Roswell that night. I didn’t see these events for myself. I only heard them years later when the task fell to me to make something out of all this. But the debris from the crash of the object that was either caused by lightning or by our targeting radar, sonic say, and fell out of the sky that night was on its way to a collision course with my life. 

Our paths would cross officially at the Pentagon in the 1960s even though, for a very brief moment in 1947, when I was a young major at Fort Riley, fresh from the glory of victory in Europe, I would see something that I would tuck away in my memory and hope against hope I would never see again for the rest of my life. 

CHAPTER 2 

👽Convoy to Fort Riley👽

I CAN REMEMBER A TIME WHEN I WAS SO YOUNG AND FEELING so invincible that there was nothing in the world I was afraid of. I had faced down fear in North Africa. With General Patton’s army I stood toe to-toe against the artillery in Rommel’s Panzer Divisions and gave them better than they dished out to us. We were an army of young men from a country that hadn’t started the war but found itself right in the midst of it before we even got out of church the Sunday Pearl Harbor was attacked. The next thing we knew Hitler declared war on us and we were fighting in Europe. But by 1942, we drove the Germans right out of Africa and jumped across the sea to Sicily. 

Then, while Mussolini was still reeling from the punches, we invaded Italy and fought our way up the peninsula until we came to Rome. We were the first invading army to conquer Rome since the Middle Ages, and obviously the first invading army from the New World to ever occupy Rome. 

But there we were by early 1944, sitting in Rome after Mussolini fled and the German front collapsing all around us. And as a too young captain in Army Intelligence, I was ordered to oversee the formation of a civilian government under Allied military rule in the magical city of my ancestors that I’d only read about in history books. 

Pope Pious himself offered me an audience to discuss our plans for the city government. You can’t even dream this stuff up. It has to happen to you in real life, and then you pinch yourself to make sure you don’t wake up in your own bed outside of Pittsburgh on a winter morning. 

I stayed in Rome for three years from the months before the landing at Normandy in 1944, when the German front lines were still only a few miles south of Rome and our boys were slugging their way up the slopes of Monte Casino, to early 1947, when I was shipped back home and my wife and I threw everything we had into the trunk of a used Chevy convertible and drove across the farmland state routes of peace time America from Pennsylvania to Kansas. I’d been away five years. 

But now I was home! Driving top-down across Missouri to an assignment that was considered a plum for any young officer on his way up the army ladder: Military Intelligence School, only one step away from Strategic Intelligence, the army’s version of the Ivy League; I was moving up in the world. And what was I? Just a draftee out of Pennsylvania who was chosen for Officer Candidate School, and now fresh from a wartime intelligence command in Allied occupied Europe and ready to begin my new career in Army Intelligence. 

Having been in Africa and Europe for so many years, I was anxious to see America again. By this time its people were not stooping under the weight of the depression nor in factories nor in uniform sweating out a desperate war across two oceans. This was an America victory, and you could see it as you drove through the small towns of southern Ohio and Illinois and then across the Mississippi. We didn’t stop overnight to see St. Louis or even to linger on the Kansas side of the river. I was so excited to be a career officer that we didn’t stop driving until we pulled straight into Fort Riley and set up an apartment in nearby Junction City, where we’d live while they got our house ready on the base. 

For most of the next few weeks, my wife and I got used to living in America again on a peacetime army base. We had lived in Rome after the war while I was still trying to help pacify the city and fend off the Communist attempts to take over the government. It was as if we were still fighting a war because each day had brought renewed challenges from either the Communists or the organized crime families who had tried to infiltrate their way back into the civilian government. My life was also in danger each day from the different cadres of terrorists in the city, each group with its own agenda. So in contrast to Italy, Fort Riley was like the beginning of a vacation. 

And I was back in school again. This time, however, I was taking courses in career training. I knew how to be an intelligence officer and, in fact, had been trained by the British MI 19, the premier wartime intelligence network in the world. My training had been so thorough that even though we were up against crack Soviet NKV Dunits operating within Rome, we were able to out think them and actually destroy them. 

Prior to the war, the United States really didn’t have a peacetime intelligence service, which is why they quickly formed the OSS when war broke out. But the Army Intelligence units and the OSS didn’t operate together for most of the war because communication lines were faulty and we never really trusted the OSS agenda. Now with the war over and Army Intelligence having come into its own, I was part of a whole new cadre of career intelligence officers who would keep watch on Soviet activities. The Soviets had become our new old enemies. 

In intelligence school during those first months we reviewed not only the rudiments of good intelligence gathering - interrogation of enemy prisoners, analysis of raw intelligence data, and the like - but we learned the basics of administration and how to run a wartime intelligence unit called the aggressor force. None of us realized during those early days how quickly our newly acquired skills would be tested nor where our enemies would choose to fight. But those were confident days as the weather turned warmer on the plains and the days grew long with the coming of summer. 

Before the war broke out and when I was in high school back in California, Pennsylvania, my hometown, I was something of a bowler. It was a sport I wanted to get back to when the war ended, so when I got to Fort Riley, one of the first places I looked up was the bowling alley on the base, which had been built in one of the former stables. Fort Riley was a former cavalry base, the home of Cutter’s 7th Cavalry, and still had a polo field after the war. I started practicing my bowling again and was soon rolling enough strikes that the enlisted men who bowled there began talking to me about my game. 

Before too many months had passed, M. Sgt. Bill Brown - the men called him “Brownie” - stopped me when I was changing out of my bowling shoes and said he wanted to talk. 

“Major, sir, “ he began, more than a little embarrassed to address an officer out of uniform and not on any official army business. He couldn’t possibly have realized that I was a draftee just like him and had spent the first few months in the service taking orders from corporals in boot camp. 

“Sergeant?” I asked. 

“The men at the post want to start up a bowling league, sir, have teams to bowl against and maybe come up with a team to represent the base, “ he began. “So we’ve been watching you bowl on Saturdays.“ 

“So what am I doing wrong?” I asked. I figured at first maybe this sergeant was going to give me a tip or two and wanted to establish some authority. OK, I’ll take a tip from anybody. But that’s not what he asked. 

“No, sir. Nothing at all, “ he stammered. “I’m saying something different. We, the guys, were wondering if you’ve bowled before - do you think maybe you’d like to become part of the team?” He had gotten more confidence the more he framed his request.

 “You want me for your team?” I asked. I was pretty surprised because officers weren’t supposed to fraternize with enlisted men at that time. Things are very different now, but then, fifty years ago, it was a different world, even for much of the officer corps that started out as draftees and went through officer training. 

“We know it’s out of the ordinary, sir, but there are no rules against it. “ I gave him a very surprised look. “We checked, “ he said. This was obviously not a spur of the moment question. 

“You think I can hold up my end of things?” I asked. “It’s been along time since I’ve bowled against anybody. “ 

“Sir, we’ve been watching. We think you’ll really help us out. Besides, “ he continued, “we do need an officer on the team. “ 

Whether out of modesty or because he didn’t want to put me off, he had completely understated the nature of the bowling team. These guys had been champions in their own hometowns and, years later, you could have found them on Bowling for Dollars. There was no reason in the world I should have been on that team except that they wanted an officer because it would give them prestige. 

I told him I’d get back to him on it because I wanted to check on the rules, if there were any, for myself. In fact officers and enlisted personnel were allowed to compete on the same athletic teams, and, in very short order, I joined the team, along with Dave Bender, John Miller, Brownie, and Sal Federico. We became quite a remarkable team, winning most of our matches, more than a few trophies, and had lots of exciting moments when we made the impossible splits and bowled our way all the way to the state finals. We ultimately won the Army Bowling Championships, and the trophy sits on my desk to this very day. Magically, the barrier between officer and enlisted man seemed to drop. And that’s the real point of this story. Through the months I spent on the team, I became friends with Bender, Miller, Federico, and Brown. We didn’t socialize much, except for the bowling, but we also didn’t stand on ceremony with each other, and I liked it that way. I found that a lot of the career intelligence officers also liked to see some of the barriers drop because sometimes men will speak with more honesty to you if you don’t throw what’s on your shoulders into their faces every time you talk to them. So I became friends with these guys, and that’s what got me into the veterinary building on Sunday night, July 6, 1947. 

I remember how hot it had been that whole weekend of July 4th celebrations and fireworks. These were the days before everybody had to have air-conditioning, so we just sweltered inside the offices at the base and swatted away the fat lazy flies that buzzed around looking for hot dog crumbs or landing on chunks of pickle relish. By Sunday, the celebrations were over, guys who’d had too much beer had been dragged off to their barracks by members of their company before the MPs got hold of them, and the base was settling down to the business of the week. 

Nobody seemed to take much notice of the five deuce-and-a-halfs and side-by-side lowboy trailers that had pulled into the base that afternoon full of cargo from Fort Bliss in Texas on their way to Air Materiel Command at Wright Field in Ohio. If you had looked at the cargo manifests the drivers were carrying, you’d have seen lists itemizing landing gear assembly struts for B29s, wing tank pods for vintage P51s, piston rings for radial aircraft engines, ten crates of Motorola walkie-talkies, and you wouldn’t think anything of the shipment except for the fact that it was going the wrong way. 

These spare parts were usually shipped from Wright Field to bases like Fort Bliss rather than the other way around, but, of course, I wouldn’t know that until years later when the real cargo on those trucks fell straight onto my desk as if it had dropped out of the sky. 

It got quiet that evening right after dark, and I remember that it was very humid. Off in the distance you could see lightning, and I wondered if the storms were going to reach the base before morning. I was the post duty officer on that night - similar to the chief duty officer of the watch on a naval vessel - and hoped, even more fervently, that if a storm were on its way, it would wait until morning to break so that I might be spared walking through the mud from sentry post to sentry post in the midst of a summer downpour. I looked over the sentry duty roster for that night and saw that Brownie was standing a post over at one of the old veterinarian buildings near the center of the compound. 

The post duty officer spends his night at the main base headquarters, where he watches the phones and is the human firewall between an emergency and a disaster. Not much to do unless there’s a war on or a company of roustabouts decides to tear up a local bar. And by late night, the base settles into a pattern. The sentries walk their posts, the various administrative offices close down, and whoever is on night watch takes over the communications system - which in 1947 consisted primarily of telephone and telex cable. 

I had to walk a beat as well, checking the different buildings and sentry posts to make sure everyone was on duty. I also had to close down the social clubs. After I made my obligatory stops at the enlisted men’s and officers’ clubs, shutting down the bars and tossing, with all due respect to the senior officers, the drunks back to their quarters, I footed it over to the old veterinary building where Brown was standing watch. But when I got there, where he was supposed to be, I didn’t see him. Something was wrong. 

“Major Corso, “ a voice hissed out of the darkness. It had an edge of terror and excitement to it. 

“What the hell are you doing in there, Brownie?” I began cussing out the figure that peeked out at me from behind the door. “Have you gone off your rocker?” He was supposed to be outside the building, not hiding in a doorway. It was a breach of duty. 

“You don’t understand, Major, “ he whispered again. “You have to see this.“ 

“Better be good, “ I said as I walked over to where he was standing and waited for him outside the door. “Now you get out here where I can see you, “ I ordered. 

Brown popped his head out from behind the door.  

“You know what’s in here?” he asked. 

Whatever was going on, I didn’t want to play any games. The post duty sheet for that night read that the veterinary building was off-limits to everyone. Not even the sentries were allowed inside because whatever had been loaded in had been classified as “No Access.“ What was Brown doing on the inside? 

“Brownie, you know you’re not supposed to be in there, “ I said. “Get out here and tell me what’s going on. “ 

He stepped out from inside the door, and even through the shadow I could see that his face was a dead pale, just as if he’d seen a ghost. “You won’t believe this, “ he said. “I don’t believe it and I just saw it. “ 

“What are you talking about?” I asked. 

“The guys who off-loaded those deuce-and-a-halfs, “ he said. “They told us they brought these boxes up from Fort Bliss from some accident out in New Mexico?” 

“Yeah, so what?” I was getting impatient with this. 

“Well, they told us it was all top secret but they looked inside anyway. Everybody down there did when they were loading the trucks. MPs were walking around with sidearms and even the officers were standing guard, “ Brown said. “But the guys who loaded the trucks said they looked inside the boxes and didn’t believe what they saw. You got security clearance, Major. You can come in here. “ 

In fact, I was the post duty officer and could go anywhere I wanted during the watch. So I walked inside the old veterinary building, the medical dispensary for the cavalry horses before the First World War, and saw where the cargo from the convoy had been stacked up. There was no one in the building except for Bill Brown and myself. 

“What is all this stuff?” I asked. 

“That’s just it, Major, nobody knows, “ he said. “The drivers told us it came from a plane crash out in the desert somewhere around the 509th. But when they looked inside, it was nothing like anything they’d seen before. Nothing from this planet. “ 

It was the silliest thing I’d ever heard, enlisted men’s tall stories that floated from base to base getting more inflated every lap around the track. Maybe I wasn’t the world’s smartest guy, but I had enough engineering and intelligence schooling to pick my way around pieces of wreckage and come up with two plus two. We walked over to the tarpaulin shrouded boxes, and I threw back the edge of the canvas. 

“You’re not supposed to be in here, “ I told Brownie. “You better go. “ 

“I’ll watch outside for you, Major. “ 

I almost wanted to tell him that that’s what he was supposed to be doing all along instead of snooping into classified material, but I did what I used to do best and kept my mouth shut. I waited while he took up his position at the door to the building before I dug any further into the boxes. 

There were about thirty-odd wooden crates nailed shut and stacked together against the far wall of the building. The light switches were the push type and I didn’t know which switch tripped which circuit, so I used my flashlight and stumbled around until my eyes got used to the darkness and shadows. I didn’t want to start pulling apart the nails, so I set the flashlight off to one side where it could throw light on the stack and then searched for a box that could open easily. Then I found an oblong box off to one side with a wide seam under the top that looked like it had been already opened. It looked like either the strangest weapons crate you’d ever see or the smallest shipping crate for a coffin. Maybe this was the box that Brownie had seen. I brought the flashlight over and set it up high on the wall so it would throw as broad a beam as possible. Then I set to work on the crate. 

The top was already loose. I was right - this one had just been opened. I jimmied the top back and forth, continuing to loosen the nails that had been pried up with a nail claw, until I felt them come out of the wood. Then I worked along the sides of the five-or-so-foot box until the top was loose all the way around. Not knowing which end of the box was the front, I picked up the top and slid it off to the edge. Then I lowered the flashlight, looked inside, and my stomach rolled right up into my throat and I almost became sick right then and there. 

Whatever they’d crated this way, it was a coffin, but not like any coffin I’d seen before. The contents, enclosed in a thick glass container, were submerged in a thick light blue liquid, almost as heavy as a gelling solution of diesel fuel. But the object was floating, actually suspended, and not sitting on the bottom with a fluid overtop, and it was soft and shiny as the underbelly of a fish. At first I thought it was a dead child they were shipping somewhere. But this was no child. It was a four-foot human shaped figure with arms, bizarre looking four-fingered hands - I didn’t see a thumb - thin legs and feet, and an oversized incandescent light bulb shaped head that looked like it was floating over a balloon gondola for a chin. I know I must have cringed at first, but then I had the urge to pull off the top of the liquid container and touch the pale gray skin. But I couldn’t tell whether it was skin because it also looked like a very thin one-piece head-to-toe fabric covering the creature’s flesh. 

Its eyeballs must have been rolled way back in its head because I couldn’t see any pupils or iris or anything that resembled a human eye. But the eye sockets themselves were oversized and almond shaped and pointed down to its tiny nose, which didn’t really protrude from the skull. It was more like the tiny nose of a baby that never grew as the child grew, and it was mostly nostril. 

The creature’s skull was over grown to the point where all of its facial features - such as they were - were arranged absolutely frontally, occupying only a small circle on the lower part of the head. The protruding ears of a human were nonexistent, its cheeks had no definition, and there were no eyebrows or any indications of facial hair. The creature had only a tiny flat slit for a mouth and it was completely closed, resembling more of a crease or indentation between the nose and the bottom of the chinless skull than a fully functioning orifice. I would find out years later how it communicated, but at that moment in Kansas, I could only stand there in shock over the clearly non-human face suspended in front of me in a semi-liquid preservative. 

I could see no damage to the creature’s body and no indication that it had been involved in any accident. 

There was no blood, its limbs seemed intact, and I could find no lacerations on the skin or through the gray fabric. I looked through the crate encasing the container of liquid for any paperwork or shipping invoice or anything that would describe the nature or origin of this thing. What I found was an intriguing Army Intelligence document describing the creature as an inhabitant of a craft that had crash landed in Roswell, New Mexico, earlier that week and a routing manifest for this creature to the login officer at the Air Materiel Command at Wright Field and from him to the Walter Reed Army Hospital morgue’s pathology section where, I supposed, the creature would be autopsied and stored. It was not a document I was meant to see, for sure, so I tucked it back in the envelope against the inside wall of the crate. 

I allowed myself more time to look at the creature than I should have, I suppose, because that night I missed the time checks on the rest of my rounds and believed I’d have to come up with a pretty good explanation for the lateness of my other stops to verify the sentry assignments. But what I was looking at was worth any trouble I’d get into the next day. This thing was truly fascinating and at the same time utterly horrible. It challenged every conception I had, and I hoped against hope that I was looking at some form of atomic human mutation. I knew I couldn’t ask anybody about it, and because I hoped I would never see its like again, I came up with explanation after explanation for its existence, despite what I’d read on the enclosed document: It was shipped here from Hiroshima, it was the result of a Nazi genetic experiment, it was a dead circus freak, it was anything but what I knew it said it was - what it had to be: an extraterrestrial. 

I slid the top of the crate back over the creature, knocked the nails loosely into their original holes with the butt end of my flashlight, and put the tarp back in position. Then I left the building and hoped I could close the door forever on what I’d seen. Just forget it, I told myself. You weren’t supposed to see it and maybe you can live your whole life without ever having to think about it. Maybe. 

Once outside the building I rejoined Brownie at his post. 

“You know you never saw this, “ I said. “And you tell no one. “

“Saw what, Major?” Brownie said, and I walked back to the base general headquarters, the image of the creature suspended in that liquid fading away with each and every step I took.By the time I slid back behind the desk, it was all a dream. No, not a dream, a nightmare - but it was over and, I hoped, it would never come back. 

CHAPTER 3 

👽The Roswell Artifacts 👾

THE NIGHTMARE OF THE CREATURE I SAW AT FORT RlLEY NEVER faded from my memory, although I was able to bury it during my years as a guided missile commander in Europe. And I never saw its body again the rest of my life except for the autopsy photos and the medical examiner sketches that would catch up to me, along with the rest of what happened at Roswell, when I returned to Washington from Germany for assignment at the Pentagon in 1961. I can remember my first day back when I was waiting outside my boss’s door for entry into the inner sanctum. And, boy, was I ever nervous. 

The last time I remembered being that nervous in Washington, I was standing in the little anteroom outside the Oval Office in the White House waiting for President Eisenhower to get off the phone. I had a big request to make and I wanted to do it face-to-face, not go through any aides or assistants or wait for special assistant C. D. Jackson to show up to make everything OK. I was almost a regular in the Oval Office those days, back in the 1950s, dropping off National Security Council staff papers for the President, making reports, and sometimes waiting while he read them just in case he wanted me to relay a message. 

But this time was different. I needed to speak to him myself, alone. But Ike was taking a longer time than he usually took on this phone call, and I shifted around and sneaked a glance at the switchboard lights on Mrs. Lehrer’s desk off to the side. Still on the phone, and you could see at the bottom of the switch panel where the calls were backing up. 

I was asking President Eisenhower for a personal favor: to let me out of my fifth year on the White House National Security staff so I could pick up the command of my own anti-aircraft guided-missile battalion being formed up in Red Canyon, New Mexico. Ike had once promised me a command of my own when I returned from Korea and was posted to the White House. And in 1957 the opportunity came up, a juicy assignment at a high-security base with the coveted green tabs and all the trappings: train and command an anti-aircraft battalion to use the army’s most secret new surface-to-air missile and then take it to Germany for some front-line target practice right where the Russians could see us. 

In case of World War III, the order of battle read, Soviet Backfire bombers will drop an inferno of high explosives on our positions first and the East German tanks will roll straight into our barracks. We stand and fight, torching off every missile we have so as to take out as many attacking aircraft as we have missiles, and get the hell out of there. I could almost taste the thrill in my mouth as I waited for Ike to get off the phone that day back in 1957. 

Those were my memories this afternoon as I stood outside the back door of General Trudeau’s office on the third floor of the outer ring of the Pentagon. It was 1961, four years after I left the White House and put on my uniform again to stand guard across the electronic no-man’s-land of radar sweeps and photo sensors just a few kilometers west of the Iron Curtain. Ike had retired to his farm in Pennsylvania, and my new boss was General Arthur Trudeau, one of the last fighting generals from the Korean War. 

Trudeau became an instant hero in my book when I heard about how his men were pinned down on the cratered slopes of Pork Chop Hill, dug into shallow foxholes with enemy mortars dropping round them like rain. You couldn’t order anyone up that hell of an incline to walk those boys back down; just too damn many explosions. So Trudeau pulled off his stars, clapped a sergeant’s helmet over his head, and fought back up the hill himself, leading a company of volunteers, and then fought his way back down. That was how he did things, with his own hands, and now I’d be working directly for him in the Army R&D Division. 

I was a lieutenant colonel when I came to the Pentagon in 1961, and all I brought with me were my bowling trophy from Fort Riley and a nameplate for my desk cut out of the fin of a Nike missile from Germany. My men made it for me and said it would bring me luck. After I got to the Pentagon - it was still a couple of days before my assignment actually began - I found out right away I’d need a lot of it. In fact, as I opened the door and let myself directly into the general’s inner office, I found out how much luck I’d need that very day. 

“So what’s the big secret, General?” I asked my new boss. It was strange talking to a general this way, but we’d become friends while I was on Eisenhower’s staff. “Why not the front door?” 

“Because they’re already watching you, Phil, “ he said, knowing exactly what kind of cold chill that would send through me.“And I’d just as soon have this conversation in private before you show up officially. “

 He walked me over to a set of file cabinets. “Things haven’t changed that much around here since you went to Germany, “ he said. “We still know who our friends are and who we can trust. “ 

I knew his code. The Cold War was at its height and there were enemies all around us: in government, within the intelligence services, and within the White House itself. Those of us in military intelligence who knew the truth about how much danger the country was in were very circumspect about what we said, even to each other, and where we said it. Looking back on it now from the safe distance of forty years, it’s hard to believe that even as big eight-cylinder American cars rolled off the assembly lines and into suburban driveways and television antennas sprung up on roofs of brand-new houses in thousands of subdivisions around the country, we were in the midst of a treacherous war of nerves. 

Deep inside our intelligence services and even within the President’s own cabinet were cadres of career government officers working - some knowingly, some not - for the Soviet Union by carrying out policies devised inside the KGB. Some of the position papers that came out of these offices made no sense otherwise. We also knew the CIA had been penetrated by KGB moles, just as we knew that some of our own policy makers were advocating ideas that would only weaken the United States and lead us down the paths that served the best interests of our enemies. 

A handful of us knew the awful truth about Korea. We lost it not because we were beaten on the battlefield but because we were compromised from within. The Russian advisers fighting alongside the North Koreans were given our plans even before they reached those of us on Macarthur’s staff. And when we threw our host technology into the field and into the air, the Soviets had already formulated plans to capture it and take it back to Russia. When the time came to talk peace at Panmunjom and negotiate a POW exchange, I knew where those Americans were, ten miles north of the border, who wouldn’t be coming home. And there were people right inside our own government who let them stay there, in prison camps, where some of them might be alive to this very day. 

So General Trudeau gave me his very grim smile and said, as he walked me toward the locked dark olive military file cabinet on the wall of his private office, “I need you to cover my back, Colonel. I need you to watch because what I’m going to do, I can’t cover it myself. “ 

Whatever Trudeau was planning, I knew he’d tell me in his own time. And he’d tell me only what he thought I needed to know when I needed it. For the immediate present, I was to be his special assistant in R&D, one of the most sensitive divisions in the whole Pentagon bureaucracy because that was where the most classified plans of the scientists and weapons designers were translated into the reality of defense contracts. R&D was the interface between the gleam in someone’s eye and a piece of hardware prototype rolling out of a factory to show its potential for the army brass. Only it was my job to keep it a secret while it was developed. 

“But there’s something else I want you to do for me, Phil, “ General Trudeau continued as he put his hand on top of the cabinet. “I’m going to have this cabinet moved downstairs to your office. “ 

The general had put me in an office on the second floor of the outer ring directly under him. That way, as I would soon find out, whenever he needed me in a hurry I could get upstairs and through the back door before anybody even knew where I was. 

“This has some special files, war materiel you’ve never seen before, that I want to put under your Foreign Technology responsibilities, “ he continued. 

My specific assignment was to the Research & Development Division’s Foreign Technology desk, what I thought would be a pretty dry post because it mainly required me to keep up on the kinds of weapons and research our allies were doing. Read the intelligence reports, review films of weapons tests, debrief scientists and the research people at universities on what their colleagues overseas were doing, and write  up proposals for weapons the army might need. 

It was important and it had its share of cloak and dagger, but after what I’d been through in Rome chasing down the Gestapo and SS officers the Nazis left behind and the Soviet NKVD units masquerading themselves as Italian Communist partisans, it seemed like a great opportunity to help General Trudeau keep some of the army’s ideas out of the hands of the other military services. But then I didn’t know what was inside that file cabinet. 

The army generally categorized the types of weapons research it was doing into two basic groups, domestic and foreign. There was the research that sprang out of work going on in the United States and research by people overseas. I knew I’d be keeping track of what the French were doing with advanced helicopter design and whether the British would be able to build a practical vertical takeoff and landing fighter, something we’d given up on after World War II. Then there was the German big gun, the V3, granddaughter of Big Bertha that the Germans threatened Paris with during the First World War. We’d found the barrel assemblies of the German artillery pieces near Calais after we invaded Normandy and knew that the Nazis were working on something that, like their jet engine fighter and new Panzer tank, could have changed the outcome of the war if they’d held us off any longer at the Battle of the Bulge. 

I was responsible for developing this technology, ideas we hadn’t come up with ourselves, and work up recommendations for how we could incorporate this into our weapons planning. But I didn’t know why the general kept on patting the top drawer of that file cabinet. 

“I’ll get to those files right away if you like, General, “ I said. “And write up some preliminary reports on what I think about it. “ 

“It’s going to take you a little longer than that, Phil, “ Trudeau said. 

Now he was almost laughing, something he didn’t do very much in those days. In fact, the only time I remember him laughing that way was after he heard that his name had been put up to command the U.S. forces in Vietnam. He also heard that they wanted me to head up the intelligence section for the Army Special Forces command in Vietnam. We both knew that the army mission in Vietnam was headed for disaster because it was a think-tank war. And the people in the think tank were more worried about restraining the army than in wiping out the Vietcong. So Trudeau had a plan: 

“We’ll either win the war or get court-martialed, “ he said. “But they’ll know we were there. “ And he laughed when he said that the same way he was laughing as he told me to take my time with the contents of the file cabinet. “You’ll want to think about this before you start writing any reports, “ he said. 

I couldn’t help but pick up the nervousness in his voice, forcing itself through his laughter, the same sound over the phone that got me nervous when I heard it the first time. There really was something here he wasn’t telling me. 

“Is there something else about this I should know, General?” I asked, trying not to show any hesitation in my voice. Business as usual, nothing out of the ordinary, nothing anybody can throw my way that I can’t handle. 

“Actually, Phil, the material in this cabinet is a little different from the run-of-the-mill foreign stuff we’ve seen up to now, “ he said. “I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the intelligence on what we’ve got here when you were over at the White House, but before you write up any summaries maybe you should do a little research on the Roswell file. “ 

Now I’d heard more about Roswell than I was ready to admit right on the spot my first day at the Pentagon. And there were more wild stories floating around about Roswell and what we were still doing there than anyone could have imagined. But I hadn’t made the connection between the Roswell files and what was in the cabinet General Trudeau was talking about. Basically I had hoped after Fort Riley that it would all go away and I could simply stick my head in the sand and worry about things I could get my brain around like bureaucratic in fighting inside Washington instead of little aliens inside sealed coffins. 

The general didn’t wait for me to answer him. He left me standing there in his office and walked out to the reception room, where I heard him giving orders into a speaker phone. He had barely clicked off the speaker and walked back to where I was standing when four enlisted men pulling a hand truck showed up,  saluted, and stood there at attention while Trudeau kept looking at me. He didn’t say anything. He turned to the enlisted men instead. 

“Load up this cabinet on that dolly and follow the colonel to his office on the second floor. Don’t stop for anybody. Don’t talk to anybody. If anyone stops you, you tell them to see me. That’s an order. “ 

Then he turned back to me. 

“Why don’t you take some time with this, Phil. “ He paused. “But not too much time. Sergeant” - he turned his attention back to the enlisted man with the shortest haircut - “please see the colonel back to his own office below. “ 

They loaded the file cabinet onto the dolly as if there were nothing inside, pulled it toward the back door, and stared at me until I followed them out. “Not too much time, Colonel, “ General Trudeau called after me as we went out the door and down the hall. 

I remember I spent quite a while just looking at that cabinet after it was loaded off the dolly and set up in my inner office. There was an almost ominous quality to it that belied its quiet, official army presence. So I must confess that, given the reverse hype of the general’s introduction, part of me wanted to tear it open right away as if it were a present on Christmas morning. But the part of me that won just let it sit there, protected, until I thought about what General Trudeau had said about Roswell and the amount of paper work that had circulated through the White House when I was on the National Security staff there. No, I wasn’t going to review the Roswell files. Not just yet. Not until I took a long hard look at what was inside this file cabinet. But even that was going to wait until the rest of my office was set up. Whatever I was supposed to do, I wanted to do it right. 

I spent a little time pacing around my new office while I thought some more about what the general said, why this file was waiting for me in his private office, and why he had wanted to talk to me specifically about it. It also wasn’t lost on me that I had not seen one scrap of paper from the general covering his delivery of the material to me nor my receipt of it. It could have just as easily been that this file cabinet didn’t even exist. As far as I knew, only his eyes and soon my eyes would review it. So whatever it was, it was serious and, only if by omission, very secret. 

I remembered a hot July night fourteen years before at Fort Riley when I was the young intelligence officer after having just been shipped back from Rome. I remembered being hustled into a storage hangar by one of the sentries, a fellow member of the Fort Riley bowling team. What he pointed to under the thick olive tarp that night was also very, very secret, and I held my breath, hoping that what was inside this cabinet wasn’t anything like what I saw that night in Kansas, July 6, 1947. 

I opened the cabinet, and almost immediately my heart sank. I knew, from looking at the shoebox of tangled wires and the strange cloth, from the vise-like headpiece and the little wafers that looked like Ritz crackers only with broken edges and colored a dark gray, and from an assortment or other items that I couldn’t even relate to the shapes and sixes of things I was familiar with, that my life was headed for a big change. Back in Kansas that night in July, I told myself that I was seeing an illusion, something that if I wished real hard, didn’t have to exist for me. 

Then, after I went to the White House and saw all the National Security Council memos describing the “incident” and talking about the “package” and the “goods, “ I knew that the strange figure I’d seen floating in liquid in a casket within a casket at Fort Riley wasn’t just a bad dream I could forget about. Nor could I forget about the radar anomalies at the Red Canyon missile range or the strange alerts over Ramstein air base in West Germany. I only hoped all of it would never catch up with me again and I could go through the rest of my army career in some kind of peace. But it was not to be. There, mangled like somebody else’s junk, were the trinkets I knew would involve me in something deeper than I had ever wanted. Whatever else I had to do in this life, here was a job that would change it all. 

You know how in the movies when Bud Abbott would open a closet, see the dead body hanging there, close the closet door, open it up again, and find the body gone? That’s what I actually did with the file cabinet. Nobody was there to see me, or so I believed, so I opened it, closed it, opened it again. But this was no movie and the stuff was still there. 

So here it was, some of the material they’d recovered from Roswell. And now, just like a bad penny, it turned up again. I heard footsteps outside my door and caught my breath. There were always sounds in the Pentagon at night because the building was never empty. Somewhere, in some office, in parts of the  building most people don’t even know about, some group is planning for a war we hope we will never fight. Therefore, more than any other building except for the White House, the Pentagon is a place where someone is always walking around after something. 

General Trudeau peeked his head around the door. 

“Look inside?” he asked. 

“What’d you do to me, General?” I said. “I thought we were friends. “ 

“That’s why I gave you this, Phil, “ he said, but he wasn’t laughing, wasn’t even smiling. “You know how valuable this property is? You know what any of the other agencies would do to get this into their hands?’ 

“They’d probably kill me, “ I said. 

“They probably want to kill you anyway, but this makes them even more rabid. The air force wants it because they think it belongs to them. The navy wants it because they want anything the air force wants. The CIA wants it so they can give it to the Russians. “ 

“What do you want me to do, General?” I asked. I couldn’t figure out what he was thinking unless he thought I should just bury the stuff and leave it at that. 

“I need a plan from you, “ he said. “Not simply what this property is, but what we can do with it. Something that keeps it out of play until we know what we have and what use we can make of it. “ 

This had all the makings of a plot, pure and simple. “Look, who’s our biggest problem?” I asked, but it was a proforma question because I already knew the answer. 

“The same people who lost Korea for us and who you had to fight over at the White House,“ he said. “You know exactly who I mean. We got to keep whatever’s valuable here from falling into the wrong hands because as sure as we’re standing in this Pentagon, it’ll find its way right to the Kremlin. “ 

There were people floating around Washington right at that very moment who, even out of the most well meaning intentions they could muster, would have shipped this Roswell file over to Russia while patting President Kennedy on the back and congratulating him for contributing to world peace. Just as there were people who would have cut Trudeau’s and my throat and left us right on the rug to bleed to death while they packed that file away. Either way, Trudeau didn’t have to quote me chapter and verse to explain that he was handing me one of the most important assignments I would ever receive from him. He was giving me the keys to a whole new kingdom, but neither he nor I knew what in the world we could do with this stuff, short of keeping it out of the hands of the Russians. At the very least, that was a start. 

“We have to know what we have first, “ I said. 

“Then that’s your job right away. What do we have? Anything usable here? Put together people you can trust from the specialists we have and go over the contacts at our defense contractor lists. And this is only part of the property we have. There’s some more of it downstairs in the file basement that the other intelligence agencies don’t know anything about. Came here from New Mexico instead of going out to Ohio. Don’t ask me why. It’s coming up to you right now in boxes. Just put everything together, take some time, and evaluate this for me. “ 

“Anybody know I have this?” I asked. 

“Everybody knows that if you’re poking around something it’s got to be important,“ he said. “So  don’t act like the cat that ate the canary. They’re watching you as much as they’re watching me. “ 

Then he walked to the doorway, looked down both ends of the hall, and turned back to me. “But move this thing along, because we could be out of this office in under a year and I don’t want to have to worry about running out of time on this. “ 

And he was gone in a heartbeat, as if we’d never had the conversation. 

I didn’t take the file apart that night, even after another nondescript wooden crate that looked like something you ship vegetables in was carted to my office by an equally nondescript army corporal. I didn’t go through the material the next night, either. But over the following week, whenever I could be sure that no one was around who could pop in without warning, I moved the material from the box into the file and allowed myself time to look at it. It was just like falling through the looking glass into a different world, a puzzle of separate pieces that only vaguely captured what had been in the memos I’d read over at the White House. 

No wonder no one had really wanted anything to do with this junk, which held out the promise of a whole world we knew nothing about but that as far back as 1947, the government had decided to keep an absolute secret. 

Career after career of anyone in government who even hinted at the big dark secret of Roswell was pulverized by whoever was behind this operation. And, although I knew far more than I had even admitted to myself, I would never be the one to shoot off my mouth. But now this file, what I would eventually call the “nut file” to General Trudeau, had come into my possession, and as the ensuing weeks turned into a month, I gradually figured out where some of the puzzle pieces fit. 

First there were the tiny, clear, single filament, flexible glass like wires twisted together through a kind of gray harness as if they were cables going into a junction. They were narrow filaments, thinner than copper wire. As I held the harness of strands up to the light from my desk, I could see an eerie glow coming through them as if they were conducting the faint light and breaking it up into different colors. When the personnel at the retrieval site in the desert outside of Roswell pulled this piece out of the wreckage of the delta shaped object, they thought it was some sort of wiring device -a harness is what they said - or maybe some of them thought it was a junction box or electrical relay. 

But whatever they thought it was, they believed there was nothing like it on this planet. As I turned the object over in my hand, I figured, from the way the individual filaments flexed back and forth but didn’t break and the way they were able to conduct a light beam along their length, they were a wire of some sort. But for what purpose I didn’t have a clue. 

Then there were the thin two-inch-around matte gray oyster cracker shaped wafers of a material that looked like plastic but had tiny road maps of wires barely raised/etched along the surface. They were the size of a twenty-five-cent piece, but the etchings on the surface reminded me of squashed insects with their hundred legs spread out at right angles from a flat body. 

Some were more rounded or elliptical. It was a circuit - anyone could figure that out by 1961, especially when you put it under a magnifying glass - but from the way these wafers were stacked on each other, this was a circuitry unlike any other I’d ever seen. I couldn’t figure out how to plug it in and what kind of current it carried, but it was clearly a wire circuitry of a sort that came from a larger board of wafers on board the flying craft. My hand shook ever so slightly as I held these pieces, not because they themselves were scary but because I was awed, just for a few seconds, about the momentous nature of this find. It was like an architectural treasure trove, the discoveries of some long departed culture, a Rosetta stone, even though whoever crashed onto the desert floor was still very active and roaming around our most secret army and air force bases. 

I was most interested in the file descriptions accompanying a two piece set of dark elliptical eye pieces as thin as skin. The Walter Reed pathologists said they adhered to the lenses of the extraterrestrial creatures’ eyes and seemed to reflect existing light, even in what looked like complete darkness, so as to illuminate and intensify images in the darkness to allow their wearer to pick out shapes. 

The reports had said that the pathologists at Walter Reed hospital who autopsied one of these creatures tried to peer through them in the darkness to watch the one or two army sentries and medical orderlies walking down a corridor adjacent to the pathology lab. These figures were illuminated in a greenish orange, depending upon how they moved, but the pathologists could see only their outer shape. And when they got close to each other, their shapes blended into a single form. But they could also see the outlines of furniture  and the wall and objects on desktops. 

Maybe, I thought as I read this report, soldiers could wear a visor that intensified images through the reflection and amplification of available light and navigate in the darkness of a battlefield with as much confidence as if they were walking their sentry posts in broad daylight. But these eyepieces didn’t turn night into day, they only highlighted the exterior shapes of things. 

There was a dull, grayish-silvery foil-like swatch of cloth among these artifacts that you could not fold, bend, tear, or wad up but that bounded right back into its original shape without any creases. It was a metallic fiber with physical characteristics that would later be called “super tenacity, “ but when I tried to cut it with scissors, the arms just slid right off without making even a nick in the fibers. If you tried to stretch it, it bounced back, but I noticed that all the threads seemed to be going in one direction. When I tried to stretch it width wise instead of length wise, it looked like the fibers had reoriented themselves to the direction I was pulling in. This couldn’t be cloth, but it obviously wasn’t metal. It was a combination, to my unscientific eye, of a cloth woven with metal strands that had the drape and malleability of a fabric and the strength and resistance of a metal. I was on top of some of the most secret weapons projects at the Pentagon, and we had nothing like this, even under the wishlist category. 

There was a written description and a sketch of another device, too, like a short, stubby flashlight almost with a self-contained power source that was nothing at all like a battery. The scientists at Wright Field who examined it said they couldn’t see the beam of light shoot out of it, but when they pointed the pencil-like flashlight at a wall, they could see a tiny circle of red light, but there was no actual beam from the end of what seemed like a lens to the wall as there would have been if you were playing a flashlight off on a distant object. When they passed an object in front of the source of the light, it interrupted it, but the beam was so intense the object began smoking. 

They played with this device a lot before they realized that it was an alien cutting device like a blowtorch. One time they floated some smoke across the light and suddenly the whole beam took shape. What had been invisible suddenly had a round, micro thin, tunnel-like shape to it. Why did the inhabitants of this craft have a cutting device like this aboard their ship? It wasn’t until later, when I read military reports of cattle mutilations in which entire organs were removed without any visible trauma to the surrounding cell tissue, that I realized that the light beam cutting torch I thought was in the Roswell file was actually a surgical implement, just like a scalpel, that was being used by the aliens in medical experiments on our livestock. 

Then there was the strangest device of all, a headband, almost, with electrical signal pickup devices on either side. I could figure out no use for this thing whatsoever unless whoever used it did so as a fancy hair band. It seemed to be a one size fits all headpiece that did nothing, at least not for humans. Maybe it picked up brain waves like an electroencephalogram and projected a chart. But no private experiment conducted on it seemed to do anything at all. The scientists didn’t even determine how to plug it in or what its source of power was because it came with no batteries or diagrams. 

There were nights I’d spread these articles all around me as if they were indeed Christmas presents. There were nights when I’d just take one thing out and turn it around until I almost memorized what it looked like from different angles before putting it back. The days were passing and, without having been told directly by Trudeau, I knew that he was getting anxious. We’d sit at meetings together when other people were around and he couldn’t say anything, and I could almost hear his insides burst. There were times when we were alone and Trudeau almost didn’t want to broach our shared secret. 

Outside the Pentagon there was a battle starting up all over again set to rage just as it had during the Truman and Eisenhower presidencies. Whose intelligence was accurate? Whose was truthful? Who was trying to manipulate the White House and who believed that by coloring or twisting fact that he could change the course of history? John Kennedy was leading a young administration capable of making extraordinary mistakes. And there were people at the heart of his administration whose own views of how the world should work were inspiring them to distort facts, misstate intentions, and disregard obvious realities in the hope that their views would prevail. 

Worse, there were those, deep within a secret government within the government, who had been placed there by the spymasters at the Kremlin. And it was those individuals we had the greatest reason to fear. Right now, Army R&D had stewardship over these bits and pieces of foreign technology from Roswell. How long we would have them I did not know. So, over a late night pot of coffee in General Trudeau’s office, he decided that we would move this material out, out to defense contractors, out to where scientists would see it and where, under the guise of top secrecy, it would be in the system before the CIA could stow it where no one would find it except the very people we were trying to hide it from. 

“This is the devil’s plan, General, “ I said to Trudeau that night. “What makes you think we can  get away with it?” 

“Not we, Phil, “ he said. “You. You’re the one who’s going to get away with it. I’ll just keep them off your back long enough until you do. “ 

Now, all I could think about was what I’d seen that night in 1947 and, worse, what in the world I was going to do with all this stuff next. I’d asked myself “why me?” hundreds of times since that night in the Pentagon. And asked why after fourteen years and my experience at Fort Riley I had become the inheritor of the Roswell file. But I had no answers then and no answers now. If General Trudeau had meant for this to happen when he took over R&D three years before I got there, I’ll never know. He never gave me any reasons, only orders. But since he was the master strategizer, I sometimes think he believed I must have had some experience with alien encounters and wouldn’t be spooked by working with the technology from the Roswell file. 

I never asked him about it, as strange as that seems, because the military being what it is, you don’t ask. You simply do. So, now as then, I don’t question. I only remember that I went forward from that night to put into development as much of the Roswell file as I could and believed that whatever happened, I was doing the right thing.

CHAPTER 4 

👽Inside the Pentagon at the Foreign Technology Desk 👽

...the pentagon never sleeps. 

And neither did I in those first few weeks at the R&D Foreign Technology desk as I racked my brain to come up with a strategy I could recommend to my boss. Amidst the constant twenty four hour motion of an office building where someone is always working, I spent more time at my desk than I did at home. Evenings, weekends, early mornings before the sunrise set the windows across the river in Washington an orange blaze, you could find me staring at the four drawer file cabinet against my corner wall. I’d fiddle with the combination lock, sometimes so absorbed in coming up with a strategy for these strange artifacts that I’d forget the sequence of numbers and have to wait until my brain reset itself. 

And always, just outside my office was the pent up urgency of crisis, the cocked trigger of a military machine always poised to attack anywhere, anytime, at the sound of a voice on the other end of a scrambled phone behind the soft colored walls of an inner office along the miles of corridors on the inner or outer ring. 

You think of the Pentagon as something of an amorphous entity with a single mind set and a single purpose. It’s probably the same way most people see the structure of the American military: one army, one goal, everybody marches together. But that’s almost totally false. The American military - and its home office, the Pentagon is just like any other big business with hundreds of different bureaus, many in direct and explicit competition with each other for the same resources and with different agendas and tactical goals. The separate military branches have different goals when it comes to how America should be defended and wars fought, and it’s not uncommon for differences to emerge even within the same branch of the service. 

I was plunged right into this in my first weeks back in D.C. Debates were still going on from World War II, sixteen years before, and all of this formed the backdrop of Roswell. There was a huge wrangling within the navy between the aircraft carrier advocates from World War II and the submariners under Adm. Hyman Rickover, who saw the big flat tops as herds of elephants, slow and vulnerable. Subs, on the other hand, running almost forever on nuclear fuel, could slip deep beneath the sea, lay a thousand or so miles off enemy territory, and blast away at his most vulnerable targets with multiple warhead ICBMs. No way our enemies would escape destruction as long as we had our submarine fleet. 

So who needs another aircraft carrier with its screen of destroyers and other escorts when just one sub can deliver a knockout punch anywhere, anytime, without enemy orbiting intel satellites snapping pictures of its every move? Look what our subs did to the Japanese in the Pacific; look what the German U-boats did to  us in the Atlantic. But you couldn’t convince the navy brass of all that in the 1960s. 

Like the navy, the air force had different advocates for different goals, and so did the army. And when there are competing agendas and strategies articulated by some of the best and brightest people ever to graduate from universities, war colleges, and the ranks of officers, you have hard nosed people playing high stakes games against one other for the big prizes: the lion’s share of the military budget. And, at the very center of it all, the place where the dollars get spent, are the weapons development people who work for their respective branches of the military. 

And that’s right where I was in the early days of 1961 shortly after John F. Kennedy came to town to begin his new administration. I had only just returned to Washington from the front lines of a war that nobody thought of as a real war except for us, the guys who were there. It was easier during a real war, like Korea. Your objective is to push the other guy back as far as you can, kill as many of his people as you can, and force him to surrender. You have a very pragmatic strategy: You try it and if it works you keep on doing it until it stops working. 

But on the front lines in Germany, where the battles were only fought with electron beams, threats, and feints, you had to assess how many soldiers might be killed or how many planes you could bring down if the shooting were to start for real. For Americans this was the Cold War, the combined military machines of two massive superpowers each capable of obliterating each other the moment either one perceived a material weakness in the other’s ability to retaliate. 

So you had a chess game played and replayed every day around the world in scores of different war rooms where different scenarios were formulated to see who would win. It was all a game of numbers and strategies with different armed services around the world winning and losing battles on computers - very elegant and precise. But what very few people outside of government knew was that the Cold War was really a Hot War, fought with real bullets and real casualties, only no one could step forward to admit it because the front lines were within the very government capitals of the countries that were fighting it. I saw this with my own eyes right here in Washington, where the war had been going on since 1947. 

So with the sides drawn and tensions between the various bureaus and services within the Pentagon, it didn’t take me long in those first few weeks to learn the politics of my new job. With the field reports, scientific analyses, medical autopsies, and technological debris from the Roswell crash I had under lock and key, my first rule was to be as circumspect as possible, draw no attention to myself. I’d learned this skill when I served on MacArthur’s staff in Korea ten years earlier: I had to be the little man who wasn’t there. If people don’t think you’re there, they talk. That’s when you learn things. 

And within those first few weeks I saw and learned a lot about how the politics of the Roswell discovery had matured over the fourteen years since the crash and since the intense discussions at the White House after Eisenhower became president. Each of the different branches of the military had been protecting its own cache of Roswell - related files and had been actively seeking to gather as much new Roswell material as possible. Certainly all the services had their own reports from examiners at Walter Reed and Bethesda concerning the nature of the alien physiology. 

Mine were in my nut file along with the drawings. It was pretty clear, also, from the way the navy and air force were formulating their respective plans for advanced military technology hardware, that many of the same pieces of technology in my files were probably shared by the other services. But nobody was bragging because everybody wanted to know what the other guy had. But since, officially, Roswell had never happened in the first place, there was no technology to develop. 

On the other hand, the curiosity among weapons and intelligence people within the services was rabid. Nobody wanted to come in second place in the silent, unacknowledged alien technology development race going on at the Pentagon as each service quietly pursued its version of a secret Roswell weapon. I didn’t know what the air force or navy had or what they might have been developing from their respective files on Roswell, but I assumed each service had something and was trying to find out what I had. 

That would have been a good intelligence procedure. If you were in the know about what was retrieved from Roswell, you kept your ears open for snippets of information about what was being developed by another branch of the military, what was going before the budget committees for funding, or what defense contractors were developing a specific technology for the services. If you weren’t in the Roswell loop, but were too curious for your own good, you could be spun around by the swirling rumor mill that the Roswell race had kicked up among competing weapons development people in the services and wind up chasing nothing more than dust devils that vanished down the halls as soon as you turned the corner on them. 

There were real stories, however, that wouldn’t go away no matter how many times somebody official stepped up to say the story was false. For example, I picked up the rumors pretty quickly concerning the UFO the air force was supposed to be keeping at Edwards Air Force Base in California and the research they were conducting on the spacecraft’s technology, especially its electromagnetic wave propulsion system. There were also rumors circling around the air force about the early harvesting of Roswell technology in the design of the allowing bombers, but I didn’t know how much stock to put in them.

 

The army had been developing an all-wing design since right after World War I, and within a year after the Roswell crash Jack Northrop’s company began test flights of their YB49 flying wing recon/bomber models. The YB49’s quadruple vertical tail fins were so uncannily reminiscent of the head on Roswell craft sketches in our files that it was hard not to make a connection between the spacecraft and the bomber. But the flying wing’s development took place over ten years before I got to the Foreign Technology desk, so I had no direct evidence relating the bomber to the spacecraft. 

General Trudeau was right, though, when he said that people at the Pentagon were watching Army R&D because they thought we were onto something. People wanted to know what Foreign Technology was working on, especially the more exotic things in our portfolio just to make sure, the memos read, that we weren’t duplicating budgetary resources by spending twice or three times for the same thing. There was a lot of talk and pressure from the Joint Chiefs of Staff about technology sharing and joint weapons development, but my boss wanted us to keep what we had to ourselves, especially what he jokingly kept calling “the alien harvest. “ 

As if the eyes of the other military services weren’t enough, we also had to contend with the analysts from the Central Intelligence Agency. Under the guise of coordination and cooperation, the CIA was amalgamating as much power as it could. Information is power, and the more the CIA tried to learn about the army weapons development program, the more nervous it made all of us at the center of R&D.

Acquaintances of mine in the agency had dropped hints, shortly after I took over the Foreign Technology desk, that if I needed any intelligence about what other countries were developing, they could help me out. But one hand washes the other, and they dropped hints that if I had any clues about where any stray pieces of “the cargo, “ or “the package” as the Roswell artifacts were commonly referred to within the military, might be found, they would surely appreciate it if I let them know. After the third time my CIA contacts bumped into me and whispered this proposal for exchanges of information into my ear, I told my boss that our friends might be anxious about what we had. 

“You really put me on the hot seat, General, “ I said to Trudeau over one of our morning briefings at the end of my first month on the job. I was still working on the strategy for the nut file and, thankfully, my boss hadn’t pressured me yet to come up with recommendations for the plan. But it was coming. “How does the CIA know what we have?” 

“They’re guessing, I suppose, “ he said. “And figuring it out by the process of elimination. Look, everybody suspects what the air force has. “ 

Trudeau was right. In the rumor bank from which everybody in the Pentagon made deposits and withdrawals, the air force was sitting on the Holy Grail - a spaceship itself and maybe even a live extraterrestrial. Nobody knew for sure. 

We knew that after it became a separate branch of the military in 1948, the air force kept some of the Roswell artifacts at Wright Field outside of Dayton, Ohio, because that’s where “the cargo” was shipped, stopping off in Fort Riley along the way. 

But the air force was primarily interested in how things fly, so whatever R&D they worked on was focused on how their planes could evade radar and out fly the Soviets no matter where we got the technology from. 

“And, “ he continued, “I’m sure the agency fellows would love to get into the Naval Intelligence files on Roswell if they’ve not done so already. “ 

With its advanced submarine technology and missile launching nuclear subs, the navy was struggling with its own problem in figuring out what to do about UUOs or USOs - Unidentified Submerged Objects, as they came to be called. It was a worry in naval circles, particularly as war planners advanced strategies for protracted submarine warfare in the event of a first strike. Whatever was flying circles around our jets since the 1950s, evading radar at our top secret missile bases like Red Canyon, which I saw with my own eyes, could plunge right into the ocean, navigate down there just as easy as you please, and surface halfway around the world without so much as leaving an underwater signature we could pick up. 

Were these USOs building bases at the bottom of oceanic basins beyond the dive capacity of our best submarines, even the Los Angeles-class jobbies that were only on the drawing boards? That’s what the  chief of Naval Operations had to find out, so the navy was occupied with fighting its own war with extraterrestrial craft in the air and under the sea. 

That left the army. “But they don’t know for sure what we have, Phil, “ Trudeau continued. He’d been talking the whole time. “And they’re busting a gut to find out. “ 

“So we have to keep on doing what we do without letting them know what we have, General, “ I said. “And that’s what I’m working on. “ 

And I was. Even though I wasn’t sure how we’d do it, I knew the business of R&D couldn’t change just because we had Roswell crash artifacts in our possession. 

However we were going to camouflage our development of the Roswell technology, it had to be within the existing way we did business so no one would recognize any difference. We operated on a normal defense development projects budget of well into the billions in 1960, most of it allocated to the analysis of new weapons systems. Just within our own bureau we had contracts with the nation’s biggest defense companies with whom we maintained almost daily communication. A lot of the research we conducted was in the improvement of existing weapons based on the intelligence we received about what our enemies were pointing at us: faster tanks, heavier artillery, improved helicopters, better tasting MREs. 

At the Foreign Technologies desk, we kept an eye on what other countries were doing, ally or adversary, and how we could adapt it to our use. The French, the Italians, the West Germans, all of them had their own weapons systems and streams of development that seemed exotic by our standards yet had certain advantages. The Russians had gotten ahead of us in liquid rocket propulsion systems and were using simpler, more efficient designs. 

My job was to evaluate the potential of the foreign technology and implement whatever we could. I’d get photos, designs, and specs of foreign weapons systems, like the French helicopter technology, for example, and bring it to American defense companies like Bell, Sikorsky, or Hughes to see whether we could develop aspects of it for our own use. And it was the perfect cover for protecting the Roswell technology, but we still had to figure out what we wanted to do with it. It couldn’t simply stay in file cabinets or on shelves forever. 

What we had retrieved from the Roswell crash and had managed to hold on to was probably the most closely guarded secret the army had. Yet it was nothing more than an orphan. Up until 1961, the army had come up with no plan to use the technology without revealing its nature or its source and in so doing blow the cover on the single biggest secret the government was keeping. There was no one bureau within the army charged with managing Roswell and other aspects of UFO encounters, as there was in the air force, and therefore nobody was keeping any public records of how the army got its hands on its Roswell technology in the first place and, consequently, no oversight mechanism. 

Everything up until 1961 was catch-as-catch-can, but now it had to change. General Trudeau was looking for the grand end game development scheme. It began with researching the history of how the whole file - the field reports, autopsy information, descriptions of the items found in the wreckage, and the bits and pieces of Roswell technology themselves - came into the possession of Army R&D. Luckily enough for me, the whole Roswell story was still unknown outside the highest military circles in 1961. Retired major Jesse Marcel, the intelligence officer at the 509th who had been at the crash site in July 1947 and who had given the initial reports of a spacecraft, would not yet tell his story in public for at least another ten years. Everyone else connected to the incident was either dead or sworn to silence. 

The air force, which moved quickly to take over management of the Roswell affair and ongoing UFO contacts and sightings, still kept everything they learned highly classified under the Air Force Intelligence Command and waged a push and pull war with the CIA for information about sightings and ongoing contacts with anything extraterrestrial. These really weren’t my concerns yet, but they would be. 

My research was not concerned with the crash at Roswell itself, nor at Corona or at San Agustin - if those crashes did, in fact, occur in early July 1947 - but on the day after Roswell, the day Bill Blanchard from the 509th crated up the alien debris and shipped it to Fort Bliss, where Gen. Roger Ramey’s staff determined its final disposition and the official government history of the event began to unfold. 

In the early hours after the cargo arrived in Texas, there was so much confusion about what was found and what wasn’t found that army officers, who were in charge of the entire retrieval operation, quickly scraped together both a cover story and a plan to silence all the military and civilian witnesses to the recovery. The cover story was easy. General Ramey ordered Maj. Jesse Marcel to recant his “flying saucer” story and pose for a news photo with debris from a weather balloon, which he described as the wreckage the retrieval team recovered from outside Roswell. Marcel followed orders and the flying saucer officially became a weather balloon. 

The silencing of military witnesses was also accomplished easily enough through top-down orders from General Ramey to everyone at the 509th and at Fort Bliss to deny that they were a part of any operation to recover anything other than a balloon. Once the material left Ramey’s command and arrived at Lt. Gen. Nathan P.Twining’s Air Materiel Command at Wright Field, all General Ramey had to do was keep denying what he was already denying and it was no longer his responsibility. Now it belonged to General Twining, from whose desk a whole new era of army involvement with the Roswell material began. 

General Ramey treated the incident as a threat to national security and deployed whatever forces he could to bring the material back for evaluation and to suppress any rumors that might light a brushfire of panic. Therefore, Ramey used the counter intelligence personnel already posted to the 509th and ordered them deployed into the civilian community as well as the military to use any means necessary to suppress the story of the crash and retrieval. No news should be allowed to get out, no speculation was to be tolerated, and the story already circulating about a crashed flying saucer had to be quashed. By the next morning, July 8, the suppression of the crash story was in full operation. 

The army had already issued a new cover story to the press by the time CIC officers had gotten to the witnesses and, using threats and outright promises of cash, forced them to recant their statements about what they saw. Rancher Mac Brazel, who first said he had been at the site during the recovery and had described the strange debris, disappeared for two days and then showed up in town driving a new pickup truck and denying he’d ever seen anything. CIC officers turned up at people’s houses and spoke quietly to parents about what their children had learned. Whatever people thought was happening, army personnel said, wasn’t, and it would have to stay that way.

 “You didn’t see a thing, “ they ordered. “Nothing happened here. Let me hear you repeat that. “

The silencing worked so well that for the next thirty years the story seemed to have been swallowed up by the quiet emptiness of desert where all things are worn down to a fine grade of sameness. But belying the quiet that settled over Roswell, a thousand miles away, part of the U.S. military went on wartime alert as bits and pieces of the craft reached their destinations. One of those destinations, Lt. Gen. Nathan Twining’s desk at Wright Field, was the focal point from which the Roswell artifacts would reach the Foreign Technology desk at the Pentagon. 

Among the first of the army’s top commands notified of the events unfolding in Roswell in early July would have had to have been Lieutenant General Twining’s Air Materiel Command at Wright Field, where the Roswell debris was shipped. Nathan Twining has become important to UFO researchers because of his association with a number of highly secret meetings at the Eisenhower White House having to do with the national security issues posed by the discovery of UFOs  and his relationship to National Security Special Assistant Robert Cutler, who was the liaison between the NSC and President Eisenhower when I was on the NSC staff in the 1950s. 

The silver-haired General Twining was the point man for initial research and dissemination of Roswell related materials and, partly because of the capability with which he administered the vital AMC at Wright, he became part of an ad hoc group of top military and civilian officials assembled by President Truman to advise him about the Roswell discovery and its national security implications. 

General Twining had been scheduled to travel to the West Coast in early July 1947, but he canceled the trip, remaining in New Mexico at the army’s air base at Alamogordo until at least July 10. Alamogordo was important not just because it was the nation’s nuclear weapons test site in the 1940s and 1950s but because it was also a field office of the AMC itself, where rocket scientists Wernher von Braun and others were primarily based. Close by was the White Sands guided missile base, where some of our military’s most advanced tracking and embryonic targeting radars were deployed. These were sensitive installations, especially during the UFO activity that week, and it made perfect sense that immediately after the recovery of the UFO the army general whose responsibility it would have been to manage the retrieval was almost directly on-site conferring with his top scientists. 

Although I never saw the actual memos from President Truman to General Twining regarding his trip to New Mexico, I had heard stories about secret orders that Truman had issued to General Twining directing him to New Mexico to investigate the reports of the crash and to report directly to the White House on what he’d found. I believe that it was General Twining’s initial report to the President that confirmed that the army had retrieved something from the desert and might have suggested the need for the formation of an advisory group to develop policy about whatever was discovered. And, remember, in those first forty-eight hours, nobody really knew what this was. 

By the time the Roswell debris had been shipped out of Fort Bliss and had arrived at Wright Field, General Twining had flown back from New Mexico to Wright to oversee the analysis and evaluation of the Roswell treasure trove. Twining moved quickly once back at his office. The alien bodies had to be autopsied in utmost secrecy and the spacecraft and its contents analyzed, cataloged, and prepared for dissemination to various facilities within the military. In as much as everything about the crash was given the highest security classification, stories had to be prepared for those with lower security classifications but whose contributions could be important to the creation of a credible cover story. 

The official camouflage was almost as important to the military in 1947 as it was in 1961 when I took over. It was important because as far as the army was concerned, 1947 was still wartime, a Cold War, perhaps, but war nevertheless, and stories about military hardware as valuable as the material retrieved from Roswell could not be disclosed for fear that the Soviets would exploit it. Thus, from day 1, the army treated its retrieval of the debris as if it were an operation conducted in a wartime theater under battle conditions. Roswell became military intelligence. 

General Twining had seen the material for himself, and even before he returned to Wright Field, he’d conferred with the rocket scientists who were part of his brain trust at Alamogordo. Now, during the remainder of the summer months, he quietly compiled a report that he would deliver to President Truman and an ad hoc group of military, government, and civilian officials, who would ultimately become the chief policy makers for what would become an ongoing contact with extraterrestrials over the ensuing fifty years. And as stories of the Roswell crash and other UFO sightings around U.S. military bases began to filter in through the command chain of the armed services, General Twining also needed to establish a lower security channel along which he could exchange information with other commands that were not cleared all the way to the top. 

General Twining still reported to higher ups who, though they may not have had the security clearance he had with regard to extraterrestrial contact, nevertheless were his commanding officers and routinely sought information from the AMC. Accordingly, General Twining needed to maintain a quasi cover-up even within the military. 

The first of these reports was transmitted from General Twining to the commanding general of Army Air Forces in Washington, dated September 23, 1947. Written to the attention of Brig. Gen. George Schulgen, Twining’s memo addressed, in the most general of terms, the official Air Materiel Command’s intelligence regarding “flying discs. “ He drew a remarkable number of conclusions, most of which, I had to surmise when I was on Eisenhower’s National Security Council and then again when I got to the Pentagon, were based on Twining’s own first hand experience with the sighting reports from Roswell and other sighting reports as well as the materials themselves, which were in the military’s possession. 

Flying saucers or UFOs are not illusions, Twining says, referring to the sighting of strange objects in the sky as “something real and not visionary or fictitious. “ Even though he cites the possibility that some of the sightings are only meteors or other natural occurrences, he says that the reports are based upon real sightings of actual objects” approximating the shape of a disc, of such appreciable size as to be as large as man made aircraft. “ Considering that this report was never intended for public scrutiny, especially in 1947, Twining marveled at the aircraft's operating characteristics and went on record, drawing major conclusions about the material he had and the reports he’d heard or read. 

But, when he wrote that the extreme maneuverability of the aircraft and their “evasive” actions when sighted “or contacted” by friendly aircraft and radar led him to believe that they were either “manually, automatically, or remotely” flown, he not only suggested a guided flight but imparted a hostile intent to their evasive maneuvers to avoid contact. His characterization of the aircrafts’ behavior revealed, even weeks after the physical encounter, that those officers in the military who were now running the yet-to-be-codenamed extraterrestrial contact project already considered these objects and those entities who controlled them a military threat. He described the aircraft as it had been reported in the sightings: 

a “light reflective or metallic surface, “ 

“absence of a trail except in those few instances when the object was operating under high performance conditions, “  

“circular or elliptical in shape, flat on bottom and domed on top, 

“ flights in formation consisting of from “three to nine objects, “ and no sound except for those instances when “a substantial rumbling roar was noted. “ 

The objects moved quickly for aircraft at that time, he noted to General Schulgen, at level flight speeds above three hundred knots. 

Were the United States to build such an aircraft, especially one with a range of over seven thousand miles, the cost, commitment, administrative and development overhead, and drain on existing high technology projects required that the entire project should be independent or outside of the normal weapons development bureaucracy. In other words, as I interpreted the memo, Twining was suggesting to the commander of the Army Air Force that were the airforce, which would become a separate branch of the military by the following year, to attempt to exploit the technology that had quite literally dropped into its lap, it had to do so separately and independently from any normal weapons development program. 

The descriptions of the super secret projects at Nellis Air Force Base or Area 51 in the Nevada desert seem to fit the profile of the kind of recommendation that General Twining was making, especially the employment of the “skunk works” group at Lockheed in the development of the Stealth fighter and B2 bomber. 

Not revealing to the Army Air Forces command that Twining himself had been ordered to visit bases in New Mexico in the hours after the crash, the general advised his bosses that the military should consider whether the flying disks were of domestic origin, “the product of some high security project” already developed by the United States outside of normal channels, or developed by a foreign power that “has a form of propulsion possibly nuclear, which is outside of our domestic knowledge. “ At the same time, weaving a cover story that takes him out of the loop of reporting any of these flying disks as a first hand observer, Twining writes that there is a “lack of physical evidence in the shape of crash recovered exhibits which would undeniably prove the existence of these objects. “ 

But, even though General Twining has just written that there is no evidence, he nevertheless recommends to his superiors that: 

Headquarters, Army Air Forces issue a directive assigning a priority, security classification and Code Name for a detailed study of this matter to include the preparation of complete sets of all available and pertinent data which will then be made available to the Army, Navy, Atomic Energy Commission, JRDB, the Air Force Scientific Advisory Group, NACA, and the RAND and NEPA projects for comments and recommendations, with a preliminary report to be forwarded within 15 days of receipt of the data and a detailed report thereafter every 30 days as the investigation develops. A complete interchange of data should be effected.

This was an important part of the memo, at least for me and my research into how the army got the Roswell rile, because it accounted for the army’s dissemination of the Roswell materials and accompanying reports within only a couple of months after the material’s arrival at Wright Field. When General Twining suggested to his commanding officers at AAF that all the military branches as well as existing government and civilian commissions needed to share this information, the dispersal of the materials was already under way. This is how the technology came into the possession of Army R&D. 

Finally, the general promised the Army Air Forces command that the Air Materiel Command would continue to investigate the phenomenon within its own resources in order to define its nature further and it would route any more information it developed through channels. Three days after the memo, on September 26,1947, General Twining gave his report on the Roswell crash and its implications for the United States to President Truman and a short list of officials he convened to begin the management of this top-secret combination of inquiry, police development, and “ops.“ This working group, which included Adm. Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, Dr. Vannevar Bush, Secretary James Forrestal, Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg, Dr. Detlev Bronk, Dr. Jerome Hunsaker, Sidney W. Souers, Gordon Gray, Dr. Donald Menzel, Gen. Robert M. Montague, Dr. Lloyd V. Berkner, and Gen. Nathan Twining himself, became the nucleus for an ongoing fifty-year operation that some people have called “Majestic-12. “ 

At the Eisenhower White House, it was simply referred to as “the group, “ and in the days after Roswell it went into operation just as smoothly as slipping your new 1949 Buick with its “Dynaflow” automatic transmission into drive and pulling away from the curb. In this way General Twining had carefully orchestrated a complete cover-up of what had happened at Roswell as well as a full scale, top-secret military R&D operation to identify the nature of the phenomenon and assess its military threat to the United States. It was as elegant as it was effective. 

But the plan didn’t stop with the creation of the working group - in fact, the operation very quickly developed into something far more sophisticated because General Twining’s “flying discs” simply wouldn’t go away. As more information on sightings and encounters came rolling in through every imaginable channel, from police officers taking reports from frightened civilians to airline pilots tracking strange objects in the sky, the group realized that they needed policies on how to handle what was turning into a mass media phenomenon. They needed a mechanism for processing the thousands of flying saucer reports that could be anything from a real crash or close encounter to a couple of bohunks tossing a pie tin into the air and snapping its picture with their Aunt Harriet’s Kodak Brownie. 

The group also had to assess the threat from the Soviet Union and Iron Curtain countries, assuming of course that flying saucers weren’t restricted to North America, and gather intelligence on what kinds of information our allies had on flying saucers as well. And it still had to process the Roswell technology and figure out how it could be used. So from the original group there developed a whole tree structure of loosely confederated committees and subgroups, sometimes complete organizations like the air force Project Blue Book, all kept separate by administrative firewalls so that there would be no information leakage, but all controlled from the top. 

With the initial and ongoing stories safely covered up, the plans for the long term reverse engineering work on the Roswell technology could begin. But who would do it? Where would the material reside? And how could the camouflage of what the military was doing be maintained amidst the push for new weapons, competition with the Soviets, and the flying saucer mania that was sweeping the country in the late 1940s? 

General Twining had a plan for that, too. Just a little over a year after the initial group meetings at the White House, Air Force Intelligence, now that the air force had become a separate service, issued a December 1948 report - 100-203-79 - called “Analysis of Flying Object Incidents in the U.S.“ in which UFOs are never referred to as extraterrestrial objects but as elements of “foreign technology,“ which is actually the subject of the report. The report, innocuous to most people because it doesn’t say that flying saucers came from outer space, is actually one of the first indications showing how the camouflage plan was supposed to work over the ensuing years. 

The writers of the report had located within the existing military administrative structure the precise place where all research and development into the flying disk phenomenon could be pursued not only under a veil of secrecy but in the very place were no one could be expected to look: the Foreign Technology desk. Here, the materials could be deposited for safe keeping within the military while army and air force brass decided what our existing industrial and research technology allowed them to do. There could he as weapons failed, secret experiments without fear of exposure, and, most importantly, an ongoing discussion of how the United States could develop this treasure trove of engineering information, all within the very structure where it was supposed to take place. Just don’t call it extraterrestrial; call it “foreign technology” and throw it into the hopper with the rest of the mundane stuff the foreign technology officers were supposed to do. 

And that’s how, twelve years later, the Roswell technology turned up in an old combination locked military file cabinet carted into my new Pentagon office by two of the biggest enlisted men I’d ever seen. 

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The Cover-up