The Day After Roswell
Col. Philip J. Corso
With
William J. Birnes
CHAPTER 5
The Cover-up
The Cover-up while General Twining was flying back and forth from Ohio to New Mexico, on the other side of the world in Moscow, Chairman Josef Stalin was furious. Red-faced and not even trying to hide the rage that erupted like an exploding volcano, Stalin held up a copy of the Roswell Daily Record for Tuesday, July 8,1947, and threw it out onto the center of the table for any of the scientists in the room who could read English. Stalin didn’t need an American newspaper to tell him what his NKVD agents on the ground at Alamogordo reported weeks before: that a U.S. Army retrieval team had pulled a crashed alien spacecraft out of the New Mexico desert and was already evaluating the valuable technology they’d recovered.
At first, when the Soviet intelligence bosses got the reports from their agents at the American bases, they were more than skeptical. They figured the stories were plants, false information to flush out the Soviet spies the Americans suspected had infiltrated their most secret bases. If the Soviet government reacted to the disinformation, the American counter intelligence agents would be able to determine the path of the story and isolate the spies. But when newspapers began reporting the crash, then covered it up with stories about weather balloons, the Soviets knew they had stumbled onto the real thing. So it was true, Stalin told the group, the Americans had actually gotten their own flying saucer. Now, he asked, what would they do with it?
One of the chief designers of the Soviet’s embryonic liquid-fuel-rocket program was at the meeting. He, like many of the Soviet engineers who’d read the German secret weapons files at the end of the war, knew exactly where the Americans should have been in their guided-missile-development program. What information his bosses in the Kremlin thought he still needed to know, they gave him from the reports they received from agents in the field. But nothing, nothing about the V2 launches at White Sands, nothing about the new tracking radars at Alamogordo gave the scientists in the Soviet rocket program any indications the Americans were even an iota ahead of them in guided missiles until he heard the news of the Roswell crash.
Both the Russian and American missile programs were based almost entirely upon the German weapons research spoils that the Allies were dividing up even before the end of the war. I was a firsthand participant in this, secreting out German weapons scientists through Italy after we occupied Rome as part of a secret operation code named “Paper Clip” that began in 1944. With V2 designers Wernher von Braun, Willy Ley, and others running experiments on the German missiles we brought back to the United States, the army had successfully appropriated much of the German advanced weapons research and was carrying on experiments in New Mexico. The Soviets also got their own share of German technology through their own intelligence agents and local Communist Party cells in occupied countries.
And what a technology it was. The Germans had developed a crescent shaped jet powered flying wing, jet powered Messerschmitts that blazed by our P51s as if they were standing still, and a U boat launched VI/V2 that, had the Germans been able to hide even a small flotilla off the American East Coast, could have bombed out much of heavily concentrated downtown Washington in a matter of hours. All they needed to buy was enough time to deploy their weapons and get their U-boats in position. And that was their strategy toward the end of 1944 when they turned around and counter attacked through Belgium in the dead of winter and pinned us down at the Battle of the Bulge.
Break our advance on the ground, blast us out of the air with their new jets, bomb North American cities, and knock Britain out of the war. With their new weapons they could have fought us to a stand still and won a bitter truce. Both the Americans and the Soviets wanted to get their hands on those German weapons, especially the V2s.
Stalin didn’t have to worry much about who held the advantage in German weaponry after the war. Both sides were about equal. But this flying saucer crash, that was a different matter, and it meant that in an instant the United States could have gained an enormous advantage in the Cold War weapons race that had begun only moments after the Germans surrendered. What might that advantage be? The Russian liquid fuel engineer wondered aloud. What could the Americans have retrieved from that crash?
Soviet agents reported that the townspeople in Roswell had talked about little creatures at the crash site and a crescent shaped aircraft that the army hauled away on trucks, but the stories had been quickly silenced by military counter intelligence. So any real intelligence on what the Americans might be developing would have to come from Soviet agents deep inside the U.S. government. Stalin would order it. And, as if they were activated by an invisible switch, spies from one of the most efficient and ruthless intelligence machines in the world began homing in on the American military bases associated with the Roswell retrieval and the key American military and civilian personnel the Russians knew would have to be involved.
The Americans might not have been the most efficient spy catchers in 1947, but Army Counter intelligence had been put on alert even before the Soviets knew that a flying saucer had been retrieved. Starting from the central point at the nexus of sensitive New Mexico bases during the summer of 1947, CIC agents questioned anybody who seemed interested in learning about what happened in Roswell. Ask too many questions and knocking at your door would be a couple of plain clothes investigators who didn’t need a search warrant to rummage through your things. So maybe the army was a little overzealous about their interrogation procedures, but by early August it began producing results. By the time General Twining was writing his report to Army Air Forces command in Washington, both Army and Navy Intelligence commanders knew that the Soviets had a high priority operation in place at military bases around the country.
Soviet agents were everywhere. Central Intelligence group director Adm. Roscoe Hillenkoetter, a member of President Truman’s advisory group on UFOs, informed the president. A top down counter intelligence operation had to he put in place immediately, here commended, or every plan the military had to evaluate what they’d retrieved from Roswell would be compromised. There were a million questions. Were these flying objects the prelude to something much bigger? Were they communicating with the Soviets? Were they allied with the Soviets? Were they probing our defenses for a planetary invasion? We had already assumed that the behavior of these aircraft was hostile, but what did they want?
Meanwhile, other reports of civilian flying saucer sightings were turning up in newspapers and coming in through local police. Even airline pilots were seeing strange lights. There wasn’t much time to act. A secret this big about flying saucers was bound to get out and cause untold panic among the civilian population unless an elaborate camouflage was established. And worse, we had to keep the Soviets away from this until we knew what we had. We needed a plan, and right away.
Some have said it was Secretary of Defense James Forrestal’s idea. Others said the whole scheme belonged to Central Intelligence director Hillenkoetter. I, frankly, don’t know first hand because when the plan was hatched I was sweating out the end of the summer at Fort Riley, still trying to shake out of my mind the image of that ghoulishly unearthly thing I’d seen floating in its container. But whoever said it first was saying the obvious, according to the people on Eisenhower’s National Security staff whom I worked with six years later. Maybe it was Forrestal after all who was the only person in the cabinet who could have spoken to Truman that bluntly just a little over two years after the man had inherited the office from FDR and was already a very unpopular president.
“It’s like this, “ I had heard President Truman was told. “We’re in a real pickle here. Nate Twining says he doesn’t know what the hell this thing is except that if the Soviets get a hold of it, it’ll change the shape of things to come for sure. “
“You fellas going to write up some report for me?” the President asked.
“General Twining says he’d rather do it as a briefing, sir, for the time being, “ Admiral Hillenkoetter suggested.
“For your ears only. Then we have to have a working task group to manage this whole issue. “
Maybe the working group, whatever it was going to be called, would come up with a report analyzing the situation as soon as they reviewed what General Twining was putting under lock and key at Wright field, but nobody wanted to speculate until they knew what was there.
“Maybe you should sit down with General Twining first, “ both Forrestal and Hillenkoetter suggested. They knew that Harry Truman liked to get first hand reports from people who had seen the situation with their own eyes. FDR was corporate and knew how to digest reports. He trusted his subordinates. But Truman was different. He knew how to run a haberdashery store; if a hat didn’t fit he’d have to go back to the factory to find out why. It was the same with General Twining, who’d been at the crash sites himself. If Truman wanted answers, he’d have to see it through the eyes of someone who’d been there.
“Does he know what these SOBs are after?” Truman asked, referring to the aliens in the crashed saucer.
“That’s one of the questions we want to address, “ they said.
“How do you plan to do it?”
Forrestal and Hillenkoetter explained that they wanted the President to hear what General Twining had to say and then convene a group of military, civilian, and intelligence personnel with strong old school ties of trust for one another. In this way whatever decisions they made wouldn’t have to be memoed all over the place, thus risking the possibilities of leaks and tip-offs to the Soviets.
“We don’t want the newspapers or radio people getting their hands on any of this either, “ they told the President.
“Winchell would crucify me with this if he found out what we were doing, “ Truman was reported to have said at that meeting.
Nobody in the know liked President Truman very much, and he could appreciate it.
“It’s just like the Manhattan Project, Mr. President, “ Admiral Hillenkoetter reminded him. “It was war. We couldn’t tell anyone. This is war. Same thing. “
Then they explained that after they had convened a working group, they would task out the research of the technology while keeping it from the Soviet spy machine already operating at full bore within the government.
“We hide it from the government itself, “ the secretary explained.
“Create a whole new level of security classification just for this, “the Central Intelligence director said. “Any information we decide to release, even internally, we down grade so the people getting the information never have the security clearance that allows them all the way to the top. The only way to hide it from the Russians is to hide it from ourselves. “
But the President was still thinking about the difficulties of keeping an operation this far reaching out of the news, especially when flying saucers had become one of the hottest new items to talk about. What was he supposed to say when people ask the government about the flying disk stories? he asked, pressing for details that still had to be established. How could they research these strange creatures without the news getting out? And how could they analyze the wealth of physical material Hillenkoetter had described to him without bringing people from outside government? President Truman simply didn’t see how this government within a government camouflage idea could work without the whole thing spinning out of control. Despite Forrestal’s assurances, the president remained skeptical.
“And there’s one final point, “ Truman was said to have brought up to his Central Intelligence group director and secretary of defense. It was a question so basic that its apparent naivete belied an ominous threat that it suggested was just over the horizon. “Do we ever tell the American people what really happened?” There was silence.
Don’t ask me how I know. My old friend and enemy from the KGB wouldn’t tell me how he knew, and I didn’t press him. But, accept it as fact from the only source that could know, just as I did back when I was told, that neither the secretary of defense nor the director of intelligence had considered a disclosure like this as even a remote possibility.
“Well, “ President Truman said. “Do we?”
On November 7, 1944, the day FDR was elected to his fourth and final term, his chief adviser, Harry Hopkins, had described the new vice president Harry Truman as a man who couldn’t block a hat but who shouldn’t be underestimated. And James Forrestal, the man to whom he was speaking at the time, now understood what he meant as the secretary sat across from the now President Harry Truman.
This was a basic yes/no question, and although Forrestal and Hillenkoetter had a knee jerk reflex answer, “no, “ Forrestal quickly saw that it wasn’t that easy. As wartime administrators their first response was naturally to disclose nothing, abiding by the old saw that what the people don’t know, they don’t need to know. But President Truman, who had not come from a military background, had seen something neither Forrestal nor Hillenkoetter had seen. If these ships could evade our radar and land anywhere at will, what would stop them from landing in front of the White House or, for that matter, the Kremlin? Certainly not the U.S. Army Air Force.
“So what do we say when they land, “ I’m told that Truman continued, “and create more panic in the streets than if we’d disclosed what we think we know now?”
“But we really don’t know anything, “ the director of intelligence said. “Not a thing until we analyze what we’ve retrieved. “
But both the secretary of defense and director of intelligence agreed with President Truman that he was right to be skeptical, especially on his final point about disclosure.
“So can we postpone coming to any conclusions at least until after you’ve meet with General Twining?”
Admiral Hillenkoetter asked. “I think he’ll provide some of the answers we’re all looking for. “
While Adm. Roscoe Hillenkoetter and James Forrestal were briefing President Truman on their plan for the working group, Gen. Nathan P. Twining was completing his preliminary analysis of the reports and material sent to Wright Field. Almost immediately, he dispatched the remains of the aliens to the Bethesda Naval Hospital and the Walter Reed Army Hospital for further analysis by the two military services.
The aircraft itself remained at Wright Field but, as he would promise in his memo to the Army Air Forces command, General Twining was preparing to distribute the material from the wreckage among the different military and civilian bureaus for further evaluation. He’d already been cautioned by Admiral Hillenkoetter that new security classifications had been put in place regarding the Roswell intelligence package. No one within the military other than names he would receive from the President himself had the full security clearance to learn the complete story. about Roswell that Twining would deliver to the President and other members of a working group.
Within three months after he’d been dispatched to New Mexico to learn what had happened at Roswell, General Twining met with President Truman, as Hillenkoetter and Forrestal had suggested, and explained exactly what he believed the army had pulled out of the desert. It was almost beyond comprehension, he described to the President, nothing that could have come from this planet. If the Russians were working on something like this, it was so secret that not even their own military commanders knew anything about it, and the United States would have to establish a crash program just to prepare a defense. So it was Twining’s assessment that what they found outside of Roswell was, in his words, “not of this earth. “ Now President Truman had heard it, he told Forestall after Twining had left for Ohio, “directly from the horse’s mouth, “ and he was convinced. This was bigger than the Manhattan Project and required that it be managed on a larger scale and obviously for a longer period.
The group proposed by Forrestal and Hillenkoetter had to consider what they were really managing and for how long. Were they only trying to keep one secret - that an extraterrestrial alien spaceship crashed at Roswell - or were they hiding what would quickly become the largest military R&D undertaking in history, the management of what would become America’s relationship with extraterrestrials?
General Twining had made it clear in his preliminary analysis that they were investigating the whole phenomenon of flying disks, including Roswell and any other encounter that happened to take place. These were hostile entities, the general said, who, if they were on a peaceful mission, would have not avoided contact by taking evasive maneuvers even as they penetrated our airspace and observed our most secret military installations.
They had a technology vastly superior to ours, which we had to study and exploit in case they turned more aggressive. If we were forced to fight a war in outer space, we would have to understand the nature of the enemy better, especially if it came to preparing the American people for an enemy they had to face. So investigate first, he suggested, but prepare for the day when the whole undertaking would have to be disclosed. This, Truman could understand. He had trusted Twining to manage this potential crisis from the moment Forrestal had alerted him that the crash had taken place. And Twining had done a brilliant job. He kept the lid on the story and brought back everything that he could under one roof.
He understood as Twining described to him the strangeness of the spacecraft that seemed to have no engines, no fuel, nor any apparent methods of propulsion, yet out flew our fastest fighters; the odd childlike creatures who were inside and how one of them was killed by a gunshot; the way you could see daylight through the inside of the craft even though the sun had not yet risen; the swatches of metallic fabric that they couldn’t burn or melt; thin beams of light that you couldn’t see until they hit an object and then burned right through it, and on and on; more questions than answers. It would take years to find these answers, Twining had said, and it was beyond the immediate capacity of our military to do anything about it. This will take a lot of man power, the general said, and most of the work will have to be done in secret.
General Twining showed photographs of these alien beings and autopsy reports that suggested they were too human; they had to be related to our species in some way. They were obviously intelligent and able to communicate, witnesses at the scene had reported, by some sort of thought projection unlike any mental 39 telepathy you’d see at a carnival show. We didn’t know whether they came from a planet like Mars in our own solar system or from some galaxy we could barely see with our strongest telescopes. But they possessed a military technology whose edges we could understand and exploit, even if only for self defense against the Soviets. But by studying what these extraterrestrials had we might be able to build a defense system against them as well.
At the very least, Twining had suggested, the crescent shaped craft looked so uncomfortably like the German Horten wings our flyers had seen at the end of the war that he had to suspect the Germans had bumped into something we didn’t know about. And his conversations with Wernher von Braun and Willy Ley at Alamogordo in the days after the crash confirmed this. They didn’t want to be thought of as but intimated that there was a deeper story about what the Germans had engineered.
No, the similarity between the Horten wing and the craft they had pulled out of the arroyo was no accident. We always wondered how the Germans were able to incorporate such advanced technology into their weapons development in so short a time and during the Great Depression. Did they have help? Maybe we were now as lucky as the Germans and broke off a piece of this technology for ourselves. With an acceleration capability and maneuverability we’d never seen before, this craft would keep American aircraft engineers busy for years just incorporating what they could see into immediate designs.
The issue of security was paramount, but so were questions of disclosure, the President reminded him. This thing was too big to hide and getting bigger all the time while reporters were just like dogs on a scent. So just putting a higher security classification on it and threatening anybody who came too close wasn’t enough to hide a secret this big. You couldn’t prevent leaks, and eventually it would all have to come out anyway. General Twining should think about that before the group made any final decisions, the President advised.
By the middle of September it was obvious to every member of President Truman’s working group, which included the following:
• Central Intelligence Director Adm. Roscoe Hillenkoetter
• Secretary of Defense James Forrestal
• Lt. Gen. Nathan Twining of the AAF and then USAF Air Materiel Command
• Professor Donald Menzel, Harvard astronomer and Naval Intelligence cryptography expert
• Vannevar Bush, Joint Research and Development Board Chairman
• Detlev Bronk, Chairman of the National Research Council and biologist who would ultimately be named to the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics
• Gen. Robert Montague, who was General Twining’s classmate at West Point, Commandant of Fort Bliss with operational control over the command at White Sands
• Gordon Gray, President Truman’s Secretary of the Army and chairman of the CIA’s Psychological Strategy Board
• Sidney Souers, Director of the National Security Council
• Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg, Central Intelligence Group Director prior to Roscoe Hillenkoetter and then USAF Chief of Staff in 1948
• Jerome Hunsaker, aircraft engineer and Director of the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics
• Lloyd Berkner, member of the Joint Research and Development Board
Unless this group established a long term plan for protecting and developing the Roswell project, the secrets would soon leak out. I understand that it was General Twining who pointed out to the group that, in fact, the story had already leaked out. It was leaked, he said, hours after the crash and then retracted. In fact, people were still talking about it in New Mexico, but after the army’s weather balloon story, the national newspapers were treating the flying disk reports as the delusions of people who had seen too many Buck Rogers movies. The national press was already doing the committee’s work.
What was really needed, Twining suggested, was a method for gathering the information about continuing UFO activity - especially crashes, high probability sightings by pilots or the military, or actual physical encounters with individuals - and surreptitiously filtering that information to the group while coming up with practical explanations that would turn unidentified flying disks into completely identifiable and explainable phenomena.
Under the cover of explaining away all the flying disk activity, the appropriate agencies represented by members of the working group would be free to research the real flying disk phenomenon as they deemed appropriate. But through it all, Twining stressed, there had to be a way of maintaining full deniability of the flying disk phenomenon while actually preparing the public for a disclosure by gradually desensitizing them to the potential terror of confronting a more powerful biological entity from a different world. It would have to be, General Twining suggested, at the same time both the greatest cover-up and greatest public relations program ever undertaken.
The group agreed that these were the requirements of the endeavor they would undertake. They would form nothing less than a government within the government, sustaining itself from presidential administration to presidential administration regardless of whatever political party took power, and ruthlessly guarding their secrets while evaluating every new bit of information on flying saucers they received. But at the same time, they would allow disclosure of some of the most far fetched information, whether true or not, because it would help create a climate of public attitude that would be able to accept the existence of extraterrestrial life without a general sense of panic.
“It will be, “ General Twining said, “a case where the cover-up is the disclosure and the disclosure is the coverup. Deny everything, but let the public sentiment take its course. Let skepticism do our work for us until the truth becomes common acceptance. “
Meanwhile, the group agreed to establish an information gathering project, ultimately named Blue Book and managed explicitly by the air force, which would serve public relations purposes by allowing individuals to file reports on flying disk sightings. While the Blue Book field officers attributed commonplace explanations to the reported sightings, the entire project was a mechanism to acquire photographic records of flying saucer activity for evaluation and research. The most intriguing sightings that had the highest probability of being truly unidentified objects would be bumped upstairs to the working group for dissemination to the authorized agencies carrying on the research. For my purposes, when I entered the Pentagon, the general category of all flying disk phenomena research and evaluation was referred to simply as “foreign technology. “
CHAPTER 6
The Strategy
The Strategy there is an old story I once heard about keeping secrets. A group of men were trying to protect their deepest secrets from the rest of the world. They took their secrets and hid them in a shack whose very location was a secret. But the secret location was soon discovered and in it was discovered the secrets that the group was hiding. But before every secret could be revealed, the men quickly built a second shack where they stored those secrets they still kept to themselves.
Soon, the second shack was discovered and the group realized they would have to give up some secrets to protect the rest. So they again moved quickly to build a third shack and protect whatever secrets they could. This process repeated itself over and over until anyone wanting to find out what the secrets were had to start at the first shack and work their way from shack to shack until they came to where they could go no further because they didn’t know the location of the next shack.
For fifty years this was the very process by which the secrets of Roswell were protected by various serial incarnations of an ad hoc confederation of top-secret working groups throughout different branches of the government, and it is still going on today.
Were you to search through every government document to find the declassified secrets of Roswell and the contact we maintained with the aliens who were visiting us before and have been doing so ever since, you would find code named project after code named project, each with its own file, security classification, military or government administration, oversight mechanism, some form of budget, and even reports of highly classified documents. All of these projects were started to accomplish part of the same task: manage our ongoing relationship with the alien visitors we discovered at Roswell. However, at each level, once the security had been breached for whatever reason -even by design - part of the secret was disclosed through declassification while the rest was dragged into a new classified project or moved to an existing one that had not been compromised.
It makes perfect sense, especially to those of us who understand that the government is not some monolithic piece of granite that never moves or reacts. To those of us inside the military/government machine the government is dynamic, highly reactive, and even proactive when it comes to devising ways to protect its most closely held secrets. For all the years after Roswell we weren’t just one step ahead of people wanting to know what really happened, we were a hundred steps ahead, a thousand, or even more. In fact, we never hid the truth from anybody, we just camouflaged it. It was always there, people just didn’t know what to look for or recognize it for what it was when they found it. And they found it over and over again.
Project “Blue Book” was created to make the general public happy that they had a mechanism for reporting what they saw. Projects “Grudge” and “Sign” were of a higher security to allow the military to process sightings and encounter reports that couldn’t easily be explained away as balloons, geese, or the planet Venus. Blue Fly and Twinkle had other purposes, as did scores of other camouflage projects like Horizon, HARP, Rainbow, and even the Space Defense Initiative, all of which had something to do with alien technology. But no one ever knew it. And when reporters were actually given truthful descriptions of alien encounters, they either fell on the floor laughing or sold the story to the tabloids, who’d print a drawing of a large headed, almond eyed, six fingered alien. Again, everybody laughed. But that’s what these things really look like because I saw the one they trucked up to Wright Field.
Meanwhile, as each new project was created and administered, another bread crumb for anyone pursuing the secrets to find, we were gradually releasing bits and pieces of information to those we knew would make something out of it. Flying saucers did truly buzz over Washington, D.C., in 1952, and there are plenty of photographs and radar reports to substantiate it. But we denied it while encouraging science fiction writers to make movies like The Man from Planet X to blow off some of the pressure concerning the truth about flying disks. This was called camouflage through limited disclosure, and it worked. If people could enjoy it as entertainment, get duly frightened, and follow trails to nowhere that the working group had planted, then they’d be less likely to stumble over what we were really doing. And what were we really doing?
As General Twining had suggested in his report to the Army Air Forces, “foreign technology” was the category to which research on the alien artifacts from Roswell was to be delegated. Foreign technology was one of the great catch all terms, encompassing everything from researching French air force engineering advances on helicopter blades to captured Russian MiGs flown in from Cuba by savvy pilots who could negotiate our southern radar perimeter better than our own pilots. So what if a few pieces of technological debris from a strange crescent shaped hovering wing turned up in an old file somewhere in the army’s foreign technology files? If nobody asked about it - and nobody did because foreign technology was just too damned dull for most reporters to hang around - we didn’t have to say anything about it. Besides, most foreign technology stuff was classified anyway because it dealt with weapons development we were hiding from the Soviets and most reporters knew it. Foreign technology was the absolute perfect cover. All I had to do was figure out what to do with the stuff I had. And General Trudeau wasn’t in the mood to wait any longer.
“Come on, Phil, let’s go. “ The general’s voice suddenly filled the room over the blown speaker hum of my desk intercom. I put down my coffee and headed up the stairway to the back door of his inner office. This was a routine that repeated itself three, sometimes four times a day. The general always liked to get briefed in person because even in the most secure areas of the Pentagon, the walls tended to listen and remember our conversations.
Our sessions were always private, and from the way our conversation bounced back and forth among different topics, if it weren’t for his three stars and my pair of leaves, you wouldn’t even think you were listening to a pair of army officers. It was cordial and friendly, but my boss was my boss and, even after we both retired like two old war horses put out to pasture, our meetings were never informal.
“So now you figured out how the package arrived?” he asked me after I sat down. I had figured it out by going through all of the files I could get my hands on and tracing the path of the Roswell information from the 509th to Fort Bliss and from there to Wright Field, the dissemination point.
General Trudeau motioned for me to sit down and I settled into a chair. It was already ten thirty in the morning so I knew there’d be at least two other sit down briefings that day.
“I know it didn’t come by the parcel service, “ I said. “I don’t think they have a truck that big. “ “Does that help you figure out what we should do?” he asked.
Actually, knowing how the material got into the Foreign Technology files was critically important because it meant that it was dispatched there originally. Even if it had been neglected over the years, it was clear that the Foreign Technology desk of the R&D system was its intended destination, part of the original plan. And I even had the documents from General Twining’s own files to substantiate this. Not that I would have ever revealed them at that time. General Twining, more than anyone else during those years after the war, understood the sensitive and protected nature of the R&D budget. And now that I understood how the camouflage was to take place, I also saw how brilliant the general’s plan was. R&D, although important and turning over records like topsoil from the Nazi weapons development files captured after the war, was kind of a backwater railroad junction. Unnoticed by most officers on their way to the top and not called upon in the late 1940s to do much more than record keeping, it turned out to be the perfect hideaway when the CIA hirelings came sniffing through the Pentagon in the early 1950s looking for anything they could find on the Roswell technology. Unless they were part of the working group from the start, not even members of the Eisenhower White House National Security staff knew that R&D was the repository of Roswell artifacts. I was there. I can vouch for that. In fact, it wasn’t until I saw the files for myself and reverse traced their path to my doorstep that I realized what General Twining and the working group had accomplished. By the time I had arrived at the White House, though, it was all ancient history. People were more worried about the sighting information deluging Project Blue Book every day than they were about the all but forgotten story of Roswell.
But my mind was drifting and the general was still speaking. He wanted to know what my research had uncovered and what I had learned about Roswell during my years at the White House, what I’d seen, how far the concentric circles of the group and the people who worked for them went.
“Phil, we both know that the package you have is no surprise, “ he said very flatly.
I didn’t respond substantively, and he didn’t expect me to, because to do so would have meant breaching security confidentiality that I’d sworn to maintain when I was assigned to the NSC staff at the White House.
“You don’t have to say anything officially, “ he continued. “And I don’t expect you to. But can you give me your impressions of how people working for the group talked about the package?”
“I wasn’t working for the group, General, “ I said. “And whatever I saw or heard was only because it happened to pass by, not because I was supposed to do anything about it. “
But he pushed me to remember whether the NSC staff had any direct dealings with the group and how much the Central Intelligence staffers at the White House pressed to get any information they could about what the group was doing. Of course I remembered the questions going back and forth about what might have happened at Roswell, about what was really behind Blue Book, and about all those lights buzzing the Washington Monument back in 1952. I didn’t have anything substantive to tell my boss about my involvement, but his questions helped me put together a bigger picture than I thought I knew.
From my perspective in 1961, especially after reviewing everything I could about what happened in the days after the Roswell crash, I could see very clearly the things that I didn’t understand back in 1955. I didn’t know why the CIA was so aggressively agitated about the repeated stories of flying saucer sightings or why they kept searching for any information about the technology from Roswell. I certainly didn’t volunteer any information, mainly because nobody asked me, about having seen parts of “the cargo” as it passed through Fort Riley. I just played position, representing the army as the military member of the National Security Staff, but I listened to everything I heard like a fly on the wall.
General Trudeau’s questions forced me to ask myself what the big picture was that he saw. He was obviously looking for something in my descriptions of the architecture of the group, as I had learned it from my review of the history, and of the starters on the lower security classification periphery as I understood it from my experience at the White House. He really wanted to know how the bureaucracy worked, how much activity the group itself generated, what kinds of policy questions came up in my presence, and whether I was asked to comment informally on anything having to do with the issues of the group.
Did Admiral Hillenkoetter host many briefings for President Eisenhower where Generals Twining, Smith, Montague, and Vandenburg were present? Gen. W. B. Smith had replaced Secretary Forrestal after he committed suicide during the second year of the Truman administration. Were Professor Menzel and Drs. Bush and Berkner visitors to the White House on regular occasions? Did they meet at the White House with Admiral Hillenkoetter or the generals? What was the level of presence of the CIA staffers at the White House through all of this? And did I recognize anyone from the Joint Research and Development Board or the Atomic Energy Commission at any briefings chaired by Admiral Hillenkoetter?
Through General Trudeau’s questions I could see not only that the general knew his history almost as well as I did about how the original group was formed and how it must have operated, but he also had a sense of what kind of problem was facing the military R&D and how much leeway he had to solve it. Like most ad hoc creations of government, the group must have at some point become as self-serving as every other joint committee eventually became the longer it functioned and the more its job increased. As the camouflage about flying disks grew, so did the role of the group.
Only the group didn’t have the one thing most government committees had : the ability to draw upon other areas of the government for more resources. This group was above top secret and, officially, had no right to exist. Therefore, as its functions grew over the next ten years to encompass the investigations of more flying saucer sightings and the research into more encounters with alien aircraft or with the extraterrestrials themselves, its resources became stretched so thin that it had to create reasons for drawing upon other areas of the government. Accordingly, task-defined subgroups were formed to handle specific areas of investigation or research. These had to have had lower security classifications even if only because the number of personnel involved couldn’t have been cleared that quickly to respond to the additional work the group was taking on. In fact, the work of the group must have become unmanageable. Bits and pieces of information slipped out, and the group had to determine what it could let go into the public record and what had to be protected at all costs. As in the story about the shacks, the group members retreated to create new protected structures for the information they had to preserve.
The official camouflage was sagging under the weight of the information the group had to investigate and the pressure of time they were allotted. Soon the military representatives found, just as we did in Korea, that they really couldn’t trust the career intelligence people, especially the CIA, because they seemed to have a different agenda. Maybe the military became resistant to giving up all the information it was collecting independently to the central group? Maybe, in the absence of any actual legislation establishing how the group’s work was to be paid for, the military saw valuable and fundable weapons opportunities slip through its fingers to the CIA’s budget? Maybe - and I know this is what happened - a power struggle developed within the group itself.
The whole structure of the working group had changed, too, since the late 1940s when it was formed. What started out as a close-knit group of old friends from prep school had become an unmanageable mess within five years. Many pieces of the pie were floating around, and the different military branches wanted to break off chunks of the black budget so that you needed an entire administration just to manage the managers of the cover-up.
Therefore, at some point near the middle of the Eisenhower administration, seams opened up in the grand camouflage scheme where nobody knew what anybody else was doing. Because of the cover-up, nobody really had a need to know, so nobody knew anything. The only people who wanted to get their hands on information and hardware belonged to the CIA, but nobody, even those who vaguely understood what had happened fourteen years earlier, trusted the CIA. Officially, then, nobody knew nothing and nothing happened.
Through the 1950s a cascade effect developed. What had started out as a single-purpose camouflage operation was breaking up into smaller units. Command and control functions started to weaken and, just like a submarine that breaks up on the bottom of the ocean, debris in the form of information bubbled to the surface. Army CIC, once a powerful force to keep the Roswell story itself suppressed, had weakened under the combined encroachments of the CIA and the FBI. It was during this period that my old friend J. Edgar Hoover, never happy at being kept out of any loop, jumped into the circle and very quietly began investigating the Roswell incident. This shook things up, and very soon afterward, other government agencies - the ones with official reporting responsibilities - began poking around as well.
For all intents and purposes, the original scheme to perpetrate a camouflage was defunct by the late 1950s. Its functions were now being managed by series of individual groups within the military and civilian intelligence agencies, all still sharing limited information with each other, each pursuing its own individual research and investigation, and each - astonishingly - still acting as if some super intelligence group was still in command. But, like the Wizard of Oz, there was no super intelligence group. Its functions had been absorbed by the groups beneath it. But nobody bothered to tell anyone because a super group was never supposed to exist officially in the first place.
That which did not exist officially could not go out of existence officially. Hence, right through the next forty years, the remnants of what once was a super group went through the motions, but the real activities were carried out by individual agencies that believed on blind faith that they were being managed by higher-ups. Remember the lines of cars at gas pumps during the fuel shortage of 1973 when one driver, thinking a gas station was open, would wait at a pump and within fifteen minutes scores of other cars pulled up behind him? Lines a mile long formed behind pumps that were never open because there was no gas. That’s what the great flying saucer camouflage was like by the time President Kennedy was inaugurated.
“There’s nobody home, Phil, “ General Trudeau told me as we compared our notes at that morning’s briefing.
“Nobody home except us. We have to make our own policy. “
I was a soldier and followed orders, but Trudeau was a general, the product of a political process, stamped with congressional approval, and reporting to a civilian executive. Generals are made by the government, not by the army. They sit between the government and the vast military machine and from the Army Chief of Staff all the way down to the brigadiers at bases around the world, generals create the way military policy is supposed to work. And on the morning of this briefing over cups of coffee in his inner office of the third floor of the Pentagon, Lieutenant General Trudeau was going to make policy and do the very thing that over ten years of secret work groups and committees and research planning had failed to do: exploit the Roswell technology.
“I need you to tell me you found a way to make something out of this mess, “ General Trudeau told me. “There must be some piece of technology in your file that’ll make a weapon, that we can use for one of our helicopters. What do we have in there, Phil?”
Then he said. “Time is now of the essence. We have to do something because nobody else will. “
In the great cloud of unknowing that had descended upon the Pentagon with respect to the Roswell package, the five or six of us in the navy, air force, and army who actually knew what we had didn’t confide in anyone outside his own branch of the military and certainly didn’t talk to the CIA. So, in a way that could only happen inside the military bureaucracy, the cover-up became covered up from the cover-up, leaving the few of us in the know free to do whatever we wanted.
General Trudeau and I were all alone out there in so far as the package went. Whatever vestige of the group remained had simply lost track of the material delivered to Foreign Technology fourteen years earlier. And the general was right, nobody was home and our enemies inside government were capitalizing on whatever information they could find. The Roswell package was one of the prizes, and if we didn’t do anything with it, the Russians would. And they were onto us.
Our own military intelligence personnel told us that the Soviets were trafficking so heavily in our military secrets that they knew things about us in the Kremlin before we knew them in Congress. The army at least knew the KGB had penetrated the CIA, and the leadership of the CIA had been an integral part of the working group on flying disks since the early 1950s. Thus, whatever secrets the group thought they had, they certainly weren’t secrets to the KGB.
But here’s what kept the roof from falling in on all of us. The KGB and the CIA weren’t really the adversaries everybody thought them to be. They spied on each other, but for all practical purposes, and also because each agency had thoroughly penetrated the other, they behaved just like the same organization. They were all professional spies in a single extended agency playing the same intelligence game and trafficking in information. Information is power to be used. You don’t simply give it away to your government’s political 45 leadership, whether it’s the Republicans, the Tories, or the Communists, just because they tell you to. You can’t trust the politicians, but you can trust other spies. At least that’s what spies believe, so their primary loyalty is to their own group and the other groups playing the same game. The CIA, KGB, British Secret Service, and a whole host of other foreign intelligence agencies were loyal to themselves and to the profession first and to their respective governments last.
That’s one of the reasons we in the military knew that the professional KGB leadership, not the Communist Party officers who were only inside for political reasons, were keeping as much information from the Soviet government as the CIA was keeping from our government. Professional spy organizations like the CIA and the KGB tend to exist only to preserve themselves, and that’s why neither the U.S. military nor the Russian military trusted them. If you look at how the great spy wars of the Cold War played out you’ll see how the KGB and CIA acted like one organization: lots of professional courtesy, lots of shared information to make sure nobody got fired, and a few human sacrifices now and then just to keep everybody honest. But when it came down to loyalty, the CIA was loyal to the KGB and vice versa.
I believe they had a rationale for what they did. I know they thought the rest of us were too stupid to keep the world safe and that by sharing information they kept us out of a nuclear war. I believe this because I knew enough KGB agents during my time and got enough bits and pieces of information off the record to give me a picture of the Soviet Union during the 1950s and 1960s that’s very different from what you’d read on the front page of the New York Times.
CIA penetration by the KGB and what amounted to their joint spying on the military was a fact we accepted during the 1950s and1960s, even though most of us in the Pentagon played spy versus spy as much as we could; those of us, like me, who’d gone to intelligence school during the war and knew some of the counter espionage tricks that kept the people watching you guessing. We would change our routes to work, always used false information stories as bait to test phones we weren’t sure about, swept our offices for listening devices, always used a code when talking with one another about sensitive subjects. We had a counter intelligence agent in the military attaché’s office over at the Russian consulate in Washington whose friends in the Soviet army trusted the KGB less than I did. If my name came up associated with a story, he’d let me know it. But he’d never tell the CIA. Believe it or not, in the capital of my very own country, that kind of information helped me stay alive.
It was very disconcerting that the CIA had a tail on me all throughout my four year tenure at the White House.
I was mad about it, but there was nothing much I chose to do. Then, when I came back to Washington in 1961 to work for General Trudeau, they put the tail back on and I led him down every back alley and rough neighborhood in D.C. that I could. He wouldn’t shake. So the next day, after I told my boss what I was going to do, I led my faceless pursuer right to Langley, Virginia, past a sputtering secretary, and straight into the office of my old adversary, the director of cover operations Frank Wiesner, one of the best friends the KGB ever had. I told Wiesner to his face that yesterday was the last day I would walk around Washington without a handgun. And I put my .45 automatic on his desk. I said if I saw his tail on me tomorrow, they’d find him in the Potomac the next day with two bloody holes for eyes; that is, if they bothered to look for him. Wiesner said, “You won’t do that, Colonel. “
But I reminded him very pointedly that I knew where all his bodies were buried, the people he’d gotten killed through his own ineptitude and, worse, his cooperation with the Russians. I’d tell his story to everyone I knew in Congress. Wiesner backed down. Subsequently, on a trip to London, Wiesner committed suicide and was found hanging in his hotel room. I never did tell his story. Two years later in 1963, one of Wiesner’s friends at the agency told me that it was “all in good fun, Phil. “ Part of an elaborate recruitment process to get me into the CIA after I retired from the army. But I went to work for Senator Strom Thurmond on the Foreign Relations Committee and then Senator Richard Russell on the Warren Commission instead.
Our collective experience dodging the CIA and the KGB only meant that when General Trudeau wanted the CIA kept out of our deliberations at all cost, it was because he knew that everything we discussed would be a topic of conversation at the KGB within twenty four hours, faster if it were serious enough for the KGB to get their counterparts in the CIA to throw a monkey wrench into things.
How do I know all this? The same way I knew how the KGB stayed one step ahead of us during the Korean War and were able to advise their friends, the North Koreans, how to hold POWs back during the exchange. We had leaks inside the Kremlin just like they had leaks inside the White House. What General Trudeau and I knew in Army R&D, our counterparts in the navy and air force also believed. The CIA was the enemy. You trust no one. So when it became clear to the general even before 1961 that no one remembered what the army had appropriated at Roswell, whatever we had was ours to develop according to our own strategy. But we had to do it so as not to allow the CIA, and ultimately our government’s enemies, to appropriate it from us. So when General Trudeau said we have to run radio silent on the Roswell package, I knew exactly what he was talking about.
Logic, and clearly not my military genius, dictated the obvious course. If nobody knows what you have, don’t announce it. But if you think you can make something out of what you have, make it. Use any resources at your disposal, but don’t say anything to anyone about what you’re doing. The only people in the room when we came up with our plan were the general and myself, and he promised, “I won’t say anything if you don’t, Phil. “
“There’s nobody in here but us brooms, General,“ I answered.
So we began to devise a strategy.
“Hypothetically, Phil, “ Trudeau laid the question out. “What’s the best way to exploit what we have without anybody knowing we’re doing anything special?”
“Simple, General, “ I answered. “We don’t do anything special. “
“You have a plan?” he asked.
“More of an idea than a plan, “ I began. “But it starts like this. It’s what you asked: If we don’t want anybody to think we’re doing anything out of the ordinary, we don’t do anything out of the ordinary. When General Twining made his original recommendations to President Truman and the army, he didn’t suggest they do anything with this nut file other than what they ordinarily do. Business as usual? That’s how this whole secret group operated. Nobody did anything special. What they did was organize according to a business plan even though the operation was something that hadn’t been done before. That’s the camouflage: don’t change a thing but use your same procedures to handle this alien technology. “
“So how do you recommend we operate?” he asked. I think he already figured out what I was saying but wanted me to spell it out so we could start moving my nut file out of the Pentagon and out of the encroaching shadow of the CIA.
“We start the same way this desk has always started : with reports, “I said. “I’ll write up reports on the alien technology just like it’s an intelligence report on any piece of foreign technology. What I see, what I think the potential may be, where we might be able to develop, what company we should take it to, and what kind of contract we should draw up. “
“Where will you start?” the general asked.
“I’ll line up everything in the nut file, “ I began. “Everything from what’s obvious to what I can’t make heads or tails out of. And I’ll go to scientists with clearance who we can trust, Oberth and von Braun, for advice. “
“I see what you mean, “ Trudeau acknowledged. “Sure. We’ll lineup our defense contractors, too. See which ones have ongoing development contracts that allow us to feed your development projects right into them. “
“Exactly. That way the existing defense contract becomes the cover for what we’re developing, “ I said. “Nothing is ever out of the ordinary because we’re never starting up anything that hasn’t already been started up in a previous contract. “
“It’s just like a big mix and match, “ Trudeau described it.
“Only what we’re doing, General, is mixing technology we’re developing in with technology not of this earth, “ I said. “And we’ll let the companies we’re contracting with apply for the patents themselves. “
“Of course, “ Trudeau realized. “If they own the patent we will have completely reverse engineered the technology. “
“Yes, sir, that’s right. Nobody will ever know. We won’t even tell the companies we’re working with where this technology comes from. As far as the world will know the history of the patent is the history of the invention. “
“It’s the perfect cover, Phil, “ the general said. “Where will you start?”
“I’ll write up my first analysis and recommendation tonight, “ I promised. “There’s not a moment to lose. “
“The photographs in my file,“ I began my report that night over the autopsy reports, which I attached, show a being of about 4 feet tall. The body seemed decomposed and the photos themselves aren’t of much use except to the curious. It’s the medical reports that are of interest. The organs, bones, and skin composition are different from ours. The being’s heart and lungs are bigger than a human’s. The bones are thinner but seem stronger as if the atoms are aligned differently for a greater tensile strength.
The skin also shows a different atomic alignment in a way that appears the skin is supposed to protect the vital organs from cosmic ray or wave action or gravitational forces that we don’t yet understand. The overall medical report suggests that the medical examiners are more surprised at the similarities between the being found in the spacecraft (note: NSC reports refer to this creature as an Extraterrestrial Biological Entity [EBE]) and human beings than they are at the differences, especially the brain which is bigger in the EBE but not at all unlike ours.
I wrote on into the first of many nights that year, drafting rough notes that I would later type into formal reports that no one would ever see except General Trudeau, reaching conclusions that seemed more science fiction than real. I was most happy not because I was finally working on these files but, oddly enough, because when I sat down to write, I believed these reports would never see the light of day. In the harsh reality of the everyday world, they sound, even now as I remember them, fantastic. Even more fantastic, I remember, were the startling conclusions I allowed myself to come to. Was this really I writing, or was it somebody else? Where did these ideas come from?
If we consider similar biological factors that affect human beings, like long distance runners whose hearts and lungs are larger than average, hill and mountain dwellers whose lung capacity is greater than those who live closer to sea level, and even natural athletes whose long striated muscle alignment is different from those who are not athletes, can we not assume that the EBEs who have fallen into our possession represent the end process of genetic engineering designed to adapt them to long space voyages within an electromagnetic wave environment at speeds which create the physical conditions described by Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity?
(Note for the record: Dr. Hermann Oberth suggests we consider the Roswell craft from the New Mexico desert not a spacecraft but a time machine. His technical report on propulsion will follow.)
CHAPTER 7
The EBE
Therefore, perhaps we should consider the EBEs as described in the medical autopsy reports humanoid robots rather then life forms, specifically engineered for long distance travel through space or time.
A hot Washington summer morning had already settled over the Potomac like a wet towel on the day I finished the first of my reports for General Trudeau. And what a report it was. It set the tone for all of the other reports and recommendations I was to make for the general over the next two years. It began with the biggest find we had: the alien extraterrestrial itself. Had I not read the medical examiner’s report of the alien from Walter Reed with my own eyes and reviewed the 1947 army photographs and sketches, I would have called any description of this creature pure science fiction; that is, had I not seen either this or its twin suspended in a transparent crypt at Fort Riley. But here it was again, just a yellowing sheaf of papers and a few cracked glossy prints in a brown folder sitting among scores of odds and ends, bits of debris, and strange devices in my nut file. Even stranger to me than the medical examiner’s report was my reaction: What could we exploit from this entity? I wrote the general that “whether we found an ‘extraterrestrial biological entity’ is not as important in the R&D arena as are the ways we can develop what we learn from it so that man can travel in space. “ This quickly became the overriding concern with all of the Roswell artifacts and the general format for all of my reports. Once I swallowed back the “oh wow” aspect to all of this life altering information - and sometimes it took a very big swallow - I was still left with the job of sorting out what looked promising for R&D to develop from what seemed beyond our realistic grasp for the present. I began with the EBE.
The medical report and supporting photographs in front of me suggested that the creature was remarkably well adapted for long distance space travel. For example, biological time, the Walter Reed medical examiners hypothesized, must have passed very slowly for the entity because it possessed a very slow metabolism, evidenced, they said, by the enormous capacities of the huge heart and lungs.
The physiology of this thing indicated that this was not a creature whose body had to work hard to sustain it. A larger heart, my ME’s report read, meant that it took fewer beats than an average human heart to drive the thin, milky, almost lymphatic like fluid through a limited, more primitive looking, and apparently reduced capacity circulatory system. As a result, the biological clock beat more slowly than a human’s and probably allowed the creature to travel great distances in a shorter biological time than humans.
The heart was very decomposed by the time the Walter Reed pathologists got their hands on it. It seemed to them that our atmosphere was quite toxic to the creature’s organs. Given the time that passed between the crash of the vehicle and the creature’s arrival at Walter Reed, it decomposed all of the organs far more rapidly than it would have decomposed human organs. This fact particularly impressed me because I had seen one of these things, if not the very one described in the report, suspended in a gel-like substance at Fort Riley.
So whatever exposure it must have had was very minimal by human standards because the medical personnel at the 509th’s Walker Field got it into a liquid preservation state very quickly. Nevertheless, the Walter Reed pathologists were unable to determine with any certainty the structure of the creature’s heart except to guess that because it functioned as a passive blood storage facility as well as a pumping muscle that it didn’t work the same way as did a four chambered human heart. They said the alien heart seemed to have had internal diaphragm like muscles that worked less hard than human heart muscle did because the creatures were meant to survive within a reduced gravity as we understand gravity.
As camels store water, so did this creature store whatever atmosphere it breathed in the large capacity of its lungs. The lungs functioned in ways similar to a camel’s humps or to our scuba tanks and released atmosphere very slowly into the creature’s system. Because of the large heart and the storage function we believed it had, we also surmised that it took far less breathable atmosphere to sustain the creature, thereby reducing the need for carrying large volumes of atmosphere along on the voyage.
Perhaps the aircraft had a means of recirculating its atmosphere, recycling spent or waste air back into the craft. Moreover, because the creatures were only four or to feet tall, the large lungs occupied a far greater percentage of the chest cavity than human lungs did, further impressing the pathologists who examined the creatures’ remains. This also indicated to us that perhaps we were dealing with an entity specifically engineered for long distance travel.
If we believed the heart and lungs seemed bioengineered for long distance travel so, too, was the creature’s skeletal tissue. Although it was in a state of advanced decomposition, the creature’s bones looked to the army medical examiners to be fibrous, actually thinner than comparable human bones such as the ribs, sternum, clavicle, and pelvis. Pathologists speculated that the bones were more flexible than human bones and had a resiliency that might be related to the function of shock absorbers. More brittle human bones might more easily shatter under the stresses these alien entities must have been routinely subjected to. However, with a flexible skeletal frame, these entities appeared well suited for potential shocks and physical traumas of extreme forces and could withstand the fractures that would cripple human space travelers in a similar environment.
The military recovery team at the Roswell site had reported that the two creatures still alive after the crash had difficulty breathing our atmosphere. Whether that was because they were suddenly tossed out of their craft, unprotected, into our gravity envelope or whether our atmosphere itself was toxic to them, we don’t 49 know. We also don’t know whether the one creature who died very shortly after the crash was struggling to breathe because he was fatally wounded by gunshots or because of other reasons.
Military witnesses recounted different stories about the creature that survived and tried to run. Some said it was struggling to breathe from the moment the military had secured the area; others said that it was gasping only after it had been shot by one of the sentries. My guess was that it was the alien’s sudden exposure to the earth’s strong gravity that caused the creature to panic at first. That could have been one reason his breathing seemed labored. Then, after he fled and was shot, he was struggling to breathe because of his wounds. The medical examiner’s report mentioned nothing about toxic gases or the kind of atmosphere he believed the creatures naturally breathed.
If the Roswell craft were a scout or surveillance ship, as the military analysts back at Wright believed, then it was also more than likely that the creatures never intended to exit the craft. This was a craft equipped with a device that was capable of penetrating our nighttime or utilizing the temperature differentials of different objects to create a visual image, enabling the occupants to navigate and observe in darkness. And because it could elude our interceptors and appear and disappear on our radar screens at will, we believed that the occupants simply stayed inside and observed rather than roamed about. Perhaps other types of craft deployed from this same culture were equipped to land and carry out missions and therefore had breathing and antigravity apparatus on board for its crew that permitted them to exit the craft without suffering any consequences. The medical examiner didn’t speculate on this.
What did intrigue those who inspected the aircraft once it was shipped to Wright Field was the complete absence of any food preparation facilities. Nor were there any stored foodstuffs on board. At a time when space travel was a science fiction writer’s fantasy, military analysts were already at work formulating ideas for how just such a technology could be practically implemented. It was not for travel to other planets, but for navigation around the earth because that’s the technology that military planners believed the Germans were developing as an extension of their V2 rocket program.
If you’re going to put airmen into earth orbit, how do you process their waste products, provide adequate oxygen, and sustain them during prolonged periods? Clearly, after you’ve developed a launch vehicle with enough thrust to put a craft into earth orbit, keeping it there long enough for it to accomplish a mission is the next problem to tackle. The Roswell craft seemed to have tackled it because somehow it got here from somewhere else. But there was no indication of how such household problems as food preparation and the disposal of waste were solved.
There was much speculation from the different medical analysts about what these beings were composed of and what could have sustained them. First of all, doctors were more tantalized by the similarities the creatures shared with us than they were concerned about the differences. Rather than hideous-looking insects or the reptilian man-eaters that attacked Earth in War of the Worlds, these beings looked like little versions of us, only different. It was eerie.
While doctors couldn’t figure out how the entities’ essential body chemistry worked, they determined that they contained no new basic elements. However, the reports that I had suggested new combinations of organic compounds that required much more evaluation before doctors could form any opinions. Of specific interest was the fluid that served as blood but also seemed to regulate bodily functions in much the same way glandular secretions do for the human body. In these biological entities, the blood system and lymphatic systems seem to have been combined. And if an exchange of nutrients and waste occurred within their systems, that exchange could have only taken place through the creature’s skin or the outer protective covering they wore because there were no digestive or waste systems.
The medical report revealed that the creatures were enclosed within a one piece protective covering like a jumpsuit or outer skin in which the atoms were aligned so as to provide a great tensile strength and flexibility. One examiner wrote that it reminded him of a spider’s web, which appears very fragile but is, in fact, very strong. The unique qualities of a spiderweb result from the alignment of fibers that provide great tenacity because they’re able to stretch under great pressure, yet display a resiliency that allows them to snap back into shape even after the shock of an impact. Similarly, the creature’s spacesuit or outer skin appeared to be stretched around it as if it were literally spun over the creature and seized up around it, providing a perfect skin-tight protective fit. The doctors had never seen anything like it before.
I think I finally understood it years later, after I had left the Pentagon and I was buying a Christmas tree. As I stood there in the frosty air, I watched as the young man who prepared the tree for transport inserted it, top first, into a stubby barrel like device that automatically spun a twine mesh covering around the branches to keep them in place for the trip home. After I got home I had to cut through the mesh with a knife to remove the tree and separate the branches. This tree set up reminded me specifically of the medical report on the creature from the Roswell crash, and I imagined that maybe the spinning process of the creature’s outer garment resembled something like this.
The lengthwise alignment of the fibers in the suit also prompted the medical analysts to suggest that the suit might have been capable of protecting the wearer against the low energy cosmic rays that would routinely bombard any craft during a space journey. The interior organs of the creature seemed so fragile and oversized that the Walter Reed medical analysts imagined that without the suit the entity would have been vulnerable to the cumulative physical trauma from a constant energy particle bombardment. Space travel without protection from subatomic particle bombardment might subject the traveler to the same kind of effects he’d experience if he were cooked in a microwave oven. The particle bombardment inside the craft, if heavy enough to constitute a shower, would so excite and accelerate the creature’s atomic structure that the resulting heat energy would literally cook the entity up.
The Walter Reed doctors were also fascinated by the nature of the creature’s inner skin. It resembled, although their preliminary reports didn’t go into any chemical analysis, a thin layer of fatty tissue unlike any they’d ever seen before. And it was completely permeable, as if it were constantly exchanging chemicals back and forth with the combination blood/lymphatic system. Was this the way the creatures nourished themselves during their journeys and was this how waste was processed? The very small mouths and the lack of a human digestive system troubled the doctors at first because they didn’t know how these things were sustained. But their hypothesis that they processed chemicals released from their skin and maybe even recirculated waste chemicals would have explained the lack of any food preparation or waste processing facilities on the craft. I speculated, however, that they didn’t require food or facilities for waste disposal because they weren’t actual life forms, only a kind of robot or android.
Another explanation, of course, suggested by the engineers at Wright Field, is that there would have been no need for food preparation facilities had this craft been only a small scout ship that didn’t venture far from a larger craft. The creatures’ low metabolism meant that they could survive extended periods away from the main craft by subsisting on some form of military prepackaged foods until they returned to base. Neither the Wright Field engineers nor the Walter Reed medical examiners had an explanation for the lack of waste disposal on board the craft, nor could they explain how the creatures’ waste was processed. Maybe I was speculating too far about robots or androids when I was writing my report for General Trudeau, but I kept thinking, also, that the skin analysis that I was reading sounded more akin to the skin of a houseplant than the skin of a human being. That, too, could have been another explanation for the lack of food or waste facilities.
Much of the attention during the preliminary and later autopsies of the creatures focused on the size, nature, and anatomy of their brains. Much credence also was given to the first hand descriptions of on scene witnesses who said they received impressions from the dying creature that it was suffering and in great pain. No one heard the creature make any sounds, so any impressions, Army Intelligence personnel assumed, would have to have been created through some type of empathic projection or outright mental telepathy.
But witnesses said they heard no “words” in their mind, only the resonance of a shared or projected impression much simpler than a sentence but far more complex because they were able to share with the creature a sense not only of suffering but of profound sadness, as if it were in mourning for the others who perished on board the craft. These witness reports intrigued me more than any other information we took from the crash site.
The medical examiners believed that the alien brain, way oversized in comparison with the human brain and in proportion to the creature’s tiny stature, had four distinct sections. The creatures were dead and the brains had begun to decompose by the time they were removed from the soft spongy skulls that felt to the doctors more like palatal cartilage than the hard bone of a human cranium. Even had the creatures been alive when they were examined, 1947 medical technology didn’t have ultrasound scanning or the high resonance tomography of today’s radiology labs.
Accordingly, there was no way for the doctors to evaluate the nature of the cranial lobes, or “spheres, “ as they called them in the report. Thus, despite the rampant speculation about the nature of the creatures’ brains - thought projection, psychokinetic powers, and the like - no hard evidence existed of anything, and the reports were very light on real scientific data.
Where the possibility of some evidence about the workings of the alien brains did exist was in what I referred to in my reports as the ”headbands”. Among the artifacts we retrieved were devices that looked something like headbands but had neither adornment nor decoration of any kind. Embedded by some very advanced kind of vulcanizing process into a form of flexible plastic were what we now know to have been 51 electrical conductors or sensors, similar to the conductors on an electroencephalograph or polygraph.
This band was fitted around the part of the alien cranium just above the ears where the skull began to expand to accommodate the large brain. At the time, the field reports from the crash and the subsequent analysis at Wright Field indicated that the engineers at the Air Materiel Command thought these might be communication devices, like the throat mikes our pilots wore during World War II. But, as I would find out when I evaluated the device and sent it into the market for reverse-engineering, this was a throat mike only in a way that a primitive stylus can be considered the forerunner of the color laser-imaging printer.
Suffice it to say that in the few hours the material was at Walker Field in Roswell, more than one officer at the 509th gingerly slipped this thing over his head and tried to figure out what it did. At first it did nothing. There were no buttons, no switches, no wires, nothing that could even be considered to have been a control panel. So no one knew how to turn it on or off. Moreover, the band was not really adjustable, though it had enough elasticity to have been one size fits all for the creatures whose skulls were large enough to accommodate them. However, the reports I read stated, the few officers whose heads were just large enough to have made contact with the full array of conductors got the shocks of their lives.
In their descriptions of the headband, these officers reported everything from a low tingling sensation inside their heads to a searing headache and a brief array of either dancing or exploding colors on the insides of their eyelids as they rotated the device around their head and brought the sensors into contact with different parts of their skull.
These eyewitness reports suggested to me that the sensors stimulated different parts of the brain while at the same time exchanged information with the brain. Again, using the analogy of an EEC, these devices were a very sophisticated mechanism for translating the electrical impulses inside the creatures’ brains into specific commands. Perhaps these headband devices comprised the pilot interface of the ship’s navigational and propulsion system combined with a long range communications device.
At first I didn’t know, but it was only when we began development of the long brain wave research project toward the end of my tenure at the Pentagon that I realized just what we had and how it might be developed. It took a long time to harvest this technology, but fifty years after Roswell, versions of these devices eventually became a component of the navigational control system for some of the army’s most sophisticated helicopters and will soon be on the American consumer electronics market as user input devices for personal computer games.
The first Army Air Force analysts and engineers both at the 509th and at Wright Field were also bedeviled by the lack of any traditional controls and propulsion system in the crashed vehicle. Looking at their reports and the artifacts from the perspective of 1961, however, I imagined that the keys to understanding what made the craft go and directed its flight lay not only within the craft itself but in the relationship between the pilots and the craft. If we hypothesized a brainwave guidance system that was as specific to the pilots’ electronic signature as it was to the spacecraft’s, then we were looking at an entirely revolutionary concept of guided flight in which the pilot was the system.
Imagine transportation devices in which the key to the ignition is a digitized code derived from your electroencephalographic signature and is read automatically upon your donning some sort of sensorized headband. That’s the way I believed the spacecraft was navigated, by direct interaction between the electronic waves generated within the minds of the pilots and the craft’s directional controls. The electronic brain signals were interpreted and transmitted by the headband devices, which served as interfaces.
I never managed to obtain a copy of the Bethesda autopsy of the alien body the navy received from General Twining. I only had the army report. The remaining bodies were kept in storage at Wright Field initially. Then they were split up among the services. When the air force became a separate branch of the service, the remaining bodies, stored at Wright, along with the spacecraft, were sent to Norton Air Force Base in California, where the air force began experiments to replicate the technology of the vehicle. This made sense. The air force cared about the flight capabilities of the craft and how to build defenses against it.
Experiments were carried out at Norton and ultimately at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, at the famous Groom Lake site where the Stealth technology was developed. The army cared only for the weapons systems aboard the craft and how they could be re-engineered for our own use. The original Roswell spacecraft remained at Norton, however, where the air force and CIA maintained a kind of alien technology museum, the final resting place of the Roswell spacecraft. But experiments in replicated alien craft continued to be carried on through the years as engineers tried to adapt the propulsion and navigation systems to our level of technology. This continues to this very day almost in plain sight for people with security clearance who are taken to where the vehicles are kept.
Over the years, the replicated vehicles have become an ongoing, inner circle saga among top ranking military officers and members of the government, especially the favored senators and members of the House who vote along military lines. Those who are shown the secrets are immediately bound by national secrecy legislation and cannot reveal what they saw. Thus, the official camouflage is maintained despite the large number of people who really know the truth. I admit I’ve never seen the craft at Norton with my own eyes, but enough reports passed across my desk during my years at Foreign Technology so that I knew what the secret was and how it was maintained.
There were no conventional technological explanations for the way the Roswell craft’s propulsion system operated. There were no atomic engines, no rockets, no jets, nor any propeller driven form of thrust. Those of us in R&D from all three branches of the service tried for years to adapt the craft’s drive system to our own technology, but, through the 1960s and 1970s, fell short of getting it operational. The craft was able to displace gravity through the propagation of magnetic wave, controlled by shifting the magnetic poles around the craft so as to control, or vector, not a propulsion system but the repulsion force of like charges.
Once they realized this, engineers at our country’s primary defense contractors raced among themselves to figure out how the craft could retain its electric capacity and how the pilots who navigated it could live within the energy field of a wave. At issue was not only a great discovery, but the nuts-and-bolts chance to land multibillion dollar development contracts for a whole generation of military air and undersea craft.
The initial revelations into the nature of the spacecraft and its pilot interface came very quickly during the first few years of testing at Norton. The air force discovered that the entire vehicle functioned just like a giant capacitor. In other words, the craft itself stored the energy necessary to propagate the magnetic wave that elevated it, allowed it to achieve escape velocity from the earth’s gravity, and enabled it to achieve speeds of over seven thousand miles per hour. The pilots weren’t affected by the tremendous g-forces that build up in the acceleration of conventional aircraft because to aliens inside, it was as if gravity was being folded around the outside of the wave that enveloped the craft. Maybe it was like traveling inside the eye of a hurricane. But how did the pilots interface with the wave form they were generating?
I reported to General Trudeau that the secret to this system could be found in the single-piece skin-tight coveralls spun around the creatures. The lengthwise atomic alignment of the strange fabric was a clue to me that somehow the pilots became part of the electrical storage and generation of the craft itself. They didn’t just pilot or navigate the vehicle; they became part of the electrical circuitry of the vehicle, vectoring it in a way similar to the way you order a voluntary muscle to move. The vehicle was simply an extension of their own bodies because it was tied into their neurological systems in ways that even today we are just beginning to utilize. So the creatures were able to survive extended periods living inside a high energy wave by becoming the primary circuit in the control of the wave. They were protected by their suits, which enclosed them head to feet, but their suits enabled them to become one with the vehicle, literally part of the wave. In 1947 this was a technology so new to us that it was as frightening as it was frustrating. If we could only develop the power source necessary to generate a consistently well defined magnetic wave around a vehicle, we could harness a technology which would have surpassed all forms of rocket and jet propulsion. It’s a process we’re still trying to master today, fifty years after the craft fell into our possession.
I pushed myself through the night to complete the report for the general. At least I wanted him to see that our strategy held out the probability that even in a basic evaluation of the material were covered, the seeds were there for specific products we could develop. I wanted to start the entire process by writing him a background report about the nature of the beings we’d autopsied and what we could understand of the technology from an analysis of their spacecraft.
By the time I finished, it was already just before sun up, and I looked like hell. This was the day I was going to drop my report on the general’s desk, first thing. I’d snap right to attention in front of him and say, “Here’s that report you were waiting for, General, “ confident it contained more than he ever thought it would because the subject was that new and complicated. But I wanted to be clean shaven and in a clean, crisp shirt. That’s what I wanted. I didn’t even need any sleep because my optimism and confidence at that moment were more powerful than anything a few hours of sleep could give me. I knew I was onto something here, something that could change the world.
Here in the basement of the Pentagon, lying close to dormancy for over a decade, were secrets my predecessors had just begun to discover before they were stopped. Maybe it had been the Korean War, maybe the CIA or other intelligence agencies had cast a pall over R&D’s operation, but those days were over now. I was at the Foreign Technology desk and the responsibility for this material was mine, just like General Twining had said it should be fourteen years ago.
In those drawers I had found the puzzle pieces for a whole new age of technology. Things that were only twinkles in the minds of engineers and scientists were right here in front of me as hard, cold artifacts of an advanced culture. Craft that navigated by brain waves and floated on a wave of electromagnetic energy, creatures who look through devices that helped them turn night into day, and beams of light so narrow and focused you couldn’t see them until they bounced off an object far away.
For years scientists had thought about what it would have been like to travel in space, especially since the Russians first put up their Sputnik. Plans for a military operated moon base had been developed by the army in the 1950s under the leadership of Gen. Arthur Trudeau at R&D but were ultimately shelved because of the formation of NASA. Those plans had tried to confront the issues of space travel for prolonged periods of time and adjusting to a low gravity state on the moon. But here, right in front of us, was the evidence of how an alien culture had adapted itself to long range space travel, different gravities, and the exposure to energy particles and waves crashing into a spacecraft by the billions. All we had to do was marshal the vast array of resources in the military and industry at R&D’s disposal and harvest that technology. It was all laid out for us, if we knew how to use it. This was the beginning and I was right there on the cusp of it.
So in the first few minutes of glimmering light just on the edge of the horizon, a promise of the day to come, I took off for home, for a shower, a shave, a pot of coffee, and the crispest new uniform I could find. I was driving east into the dawn of a brand new age, my report right alongside me in my briefcase on the front seat. There would be other reports and the details of long term complicated projects to confront me in the future, I knew, but this was the first, the foundation, the beam of light into a hidden past and an uncertain future. But it was a light, and that’s what was important.
No time for sleep now. There was too much to do.
CHAPTER 8
The Project Gets Under Way
“THIS IS A HELLUVA REPORT, PHIL,“ GENERAL TRUDEAU SAID, looking up from the paper clipped sheaf of typewritten sheets I’d handed him first thing that morning. I’d been waiting at my desk since before six when I got back to the Pentagon, taking looks outside the building every once in a while as the bright orange reflection of the rising sun that exploded in a distant window and looked as if it had caught fire.
“What’d you do, stay up all night writing it?”
“I put in some work after hours,“ I said. “I don’t want to spend too much time in the nut file when people are supposed to be working.“
The general laughed as he fingered through the paperwork, but you could see he was impressed. As much as I wanted to denigrate the Roswell file in front of him as a bunch of drawers full of stuff that people would put me away for, we both knew that it contained much of the future of our R&D.
Military research and development agencies were under growing pressure from the Congress to put some success points on the scoreboard or get out of the rocket launching business for good. Early failures to lift off the navy’s WAC Corporal and the army Redstone had made laughing stocks out of the American rocket program while the Soviets were showing off their success like basketball players on fancy lay-ups right across the court. The army’s Project Horizon moon base project was sitting in its own file cabinet gathering dust. And there was also a growing concern among the military that we’d be pushed into taking over the failed French mission in Indochina to keep the Vietcong, Pathet Lao, and Khmer Rouge from making the whole area Communist. It was a war we could not win but that would drain our resources from the real battle front in Eastern Europe.
So, even more than scoring some field goals, General Trudeau needed projects going into development to keep the civilian agencies from cutting us back and diverting our resources. Now my boss held my first report in his hands and knew that our strategic plan had some rational grounding. He pushed for a tactical plan.
“We know what we want to do, “ he said. “Now, how do we do it?”
“I’ve been thinking about that, too, General, “ I said. “And here’s how I’d like to start. “
I explained that I wanted to compile a list of all our technical human resources, like the rocket scientists from Germany then still working at Alamogordo and White Sands. I’d met more than my share of our rocket fuel and guidance specialists in the guided missile program during my years at Red Canyon in command of the Nike battalion.
But we were working with theoretical scientists as well, men with experience who could combine the cold precision of an engineer with the speculative vision of a free thinker. These were the people I wanted to assemble into a brain trust, people I could talk to about strange artifacts and devices that had no basis in earthly reality. They were the scientists who could tell me what the potential was in items like wafer shaped plywood thin pieces of silicon with mysterious silver etchings on them.
“And once you have this brain trust, “ General Trudeau asked, “then what?”
“Match them up with technologies, “ I said. I admitted that we were flying blind on much of the material that we had.
We couldn’t go out to the general scientific and academic communities to ask them what we had because we would very quickly lose control of our own secrets. Besides, a lot of it had to do with weaponry, and there were very strict rules on what we could and could not disclose without the appropriate clearances. But our brain trust would be invaluable. And, with the proper orientation and security checks, they would keep our secrets, too, just as they had since the end of World War II.
“Which of the scientists do you have in mind?” Trudeau asked, taking out the little black leather covered notepad he kept in his inside pocket.
“I was thinking of Robert Sarbacher, “ I said. “Wernher von Braun, of course. Hans Kohler. Hermann Oberth. John von Neumann. “
“How much do they know about Roswell?”
Trudeau wanted to know. If they’d been consulted on the Roswell material back in 1947, as I knew Wernher von Braun had been by General Twining, then we weren’t revealing any secrets. If they had never been informed about the crash, then we were going out on a limb by sharing information that was still classified above top secret. General Trudeau needed to know how dangerous it was to bring these scientists into the loop.
But I assured him that all of them knew something about Roswell because of their connection with the Research and Development Board. During the Eisenhower administration information about the classified research and data collection projects into extraterrestrials was routinely filtered to the Office of Research and Development because the head of the Research and Development Board had been one of the original members of the group.
“I was at the White House when Sarbacher was on the board, General, “ I told my boss. “So I can be pretty sure he was in the know. And Hermann Oberth, “ I admitted to Trudeau. “He already told me that he believed that the objects we saw popping up on our radar screens at Red Canyon and then disappearing as if they were never there were probably the same kinds of extraterrestrial aircraft that we picked up at Roswell. So he knew, but I don’t know how. “
“Well, that’s good news, at least, “ the general said. “I’d rather not be the one authorizing the release of classified information to anyone who didn’t know it before hand. And I don’t want to put you in the position, Phil, of having to explain to any higher ups why you decided to release top secret information to people without clearances, even in the interest of national security. “
I appreciated that, but for our plan to work, we needed the technical and scientific expertise people like von Braun, Oberth, and Sarbacher could bring to any reverse engineering and product development strategies.
"Will you approach them?” Trudeau asked.
“We’ll have to begin by taking an inventory of all of the defense industry contracts we’re currently managing, General, “ I said. “Lineup the contracts and systems we’re developing with the materials in the nut file to see where they fit in. Then bring in the scientists to consult on making sure we know what we think we have, that is, if they can figure out what we have. “
“Let’s go through a potential product list first, “ the general suggested. “Then see where our contracts line up and where the scientists can help. And you know what happens then, “ Trudeau asked.
I wasn’t sure where he was going to take this.
“We’re sticking you back in civilian clothes and sending you on the road to visit our friends in these defense contractors. “
“I don’t even get to keep my battle ribbons, “ I joked.
“I don’t want anyone to know, “ General Trudeau explained, “that some lieutenant colonel on the CIA’s Most Wanted list is traveling to our biggest defense contractors with a mysterious briefcase full of nobody knows what. You might as well wear a sign, “ he laughed. “We have to get to work on that list. “
That same afternoon I went back to my report on the EBE and his craft and began to list the riddles it contained and the opportunities for the discovery of product it presented to us. The entire event was like an enigma to us because every conventional requirement one would expect to have found at the crash site, in the craft, or even in the EBEs themselves was missing.
Where was the engine or the power supply for the craft? It had neither jet engines nor propellers. It had no rocket propulsion like the V2 missiles, nor did it carry any fuel. At Norton Air Force Base, where the craft eventually was hangared, engineers marveled at the thin amalgam of the most refined copper and purest silver they had ever seen that covered the ship’s underside. The metal was remarkable for its conductivity, as if the entire craft was an electrical circuit offering no resistance to the flow of current.
Yet it was something our military engineers could not replicate. By the 1950s at Norton Air Force Base, at least two prototypes of the alien craft had been fabricated, but neither had the power source of the craft that had crashed. In its stead were crude attempts at nuclear fission generators, but they were ineffective and dangerous. Even the portable nuclear generators that would power the primitive Soviet and American satellites in the 1960s were insufficient for the needs of the replicated spacecraft. So the question remained, what powered the Roswell spacecraft?
I reviewed all of my discoveries in a checklist:
• The crescent shaped space vehicle also had no traditional navigational controls as we understood them.
• There were no control sticks, wheels, throttles, pedals, cables, flaps, or rudders.
• How did the creatures pilot this ship and how did they control the speed, accelerating from a near stationary hover above a given spot, like a helicopter, to speeds in excess of seven thousand miles per hour in a matter of seconds?
• What protected the creatures from the tremendous g-forces they would have had to have pulled in any conventional aircraft?
Our own pilots in World War II had to wear special devices as they pulled up out of dives that kept the oxygen from flowing out of their brains and causing them to blackout. But we found nothing in the flight suits of the creatures that indicated that they faced the same problem. Yet their craft should have pulled ten times the g-forces our own pilots did, so we couldn’t figure out how they managed this. No controls, no 56 protection, no power supply, no fuel: these were the riddles I listed.
Along side them I listed that:
• The craft itself was an electrical circuit.
• That the flight suits - “flight skins” is a better description - the creatures wore were made of a substance whose atomic structure was elongated, strengthened lengthwise, so as to provide a directional flow to any current applied to it.
The engineers who first discovered this were amazed at the pure conductivity of these skins, functionally like the skin of the craft itself, and their obvious ability to protect the wearer while at the same time vectoring some kind of electronic field.
Where was the physical junction of the circuit between the pilot and the ship? Was it turned on and off somehow by the pilot himself through a switch we didn’t know about?
Alongside the riddle of the apparent absence of navigational controls I listed the sensorized headband that so intrigued the officers at Roswell’s Walker Field and fascinated me as well. If, as we all suspected, this device picked up the electronic signatures from the creatures’ oversized brains, what did it do with them? I believed - and our industrial product development from the 1960s through today as the brain wave control helmets finally came into service ultimately confirmed - that these headbands translated the brain’s electronic signals into system commands that controlled speed, direction, and elevation.
Maybe the headbands had to be calibrated or tuned to each individual pilot, or maybe the pilots - since I believed they were genetically engineered beings biologically manufactured especially for flight or long term exploration had to be calibrated to the headband. Either way, the headbands were the interface between the pilot and the ship. But that still didn’t resolve the question of the lack of cables, gears, or wires.
Maybe the answer lay not in the lack of structural controls but in the way the suit, the headband, the creatures’ brains, and the entire craft worked together. In other words, when I looked at the possible function of the entire system, the synchronicity between the brain interface in the headband, the pure conductivity of the spacecraft, and the elongated structure of the space skins, which also acted like a circuit, I could see how directional instructions could have been translated by the headbands into some form of current flowing through the skins and into the series of raised deck panels where there were indentations for the creatures’ hands.
The indentations on these panels, as the Roswell field reports described them, looked like the handprints pressed into the concrete at the old Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood. Were the directional commands a series of electronic instructions transmitted directly from the creatures’ brains along their bodies and through the panels into the ship itself as if the ship were only an extension of the creature’s body? For that to have been the case, something was still missing. The engine.
Again, I settled on the idea of function over structure. The debris and the spacecraft indicated that an engine didn’t somehow fall out of the craft when it crashed. A conventional engine was never there in the first place. What we found was that the craft seemed to have had the ability to store as well as conduct a vast amount of current. What if the craft itself were the engine, imparted with a steady current from another source that it stored as if it were a giant capacitor? This would be like charging the battery in an electric car and running it until the battery was drained. Sound far fetched?
It’s not much different from filling up a car with gas at the pump and driving until the tank’s dry, or fueling a plane and making sure you land before the fuel’s gone. I suspected the Roswell craft was simply a capacitor that stored current that was controlled or vectored by the pilot and was able to be recharged in some way or could recharge itself with some form of built in generator.
That would have explained the power supply, I noted along side the riddle of the missing engine, but what was the means of propulsion and direction? If there was a force that functioned the same way thrust does, it wasn’t immediately obvious how it was created and vectored. As early as September 1947, scientists who had gone to the Air Materiel Command at Wright Field to see the debris were speculating that the electronic potential of the Roswell craft reminded them of the German and British anti-gravity experiments of the 1920s and 1930s.
General Twining was reported to have said more than once that the name of the Serbian electrical engineer and inventor of alternating current, Nikola Tesla, kept bubbling up in the conversation because the scientists examining the damaged craft described the way it must have converted an electromagnetic field into an anti-gravity field. And, of course, the craft itself reminded them of the German experimental fighter aircraft that made their appearance near the end of the war but that had been in development ever since the 1930s.
Tesla and a number of other European scientists had been pioneers in the conversion of circumscribed small area antigravity fields out of electromagnetic fields. However, the effort to develop true anti-gravity aircraft never came to fruition among conventional aircraft manufacturers because gasoline, jet, and rocket engines provided a perfectly good weapons technology. But the theory of electromagnetic antigravity propulsion was not unknown even if it was not well understood and, without a power source like a small portable nuclear fission generator, not at all feasible. But, what if the flying craft already carried enough electric potential and storage capacity to retain its power, just like a very advanced flying battery?
Then it might have all the power it needed to propagate and vector a wave directionally by shifting its magnetic poles. If the magnetic field theory experiments carried out by engineers and electrical energy pioneers Paul Biefeld and Townsend Brown in the 1920s at the California Institute for Advanced Studies were accurately reported - and the U.S. military as well as scientific record keepers at the Bureau of Investigation kept very close tabs on what these engineers were doing - then the technological theory for anti-gravity flight existed before World War II.
In fact, prototypes for vertical takeoff and landing disk shaped aircraft had been on the drawing boards at the California Institute since before the war. It was just that in the United States nobody paid them much attention. The Germans did develop and had flown flying disks, or so the intelligence reports read, even though they had no impact on the outcome of the war other than stimulating a race between the United States and the USSR to gather as much of the German technology as possible.
Thus, even though engineers had attempted to build vertical takeoff and flying wing aircraft before and had succeeded, the Roswell spacecraft, because it was so truly functional and out flew anything we had - as well as traveled in space - represented a practical technological challenge to the scientists visiting the Air Materiel Command. We knew what the EBEs did, we just couldn’t duplicate how. My reports for Army R&D were analyses of the types of technology that we had to develop to either challenge this spacecraft militarily with a credible defense or build one ourselves.
In my notes to General Trudeau, I reviewed for him all the technological implications that I believed were relevant in any discussion about what could be harvested from the Roswell craft. I also wrote up what I understood about the magnetic field technology and how unconventional designers and engineers had drafted prototypes for these “antigravs” earlier in the century. All of this pointed in one direction, I suggested : that we now had a craft and could farm out to industry the components that comprised this electromagnetic anti-gravity drive and brain wave directed navigational controls. We had to dole them out piece meal once we broke them down into developable units, each of which could have its own engineering track.
For that we’d need the advice of the scientists who would eventually comprise our brain trust, individuals we could rely on and whom we could talk to about the Roswell debris. These were scientists who routinely worked with our prime defense contractors and could tell us whom to approach in their R&D divisions for secure and private consultations.
I was hoping that the evaluation of the kinds of things we were able to learn from the EBE and his craft that I was preparing for General Trudeau would lead me toward the solution of some of the physiological problems we knew our astronauts would encounter in space flight. In the early 1960s, astronauts from both the United States and the USSR had made their first orbital flights and had experienced more than a few negative physical symptoms from the weightless environment during the mission. Despite our official claims that humans could travel safely in space, our doctors knew that even short periods of weightlessness were extremely disorienting to some of our astronauts, and the longer the flight, the more uncomfortable the symptoms could become. We were worried about loss of physical strength, reduced muscle capability in the heart and diaphragm, reduction of lung capacity, and loss of tensile strength in the bones.
Yet, scattered across the desert floor outside of Roswell were creatures who seemed completely adapted to space flight. Just to be able to examine these entities was an enormous opportunity, but I knew we had the ability to harvest what we could observe about aliens. So, again, along side the speculations I had made about the EBEs and their craft I listed what I thought were the major possibilities of developing product to enable us to travel in space for extended periods of time.
Renewable oxygen and food supplies were obvious directions to take, and by the 1960s, NASA engineers were already designing ways to recharge the atmosphere inside a capsule and provide for food storage. We helped. It was Army R&D and our plan for developing an irradiation process for food that even today 58 provides the basis for non-refrigerated food supplies on board spacecraft. But beyond that were real issues of health and survival. Merely getting human beings into earth orbit or even launching them into lunar orbit and bringing them back safely were straight forward engineering projects. But the readaptation of the human body to earth gravity after an extended period of weightlessness or reduced gravity was a far more intractable problem to solve. The physiology of the EBEs provided an important clue.
Besides the development of super tenacity fibers that would protect the astronauts and the skin of the spacecraft and the development of a food preservation process that would neutralize all the bacteria that cause spoilage, we needed to examine the ways we trained our astronauts physically so that they would be more adaptable to periods of weightlessness and spatial disorientation. At the same time we needed to develop nutritional packages that would not place undue stress on a digestive system that needed to compensate for deprivation of gravity.
Since there were no food preparation facilities on board the spacecraft, we didn’t know how they stored or processed food or even what they ate, if anything at all. However, my concern over a process to preserve food for space travel was prompted by the obvious challenge posed by the spacecraft itself. If we were going to travel in space, and it was clear from what the army found at Roswell that at least one culture had developed the technology to do so, then R&D had to find a way to feed our pilots in space. Therefore, we needed to develop a process to preserve food for space missions that didn’t require refrigeration facilities and the consumption of excessive amounts of energy. The problem of long term space travel still hasn’t been solved, in part because we continue to rely upon conventional means of propulsion that subject our astronauts to great periods of physical stress, especially during takeoff. We also have no magic way for astronauts to readjust to earth gravity after a long ride in an orbit in space station like the Russian Mir or our own planned station early in the next century. Manned trips to Mars, also on the drawing boards for early in the twenty-first century, will also be a problem because they will last for months and subject our astronauts to a great deal of stress.
I suggested to General Trudeau in my report that although this wasn’t explicitly an Army R&D mission, NASA should begin the preparation of astronaut candidates from the time they’re still in school.
“If we train our astronauts from the time they’re children the same way we do with potential athletes at sports camps and provide the most promising candidates with flight training and military or government scholarships to ROTC colleges, we will create a cadre of officers physically adaptable and scholastically trained to enter the next generation of space travel, “ I wrote.
I know that General Trudeau passed this recommendation along because NASA itself opened a space training camp for future astronauts within a few years after my retirement from the service.
Beyond the issues concerning the training potential of astronauts for conventionally powered space flight, the examination of the EBE bodies and the ship’s possible propulsion system raised other intriguing questions. What if, in addition to having been bioengineered for interstellar travel, the EBE’s weren’t subjected to the kinds of forces human pilots would routinely face? If the EBEs utilized a wave propagation technology as an anti-gravity drive and navigation system, then they traveled inside some form of adjustable electromagnetic wave. I suggested to General Trudeau that we should study the potential physiological effects on humans of long term exposure to the kinds of energy spillage generated by the propagation of an electromagnetic field.
Biologists needed to determine how feasible such a form of space travel would be based upon whether energy radiation would disrupt the cellular activity of the human body. Perhaps the external one piece skins worn by the EBEs afforded them protection against the effects of being enclosed in a portable electromagnetic field.
Although Army R&D never conducted these studies because the medical issues surrounding space travel were subsumed by NASA under contracts with the military, indirect medical research was conducted years later. Studies surrounding the physiological effects on persons living near high voltage power transmission lines and persons using extendable antenna hand held cellular telephones both proved inconclusive. While some people argued that there were higher incidences of cancer among both groups, other studies argued just the opposite or found other reasons for any incidences of cancer.
I believe that a definitive piece of research on the effects of low energy or ELM wave exposure still needs to be done because, ultimately, even more than atomic energy or ion drives, magnetic field generation will be the system that will propel our near planetary voyages from 2050 through the early twenty second century. Beyond that, for humans to reach destinations beyond the solar system technology will require a radically different form of propulsion that will enable them to reach velocities at or beyond the speed of light.
Thus did my second report cover the opportunities for research presented to us by the autopsies of the EBEs and from the crash of their vehicle. To my mind, it was nothing less than a confirmation that the research into electromagnetics in the 1920s and the highly experimental saucer and crescent shaped development of aircraft by the Allies and Axis powers would have led to an entirely new generation of airships. I know that my reports were read by the higher ups in the military because top secret research has continued right through to the present on a whole range of designs and propulsion systems from the Stealth fighter and bomber to prototypes for a very high altitude suborbital interceptor aircraft, developed at Nellis and Edwards, now on the drawing board, which can hover in place and fly at speeds over seven thousand miles per hour.
Once I finished my report on the opportunities we could possibly derive from the EBEs and the craft, I turned my attention to compiling a short list of immediate opportunities I believed achievable by the Army R&D’s Foreign Technology Division from a reverse engineering of items retrieved from the crash. These were specific things, not as theoretical as questions about the physiology of the EBE or the description of its craft. But, while some might call them purely mundane, each of these artifacts, as a direct result of Army R&D’s intervention, helped spawn an entire technological industry from which came new products and military weapons.
Among the Roswell artifacts and the questions and issues that arose from the Roswell crash, on my preliminary list that needed resolution for development scheduling or simple inquiries to our military scientific community were:
• Image intensifiers, which ultimately became “night vision”
• Fiber optics
• Super-tenacity fibers
• Lasers
• Molecular alignment metallic alloys
• Integrated circuits
• Microminiaturization of logic boards
• HARP (High Altitude Research Project)
• Project Horizon (moon base)
• Portable atomic generators (ion propulsion drive)
• Irradiated food
• Third brain guidance systems (EBE headbands)
• Particle beams (“Star Wars” antimissile energy weapons)
• Electromagnetic propulsion systems
• Depleted uranium projectiles
For each of the items on my list, General Trudeau went into his human resources file and found the names of scientists working on government defense projects or in allied research projects at universities where I could turn for advice and some consultation. I wasn’t surprised to see Wernher von Braun turn up under every rocket propulsion issue. von Braun had gone on record in 1959 by announcing that the U.S. military had acquired a new technology as a result of top secret research in unidentified flying objects. Nor was I 60 surprised to sec John von Neumann’s name next to the mention of the strange looking silver imprinted silicon wafers that I thought looked like elliptical shaped crackers.
“If these are what I think they might be, “ General Trudeau said, “printed circuitry, there’s only one person we can talk to. “
Dr. Robert Sarbacher was an especially important contact person on our list of scientists because he had worked on the Research and Development Board during the Eisenhower administration. Not only had Sarbacher been consulted by members of Admiral Hillenkoetter’s and General Vandenberg’s working group on UFOs during the 1950s, he was part of the original decision General Twining made to bring all of the Roswell debris back to Wright Field for preliminary examination before farming it out to the military research community.
As early as 1950, Sarbacher, commenting on the nature of the debris, said that he was sure the light and tough materials were being analyzed very carefully by government laboratories that had taken possession of the debris after the crash. Because he was already knowledgeable about the Roswell debris, Dr. Sarbacher was another obvious candidate for an Army R&D brain trust.
We also listed Dr. Wilbert Smith, who, in a memo to the controller of telecommunications in November 1950, had urged the government of Canada to investigate the nature of alien technology the United States had retrieved from crashed extraterrestrial vehicles and that was at that time being studied by Vannevar Bush. Dr. Smith, who had learned of the U.S. investigation from Sarbacher, said that regardless whether UFOs fit into our belief system or not, the fact was we had acquired them and it was important for us to harvest the technology they contained. He implored the government to make a substantial effort to utilize alien technology. General Trudeau joked that although Dr. Smith knew that we had acquired technology at Roswell, he didn’t really know what it was. “I can’t wait to see his face when you open your briefcase in front of him, Phil, “ the general said, thinking about how his old friend had always wanted to know the specifics of what he had secreted away in 1947.
Each of these scientists had maintained existing relationships with any number of defense contractors during the 1950s. General Trudeau also had relationships with the army contractors who were developing new weapons systems for the military within one part of the company while another part was harvesting some of the same technology for consumer products development. These were companies—Bell Labs, IBM, Monsanto, Dow, General Electric, and Hughes - that General Trudeau wanted to talk to about the list of technological products that we’d compiled from our R&D Roswell nut file.
“You begin calling our scientist friends, “ General Trudeau announced. “And make whatever appointments you want. “
“Where are you going to be, General?” I asked.
“I’m going to be taking some trips, too, “ he said. “First to the chief of staff to make sure we have the discretionary budget we’re going to need. Then to some of the people I want you to talk to once you have the backing from the scientific community for the projects on your list. “
“Where to first?” I asked.
“What do you like?” the general shot right back to me.
“We’ve been working with image intensifies for some time, “ I said. “We even got our hands on devices the Germans were working on at the end of the war. “
“Well then, why don’t you make a very preliminary trip over to Fort Belvoir,“ General Trudeau said. “They’ve had a night vision project in the works for the past ten years, but it’s got nothing over what you have in your file. “
“I’ll get over there first thing, “ I said.
“Yes, Phil, but you get out of that uniform and into a real lawyer suit, “ the general ordered. “And don’t take your staff car.“ He saw me raise my eyebrows. “All you’re going to do is feed a project,“ Trudeau continued, “that’s been under way since right after the war. They’ve got stuff, but you’re going to give them a giant leap. Once you’ve fed them, you’ll disappear and I’ll assign a night vision project manager here to see the development through.“ I prepared to leave his office.
“No one will know, Phil, “ he said. “Just like you thought, the Roswell night viewer will put a seed of an idea in someone’s mind over at Fort Belvoir and it will become part of along project history. It will disappear just like you into the history of the product development. “
“Yes, sir, “ I said. I was beginning to realize just how lonely this job could be.
“You still have a suit that fits?” the general asked.
“I think so,“ I answered. “Maybe what I wore over at the White House is a little out of style, but it’ll pass.“
“Good luck, Phil, “ General Trudeau said. “Make sure no one knows where you’re going and I’ll make sure you have all the budget you need. “
This was the beginning. I saluted, but the general just stuck out his hand and I shook it. We both realized in that moment, as we were striking out on our own, just how momentous this was about to become. A lieutenant general allocating money for his development budget and a lieutenant colonel looking for someone to develop an innocuous-looking eye shield an unknown GI had picked up out of the sand near a UFO crashed into a rock in the lonely desert outside of Roswell in a lightning storm fourteen years ago.
What a pair we must have made.
next
The Project Had Officially Begun
No comments:
Post a Comment