Part 3: The Day After Roswell...The Project had Officially Begun...U2 Program & Project Corona...Project Moon Base...The Integrated Circuit Chip

The Day After Roswell

Col. Philip J. Corso 

With

William J. Birnes

CHAPTER 9 

The Project Had Officially Begun 

General Trudeau marched down the hall to his boss at the Pentagon to begin the process of funding the new items we’d identified in our Foreign Technology budget, and I went home that evening and tried on my official White House three piece suit. President Eisenhower once told me that he always trusted a man who wore a vest, and I never forgot it. Although there were times when the President asked me to wear my uniform for special meetings when I had to look military, I usually wore suits every day to work. 

But after my years at the Red Canyon missile base and in combat uniform in Germany, I lost the knack of wearing civilian clothes. Nevertheless, here I was again, after all those years, wearing a suit just like any other nine-to-five commuting Joe as I headed toward Fort Belvoir, perhaps the army’s most important base in the entire Washington Military District. Fort Belvoir was one of those military posts where the mundane activity of training and weapons testing was an effective cover for what came to be known as the secret life of Fort Belvoir. It sat comfortably within thirty minutes of the Pentagon, and it was where some of the army’s most top secret research into UFO technology was also taking place. Belvoir housed the Army Engineering School and, for former artillery and missile officers like myself, maintained a vital information database about ballistics testing and the development of new weapons. But on the secret side of the ledger, Fort Belvoir was home to the Signal School where officers for the National Security Council who had top secret crypto clearance were trained. 

Even years after I retired from active duty, stories lingered about the records of UFOs that were stored at Fort Belvoir, including photos and even motion pictures of military retrievals of downed extraterrestrial craft. 62 What very few people knew was that an elite secret air force unit operated out of Fort Belvoir - ostensibly an army base - that was responsible for retrievals of downed UFOs. That was how Fort Belvoir became a repository of classified UFO footage. Those secrets remained at Fort Belvoir over the years and were closely guarded while the installation remained shrouded in mystery. For those who suspect what information was kept at the base, Fort Belvoir remains a central part of the legends surrounding the official military cover up of UFOs. 

Me, I was on my way there to talk about the night vision project to see what German World War II files they were keeping on the infrared viewfinders the Nazis were trying to deploy for their night fighting troops. These were cumbersome, unwieldy devices that left infantry hampered and weighed down. They were never effective in the war but held out the enormous promise of opening up the night as a battlefield where an army could maneuver around its blind and helpless enemy. That was the promise that tantalized both the Soviets and American forces as we closed in on Germany’s most secret weapons facilities during the final months of the war. 

Our forces secured all of the German records on mountable weapons night viewers and headpieces, but it wasn’t until we looked inside the crashed Roswell vehicle and saw a hazy daylight through the view ports that we realized just what the potential of night viewing could be. We understood in those few moments after the vehicle was brought back to Wright Field and General Twining made his initial report that we were the blind and helpless enemy through the eyes of the EBEs. These creatures controlled our night skies, observing us with an ease that we didn’t enjoy until we had deployed our own night-viewing goggles years later and leveled the playing field against them and the Soviet client forces arrayed against us. My very proper looking deep blue Oldsmobile might not have been a secret weapon in America’s arsenal, but it was carrying a description of one of the tiny components of what would be one of our most effective Cold War weapons. Guerrilla armies used the night itself on their familiar home territory as a tactical weapon that allowed them to move right past enemy positions without being spotted. They could secure a battlefield advantage as if they were invisible. But equip a patrol with night viewers, mount night viewers on tanks and observation vehicles, hover over a battlefield at night in helicopter gunships equipped for night vision, and suddenly the night becomes day and the invisible enemy appears in your gun sights like prey for the hunter. 

To the EBEs, we were that prey, and we knew they were monitoring our defenses, surveilling the aircraft we scrambled to chase them, and hovering above the experimental satellites we launched. We could see them with our radar, I had seen them on our scopes with my own eyes, and we knew their presence wasn’t benign. But they had an advantage over us that we couldn’t overcome unless we acquired the technological ability to put up enough of a defense to make their cost too high to engage in any large scale warfare.

Not only was it an advantage that forced us to scrape whatever technology we could off the edge of our encounters with them; it was one of the many factors that forced us into a silence about the alien presence. If there was no public enemy, there would be no pressure from the public to do anything about it. So we simply denied all extraterrestrial activity because no aliens meant no military responsibility to counter their threat. But all the while we were still planning, measuring their hostile intentions, and pushing through weapons development that might reduce their advantage. 

It would have been next to impossible to stage a military build up that would help us fight extraterrestrial enemies had we not had a lot of help from our old adversaries, the Soviets and the Chinese. The Soviets made no bones about their intentions to dominate the world through Communist revolutionary coups and set about immediately to challenge us even before World War II ended. By 1948, the Iron Curtain had dropped over Eastern Europe and the Soviets were trying to back us into a position of appeasement. In 1949, Mao Tse-tung drove Chiang Kai-shek out of mainland China to the island of Taiwan, and the United States had another major Communist adversary trying to impose its will upon its Asian neighbors. We first tasted their blood in Korea and would soon almost choke on it in Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, and Cambodia. 

Those were hard times, made even harder because the U.S. military also knew that not just the free world but the whole world was under a military threat from a power far greater than the combined forces of the Soviet Union and the Republic of China. We didn’t know what the EBEs wanted at first, but we knew that between the cattle mutilations, surveillance of our secret weapons installations, reports of strange abductions of human beings, and their consistent buzzing of our unmanned and manned space launches, the EBEs weren’t just friendly visitors looking for a polite way to say “Hello, we mean you no harm. “ They meant us harm, and we knew it. The problem was we couldn’t do anything about it at first, and anything we did try to do had to be done in complete secrecy or it would set off a worldwide panic, we believed. 

This was where the Cold War turned out to be a tremendous opportunity for us, because it allowed us to upgrade our military, preparedness in public to fight the Communists while secretly creating an arsenal and strategy to defend ourselves against the extraterrestrials. In short, the Cold War, while real enough and dangerous enough, was also a cover for us to develop a planetary tracking and defense system that looked into space as well as into the Soviets’ backyard. And the Soviets were doing the exact same thing we were, looking up at the same time they were looking down. 

In an only tacitly acknowledged cooperative endeavor, the Soviets and the Americans, while each one was explicitly using the Cold War to gain an advantage over the other, both sought to develop a military capability to defend ourselves against extraterrestrials. There were very subtle indications of this policy in the types of weapons both countries developed as well as in our behavior toward one another every time one side came close to pushing the button. I can tell you definitively because I was there when we avoided nuclear war because both military commands were able to pull back when they stared over the cliff into the flaming volcano of war that threatened to engulf all of us at least four times between 1945 and 1975 - the Berlin airlift, the Chinese invasion of Korea, the Cuban missile crisis, and the Yom Kippur War - and probably many more. 

By the time President Nixon returned from China, having agreed to turn over Vietnam to the Communists, he had effectively turned the Soviets’ flank in the Cold War. For the next decade, the Soviets felt caught between the Chinese, with whom they’d fought border wars in the past, and the United States. When President Ronald Reagan demonstrated to Mikhail Gorbachev that the United States was capable of deploying an effective antimissile missile defense and sought Soviet cooperation in turning it against the extraterrestrials, all pretext of the Cold War ended and the great Soviet monolith in Eastern Europe began to crumble. 

But the Cold War worked its magic for both superpowers by allowing them to prepare defenses against the extraterrestrials without ever having to disclose to the public what they were really doing. When you examine it, the record itself should have showed that another agenda was present throughout the Cold War. After all, why did each side really have ten or more times the number of warheads needed to completely destroy the other side’s nuclear missile arsenal as well as their major population centers? 

The real story behind the vast missile arsenals, the huge fleets of bombers, and the ICBM submarine platforms that both sides deployed was the threat to the aliens that if they occupied a portion of our planet, we had the fire power to obliterate them. If they attacked either the United States or the Soviet Union so as to render one of the arsenals inoperable, we had enough missiles to spare to make them pay so heavy a price for starting a war, it wasn’t even worth trying. That was part of our secret agenda behind the huge military buildups of the 1950s and1960s: sacrifice a portion of the planet so that the rest of us could live. 

It enabled the United States and USSR to intimidate one another, but it also worked for the heads of the military intelligence agencies as a way to intimidate any extraterrestrial cultures. Nobody wrote any memos about this because weapons deployment during the Cold War was the cover for the secret agenda against the extraterrestrials. 

Sure, there was a gamesmanship going on during those forty years from 1948 through 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down. Each side tried to get the other to spend more money than they really had to so as to weaken the economy. Our CIA consistently gave us false estimates because they were feeding us KGB information while, I know, we tried to do the same thing to the Soviets. And if the Soviets could have won the Cold War as bloodlessly as possible, they would have done so. But in the end, as the futility of mutual destruction made World War III unfightable, our real attention became more focused on the common enemy: the extraterrestrials who refused to go away. 

There were subtle and not so subtle hints during the entire Cold War that a hidden agenda was in play. Most people just didn’t know where to look. For those who did, and there were and are plenty of them, the answers were in plain view. 

Although there was heavy censorship and the threat of ruined careers, plenty of military and civilian sources reported flying saucer sightings. Stories of abductions - while most were either fantasies, nightmares, or memory screens for other events in the so called abductee’s childhood - continued to abound. Some were true, and this caused great consternation among members of the UFO working group. If the government couldn’t protect private citizens from abductions by extraterrestrials, then would that not signify a breakdown in governmental authority? That was a worry, but it didn’t come to pass. 

Similarly, if too many flying saucers were seen by too many people at the same time, wouldn’t it become obvious that the military forces of the superpowers couldn’t protect their populations? For a time it was true, but the public never realized it. Soon we were able to upgrade our ability to defend our airspace so that we could amass large numbers of interceptors against the EBEs’ limited resources and pose a real threat to them. 

They backed off and probed our defenses only when it seemed safe. Thus, the race among the superpowers to spend billions of dollars to build the fastest and best interceptors had a true double purpose. We needed all these planes because they gave the super powers a flexible response alternative to simply obliterating themselves with guided missiles, but at the same time both superpowers were developing the air defense technology to defend the planet against the extraterrestrials. Everybody wants the best and fastest plane, of course, so that we can out fly and out shoot the enemy we know about. But we were also defending our skies against an enemy we didn’t admit to having. The second agenda was always there and the Cold War provided the budgetary impetus the military needed : We were building aircraft to protect against flying saucers. And in a very real measure, we succeeded.

Both the United States and USSR were sensitive to another area where the extraterrestrials were aggressing upon our military personnel : our respective space exploration programs. From the very beginning of our endeavors to put satellites in orbit, the extraterrestrials have been surveilling and then actively interfering with our launch vehicles and in some cases the manned and unmanned payloads themselves by buzzing them, jamming radio transmissions, causing electrical problems with the spacecrafts’ systems, or causing mechanical malfunctions. 

American astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts have separately reported sightings of UFOs so routinely that it’s become commonplace. The audio/video transmission downlink between space capsules and NASA, however, is a secure scrambled signal so that commentary about UFOs shadowing the spacecraft can’t be picked up by private listeners. Even then, the astronauts are specifically instructed not to report UFO sightings until they are debriefed once they’ve landed. 

Astronaut Gordon Cooper, for example, reported that when he was a fighter pilot over Germany in the 1950s, he scrambled with other Sabre Jet fighter pilots to intercept a formation of UFOs flying over his base, but when his fighter group got too close, the formation of UFOs flew away. Cooper also described film that he saw at Edwards Air Force base in California in 1957 of a UFO landing. He said that he sent the film to Washington and followed up on it with the officers at Project Blue Book, but they never responded to his queries. 

Similarly, X-15 pilot Joe Walker revealed that his 1961 mission in setting a new world air speed record was also to hunt for UFOs during his high altitude flights. He also said that he filmed UFOs during an X-15 flight a year later in 1962. Other reports persisted about Mercury 7 astronauts being shadowed by UFOs and about Neil Armstrong’s having seen an alien base on the moon during the Apollo 11 flyover and landing. NASA has, of course, not admitted to any of this, and, very correctly, it’s been treated as a matter of high national security. 

An extraterrestrial presence on the moon, whether it was true or not in the 1950s, was an issue of such military importance that it was about to become a subject for National Security Council debate before Admiral Hillenkoetter and Generals Twining and Vandenberg pulled it back under their working group’s security classification. The issue never formally reached the National Security Council, although Army R&D under the new command of General Trudeau in 1958 quickly developed preliminary plans for Horizon, a moon base construction project designed to provide the United States with a military observation presence on the lunar surface. 

Started in the late 1950s and set for completion between 1965 and 1967, Horizon was supposed to establish defensive fortifications on the moon against a Soviet attempt to use it as a military base, an early warning surveillance system against a Soviet missile attack, and, most importantly, a surveillance and defense against UFOs. It was, to be blunt, a plan to establish a skirmish line in space to protect the earth against a surprise attack. But Horizon was side tracked when the National Space and Aeronautics Act gave control over space exploration to the civilian NASA, effectively eliminating the military branches from pursuing their own projects until much later in the 1970s. 

Fears of an attack to probe our planet’s ability to defend itself were running rampant at National Security and through the military chiefs of staff during the middle 1950s. After he retired from the army, even Gen. Douglas MacArthur got into the fray, urging the military to prepare itself for what he felt would be the next major war. He told the New York Times in 1955 that, 

“The nations of the world will have to unite for the next war will be an interplanetary war. The nations of the Earth must someday make a common front against attack by people from other planets. “ 

The public took little notice of that comment, but it was, in fact, a disclosure of the strategic thinking of the military back in the 1950s and explains part of the paranoia the government was displaying about all  information relating to the flying saucers and unidentified aircraft. Part of the military response to what they perceived as threats from extraterrestrials was, first, to analyze the specific ways that alien spacecraft “passively” disrupt our defenses and world wide communications through electrical and magnetic field interference and develop circuitry hardened against it. Second, General Trudeau and his counterparts in the other branches of the military at the Pentagon charged with strategic planning looked at the aggressive behaviors of the EBEs. 

They didn’t just shadow or surveil our spacecraft in orbit; they buzzed us and tried to create such havoc with our communications systems that NASA more than once had to rethink astronaut safety in the Mercury and Gemini programs. Years later, there was even some speculation among Army Intelligence analysts who had been out of the NASA strategy loop that the Apollo moon landing program was ultimately abandoned because there was no way to protect the astronauts from possible alien threats. 

The alien spacecraft were also aggressively buzzing our frontline defenses in Eastern Europe, either looking for blind spots or weaknesses, or - which is what I believed because I was there and saw it with my own eyes - probing our radar to see how quickly we responded. We’d see blips shoot across our screens that we couldn’t identify and suddenly they’d disappear. Then they’d reappear, only this time even closer to our airfields or missile launchers. Once we determined that we weren’t being probed by Soviet or East German aircraft, we sometimes decided not to respond to the threats. Many times they’d just go away. 

But other times they would play cat and mouse, edging ever closer until we had to respond. That’s what they were looking for, how quickly we could respond and pick them upon our targeting radars or catch up to them with our interceptors. Whenever we’d get just about there for an aerial sighting, they’d take off out of the atmosphere at speeds over 7,500 miles an hour. If we tried to follow, they’d play us along until our fliers had to return. 

Our only successes in defending against them, back in the late 1950s and early 1960s, occurred when we were able to get a firm tracking radar lock. Then when we locked our targeting radars on, the signals that missiles were supposed to follow to the target, it somehow interfered with their navigational ability and the vehicle’s flight became erratic. If we were especially fortunate and able to boost the signal before they broke away, we could actually bring them down. 

Sometimes we actually got lucky enough to score a hit with a missile before the UFO could take any evasive action, which an army air defense battalion did with an antiaircraft missile near Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany in May 1974. The spacecraft managed to crash land in a valley. The craft was retrieved and flown back to Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada. The Roswell crash was different. There was much speculation that it was a combination of the desert lightning storm and our persistent tracking radars at Alamogordo and the 509th that helped bring down the alien vehicle over the New Mexico desert in 1947. 

Then there were the suspected cattle mutilations and reported abductions, perhaps the most direct form of intervention in our culture short of a direct attack upon our installations. While debates broke out among the debunkers - who said these were a combination of hoaxes, attacks by every day predators on cattle, psychological flashback memories of episodes of childhood abuse in the cases of reported abductees, and out and out fabrications of the media - field investigators found they could not explain away some of the cattle mutilations, especially where laser surgery seemed to be used, and psychologists found alarming similarities in the descriptions of abductees who had no knowledge of one another’s stories. 

The military intelligence community regarded these stories of mutilations and abductions very seriously. They worked up descriptions of at least three separate scenarios in which, 

(1) the EBEs were simply conducting scientific experiments on earthly life forms and collecting whatever specimens they could without causing too much disruption and alerting us 

(2) the EBEs were actively collecting specimens and conducting experiments so as to determine whether this was a hospitable environment for them to inhabit, and any disruption they caused was of no concern to them 

(3) all of the experimentation and specimen collection were the prelude to some kind of infiltration or invasion of our planet. We did not know their motives, but could only assume the worst and, therefore, needed to defend ourselves however we could 

While never disclosing it publicly, military intelligence analysts supported the view that Earth was already under some form of probing attack by one or more alien cultures who were testing both our ability and resolve to defend ourselves. Without ever directly addressing whether contacts between the aliens and Earth governments had already taken place - because the notes and minutes of the Hillenkoetter working group were never released to the Chiefs of Staff or to their intelligence officers - the heads of the armed services decided collectively that it was better to plan for war rather than be surprised. 

At the same time, the civilian leaders of the nation’s space program at NASA decided that military intelligence was overreacting to the shadowing and buzzing of our spacecraft. NASA, which had been holding as highly confidential any reports of extraterrestrial activity surrounding our space vehicles, nevertheless decided to adopt an internal official “wait and watch” attitude because they believed that it would have been impossible to launch an explicitly military defensive space program and still achieve the civilian scientific aims at the same time. 

So NASA agreed to go covert. As a cover, NASA, in 1961, agreed to cooperate with military planners to work a “second tier” space program within and covered up by the civilian scientific missions. They agreed to open up a confidential “back channel” communications link to military intelligence regarding any hostile activities conducted by the EBEs against our spacecraft even if these included only shadowing or surveillance. I was aware of this through my contacts in the military intelligence community. 

What NASA didn’t tell military intelligence, of course, was that they already had an even more classified back channel to the Hillenkoetter working group and were keeping them updated on every single alien spacecraft appearance the astronauts reported, especially during the early series of Apollo flights when the EBE craft began buzzing the lunar modules on successive missions after they thrusted out of earth orbit. 

Even though military intelligence was kept out of the operational loop between NASA and the working group, I and a few others still had contacts in the civilian intelligence community that kept us informed. And the army and air force managed to find at least 122 photos taken by astronauts on the moon that showed some evidence of an alien presence. It was a startling find and was one of many reasons that the Reagan administration pushed so hard for the Space Defense Initiative in 1981. 

In 1960, upon the confidential approval of the working group and at the request of the National Security Agency, which was concerned about the vulnerability of its U2 flights, NASA agreed to allow some of its missions to become covers for military surveillance satellites. These satellites, although approved for surveillance of Soviet ICBM activity, were also supposed to spot alien activity in remote portions of the earth. Maybe, in the 1960s, we didn’t have the technology we have now to intercept their ships, but by using new satellite surveillance techniques we believed we’d be able to pick up the signatures of an alien presence on the face of our planet. If we made it too difficult for them to set up shop with bases on Earth, military intelligence planners speculated, maybe they would simply go away. This was another example of how Cold War strategy was utilized for the dual purpose of trying to surveil extraterrestrial activity under the cover of surveilling Soviet activity. 

However, throughout the 1960s, critical projects were started at the Foreign Technology desk to protect vital command and control systems, including the hardening of communications and defense computer circuitry by burying components sensitive to electromagnetic pulses, the same kind of energy generated after a nuclear explosion as well as by the EBE spacecraft. In fact, so important was our research into the effects of the electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, that ever since the late 1950s the Department of Defense has been simulating EMP to determine how to protect the circuitry in its planes, tanks, missiles, and ships from being disabled by it. 

EMP generators were established at a number of facilities around the country, including the Harry Diamond Laboratories in Philadelphia, Maryland, for the army and the EMP Empress I and II simulators for the navy in the middle of Chesapeake Bay and another one at China lake in California. The air force set up EMP simulators at Kirkland Air Force Base in New Mexico and the army additional facilities at White Sands, New Mexico, and at the Redstone arsenal in Alabama. We also initiated the crash development of night vision equipment to enable our troops to see at night the same way the EBEs did, finally enabling us to get a footing, if not an equal footing, with the aliens so that we could force them to some kind of stalemate. It was only then that we began to realize what their intentions were and the startling secrets about their existence on this planet. 

It was night vision that was on my mind today as I was zipped through the sentry post at the main gate and very quickly buzzed into the development laboratories wing at Fort Belvoir by an army specialist 4 who seemed surprised that I wasn’t in uniform. 

“Colonel Corso, Dr. Paul Fredericks, technology development consultant to the night vision section at Fort Belvoir, said as he extended his hand and walked me over to what must have been his prized tobacco colored leather chair. It was way oversized for his small office and was obviously his favorite seat. I was duly appreciative of the honor and courtesy he was according me. “General Trudeau told me you were bringing us some remarkable information about one of the projects we have in development here." 

“I hope it’s helpful to you, Dr. Fredericks," I began. “I’m not a physicist, but I think we have something that might speed up the research timeline and show some new possibilities." 

“Anything that could help, Colonel," he said as I opened up my briefcase and began to spread out what I had. “Anything at all."

CHAPTER 10 

The U2 Program and Project Corona - Spies in Space 

“Of course, General Trudeau has been in touch with Don and the whole development team here," Dr. Fredericks continued as he watched me open the night vision file that I’d taken out of my briefcase. 

“And I’m aware of the nature of the material you’ve got. It’s not something we wanted to talk about over the phone." 

“I appreciate your being discreet about this, Dr. Fredericks, “ I said. “If you think what I’m about to show you can help you in the development process, it’s yours to use. But the arrangement will be that everything is originated here at Fort Belvoir. All R&D will do will be to provide the budget necessary to fund this development. You use your own sources to manufacture the product and take all the credit for the process. “ 

“And this conversation?” Dr. Fredericks asked. 

“Once you tell me you can use what I’ve brought and we get you the budget you require,“ I began, “this conversation never took place and you will take my name off your appointment schedule. “ 

“Now you really do have my interest," he said with just the edge of a bemused sarcasm in his voice as if he’d been down this road many times before. “What did you bring in that briefcase that’s so secret?” 

And with that I held up the first of the army’s 1947 sketches of the night viewer we pulled from the wreckage at Roswell. I handed it across to Dr. Fredericks, who looked at it and turned it around with his fingertips as if he were holding one of the Dead Sea Scrolls. 

“You don’t have to be so careful with it, Dr. Fredericks,“ I said. “I made a few thermal copies. “ 

“Do you have the actual device?” he asked. 

“Back at the Pentagon."

“Who was wearing this?” he continued. 

“At the time, nobody," I told him. “According to the field report, they found this in the sand near one of the bodies." 

“Bodies? At the Roswell crash?” Now he was completely incredulous. “General Trudeau didn’t tell anyone about bodies. “  

“No, that’s true,“ I said. “That’s not information we give out. General Trudeau authorized me to answer any questions you have up to a certain level of security classification." 

“We’re not there yet," Dr. Fredericks asked and asserted at the same time. 

“But we’re close,“ I suggested. “I can talk about the device, talk about where it was found, but that’s probably as far as I can go myself. If General Trudeau wants to give a background briefing and authorizes me to do so, then I can go deeper."

“Funny, but I always thought Roswell was a kind of legend. You know, they found something but maybe it was Russian,"  Dr. Fredericks said. Then he asked again if anyone at the Roswell retrieval had actually seen any of the creatures wearing the night vision device in the sketches. 

“No," I said. “There was a lot of debris that spilled out of the craft. The soldiers on the retrieval team looked through one of the seams that had been split open running along the craft’s lengthwise axis and they saw view ports built into the hull. Well, what astonished them was that when they looked through the view ports, they could see daylight, or a greenish, hazy kind of diffused light that looked like dusk, but outside it was completely dark." 

Paul Fredericks was on the edge of his seat now. 

“No one at the crash site knew anything about the night viewers the Germans were developing during the war," I explained. “So even the officers on the retrieval team were amazed at what they were seeing. When they autopsied the alien at the 509th and pulled off these ‘eyepieces,’ is the only word I can use for them, they realized that they were a complicated set of reflectors that gathered all the available light and turned them into night time image intensifiers." 

I continued, pointing to the sketch in Paul Fredericks hands. “Some medical officer tried to look through it down a darkened hall and it made the images stand out, but nothing was ever done with it and they packed it away with the rest of the alien."

“Did they perform any analysis on this when they brought it back?” Fredericks asked. 

“Some," I told him. “But they had no facilities at the 509th and had to wait until they brought it back to Wright. It wasn’t until the intelligence boys at the Air Materiel Command got hold of it that they realized that this was something the Germans were trying to deploy." 

“But this is far more sophisticated,“ Dr. Fredericks said. “The Germans weren’t even close to something like this. “ 

“Yes, sir, “ I said. “Not even close. And that’s what got the intelligence people at Wright so concerned. Just how close were the Germans about to get when the war ended? What else had they gotten their hands on? Did they have help?” 

“Or," Dr. Fredericks said very slowly, “did they find a crash just like we found?” 

“That’s exactly the point, Dr. Fredericks, “ I said. “What did they find?” 

“And if the Germans could get their hands on this material, what about the Soviets?” he asked. But he was talking to himself now, talking in a way that made him sound as if he were really thinking out loud. “Why not the Chinese or any of our European allies? Just how much of this stuff is out there?” he finally asked me. 

“We don’t have any of those answers, “ I told him. “At least not those of us in the army. And for obvious reasons nobody’s walking around sharing this information back and forth among the services or with any other agencies. We have what we have, and that’s as far as we’re willing to go.“  

“And you don’t want me talking about this or trying to sniff around for any information, “ he said. 

“If we thought you were going to do that I wouldn’t even be here, “ I said. “I have these reports here and descriptions of the device. I’ll leave them with you. If you think you can work these into your development program, I’ll have the material itself sent over and then it’s out of our hands completely. Farm it out to wherever you want it developed. Offer your defense contractor the right to patent it. Never tell them where you got it or what its origin might be. As far as we’re concerned whoever comes up with the night viewers you ultimately contract with to build can own the whole product and slap their name on it. All we want to do is get this thing developed. That’s it. “ 

“May I?” Dr. Fredericks asked, reaching for the reports I’d spread out on the arm of the leather chair. 

I handed them across in a bundle, and he flipped through them as if he were my old college professor looking at a term paper, harrumphing, grunting, and nodding at every page. 

“That’s more about how they handled the alien at Wright Field than about the eyepieces themselves, “ I said. “Because in reality, they didn’t know what made the thing tick and they didn’t really want to tear it apart. “ 

“So they just threw it in a package?” he asked. 

“Basically, that’s exactly what happened, “ I said. “At first they didn’t know how it was supposed to work. Or maybe they thought it would turn human beings blind or something. They were that afraid. After a while, they just let it stay in dead storage and hoped someone else would take it off their hands. “ 

“And that’d be you, “ Dr. Fredericks said. 

“Actually,“ I told him, “that’d be you, if you want it. “ 

“I need to read this material more thoroughly and see where we can slip your night vision into the project without causing a ripple on the surface, “ Dr. Fredericks explained. 

“How easy will that be?” I asked. 

“At Fort Belvoir, “ he answered, “teams here are taught to keep their own thoughts to themselves. If you tell them this is a piece of foreign technology our intelligence boys got from some other country and we’re supposed to make it disappear into what we’re doing, that’s the story. “ 

“Nobody asks any questions?” I pushed. 

“Nobody asks questions under any circumstances, “ he said. “It would move along faster and create its own little development bureaucracy if we had the budget to turn it into a crash development project with a real development phase deadline. “ 

“Then what happens?” I asked. 

“It’s just like Santa’s workshop on the first day of winter. None of the elves looks up from his workbench until it’s done. Then the next project comes along and everybody forgets. By the time the troops are wearing these things in the field and they’re handing out the gold watches over a prime rib at the Potomac Inn, night vision is just one big happy memory with the details  rewritten to fit the view of history that serves the moment. No one will ever even guess, Colonel Corso, “ he said. “From the moment your boys hand the material over, it goes into the developmental soup at Fort Belvoir and comes out the other end as a weapon in the field. “ 

I stood up and closed my briefcase while he walked around his desk. “So what are you going to recommend to General Trudeau?” he asked. 

“I’d like to suggest we send the device over, you come up with the budget you need, and General Trudeau finds the allocation, “ I said. 

“And you?” he said. 

“It was a pleasure not meeting you, Dr. Fredericks, “ I told him. “Of course, there will be a liaison over in Army R&D who will officially be placed in charge of night vision development. He will report to General Trudeau and anything I need to know I’ll find out from the general. I look forward to seeing the development reports as they come out. Congratulations on your new piece of technology. And congratulations to the company who winds up with this defense contract. “ 

“Congratulations, indeed, “ Dr. Fredericks said. 

We shook hands and he walked me out of his office into the corridor. For a moment, it was like stepping out of the surreal into the real. We’d just stitched our own piece of fabric over reality, created a piece of history. The technology boys in research and development at Fort Belvoir would receive a device from one of their consultants who would whisper to them that this was liberated from one of our enemies. Don’t ask any questions. But it was just the thing that the lab people at Fort Belvoir were looking for to show them how a finished device might look. Can they come up with a reverse engineering plan? Is there a company they’re already working with on night vision? 

And within a few months, some company, whoever it might be, would wind up with a plan in place, a development budget, and a new identity for the strange looking eyepieces that turned up in my Roswell files. It might take five or so years, but when it came rolling off the assembly line somewhere in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Ohio, or wherever, it would be “Made in the USA” and I’d read about it in the papers or see it on television. 

Night vision was the first project we actually seeded during the first year of my tenure at Foreign Technology. It would turn out to be easier than most because of the history of German development during the war and the research already done through the 1950s. By the time I brought the Roswell night viewer to Fort Belvoir, it fit right in through the seam of an existing development program and no one was the wiser. The actual weapons development program at Fort Belvoir served as the cover for the dissemination of Roswell technology so perfectly that the only distortion anyone could find as he went back through the history is what might seem like a sudden acceleration in the development program itself shortly after 1961. 

Night vision got a boost in funding, a new officer was assigned to the project by General Trudeau, and General Trudeau’s name starts turning up on a regular basis as one of the apparent benefactors of the program. By 1963, when he and I were gone from the Pentagon, the project was at Martin Marietta Electronics - now part of Lockheed Martin - and already on its way through the initial deployment that would take place in Europe and Vietnam.. 

But I didn’t know that as I drove through the Fort Belvoir gate and headed back to my Pentagon office. I only felt satisfied that it looked like we had successfully inserted one of our own Foreign Technology projects into an ongoing development stream already under way and had camouflaged our appropriation of a piece of alien technology. At this point, I believed, we’d kept it out of the hands of the Soviets for the time being, and the aliens, if they were monitoring what we were doing, maybe didn’t know what we were doing with it either. It would give us time. 

I headed north along the Potomac and through the green woods of Fairfax County, Virginia, back to a desk that was quickly piling up with other projects that needed disposition. One of them, which was running parallel with the night vision I’d just handed off, was the embryonic “Project Corona, “ an idea whose time was suddenly thrust upon us by the shooting down of a U2 surveillance plane and the capture of its pilot, Francis Gary Powers.

The air force and the CIA had been running the U2 program for awhile during the Eisenhower administration, and the reports and photos routinely crossed my desk at the National Security Council. Like so many other events during the Cold War, the U2 didn’t have just a single purpose, the surveillance of the Soviet Union to monitor their guided missile development program. It had a triple intent. Of course, we wanted to know exactly what the Soviets were up to, but we also wanted to test their air defense capability. 

We wanted to know how accurately their radars could track the U2 and whether any of their missiles could bring it down. So we deliberately provoked them by making our presence known when we wanted them to fire at us. Could they shoot us down? Cameras on the U2 picked up the launch of enemy surface to air missiles as the pilot flew over sensitive installations where the Soviets had to challenge us or cede to us the control of top classified zones in their airspace. 

So we played gamesmanship with them, probing their defenses, deliberately sacrificing pilots who we believed died when their planes were shot down, and always denying what we were doing even as Khrushchev screamed at Eisenhower that the U2 program was putting Khrushchev himself at risk inside the Kremlin. “We can deal with each other, “ the Communist Party chairman told Ike. “But not if you force me out of office." 

But as much as Eisenhower hated the U2 program and the jeopardy into which it placed our pilots, the President had to accommodate himself to one of the other agendas of the surveillance: the ongoing search for any evidence of extraterrestrial spacecraft landings or crashes within the vastness of the Soviet Union. We also wanted to see whether the Soviets were harvesting any of the alien aircraft technology for themselves. That’s what made the U2 program too valuable to give up until we had an alternative. And the alternative, although it was an air force and not an army program, was part of a shared R&D between our intelligence services and the National Security Council/CIA apparatus. And it was already in development within Lockheed in a division they called “skunk works. “ 

Because we had set up our U2 flights to provoke the Soviets and because we knew that ultimately we would start to lose pilots and planes, the National Security staff began looking aggressively for a more secure surveillance program as early as 1957, my last year at the White House. Intelligence decided to take orbital satellite photos of Soviet installations, but only if they could get a bird up there that would be reliable. Also, we didn’t want to let the Soviets know we were turning earth orbit into a surveillance facility because we didn’t want to encourage them to go after our satellites. So the trick was to get a satellite up there in complete secrecy. But how could you do that with the whole world watching? The army and air force had an idea. Lockheed had already shown that it could develop a surveillance plane, the U2 and eventually the SR 71, out of the public view and run those flights without too much interference from Senate watchdog committees and out of the presence of any newspaper reporters. Could they do the same thing with a satellite? And if they could, would the satellite recon photos be as reliable as the photos we were getting from the U2s?

Normally, I would have said that if the army were putting up a satellite, it could do anything it wanted because everything we did under our intelligence blanket remained relatively secure. However, both the army and the air force were effectively put out of the satellite launching business toward the end of the Eisenhower administration by the civilian National Aeronautics and Space Agency under a pooled resources crash program to get satellites up into space to show the world the flag. The Soviets had beaten us in the race initially with Sputnik, and the failed army and navy attempts to launch satellites only made us look worse. I learned for a fact that when the New York Daily News ran the full page headline, “Oh Dear, “ after the Corporal rose a few inches, fell back onto the launchpad, and blew up into smithereens, no one was laughing harder than Nikita Khrushchev. 

After a few of these attempts, the National Security Council advised President Eisenhower to throw in the towel, pool all the national scientific resources he could, and turn the U.S. entry into the space race over to a civilian agency. The military services had learned their lesson about competing over the same technology the hard way and had to stand back and watch NASA take over. 

NASA had some immediate successes, and before the end of the Eisenhower administration in 1960, they had managed to put satellites in orbit and experiment with the effects of orbital flight on animals in far more sophisticated ways than the army’s V2 experiments with small primates at Alamogordo in the late 1940s and early 1950s. As the army and air force intelligence offices looked at the successes of these NASA satellites and at the increasing vulnerabilities of the U2 flights, they saw the possible answer to their need for a fail safe surveillance program. 

When NASA began its Discoverer orbiter program, launching a payload into low orbit and returning it, the military services thought they saw a solution. If they could somehow manage to build a workable photo recon satellite small enough to fit into the very limited space inside the Discoverer payload capsule, recover the surveillance device when the orbiter returned to Earth, and install the entire military spying program within a civilian scientific exploration program that was getting a lot of attention from the newspapers without alerting the public to the military’s secret agenda, they would have their covert surveillance. 

We knew that the Soviets would very quickly find out about the program, but that wasn’t such a bad thing. We reasoned that there was no way, given the CIA’s penetration by the KGB, to keep the program completely covert, but if the Soviets knew we were able to watch them it might keep them honest. And Khrushchev wouldn’t have to worry about our deliberately violating his airspace, so he was off the hook at the Kremlin and thankful for it. All we had to do was keep it out of the public arena and we’d be home free. The whole program rested on our being able to slip what we now called “Corona” into the existing Discoverer program without a whisper in the air, the Soviets would go along without a protest, and we would get our surveillance photos. 

We added an additional incentive for the Soviets to discourage them from getting their friends in the CIA to leak the story to friendly journalists and blowing the cover on the whole operation. We encouraged them to participate with us in the hidden agenda of Corona: surveillance of potential alien crash landings. Army Intelligence, upon Eisenhower’s and the NSC’s express approval, let it be known to their counterparts in the Soviet military that any aerial intelligence we developed as a result of Corona that revealed the presence of aliens on Soviet territory would be shared with the military. What they did with the information, we said, we really didn’t care. 

But the military was more than grateful. The professional military didn’t trust the commissars in the Communist Party anymore than we did and hated being under their collective thumb. Thus, in a perverse way, although we were tipping off the Russian military about alien activity in their territory, we really weren’t sharing information with the Communists because of the deep division within the Soviet government between the Communist Party and the military. 

Our incentive worked and the KGB encouraged the CIA - even I was surprised at how effectively they worked together - not to leak the story. Now it was up to the air force and the skunk works division at Lockheed to build the Corona surveillance satellite out of the public arena and load the vehicle into the Discoverer rocket right under the noses of the American press. It was one of the trickiest operations of the Cold War because the Russians knew what we were doing, NASA was making the entire project happen, but the American press, hungry for even the smallest tidbit of spaceflight information, had to be kept completely in the dark. 

If necessary, we had to lie to them, provide them with cover stories, completely trick them into thinking that all the American people had to think about was the little chimp that was blasted into orbit wearing his custom sized space helmet. And we didn’t have much time to do it because we knew the Soviets were trying to embarrass Ike at the end of his term by bringing down one of our U2 planes with a live pilot inside. We were now in a race against the Soviets to replace the U2 with the Corona, even though the Soviets understood and accepted what we were doing every step of the way. It was one of the ironies of the Cold War. 

The engineers at Lockheed designed the satellite camera package to fit neatly into the payload cone of the Discoverer capsule. They worked under brutal time constraints because President Eisenhower was putting pressure on the National Security Council to cut off the U2 overnights completely. The old general knew it was just a matter of time before the Soviets would capture a living American pilot, extract his confession, and march him in front of the television cameras to the humiliation of the United States. Eisenhower was a man of his word who disliked politicians because they always sought the expedient solution, not the most honorable one. 

Eisenhower disliked expedience for expediency’s sake and always preferred to take the most directly honest path whenever he could. But, as Khrushchev complained about the U2 flights, Ike always denied we were sending them. It was such an obvious lie that Khrushchev kept goading Eisenhower about exposing himself that way. “We will shoot one of them down, you’ll see, “ he kept telling Eisenhower whenever he complained. “Then what will you say?” 

But President Eisenhower denied the existence of the U2, put down the telephone, and turned on his own staff, furious that they had put him into such an untenable situation. “Stop the flights, “ he ordered. But the CIA kept pushing for one more flight. It was serving a purpose, they argued. They were learning about the Russian air defense system at the same time they were surveilling possible areas of alien spacecraft activity. With or without the Russians’ knowledge, the U2s denied the extraterrestrials a complete camouflage because of our high resolution aerial surveillance. I don’t know whether we actually found any  evidence of an alien landing on Russian territory from our U2 surveillance, but the extraterrestrials certainly could see that we were able to surveil the Soviet Union, and their knowledge of our capability served as a deterrent to roaming the vast areas of the Soviet Union with impunity. 

The CIA claimed the U2s were so important to our national security that they were even ready to sacrifice one of their own pilots. However, I also believe that the KGB moles who had penetrated them wanted Eisenhower to be embarrassed before the entire world. And when Francis Gary Powers took off in May 1960, they had their chance. 73s

There is still a great deal of doubt about the shoot-down of Powers’s U2. His mission was to fly over the most sensitive Soviet missile installations and make himself a target. We believed the Russian SAMs couldn’t reach his altitude. But, whether Powers fell asleep at the stick because of oxygen deprivation or whether his CIA controllers forced him to a lower altitude to get better photos or even to make himself a more provocative target, we’ll never know. I believe that Powers was probably startled out of a low oxygen lethargy by the explosion of a SAM close enough to force him to lose control. His plane was not hit by the missile. The U2 was the type of aircraft that was very difficult to fly. Powers probably pulled into a stall and was unable to bring it back. As his plane spun toward the ground and Powers became too disoriented to regain control, he pulled on the lever next to his seat, blew the canopy off, and ejected. 

Powers was captured alive, paraded before cameras, and forced to confess that he was spying on the Soviet Union. Khrushchev had his excuse to cancel a summit meeting with Eisenhower and put on one of the great performances of his career in front of the Supreme-Soviet. Eisenhower, as he had most feared, was publicly humiliated and forced to admit to Khrushchev that he had sent the U2s over the Soviet Union. He promised Khrushchev that the U2 flights would end, eliminating a valuable surveillance tool and potentially blinding us not only to what the Soviet Union was doing but potentially to what the extraterrestrials were doing in Asia as well. It was a terrible experience for the old man, who believed he had been compromised by his own administration. 

All the while during the final months of preparations before Gary Powers’s U2 flight, NASA was completing the engineering details to insert the Corona payload into the Discoverer payload. If all went well, the first launch of Corona would give the National Security Council the results they wanted and the U2 program would come to an end because it had been made obsolete by Corona. Then Gary Powers was shot down and the U2 program came to an end because Eisenhower terminated it. We were blind. Then Discoverer was launched from Cape Canaveral and those of us in the army and air-force missile programs who were aware of Corona and what was at stake in the mission held our collective breaths. If it worked, we had eyes. If it failed, our best surveillance opportunity would have failed. 

You can imagine the jubilation at the Pentagon when the Corona payload was recovered and we developed the first photos. They were better than what we had gotten from the U2, and the Corona was completely invisible to the Soviets. Khrushchev hid the information from his own Supreme Soviet, and Eisenhower certainly didn’t make a public statement to the American people. We were back in the photo intelligence business, and in addition to keeping tabs on Soviet missile developments, we had a way to track any possible EBE attempt to set up a base in the remotest parts of Asia, Africa, or South America. We were gaining parity with the EBEs, a small victory, but a victory nevertheless. 

What satisfied me the most about Project Corona, I thought as I reached the outskirts of Washington on my way back from Fort Belvoir, was that it was elegant as well as successful; Just like the ease with which we had slipped the Roswell night visor into the development and engineering stream at Fort Belvoir, so had we slipped the Corona photo-surveillance payload directly into the ongoing Discoverer program, reverse engineering Discoverer to make the payload fit. No one realized what we had accomplished or how effectively the military utilized traditional programs as a cover for their own secret weapons development systems. At the same time, we knew we were gaining on the aliens. With each successful start of a new project, some based on the Roswell technology, others initiated specifically to counter the alien capabilities we had discovered at Roswell, we believed we were advancing our game piece to the next square. We believed that no matter how hostile the aliens’ intentions were, they didn’t have the raw power to launch a global war against us. They would study us, infiltrate us, wear us down until we might not be able to resist them, but they had neither the intention nor the capability, we believed, of destroying the planet so as to take it for themselves. In that, we held the upper hand. 

But what we needed was a real outpost in a location that would enable us to establish a strategic advantage, a base to strike at them far enough away so that we wouldn’t create a panic on Earth. We needed a base on the moon. It was something the army had dreamed about from the very first months after our encounters with the aliens outside of Roswell and something we had tried to fund without the public’s knowledge. It was an ambitious project that had bounced around from skeptic to skeptic inside the military  for over a year before it landed in front of me. And when I took over the Foreign Technology desk, it was a project we almost had. 

CHAPTER 11 

Project Moon Base 

“I ENVISION EXPEDITIOUS DEVELOPMENT OF THE PROPOSAL TO establish a lunar outpost to be of critical importance to the U.S. Army of the future. This evaluation is apparently shared by the Chief of Staff in view of his expeditious approval and enthusiastic endorsement of initiation of the study, “ General Trudeau wrote to the chief of ordnance in March 1959, in support of the army’s “Project HORIZON, “ a strategic plan for deploying a military outpost on the surface of the moon.. It was the army’s most ambitious response to the threat from extraterrestrials and, by the time I arrived at the Pentagon, it was one of the projects that General Trudeau had handed off to me to get moving. 

“The boys at NASA are taking over the whole rocket launching business, Phil, “ he said. “And the army’s not even getting the scraps left on the table. “ 

I had just left the White House when the National Aeronautics and Space Act was passed in 1958, and I knew what that had portended. It transferred the responsibility of space from the military services to a civilian run agency that was supposed to fulfill the U.S. promises to other countries for the demilitarization of space. It was a laudable goal, anyone would argue : demilitarize space so that countries could explore and experiment without the risk of losing their space vehicles or satellites to hostile activities. 

For the United States and the Russians the agreement meant that our respective astronauts and cosmonauts wouldn’t make war on each other. Good idea. But someone forgot to tell it to the extraterrestrials, who had been systematically violating our planet’s airspace for decades, if not centuries, and had already set up a base of operations on the moon.

For General Trudeau and much of the U.S. military command, the Soviets’ ability to put high payload vehicles and cosmonauts into orbit with relative ease was a frightening prospect. Unless the United States challenged Soviet technology with our own ongoing launch program and expanded our satellite surveillance, the army believed it would cede an all important strategic advantage to the Soviet Union. By 1960, we were reaching a critical juncture. Because of the development window and the time it took to get projects through development, programs started too late in the 1960s would be hopelessly obsolete by 1970, when the Soviets were expected to have established a presence in space. 

As in the U2 program, we had another agenda that concerned us more than just the Soviets’ ability to threaten us with a nuclear missile capability from space. We were also very much aware of the ability of a dominant military power on Earth to establish its own version of a treaty with extraterrestrials. We had already seen how Stalin negotiated a separate non-aggression pact with Hitler, allowing the Germans to stabilize its Eastern front and invade Western Europe. We didn’t want to see Khrushchev gain so much unchallenged power in space that the extraterrestrials would readily agree to some kind of accommodation with him guaranteeing both of them a degree of freedom to dominate the political affairs of our planet. This may seem paranoid now, in the 1990s, but in the late 1950s this was exactly the thinking of the military intelligence community. 

General Trudeau’s concerns were the concerns of anybody who knew the truth about an alien presence around our planet and their abilities to drop on top of us from out of nowhere just like they had done in Roswell, in Washington, D.C., in 1952, and in countless other places around the world. And we didn’t know if any one of these sightings could turn into a full-fledged landing in force or if an invasion hadn’t already begun.

If they could turn the Soviet government into a client state with a proxy army, there might be no checking their ability to exercise their will to colonize our planet, appropriate our natural resources, or, if the cattle 75 mutilations and stories of abductions were true, conduct with complete impunity an organized experimentation or testing program on the life forms of this planet. In the absence of any information to disprove our fears, it was the military’s obligation to project the worst possible scenario. That’s why the army pushed for Project HORIZON. We had to have a plan. 

The Horizon documents were straight forward in expressing their concerns: We needed to put a fully armed military outpost on the moon first because if the Soviets achieved this objective before we did, we would be in the position of having to storm a hill or secure a military position. We would rather be the defenders of a strongly fortified enclave than the attackers. Our outpost had to be strong enough to withstand an assault and have enough personnel to conduct scientific experiments and continual surveillance of the earth and its airspace. 

Initially, General Trudeau argued, the outpost must be of sufficient size and contain sufficient equipment to permit the survival and moderate constructive activity of from ten to twenty personnel at a minimum. It must allow for expansion of the permanent facilities, resupply, and rotation of personnel to guarantee the maximum amount of time for a sustained occupancy. The general not only wanted the outpost to establish a beach head on the moon, he wanted it to be permanent and able to sustain itself for long periods without support from the earth. Therefore, location and design were critical and required, in the army’s view, a triangulation station of moon to Earth baseline space surveillance system that facilitated: 

(1) communication with and optimum observation of the earth, 

(2) routine travel between the moon and the earth, 

(3) the best possible exploration capability not only of the immediate area of the lunar surface but long range exploration expeditions and, most importantly from the army’s perspective, 

(4) the military defense of the moon base. The army’s primary objective was to establish the first permanent manned installation on the moon and nothing less. The military potential of the moon was paramount, but the mission allowed for an ongoing investigation of the commercial and scientific potentials of the outpost as well. 

The army wanted to make Horizon conform to existing national policy on space exploration, even insofar as the demilitarization of space was concerned. But it was tough because all of us in the military services who had come in contact with the Roswell file believed that we were already under some form of attack. Demilitarizing space only meant playing into the hands of a culture that had displayed a hostile intent toward us. But we also realized that overtly establishing a military presence in space would encourage the Soviets to match us step for step and result in an arms race in outer space that would exacerbate Cold War tensions. 

Armaments in space might be more difficult to control, and the chance of an accidental military exchange could have easily precipitated a crisis on Earth. Thus, the whole problem of what to do about establishing a military presence in space was a conundrum. Horizon was the army’s attempt to accomplish its military objectives within the context of the government’s demilitarization policy. 

The army faced another obstacle in its plans from the members of the Roswell working group who were still establishing and enforcing policy at levels above top secret. The working group correctly saw that any independent military expedition into space, especially for the purpose of establishing an outpost on the moon, had a high probability of encountering extraterrestrials. In this encounter, there was no guarantee that a military exchange would not ensue or, at the very least, a military report would be filed. 

Even if these reports were kept top secret, given the military bureaucracy and the presence of legislative oversight it was highly unlikely that the press would not learn about military encounters with aliens. Thus, the basic premise of the working group and its entire mission, the camouflage of our discovery of alien life forms visiting and probably threatening Earth, would be undermined and years of successful operations might easily be brought to an unsatisfactory end. No, the working group would rather have the exploration of space in the hands of a civilian agency whose bureaucracy could be more easily controlled and whose personnel would be handpicked, at least at the outset, by the members of the working group. 

Thus, the stage was set for a Byzantine bureaucratic struggle among members of the same organizations but with different levels of security clearance, policy objectives, and even knowledge of what had taken place in years gone by. And underlying it all was the basic assumption that the world’s civilian population was not ready to learn the real truth about the existence of extraterrestrial cultures and the likely threat  these cultures posed to life on Earth. General Trudeau was as undaunted as I had ever seen him.

In Korea, he charged back up Pork Chop Hill into the face of an enemy attack so fierce that the soldiers who had volunteered to go up with him believed they were going to breathe their last. But they couldn’t let him go up there alone, which is exactly what he was set to do when he threw away his helmet and clasped one on from a wounded sergeant. He chambered the first round into his automatic and said, “I’m going. Who’s with me?” I imagined he had the same look on his face now, as he handed me the report for Project Horizon, as he did then. 

“We’re going, Phil,“ he said, and that was all I needed to hear. 

When the civilian space agency supporters told the army that all of the issues the military raised about the need to establish a presence first would be accomplished with civilian missions, General Trudeau argued that the civilian plans did not explicitly call for a base on the moon, only for the possibility of an outpost in earth orbit that may or may not be capable of serving as a way station for flights to the moon or to other planets. 

And the time frame for the construction of an orbiting space station made it seem obsolete even before it reached the drawing boards. Besides, General Trudeau told the scientists on Eisenhower’s aeronautics and space advisory committee toward the end of the President’s administration, you can’t trust a civilian run agency to complete a military mission. It hadn’t happened in the past and it wouldn’t happen in the future. If you wanted a military operation completed, only the military could do it. President Eisenhower understood that kind of logic. 

In the late 1950s, the White House had forwarded queries to General Trudeau about the army’s research and development policy regarding Project Horizon and why, specifically, the military needed to be on the moon and why a civilian mission couldn’t accomplish most of the scientific objectives. This was at the time when the White House was supporting the National Aeronautics and Space Act and was supporting the creation of the civilian National Aeronautics and Space Administration. 

General Trudeau responded that he couldn’t immediately lay out the full extent of the military potential. “But,“ he wrote in the report, “it is probable that observation of the Earth and space vehicles from the moon will prove to be highly advantageous.“ 

Later he wrote that by using a moon to Earth baseline, space surveillance by triangulation - in other words, using a point of reference on Earth and a point of reference on the moon to pin point the positions of enemy missiles, satellites, or spacecraft - promised greater range and accuracy of observation. Instead of having only one point of observation, we would have an additional angle because we would have a base on the moon as another point of observation. 

This was especially the case for the types of lunar and Mars missions NASA was planning as early as 1960. He said that the types of earth based tracking and control networks currently in the planning stages were already inadequate for the deep space operations that were also in the planning stages in the civilian agencies. So, it made no sense to spend money developing communications and control networks that would be obsolete for the very purposes for which they were being designed. Military communications would be improved immeasurably by the use of a moon based relay station that would cover a broader range and probably be more resistant to attack during a conventional or nuclear war that took place on Earth. But General Trudeau had the real bombshell waiting to be dropped. 

“The employment of moon based weapons systems against Earth or space targets may prove to be feasible and desirable,“ he wrote the army chief of ordnance, revealing for the first time that he believed, along with Douglas MacArthur, that the army might be called upon to fight a war in space as well as on Earth. General Trudeau foresaw the possibility that a moon based communications network would have an advantage in tracking guided missiles launched from Earth, but he also realized that weapons could be fired from space, and not just by Earth governments but by extraterrestrial craft. It was the moon base project, he believed, that would be able to protect civilian populations and military forces on Earth from attacks launched either from earth orbit or from space. But a moon based defense initiative had an added feature. 

“Moon based military power will be a strong deterrent to war because of the extreme difficulty, from the enemy point of view, of eliminating our ability to retaliate, “ he hypothesized. “Any military operations on the moon will be difficult to counter by the enemy because of the difficulty of his reaching the moon, if our forces are already present and have means of countering a landing or of neutralizing any hostile forces that have landed. “ 

And, the general told me, this would apply whether those hostile forces were the Soviets, the Chinese, or the EBEs. The situation would be reversed, however, “if hostile forces are permitted to arrive first. They can militarily counter our landings and attempt to deny us politically the use of their property.“ 

The army conceived of the development of a moon base as an endeavor similar to the building of the atomic bomb: a vast amount of resources applied to one particular mission, complete secrecy about the nature of the mission, and a crash program to complete the mission before the end of the next decade. He said that the establishment of the outpost should be a special project having authority and priority similar to the Manhattan Project in World War II. Once established, the lunar base would be operated under the control of a unified space command, which was an extension of current military command and control policy, and still is. 

Space, specifically an imaginary sphere of space encompassing the earth and the moon, would be considered a military theater governed by whatever military rules were in force at that time. The control of all U.S. military forces by a unified command had already been in effect by the late 1950s, so General Trudeau’s plan for a unified military space command was no exception to an ongoing practice. The only difference was that the general didn’t want the unified command to exercise authority solely over the moon base itself; he wanted it extended to control and utilize exclusively military satellites, military space vehicles, space surveillance systems, and the entire logistical network installed to support these military assets. 

To the general, being second to the Soviet Union in deploying and supporting a permanent lunar outpost would have been disastrous not only to our national prestige but to our very democratic system itself. In Arthur Trudeau’s estimation, the Soviet Union was currently planning to fortify a lunar base by the middle 1960s and declare it Soviet territory. He believed that if the United States tried to land on the moon, especially if we tried to establish a base of operations there, the Soviets would have propagandized the event as an act of war, an invasion of its territory, and would have tried to characterize the United States as the aggressor and our presence as a hostile act. 

If they defended the moon as one of their colonies, or if they were the proxy force on behalf of the extraterrestrials with whom they had forged a military treaty, the United States would be in a weakened position. Thus, General Trudeau concluded and so advised his chief of the Ordnance Missile Command, it was of the utmost urgency that the U.S. Army devise a feasible plan to have a manned landing on the lunar surface by spring 1965, with a fully operational lunar outpost deployed on the moon by late 1966 at a cost over an eight and a half year period of $6 billion. [interesting because we know there have been rumors that Armstrong or one of the other astronauts suggested there was a base on the moon, this astronaut seemed to suggest it was alien, how do we know the base that was supposedly seen, is not the one he is talking about in this chapter DC]

The first two astronauts, the spear head of the scouting crew, were scheduled to touch down on the lunar surface in April 1965, in an area near the lunar equator where, according to the surveys, the army believed the terrain would support multiple landing and lift off facilities and the construction of a cylindrical, ranch house type of structure with tubular walls built beneath the surface into a crevice that would house an initial twelve personnel. The bulk of the construction materials for the lunar outpost, about 300,000 pounds, would already be on the site, having been transported there over the previous three months. According to the army plan, an additional 190,000 pounds of cargo would be sent to the moon from April 1965 through November 1966. And from December 1966 through December 1967, another 266,000 pounds of cargo and supplies would be scheduled to arrive at the now operational moon base. 

It is April 1965, and a lunar vehicle with a crew of two astronauts has just touched down on the moon’s surface. Although the vehicle has an immediate lift off capability to return the astronauts to Earth, their scouting from orbit has determined that the area is safe and that there are no threats from either the Soviets or any extraterrestrials. The radio crackles with the team’s first instructions. 

“This is Horizon control, Moonbase. You are go for the first twenty-four hours,“ Horizon control at the Cocoa Beach, Florida, Cape Canaveral Space Command Center advises the astronauts. They secure their lander, which, if they receive the go to stay for additional periods, will ultimately become their cabin for the next two months as the construction crews arrive from Earth to begin the assembly of the lunar outpost. 

However, even before the first manned cargo ships arrive, the advance crew of two astronauts will confirm the condition of the cargo that has already been delivered to the site, refine the environmental studies that have been conducted by the unmanned surveillance probes, and verify that the initial measurements and assumptions for the site of the moon base are correct. 

By July 1965, the first crew of nine men arrive to begin laying the cylindrical tubes in the crevice beneath the surface and install the two portable atomic reactors that will power the entire outpost. A number of factors influenced the army’s decision to sink the main structures beneath the lunar surface. The most  important of these were the uniform temperatures, the insulation of the lunar surface material itself, protection from a potentially hazardous shower of small meteors and meteorites, camouflage and security, and protection from the kinds of radiation particles that are normally prevented from reaching Earth by our atmosphere. 

Army engineers designed the cylindrical housing units to look and act like vacuum tank thermos bottles with a double wall with a special insulation between. The thermos design would prevent heat loss and so insulate the housing unit so that just the heal radiated by the internal artificial lighting system would be more than adequate to maintain a comfortable temperature inside. The crew’s atmosphere was to be maintained by insulated tanks containing liquid oxygen and nitrogen with the waste moisture and carbon dioxide absorbed by solid chemicals and recycled through a dehumidifier. Eventually, as the base became more permanent and new crews were rotated in and out, a more efficient recycling system was to be installed. The initial construction crew was assigned to live in a temporary configuration of cylindrical quarters as their numbers were increased by an additional six men and more supplies. Like the permanent facility, the temporary construction cabin would be buried in a crevice beneath the lunar surface, but it would be smaller than the permanent cabin and have none of the laboratory facilities that were to be built in the permanent structure. 

From the component parts already shipped to the landing site, the construction crew was to assemble a lunar surface rover, a digging and trenching vehicle - similar to a backhoe - and a forklift type of vehicle that would also serve as a type of crane. With just these three devices, the army believed, a crew of fifteen workers could assemble a permanent outpost out of prefabricated components. The Horizon plan for construction of facilities in a weightless, airless environment ultimately became the model for the construction of both the Russian Mir and American freedom space stations. 

While the construction of the permanent subsurface structure was under way, other members of the crew would lay out the multi antenna communications system that would rely on geosynchronous Earth satellites to relay transmissions back and forth from Earth ground stations. Lunar based tracking and surveillance radar equipment would also maintain a constant vigilance of the earth and be able to track any orbital vehicles from the earth’s surface as well as space vehicles entering the planet’s atmosphere from outer space. Members of the crew would communicate with each other: and with the outpost itself by radios mounted in the helmets of their space suits. 

By the time the army was proposing Project Horizon, army engineers had already selected a number of launch sites. Instead of Cape Canaveral, the army chose an equatorial location because the earth spins fastest at the equator and this would provide added thrust to any rocket with an especially heavy payload. The army chose a secret location in Brazil where it wanted to start construction on an eight launchpad facility that would house the entire project. 

The spacecraft would be monitored and controlled from the facilities at Cocoa Beach, where the army and navy were already launching their satellites. 

We broke the program into six separate phases beginning with the June 1959 initial feasibility, which was written in response to General Trudeau’s first proposal and became Phase I of the entire plan. 

Phase II, scheduled to be completed in early 1960, when I was to take over the project, called for a detailed development and funding plan in conjunction with preliminary experimentation on some of the essential components. During this phase, I had planned to use our regular Army R&D procedures to manage and review the testing and make sure that we could do what we said we could do under the initial feasibility study. 

In Phase III, we scheduled the complete development of the hardware and the system integration for the entire project. This included the rockets, the space capsules, all of the lunar transportation and construction vehicles, the launch facilities at the proposed site in Brazil, and the lunar outpost components for both the temporary and the permanent bases. Also included in this phase was the development of all of the communications systems, including relay stations, surveillance systems, and the personal protective and communications gear that the astronauts would use. And finally, Phase III called for the engineering of all the actual procedures needed for Horizon to be successful such as the orbital rendezvous, orbital fueling of lunar transportation vehicles, transfer of cargo in orbit, and launching and testing of cargo rockets. 

Under Phase IV, scheduled for 1965, the first lunar landing was to take place. The establishment of the first two man lunar observation outpost and the construction of the preliminary living and working quarters for the first detachment of the crew were all slated for completion. The plans stated that by the end of this phase, “a manned lunar outpost will have been established.“ 

Phases V and VI were the operational phases of the project and were scheduled to be completed over a two year period beginning in December 1966 and winding up in January 1968. Under these phases, the lunar outpost would progress from the preliminary construction phases to the construction of the permanent facilities. These facilities begin the surveillance of Earth, establish our military presence by the emplacement of fortified positions on the moon, and begin the first scientific experiments and exploration. 

In Phase VI, based upon the success of the permanent outpost and the exploration of the lunar terrain, the army planned to expand the outpost with more landings and additional facilities and report on the results of biological and chemical testing and the first attempts to exploit the moon as a commercial entity. The army also believed, because that was the way we in R&D believed we could pay back the enormous development overhead we incurred, that by commercially exploiting the moon, perhaps through the same kind of federal land leasing deals the Department of the Interior currently grants for oil and mineral exploration, we could put the billions of dollars spent back into the federal coffers. 

Project Horizon also outlined the development of an Earth orbiting station as an ancillary project to support the lunar landing missions. Under the “Orbital Station” specifications, the Army Ordnance project developers suggested the launching and assembly of an “austere, basic” orbital platform that would provide astronaut crews on their way to the moon with a rendezvous point for exchanging and increasing their payloads, refueling, and relaunching their spacecraft. 

The orbiting station would also be important in the early cargo shipment stages of Project Horizon where army crews could handle the cargo loading in the weightlessness of space faster and easier than they could on Earth. Cargo could be shipped up separately, travel in earth orbit with the station, and then be reassembled by crews who would live in their own spaceship cabins instead of in the space station and then return to Earth when the refueling and reassembly of payloads was complete. If the preliminary basic space station were successful, the army envisioned a more elaborate, sophisticated facility that would have its own scientific and military mission and serve as a relay station for crews on their way to or from the lunar outpost. This station would have an enhanced military capability and enable the United States to dominate the airspace over its enemies, blind its enemies’ satellites, and shoot down its missiles. The army also saw the enhanced orbiting space station as another component in an elaborate defense against extraterrestrials, especially if the military were able to develop high energy lasers and the particle beam weapon we had seen aboard the Roswell spacecraft. The space station would, according to the army plan, effectively provide the platform for testing Earth to space weapons, and these, General Trudeau and I agreed, would be primarily directed against the hostile extraterrestrials who were the real threat to our planet. 

In its plan for a separate administration and management structure within the structure of the army, Project Horizon was designed to be the largest research, development, and deployment operation in the army’s history. Larger than the Manhattan Project, Horizon could easily have become a completely separate unit within the army itself. As such, Horizon was perceived as an immediate threat to the other branches of the military as well as to the civilian space agencies. The navy had its own pet plan for establishing undersea bases that would harvest the commercial and scientific opportunities at the bottom of the oceans while at the same time, and more importantly, establishing an antisubmarine defense that would counter the threat from Soviet nuclear submarines. We suspected that the navy plans, like our own plans for a moon base, also gave the navy the capability of carrying out surveillance tracking of unidentified undersea objects if, in fact, that’s what the EBEs were sending to Earth. 

Despite the civilian opposition to the army’s plan, General Trudeau wrote that the army had no choice but to advocate its plans for a moon base. 

“The United States intelligence community agrees that the Soviet Union may accomplish a manned lunar landing at anytime after 1965. “ This, he said, would establish a Soviet precedent for claiming the lunar surface as Soviet territory which, even in and of itself, could precipitate the next war if the United States also tried to establish a presence there. Being second was no option. “As the Congress has noted, “ General Trudeau continued, “we are caught in a stream in which we have no choice but to proceed. “ . 

However, as hard as we tried to get Project Horizon into full funding and development, we were stopped. The nation’s space program had become the property of the civilian space agency, and NASA had its own agenda and its own schedule for space exploration. We were successful in discrete projects like Corona, but it would not relinquish to the army the control necessary to establish a moon base under the terms of a Project Horizon. 

I became General Trudeau’s point man for the project in Washington. I was able to lobby for it, and Horizon also became an effective cover for all of the technological development I was overseeing out of the Roswell file. 

No one knew just how much of the Roswell technology would wind up getting into development because of the military issues Horizon implicitly proposed about the presence of extraterrestrials and their hostile intentions. After his first full year in office, President Kennedy also saw the value in Project Horizon even though he was in no position to dismantle NASA or order NASA to cede control to the army for the development of a base on the moon. 

But I think we eventually made our point to the President because he ultimately saw the value in a moon base. Shortly after I testified before the Senate in a closed, top secret session about how the KGB had penetrated the CIA and was actually dictating some of our intelligence estimates since before the Korean War, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, who read that secret testimony, asked me to come over to the Justice Department for a visit. 

We came to a meeting of the minds that day. I know that I convinced him that the official intelligence the President was receiving through his agencies was not only faulty, it was deliberately flawed. Robert Kennedy began to see that those of us over at the Pentagon were not just a bunch of old soldiers looking for a war. He saw that we really did see a threat and that the United States was truly compromised by Soviet penetration of our most secret agencies. 

We didn’t talk about Roswell or any aliens. I never told him about extraterrestrials, but I was able to convince him that if the Soviets got to the moon before we did, victory in the Cold War might just belong to them by the end of this decade. Bobby Kennedy suspected that there was another agenda to the army’s desire to deploy a lunar outpost for military as well as for scientific and commercial purposes and, without ever acknowledging that agenda, promised that he would talk about it with the President. 

I can only tell you that it was a mark of achievement for me personally when President John Kennedy announced to the nation shortly after my meeting with Bobby at the Justice Department that it was one of his goals that the United States put a manned expedition on the moon before the end of the 1960s. He got it! Maybe he couldn’t let the army have another Manhattan Project. That was another era and another war. But Jack Kennedy did understand, I believe, the real consequences of the Cold War and what might have happened if the Russians had put a manned lander on the moon before we did. 

The way history turned out, it was our lunar expeditions, one after the other throughout the 1960s, that not only caught the world’s attention but showed all our enemies that the United States was determined to stake out its territory and defend the moon. Nobody was looking for an out and out war, especially the EBE's who tried to scare us away from the moon and their own base there more times than even I know. They buzzed our ships, interfered with our communications, and sought to threaten us by their physical presence. But we continued and persevered. Ultimately, we reached the moon and sent enough manned expeditions to explore the lunar surface that they effectively challenged the EBEs for control over our own skies and sphere of space, the very sphere General Trudeau was talking about in the Project Horizon memoranda ten years earlier. 

And although the Horizon proposal projected a lunar landing by 1967, it presupposed that the army would begin creating the bureaucracy to manage the effort and build the hardware as early as 1959. Because of NASA and civilian management of space exploration, the United States took longer to reach the moon than we had originally assumed and, of course, never did build the permanent base we had planned for in the original Horizon proposal. 

I knew, even though I was no longer in the army in 1969, that our success at lunar exploration had demonstrated that we were exercising control and that the EBE's would not have free rein over our skies. It also demonstrated that if there were any deals to be made, any proxy relationships to establish, the Soviets were not the ones to deal with. By the beginning of the 1970s, as the Apollo lunar landings continued, it was clear that the tide had turned and we had gained some of the advantage in dealing with the EBEs that we were seeking way back in the 1950s.[he contradicts himself from earlier saying a base would be 'key' to controlling our skies, against both soviet and ebe threats DC]  

But for me, back in 1961, staring at the mammoth Project Horizon report on my desk and realizing that the entire civilian science establishment was mobilizing against this endeavor, I knew that small victories would have to suffice until the big ones could be won. And I took out the printed silicon wafers we’d pulled from the Roswell spacecraft wreckage and told myself that these would comprise the next project I would get into development. I barely knew what they were, but, if the scientists at White Sands Proving Grounds were right about what they portended, this was a victory we would relish long after the political battles over Project Horizon were over. 

CHAPTER 12 

The Integrated Circuit Chip: From the Roswell Crash Site to Silicon Valley 

WITH THE NIGHT-VISION IMAGE INTENSIFIER PROJECT UNDER way at Fort Belvoir and the Project Horizon team trying to swim upstream against the tide of civilian management of the U.S. space program, I turned my attention to the next of the Roswell crash fragments that looked especially intriguing: the charred semiconductor wafers that had broken off some larger device. I hadn’t made these my priorities at first, not knowing what they really were, until General Trudeau asked me to take a closer look. 

“Talk to some of the rocket scientists down at Alamogordo about these things, Phil, “ he said. “I think they’ll know what we should do with them.“ 

I knew that in the days immediately following the crash, General Twining had met with the Alamogordo group of the Air Materiel Command and had described some of the debris to them. But I didn’t know how detailed his descriptions were or whether they even knew about the wafers we had in our file. 

“I want to talk to some of the scientists up here, too, “ I said. “Especially, I want to see some of the engineers from the defense contractors. Maybe they can figure out what the engineering process is for these things. “ 

“Go over to Bell Labs, Phil, “ General Trudeau also suggested. “The transistor came out of their shop and these things look a lot like transistorized circuits.“ 

I’d heard that General Twining had worked very closely with both Bell Labs and Motorola on communications research during the war, afterwards at the Alamogordo test site for V2 missile launches, and after the Roswell crash. Whether he had brought them any material from the crash or showed them the tiny silicon chips was a matter of pure speculation. I only know that the entire field of circuit miniaturization took a giant leap in 1947 with the invention of the transistor and the first solid state components. 

By the late 1950s,transistors had replaced the vacuum tube in radios and had turned the wall-sized wooden box of the 1940s into the portable plastic radio you could hear blaring away at the shore on a hot July Sunday. The electronics industry had taken a major technological jump in less than ten years, and I had to wonder privately whether any Roswell material had gotten out that I didn’t know about prior to my taking over Foreign Technology in 1961. I didn’t realize it at first when I showed those silicon wafers to General Trudeau, but I was to become very quickly and intimately involved with the burgeoning computer industry and a very small, completely invisible, cog in an assembly line process that fifteen years later would result in the first microcomputer systems and the personal computer revolution. Over the course of the years since I joined the army in 1942, my career took me through the stages of vacuum tube based devices, like our radios and radars in World War II, to component chassis. 

These were large circuitry units that, if they went down, could be changed in sections, smaller sections, and finally to tiny transistors and transistorized electronic components. The first army computers I saw were room sized, clanking vacuum tube monsters that were always breaking down and, by today’s standards, took an eternity to calculate even the simplest of answers. They were simply oil filled data pots. But they amazed those of us who had never seen computers work before. 

At Red Canyon and in Germany, the tracking and targeting radars we used were controlled by new transistorized chassis computers that were compact enough to fit onto a truck and travel with the battalion. So when I opened up my nut file and saw the charred matte gray quarter sized, cracker shaped silicon wafers with the gridlines etched onto them like tiny printed lines on the cover of a match book, I could make an educated guess about their function even though I’d never seen anything of the like before. I knew, however, that our rocket scientists and the university researchers who worked with the development laboratories at Bell, Motorola, and IBM would more than understand the primary function of these chips and figure out what we needed to do to make some of our own.  

But first I called Professor Hermann Oberth for basic background on what, if any, development might have taken place after the Roswell crash. Dr. Oberth knew the Alamogordo scientists and probably received second hand the substance of the conversations General Twining had with his Alamogordo group in the hours after the retrieval of the vehicle. And if General Twining described some of the debris, did he describe these little silicon chips? And if he did, in those months when the ENIAC - the first working computer - was just cranking up at the Aberdeen Ordnance Testing Grounds in Maryland, what did the scientists make of those chips? 

“They saw these at the Walker Field hangar, “ Dr. Oberth told me. “All of them at Alamogordo flew over to Roswell with General Twining to oversee the shipment to Wright Field. “ 

Oberth described what happened that day after the crash when a team of AMC rocket scientists pored over the bits and pieces of debris from the site. Some of the debris was packed for flight on B29s. Other material, especially the crates that wound up at Fort Riley, were loaded onto deuce and a halfs for the drive. Dr. Oberth said that years later, von Braun had told him how those scientists who literally had to stand in line to have their equations processed by the experimental computer in Aberdeen Maryland were in awe of the microscopic circuitry etched into the charred wafer chips that had spilled out of the craft. 

Von Braun had asked General Twining whether anyone at Bell Labs was going to be contacted about this find. Twining seemed surprised at first, but when von Braun told him about the experiments on solid state components - material whose electrons don’t need to be excited by heat in order to conduct current - Twining became intrigued. What if these chips were components of a very advanced solid state circuitry? von Braun asked him. What if one of the reasons the army could find no electronic wiring on the craft were the layers of these wafers that ran throughout the ship? These circuit chips could be the nervous system of the craft, carrying signals and transmitting commands just like the nervous system in a human body. General Twining’s only experience had been with the heavily insulated vacuum tube devices from World War II, where the multistrand wires were covered with cloth. He’d never seen metallic printed chips like these before. How did they work? he’d asked von Braun. 

The German scientist wasn’t sure, although he guessed they worked on the same principle as the transistors that laboratories were trying to develop to the point where they could be manufactured commercially. It would completely transform the electronics industry, von Braun explained to General Twining, nothing short of a revolution. The Germans had been desperately trying to develop circuitry of this sort during the war, but Hitler, convinced the war would be over by 1941, told the German computer researchers that the Wehrmacht had no need for computers that had a development timetable greater than one year. They’d all be celebrating victory in Berlin before the end of the year. 

But the research into solid state components that the Germans had been doing and the early work at Bell Labs was nothing compared to the marvel that Twining had shown von Braun and the other rocket scientists in New Mexico. Under the magnifying glass, the group thought they saw not just a single solid state switch but a whole system of switches integrated into each other and comprising what looked like an entire circuit or system of circuits. They couldn’t be sure because no one had ever seen anything even remotely like this before. 

But it showed them an image of what the future of electronics could be if a way could be found to manufacture this kind of circuit on Earth. Suddenly, the huge guidance control systems necessary to control the flight of a rocket, which, in 1947, were too big to be squeezed into the fuselage of the rocket, could be miniaturized so that the rocket could have its own automatic guidance system. If we could duplicate what the EBEs had, we, too, would have the ability to explore space. In effect, the reverse engineering of solid state integrated circuitry began in the weeks and months after the crash even though William Shockley at Bell Labs was already working on a version of his transistor as early as 1946.

In the summer of 1947, the scientists at Alamogordo were only aware of the solid state circuit research under way at Bell Labs and Motorola. So they pointed Nathan Twining to research scientists at both companies and agreed to help him conduct the very early briefings into the nature of the Roswell find. The army, very covertly, turned some of the components over to research engineers for an inspection, and by the early 1950s the transistor had been invented and transistorized circuits were now turning up in consumer products as well as in military electronics systems. The era of the vacuum tube, the single piece of eighty year old technology upon which an entire generation of communications devices including television and digital computers was built, was now coming to a close with the discovery in the desert of an entirely new technology. 

The radio vacuum tube was a legacy of nineteenth century experimentation with electric current. Like many  historic scientific discoveries, the theory behind the vacuum tube was uncovered almost by chance, and nobody really knew what it was or cared much about it until years later. The radio vacuum tube probably reached its greatest utility from the 1930s through the 1950s, until the technology we discovered at Roswell made it all but obsolete. 

The principle behind the radio vacuum tube, first discovered by Thomas Edison in the 1880s while he was experimenting with different components for his incandescent light bulb, was that current, which typically flowed in either direction across a conductive material such as a wire, could be made to flow in only one direction when passed through a vacuum. This directed flow of current, called the “Edison effect, “ is the scientific principle behind the illumination of the filament material inside the vacuum of the incandescent light bulb, a technology that has remained remarkably the same for over a hundred years. 

But the light bulb technology that Edison discovered back in the 1880s, then put aside only to experiment with it again in the early twentieth century, also had another equally important function. Because the flow of electrons across the single filament wire went in only one direction, the vacuum tube was also a type of automatic switch. Excite the flow of electrons across the wire and the current flowed only in the direction you wanted it to. You didn’t need to throw a switch to turn on a circuit manually because the vacuum tube could do that for you. 

Edison had actually discovered the first automatic switching device, which could be applied to hundreds of electronic products from the radio sets that I grew up with in the 1920s to the communications networks and radar banks of World War II and to the television sets of the 1950s. In fact, the radio tube was the single component that enabled us to begin the worldwide communications network that was already in place by the early twentieth century.

Radio vacuum tubes also had another important application that wasn’t discovered until experimenters in the infant science of computers first recognized the need for them in the 1930s and then again in the 1940s. Because they were switches, opening and closing circuits, they could be programmed to reconfigure a computer to accomplish different tasks. The computer itself had, in principle, remained essentially the same type of calculating device that Charles Babbage first invented in the 1830s. It was a set of internal gears or wheels that acted as counters and a section of “memory” that stored numbers until it was their turn to be processed. Babbage’s computer was operated manually by a technician who threw mechanical switches in order to input raw numbers and execute the program that processed the numbers. 

The simple principle behind the first computer, called by its inventor the “Analytical Engine, “ was that the same machine could process an infinite variety and types of calculations by reconfiguring its parts through a switching mechanism. The machine had a component for inputting numbers or instructions to the processor; the processor itself, which completed the calculations; a central control unit, or CPU, that organized and sequenced the tasks to make sure the machine was doing the right job at the right time; a memory area for storing numbers; and finally a component that output the results of the calculations to a type of printer: the same basic components you find in all computers even today.

The same machine could add, subtract, multiply, or divide and even store numbers from one arithmetical process to the next. It could even store the arithmetical computation instructions themselves from job to job. And Babbage borrowed a punch card process invented by Joseph Jacquard for programming weaving looms. Babbage’s programs could be stored on series of punch cards and fed into the computer to control the sequence of processing numbers. Though this may sound like a startling invention, it was Industrial Revolution technology that began in the late eighteenth century for the purely utilitarian challenge of processing large numbers for the British military. Yet, in concept, it was an entirely new principle in machine design that very quietly started the digital revolution. 

Because Babbage’s machine was hand powered and cumbersome, little was done with it through the nineteenth century, and by the 1880s, Babbage himself would be forgotten. However, the practical application of electricity to mechanical appliances and the delivery of electrical power along supply grids, invented by Thomas Edison and refined by Nikola Tesla, gave new life to the calculation machine. The concept of an automatic calculation machine would, inspire American inventors to devise their own electrically powered calculators to process large numbers in a competition to calculate the 1890 U.S. Census.

The winner of the competition was Herman Hollerith, whose electrically powered calculator was a monster device that not only processed numbers but displayed the progress of the process on large clocks for all to see. He was so successful that the large railroad companies hired him to process their numbers. By the turn of the century his company, the Computing Tabulating and Recording Company, had become the single largest developer of automatic calculating machines. By 1929, when Hollerith died, his company had  become the automation conglomerate, IBM. 

Right about the time of Hollerith’s death, a German engineer named Konrad Zuse approached some of the same challenges that had confronted Charles Babbage a hundred years earlier: how to build his own version of a universal computing machine that could reconfigure itself depending upon the type of calculation the operator wanted to perform. Zuse decided that instead of working with a machine that operated on the decimal system, which limited the types of arithmetic calculations it could perform, his machine would use only two numbers, 0 and 1, the binary system. 

This meant that he could process any type of mathematical equation through the opening or closing of a series of electromagnetic relays, switches that would act as valves or gates either letting current through or shutting it off. These relays were the same types of devices that the large telephone companies, like the Bell system in the United States, were using as the basis of their networks. By marrying an electrical power supply and electric switches to the architecture of Babbage’s Analytical Engine and basing his computations in a binary instead of a decimal system, Zuse had come up with the European version of the first electrical digital computer, an entirely new device. It was just three years before the German invasion of Poland and the outbreak of World War II. 

In the United States at about the same time as Zuse was assembling his first computer in his parents’ living room, Harvard mathematics professor Howard Aiken was trying to reconstruct a theoretical version of Babbage’s computer, also using electromagnetic relays as switching devices and relying on a binary number system. The difference between Aiken and Zuse was that Aiken had academic credentials and his background as an innovative mathematician got him into the office of Thomas Watson, president of IBM, to whom he presented his proposal for the first American digital computer. Watson was impressed, authorized a budget for $1 million, and, right before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the project design was started up at Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was then moved to IBM headquarters in New York during the war. 

Because of their theoretical ability to calculate large sets of numbers in a relatively short period of time, digital computers were drafted into the war effort in the United Kingdom as a code breaking device. By 1943, at the same time that IBM’s first shiny stainless steel version of Aiken’s computer was up and running in Endicott, New York, the British were using their dedicated crypto analytical Colossus computer to break the German codes and decipher the code creating ability of the German Enigma - the code machine that the Nazis believed made their transmissions indecipherable to the Allies. 

Unlike the IBM-Aiken computer at Harvard and Konrad Zuse’s experimental computer in Berlin, the Colossus used radio vacuum tubes as relay switches and was, therefore, hundreds of times faster than any experimental computer using electromagnetic relays. The Colossus, therefore, was a true breakthrough because it married the speed of vacuum tube technology with the component design of the Analytical Engine to create the first modern era digital computer. 

The British used the Colossus so effectively that they quickly felt the need to build more of them to process the increasingly large volume of encrypted transmissions the Germans were sending, ignorant of the fact that the Allies were decoding every word and outsmarting them at every turn. I would argue even to this day that the technological advantage the Allies enjoyed in intelligence gathering apparatus, specifically code breaking computers and radar, enabled us to win the war despite Hitler’s initial successes and his early weapon advantages. The Allies’ use of the digital computer in World War II was an example of how a superior technological advantage can make the difference between victory and defeat no matter what kinds of weapons or numbers of troops the enemy is able to deploy. 

The American and British experience with computers during the war and our government’s commitment to developing a viable digital computer led to the creation, in the years immediately following the war, of a computer called the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator, or ENIAC. ENIAC was the brain child of Howard Aiken and one of our Army R&D brain trust advisers, the mathematician John von Neumann. Although it operated on a decimal instead of a binary system and had a very small memory, it relied on radio vacuum tube switching technology. For its time it was the first of what today are called “number crunchers. “ 

When measured against the way computers developed over the years since its first installation, especially the personal computers of today, ENIAC was something of a real dinosaur. It was loud, hot, cumbersome, fitful, and required the power supply of an entire town to keep it going. It couldn’t stay up for very long because the radio tubes, always unreliable even under the best working conditions, would blow out after only a few hours’ work and had to be replaced. But the machine worked, it crunched the numbers it was fed, and it showed the way for the next model, which reflected the sophisticated symbolic architectural design of John von Neumann. 

Von Neumann suggested that instead of feeding the computer the programs you wanted it to run every time you turned it on, the programs themselves could be stored in the computer permanently. By treating the programs themselves as components of the machine, stored right in the hardware, the computer could change between programs, or the routines of subprograms, as necessary in order to solve problems. This meant that larger routines could be processed into subroutines, which themselves could be organized into templates to solve similar problems. In complex applications, programs could call up other programs again and again without the need of human intervention and could even change the subprograms to fit the application. von Neumann had invented block programming, the basis for the sophisticated engineering and business programming of the late 1950s and 1960s and the great, great grandmother of today’s object oriented programming. 

By 1947, it had all come together: the design of the machine, the electrical power supply, the radio vacuum tube technology, the logic of machine processing, von Neumann’s mathematical architecture, and practical applications for the computer’s use. But just a few years shy of the midpoint of the century, the computer itself was the product of eighteenth and nineteenth century thinking and technology. In fact, given the short comings of the radio tube and the enormous power demands and cooling requirements to keep the computer working, the development of the computer seemed to have come to a dead end. 

Although IBM and Bell Labs were investing huge sums of development money into designing a computer that had a lower operational and maintenance overhead, it seemed, given the technology of the digital computer circa 1947, that there was no place it could go. It was simply an expensive to build, expensive to run, lumbering elephant at the end of the line. And then an alien spacecraft fell out of the skies over Roswell, scattered across the desert floor, and in one evening everything changed. 

In 1948 the first junction transistor - a microscopically thin silicon sandwich of w-type silicon, in which some of the atoms have an extra electron, and p-type silicon, in which some of the atoms have one less electron - was devised by physicist William Shockley. The invention was credited to Bell Telephone Laboratories, and, as if by magic, the dead end that had stopped the development of the dinosaur like ENIAC generation of computers melted away and an entirely new generation of miniaturized circuitry began. 

Where the radio tube circuit required an enormous power supply to heat it up because heat generated the electricity, the transistor required very low levels of powers and no heating up time because the transistor amplified the stream of electrons that flowed into its base. Because it required only a low level of current, it could be powered by batteries. Because it didn’t rely on a heat source to generate current and it was so small, many transistors could be packed into a very small space, allowing for the miniaturization of circuitry components. Finally, because it didn’t burn out like the radio tube, it was much more reliable. 

Thus, within months after the Roswell crash and the first exposure of the silicon wafer technology to companies already involved in the research and development of computers, the limitations on the size and power of the computer suddenly dropped like the removal of a roadblock on a highway and the next generation of computers went into development. This set up for Army R&D, especially during the years I was there, the opportunity for us to encourage that development with defense contracts calling for the implementation of integrated circuit devices into subsequent generations of weapons systems. 

More than one historian of the microcomputer age has written that no one before 1947 foresaw the invention of the transistor or had even dreamed about an entirely new technology that relied upon semiconductors, which were silicon based and not carbon based like the Edison incandescent tube. Bigger than the idea of a calculating machine or an Analytical Engine or any combination of the components that made up the first computers of the 1930s and 1940s, the invention of the transistor and its natural evolution to the silicon chip of integrated circuitry was beyond what anyone could call a quantum leap of technology. 

The entire development arc of the radio tube, from Edison’s first experiments with filament for his incandescent light bulb to the vacuum tubes that formed the switching mechanisms of ENIAC, lasted about fifty years. The development of the silicon transistor seemed to come upon us in a matter of months. And, had I not seen the silicon wafers from the Roswell crash with my own eyes, held them in my own hands, talked about them with Hermann Oberth, Wernher von Braun, or Hans Kohler, and heard the reports from these now dead scientists of the meetings between Nathan Twining, Vannevar Bush, and researchers at Bell Labs, I would have thought the invention of the transistor was a miracle. I know now how it came about. 

As history revealed, the invention of the transistor was only the beginning of an integrated circuit technology that developed through the 1950s and continues right through to the present. By the time I became personally involved in 1961, the American marketplace had already witnessed the retooling of Japan and Germany in the 1950s and Korea and Taiwan in the late 1950s through the early 1960s. General Trudeau was concerned about this, not because he considered these countries our economic enemies but because he believed that American industry would suffer as a result of its complacency about basic research and development. 

He expressed this to me on many occasions during our meetings, and history has proved him to be correct. General Trudeau believed that the American industrial economy enjoyed a harvest of technology in the years immediately following World War II, the effects of which were still under way in the 1960s, but that it would soon slow down because R&D was an inherently costly undertaking that didn’t immediately contribute to a company’s bottom line. And you had to have a good bottom line, General Trudeau always said, to keep your stockholders happy or else they would revolt and throw the existing management team right out of the company. By throwing their efforts into the bottom line, Trudeau said, the big American industries were actually destroying themselves just like a family that spends all its savings. 

“You have to keep on investing in yourself, Phil, “ the General would like to say when he’d look up from his Wall Street Journal before our morning meetings and remark about how stock analysts always liked to place their value on the wrong thing. 

“Sure, these companies have to make a profit, but you look at the Japanese and the Germans and they know the value of basic research, “ he once said to me. 

“American companies expect the government to pay for all their research, and that’s what you and I have to do if we want to keep them working. But there’s going to come a time when we can’t afford to pay for it any longer. Then who’s going to foot the bill?” 

General Trudeau was worrying about how the drive for new electronics products based upon miniaturized circuitry was creating entirely new markets that were shutting out American companies. He said that it was becoming cheaper for American companies to have their products manufactured for them in Asia, where companies had already retooled after the war to produce transistorized components, than for American companies, which had heavily invested in the manufacturing technology of the nineteenth century, to do it themselves. 

He knew that the requirement for space exploration, for challenging the hostile EBEs in their own territory, relied on the development of an integrated circuit technology so that the electronic components of spacecraft could be miniaturized to fit the size requirements of rocket propelled vehicles. The race to develop more intelligent missiles and ordnance also required the development of new types of circuitry that could be packed into smaller and smaller spaces. But retooled Japanese and German industries were the only ones able to take immediate advantage of what General Trudeau called the “new electronics. “ 

For American industry to get onto the playing field the basic research would have to be paid for by the military. It was something General Trudeau was willing to fight for at the Pentagon because he knew that was the only way we could get the weapons only a handful of us knew we needed to fight a skirmish war against aliens only a handful of us knew we were fighting. 

Arthur Trudeau was a battlefield general engaged in a lonely military campaign that national policy and secrecy laws forbade him even to talk about. And as the gulf of time widened between the Roswell crash and the concerns over postwar economic expansion, even the people who were fighting the war alongside General Trudeau were, one by one, beginning to die away. Industry could fight the war for us, General Trudeau believed, if it was properly seeded with ideas and the money to develop them. By 1961, we had turned our attention to the integrated circuit. 

Government military weapons spending and the requirements for space exploration had already heavily funded the transistorized component circuit. The radars and missiles I was commanding at Red Canyon, New Mexico, in 1958 relied on miniaturized components for their reliability and portability. New generations of tracking radars on the drawing boards in 1960 were even more sophisticated and electronically intelligent than the weapons I was aiming at Soviet targets in Germany. In the United States, Japanese and Taiwanese radios that fit into the palm of your hand were on the market. 

Computers like ENIAC, once the size of a small warehouse, now occupied rooms no larger than closets and, while still generating heat, no longer blew out because of overheated radio vacuum tubes. Minicomputers, helped by government R&D funding, were still a few years away from market, but were already in a design phase. Television sets and stereophonic phonographs that offered solid state electronics were coming on the market, and companies like IBM, Sperry-Rand, and NCR were beginning to  bring electronic office machines onto the market. It was the beginning of a new age of electronics, helped, in part, by government funding of basic research into the development and manufacture of integrated circuit products. 

But the real prize, the development of what actually had been recovered at Roswell, was still a few years away. When it arrived, again spurred by the requirements of military weapons development and space travel, it caused another revolution. 

The history of the printed circuit and the microprocessor is also the history of a technology that allowed engineers to squeeze more and more circuitry into a smaller and smaller space. It’s the history of the integrated circuit, which developed throughout the 1960s, evolved into large scale integration by the early 1970s, very large scale integration by the middle 1970s, just before the emergence of the first real personal computers, and ultra large scale integration by the early 1980s. Today’s 200 plus megahertz, multi gigabyte hard drive desktop computers are the results of the integrated circuit technology that began in the 1960s and has continued to the present. The jump from the basic transistorized integrated printed circuit of the 1960s to large scale integration was made possible by the development of the microprocessor in 1972. 

Once the development process of engineering a more tightly compacted circuit had been inspired by the invention of the transistor in 1948, and fueled by the need to develop better, faster, and smaller computers, it continued on a natural progression until the engineers at Intel developed the first microprocessor, a four bit central processing unit called the 4004, in 1972. 

This year marked the beginning of the microcomputer industry, although the first personal microcomputers didn’t appear on the market until the development of Intel’s 8080ª. That computer chip was the heart of the Altair computer, the first product to package a version of a high level programming language called BASIC, which allowed non-engineering types to program the machine and create applications for it. Soon companies like Motorola and Zilog had their own microprocessors on the market, and by 1977 the Motorola 6502-powered Apple II was on the market, joined by the 8080ª Radio Shack, the Commodore PET, the Atari, and the Heathkit. 

Operationally, at its very heart, the microprocessor shares the same binary processing functions and large arrays of digital switches as its ancestors, the big mainframes of the 1950s and 1960s and the transistorized minis of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Functionally, the microprocessor also shares the same kinds of tasks as Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine of the 1830s: reading numbers, storing numbers, logically processing numbers, and outputting the results. The microprocessor just puts everything into a much smaller space and moves it along at a much faster speed. In 1979, Apple Computer had begun selling the first home computer floppy disk operating system for data and program storage that kicked the microcomputer revolution into a higher gear. Not only could users input data via a keyboard or tape cassette player, they could store relatively large amounts of data, such as documents or mathematical projections, on transportable, erasable, and interchangeable Mylar disks that the computer was able to read. Now the computer reached beyond the electronics hobbyist into the work place. 

By the end of the year, MicroPro’s introduction of the first fully functional word processor called WordStar, and Personal Software’s release of the very first electronic spreadsheet called VisiCalc, so transformed the workplace that the desktop computer became a necessity for any young executive on his or her way up the corporate ladder. And by the early 1980s, with the introduction of the Apple Macintosh and the object oriented computer environment, not only the workplace but the whole world looked like a very different place than it did in the early 1960s. 

Even Dr. Vannevar Bush’s concept of a type of research query language based not on a linear outline but on an intellectual relationship to something embedded in a body of text became a reality with the release of a computer program by Apple called HyperCard. 

It was as if from the year 1947 to 1980 a fundamental paradigm shift in the ability of human kind to process information took place. Computers themselves almost became something like a silicon based life form, inspiring the carbon based lifeforms on planet Earth to develop them, grow them, and even help them reproduce. With computer directed process control programs now in place in virtually all major industries, software that writes software, neural network based expert systems that learn from their own experience in the real world, and current experiments under way to grow almost microscopically thin silicon based chips in the weightless environment of earth orbit may be the forerunner of a time when automated orbital factories routinely grow and harvest new silicon material for microprocessors more sophisticated than we can even imagine at the present. 

Were all of this to be true, could it not be argued that the silicon wafers we recovered from Roswell were the real masters and space travelers and the EBE creatures their hosts or servants? Once implanted  successfully on Earth, our culture having reached a point of readiness through its development of the first digital computers, would not the natural development stream, starting from the invention of the transistor, have carried us to the point where we achieve a symbiotic relationship with the silicon material that carries our data and enables us to become more creative and successful? 

Maybe the Roswell crash, which helped us develop the technological basis for the weapons systems to protect our planet from the EBEs, was also the mechanism for successfully implanting a completely alien non-humanoid life form that survives from host to host like a virus, a digital Ebola that we humans will carry to another planet someday. Or what if an enemy wanted to implant the perfect spying or sabotage mechanism into a culture? 

Then the implantation of the microchip based circuit into our technology by the EBEs would be the perfect method. Was it implanted as sabotage or as something akin to the gift of fire? Maybe the Roswell crash in 1947 was an event waiting to happen, like poisoned fruit dropping from the tree into a playground. Once bitten, the poison takes effect. 

“Hold your horses, Phil, “ General Trudeau would say when I would speculate too much. “Remember, you’ve got a bunch of scientists you need to talk to and the people at Bell Labs are waiting to see your report when you’ve finished talking to the Alamogordo group. “ 

It was 1961 and the miniaturization of computer and electronic circuitry had already begun, but my report to the general and appointments he was arranging for me at Sperry-Rand, Hughes, and Bell Labs were for meetings with scientists to determine how their respective companies were proceeding with applying miniaturized circuitry into designs for weapons systems. The inspiration for microcircuitry had fallen out of the sky at Roswell and set the development of digital computers off in an entirely new direction. It was my job now to use the process of weapons development, especially the development of guidance systems for ballistic missiles, to implement the application of microcircuitry systems to these new generations of weapons. 

General Trudeau and I were among the first scouts in what would be the electronic battlefield of the 1980s. 

“Don’t worry, General, I’ve got my appointments all set up, “ I told him. I knew how carried away I could get, but I was an intelligence officer first, and that meant you start with a blank page and fill it in. “But I think the people at Bell Labs have already seen these things before.“ 

And they actually did - in 1947.

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CHAPTER 13 The Laser