The Day After Roswell
Col. Philip J. Corso
With
William J. Birnes
CHAPTER 13
The Laser
AS I WORKED MY WAY THROUGH THE LIST OF ITEMS IN MY NUT file, writing advisory reports and recommendations to General Trudeau about the potential of each item, I lost all concept of time. I could see, as I drove up and down the Potomac shore to Fort Belvoir to check on the progress of night vision at Martin Marietta, that the summer was coming to an end and the leaves had started to change color. I could also see that now it was already dark when I left the Pentagon. And it was dark now when I set out for the Pentagon every morning. I’d gotten into the habit of taking different routes to work just to make sure that if the CIA had put a tail on me, I’d make him work harder to stay up with me.
General Trudeau and I had settled down into a long daily routine ourselves at R&D. We had our early morning meetings about the Roswell file - he also called it the “junk pile” because it was filled with so much debris and pieces of items that had broken away from larger components - but we had buried the Roswell material development projects themselves so deep inside the regular functions of the R&D division that not even the other officers who worked with us every day knew what was going on. We’d categorized the work we did so carefully that when it came time to discuss anything about Roswell, even if it had a bearing on some other item we were working on at the time, we made sure that either no one was at the office, or we were at a place where we wouldn’t have to stop talking just because someone came into the room.
My responsibility at Foreign Technology was to feed R&D’s ongoing project development with information and intelligence from sources outside the regular army channels. These ran in interconnected rings through the Pentagon to defense industry contractors to testing operations at army bases and to researchers at universities or independent laboratories who were under contract with us. If we were developing methods of preserving food, always trying to come up with a better way to prepare field rations, and the Italians and Germans had a process that seemed to work, it was my job to learn about it and slip the information into the development process.
Even when there was no official development process underway for a specific item, if something I learned was appropriate to anyone of the army’s major commands, whether it was the Medical Corps, the Signal Corps, the motor pool, ordnance, or even the Quartermaster Corps, it was also my job to find a way to make that information appropriate and drop it in without so much as a splash. This made the perfect cover for what I was doing with the Roswell file as long as I could find ways to slip the Roswell technology into the development process so invisibly no one would ever able to find the Roswell on ramp to the information highway.
For all the world to see, General Trudeau and I regularly met to review the ongoing projects in Army R&D, those we had inherited from the previous command and those we wanted to initiate on our watch. Officers who’d been assigned to R&D before we arrived had their own projects already in development, too, and the general had assigned me the task of feeding those projects with information and intelligence, no matter where it came from, without disturbing either what the officers were doing or interfering with their staffs. It was tricky because I had to work in the dark, undercover even from my own colleagues whose reputations would have been destroyed if word leaked out that they were dealing in “flying saucer stuff."
Yet at the same time, most high ranking officers at the Pentagon and key members of their staffs knew that Roswell technology was floating through most of the new projects under development. They were also vaguely, if not specifically, aware of what had happened at Roswell itself and of the current version of the Hillenkoetter/Bush/Twining working group, which had personnel stationed at the Pentagon to keep tabs on what the military was doing.
Uniting what I called my official “day job” at R&D on regular projects and my undercover job in the Roswell file, was my official, but many times informal, role as General Trudeau’s deputy at the division. In that job, I would carry out the general’s orders as they related to the division and not specifically to any one project or another. If General Trudeau needed information to help him redefine his budgetary priorities or assemble information to help compile supplementary development budgets, he’d often ask me to help or at least give him advice.
And I functioned as the general’s intelligence officer as well, supporting him at meetings with information, helping him present position papers, assisting him whenever he had to hold briefings or meet with congressional committees, and defending him and the division against the almost weekly attacks on our turf from officers in the other military branches or from the civilian development and intelligence agencies. Everybody wanted to know what we knew, what we were spending, and what we were spending it on. And we had no quarrel with telling anybody who wanted to know exactly what kinds of goods the American people were getting for their money except when it came to one category - Roswell.
That’s when the mantle of darkness would fall and our memories about where certain things came from became very dim, as it did with the dramatic improvement in night vision technology shortly after the summer of 1961. Even our own people became very frustrated with us when General Trudeau would turn to me at a meeting and say,
“You know that night vision information you sent over to Fort Belvoir a while back? Where did you find that file, Phil?” And if I couldn’t play dumb and say, “I don’t think I ever came across this before, must be someone else in charge, “ then I’d simply shrug and say, “I don’t know, General, must have been in the files somewhere. I’ll have to go back and look. “
It was an act, and many of the officers who suspected we had a stash of information somewhere knew we were covering up something. But if they were career, they also knew how to play the Pentagon version of steal the bacon. We had it and we were hiding it. No one would find out anything unless we let them. So the general would typically hand off anything having to do with military intelligence information to me and I would usually find a way not only to lose the answer but to lose the question as well. We became so practiced at this that entirely new inventions could find their way into development at many different places at the same time without anyone’s ever becoming aware of the source of the technology, especially the officer who was assigned the task of project manager within our very own division.
The CIA got so frustrated at not getting any information out of us that they began keeping closer tabs on the Russian attaches floating around Washington and working under their KGB controllers at the embassies and consulates. Because the CIA knew how thoroughly our universities had been penetrated they figured they’d get information on the rebound by photographing what was inside the photocopiers at the Russian embassy in Washington. And sure enough, from the rumor mill circulating around the exchange of scientists between industry and academia, the CIA knew that we were on to something at Army R&D and kept the circle as tight around us as they possibly could. So I had to keep close tabs on the general, not letting him go into meetings, any meetings, unprotected and always making sure that the CIA knew that they would have to climb over me to get to General Trudeau and anything he knew. And the CIA knew that I knew what they were doing and where their loyalties lay and also knew that it would have to come to a showdown someday.
General Trudeau and I had quickly established our routine in early 1961, and our categorization of how we did our jobs seemed to be working. Night vision was under development at Fort Belvoir, and researchers who worked with us had made sure that the silicon wafer chips had gotten to their colleagues at Bell Labs and assured us that a new generation of transistorized circuitry was already finding its way into development. The silicon chips were a covert reintroduction to the people at Bell Labs because the initial introduction of the integrated circuit chips from the Roswell crash had reached defense contractors as early as 1947 in the weeks after the material reached Wright Field.
A similar history of introduction and reintroduction had occurred with stimulated energy radiation, a weapon the early analysts believed they were looking at in the wreckage of the Roswell craft. Since directed energy radiation was a technology we’d already deployed in World War II, seeing what they thought was a super advanced version of that technology, so advanced as to be in a completely different realm, so excited the analysts at Wright Field that they wanted to get it out to research scientists as quickly as possible, which they did. And by the early 1950s, a version of stimulated energy radiation had found its way into the scientific community, which was developing new products around the process of microwave generation.
Most Americans who were alive in the 1950s remember the introduction of the microwave oven that helped us “live better electrically” in our new modern kitchens. One of the miracle appliances that burst onto the scene in the 1950s promised to cook food in less than half the time of conventional ovens, even when the food had been completely frozen. Marketed under a variety of brand names including the now historic “Radar Range, “ the microwave oven cooked whatever was inside not by the application of pure heat, the way conventional ovens did, but by bombarding the food with showers of tiny waves of electromagnetic radiation, usually only a centimeter or so long.
The waves would pass through the food, exciting the water molecules deep inside and causing them to align and realign, back and forth, with greater velocity. The molecular activity generated heat from within and the food cooked from the inside out. Once you enclosed it in the right kind of container to keep all the moisture from evaporating, you had a quick cooked meal.
The theory behind the microwave oven that started us down the long and profitable path of stimulated energy research was formulated in 1945 with the first commercial microwave ovens rolling off the line at Raytheon in Massachusetts in 1947 before any dissemination of either intelligence or material from the crash of the Roswell spacecraft. But in the wreckage of that craft, the scientists from the test firing range at Alamogordo reported that the inhabitants of the craft seemed to use very advanced wave stimulation instrumentation that, according to their analysis, bore a relationship to the physics of a basic microwave generator.
The retrieval team that pulled the wreckage out of the desert also found a short, stubby, internally powered flashlight device that threw a pencil thin, intense beam of light for a short distance that could actually cut through metal. This, the engineers at Wright Field believed, was also based on wave stimulation. The questions then were, how did the EBEs use wave stimulation and how could we adapt it to military uses or slip it into the product development already under way?
By 1954, when I was at the White House, the National Security Council was already receiving reports of a theory, developed by Charles H. Townes, that described how the atoms of a gas could be excited to extraordinarily high energy levels by the application of bursts of energy. The gas would release its excess energy as microwaves of a very precise frequency that could be controlled. In theory, we thought, the energy beam could be a signal to carry communications or an amplifier for the signal. When the first maser was assembled at Bell Laboratories in 1956, it was used as a timer because of the very exact calibration of the wave frequency. The maser, however, was only a forerunner of the product that was to come, the laser, which would revolutionize every aspect of technology it touched. It would also prove to be a weapon that would help us deploy a realistic threat to the EBEs who seemed poised to trigger a nuclear war between the superpowers. Where the maser was an amplification of generated microwaves, the laser was an amplification of light, and theories about how this might be accomplished were circulating widely throughout the weapons development community even before Bell Labs produced the first maser. I had seen the descriptions of the EBE laser in reports about the Roswell crash, a beam of light so thin that you couldn’t even see it until it landed on a target.
What was the purpose of this light generator? the Alamogordo group had asked. It looked like a targeting or communications device, seemed to have an almost limitless range, and, if the right power source could be found to amplify the light beam to where it could penetrate metal, the device could be used as a drill, a welder, or even a devastating weapon.
Even while I was at the White House, all three branches of the military were working with researchers in university laboratories to develop a working laser. In theory, exciting the atoms of an element to produce light energy in the same way that atoms of a gas were excited to produce microwaves, lasers offered the tantalizing promise of a directed energy beam that had such a wide variety of applications it could become an almost universal utility for all divisions of the military, even controlling warehouse inventory for the Quartermaster Corps. Finally, in 1958, the year after I left the White House, there was a surge in research activity, especially at Columbia University where, two years later, physicist Theodore Maiman constructed the first working laser.
The first practical demonstration of the laser took place in 1960,and by the time I got to the Pentagon, General Trudeau had put it on our list of priorities to develop for military purposes. Also, because stimulated energy radiation devices were among the cache of technological debris we recovered from Roswell, the U.S. development or the laser encompassed the special urgent requirements of my Roswell mission. I had to write a report to General Trudeau suggesting ways the EBEs might have used laser technology in their missions on this planet and how we could develop similar uses for it under the guise of a conventional development program. In other words, once we guessed how the aliens were using it, it was to become our developmental model for similar applications.
We believed that the EBEs used lasers for navigation, by bouncing beams off distant objects in space and homing in on them to triangulate a course; for communication, by using the laser beam as a carrier signal or as a signal in and of itself; for surveillance, by painting potential targets with a beam; and for power transmission, illumination, and even data storage. The strength and integrity of the laser beam should have served as the EBEs’ primary method of communication over vast distances or even as a way of storing communications in packages for later delivery.
However, it was the EBEs’ use of directed energy as a medical tool and ultimately as a potential weapon that sent shivers up and down our spines because to our minds it was evidence of the aliens’ hostile intentions. Whether they saw us as true enemies to be destroyed or regarded all life on our planet as laboratory specimens to be experimented with, the results from the animal carcasses picked up in the field by our military nuclear, biological, and chemical recovery teams and the civilian intelligence investigators could have been very much the same.
In the Pentagon from 1961 to 1963, I reviewed field reports from local and state police agencies about the discoveries of dead cattle whose carcasses looked as though they had been systematically mutilated and reports from people who claimed to have been abducted by aliens and experimented on. One of the common threads in these stories were reports by the self described abductees of being subjected to some sort of probing or even a form of surgery with controlled, intense, pencil thin beams of light.
Local police reported that when veterinarians were called to the scene to examine the dead cattle left in fields, they often found evidence not just that the animal’s blood had been drained but that entire organs were removed with such surgical skill that it couldn’t have been the work of predators or vandals removing the organs for some depraved ritual. Where there was evidence of crime of someone staging a bizarre hoax, it was usually obvious from the clumsiness of the attempt and the deliberate staging of the carcass. And in the overwhelming majority of instances where the animal was killed by a predator who consumed its blood and carried away internal organs, the evidence of teeth marks or of a brief life and death struggle was also a clear indicator of what had happened.
But in those cases where investigators claimed to have been baffled by what they found, the removal of the organs and the draining of the animal’s blood - where blood had been completely drained - were so sophisticated that there was almost no peripheral damage to the surrounding tissue. There was even some speculation, in the early 1960s, that whatever device the EBEs had employed, it didn’t even cut through the surrounding tissue. We had no medical instruments that even remotely approached what the aliens could do. It was as though some device had simply excised the organs with techniques that even went beyond our own surgical precision.
While I was on the White House National Security staff and later when I was at the Pentagon, I was intrigued by these reports. I also remember that both civilian and military intelligence personnel attached to the staffs of individuals who worked for the Hillenkoetter and Twining working group on UFOs in the 1950s were actively engaging in research into the kinds of surgical methods that would produce “crime scene evidence” like this.
Could have been the Russians, they thought at first. Given the tense climate of the Cold War, a fear that the Soviets were experimenting with American livestock to develop some form of toxin or biological weapon that would devastate our cattle population was not unduly paranoid. It’s sufficient to say, without going into any detail, that we were thinking about the same kinds of weapons, so it was not far fetched to say that we were projecting our own doomsday strategies onto what the Russians might have done.
But it wasn’t the Soviets who were going after our cattle. In fact the Soviet strategy for destabilizing the United States was so sophisticated that it was only a strategy of playing nuclear chicken with the Soviets that forced them to back down in the end. It was the EBEs who were experimenting with organ harvesting, possibly for transplant into other species or for processing into some sort of nutrient package or even to create some sort of hybrid biological entity.
This is what people attached to the working group thought in the 1950s and 1960s, and even though we had no solid intelligence at the time that we were right, we operated on the assumption that no one takes an organ just for the sheer pleasure of removing it. Although the first public reports of cattle mutilations surfaced around 1967 in Colorado, at the White House we were reading about the mutilation stories that had been kept out of press as far back as the middle 1950s, especially in the area around Colorado.
There was speculation, also, that maybe pharmaceutical companies were responsible because they could utilize the organs and soft tissues in biological experimentation, but we dismissed that because the companies had their own farms and could grow anything they wanted. Our intelligence organizations and especially the working group believed that the cattle mutilations that could not be obviously explained away as pranks, predators, or ritual slaughter were the results of interventions by extraterrestrials who were harvesting specific organs for experimentation.
So if our cattle were important enough to the EBEs to get them to expose what they were doing, it was an important thing for us to understand why. The EBEs were nothing if not coldly and clinically efficient - their methodology reminded us of the Nazis - and they didn’t waste time sitting around on the ground where they were most vulnerable to attack or capture unless they had a darn good reason for doing so.
We didn’t know their reasons back in the 1950s and 1960s and can only make educated guesses about them now, but back then we were driven by a terror that unless we found ways to defend ourselves against the EBEs we would be corralled by them and used for replacement tissue or as a source of nutrition. In 1997 this may sound like a nightmare out of a flying saucer horror movie, but in 1957 this was our thinking both in the White House and in the military. We didn’t know, but we had irrefutable evidence that EBEs were landing on farms, harvesting vital organs from livestock, and then just leaving the carcasses on the ground because they knew we couldn’t do anything about it.
The mutilations that interested the National Security personnel seemed to have the same kind of modus operandi. Whoever went after the animals seemed most interested in the mammary, digestive, and reproductive organs, especially the uteruses from cows. In many cases the eyes or throats were removed in a type of surgery in which the demarcation line was almost microscopically thin and the surrounding tissue showed that the incision had super heated and then blackened as it cooled.
But the crime scene and forensic specialists noted that in any type of cut by a predatory animal or a human - even a skilled surgeon - one would find evidence of some trauma in the surrounding tissue such as swelling, contusions, or other forms of abrasion. In these reports of mutilations, forensic examination showed no evidence of collateral trauma or even inflammation.
Therefore, they believed, the cuts to extract the tissue were made so quickly and wounds were sealed so fast that the surrounding tissue never was destroyed. This meant that whoever was operating on these animals did so in a matter of minutes. It was rare, therefore, that police would ever catch them in the act. So if we couldn’t protect our livestock or react intelligently to the stories of human abductions, except to debunk them and make the abductees themselves think they were delusional, we had to find weapons that would put us on a more equal footing with the EBEs. One of those weapons, which had a wide application potential, was the laser - light amplification through stimulated energy radiation - the device the army found in the Roswell spacecraft and would later develop as a weapon in cooperation with Hughes Aircraft.
Shortly after the first successful demonstration of a ruby red laser at Columbia University, the three military branches realized they had a winner. The following year, the results of the tests at Columbia, the industry interest in developing laser based products, and the Roswell report on stimulated energy all merged on my desk. Now it was my turn to get involved and assemble the information to support laser product development with military funds before the whole operation was turned over to one of the R&D specialists who would take the product through its next stages. That was the way our backfield worked: I fed the play, made sure the snap got off, and then faded in behind the blockers. By the time the ball carrier had made his way into the secondary, I was already off the field. I never got the Heisman Trophy, but I sure as hell moved the ball.
I began by listing the needs of the army for what the laser might be able to accomplish. Based on what the army analysts reported they saw in the Roswell ship, it seemed to me obvious that if the Roswell laser was a cutting or surgical tool, the beam could also be utilized as an advanced rapid firing weapon. With a beam so precise and directed, the laser would also make an excellent range finder and target manager for artillery. If the beam was capable of instantaneous read adjustment and fed into a computer, it would also be the perfect targeting system for a tank, especially a tank on the move.
Typically, a tank must stop before it can fire because the gunner needs to have a fixed firing platform from which he calculates range direction, and other compensating factors. The laser can do all that while the vehicle is moving and should therefore enable a tank to stay on the move while firing. And if a laser can paint a target from a tank and find the range, I speculated, it can do the same for a helicopter from air to air and air to ground. I suggested to General Trudeau that all the research we were conducting into helicopter tactics, especially into the role of helicopters as infantry support gun and rocket platforms, dove tailed perfectly with the possibilities of the laser as a range finding mechanism. We could paint friendly troops to locate them, identify our foes, and illuminate potential targets with light invisible to all but our own gunners. At the same time, our own bombs or missiles can home in on the laser image we project onto a target, like a heat seeking missile. Once painted, the target could evade the laser guided rocket or shell only with great difficulty. For a stationary target such as a fortification or artillery redoubt, a laser guided shell would be particularly devastating because we could take it out with one or two rounds instead of having to go back again and again to make sure we’d found the target.
As a signal, a laser is so intense, refined, and perfectly stable that it is almost impervious to any kind of disturbance. For this reason, I wrote General Trudeau, the EBEs must have used an advanced form of a laser for their communication, and we can, too. The intensity of the beam and its highly refined focus mean that it can be aimed with minute precision. Amplifying the power to boost the signal should not distort the beam’s aim, which makes it perfect for straight line long distance communication.
Lasers also have high capacities for carrying multiple signals. Therefore, I wrote the general, we can pack a greater number of transmission bands into a laser signal than we can with our conventional signal carriers. This meant that we could literally flood a battlefield with different kinds of communication channels, each carrying different kinds of communication, some not even invented yet, and have them securely carried by laser signals. For command and control on the increasingly sophisticated electronic battlefield the army was predicting for the 1970s, lasers would become the Signal Corps workhorses.
General Trudeau said that he was also interested in an item from one of the specification reports that other military observers wrote that said that lasers could also serve as projection devices for large screen displays. Lasers were so bright that displays could be shown in rooms that didn’t have to be darkened. The general saw the possibility of fully lit situation rooms with large screen displays from satellite radar transmissions. The room would allow computer operators to see what they were doing at their keyboards while seeing the displays and listening to the briefing.
I suggested that the army cartography division would be particularly interested in the accuracy of the laser derived measurements for maps. That same measurement ability would also be able to generate digital data for ground hugging infantry support helicopters or low flying planes. Aircraft that could stay close to the ground could avoid enemy radar and stay concealed until the last minute. But unless there was a method for accurately charting the topography, aircraft could find themselves scraping tree tops or crashing into the side of a hill. If a laser could accurately transmit topographic features to altitude control and navigational computers on board attack aircraft, it would keep the aircraft safely above any ground obstacles but close enough to the ground to remain concealed.
This ground hugging capability that I suggested to General Trudeau had been suggested to me from the analysis reports of UFOs that also had this capability. It was what enabled them to hover close to the ground and to move rapidly at speeds over a thousand miles an hour at treetop level without hitting anything. The laser type devices aboard the UFO instantly fed the craft with the topographic features of the landscape and the craft automatically adjusted to the terrain.
In late 1961, General Trudeau asked me to visit Fort Belvoir again, this time to meet a Dr. Mark Johnston, one of aeronautical research scientists from Hughes Aircraft. Fort Belvoir was one of the safe houses for the Office of R&D to conduct meetings in because it was a secure military facility. My comings and goings there on Army R&D business were completely routine, even to the CIA surveillance teams that would occasionally pick up my car coming out of the Pentagon, and could be covered in our daily logs with references to the ongoing projects that served as covers. My meeting with Johnston, for example, was to talk about the Hughes helicopter development program, not to give him my reports on the laser measuring devices we believed were in the Roswell spacecraft.
I briefed Johnston on what the scientific team from Alamogordo believed was on the spacecraft, asked him not to talk about it, and suggested that the Hughes team developing the navigational radars for the helicopter project consider using the newly developed lasers as terrain measuring apparatus and for target acquisition.
“Yes, of course, “ I assured him. “The Office of R&D would have a development budget for the laser project if the R&D team at Hughes thought our idea was feasible and they could develop it. “
And that’s exactly what happened. Using the positive results from the Columbia University test and the army weapons specifications we drew up in R&D for the requirements of a range finder, targeting, and tracking weapon, and with research grants from the Pentagon, Hughes signed on as one of the contractors for the military laser. Today, the laser has become the HEL, or High Energy Laser, deployed by the army’s Space Defense Command as, among other things, an anti-satellite/anti-warhead weapon.
My meeting at Hughes was quick and direct. Like so many of the research scientists I met with from Hughes, Dow, IBM, and Bell, Johnston disappeared behind the workbenches, computer screens, or test tubes of the company’s back room and out of my sight forever. When General Trudeau would ask me to follow up on the project months later, a different company representative would meet with me and the project would look just like any other Army R&D initiated research contract. Any traces of Roswell or the nut file would be gone, and the project would have been slipped into the normal R&D functioning. Of course this device didn’t come out of the Roswell incident. The incident was only a myth; it never took place. This came out of the Foreign Technology desk, something the Italians or French were working on and we picked up through our intelligence sources.
Our work with laser products was becoming so successful by the end of 1961 that General Trudeau was urging me to spread the wealth around as many army bases as I could. I spoke to weapons experts at Fort Riley, Kansas, for example, about the use of lasers by troops in the field. Maybe as range finders, we suggested, or even as ways to lock onto a target the way the air force was experimenting with something they were calling “smart bombs. “ By 1964, after seeing the research into the feasibility of lasers that we had commissioned, handheld rangefinders were being tested at army bases around the country, and today, police forces use laser sights on their weapons. Lasers became one of the army’s great successes.
In one of our final pushes for the development of laser based weapons systems, we argued successfully for a budget to develop laser tracking systems for incoming missiles. This was a project we fought hard for, over political opposition as well as opposition from the other military branches, which were looking at our proposal as a conventional method of tracking missiles.
The laser was too new, they argued. Atmospheric interference or heavy clouds would distort the laser over long distances, they said. Or, they said, it would simply take too much power and would have no portability. General Trudeau and I had another agenda for this project that we couldn’t readily share with anybody. We believed that lasers could be used not just to track incoming missiles - that was obvious. We saw the lasers too as our best weapon for not only tracking UFOs from the ground, from aircraft, or from satellites but, if we could boost the power to the necessary levels, for shooting them down. Shoot down a few of them, we speculated, and they wouldn’t violate our airspaces with such impunity.
Equip our fighter planes or interceptors with laser firing mechanisms and we could pose a credible threat to them. Equip our satellites with laser firing mechanisms and we could triangulate a firing pattern on the UFOs that might even keep them away from our orbiting spacecraft. But all of this was speculation in late 1961.
Only a very few people in the other branches of R&D even had a hint about what we were proposing. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration had its own plans for developing laser tracking systems and didn’t want to share any development budget with the military, so there was very little help forth coming from NASA. The air force and navy were guarding their own development budgets for laser weapons, and we couldn’t trust the civilian intelligence agencies at all.
So General Trudeau and I began advocating a plan as a cover to develop laser tracking and other sophisticated types of surveillance projects. It was outrageous on the surface, but it quickly found its adherents, and its real agenda could be completely masked. We could never call it an anti-UFO device so we named it the antimissile missile. It was one of the most successful projects ever to come out of Army R&D. It owed most of its theory to our discovery of the laser in the Roswell wreckage.
CHAPTER 14
The Antimissile Missile Project
There were times during my tenure at the Pentagon when something in the Roswell file had such resonance in my life that it made me question whether there was some larger plan for my work. I’ve read about the concept of synchronicity or confluence in the years since I retired from the military and how things or events tend to cluster around a common thread. Such a common thread was the development of the antimissile missile that encompassed my work in R&D at the Pentagon, my brief stint as a staff adviser to Senator Strom Thurmond, and my years in Rome during the war and occupation as the assistant chief of staff, Intelligence (G-2), Rome Area Allied Command.
In early 1963, just after I left the Pentagon, Senator Strom Thurmond asked me to join his staff as a consultant and adviser on military and national security issues. Congress had just appropriated $300 million to turn a fledgling plan to investigate the feasibility of an antimissile missile program into a full development project. But it ran right into a concrete barrier just as soon as it left the Senate. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara flatly refused to spend the money because, he said, not only would it intensify the U.S.- Soviet arms race, it would actually offend the Kremlin because it would put them on notice that we were trying to deploy a first strike capability while neutralizing their ICBMs. Worse, he said to the Congress, the United States military simply didn’t need the weapon in the first place. Senator Thurmond was incensed and I was deeply worried. McNamara just didn’t get it. He was completely misinformed about how the Soviets reacted to any weapons deployment on our part. They didn’t negotiate with us out of a sense of cooperation, only a sense of necessity that it was in their best interests to do so. If they thought we could knock out their ICBMs, that, more than anything, would keep them honest. Hadn’t they backed down over Cuba because they saw that Kennedy actually meant business when he screwed up his resolve to order the navy to enforce the blockade? But the CIA had McNamara’s ear and was giving him exactly the information the disinformation specialists in the Kremlin wanted him to have: don’t develop the antimissile missile.
General Trudeau and I had a secret agenda we had worked up the previous year at the Pentagon. The antimissile missile, utilizing laser targeting and tracking, was supposed to be the perfect mechanism for getting the funds to develop a laser beam weapon we could ultimately use to fire on UFOs. At least that was the way we’d planned it. The general had gotten it through the Pentagon bureaucracy while I covered his flank on the legislative side, testifying before the Armed Services Committee on the efficacy of a weapon that was capable of protecting American strategic forces with an umbrella. If any country were foolish enough to attack the United States, the antimissile missile would blunt their offensive and enable us not only to devastate their military forces but hold their population centers hostage as well.
Not so, said the Defense Department. The deployment of an antimissile missile would encourage our enemies to attack our cities first and devastate our civilian population. What did it matter if we had the ability to strike back when the damage to us had already been done? The only thing that was keeping our civilian population centers safe was each side’s ability to hold the other’s nuclear forces hostage. If both sides devastated one another’s nuclear forces, it would give each side time to stop before a mutual destruction of the civilian populations.
But the secretary of defense didn’t understand war. He especially hadn’t seen what lessons the Soviets learned during World War II when their population centers had been devastated and people were reduced to the point of starvation and cannibalized one another for food. That kind of experience doesn’t toughen you against the ravages of war, it educates you. The Soviets’ only hope for a victory in the Cold War was in our putting down our guard and capitulating to them. By refusing to go forward with the antimissile missile, the secretary of defense was listening to arguments that were spoon fed to him, certainly without his knowledge, by people in the civilian intelligence community who were being manipulated by the KGB.
Senator Thurmond’s reaction to Bob McNamara’s refusal to spend the antimissile missile appropriation was to hold subcommittee hearings on this issue to find out why. The Defense Department didn’t want to disclose classified information about the capabilities of a proposed weapon and our defense policy before a public session of Congress. So Fred Buzhardt, who years later became President Nixon’s counsel, suggested that Senator Thurmond invoke a senatorial privilege to close a session of the Senate so that the issue of the antimissile missile could be discussed in private before the full Senate.
But first, we had to request specific information from the Department of Defense, and that task, because I was the Senator’s adviser for military affairs, fell to me. No one knew that I was actually the officer who had initially prepared the information for the antimissile missile program to begin with and probably knew more about the documents than anyone because less than a year earlier I had prepared them myself.
The first meeting with the Defense Department was held in my new office in the basement of the Capitol Building. Secretary McNamara sent his own scientific adviser, Harold Brown, who would later become the secretary of defense himself, along with an army colonel who had become the project officer for the antimissile missile development program. Brown didn’t know who I was, but his assistant from the army certainly did.
“Colonel, “ the army project officer began as soon as I asked him a question about the request we’d sent for information, and Harold Brown sat up straight in his chair. Gradually, like chipping away parts of a granite block, I asked the project officer about the specific details of the antimissile missile program, how much of the budget allocation from previous Pentagon funding they’d already spent, and what their development time table would be if the current appropriation were spent for the current phase of the project.
Then I asked more technical questions about the research into ground based radars, satellite based radars, speculation into Soviet counter antimissile missile strategies, and Soviet development of even bigger and more mobile ICBMs that would present more imperative targets for any antimissile missile system because we couldn’t take them out in a first strike. Mounted on railway cars or trucks, mobile Soviet missiles would be almost impossible to track even though they would have to remain stationary for the liquid fueling process to be completed.
“I see that my assistant keeps on calling you colonel, Mr. Corso, “Harold Brown said. “And you certainly seem to know a lot of details on this subject. “
“Yes, sir, “ I said. “I only retired from the army a couple of months ago but while I was at the Pentagon, I was the acting projects officer for the antimissile missile program. “
“Then there’s no use in holding back, “ Harold Brown said and finally smiled for the first time in our meeting. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a folded envelope. “Here are your copies of the complete details of the project about which we briefed President Kennedy. It’s all here. And I presume this is what you are looking for, officially, “ he said with a special emphasis on “officially. “
He knew that I knew what was in that envelope but couldn’t disclose it before the Senate because it contained classified information and I would be breaching the National Security Act. However, by his giving me the material, much of it based on information that I had developed myself and had privately briefed Attorney General Robert Kennedy on in 1962, Brown was giving me the full authorization to disclose. He probably realized that in private sessions, I had talked generally about what was in the army file on the antimissile missile - that was a form of senatorial privilege as long as it wasn’t abused - but that I couldn’t go formal with it. Now I could, and I appreciated Harold Brown’s candor.
The battle over the appropriation was about to be joined, but I couldn’t look over the contents of the envelope, some of which were my own notes, without thinking back to the sequence of events that led to this meeting and to the project that ultimately was developed as a result of it. It began earlier in 1962 as I was working down the list of the priorities I had set for myself in the nut file. In it was a medical report about the creatures that I was trying to save until I had gotten all of the tangible items from Roswell into the development process.
It was a report on the possible function and apparent structure of the alien brain, a report that marveled at the similarities between the KBH brain and the human brain. However, one item in the report threw me for a complete loop. The medical examiner wrote that measurements of brain activity taken from the EBE who was still barely alive at Roswell showed that its electronic signature, at least what they were able to measure with equipment in 1947, displayed a signal similar to what we would call long, low frequency waves. And the examiner referred to a description by one of the Roswell Army Air Field doctors that the creature’s brain lobes seem to have been not just physiologically and neurologically integrated but integrated by an electromagnetic current as well.
I would have loved to dismiss this as the speculation of a doctor who had no experience with this type of analysis and certainly no experience with alien beings. Therefore, whatever he wrote was nonsense and not worth the time it took to respond to it. File it back in the cabinet and get on to other issues that could be turned into viable projects.
But the medical examiner’s report was more disturbing than I was ready to admit because it took me back to a time when I was the assistant chief of staff in Rome and made friends with some of the members of the graduate faculty at the University of Rome.
I was a twenty five year old captain at the time, a former engineering undergraduate, way in over my head and learning my job responsibilities each day, keeping one step ahead of my boss so he wouldn’t find out that I didn’t really know anything. In one of my visits to the university I met Dr. Gislero Flesch, a professor of criminology and anthropology who lectured me on what he called his theory and experiments on “the basis of life. “ It was a wild and, I thought, supernatural theory on what he called the filament within each cell. The filament was activated by some cosmic action or form of electromagnetic radiation that bombarded the earth continuously from outer space and resonated against a constant refresh of electrical activity from the brain.
“Captain” he would say whenever he began some formal explanation. I also thought that he was always surprised that someone so young could actually be dispatched from the New World to administer law and justice in Rome, the capital of the ancient world. The old professor also was scrupulous about showing everyone, including his dimmest of students, extraordinary respect.
“The electromagnetic forces in the body are the least understood, “ he continued. “Yet they account for more activity than anyone realizes."
As an engineering student whose whole experience with energy had to do with verifiable experiments, I was more than skeptical at first. How can you measure an electrical activity in the brain that you cannot see? How can invisible waves of energy that you can’t feel or see excite certain areas of the human cell, and what was their purpose?
Professor Flesch introduced me to Professor Casmir Franck, one of the first scientists to ever photograph brain waves. Professor Franck became a friend because during my days in Rome, fighting off Gestapo agents, Communist partisans, and the local crime families and crime chieftains, I was always engaged in some type of warfare. But when I had time off, I wanted to meet people, to stretch my experience, to fall in love with the city of my own ancestors I had been assigned to protect. So I sought out a network of friends to whom I could relate and from whom I could learn. Professor Franck was just such a man.
In Franck’s first experiments he had used a rabbit brain as a test subject. He measured what he said were the long, low frequency waves animal brains generate and described how he was able to trace the paths these waves took when they were transmitted from the brain to the animal’s voluntary muscles. Certain muscles, Professor Franck said, were attuned to respond to certain brain wave lengths, waves of a specific frequency. In cases of muscle paralysis, it’s not the muscle that’s necessarily damaged, it’s the muscle’s tuning mechanism that becomes disabled so that it no longer picks up the right frequency.
It’s like a radio, he said. If the radio can’t pick up a signal, the radio isn’t necessarily broken; its antenna or the crystal may need to be adjusted to the correct frequency. I was a guest at his laboratory more than a few times and watched him carry out his experiments with live rabbits, interfering with their brains’ electromagnetic wave propagation by implanting electrodes and seeing which muscles became cataleptic and which responded. He said it was the frequency that was being altered because once the animal was removed from the experimental table, it could walk and hop as if nothing had ever happened.
Then Professor Franck introduced me to another one of his colleagues, the celebrated research biologist and physician Doctor Castellani, who had many years earlier isolated and identified the disease called “sleeping sickness” and perfected what during the 1930s and 1940s became known as “Castellani Ointments” as treatments for a variety of skin diseases.
Where other doctors, he said, had focused on treating only the symptoms they could see on the skin, Doctor Castellani said that the problems of many skin rashes, psoriasis, or inflammations that looked like bacterial infections were, in fact, correctable by changing the skin’s electromagnetic resonance. The ointments, he said, didn’t attack the infection with drugs; they were chemical reactants that changed the electrostatic condition of the skin, allowing the long, low frequency waves from the brain to do the healing.
All three men were using these electromagnetic waves to promote healing in ways I considered astounding. They made claims about the ability of electromagnetic treatments to affect the speed at which cells divide and tumors grow. They claimed that through directed electromagnetic wave propagation they could cure heart disease, arthritis, all types of bacteriological infections that interfered with cell function, and even certain forms of cancer.
If this sounds like something supernatural in 1997, imagine how it must have sounded to the ears of a young and inexperienced intelligence officer in 1944 who was so far out of his element that the older, seasoned British intelligence laughed at his age. They laughed until they saw what happened to the Gestapo agents who were trying to re-infiltrate Rome behind the Allied front lines and met up with my men on the back streets and alleys. That’s when the laughing stopped.
I spent many hours with Professors Flesch, Franck, and Castellani in Rome and watched them experiment with all kinds of small animals. They didn’t have the research funds nor the endorsements of the medical societies to allow them to expand their work or to treat patients with their unconventional methods. Thus, much of their work found its way into research monographs, articles in academic journals, or university lectures at symposiums. And I left Rome in the spring of 1947, said my goodbyes to the friends I had made at the University of Rome, and put their work - relegated once again to the supernatural - out of my mind as I concentrated on my new jobs at Fort Riley, the White House, Red Canyon, Germany, and the Pentagon.
Then on the day that I came across the speculative report on the structure of the alien brain from Roswell, everything Professors Flesch, Franck, and Castellani said came back to me like a clap of thunder. Here I was again, staring at a piece of loose leaf paper that was staring right back at me and forcing me to consider ideas and notions from over ten years ago that challenged everything science back then was telling us about the way the brain worked.
While I reviewed the reports about the autopsied alien brain and what the medical examiner thought the low frequency waves meant when he applied current to the tissue, I also saw reports from an army military liaison attached to the Stalingrad consulate office that described Soviet experiments with psychics who were attempting to exercise some form of kinetic mind control over objects traveling through the air, directing them from one spot to another. These reports, written in the late 1950s, gave General Trudeau a lot of concern because they showed the Soviets were onto something.
“These fellas don’t waste their time, Phil, “ the general told me a on one of our morning briefings after I had dropped off the reports the day before so he could look them over. “If they’re looking into this stuff, then they know there’s something there. “
“You don’t think this report is just a lot of speculation?” I asked. I knew from the expression on his face that it was a question I shouldn’t have asked.
“If you thought this was just speculation, Colonel, “ he said very abruptly, “then you wouldn’t be passing the buck up to me to tell you that. “
General Trudeau had a way of bringing you up short when he thought you said something stupid. And what I had said was very stupid for an officer with my training and experience. He also knew I was worried or else I wouldn’t have tried to back off so quickly. “You’re right to be worried about this, “ he said, his tone softening when he saw how I was looking at him. “You’d be right if you sat in your office and sweated bullets over what this means. And you know exactly what worries the both of us. Do I have to say it?”
No, he didn’t. It was obvious. If the Soviets had gotten their hands on some of the apparatus from any one of the alien spacecraft that had gone down since 1947 - and I didn’t know how many there were - they’d have figured out by now that the aliens had used some form of brain wave control for navigation. How they directed their thoughts or translated them into an electronic circuit, we didn’t know. But we knew that there were no steering wheels or conventional methods of control on the spacecraft, and the headbands we found with the electronic sensors on them were designed to pick up some form of signal from the brain.
The analysts at Wright Field believed that the sensors on the headbands corresponded with points on the multi lobed alien brain that generated low frequency waves, so the headbands formed an integral part of the circuit. If we were able to figure that out, the Soviets were certainly, capable of figuring that out as well. Besides, the general didn’t have to say it because I thought it: What if the Soviets, all alone in space the way they were in the early 1960s, had some communication with the aliens that we didn’t have? Who said the EBEs had to be anti-Communist anyway?
General Trudeau also shared with me some intelligence reports that described antimissile missile tests the Soviets had conducted with very powerful tracking radar. We’d known about their radars because I’d seen them work during exercises in Germany when each side would test the other’s responses over the East German border.
Their radars and their ability to lock onto aircraft was just as good as ours. But what the general showed me were reports that described the Soviets firing intercept missiles at incoming ICBM vehicles and exploding the intercept warheads so as to knock out the navigational systems on the aggressor missiles. One of those test intercepts had been conducted successfully right through an atomic cloud on one of the Soviet missile test ranges in Asia. This was especially disturbing because anyone who knows anything about the nature of anatomic cloud knows that the electromagnetic pulse immediately knocks out any form of electronics.
That’s also how we knew what the signatures were of the alien UFOs that buzzed our ships and bases. So much of our non-hardened power was knocked out by the pulse that we knew an electromagnetic wave had hit us. So if the Soviets could harden their antimissile missile guidance system to home in on a target through an electromagnetically charged atomic cloud, they were using a technology significantly more advanced than ours, and it spelled trouble.
“When you were in Germany commanding the Nike battalion, “ the general asked me, still holding the reports in his hand, “you experimented with tight evasive maneuvers in drone target practice, didn’t you?”
The general’s memory served him correctly. Our antiaircraft battalion deployed the Nike, one of the most advanced guided antiaircraft missiles of its time. The Nike was a radar guided missile.
And the Hawk was a heat seeking missile that could be locked onto its target by tracking radar and then, when launched, would home in on the target’s heat exhaust. So, even if a pilot tried to evade the missiles, the fast moving Hawk warheads would catch up to him and blow off his engine. If it were a tail engine fighter, it would effectively end his mission and he’d probably have to eject. If it were a wing engined bomber, then, with one of his wing mounted engines shot off, the pilot would probably have to turn for home because he wouldn’t have the power to carry the payload of bombs to the target.
“When we were shooting at drones in simulated bombing formation, we scored a perfect shoot down again and again, but when pilots used extremely fast evasive maneuvers against our missiles, we couldn’t hit them, “ I said.
“Explain how that worked, “ he asked.
“Nike antiaircraft missiles move like boats on water, “ I explained.
“They cut wide arcs and get an angle to home in on their targets. Any early evasive maneuvers the fighter pilot makes, the missile compensates for and stays on course toward his heat source. But if the pilot is able to evade at the very last minute of the Nike’s trajectory, the missile will fly right by and can’t recover. Bomber pilots have to stay in formation and keep on course if they’re going to hit their target and have enough fuel to get home, so their evasive patterns are strictly limited. For fighter pilots, it’s much easier so any MiG, just like any of our Phantoms, can out maneuver a Nike any day. “
“So if the Soviets have something that can take out missile warheads through an atomic cloud and are using devices that may have come from an alien technology, we have something to worry about, “ the general said.
“We’d have a lot to worry about, “ I agreed. “We have nothing even remotely like this, except for the laser tracking system, but that’s years away from any sort of deployment even assuming we can get the President to ask Congress to give us the money to develop it. “
General Trudeau slammed his palm on the desk with enough force to shake the entire office. I’m sure his clerk sitting just outside thought I was getting bawled out for something, but that was the general’s way of reinforcing a decision he was making.
“Phil, you are the antimissile missile projects officer for the time being. I don’t care whatever the hell else you have to do, you write me up a report on what we discussed here and then put together a proposal I can use to get us some money to develop this thing, “ he said. “I know we’re on the right track, even if we’re in a strange arena. Thought control, “ he said, speculating about how the power of the human brain could be harnessed to the navigation of a guided missile.
“Well, if the Russians are looking at it seriously, then we’d better do the same thing before they blindside us like the did with Sputnik. “
“Why me?” I said to myself as I walked down the stairs to my office.
This was like an assignment to write a term paper when there wasn’t even any research you could use and still be called sane. I had to write about the hardware and systems applications of navigational control, not medical or biological functions per se, but that made it all the more difficult. I remembered my son telling me that he was able to fix gasoline engines that had broken down and electrical motors that were no longer putting out power because he believed the moving parts spoke to him. As way out as I thought that sounded at the time, walking back to my office now and thinking about what the Soviets were playing with, maybe my kid didn’t sound so crazy after all. It was something I’d have to research.
If the information that Professors Flesch, Franck, and Castellani conveyed to me back in Rome fifteen years ago had any validity, then the vague references in the Roswell report that I’d read probably had validity as well. So I began.
“The references to EBE brain function in the medical examiner’s reports from Roswell, “ I wrote in my opening memo to General Trudeau, suggest new avenues of research to us in the guidance and navigational control of machines.
The electromagnetic integration of the alien brain lobes and the possible integration with other brain functions including kinesthetic capability - the ability to move objects - over long distance is startling and sounds more like science fiction than fact. But if we can establish a correlation with long, low frequency waves and this electromagnetic integration, it will be a way to identify a measurable phenomenon with a process we do not understand. Initially, I recommend we study the phenomenon in an effort to apply our findings to gathering and utilizing any data we can develop concerning long, low frequency waves and electromagnetic integration so as to marry it to our existing guidance and control hardware systems and create a new state of the art in missile tracking.
A caveat: The Central Intelligence Agency has begun a program in which they work with “seers, “ as they call them, parapsychologists who they expect will give them the same capability as the KGB’s “Psychotronic Technology” training. Both intelligence agencies are skirting the edges of our military’s approach and we must be careful not to let our research fall into their cauldron. We would be discredited and possibly stopped from proceeding both from efforts from our own side and from protests by the Soviets should they find out. Therefore I recommend that the background of our experimentation with long low frequency brain waves and any source material be completely expunged along with any historical data relevant to this analysis.
My basis for our proposed antimissile missile was the Soviets’ own success with controlling the trajectory of an ICBM warhead in flight and the success they had in targeting incoming warheads with their own antimissile missile in development.
“In recent months, “ I wrote, it has come to our attention that the Soviets can change the trajectory of an ICBM after launch once it is on its way to a target. In addition, the Soviets have twice tested an antimissile missile fired through an atomic cloud at an approaching ICBM. Therefore, a technical proposal must be drawn up as soon as possible for:
1. An antimissile missile that will be able to lock onto an incoming ICBM and stay locked on through all evasive maneuvers and destroy it before it reaches its target, and
2. All circuitry must be hardened to withstand radiation, blast, heat, and electromagnetic pulse from an atomic detonation up to and including the intensity of the Russian bomb explosion of 60 megatons.
Premise: Our present antiaircraft missiles centered around the Nike-Ajax, Nike-Hercules, and the Hawk are not adequate against ICBMs thus rendering us virtually defenseless against such an attack. Present systems cannot remain locked onto an incoming ICBM or find the target to destroy if it changes trajectory, which capability the latest Soviet test models indicate the enemy may be able to deploy within the decade.
Our spy satellites will be able to locate the Soviet warheads once they are launched, but the Soviets are also developing the capability to disable our surveillance satellites either with orbiting nuclear weapons to destroy them or send them out of orbit. At the very least, Soviet capability to generate an electromagnetic pulse through a nuclear detonation in space will render our satellites electronically blind. Secret intelligence reports confirm that the Soviets have already disabled two of our satellites and one launched by the British.
We, therefore, have a two fold problem, not only must the antimissile missile circuitry be hardened but the spy satellite circuitry must also be hardened from radiation, ion emissions, and ELM pulses. But because of the nuclear test ban treaty, the United States will not have the opportunity to run actual tests so we will have to scale our data up from our existing test results to arrive at figures we can only assume are accurate. When General Trudeau read my full report, he asked me to speak to the scientists who consulted with us as part of a brain trust and develop a technical discussion, as speculative as we needed it to be with no restrictions whatsoever, in which we integrated what we had in our Roswell files with what intelligence we had on the types of testing the Soviets were conducting.
“Don’t worry about how it’s going to be circulated, Phil, “ General Trudeau assured me. “I want to show it to only a few members of the House and Senate Defense appropriations committees and they’ve promised to keep it confidential. “
“I know you want this right away, General, “ I said. “Can I have the rest of the day to work on it?”
“You can have until tomorrow morning, “ he said. “Because after lunch tomorrow you and I are meeting with the Senate subcommittee and I want to read them this report. “
I told my wife that I’d be home late in the morning for a change of uniform and then I was going over to Capitol Hill for a meeting. Then I ordered up a couple of sandwiches, put a new pot of coffee on, and settled in at the office for a long night.
“The present design and configuration of our ICBMs is adequate, “ I wrote onto my legal pad, crossed out the sentence, and then wrote it again. “However internal changes are necessary, especially within the warhead capsule. “
What I would recommend would be nothing less than radical. We needed an entirely new navigational computer system that would take advantage of the transistorized circuitry now coming into development and projected for the marketplace by the late 1960s.
I suggested we model the missile’s on board computer on the design of an actual dual hemisphere brain with one hemisphere or lobe receiving global positioning data from orbiting satellites. The other hemisphere will control the missile functions such as thrusters, positioning changes, and booster stage separation. It will receive data through a low frequency transmission from the other lobe.
The control lobe will also transmit missile flight telemetry to the positioning lobe so that the two computers will function together in tandem. This, I reasoned, would make the system more difficult to jam. If our global positioning satellite detected a threat from an incoming antimissile missile, it would relay that information to the warhead, whose control computer would direct the thrusters to fire so as to take evasive action before the final target approach.
In as much as I believed it was through the application and amplification of low frequency brain waves that the EBEs navigated the craft that we found at Roswell, our implementation of this technology might enable us also to use our brains to control the flight of objects. We could use some form of a brain wave system to navigate our ICBM warhead final stage vehicles if their on board radar detected a threat from an anti-ballistic missile. We could also use this system to home in on incoming enemy warhead launchers even if they were capable of taking some evasive action.
If we designed the missile the way I suggested, by the time it had been locked into its final trajectory, its detonation would be set so that even if it were knocked off course it would still explode and cause enough collateral damage that it would count as a hit. Enough of our ICBMs could get through, we reasoned, so as to overwhelm not only the Soviet guided missile forces but pose a realistic threat to their population centers. Meanwhile, the technology we developed for changing the flights of our incoming ICBMs could be applied as a template to our own antimissile missiles so as to neutralize any Soviet missile threat.
My conclusion:
“An appropriation of $300 million must be requested for the coming FY 1963 as a urgent crash development appropriation. “
I read my own notes from the envelope handed over by Harold Brown and looked back at him.
“Colonel, “ Brown’s assistant said. “We understand the urgency of your request last year and we appreciate your reasons for fighting for it now. “
“But the Defense Department is simply not going to allow the army to go forward with an antimissile missile at this time. Not in 1963, “ Mr. Brown said.
“When?” I asked.
“At a time, “ the army colonel said, “when the impact of our deploying this system will be greater than it is now. The Russians know we have a bead on the type of satellites they’re putting up and we can take them out in a heartbeat, much faster than they can take out ours. “
I began to answer, but Harold Brown got up to leave. We shook hands and he walked toward the door. The army colonel remained in front of my desk.
“Maybe just you and I can have a word, Colonel Corso, “ he said. My own associate on Senator Thurmond’s committee left the office also.
“In the Pentagon, we understand that your early research into the technology of the antiballistic missile is the real reason for your support, Colonel Corso, “ the project manager said. “It’s in good hands. “
But I can tell you he didn’t know the real reason, the EBEs. Only General Trudeau understood the secret agenda that lay beneath the research into the project.
“But when do you think development will start?” I asked.
“In just a couple of years we’ll have lunar spacecraft orbiting the moon, “ he said. “We’ll have orbiting satellites mapping every inch of the Soviet Union. We’ll see what they can throw against us. Then we’ll have exactly the kind of antimissile missile you proposed because then even the Congress will see the reason for it. “ “But until then ... “ I began.
“Until then, “ the colonel said, “all we can do is wait. “It would take another twenty years for the beginnings of an antimissile to be deployed. And it would also take a president who was willing to recognize the threat from the extraterrestrials to force an antimissile weapon through a hostile Congress.
CHAPTER 15
My Last Year in R&D: The Hoover Files,
Fiber Optics, Super tenacity, and Other Artifacts
I BARELY PICKED MY HEAD UP FROM THE PILES OF TECHNICAL proposals on my desk during the winter months of 1961. The work didn’t even stop for the Christmas holiday, when most of Washington likes to take a break and head for the West Virginia mountains or the Maryland countryside. I was traveling a lot during the final months of 1961, seeing weapons undergo testing at proving grounds around the country, meeting with university researchers on such diverse items as the preservation of food or the conversion of spent atomic pile material into weapons, and developing intelligence reports for General Trudeau on the kinds of technologies that might shape weapons development into the next decade.
With my other eye, I was keeping a look out for any reports going to the Air Intelligence Command about UFO sightings that I thought Army Intelligence should be thinking about. The AIC was the next step in classification from the Project Blue Book people. Its job, besides the obvious task of moving any urgent UFO reports up the ladder of secrecy to the next levels where they would disappear behind the veil of camouflage, was to classify the type of event or incident the sighting seemed to indicate.
Usually that meant separating real aircraft sightings that needed to be investigated for pure military intelligence purposes from either true UFO sightings that needed to be processed by whatever elements of the original working group were on watch or false sightings that needed to be sent back down to Blue Book to be debunked. The AIC loved it when it had actual false sightings it could send back: an obvious meteorite that they could confirm, some visual anomaly having to do with an alignment of planets, or, best of all, a couple of clowns somewhere that decided to pull a Halloween prank and scare the locals.
There were guys running around wheat fields with snowshoes or submitting photos of flying frozen pie tins to the local papers. Then the folks at Blue Book could release the story to the press, and everybody patted themselves on the back for the job they were all doing. Life could be fun in the early 1960s, especially if you didn’t know the truth.
Moving into 1962, Army Intelligence was lit up with rumors about potential threats coming in from all over the place. The anti-Castro Cubans were mad about the President’s refusal to support the Bay of Pigs invasion and were looking for revenge; Castro was mad about the Bay of Pigs invasion and was looking to get back at us; Khrushchev was still furious about the U2 and the Bay of Pigs and thinking Kennedy was a pushover, would soon jump on an opportunity to force us into some humiliating compromise.
The Russians were on the verge of sending manned spacecraft into extended orbital flights and robot probes out to explore Venus. We were way behind in the space race and none of the services had the budget or the ability to get us back into the fight. NASA was telling the President they would have to dig in, develop the technology base, and, by the middle of the decade, put on a show for the whole world. But now, as the year turned, it was all silent running until we could put something up we could brag about.
The army was making ominous noises about events in Southeast Asia. The more the army pushed to get troops on the ground, the more the Kennedy administration refused to get involved. The army was telling the President we would eventually be sucked into a war we could not win and the events would control us instead of our controlling them. Later that same year, I would be offered the job of director of intelligence for the Army Special Forces units already operating in the Southeast Asian theater.
At about the same time the army said it was going to name Gen. Arthur Trudeau as the commander of all U.S. forces in South Vietnam. As our names were being circulated, General Trudeau confided to me that he doubted we would get the jobs. And if we did, he said, it would be a toss-up as to who would be the most unhappy, the Vietcong or the U.S. Army.
“If they send us over there, Phil, “ he said after one of our morning briefings, “one of two things will happen. Either we’ll both get court martialed or we’ll win the damn war. Either way the army’s not going to like the way we do business. “
As usual, General Trudeau was right. Before the end of 1962 and right about the time the old man was making up his mind whether to retire or not, his name was vetoed as the commander of all U.S. forces in Vietnam and I was told to stay at my desk. The handwriting was on the wall: Vietnam was going to be a political war run by the disinformation specialists at the CIA and fought under a cloud of unknowing. Unfortunately, history proved us to be correct. By the time Richard Nixon surrendered to the Chinese and we crawled out of Southeast Asia a few years later, we would learn, I hope for the last time, what it was like to be humiliated on the battlefield and then eviscerated at the negotiating table.
The new year brought J. Edgar Hoover over to the Pentagon. The FBI director was growing increasingly anxious at all the Roswell stories circulating like ice cold currents deep under the ocean throughout NASA and the civilian intelligence agencies. Somebody was conspiring about something, and that meant the FBI should get involved, especially if the CIA was messing around in domestic issues. Hoover didn’t like the CIA and he especially didn’t like the cozy relationship he thought President Kennedy had with the CIA because he believed his boss, the President’s brother, was keeping him on a short leash when it came to taking on the agency about territorial issues.
Hoover knew, but didn’t believe, that after the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy had become very suspicious of the intelligence information he was getting from the CIA. By the end of 1962, the President would learn from his own brother, who would learn from me, just how deliberately flawed the information coming out of the CIA was. And I would also learn, when I worked for Senator Russell on the Warren Commission in 1964, how that had sealed his fate.
But in 1962, still near the height of his power, J. Edgar Hoover was as territorial as any lifetime bureaucrat in Washington could be. And when somebody stepped on his toes, or when he thought someone had stepped on his toes, he kept kicking them until the guy was dead. Even his own agents knew what it was like to get on his bad side. I was as territorial in my own way as the FBI director was in his, and during my years at the White House under President Eisenhower, we had established a professional relationship. If he needed to know something that bore on some KGB agent nosing around the government, I helped him out. If I needed to find something out on the qt. about somebody I needed to take out of the bureaucratic loop, he would tell me what he knew. We never established any formal relationships in the 1950s, but we let each know who we thought the bad guys were.
In the 1950s, Hoover got interested in the rumors about Roswell because anything the CIA got their teeth into made him nervous. If it were only the military running a cover-up, he could live with that, although he thought the military never should have run the OSS during World War II. But once he suspected the CIA was part of the Roswell story, he wanted in. But in my years on the White House staff, there wasn’t much I could tell him. It wouldn’t be until 1961 that I got my hands on what really happened at Roswell, and then I didn’t have to contact him. He called me.
We found we could help each other. Besides being territorial, J. Edgar Hoover was an information fanatic. If there was a bit of information floating around, whether it was rumor or truth, Hoover was obsessive about putting it into his files. Information was such a valuable commodity to him, he was willing to trade for it with anybody in government he trusted. I wanted information, too. I was going out to meetings with scientists and university researchers whose loyalties I couldn’t verify. I had to be very circumspect about the technological information I was delivering, and many times I needed to know whether a particular chemist or physicist had ever been suspected of dealing with the Communists or, worse, was on the payroll of the CIA.
In retrospect I can see how all this smacks of the thinking of Senator Joe McCarthy, but I was at the White House during the army McCarthy hearings and I can tell you straight out that Joe McCarthy - unwittingly - was the best friend the Communists ever had in government. Single handedly, Senator McCarthy helped give respectability to a bunch of people who would never have had it otherwise. He turned behaving in contempt of Congress into a heroic act by his very tactics, and the Communists in government were laughing at the free rein he gave them. All they had to do was provide him with a human sacrifice every now and then, someone completely unimportant or actually innocent of any wrong doing, and McCarthy pilloried them on television. But when he turned against the US. Army, he crossed into my territory and we had to shut him down.
The Communists used McCarthy to give them good press and open up an area where they could work while the anti-Communists were made to look like fools. I told this to Robert Kennedy, who as a young lawyer had been a member of Roy Cohn’s investigative staff working for the McCarthy subcommittee and who had learned firsthand what it was like to be completely misled into self destructive behavior. It was a mistake, he confided to me, that he would never make again. Unfortunately, his brother’s enemies were his own, and he was misled into thinking that being president would allow him to settle the score.
But in January of 1962 all that was on my mind was reestablishing a relationship with J. Edgar Hoover so that I could pursue my agenda while keeping a lookout for who might be dangerous out there in the academic community. Now I had something to bargain with for the information I wanted. Not only did I have the bits and pieces of the Roswell story that I knew Hoover wanted, I also had information about the domestic activities of the CIA. Hoover was more than interested in sharing information, and we continued to talk right through 1962 until I left the army and went over to Senator Thurmond’s staff.
Our relationship continued right through 1963. And in 1964, when I was an investigator for Senator Russell on the Warren Commission and Hoover was pursuing his own independent investigation into the President’s assassination, he and I could only stare at one another again on either side of the abyss of that crime. Stacked up against the enormity of what had happened, Hoover and I both understood that there are some battles you cannot win. So you leave them alone so you can fight another day.
I’m not sure whether J. Edgar Hoover ever really believed that the Roswell story was true, an absolute conspiracy to cover up something else, or just a delusion that became mass hysteria out there in the desert. There were so many details buried in army memos and maintained under layers of cover stories fabricated by military intelligence experts that he couldn’t possibly know the truth. But like the good cop that he was, he took information wherever he could find it and kept on searching for something that made sense.
If the army saw a threat to our society, then Hoover thought there was a threat. And whenever he could follow up a report of a sighting with a very discreet appearance by a pair of FBI agents to interview the witnesses and get away with it, he did. He was more than willing to share that information with me, and that was how I found out about some of the unpublicized cattle mutilation stories in the early 1960s.
My J. Edgar Hoover connection was important to me as I began my work in the early weeks of 1962 because the level of research into the types of projects we were developing became very intense. The rumors of General Trudeau’s appointment to the Southeast Asia command and my selection as intelligence director for the Green Berets in Southeast Asia, as vague and unconfirmed as they were, set a deadline for the general and me to push our projects forward because we knew we had only a year or so left on our tenure at R&D.
So when the FBI director and I would talk, I had questions ready to ask. No information we ever shared was in writing, and any notes that I took from the conversations we had I later destroyed after committing them to memory or taking action on the things he said. Even to this day, although FBI agents have contacted me about records supposedly still left in the old files, I don’t know what notes the FBI director took about our conversations and what specific actions he ever took. Because we trusted each other and remained in contact once every six months or so even after I left government service, I never followed up on anything I said and never asked for any verification of information in the files. I think Hoover appreciated that.
By February of 1962 I had lined my nut file projects up for an end run that would take me to the end of the year and either South Vietnam or retirement. The first folder on the desktop was the “glass filaments. “
Fiber Optics
Members of the retrieval team who foraged around inside the spacecraft on the morning of the discovery told Colonel Blanchard back at the 509th that they were amazed they couldn’t find any conventional wiring.
Where were the electrical connections? they asked, because obviously the vehicle had electronics. They didn’t understand the function of the printed circuit wafers they found, but, even more important, they were completely mystified by the single glass filaments that ran through the panels of the ship. At first, some of the scientists thought that they comprised the missing wiring that also had the engineers so confused as they packed the craft for shipping. Maybe they were part of the wiring harness that was broken in the crash. But these filaments had a strange property to them.
The wire harness seemed to have broken loose from a control panel and was separated into twelve frayed filaments that looked something like quartz. When, back at the 509th’s hangar, officers from the retrieval team applied light to one end of the filament, the other end emitted a specific color. Different filaments emitted different colors. The fibers - in reality glass crystal tubes - led to a type of junction box where the fibers separated and went to different parts of the control panel that seemed to acknowledge electrically the different color pulsing through the tube.
Since the engineers evaluating the material at Roswell knew that each color of light had its own specific wavelength, they guessed that the frequency of the light wave activated a specific component of the spacecraft’s control panel. But beyond that, the engineers and scientists were baffled. They couldn’t even determine the spacecraft’s power source, let alone what generated the power for the light tubes. And, the most amazing thing of all was that the filaments not only were flexible but still emitted light even when they were bent back and forth like a paper clip.
How could light be made to bend? the engineers wondered. This was one of the physical mysteries of the Roswell craft that stayed hidden through the 1950s until one of the Signal Corps liaisons, who routinely briefed General Trudeau on the kinds of developments the Signal Corps was looking for, told us about experiments in optical fibers going on at Bell Labs.
The technology was still very new, Hans Kohler told me during a private briefing in early 1962, but the promise of using light as a carrier of all kinds of signals through single filament glass strands was holding great promise. He explained that the premise of optical fibers was to have a filament of glass so fine and free of any impurities that nothing would impede the light beam moving along the center of the shaft. You also had to have a powerful light source at one end, he explained, to generate the signal, and I thought of the successful ruby laser that had been tested at Columbia University. I knew the EBEs had integrated the two technologies for their glass cable transmission inside the spacecraft.
“But what makes the light bend?” I asked Professor Kohler, still incredulous that the aliens seem to have been able to defy one of our own laws of physics. “Is it some kind of an illusion?”
“It’s not a trick at all, “ the scientist explained. “It only looks like an illusion because the fibers are so fine, you can’t see the different layers without a microscope. “
He showed me, when I gave him the broken pieces of filament that I still had in my nut file, that each strand, which looked like one solid piece of material enclosing the circumference of a tiny tube, was actually double layered. When you looked down the center of the shaft you could see that around the outside of the filament was another layer of glass. Dr. Kohler explained that the individual light rays are reflected back toward the center by the layer of glass around the outside of the fiber so that the light can’t escape. By running the glass fibers around corners and, in the case of the Roswell spacecraft, through the interior walls of the ship, the aliens were able to bend light and focus it just like you can direct the flow of water through a supply pipe. I’d never seen anything like that before in my life.
Kohler explained that, just like lasers, the light can be made to carry any sort of signal : light, sound, and even digital information.
“There’s no resistance to the signal, “ he explained. “And you can fit more information on to the light beam. “
I asked him how the EBEs might have used this type of technology. He suggested that all ship’s communication, visual images, telemetry, and any amplified signals that the vehicles sent or received from other craft or from bases on the moon or on earth would use these glass fiber cables.
“They seem to have an enormous capacity for carrying any kind of load, “ he suggested. “And if a laser can amplify the signal, in their most refined form, these cables can carry a multiplicity of signals at the same time. “
I was more than impressed. Even before asking him about the specific types of applications these might have for the army, I could see how they could make battlefield communications more secure because the signals would be stronger and less vulnerable to interference. Then Professor Kohler began suggesting the uses of these fibers to carry visual images photographed in tiny cameras from the weapons themselves to controlling devices at the launcher.
“Imagine, “ he said, “being able to fire a missile and actually see through the missile’s eye where it’s going. Imagine being able to lock onto a target visually and even as it tries to evade the missile, you can see it and make final adjustments. “
And Kohler went on to describe the potential of how fiber optics based sensors could someday keep track of enemy movements on the ground, carry data heavy visual signals from surveillance satellites, and pack very complicated multichannel communications systems into small spaces.
“The whole space program is dependent upon carrying data, voice, and image, “he said. “But now, it takes too much space to store all the relays and switches and there’s too much impedance to the signal. It limits what we can do on a mission. But imagine if we could adapt this technology to our own uses. “
Then he looked me very squarely in the eye and said the very thing that I was thinking.
“You know this is their technology. It’s part of what enables them to have exploration missions. If it became our technology, too, we’d be able to, maybe we could keep up with them a little better. “
Then he asked me for the army’s commitment. He explained that some of our research laboratories were already looking into the properties of glass as a signal conductor and this would not have to be research that was started from complete scratch. Those kinds of start ups gave us concern at R&D because unless we covered them up completely, it would look like there was a complete break in a technological path. How do you explain that? But if there’s research already going on, no matter how basic, then just showing someone at the company one of these pieces of technology could give them all they need to reverse engineer it so that it became our technology. But we’d have to support it as part of an arms development research contract if the company didn’t already have a budget. This is what I wanted to do with this glass filament technology.
“Where is the best research on optical fibers being done?” I asked him.
“Bell Labs, “ he answered. “It’ll take another thirty years to develop it, but one day most of the telephone traffic will be carried on fiber optic cable. “
Army R&D had contacts at Bell just like other contractors we worked with, so I wrote a short memo and proposal to General Trudeau on the potential of optical fibers for a range of products that Professor Kohler and I discussed. I described the properties of what had been previously called a wiring harness, explained how it carried laser signals, and, most importantly, how these fibers actually bent a stream of light around a corner and conducted it the same way a wire conducts an electrical current. Imagine conducting a beam of high intensity single frequency light the same way you’d run a water line to a new bathroom, I wrote. Imagine the power and flexibility it provided the EBEs, especially when they used the light signal as a carrier for other coded information.
This would enable the military to recreate its entire communications infrastructure and allow our new surveillance satellites to feed find store potential targeting information right into frontline command and control installations. The navy would be able to see the deployment of an entire enemy fleet, the air force could look down on approaching enemy squadrons and target them from above even if our planes were still on the ground, and for the army it would give us an undreamed of strategic advantage. We could survey an entire battlefield, track the movements of troops from small patrols to entire divisions, and plot the deployments of tanks, artillery, and helicopters at the same time.
The value of fiber optic communication to the military would be immeasurable. And, I added, I was almost certain that a development push from the army to facilitate research on the complete reengineering of our country’s already antiquated telephone system would not be seen by any company as an unwarranted intrusion. I didn’t have to wait long for the general’s response.
Do it, “ he ordered. “And get this under way fast. I’ll get you all the development allocation you need. Tell them that. “ And before the end of that week, I had an appointment with a systems researcher at the Western Electric research facility outside of Princeton, New Jersey, right down the road from the Institute for Advanced Study. I told him it came out of foreign technology, something that the intelligence people picked up from new weapons the East Germans were developing but thought we could use.
“If what you think you have, “ he said over the phone, “is that interesting and shows us where our research is going, we’d be silly not to lend you an ear for an afternoon. “
“I’ll need less than an afternoon to show you what I got, “ I said. Then I packed my Roswell field reports into my briefcase, got myself an airline ticket for a flight to Newark Airport, and I was on my way.
Super-tenacity Fibers
Even before the 1960s, when I was, still on the National Security staff, the army had begun to look for fibers for flak jackets, shrapnel proof body armor, even parachutes, and a protective skin for other military items. Silk had always been the material of choice for parachutes because it was light, yet had an incredible tensile strength that allowed it to stretch, keep shape, and yet withstand tremendous forces. Whether the army’s search for what they called a “tenacity fiber” was prompted purely by its need to find better protection for its troops or because of what the retrieval team found at Roswell, I do not know. I suspect, however, that it was the discovery at the crash site that began the army’s search.
Among the items in my Roswell file that we retained from the retrieval were strands of a fiber that even razors couldn’t cut through. When I looked at it under a magnifying glass, its dull grayness and almost matte finish belied the almost supernatural properties of this fiber. You could stretch it, twist it around objects, and subject it to a level of torque that would rend any other fiber, but this held up. Then, when you released the tension, it snapped back to its original length without any loss of tension in its original form. It reminded me of the filaments in a spiderweb. We became very interested in this material and began to study a variety of technologies, including spider silks because they, alone in nature, exhibit natural super tenacity properties.
The spiders’ spinning of its silk begins in its abdominal glands as a protein that the spider extrudes through a narrow tube that forces all the molecules to align in the same direction, turning the protein into a rod like, very long, single thread with a structure not unlike a crystal. The extrusion process not only aligns the protein molecules, the molecules are very compressed, occupying much less space than conventionally sized molecules. This combination of lengthwise aligned and super compressed molecules gives this thread an incredible tenacity and the ability to stretch under enormous pressure while retaining its tensile strength and integrity. A single strand of this spider’s silk thread would have to be stretched nearly fifty miles before breaking and if stretched around the entire globe, it would weigh only fifteen ounces.
Clearly, when the scientists at Roswell saw how this fiber - not cloth, not silk, but something like a ceramic - had encased the ship and formed the outer skin layer of the EBEs, they realized it was a very promising avenue for research. When I examined the material and recognized its similarity to spider thread, I realized that a key to producing this commercially would be to synthesize the protein and find a way to simulate the extrusion process. General Trudeau encouraged me to start contacting plastics and ceramics manufacturers, especially Monsanto and Dow, to find out who was doing research on super-tenacity materials, especially at university laboratories. My quick poll paid off.
I not only discovered that Monsanto was looking for a way to develop a mass production process for a simulated spider silk, I also learned that they were already working with the army. Army researchers from the Medical Corps were trying to replicate the chemistry of the spider gene to produce the silk manufacturing protein. Years later, after I’d left the army, researchers at the University of Wyoming and Dow Corning also began experiments on cloning the silk manufacturing gene and developing a process to extrude the silk fibers into a usable substance that could be fabricated into a cloth.
Our research and development liaison in the Medical Corps told me that the replication of a super-tenacity fiber was still years away back in 1962, but that any help from Foreign Technology that we could give the Medical Corps would find its way to the companies they were working with and probably wouldn’t require a separate R&D budget. The development funding through U.S. government medical and biological research grants was more than adequate, the Medical Corps officer told me, to finance the research unless we needed to develop an emergency crash program. But I still remained fascinated by the prospect that something similar to a web spinner had spun the strands of super-tenacity fabric around the spaceship. I knew that whatever that secret was, amalgamating a skin out of some sort of fabric or ceramic around our aircraft would give them the protection that the Roswell craft had and still be relatively lightweight.
Again, I didn’t find out about it until much later, but research into that very type of fabrication was already under way by a scientist who would, years later, win a Nobel Prize. At a meeting of the American Physical Society three years before, Dr. Richard Feynman gave a theoretical speculative assessment of the possibilities of creating substances whose molecular structure was so condensed that the resulting material might have radically different properties from the non-compressed version of the same material. For example, Feynman suggested, if scientists could create material in which the molecular structures were not only compressed but arranged differently from conventional molecular structures, the scientists might be able to alter the physical properties of the substance to suit specific applications.
This seemed like brand new stuff to the American Physical Society. In reality, though, compressed molecular structures were one of the discoveries that had been made by some of the original scientific analytical groups both at Alamogordo right after the Roswell crash and at the Air Materiel Command at Wright Field, which took delivery of the material. As a young atomic physicist, Richard Feynman was a colleague of many of the postwar atomic specialists who were in the army’s and then the air force’s guided missile program as well as the nuclear weapons program in the 1950s.
Although I never saw any memos to this effect, Feynman was reported to have been in contact with members of the Alamogordo group of the Air Materiel Command and knew about some of the finds at the Roswell crash site. Whether these discoveries suggested theories to him about the potential properties of compressed molecular structures or whether his ideas were also extensions of his theories about the quantum mechanics behavior of electrons, for which he won the Nobel Prize, I don’t know. But Dr. Feynman’s theories about compressed molecular structures dove tailed with the army efforts to replicate the super-tenacity fiber composition and extrusion processes. By the middle of the 1960s work was under way not only at large industrial ceramics and chemical companies in the United States but in university research laboratories here, and in Europe, Asia, and India.
With my questions about who was conducting research into super-tenacity fibers answered and learning where that research was taking place, I could turn my attention to other applications of the technology to see whether the army could help move the development along faster or whether any collateral development was possible to create products in advance of the super-tenacity fibers. Our scientists told us that one way to simulate the effect of super-tenacity was in the cross alignment of composite layers of fabric. This idea was the premise for the army’s search for a type of body armor that would protect against the skin piercing injuries of explosive shrapnel and rounds fired from guns.
“Now this won’t protect you against contusions, “ General Trudeau told me after a meeting with Army Medical Corps researchers at Walter Reed. “And the concussive shock from an impact will still be strong enough to kill anybody, but at least it’s supposed to keep the round from tearing through your body. “
I thought about the many blunt trauma wounds you see in a battle and could imagine the impact a large round would leave even if it couldn’t penetrate the skin. But through the general’s impetus and the contacts he set up for me at DuPont and Monsanto, we aggressively pursued the research into the development of a cross aligned material for bulletproof vests. I hand carried the field descriptions of the fabric found at Roswell to my meetings at these Companies and showed the actual fabric to scientists who visited us in Washington.
This was not an item we wanted to risk carrying around the country. By 1965, Du Pont had announced the creation of the Kevlar fabric that, by 1973, was brought to market as the Kevlar bulletproof vest that’s in common use today in the armed Services and law enforcement agencies. I don’t know how many thousands of lives have been saved, but every time I hear of a police officer whose Kevlar vest protected him from a fatal chest or back wound, I think back to those days when we were just beginning to consider the value of cross aligned layers of super-tenacity material and am thankful that our office played a part in the product’s development.
Our search for super-tenacity materials also resulted in the development of composite plastics and ceramics that with stood heat and the pressures of high speed air maneuvers and were also invisible to radar. The cross stitched super-tenacity fibers on the skin of the Roswell vehicle, which I believe had been spun on, also became an impetus for an entirely new generation of attack and strategic aircraft as well as composite materials for future designs of attack helicopters.
One of the great rumors that floated around for years after the Roswell story became public with the testimony of retired Army Air Force major Jesse Marcel before he died was that Stealth technology aircraft were the result of what we learned at Roswell. That is true, but it was not a direct transfer of technology. Army Intelligence knew that under certain conditions the EBE spacecraft had the ability to hide their radar signature, but we didn’t know how they did it. We also had pieces of the Roswell spacecraft’s skin, which was a composite of supertenacity molecular aligned fibers.
As far as I know, we’ve still not managed to recreate the exact process to manufacture this composite, just like we’ve not been able to duplicate the electromagnetic drive and navigation system that enabled the Roswell vehicle to fly even though we have that vehicle and others at either Norton, Edwards, and Nellis Air Force bases. But through the study of how this material worked and what its properties are, we’ve replicated composites and rolled an entirely new generation of aircraft off the assembly line.
Although the American public first heard about the existence of a Stealth technology in President Jimmy Carter’s campaign against President Ford in 1976, we didn’t see the Stealth in action until the air attacks on Iraq during the Persian Gulf War. There, the Stealth fighter, completely invisible to Iraqi radar, launched the first high risk assaults on the Iraqi air force air defense system and operated with almost complete impunity. Invisible to radar, invisible to heat seeking missiles, striking out of the night sky like demons, the Stealth fighters, with their flying wing almost crescent shaped, look uncannily like the space vehicle that crashed into the arroyo outside of Roswell.
But appearances aside, the composite skin of the Stealth that helps make it invisible to almost all forms of detection was inspired by the Army R&D research into the skin of the Roswell aircraft that we sectioned apart for distribution to laboratories around the country.
Depleted Uranium Invisible Artillery Shells
For the air force, Stealth technology meant that aircraft could approach a target invisible to radar and maintain that advantage throughout the mission. For the army, Stealth technology for its helicopters provides an incredible advantage in mounting search and destroy, Special Forces recon, or counter insurgency missions deep into enemy territory. But the possibility of a Stealth artillery shell, which we conceived of at R&D in 1962, would have allowed us something armies have sought ever since the first deployment of artillery by a Western European army at Henry V’s victory at Agincourt in the early fifteenth century.
Certainly Napoleon would have wanted this ability when he deployed his artillery against the British line at Waterloo. So would the Germans in World War I when their artillery pounded the Allied forces hunkered down in their trenches and again at the Battle of the Bulge in 1944 when those of us stationed in Rome could only pray that our boys could hang on until the clouds broke and our bombers could hit the German emplacements.
In all artillery battles, once a shell is fired, it can be tracked by an observer back to its source and then return fire can be directed against whoever is firing. But as the range of artillery increased and we found ways to camouflage guns, we became proficient in hiding artillery until the advent of battlefield radar, which allows the trajectory of shells to be tracked back to their source. But imagine if the shell were composed of a material that rendered it invisible to radar? That was the possibility we proposed to General Trudeau: an invisible artillery shell, I suggested to him in his office one morning as we were designing the plan for research and development of composite materials.
On the night battlefield of the future you could deploy weapons that were invisible even to radar tracking planes flying over head behind the lines. Shells would start falling, and the enemy wouldn’t know where they were coming from until after we had the advantage of five or more unanswered salvos. By then, and with the advantage of surprise, the damage might well be done. If we were using mechanized artillery, we could set up positions, fire a series of quick salvos, redeploy, and set up again. The secret lay not just in the same Stealth aircraft technology but also in the development of a Stealth ceramic that could withstand tremendous explosive barrel pressures and still maintain an integrity through the arc of its trajectory. The search for just such a molecularly aligned composite ceramic was inspired by the composite material of the Roswell spacecraft. In analysis after analysis, the army tried to determine how the extraterrestrials fabricated the material that formed the hull of the spacecraft but was unable to do so.
The search for the kind of molecularly aligned composite began in the 1950s even before General Trudeau took command of R&D, continued during my tenure at Foreign Technology when the early “Stealth” experimentation began at Lockheed that resulted in the F 117 fighter and Stealth bomber, and continues right through to today.
The general was also more than interested in the kinds of warheads we would propose for just such a shell, a warhead that did come into use in 1961 and was successfully deployed during the Gulf War. And we had a suggestion for a round that we thought could change the nature of the kinds of battles we projected we’d be fighting against the Warsaw Pact forces, a warhead fabricated out of depleted uranium. This was a way to utilize the stockpile of uranium we foresaw we’d have as a result of spent fuel from commercial nuclear reactors, reactors powering U.S. Navy vessels, and the nuclear reactors the army was developing for its own bases and for delivery to bases overseas.
Depleted uranium was a dense, heavy metal, so dense in fact that conventional armament was no match for a high speed round tipped with it. Its ability to penetrate even the toughest of tank armor and detonate once it was inside the enemy vehicle meant that a single round fired from one of our own tanks equipped with a laser range finder would disable, if not completely destroy, an enemy tank. Depleted uranium would give us a decided advantage on a European battlefield on which we knew we’d be outnumbered two or three to one by the Warsaw Pact or in China where sheer numbers alone would mean that either we’d be overwhelmed or we’d have to resort to nuclear weapons. The depleted uranium shell kept us from having to go nuclear.
Privately, I suggested to General Trudeau that depleted uranium also fulfilled our hidden agenda. It was another weapon in a potential arsenal we were building against hostile extraterrestrials. If depleted uranium could penetrate armor, might the heaviness of the element enable it to penetrate the composite skin of the spacecraft, especially if the spacecraft were on the ground? I suggested that it certainly merited development at the nearby Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland, and if it proved worthwhile, it was a weapon we should deploy.
Even though the composite ceramic Stealth round is still an elusive dream in weapons development, the depleted uranium tipped war head saw action in the Gulf War, where it didn’t just disable the tanks of the Iraqi Republican Guard, it exploded them into pieces. Fired from the laser range finder equipped Abrams tanks, TOW missile launchers, or even from Hedgehog infantry support aircraft, the depleted uranium tipped warheads wreaked havoc in the Gulf. They were one of the great weapons development successes of Army R&D that came out of what we learned from the Roswell crash.
HARP - The High-Altitude Research Project
HARP was another project whose need for research and development was suggested to us by the challenge posed by flying saucers. They could out fly our own aircraft, we had no guided missiles that could bring them down, and we didn’t have any guns that could shoot them down. We were also exploring weapons systems that had a double or triple use, and HARP, or “the big gun, “ was one such system. Essentially, Project HARP was the brainchild of Canadian gunnery expert and scientist Dr. Gerald Bull. Bull had studied the threat posed by the German “Big Bertha” in World War I and the Nazi V3 supergun toward the end of World War II. He realized that long range, high powered artillery was not only a practical solution to launching heavy payload shells, it was very affordable once the initial research and development phase was completed.
Mass produced big guns and their ordinance, assembled in stages right on the site, could provide enormous firepower well back from the front lines to any army. They would become a strategic weapon to rain nuclear destruction down on enemy population centers or military staging areas.
Dr. Bull had also suggested that the gun could be retasked as a launch vehicle, blasting huge rounds into orbit, which could then be jettisoned, like the booster stage of a rocket, so the payload warhead could thrust itself into position. This would require a minimum amount of rocket fuel and could effectively push a string of satellites into orbit very quickly, almost like an artillery barrage. If the army needed to put special satellites into orbit in a hurry or, better still, explosive satellites that would pose a threat to orbiting extraterrestrial vehicles, the big gun was one method of accomplishing this mission.
There was still a third potential to the supergun. General Trudeau foresaw the ability of this weapon to launch rounds that could ultimately be placed into a lunar orbit. Especially if hostilities broke out between the United States and USSR or, as we expected, between Earth military forces and the extraterrestrials, we could re-supply a military moon base without having to rely on rocket launch facilities, which would demand long turn around times and be very vulnerable to attack. A camouflaged supergun, even a series of superguns, would allow us all the benefits of a field artillery or quick response antiaircraft unit, but with a piece that could launch payloads into space. It was this combination of capabilities that delighted General Trudeau because it enabled one R&D project to help create many different systems.
The United States, Canada, and the British military combined their joint expertise to find ways to develop Dr. Bull’s supergun with General Trudeau, I believe, becoming one of Bull’s staunchest supporters. But by the time military budget decisions had to be made to fund the weapon, all of the governments military establishments had become committed to the guided missile and rocket launched space vehicle rather than a supergun. While the weapon had some potential, the United States, UK, and Canada were too far along with their own missile programs to start up a completely new type of weapon. And in the end, they decided to end the research while still keeping close tabs on Bull’s efforts to sell his technology to other powers, especially governments in the Middle East.
Through the 1980s, Gerald Bull, whom I had met at a reception honoring General Trudeau in 1986, Entered into negotiations with the Israelis as well as with the Iraqis and perhaps even the Iranians. The decade long war between Saddam Hussein and Iran proved a fertile sales territory for weapons merchants in general, and particularly for Gerald Bull, who was courted by both sides. In the end, he cut his deal with the Iranians, testing experimental versions of a supergun and planning to build the monster weapon before the British intervened and seized shipments of gun barrel units before they were shipped out of the country. By this time, Dr. Bull may have become a liability to the Iraqis, as well as to the Israelis and to the United States as well, and was shot to death outside his apartment in Belgium before the outbreak of the Gulf War.
Like Jules Verne’s character Barbicane in From the Earth to the Moon, Bull had a vision of the potential of a long range artillery piece. Unlike Barbicane, he came very close to proving it a practical way of launching vehicles into space. The murder of Gerald Bull has never been solved, and whatever secrets he still possessed about the assembly of a gun to launch vehicles into space probably died with him in the hallway outside his apartment.
List of Omissions
As I worked through the stack of projects on my desk during the spring months of 1962, I found I was devoting more of my time to the Roswell file and less to some of the other projects under development. It was apparent to me that the treasure trove we’d retrieved from Roswell was beginning to pay off in ways that not even I thought would happen. There were so many army research projects under way, I told my boss, that were not foundering, but sputtering along that could benefit from something similar found in the Roswell wreckage it we could find the match between the two.
Night vision, lasers, and fiber-optic communication were obvious, I said to him, but I was sure there were other areas we could find just by looking at the problems posed by what we discovered from Roswell, not just retrieved from the wreckage.
“Make it specific, Phil, “ the general asked. “What do you mean?”
“If you just look at what we didn’t find at the crash site, “ I said. “That goes a long way to explaining the differences between what we are and what they are. It also shows us what we need to develop if we’re going to prepare for long periods of travel in space. “
“Can you make me a list?” the general asked. “There are a lot of ongoing research contracts out there that could benefit from a list of things we’d have to concern ourselves with if we’re going to be planning for space travel in the next fifty years. “
By the time our conversation was finished, General Trudeau had asked me to prepare not only a list of what were called the “omissions” at Roswell but a very brief report detailing the areas where I thought development needed to take place. So I assembled all the reports and information in the Roswell file and began looking for what was missing that I might expect to find at a space traveler’s crash site.
There was no mention in any of the reports of any food source or nutrient, and no one discovered any food preparation units or stored food on board the spacecraft, nor were there any refrigeration units for food preservation. There was no water on the ship either for drinking, washing, or flushing of waste, nor were there any waste or garbage disposal facilities. The Roswell field reports said that the retrieval team found something they thought was a first aid kit because it contained material that a doctor said was for bandaging purposes, but there were no medical facilities nor any medications. And finally, the army retrieval team said there were no rest facilities at all on board the ship; nothing that could be construed as a bunk or a bed.
From this available data the army assumed that this UFO was a reconnaissance craft and could quickly return to a larger or mothership where all of the missing items might be found. The other explanation Dr. Hermann Oberth came up with was that this was a time dimensional travel ship that didn’t traverse large distances in space. Rather, it “jumped” from one time space to another or from one dimension to another and instantly returned to its point of origin. But this was just Dr. Oberth’s speculation, and he would usually discount any of it the moment he believed I was taking it as fact.
I believed, however, that the EBEs didn’t require food or facilities for waste disposal because they were fabricated beings, just like robots or androids, who had been created specifically for space travel and the performance of specific tasks on the planets they visited. Just like our lunar rover in the 1970s, which was a robot, so these creatures had been programmed with specific tasks to perform and carried them out. Perhaps their programming could be updated or altered from a remote source, but they weren’t life forms that required ongoing sustenance. They were the perfect creatures for long voyages through space and for visiting other planets. Human beings, however, weren’t robots and did require sustenance. Therefore, it would be necessary to provide for long term sustenance and waste disposal needs if humans were going to travel long distances in space.
Other scientists from our R&D ad hoc brain trust suggested that, indeed, this could have only been a scout ship that either got caught in our tracking radars from the 509th or from Alamogordo or was hit by lightning in the fierce electrical storm that night. They believed that the ship was navigated by an electromagnetic propulsion system. Other scientists suggested that even before we could generate the necessary power to drive such a propulsion system, we would have to have developed some form of a nuclear powered ion drive first. As for the absence of food, scientists suggested that this would pose a major drawback for long term human space exploration. Thus, in my quick and dirty proposal for General Trudeau, I suggested that the army had to complete the development of at least two items that I knew had been in the R&D system for at least ten years: a food supply that could never spoil and didn’t require refrigeration and an atomic drive that could be assembled in space out of components as the power plant for an interplanetary space craft.
Irradiated Foods
The general read my notes a few days later, and seemed impressed. He knew from the memo I had left him the night before that I’d be ready to talk about my omissions list the next day, but he didn’t say anything to me right away Instead, he picked up the phone, dialed a number, told someone at the other end that he’d be right over, then looked up at me.
“Go get your hat, “ he said. “Meet me on the helipad. We’ve been invited to lunch. “
Ten minutes later after the general’s helicopter had picked us up, we circled the Pentagon once and were flown over to the Quarter master Center.
An officer who shall remain anonymous met us at the helipad. He saluted as we got off the chopper. “Thank you for joining us. “
He took us inside to a downstairs store room where he showed off shelves and shelves of all types of meat, fruit, and vegetables.
“Look at this pork, “ he said. “It’s been stored here unrefrigerated for months and it’s completely free of trichina worm. “ He held up a couple of loose eggs and a chicken breast. “Eggs, unrefrigerated, and chicken. Completely free of bacterium salmonella. And it’s the same for the seafood. “
He escorted us along the shelves of food and, almost like a salesman, presented the virtues of each of the items. The food was wrapped, but not vacuum sealed, in a clear cellophane to keep it free from dust and surface dirt, but it was not preserved in any manner that I could determine.
“Free of fungus or any spores, “ he said about the vegetables. “No mold or any insect infestations in the fruit, “ he said.
“And the milk, it’s been here on the shelf for over two years and it’s not even slightly sour. We’ve taken great steps to preserve food completely without salting, smoking, refrigeration, freezing, or even canning. “
“Does this answer one of your questions, Colonel?” General Trudeau asked as we looked at the stocks of food that seemed completely resistant to spoilage.
The commanding general of the Quartermaster Center joined us in the stockroom.
Pick your lunch, gentlemen,“ he said and chose a thick steak for himself. “I’m going to have this and, if you don’t mind, I’ll take the liberty of ordering up the same thing for you, General Trudeau, and you, too, Colonel. How about some potatoes and maybe some strawberries for dessert. All fresh, delicious, and harmless. “
Then he paused. “And completely bombarded with what some people would call lethal doses of radiation to destroy any bacteria or infestation. “
We were escorted upstairs to the commandant’s dining room, where we were joined by a number of other officers and civilian research and food technology experts who described the process of ionizing radiation to destroy the harmful bacteria while preserving the food without canning or smoking. The irradiation process was so complete that if the food were maintained in an antiseptic or dust free atmosphere, it wouldn’t be attacked and would remain uncontaminated. However, because the atmosphere was as dirty as any other atmosphere inside any other building, the food was wrapped in cellophane. Other foods were packaged in a clear plastic wrap and were displayed for visitors like us just as if they were on supermarket shelves.
“We first wanted to determine whether the whole concept of irradiated food was safe, “ one of the engineers explained. “So our first studies were made with food which was irradiated and then stored in the frozen area. We fed these foods to rats and noticed no harmful effects. Then we did the same thing except this time we increased the radiation to six mega rads and then froze the food. Again, no harmful effects. “
His presentation continued while we ate, accompanied by charts that showed how the sterilization rate was increased to try to find any harmful effects on rats. Then they tested the irradiated and then frozen food on human volunteers.
“But wait, “ I asked. “I still don’t understand why you irradiated the food and then froze it. “
The engineer was waiting for this question because he had his answer already prepared. He acted like he’d been asked it many times before.
“Because,“ he said, “we were testing only for harmful effects from the radiation, not for spoilage, not for taste, not even for harmful effects from the food itself even though we knew it had been sterilized and was tested completely free from bacteria when it was defrosted. What we needed to prove in field trials was the harmlessness to animals and humans of the irradiation process. “
Then he described the field trials to prove that irradiation preserved food stored at room temperature.
“We selected high spoilage foods, “ he said. “Like the meats, chicken, and especially the seafood. We also made composite foods like stews which we fed to rats and dogs along with straight meat and then straight tuna. We first irradiated a sample at three mega rads then another sample at six mega rads and tested the animals over a period of six months to see whether radiation became concentrated in any of their organs or bones.“ He paused, letting the dramatic effect of what he was going to say sink in while we were sinking our teeth into the irradiated foods that resulted from the years of experimentation throughout the 1950s.
“No toxicological effects whatsoever. And we were very thorough before we tested these foods on human volunteers. “
“What’s next?” I asked.
“We’re setting taste trials of favorite foods at Fort Lee, Virginia, to see how troops in the field respond to this. We think that before the end of the decade we’ll have a variety of Meals Ready to Eat for troops in the field who have no benefit of cooking facilities or refrigeration. “
General Trudeau looked across the table at me and I nodded. This was perfectly good food that was right up to any quality you’d care to measure.
“Gentlemen, “ General Trudeau said as he stood. As a three star general, he was the highest ranking officer in the room, and when he spoke everyone was silent. “My assistant believes that your work is of utmost importance to the U.S. Army, our nation, and the world, and will contribute to our travel in space. I am of the very same opinion. We are most impressed with your test results and want to help you expand your operation and speed up the testing process. The army needs what you’ve developed. In the next two weeks, submit to me your supplementary budget to expand your operation and I want it also included into next year’s budget. “
Then he turned to me, nodded, and we thanked the commanding general for lunch and walked out to General Trudeau’s helicopter.
“How about that, Phil?” he asked. “I think we checked off some of the items on your list right on the spot. “
The pilot helped the general into his seat and I got around on the other side.
“So what do you think?” he asked again.
“I think if we move any faster we’ll have the EBEs down here asking for some of our irradiated food, “ I said.
General Trudeau laughed as we whisked off the helipad and headed back for the short jump to the Pentagon.
“Now you have to get to work on finding out what you can about your atomic propulsion system. If NASA ever gets it into its mind to push ahead with building its space station, I’d like the military to have a power source that can keep us up there for a while. If we can get a surveillance window on our visitors, I want it sooner rather than later. “
And before the week was out, I was at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, again looking at the developments the army had made in the development of portable nuclear reactors.
Portable Atomics
A challenge posed to us directly by the army’s retrieval of the Roswell craft and our further discovery that the craft was not propelled by a conventional engine - either propeller, jet, or rocket - pressed upon us the critical realization that if we were to engage these extraterrestrial creatures in space we would need a propulsion system that gave us a capability for long distance travel similar to theirs. But we had no such system. The closest form of energy we had that did not rely on a constant supply of fuel was atomic power in a controlled, sustained reaction, and even that was far away from development. However, at the close of the war the army had operational control over atomic weapons because, under Gen. Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project, the army had established the bureaucracy that developed and deployed the atomic bomb.
So for army engineers, struggling to find out how the Roswell spacecraft was powered, atomic power was the easiest form of propulsion to seize upon, in part because it was the most immediate. However, by 1947, a struggle was already breaking out within the Truman administration over who would control nuclear power, a civilian commission or the military. As the nation was making the transition from wartime to peace time, the specter of a General Groves secretly dictating how and in what manifestation atomic power would be used frightened Truman’s advisers.
So in the end, President Truman made the decision to turn control of the nation’s nuclear program over to a civilian commission. Thus, by 1947, the army was getting out of running the nuclear power business, but that didn’t mean that research into the military applications of nuclear power plants stopped. We needed to develop nuclear reactors, not only to manufacture nuclear power propulsion systems for naval vessels and for on site installation of power generating stations, but to experiment with ways nuclear power could be made portable in space by assembling systems in orbit from component parts.
This would enable us to maintain long term outposts in space and even to power interplanetary vessels that could serve as a defensive force against any extraterrestrial hostile forces. If this sounds like science fiction, remember, it was 1947, and the nation had barely gotten out of World War II before the Cold War had begun. War, not peace, was on the mind of the military officers who were in charge of the Roswell retrieval and analysis of the wreckage.
The army, I discovered from the “Army Atomic Reactors” reports at Fort Belvoir, not only had a very sophisticated portable reactor program under way, but had already built one in cooperation with the air force for installation at the Sundance Radar Station six miles out of Sundance, Wyoming, early in 1962. This was a highly sophisticated piece of power generating apparatus that provided steam heat to the radar station, electrical power for the base, and a very precisely controlled separate power supply for the delicately calibrated radar equipment. But this wasn’t the first portable power plant, as most people thought it was.
The first portable nuclear reactor plant anywhere was for a research facility in Greenland, under the Arctic ice cap, designed for Camp Century, an Army Corps of Engineers project nine hundred miles from the North Pole. Ostensibly operated by the Army Polar Research and Development Center conducting experiments in the Arctic winter, Camp Century was also a vital observation post in an early warning system monitoring any Soviet activity at or near the North Pole and any activity related to UFO sightings or landings.
During the years when I was at the White House, the UFO working group had consistently pushed President Eisenhower to establish a string of formal listening posts - electronic pickets staffed by army and air force observers at the most remote parts of the planet - to report on any UFO activity. General Twining’s group had argued that if the EBEs had any plans to establish semipermanent Earth bases, it wouldn’t be in a populated area or an area where our military forces could monitor. It would be at the poles, in the middle of the most desolate surroundings they could find, or even underneath the ocean.
The polar caps seemed like the most obvious choices because during the 1950s we had no surveillance satellites that could spot alien activity from orbit, nor did we have a permanent presence at the two poles. It was thought that we wouldn’t be able to put any sophisticated devices at the poles, either, because doing so would require more power than we could transport. However, the army’s Nuclear Power Program, developed in the1950s at Fort Belvoir, provided us with the ability to install a nuclear powered base anywhere on the planet.
In 1958, work was started on the Camp Century power plant, which was to be constructed beneath the ice in Greenland. Initially this was supposed to be top secret because we didn’t want the Soviets to know what we were up to. Ultimately, however, the high security classification proved too unwieldy for the army because too many outside contractors were involved and the logistics, transportation to Thule, Greenland, then installation on skids beneath the ice pack created a cover story nightmare. So Army Intelligence decided to drop the security classification entirely and treat the entire plan as a scientific information gathering expedition by its polar research group.
Just like the whole camouflage operation that had protected the existence of the working group, Camp Century provided the perfect cover for testing out a procedure for constructing a prefabricated, prepackaged nuclear reactor under arduous conditions and flying it to its site for final assembly. It also provided the army with a means of testing the performance of the reactor and how it could be maintained at an utterly desolate location in the harshest climate on the planet.
The plant was the first of its kind. It had a completely modular construction that had separately packaged components for air coolers, heat exchangers, switch gear, and the turbine generator. The power plant also had a mechanism that used the recycled steam to melt the ice cap surface to provide the camp’s water supply. The entire construction was completed in only seventy seven days, and the camp remained in operation from October 1960 to August 1963, when the research mission completed its work. The entire operation was successfully taken apart and placed in storage in 1964, and the site of Camp Century was completely restored to its natural state.
I received reports about the camp’s operation during the later months of 1962 after General Trudeau had asked me about the feasibility of the army’s portable atomics program as a way to instigate research into a launchable atomics program for generating power in orbit. I was so enthusiastic about the success of our portable atomics and the way they provided the research platform for the subsequent development of mobile atomics that I urged the general to provide as much funding as R&D could to enable the Fort Belvoir Army Nuclear Power Program to construct and test as many mobile and portable power plants as possible.
Each power plant gave us a kind of a beachhead into remote areas of the world where the EBEs might have wanted to establish a presence because they believed they could go about it undetected. They were a kind of platform. Once we had demonstrated the ability to protect remote areas of the earth, we’d be in a better position to establish a presence in space.
The atomics program, which was in part a direct outgrowth of the challenge posed to us from our analysis of the Roswell craft, ultimately helped us develop portable atomic power plants, which are now used to power Earth satellites as well as naval vessels. It showed us that we could have portable atomic generators and gave the army a longer reach than anybody might have thought. Ultimately, it allowed us to maintain surveillance and staff remote listening posts. It also provided the basis for research into launching nuclear power facilities into space to become the power plants of new generations of interplanetary vehicles. The portable atomics program allowed us to experiment with ways we would develop atomic drives for our own space exploration vehicles, which, we believed, would enable us to establish military bases on the moon as well as on the planets near us in the solar system.
And from our successes with atomics, we turned our attention to the development of the weapons we could mount on surveillance satellites in orbit, weapons we developed directly from what we found in the flying saucer at Roswell.
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CHAPTER 16 “Tesla’s Death Ray” and the Accelerated Particle Beam Weapon
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