Part 5 of 5 : The Day after Roswell...“Tesla’s Death Ray” and the Accelerated Particle Beam Weapon ...Star Wars

The Day After Roswell

Col. Philip J. Corso 

With

William J. Birnes

CHAPTER 16 

“Tesla’s Death Ray” and the 

Accelerated Particle Beam Weapon 

Embedded in the army field reports and air materiel Command engineering evaluations analyzing the Roswell craft were descriptions of how the spacecraft might have utilized a form of energy known as “directed energy, “ powerful beams of excited electrons that could be precisely directed at any target. We didn’t know very much about directed energy back in 1947, or more precisely put, we didn’t know how much we knew because in reality we knew a lot. 

But the information that had been readily available since the 1930s was lying sequestered at a public storage facility, under the authority of the federal government, over on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the notes of the mysterious inventor Nikola Tesla, whose experiments and reputed discoveries have become the stuff of bizarre but exciting legend. 

The laser surgical cutting tool found in the Roswell wreckage was one form of directed energy beam device whose ability to fire rapidly and with precision revealed that the extraterrestrials had a potential in weaponry far superior to ours. However, if the craft had been brought down by lightning, itself a directed energy beam of one of the highest magnitudes, then it revealed their vulnerability to bolts of electrons. That stimulated the thinking of army scientists and researchers into the analysis of the potential of a directed energy beam weapon. 

Today, fifty years after the crash of the spacecraft at Roswell, these weapons are far more than the device that the Emperor Ming aimed at Earth in the Flash Gordon serials; they are a reality that can be launched on a guided missile, separated from a booster, aimed by an internal computer guidance system at any incoming device, whether an ICBM warhead or a space vehicle, and fired with devastating effect. 

This weapon has been a true Army R&D success story. 

“The possibilities for benefits to the military are enormous, “ I wrote to General Trudeau in my 1962 analysis of the potential for directed energy weapons. “Although, as we have seen, even the most rudimentary of directed energy products, the microwave oven, has more than repaid the initial research and development overhead through consumer product sales, it is the military that will see the greatest benefits from directed energy and is already seeing the potential from it in the applications that are being projected for the laser which is only two years old. “ 

The concept of a weapon that relied on a directed energy beam, whatever the nature of that beam was, was not a completely new concept to the military community, although its origins were totally shrouded in secrecy. The first test of a directed energy weapon, a particle beam accelerator code named Seesaw whose beam was to be aimed at incoming guided missiles, was first conducted in 1958, two years before the successful demonstration of the laser, by the Advanced Research Projects Agency. Although the test took place the year that I was in Red Canyon, New Mexico, I had known about the project first when I was on the National Security Council at the White House and then again after the successful experiments against a simulated target. 

In theory, the particle beam weapon looked like it would work, assuming the technological development of power generators, electrical storage apparatus, and the computer software to aim and fire the weapon. We already had a rough model for the particle beam weapon in nature: the lightning bolt, a pure, intense beam of electrons firing between opposite poles and destroying or incapacitating anything it hit that was not grounded. Scientists from Benjamin Franklin to Nikola Tesla have tried to chain the force of lightning as a power source.

Now the Advanced Research Projects Agency was experimenting with the theory to apply it to a new and deadly weapon. If they could build the hardware and write the software, the developers at ARPA decided they would be able to generate an intense beam of either electrons or neutral hydrogen atoms, aim it at an incoming target, and fire the particle beam impulses that would travel near the speed of light and excite the atoms in the target until they literally blew apart. Whatever didn’t blow up would be destroyed electronically and rendered useless. 

Officially, the project would remain secret until funding could be acquired and the technological development of the components moved far enough along to allow us to build working prototypes. The great fear of the developers at ARPA was that the Soviets, realizing what we were trying to construct, would maximize their effort to build one before we did, rendering our newly developed Atlas ICBM obsolete before it even got to the launching pad. 

The Advanced Research Projects Agency was a highly secretive network of defense scientists, members of the industrial defense contractor R&D community, and university researchers operating either under the formula of a government grant or the tacit acknowledgment of the Defense Department that their research would come under government control at some point. ARPA was founded in 1958, in part, I believed, because up to then Army R&D had been a disorganized department barely able to manage the core research necessary to keep us technologically superior to our enemies. This created a gap in research that the Advanced Research Projects Agency was created to fill. 

Working on military defense oriented research, many times far in advance of any concrete proposals for the development of a weapons system or a product, ARPA often acted as a forward skirmish line for the development of military weapons or simply facilitated the basic scholarship necessary for the more concrete items to be developed. However, too many times it was in conflict with the military because ARPA had its own separate agenda, especially after General Trudeau had reorganized the entire military R&D apparatus and refocused it so that it ran like a machine. 

In 1969, during the era of large main frame computers, under a contract to develop a network of networks linking universities, defense contractors, and the military, the ARPANET was born. And in the 1970s after the Advanced Research Projects Agency changed its name to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, it instituted a project to create an “internetting” of all the existing computers on its system, instituting the software protocols that would link networks running on different operating systems. 

By 1974, the Transmitting Control Protocol/Internet Protocol was born and the ARPANET became the Internet. In the late 1980s, the European laboratory for Particle Physics launched a hypertext language, originally conceived of by Vannevar Bush, as a search mechanism on the Internet and by 1990 married it to a graphics user Interface that combined hypertext and graphics. The World Wide Web was born. 

In 1958, when it was first developing the concepts behind the particle beam weapon, ARPA was only a year old. It was formed in 1957, when I was still at the White House, in response to the Soviet Union’s successful launch of Sputnik because the government realized that the United States needed an independent research organization to marshal the resources of the academic, scientific, and industrial communities. ARPA was formed to fund basic research, and even though it didn’t have a military orientation at the outset, it quickly became associated with military projects because that was where the government saw the greatest need for basic research into scientific and technical areas. 

There was another reason for the formation of ARPA that, at least in theory, had a lot to do with the perceived threats facing the United States and the need for basic research to respond to them. ARPA, because it was a network deep inside the government and ultimately the Department of Defense, could  engage in research ostensibly far afield from the immediate needs of the military services whose research and development organizations were part of the command structure. ARPA wasn’t. Although it reported to its own higher ups in the Defense Department and at the White House, it was not part of a command structure and didn’t have to confine itself to the agendas of the heads of the various special military corps. 

ARPA didn’t just come into existence out of nowhere. Its ancestor, the National Research Council, had been formed under President Wilson to organize and marshal scientific research for defense purposes and as a rival to the Naval Consulting Board, which was run by Thomas Edison, who had gone on record as saying that the country didn’t need a Naval Consulting Board at all. He invited scientists he called a bunch of “perfessers” down to his laboratory in New Jersey to walk around the “scrap heap” to see how real inventions were created. 

University researchers and corporate heads of research and development were naturally appalled at what Edison thought about government sponsored research for the war effort and rallied around the NRC. If there were government grants to be handed our for basic defense research, the scientists who worked for corporations, who needed help in basic research no matter what its primary purpose was, were anxious to become associated with this new organization. 

University researchers argued, through the prestigious National Academy of Sciences, that the National Research Council should be an “arsenal of science” to protect the United States through the application of its great brain trust in academia and industrial contractors to issues of national defense through technology. President Wilson agreed, and the NRC was born. One of the first tasks given to the National Research Council was the development of a submarine defense. Aircraft had not yet made a decisive appearance on the battlefield at the outset of World War I, but the German U-boats were ravaging the Atlantic fleets. 

The navy was desperately searching for a way to detect submarines, and although Nikola Tesla had submitted his plans for an energy beam detector that would send low frequency waves through the water to reflect off any hidden objects, the National Research Council thought the idea too esoteric and looked for a more conventional technology. Tesla’s low energy wave didn’t work well in water anyway, but years later Tesla’s description of his invention was the basis for one of the most important devices to come out of World War II, “radar. “ 

The National Research Council had established a pattern of government support for basic research when it had an aspect to it that could be developed for military purposes. It was the first time that research scientists from the private sector, corporations, academicians, bureaucrats, and the military were brought together to solve mutual problems. Therefore, the Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, son of ARPA, were natural outgrowths of an ongoing government relationship. 

The problem with ARPA was that it was political and had its own agenda. It was not uncommon for conflicts to arise between the Office of the Chief of Research and Development, General Trudeau, who was operating within the military command structure, and ARPA over money and the policy issues that arose between them. The staffs at ARPA and in the Pentagon crossed swords on a number of occasions, and more than once ARPA tried to lay the blame for its own shortcomings and mistakes on the military. During the early years of the Vietnam War, for example, ARPA tried to blame General Trudeau for mistakes in the deployment of Agent Orange. 

But General Trudeau and R&D weren’t responsible at all for Agent Orange. It was ARPA’s baby from the start. But when the field reports started coming in on the casualties Agent Orange was causing among our own troops and ARPA said that it would testify before Congress that General Trudeau was responsible, I hit the ceiling. I let the ARPA staff people know that, protocol be damned, I would storm into the congressional committees on military and veterans affairs and raise the roof of the Capitol Building until everyone knew that ARPA was trying to duck responsibility for negligence in the deployment of a bad chemical. ARPA backed down, but the bad blood between us remained. 

When the concept of an ARPA was first discussed at the White House, I saw the potential as well as the problem, but I also knew that a secret agenda driving everything was the policy of the UFO working group. ARPA was an asset to them because they could network through the university community and find out who had any information about UFOs that they weren’t disclosing to the military, what technology was being developed that had any relation to the problem of UFOs or EBEs, and who in the academic or scientific community were coming up with theories about the existence or intentions of EBEs. In other words, in addition to being a conduit for research and research grants that fit certain government/military profiles, ARPA was another intelligence gathering agency, but dedicated to the academic and scientific communities. If information was out there, ARPA was going to find it and pay for its development. 

Therefore, when the urgency of coming up with a technological challenge to the Soviet space program arose in 1957, it was no surprise to anyone who understood the requirements of a space defense that it would be an organization like ARPA that would be given the mandate to develop that military response. And given the challenge posed by the Soviet satellite program, a particle beam weapon was the logical direction such a response would take. 

The United States had to develop a weapon that theoretically could knock out the Soviet satellites or blind them so they couldn’t take any surveillance photos. They had to gather resources in the academic research community to see whether a talent pool existed for the development of such a weapon. At the same time they didn’t want to divert military research into exotic weapons while the military was still trying to get its own satellites into orbit. 

But rather than putting the plan directly into the hands of the military R&D organizations, they followed a course probably initially laid out for them by the protocols of the UFO working group and went outside the formal military to an ad hoc research organization that was not supposed to be involved in direct military research. When I was at the White House, I could see the hand of the CIA behind this, which immediately sent up a red flag for me because I knew that the government was only creating another budget and research grant bureaucracy the CIA would ultimately control. 

It was also no surprise that the first type of weapon whose mission was directed against space vehicles and vehicles reentering Earth’s atmosphere from space was a directed energy weapon, an accelerated particle beam, because even though it may sound like something out of a science fiction movie, it had a history that stretched back all the way to the early twentieth century. It’s original creator was Nikola Tesla, some of whose papers were still in my own files when I took over the Foreign Technology desk in 1961. 

Tesla was theorizing about directed energy beams, including particle beam weapons, even before the beginning of the twentieth century. His now famous “death ray” was essentially a version of a particle beam weapon that he believed would bring peace to the entire world because it could destroy entire cities anywhere in the world, instantly, and render squadrons of airplanes, naval fleets, and even entire armies completely useless. But even before his announcement of his death ray, Tesla was making news and a fortune through his experiments with the wireless transmission of electricity and his directed beam of electrons, which would strip the electrons of specimen material inside a light globe. 

In the 1890s, Tesla was experimenting with a device that would become the twentieth-century cyclotron, another device that would become television, and he formulated the ideas for what today are the worldwide television and radio networks. Tesla, his background and his history, are important to any history of twentieth century science and weapons because his thinking was well advanced beyond that of any scientist of his day, including Thomas Edison, and the political implications of what Tesla discovered mixed in with the furious attempts to manage the government cover up about UFOs and their technological potential in the days and months after the Roswell crash. 

Nikola Tesla, the son of a Serbian Orthodox minister, came to the United States from Paris in 1884 to meet and work for the acknowledged genius of his day, Thomas Edison. Although the two men would eventually clash like titans over the advantages of alternating current over direct current, Tesla did manage to get a job at the Edison offices and laboratory on what is now West Broadway, south of West Houston Street in New York City. 

The two men were also very different in the way they approached their inventions. Edison was a tinkerer who would come up with an idea, experiment, build and rebuild, and experiment again until it worked. Often, as in the case of his incandescent bulb, he would go through thousands of experiments, discarding each one after it failed, until he finally succeeded. 

This was Edison’s example of initial inspiration and then lots of perspiration until the thing worked and he believed he’d gotten it right. Tesla, on the other hand, laid the entire project out in his brain, visualizing it in its completeness, and then assembled it from the vision in his mind. It was unnerving to Edison, who often commented to his former assistant Charles Batchelor that Tesla’s ability to build something from what amounted to a set of schematics in his own mind was unnatural. Tesla was also a fastidious, formally trained academician who loved to discuss theory while Edison was mostly a self taught workbench inventor who often worked and slept in the same clothes for days. 

It is ironic that the rivalry between the two men who, by the time each of them died, had patented inventions upon which most of modern technological industry is built, spawned two great competing companies - General Electric and Westinghouse - whose own rivalries extend to the present day. The rivalry between  Edison and Tesla helped define the nature of the electrical power industry in the United States, the electrical appliance and entertainment industries, and sustained itself from the 1890s through the 1930s when Edison finally died. Tesla himself died in New York in 1943. 

Tesla was an acknowledged genius, a prodigy whose predictions and patents marked him to be a man way ahead of his time. Even before Czech playwright Karel Capek coined the word “robot” in his play R.U.R. and American science fiction writer Isaac Asimov invented the term “robotics” in his book of short stories I Robot, Nikola Tesla had created the first “automaton” or mechanical soldier and a robotically controlled model boat before the turn of the century. Yet Tesla, a tall, dark, brooding, but well-educated and cultured Serbian, often times turned out to be his own worst enemy. 

He became a millionaire when he was only thirty-two but ran through enormous sums of money put up by some of the great industrialists and financiers of his day, including George Westinghouse, J. Pierpont Morgan, A. Stanford White, and John Jacob Astor, only to die destitute and penniless in his room at the New Yorker Hotel. This was the man, however, whose ideas the scientists at ARPA turned to when faced not only with the threat of the first Soviet Sputnik orbiting the earth, but the even worse threat that the EBEs, seeing and hearing the Russian satellite, would be convinced that if colonization of the Earth was their goal, it was the Russians who would help them accomplish it. What was Tesla’s idea? 

Consistently, throughout the 1890s, Tesla wrote and lectured about his theory of the wireless transmission of electrical current. Like Marconi’s wireless radio, which revolutionized communication, Tesla’s wireless electrical power supply would revolutionize the growth and development of entire cities. Not just as an extrapolation of wireless power but as a theory in its own right, Tesla reported that he had experimented with a beam of electrical energy, directed without wires, that could excite the atoms in a substance to the point where the substance, even though it could resist heat in conventional ovens, would break down. Such a beam weapon, Tesla said, would revolutionize warfare. In theory at least, it was a very similar device, the laser cutting tool, that the Army retrieval team picked out of the scrub at the Roswell crash site. 

One of the astounding aspects about the life and career of Nikola Tesla isn’t just that he theorized about these projects, he actually experimented with them, many times succeeding in very intriguing ways, and then patented the important inventions that derived from his experiments. But his ideas were so radical for the time, so far ahead of anything his contemporaries were thinking, that they were dismissed as either the uncontrolled ravings of a mad scientist or so wildly impractical that they amounted to nothing. 

Yet, when you review the patents in his name, his descriptions of the systems he designed, and actual results of the public experiments or exhibitions he conducted, you find that even the most lunatic sounding ideas like his turn of the century plans for a vertical takeoff and landing bomber actually looked as though they should work. In some cases, like his atom smasher, they worked better and more efficiently than the modern equivalents of these machines when they first appeared. 

When I realized that at the turn of the century Tesla had actually demonstrated a model of a remotely piloted boat that could be controlled by radio from a distance and deliver torpedoes right into the heart of an enemy fleet, I was amazed that the navy hadn’t jumped on the idea in advance of World War I and even more amazed that we hadn’t ordered the design from Tesla in World War II when we knew the Germans were already experimenting with one. Yet today, we’re spending hundreds of millions of dollars to develop remotely piloted vehicle similar in concept to the one Tesla had designed almost a hundred years ago at less than a thousandth of today’s cost. 

And in 1915, Tesla had written the U.S. War Department that in addition to his remotely piloted boat, they should urgently consider his remotely piloted “aerial machines devoid of sustaining planes [wings], ailerons, propellers, and other eternal attachments, which will be capable of immense speeds, and are very likely to furnish powerful arguments for peace in the near future. Such a machine, sustained and propelled entirely by reaction [thrust rocket engines], can be controlled either mechanically or by wireless energy [radio controlled]. “ 

Tesla’s description of the remote controlled rocket powered guided missile, which was even more advanced than the German V2, is the forerunner of today’s modern ICBMs whose targeting information can be relayed to them after they’re in flight. As a tactical weapon, Tesla had described, over half a century earlier, the army’s remotely piloted TOW antitank missile that destroyed Saddam’s armored divisions in the Persian Gulf. Tesla’s experiments with particle beam generation and direction were well under way during the 1890s when he was invited to set up an experimental station that would prove that he could transmit electrical power using the earth’s atmosphere as the medium instead of a heavy cable. If power could be so directed, Tesla’s backers, who included industrialist George Westinghouse and financier J. P.Morgan, agreed, it would revolutionize the infant electrical power industry and make whoever controlled the source of power  rich beyond anyone’s imagination. Tesla believed he could control that power and, with about $60,000 from his backers, traveled to Colorado Springs, not coincidentally today’s home of the Air Force North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) and the United States Army’s Space Command, to build and demonstrate his power transmission station.

Tesla described his experiments in an article he wrote for the thirtieth anniversary edition of the Electrical World and Engineer in 1904. He said, 

“Not only was it practicable to send telegraphic messages any distances without wires, as I recognized long ago, but also able to impress upon the entire globe the faint modulations of the human voice, far more still, to transmit power, in unlimited amounts, to any terrestrial distance and almost without any loss. “ 

In Tesla’s vision, electrical transmission stations would circle the planet, storing and relaying power from station to station so as to provide electrical power to the entire planet without the use of above or below the ground power lines, feeder cables, and transmission lines. He also saw that a network of relay stations could receive and retransmit the world’s breaking news stories instantly around the globe to pocket receivers, “a cheap and simple device which might be carried in one’s pocket, “ which would record special messages sent to it. 

Tesla had described a modern microwave cellular telephone and remote pager system. He also said that with relay stations like this, “ the entire Earth will be converted into a huge brain, as it were capable of response in every one of its parts, “ in other words, an Internet. During his time, Tesla truly made history by showing that energy could be directed as a beam without wires. In 1899, it was rumored that Tesla was experimenting with a “death ray” in Colorado Springs. But Tesla never owned up to it, and in fact remained uncommunicative about any experiments he had conducted with rays even when English, German, Russian, and American scientists in the 1920s were applying for patents on the invention. In the 1930s, however, Tesla wrote in his monograph that he had made a new discovery that would make war obsolete because every nation would have the same power to destroy each other’s military weapons. It would require a large facility to generate the power, but such a facility would be able to stop entire armies and their machines as far away as two hundred miles in all directions. 

“It will, “ he wrote, “provide a wall of power offering an insuperable obstacle against any effective aggression. “ 

But it was not at all a death “ray,“ he said, because, as scientists working as recently as the 1970's realized, rays tend to diffuse over distance and something is necessary to maintain the intensity of the focus. 

Rather, he said, 

“My apparatus projects particles which may be relatively large or of microscopic dimensions, enabling us to convey to a small area at a great distance trillions of times more energy than is possible with rays of any kind. Many thousands of horse power can thus be transmitted by a stream thinner than a hair, so that nothing can resist. “ 

Although Tesla went on to describe how this beam will improve television transmission and the projection of images, he was really describing a directed, accelerated particle beam weapon that the folks at ARPA were struggling to develop over twenty-five years after Tesla first wrote about it and eleven years after the charred fragments of a directed-energy apparatus as well as the laser tool were discovered in the wreckage of the spacecraft at Roswell, written up by the engineers at the Air Materiel Command, and sequestered for years in my nut file. We were still trying to develop a workable beam when I was in the Pentagon in 1962 and only barely developed a working model in the Reagan administration as part of the Strategic Defense Initiative program. 

But for Tesla, his world in the 1930s rushed toward war. Writing J. P. Morgan about his vision of an H. G. Wells nightmare of the destruction of the civilized world through aerial bombardment, Tesla said that his particle beam weapon could shoot down airplanes in flight and so protect cities. He made proposals to the Russians to develop such a weapon because Stalin was afraid of an invasion from Japan. He also wrote to the British prime minister about the ability of his beam to protect London from attacks by the Germans. But no one thought his energy beam weapon practical, not even the Westinghouse Company, which, if they had advanced him the money to file for the patents they would probably have controlled, might have been able to develop the weapon before World War II had Tesla been able to complete it. 

As it was, Tesla’s death ray, his accelerated particle beam in which subatomic particles were excited by an energy field and directed toward a specific target at speeds close to the speed of light, was never developed during his lifetime. However, the mere hint that Tesla’s theories might have found their way to the Germans or the Russians so concerned the federal government, especially the FBI, that when Tesla died in January 1943, the FBI immediately seized all his papers, schematics, writings, and designs and turned them over to the Office of Alien Property, where they were officially sealed until released to the Yugoslavian ambassador, who was a representative of Tesla’s estate. 

They remained in storage in Manhattan until the early 1950s, when they were returned to Yugoslavia. Yet even after their return, the Yugoslavian government believed that the FBI had rifled through Tesla’s papers when they were in storage and had micro filmed them or photographed them. J. Edgar Hoover denied this, but photostatic copies of photographs of Tesla’s papers were in the possession of the Army R&D’s Foreign Technology desk when I took over in 1961. How did they get there? 

Tesla’s property was officially seized by the U.S. government two days after his death. Even though the FBI knew that Tesla had publicly said he’d perfected his death ray - there was no independent verification of this - no steps had been taken by the government to prevent him from transferring his plans for the death ray to a foreign powers. Vice President Henry Wallace, however, told the FBI that the government had a critical interest in whatever papers Tesla had and instructed the FBI to seize them any way they could. 

That was why the FBI directed the Office of Alien Property to enter Tesla’s hotel room on January 9, 1943, and take possession. Tesla’s other papers that were already in a storage warehouse were seized by the OAP as well. 

Over the next couple of weeks in January 1943, after a flurry of diplomatic activity between the Yugoslavian embassy and J. Edgar Hoover’s office, the FBI turned the entire matter over to the Office of Alien Property, which also wanted to get out from under the diplomatic tug of war between Belgrade and the State Department. The OAP, still reacting to the vice president’s instructions that papers that could give aid to the enemy could not leave the country, contacted the chairman of what would become the Office of R&D, the National Defense Research Committee of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Dr. John Trump. Dr. Trump examined the papers, determined that not much of them were useful, but decided to make photocopies of a number of papers Tesla wrote during the years preceding his death. 

Trump also wrote abstracts of those papers, which included an undated monograph by Nikola Tesla entitled “New Art of Projecting Concentrated Non-Dispersive Energy through Natural Media, “ Tesla’s description of how he would generate and direct a high energy beam of electrons at a target. Though dismissed by Trump as unworkable, the paper nevertheless described Tesla’s latest thinking about a directed energy weapon, the accelerated particle beam device. With the OAP’s making photographs and abstracts of Tesla’s papers, the entire Tesla property remained in storage until it was sent back to Belgrade in the 1950s. That should have put an end to the matter. However, in 1945, just after the war ended, the Air Technical Service Command at Wright Field outside of Dayton, Ohio, sought copies of the Tesla papers from the Office of Alien Property in Washington and sent a military courier to take possession of them and bring them back to Wright. Although there was some correspondence between the OAP and the Air Technical Service Command over the next two years regarding the disposition of the papers, at least one of Gen. Nathan Twining’s officers at the Air Materiel Command contacted the Office of Alien Property in November 1947 to tell them that the AMC at Wright Field had possession of the Tesla papers and would maintain possession of them at least until after January 1, 1948. Thereafter, the papers, including Tesla’s own monograph on his accelerated particle beam weapon, seem to have completely disappeared - until they appeared in my OCRD files in 1961. But that was only one of the copies. 

At least one other copy of Tesla’s monograph had remained in the possession of the working group under General Twining and had made its way to the Advanced Research Projects Agency in Washington over the course of the next ten years. It was pulled out when the working group realized that upon the launch of Sputnik, the United States had absolutely no defense against war in space being initiated by the Russians, nor against the EBEs. We had one vital clue, however, about the only possible process that could interfere with the electromagnetic field drive we suspected the aliens were using: a directed particle energy beam weapon that could disrupt the electromagnetic wave formation around the spacecraft and penetrate the anti-gravity field. And we didn’t even have to microwave the spacecraft by exciting the molecules in the composite material. 

Because the accelerated particle weapon carried with it a powerful electromagnetic pulse, the effect of this EMP - the same effect that EMPs have on any electrical equipment - was to disrupt the anti-gravity gravity field by destroying the integrity of the electromagnetic wave of the spacecraft. In this way, without exploding  the spacecraft, the particle beam could force it to crash by destroying its ability to counter gravity. In its role as a more conventional weapon against incoming warheads or enemy satellites, besides destroying any electronics within the weapon through its electromagnetic pulse, the particle beam excites the atoms in the target, causes them to disperse, and the target explodes. In this way the particle beam has a dual destructive capability. 

Tesla understood that the particle beam weapon was just like a bolt of lightning, with very much the same destructive power only much more controlled. A lightning bolt is a massive beam of electrons. Scientists have theorized that you can achieve the same destructive force with a beam of protons. Still other scientists have argued that because electrons carry a negative charge and protons a positive charge, they are vulnerable to distortion within the earth’s magnetic field because the beam will either be attracted to the opposite charge or repelled by the same charge. In addition, a beam of like particles will contain a natural dispersive force because the like charges in the beam will repel each other. 

Entire hydrogen atoms are electrically neutral, however, and make a workable beam for any weapon designed to be used outside of the earth’s atmosphere because neutral beams can be directed over the very long distances that the beam from a space weapon will have to travel. Also, a neutral beam doesn’t require the energy overhead to control dispersion because within a neutral beam the particles are not charged and will not repel each other. 

Research and experiments on prototype models of a particle beam weapon conducted after 1980 defined two basic types of weapons : those that would be used exclusively in space, or exo-atmospheric weapons, and those that would be deployed on Earth against targets like incoming missile warheads. These are called endo-atmospheric weapons. Each has enough different characteristics to make them separate weapons, but the similarities of a particle beam weapon are common to both types. 

For example, as I began work on the development of basic research into particle beam weapons, my scientists told me that the weapon has to have six basic characteristics that allow it to kill the target. 

• First, the beam must travel at such a high velocity - near the speed of light - that targets cannot evade it. Even UFOs travel slower than the speed of light so that in a chase, the particle beam will always win. At the same time, the faster the beam travels, the shorter the burst you have to have in order for it to disrupt the target. 

• Second, the beam has to stay on the target long enough for it to do its damage. We estimated that if we were bringing down an incoming enemy warhead, a powerful beam would disrupt the warhead’s ability to detonate almost immediately and destroy it within a few seconds. In space, where distances are greater, the beam would have to stay on the target for a longer period of time, but it, too, would disrupt the wave propagation of the spacecraft after a very short interval. Even if it didn’t destroy the spacecraft, it would certainly render it incapable of carrying out any offensive mission. 

• Third, you have to be able to aim the beam immediately for it to have any effectiveness, especially if you’re targeting an incoming multiple reentry warhead vehicle such as the type deployed by the Russians and us. Unless you took out the bus, the vehicle that carries and aims the separate warheads while still in orbit, you’d have to fire the beam at each of the separate vehicles very quickly in succession after they’ve split up in orbit and begun their separate reentry trajectories. Thus, you’d have to aim and fire, aim and fire, aim and fire, all within a matter of seconds and making sure each target was destroyed. 

A single fifty-kiloton detonation over New York City, for example, would paralyze the entire American financial industry and immediately change life as we know it for a considerable period of time. A multiple reentry vehicle launching four 60-kiloton warheads from orbit on separate trajectories for detonation over Boston, New York, Washington, and Miami would cripple the United States for the ensuing five to seven years. And the Russians wouldn’t have to launch such a missile; it could easily come from China, North Korea, or even one of the Middle East fanatic terrorist countries like Libya with lots of oil money to spend. A particle beam weapon that could rapidly aim and fire to take out all four warheads either before or immediately upon reentry would effectively protect the United States and deter any country or terrorist group. 

• Fourth, the beam must penetrate the surface of the target in order for it to cause any real damage to the mechanism inside the warhead. Therefore, once the beam lands on the skin of the target, its excitation of the target’s molecules must take place not just on the outer hull or skin but deep inside the vehicle’s electronics. Therefore, even if it doesn’t explode, it may either break apart into larger  pieces or simply seize up and fall to earth as a dud. 

• Fifth, the particle beam must also be able to kill through its electromagnetic pulse, which will render the target’s electronics inoperable by either throwing off its navigation or destroying its detonation program and turning it into a dud. Used as a space weapon, the electromagnetic pulse will have a similar effect on enemy satellites, killing their control programs and rendering their computer guidance and orientation programs inoperable and blinding them completely. Upon enemy spaceships, the pulse would act as a purely defensive weapon that forces the ship to withdraw because its wave propagation device is rendered inoperable. 

• And sixth, a particle beam, unlike a laser, can operate in any weather and under any atmospheric conditions. Lasers bounce off clouds and fog and are weakened by anything less than perfectly clear weather. Particle beams penetrate and can operate under all conditions. 

As the scientists back in the 1950s evaluated what they would have to do to develop a working prototype, they understood the need for a huge power generator to accelerate the particles necessary to generate the beam, some form of target painting capability not only to acquire the target quickly and aim the weapon but to re aim in case the first shot is a miss. After I left the Pentagon, work continued on the theory underlying this type of weapon but not much was done to assemble the very expensive supporting technologies such as the atomic particle accelerators, targeting computers, high energy lasers, and a way to make the whole thing portable. 

Today, however, low energy versions of these directed energy weapons, partly the great-grandchildren of the Tesla beam and partly the descendant of the directed energy apparatus from the Roswell craft, are currently on the market for installation in police cars as a weapon against fleeing vehicles as a way to shut down a high speed chase before it even starts. The police officer in the pursuing vehicle aims his directed energy particle beam at the fleeing vehicle and turns it on. The electromagnetic pulse from the stream of electrons interferes with the target’s ignition system in the engine, and the car, deprived of a flow of electrical power to fire the cylinders, rolls to a stop. 

No more high speed chases on the 11:00 p.m. news but a more effective and safer way to catch fleeing suspects in their cars. This was a device developed by the military initially and, now deployed out of the Army’s Space Command as a missile mounted kinetic energy beam for destroying enemy satellites, turned over to the law enforcement community. But its roots go back to the vision of Nikola Tesla and to what scientists believed to be actual pieces of directed energy technology that we pulled out of the crashed space vehicle at Roswell, reports about which turned up in the nut file carted into my office in the Pentagon in 1961 from the Pentagon basement. 

For me the irony has always been in the confluence between the historic work and discoveries of Nikola Tesla and the technology we ascertained the extraterrestrials had developed from our evaluation of the Roswell wreckage. Tesla had experimented with wireless transmission of energy, and the extraterrestrials seemed to have employed a type of wireless transmission of energy for navigational and defensive purposes. Tesla wrote about the theories behind the distortion or manipulation of a gravitational field through the propagation of electromagnetic waves, and the extraterrestrials seemed to have employed just that kind of technology for a propulsion system. 

And Tesla’s descriptions of the theories behind the death ray he claimed to have perfected ultimately became the basis for the defensive weapons we deployed to challenge the hostile intrusions of our airspace by the extraterrestrials. What posed a threat to us at Roswell and what we eventually learned from Tesla’s writings became two confluent streams of scientific theory that eventually became the basis of the Strategic Defense Initiative, an anti ballistic missile and space vehicle weapon. 

While scientists from the 1950s through the 1970s argued over the cost of such a weapon and whether an anti ballistic missile weapon would destabilize the otherwise stable world of mutual nuclear deterrence, others who understood the real threat from outer space argued that there were enemies besides the Soviet Union who might someday acquire the technology to launch nuclear missiles against the United States. No one would dare say that we had to defend ourselves against flying saucers. In fact, it wasn’t until the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 that the particle beam weapon received another pulse of life as part of the hotly debated but ultimately successful strategy of the Strategic Defense Initiative, or “Star Wars.“ 

Amid the guffaws from some political quarters and the hand wringing from people who thought the thing simply cost too much money, President Reagan managed to prevail. Just the strategy of Star Wars itself and the limited deployment and testing of some of the components were enough to put the United States on a wartime footing with the EBEs and show the Soviets that we finally had a real nuclear deterrent. 

The full story behind the SDI and the way it changed the Cold War and forced the extraterrestrials to change the strategies for this planet is a story that’s never been told. 

But as spectacular and fantastic as it may sound, the story behind the limited deployment of the SDI is the story of how humanity won its first victory against a more powerful and technologically superior enemy who discovered, to whatever version of shock it experiences, that there was real trouble down on its farm. 

CHAPTER 17 

Star Wars 

Toward the spring of 1962, General Trudeau told me of his intention to retire. He was not going to be the commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, he’d been told. The old man had charged up too many hills during his years in the army, rifle in hand, and fired back in the face of the enemy. Whatever he felt inside him, and General Trudeau was only human and nothing more, he never showed fear. He was unrelenting in the execution of his orders, unyielding when people opposed him, and he never ducked away from a fight. 

Those who knew him either respected or feared him, but they never discounted him. A West Point graduate, he was born into a generation of U.S. military officers who had absolutely no doubts about what was right and what was wrong, and he marched through two wars and a series of commands, including the head of U.S. Army Intelligence, secure in the knowledge that he was on the right side. 

These were great qualities in a wartime commander, but, as both General Trudeau and I found out, they could be the very things that make you vulnerable in a Cold War army of politicians angling for power as they fought an enemy who could not be seen and whose presence was only indirectly felt. 

“There are no more Pork Chop Hills, Phil, “ General Trudeau told me after he had learned that General Maxwell Taylor with the support of the army leadership had passed him over for the South Vietnam command. It meant that this was his last command and that he would retire as lieutenant general. 

“And I’m afraid this is a war the army’s going to fight by means of a political process instead of on the killing field. “ 

“We would win it if we were going there, General, “ I said, fury welling up in my chest. “You and I know what we learned in Korea. “ 

Maybe the general could see my face getting flushed because he said, “No, we probably would have gotten court martialed because of what we learned in Korea. Just think what they would do to us if we were to win the war. “ 

Then he laughed in a way that told me he was looking forward to his retirement. “We would have made the Communists look bad. You know you can’t do that, Phil. “ 

Even as we were speaking that afternoon toward the end of the summer, another Soviet trawler was heaving to at the entrance to the port of Havana, awaiting instructions for the off loading of its cargo while another one of our surveillance planes was circling high overhead snapping away its photos of the tarpaulins coming off the ICBMs laid out on the ship’s afterdeck. I didn’t know it yet, but a sequence of events was unfolding that would swirl me into one of the biggest controversies of my life just as the chilling truth about the attempts to colonize our planet and the harvesting of human beings and animals that were still going on made itself all too clear. A showdown was coming. It was just over the horizon. No one could see it, but a handful of us knew that something was stirring the waters just below the surface. 

General Trudeau was saying his good-byes and started counting the days until he would change his uniform for civilian clothes and his office in the Pentagon for a corporate executive suite that befitted his experience as the commanding officer of some of our military’s most important divisions. He had been at the helm of R&D for six years after having commanded Army Intelligence for three years before that. 

Although the general didn’t explicitly comment much on the incredible facts we had uncovered in the Roswell file because he considered it just part of his job, he did joke about it from time to time with his old friend Senator Strom Thurmond. More than once, I would take the back door into his inner office only to find Senator Thurmond and General Trudeau sitting on his couch and looking me up and down as I walked in. 

“Art, “ Senator Thurmond would drawl, barely hiding his Cheshire cat smile, “what spooky things you think old Phil’s been into?” 

“You been inside your junk file,’ Phil?” the general would ask. 

“I would guess that you’re able to tell the future, Phil, “ Senator Thurmond said. “With what you’re readin’ you can predict any-thing. “ 

“Just acting like a good intelligence officer, Senator, “ I said, being as correct and noncommittal as possible in the presence of my commanding officer. “My job is to read intelligence and make analyses. “ 

“Well, they ain’t got nuthin’ on you, Phil, “ the senator said, and everybody in the room knew exactly what “they” meant even if we weren’t allowed to talk about “them” in public. 

As for me? I was preparing my files for General Beech, the incoming chief of research and development, knowing that my own retirement would come at the end of 1962. So I would prepare to go silent about Roswell while setting up a run of about six months to push as many projects through as I could, including whatever was left in my nut file. Only I didn’t call it a nut file or anything after General Trudeau left. My new boss and I had a tacit agreement not to broadcast anything about Roswell or the files. 

As the summer of 1962 came to an end, ominous reports were circulating all through Washington concerning Soviet freighters making their way into Cuban waters. The traffic was intense, but there was no response from our intelligence people on what was happening. The CIA was completely mum, and the word making its way through the Pentagon was that we were getting slapped around by the Soviets and were going to sit still for it. Whatever it was, friends of mine in Army Intelligence were saying, the CIA was going to downplay it because the Kennedy administration didn’t want a confrontation with the Soviet Union. 

What was it? I kept asking, knowing all the while that the Soviets must have been playing around with something in Cuba and that’s why there were so many ships. Were they massing troops there? Was it a series of military exercises? My answer came in a shocking series of photographs, unmistakable surveillance photographs, that were leaked to me by my friends in an office of Army Intelligence so deep inside the Pentagon and so secret that you weren’t even allowed to take notes inside the room. I was asked, by officers who may still be alive and therefore shall go unnamed, to take a good look at the photographs they had developed from the spy planes over Cuba. 

They said, “Memorize these, Colonel, because nobody can make any copies here. “ I couldn’t believe my eyes as I looked down at the glossies and then ran a magnifying glass over them just to make sure that I wasn’t seeing things. Nope, there they were, Soviet intermediate range ballistic missiles of the latest vintage. These babies could take out Washington in just minutes, and yet there they were, sitting outside of hangars only a few miles from our marine base at Guantanamo Bay. 

Had Gen. Curtis LeMay seen these photos, I had to ask myself? LeMay, a veteran of Korean bombing runs, should have been drooling over his desk at the prospect of bombing the hell out of Castro just for thinking he could even park IRBMs so close to U.S. airspace. Yet no reaction from Washington at all. The army had nothing to say, the air force had nothing to say, and my navy friends were simply unresponsive. Somebody was putting the lid on this, and I was getting deeply worried. So I called one of my friends, New York senator Kenneth Keating, and asked him what he knew. 

“What do you mean missiles, Colonel Corso?” he asked. “What missiles, where?” 

It was October 1962. 

“In Cuba, Senator, “ I said. “They’re sitting in Cuba waiting to be deployed on launchers. Don’t you know?” 

The truth was Senator Keating did not, nor did Representative Mike Feighan, whom I also called. Both legislators knew better than to ask me where I found the photos or who gave them to me, but before they did or said anything, they wanted to know why I believed them to be authentic. 

“They come from our best resources, “ I told them. “I could pick out the missiles myself. I know what they look like. And it’s not just a single photo but a series over weeks of tracking the delivery of them on the decks of Soviet freighters. They’re unmistakable, very damning. “ 

Senator Keating asked whether I knew for sure that President Kennedy had been informed of the presence of the missiles, but I told him there was no way of knowing. Privately, I would have been shocked if intelligence sources had kept this information away from the President because there were so many intelligence pathways to the Oval Office the President would have found out no matter who tried to keep the information away. So it was pretty clear to me that the administration was trying to keep the news from the American people so that neither the Russians nor the Cubans would be embarrassed and have their backs against the wall. 

I also knew that by going to Senator Keating and Representative Feighan I was taking a huge risk. I was leaking information outside the military and executive chains of command to the legislative branch. But, that same April, I had already testified to Senator Dirksen’s committee on the administration of the Internal Security Act that it was my belief - and I had proof to back it up - that our intelligence services, particularly the Board of Estimate, had been penetrated by the KGB and as a result we lost a war in Korea that we should have won. 

The testimony was regarded as classified and was never released. But it made its way to Attorney General Robert Kennedy, who promised me, in a private interview at the Justice Department, that he would personally make sure his brother, the President, read it. Now here it was a little more than six months later and whatever intelligence information the President was getting about a serious Soviet threat to U.S. security, it was clear that unless somebody stopped them, the Russians were going to get away with it. Not on my watch. 

President Kennedy had gone up to Hyannis Port, and the vice president, Lyndon Johnson, a friend of Ken Keating’s from his days as Senate majority leader, was completely out of the decision-making loop within the White House. The rumors were that because of his association with Bobby Baker, there was going to be an investigation of the vice president and he might not return as a member of the ticket in 1964. So Senator Keating didn’t recommend going to Lyndon Johnson with this information. Besides, we had to get it right in front of the public so it couldn’t be swept away, leaving the White House free to ignore it until it was too late to force the Soviets’ hand. This was a gamble, of course, because the whole world could explode in our faces, but I knew that the only way to deal with the Russians was put their noses in it and teach them a lesson. Had we done that in Korea the way MacArthur wanted to, there probably wouldn’t have been a Vietnam War. 

One of my old friends in the Washington press corps was Paul Scott, the syndicated political columnist whose pieces appeared in the Boston Globe and the Washington Post. If we gave him the story, it would find its way into the Globe and the Post at the same time, right in the President’s face and forcing him to act. I didn’t enjoy this, but there was no other way. 

So Senator Keating, Mike Feighan, and I coordinated strategy. I called Scott and told him I had seen some photos and had an interpretation he needed to hear. We met, not at the Pentagon, and I described to him the copies of the photos that I had seen and explained, in very general terms and without revealing anything classified about our surveillance apparatus, how they were taken, why they were authentic, and what they meant. 

“You understand that when I saw these cylinders, “ I said to him, drawing on a notepad the tiny barrels in the photos on the deck of a ship, “these are intermediate range ballistic missiles that can hit Washington, New York, or Boston within fifteen minutes after launch. We don’t even detect these babies until they’re just below orbit and coming down. That gives us maybe five minutes to get under our desks. But with nuclear warheads on them, anybody sitting anywhere near where they detonate is not going to be protected. “ 

“What’s the point?” he asked. “Why would the Cubans want to get into a war with the United States?” 

“It’s not the Cubans, “ I explained. “It’s Soviet blackmail. They’re not going to turn a bunch of  missiles over to Fidel Castro and put the trigger for a nuclear war in someone else’s hand. The Soviets will have complete control, they’ll have their own troops on the island, and they’ll threaten to launch them if we or anybody tries to throw Castro out. “ 

“Why are you telling me this?” he asked. 

“Because, “ I said hoping for a sense of outrageous indignation in him that would motivate him to action, “the President already knows and won’t do anything about it. “ 

I was right; the newspaperman was in shock. He half suspected that Kennedy wanted to avoid any and all confrontation until he made it to his second term, but this was outright capitulation, he said. “He can’t get away with it. “ 

“Oh, yes, he can, “ I warned him. “If we don’t get the story out, it goes away. The President’s sticking his head in the sand and hoping nobody pulls it out. You have to run this in the Globe right when he’s in Massachusetts and force him to confront it. He flies back to Washington and it’s in the Post. Then the Soviets know that he knows and it’s all a complete mess. “ 

“But what if this sets off a war, “ Scott said. 

“Over Cuba? Listen, not even Khrushchev’s own people are willing to sacrifice Moscow for Havana, “ I told him. “It’s a Russian gambit because the KGB told Khrushchev he could get away with it. He’s punishing us for the U2 and the Bay of Pigs. We have to stand up to the Russians right here and now because if we don’t the Cold War’s over and we lost. It’s all about territory, and if we don’t defend our own hemisphere, we lose. If we make them back down, humiliate them, we win. “ 

The story ran in the Boston Globe and the Washington Post within days, forcing the President back to Washington to confront a crisis that would go down in history as one of the defining moments of the Kennedy administration. Robert Kennedy knew that the White House was getting faulty intelligence from the CIA, and John Kennedy knew that he had to strike a middle course between the CIA people who told him everything would be OK if he let Khrushchev off the hook and his own air force chief, Curtis LeMay, who wanted him to invade Cuba. 

Very wisely, President Kennedy didn’t invade Cuba. He also didn’t back down, at least in public. Our blockade of Cuba turned the Russian navy around and humiliated Nikita Khrushchev, whose gambit had failed. President Kennedy traded off some obsolete missiles in Turkey to give Khrushchev something he could take back to the Kremlin. But we knew all along that when we deployed our Polaris submarines in the Mediterranean and North Seas, we’d have more firepower packed and ready to go against the Soviets than we ever had in Turkey, and the Soviets wouldn’t even know it was there. Besides, we knew the Turks would never let us fire our missiles against the Russians from their soil. They were afraid that the Russians would use the missiles as an excuse to attack Turkey, but the Kremlin knew that, too, and knew we wanted an excuse to get out of Turkey graciously. 

So it worked all the way around, and President Kennedy got the bragging rights to drawing a line right across the ocean where the Russian navy could not cross, firing a shot across their bows in the open ocean, and making them turn around in open water and sail back home. Before the whole world the Russians had backed down. President Kennedy was a hero. 

But I had made some powerful new enemies and could see the end of my own career in the army like the distant sign on an empty expressway coming up at eighty miles an hour that reads “Freeway Ends. “ I now devoted myself to packing away the Roswell files for those whom they would go to after me and writing my own notes for the work that I might find myself in after I left the army. Who could have realized that within months I’d be sitting in an office on Capitol Hill looking across the desk at one of my own successors who was there as the scientific adviser to the secretary of defense. 

I may have stepped on the toes of some of the most powerful people in Washington, but it was still the good fight and I was, above all, still a soldier in the Cold War and still fighting the stealth war against the strategies of the EBEs, who were becoming more aggressive in their appearances over defense installations, cities, and our manned and unmanned space probes. Even the Russian intelligence services had begun to complain about the mysterious goings-on with their space probes. But they couldn’t come  right out and tell us the reasons why. We had to figure those out for ourselves. 

If the Cold War sounded complex and chaotic in the early 1960's as Kennedy juggled the strategies of Truman and Eisenhower while recognizing that he couldn’t trust his own intelligence services, imagine what it was like when you factored in the “other” cold war or, as some have called it, the “real” cold war against the extraterrestrials. It was becoming like the elephant in a room that everybody knows is there but keeps denying it. Its presence is so massive that you have to walk around it. Its trunk swings with such a force that you have to duck when it sweeps over your head. Watch out that the big elephant feet don’t crush your toes when he plants them, and you don’t want to step too close to the elephant’s backside lest you get buried in what comes out.

In other words, dealing with the Soviets was just a big mess that we had to accommodate while we all sat down at the same dinner table. The Soviets and the Americans, pretending to break bread while not blowing up the world. Yet each of us looking for the advantage while we watched one another’s hands the entire time. You watch your enemy’s hands, he watches your hands, and whatever you can do with your feet you do. Meanwhile your enemy’s doing the same thing. 

The army’s hands were tied by the cover-up, the refusal of the government to let us take on the alien threat with our full resources because we had to pussyfoot around the truth. But more than a few congressmen knew about the cover-up, were as concerned as we were about the intrusions of the EBEs, the human abductions, and the cattle mutilations, and supported the military’s agenda for a program of speeded weapons development in space. 

We were convinced that whoever the UFO extraterrestrials were, they were tampering with our planet, operating with impudence, and manipulating us constantly and secretly. But it was a secret that had our full compliance because we were unwilling to admit the truth and fight the war. Those of us in the military who knew what was happening also felt that we could be experiencing an invasion that was more of an infiltration. They were compromising our very systems of defense and government, I suggested, and then, by the time the conflict opened up, we would already be open and vulnerable. If the EBEs had been around long enough, I once suggested to General Trudeau, might they have seen the Trojan stowing that huge wooden horse the Greeks left for them right through the open gates of their city? 

For his part, General Trudeau, in the months before he retired, made a number of appearances before Congress. He argued consistently that the army did have a real place in space and we had a capability in missile defense that he had proven at Los Alamos and at the guided-missile and Redstone command at Huntsville, Alabama. Moreover, the army had been able to use German scientists in the months immediately after the fighting in Europe had ended. It wasn’t just a matter of who could get the biggest budget, General Trudeau testified. In fact, he offered in a briefing before the Congressional Committee on Science and Astronautics, if the space effort was to be completely taken away from the army, then it should be given lock, stock, and barrel to the air force. 

At least, he said, the air force was a military service and had officers and enlisted personnel who knew how to fight. But, at least in the early years, Congress and the President decided that NASA should control the space program. By the end of the 1960s, however, they had reversed that decision and realized that there was a serious military aspect to space exploration. 

General Trudeau also had his allies among the major defense contractors we worked with. Not only scientists but members of the boards of directors suspected that the army had an urgency in developing weapons for use in space. Some of them even realized that we must have had a hidden agenda because each of the projects we proposed, like Horizon and the energy weapons, seemed designed for a war with enemies far more powerful and elusive than the Soviets. 

When he would address industrial groups on matters of technical intelligence and applied engineering, General Trudeau received what I could only call a “knowing” response. He himself once wrote in his unpublished memoirs that when he was invited to give an address to one of the companies we worked with, the people who showed up were the decision makers. 

He said: 

I think on every occasion that I went out, the chairman of the board was there, the chief executive officer who was usually the president, and an impressive cross section of their senior corporate officers or directors. I might say even when I went to Sperry-Rand, no less a person than General MacArthur honored me by his presence at dinner, and he didn’t turn out for many.  

General Trudeau was the father of the ballistic missile and the person who, from the 1950s through the 1960s, made sure that our armed forces adapted the ballistic missile for our own use. His presence at Sperry-Rand with MacArthur, his boss in Korea, was all the more important because General MacArthur knew the truth about UFOs and commented that the army was girding itself to fight in space. And he didn’t mean fighting the Russians in space, he meant the extraterrestrials. 

But we were fighting so deeply immersed in the darkness of our own official denial that the fantastic nature of the truth, the ongoing effects of the truth, and the capitulation of the civilian intelligence services to some crazed blueprint they had for world order based upon an international government sometimes made us doubt our own senses. However, when you looked at what I called the secret history of the United States since 1947, you knew that the invisible elephant was walking through the room. A better analogy is the concept of the black hole. 

Black holes, the ultra dense remains of stars that have collapsed upon themselves, swallow up light and gravity and, compressing them in like a galactic compactor into something that only subatomic particle physicists can describe and that can’t actually be “seen. “ Only their effects can be determined from the way light and gravity seem to behave around them. 

So you guess that a black hole might be present in a specific region of space when light and gravity around it bend almost like the way water circulates around the drain at the bottom of your sink. That’s what the truth looked like in the region around our Cold War strategy and the development of any ultrahigh-tech or exotic weapons. It might have made sense in 1947, but by 1962, the refusal of the government to admit the war it was fighting was getting in the way of actually fighting the war. 

Since 1947 and the formation of the working group, each new layer of bureaucracy operating within the black hole of UFO strategy and intelligence gathering found itself more enmeshed in the confusion of what was true and what was false than the previous {layer. Like legions of blind soldiers, they bumped into one another in the night, upset one another’s plans, and thought that friends were foes and vice versa. In the absence of a clear policy that could be maintained from generation to generation, the strategy for dealing with the EBEs became tangled up in its own web. 

After December 1947 when Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg, the air force chief of staff, directed the air force to evaluate and track UFO sightings - this in response to the working group - Project “Sign” began at the Air Technical Intelligence Center. Sign was so critical that even J. Edgar Hoover in 1947 issued Bureau Bulletin 59 ordering that all future reports of UFOs should not be investigated by FBI agents but sent, instead, to the air force. 

Although officially not looking for UFOs, the air force Project Sign examined 243 sightings and submitted its report in February *1949. But at the same time Sign was doing its evaluation, the Air Technical Intelligence Center issued its own document called an “Estimate of the Situation.” Basically, but naively, the document came to the conclusion that we were dealing with extraterrestrial interlopers who were observing us from UFOs. 

But General Vandenberg, in the words of one of the officers I later ran into at the Pentagon, “had a cow, and not a mutilated one. “ 

“Colonel, “ this officer said, “steam was coming out of the old man’s ears he was so furious. Just be glad you weren’t there. “ 

So I asked this officer why General Vandenberg was so steamed. After all, he ordered the report in the first place. Why didn’t he just agree with General Twining and Admiral Hillenkoetter to ask the President to begin releasing the information? 

“Are you crazy?” this officer said. The year was 1956 and I had been sent over from the White House for a briefing at the Pentagon. 

Don’t you remember what happened when that Orson Welles ‘War of the Worlds’ broadcast was on the radio? We had near riots in the cities because they thought that thing was real. Can you imagine what would happen if it really happened? If our own government said that flying saucers had landed just like on the radio, only this time we caught one and they’re still coming back? Think about it. Riots, looting, people going insane because they thought aliens were destroying the planet. “

He was right. And what was worse, the aliens were setting up for some sort of hostile act, whatever it was. 

When General Vandenberg read the “Estimate of the Situation, “ he fumed and ordered the whole report burned to ashes before anyone else could read it. It was one of the last official government assessments of the UFO situation ever to get even close to being distributed before the real cover-up clamped down. 

But the grumblings about the absence of government policy concerning UFO reports continued. Project “Grudge” listed and evaluated 244 UFO sightings. Then in 1949 a memo that came out of the CIA’s Office of Scientific Investigation was very apprehensive about unexplained sightings of flying objects. Then in 1952 another CIA memo came to light; from the head of the Office of Scientific Investigations Weapons and Equipment Division it also complained about our lack of knowledge and police in the area of UFO sightings. Now even the CIA, it seemed, was at odds with itself at its various levels of bureaucracy over what to do about UFOs. Generals Twining. and Vandenberg had had enough. In 1952, the air force formally initiated Project Blue Book. At least if we weren’t going to do anything about UFOs publicly, we had to have a way to salve the public’s fear about UFO sightings. Blue Book was that salve. 

Whatever the working group was supposed to be doing in 1952, it wasn’t satisfying the National Security Council, which ordered the CIA to determine whether the existence of UFOs would create a danger for the United States. Of course, the CIA already knew, because two of its intelligence directors had been members of the working group, that UFOs were displaying hostile intentions not only to the United States but to the Soviets, the Italians, and the Scandinavians as well. All of NATO was trying to figure out a response to the UFO threat without triggering a reaction from the Soviets. 

That was one of the reasons, thirty years later, President Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev could come to a meeting of the minds about UFOs that ultimately brought an end to the need for a Cold War. On January 14, 1953, just before the inauguration of President Eisenhower, CIA officials and air force officers met at the Pentagon at the CIA’s invitation to discuss the UFO situation and what our working group had learned up to that point. Officiated at first by Dr. H. P. Robertson, a CIA employee and the director of the Weapons Systems Evaluation Group in the office of the secretary of defense, the group also had working group member Dr. Lloyd Berkner, a physicist and one of the directors of the Brookhaven National Laboratories, as one of its members. 

The Robertson Panel spent the next three days reviewing case histories of UFO sightings assembled for them by Air Force Intelligence and saw two films that contained footage of alleged flying saucers. The panel concluded there was no threat to the United States and recommended that the government should start debunking UFO sightings in general. This, the CIA reported as late as 1988, was the only official government response to UFO sightings. 

Just over a year later, the White House agreed that it was necessary to have some sort of policy governing the release of UFO information to the press. In order to keep lower-level officers from releasing unauthorized information - and by unauthorized the National Security Council advising the President meant only that information cleared by the working group - Gen. Nathan Twining, now the air force chief of staff, signed off on Air Force Regulation 200-2, which said that it was permissible to release reports to the media only when the object was identifiable, like swamp gas or a meteorite. But only the Air Technical Intelligence Center could determine which objects were identifiable and which weren’t. In other words, only the ATIC could authorize the release of any information about UFOs, and they did so only when the objects were clearly identifiable as common phenomena and not flying saucers. 

Throughout the 1950s, I witnessed the government become more and more secretive about UFOs even though privately I thought that they would get better information if they were more open about it. But I was also a military officer and understood the necessity of keeping information confidential until you understood what it was. 

Besides, the Soviets were making great strides in the race to get into space and we didn’t know if they were getting cooperation from the EBEs. There truly was a war on, and I followed orders on the White House staff even as I watched the officers in the cover-up begin to trip over their own feet time and again. 

The darkness was closing in all around us. 

In 1961, the air force began two secret projects that, in effect, had been in operation since 1947 but had not been committed to policy. “Moon Dust” had to do with the establishment of recovery teams to retrieve and recover crashed or grounded “foreign” space vehicles. But for all intents and purposes, as far as the public was concerned the air force was looking for Soviet satellites that had fallen out of the sky and landed on Earth. But in reality the air force was establishing a recovery of UFOs program just like the army had pulled the crashed UFO out of the New Mexico desert fourteen years earlier. Then in Project “Blue Fly,“ the air force authorized the immediate delivery of foreign crashed space vehicles and any other item of technical intelligence interest to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, for evaluation. It was a repeat of General Twining’s retrieval of the Roswell space vehicle from the 509th to Wright Field in 1947. 

In 1962, one of the assistants to the secretary of defense, Arthur Sylvester, told the press at a briefing that if the government deemed it necessary for reasons of national security, it would not even furnish information about UFOs to Congress, let alone the American public. Now I was at the Pentagon and I fully understood how the air force was moving to take control of the entire UFO situation. NASA had the mandate from the President to manage space exploration, but the military still had to defend against the UFO threat even though we were being hampered at every turn. 

Air Force projects “Saint” and “Blue Gemini” years later were outgrowths of USAF 7795, a code number for the USAF’s first anti-satellite program, an aggressive operation designed to locate, track, and destroy enemy surveillance satellites or, and more importantly, orbiting UFOs. Using the technology we had developed at R&D, the air force, and then the army, was taking the initial steps to defend the U.S. missile system against Soviet attacks from space and defend the planet against UFO intrusions. 

“Saint” was an orbital UFO inspector satellite, a version of a standard Agenda B satellite that the CIA had been using, that had an onboard TV camera and tracking and targeting radar system. Its job was surveillance. Find a potential enemy satellite or UFO lurking in orbit and lock onto it with a TV camera and with radar. Once the lock was in place, Blue Gemini, the “killer” satellite, would move in. One of the projects developed by Hughes Aircraft, a prime air defense contractor and satellite builder, Blue Gemini was the military version of NASA’s manned Gemini capsule. Its mission, purely and simply, was to swoop in from a higher orbit and kill or disable an enemy satellite or a UFO. 

If possible, the Blue Gemini would try to “capture” a UFO in orbit by rendering it immobile and waiting for a manned military astronaut mission to “space walk” over and retrieve whatever we could. Both of these weapons, under the cover of other missions, of course, were eventually deployed, and today they form one of the lines of defense in an antimissile and anti-UFO surveillance system. Saint and Blue Gemini were important first steps in our war against the UFOs. The technology that came out of Army R&D in the 1960s, retrieved from the aliens themselves, led directly to our ability to put up such a defense against the aliens even though in the hours after the crash at Roswell our situation looked completely hopeless. Like many of the products that came out of R&D and were used for military purposes, they had consumer uses. And today, if you look on the small dish digital direct broadcast television satellite antennas that are being marketed all across the country, you’ll see Hughes’s own brand. It’s an example of how technology originally earmarked for the military winds up as the most basic and everyday consumer product. 

On December 17, 1969, the secretary of the air force announced the termination of Project Blue Book. He said that Blue Book’s review of more than thirteen thousand cases had yielded no information that there was a threat to national security in any way and that, in effect, since every sighting processed by Blue Book had been identified as something earthly and not extraterrestrial, there were, by definition, no such things as unidentified flying objects. Blue Book had done its job and now could report that our skies were safe. But Blue Book had been pure public relations from the start, and the military’s evaluation of UFOs continued uninterrupted. 

In 1975 and early 1976, air force nuclear weapons repositories at Loring AFB in Maine, the all-important and sensitive Strategic Air Command facility at Minot, North Dakota, and other facilities in Montana, Michigan, and even the Royal Canadian Air Force Base at Falcon bridge in Ontario had been seriously encroached upon by UFOs. These weren’t just random sightings. UFOs actually conducted surveillance and scanning operations at the bases that resulted in security alerts and classified reports to Washington about the intrusions. 

Then NASA finally got a project up and running to scan for radio transmissions from any advanced civilizations whose signals we could pick up. Called the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence and endorsed by the late Carl Sagan, SETI, which has since been discontinued, was not only a set of receivers around the world but a set of international protocols governing what would happen if contact was made with an extraterrestrial civilization. 

For over fifty years, now, the war against UFOs has continued as we tried to defend ourselves against their intrusions. The Hughes hunter-killer satellites of the 1970s were our first steps in deploying a planetary defense system that held any real threat against the EBEs. When, late in the 1970s, we realized that a directed-energy weapon and high-energy laser were even more effective than exploding satellites, our defensive ability was enhanced even further. 

We recognized that by applying both the technology we found at Roswell and Tesla’s vision of a particle beam to our own anti-satellite missiles and laser targeting equipment, we could achieve the rapid aim/rapid fire capability that these type of defenses demanded. But we were still playing cover-up games even though the Russians were now finally acknowledging that maybe cooperation between the superpowers was called for to meet a common threat. 

In the 1980s, both President Reagan and Chairman Gorbachev recognized the need for cooperation against a common enemy. While neither officially owned up to the threat of EBEs and alien hostilities, both acknowledged that if the United States and the Soviet Union could lay aside their differences and participate in a shared policy to defend the space around the earth, then both superpowers would benefit. 

For his part, President Reagan pushed hard for the rapid development and deployment of a space-based defense technology to defend the planet. Called the Strategic Defense Initiative, and derisively dubbed “Star Wars” by the press, the SDI was described in 1985 in President Reagan’s own words as “a defensive shield that won’t hurt people but will knock down nuclear weapons before they can hurt people. “ 

Briefly, the Strategic Defense Initiative was described by the White House and the military as a space based defense system to protect the United States from an all-out nuclear attack by the Soviet Union. It would include satellites that could detect a massive nuclear launch within seconds, orbiting lasers to destroy the first wave of missiles, laser-equipped submarines that could defend against the next round of attacks, and a ground-based missile system providing the last line of defense. In addition, the SDI also included what I thought was the best of its weapons, a missile-launched kinetic energy beam weapon that locked onto incoming warheads or low-orbiting space vehicles and knocked out their electronics with a particle beam. 

The elegant aspect to the kinetic energy beam weapon was that you couldn’t really defend against it. Lasers, even high energy lasers, had their shortcomings in that once a laser beam bounced off a surface, the surrounding energy envelope protected the surface from subsequent pulses. You either knocked out your target right away or shielded it against subsequent hits. But with a particle-beam weapon, you penetrated the surface, just like microwaving a piece of meat, destroyed its electronics to render it useless, and then broke it apart or melted it from within. 

Amidst the warnings that the SDI wouldn’t work, was a giant unscientific gamble and a corporate giveaway, couldn’t provide the massive shield against nuclear missiles, would violate the ABM treaty President Johnson had negotiated with the Russians, and was a giant waste of the taxpayers’ money, guess what? 

It worked! We didn’t have to shoot down thousands of Soviet incoming warheads, and the Soviets never really cared about the ABM treaty in the first place because they knew they weren’t going to launch a first strike and neither would we. We both knew who the real targets of the SDI were, and it wasn’t a bunch of ICBM warheads. It was the UFOs, alien spacecraft thinking themselves invulnerable and invisible as they soared around the edges of our atmosphere, swooping down at will to destroy our communications with EMP bursts, buzz our spacecraft, colonize our lunar surface, mutilate cattle in their own horrendous biological experiments, and even abduct human beings for their medical tests and hybridization of the species. And what was worse, we had to let them do it because we had no weapon to defend ourselves. 

These creatures weren’t benevolent alien beings who had come to enlighten human beings. They were genetically altered humanoid automatons, cloned biological entities, actually, who were harvesting biological specimens on Earth for their own experimentation. As long as we were incapable of defending ourselves, we had to allow them to intrude as they wished. And that was part of what the working group had to deal with. We had negotiated a kind of surrender with them as long as we couldn’t fight them. They dictated the terms because they knew what we most feared was disclosure. Hide the truth and the truth becomes your enemy. Disclose the truth and it becomes your weapon. We hid the truth and the EBEs used it against us until 1974 when we had our first real shootdown of an alien craft over Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany. 

They had tried to disrupt our space program for years - Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and even the Space Shuttle. They buzzed our capsules traveling through space, interfered with our transmissions, and pulsed us with EMP bursts just like we used to do to the Soviet surface ships when we would hit them with a radar burst so massive it would send their earphone-wearing radar and sonar techs howling in pain down to the ship’s dispensary. But when the EBEs did it to us, we had no response. That was before the SDI. 

Once launched and tested, our space-based high-energy lasers, or HELs, acted like the lightning bolts on the nights of July 3 and 4,1947, that so thoroughly disrupted the electromagnetic wave propagators in the spacecraft flying over Roswell that the pilots couldn’t retain control of their own vehicle. We eventually realized that what happened then was that a natural version of an advanced particle-beam burst actually brought a UFO down even as it tried to escape. When we deployed our advanced particle-beam weapon and tested it in orbit for all to see, the EBEs knew and we knew they knew that we had our defense of the planet in place. 

Gorbachev, believe it or not, was also pleased because President Reagan guaranteed that the United States would throw its defensive shield around the Soviet Union, too. Sure, the two leaders shook hands and embraced one another in public. What they had achieved together, cooperating when they were supposed to be fighting, was nothing short of miraculous. Whatever we were fighting over became minimally important in the face of a threat from creatures who were so superior to us in technology that we were their farm animals to be harvested as they pleased. 

But when the United States and USSR agreed, in the early 1980s, not to fight each other over this territory or that territory, to cooperate so as to defeat the common foe, we were unbeatable. Now, as the Space Shuttle docks with the Mir and the astronauts and cosmonauts share a toast of vodka from their plastic squeeze tubes and look out into the darkest reaches of space, they know that there is an electronic shield around them. Now that the war is just about over and we defend our beachhead, the truth will ultimately be revealed. 

The real truth behind a fifty-year history of a war that looked like the ultimate defeat for human kind amidst a Cold War that threatened us with nuclear annihilation can now finally be told because we prevailed. It was because in the dark hours just before dawn in July of 1947 the army, only dimly recognizing that we were on the edge of a potential cataclysmic event, pulled the crashed space vehicle out of the desert and harvested its parts just like the inhabitants of that vehicle wanted to harvest us. In those moments, even though we might have fallen over ourselves in the darkness of the next fifty years, we set in motion the processes that brought us to an initial resolution with a military power greater than us. 

It helped us in our confrontation with the Russians and, if we don’t lose our way, will help us manage the threats to come. When that truth of alien intervention in our planet’s affairs and our ongoing contact with an alien culture is finally revealed, it won’t be frightening even though it will be a shock. 

The night closes in around you in the desert, exposing your deepest terrors of childhood bogeymen to the desolation of the landscape and the blackness of the sky. So, even inside your car you keep on chattering to keep the night away. 

“And that’s what I think about all of it, UFOs, the Cold War, all of it, “ I told my companion in the car sitting next to me as we drove south through the New Mexican desert toward the town of Roswell. “I may be over eighty now, but that’s what I think. “ 

The night was swallowing us up as our car twisted around the curves on the crowned road surface, still warm and wet on a summer night from passing thunderstorms, heading toward lights we knew were over the horizon but still could not see. 

“The Cold War, the missile crisis of 1962, the worldwide alert in 1973, all history now, don’t you think?” I asked. “Maybe it was a good thing that the aliens forced us to defend the planet. At least it kept us in a Cold War even though we were using real bullets. “ 

“And what makes you think the Cold War is over, tovarisch?” my friend asked as he carefully took out a cigarette, lit it, and blew the smoke out the window. “American cigarettes, “ he said. “Am I not the most bourgeois decadent person you’ve ever met? But what would the Amerikanskis have done without me?” 

And I laughed to myself and counted the million stars across the desert sky as far as I could see. Cattle sleeping near the scrub and sand fences along the side of the lonely state route, a coyote now and then running through the beams of our headlights, and the sound of my friend’s breath as he blew the column of smoke into the desert air. 

It was a night just like this, lightning crackling off in the distance and a thunderclap rolling across the desert floor, a night just like this. 

And what looked like a bright shooting star blazed very bright in an arc from south to north and disappeared over a rise as we continued toward Roswell into the darkness of the New Mexico night. 

AFTERWORD 

BACK IN THE 1950's, I REMEMBER WATCHING A TELEVISION SERIES ...called "I Led Three Lives" about the exploits of Herbert A. Philbrick, who described the “fantastic but true” story of his life as a member of a Communist Party cell and an undercover operative for the FBI. Years later, when I got to Army R&D, I remember thinking about how my own story was also “fantastic but true” and how what General Trudeau and I did helped to change the course of history. 

Very few people knew that what was coming out of Foreign Technology during the early 1960s had some basis in a crash of a UFO that “officially” never took place. Lives were distorted, careers destroyed, children frightened into submission by Army Counterintelligence bogeymen, businessmen in Roswell threatened with financial ruination and even worse if anybody told the story of what happened. But they were all loyal Americans, and even though some might have had their doubts about hiding the truth, they went along with what the army wanted. 

Many people have criticized the army and the government for maintaining the Roswell cover-up not only at the time but also through the years. For that, I need to say a word in defense of what the army did. It’s easy to criticize if you weren’t an adult back then or someone who didn’t understand the politics that governed our thinking at that point in American history. We had not yet fully made the transition from a nation at war to a nation at peace. 

And there was Harry Truman, still reeling from his sudden ascendancy to the presidency, toughened into steel by his decision to drop the atomic bombs on Japan, and now faced with the monumental impact of a crash landing of a strange craft on American soil. Was it Soviet? Did it belong to a foreign power? Was it hostile? We simply didn’t know and weren’t about to say anything until we knew what it was. 

Was it a flying saucer? The last time a public announcement of a landing by extraterrestrials took place, even though it was entertainment, panic ensued. In the aftermath of the war and the fears surrounding the Cold War, we didn’t want to risk another panic. So the military recommended and the White House agreed to clam up. Just like the secrecy surrounding the Manhattan Project, no word gets out. And for the next fifty years that policy, once put into place, governed the behavior of the U.S. government and the military about the existence of UFOs and the crash at Roswell. You can also ask how the government was able to keep this secret for so long. Has there been any other cover-up so efficient and thorough that it went on, unbeknownst to succeeding presidents, year after year until it was finally stopped? In fact, there was just such a cover-up, started in the war, but continued as a matter of policy by Truman in 1947, code-named “Shamrock. “ 

Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, one of the original members of the UFO working group, convinced his boss President Truman in 1947 to continue working with International Telephone and Telegraph, Western Union, and RCA to make their international communications traffic available for inspection by U.S. military intelligence services. Even though its initial purpose was to monitor any communications of military significance, such as the transmission of military secrets, there were no controls on what was inspected and what was not. This program continued for the next twenty-eight years and kept secret from every president until it was terminated under the Ford administration in 1975. 

Does Shamrock mean that UFOs exist? Of course not. 

But it does reveal the capability of the U.S. government to keep an ongoing operation secret from even the president of the United States, much like the UFO working group also under James Forrestal. 

So what do I think about all of this, about what happened and what I did? I believe that because at the time I was so much in the routine of a military intelligence officer, I didn’t really stop to think about the implications of UFOs and EBEs. I understood that we were fighting a Cold War with the Soviets and a skirmish war with extraterrestrials. I believed that their intentions were, and still are, hostile, and I believe that we took the steps necessary to develop the weapons that can blunt their threat. In fact, the U.S. military has better, more accurate, and more powerful weapons for killing UFOs than were deployed in the movie Independence Day. 

We can knock these guys down tomorrow with high-energy lasers and directed particle-beam weapons that come right out of a Star Wars movie. And these aren’t fiction, they’re fact. If you want to know more, pay a visit to the U.S. Army Space Command Web site on the Internet. These missile-launched HELs are the pride of our planetary defense system and a direct result of President Reagan’s courage in pushing for the Strategic Defense Initiative when every-one said it wouldn’t work. And that SDI was a direct result of the work General Trudeau and I did at Army R&D in 1962. 

Sometimes things just work the way they’re supposed to. Some-times, once in a very long while, you get  the chance to save your country, your planet, and even your species at the same time. And when that time comes, as Davy Crockett once said: Be sure you’re right, then go ahead.

SOURCE

http://galactic.no/rune/spesBoker/the_day_after_roswell.pdf