1997: 20th Century Innovations derived from Reverse-Engineering the Roswell UFO Crash

From “The Day After Roswell”, Col. Philip J. Corso (ret) with William J. Birnes
Simon & Schuster, Inc., ISBN 0-671-01756-X, 1997.

[StealthSkater note: Philip Corso made the claim that most of the great innovations of the 20th Century were the result of back-engineering debris collected from the 1947 Roswell, New Mexico UFO crash. In his book — which the following was excerpted — he explained that the very “above top-secret” nature prevented him from revealing to selected industrial contractors the origin of the materials that he gave them. Working at the Army’s Foreign Technology Desk at the Pentagon, his job was to match recovered devices with those companies already doing similar research and encourage them to “take the ball and run with it” without worrying about where it came from. It was an NBC “Dateline” interview that initially brought Corso’s story to my attention. If you are intrigued, you can read the complete story in the book which is available in paperback form.]
Introduction

My name is Philip J. Corso. And for 2 incredible years back in the 1860s while I was a lieutenant colonel in the Army heading up the Foreign Technology desk in Army Research and Development at the Pentagon, I led a double life.

In my routine everyday job as a researcher and evaluator of weapons systems for the Army, I investigated things like the helicopter armament the French military had developed; the tactical deployment complexities of a theater antimissile missile; or new technologies to preserve and prepare meals for our troops in the field. I read technology reports and met with engineers at Army proving grounds about different kinds of ordnance and how on-going budgeted development programs were moving forward.

I submitted their reports to my boss — Lt. Gen. Arthur Trudeau — the director of Army R&D and the manager of a 3,000+ man operation with lots of projects at different stages. On the surface — especially to Congressmen exercising oversight as to how the taxpayers’ money was being spent — all of it was routine stuff.

Part of my job responsibility in Army R&D, however, was as an intelligence officer and adviser to General Trudeau who himself had headed up Army Intelligence before coming to R&D. This was a job I was trained for and held during World War II and Korea. At the Pentagon, I was working in some of the most secret areas of military intelligence, reviewing heavily-classified information on behalf of General Trudeau.

I had been on General MacArthur‘s staff in Korea and knew that as late as 1961 — even as late, maybe, as today — as Americans back then were sitting down to watch “Dr. Kildare” or “Gunsmoke”, captured American soldiers from WWII and Korea were still living in gulag conditions in prison camps in the Soviet Union and Korea. Some of them were undergoing what amounted to sheer psychological terror. They were the men who never returned.

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

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

The Roswell file was the legacy of what happened in the hours and days after the crash when the official government cover-up was put into place. As the military tried to figure out what it was that crashed, where it had come from, and what its inhabitants’ intentions were, a covert group was assembled under the leadership of the Director of Intelligence — Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter — to investigate the nature of the flying disks and collect all information about encounters with these phenomena, while at the same time publicly and officially discounting the existence of flying saucers. This operation has been going on — in one form or another — for 50 years amidst complete secrecy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today, items such as lasers, integrated circuitry, fiber-optics networks, accelerated particle-beam devices, and even the Kevlar material in bulletproof vests are all commonplace. Yet the seeds for the development of all of them were found in the crash of the alien craft at Roswell and turned in my files 14 years later.

But that’s not even the whole story.

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

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

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

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

What happened after Roswell — how we turned the extraterrestrials’ technology against them, and how we actually won the Cold War — is an incredible story. During the thick of it, I didn’t even realize how incredible it was. I just did my job — going to work at the Pentagon day-in and day-out until we put enough of the alien technology into development that it began to move forward under its own weight through industry and back into the Army. The full report of what did at Army R&D and what General Trudeau did to grow R&D from a disorganized unit under the shadow of the Advanced Research Projects Agency — when he first took command — to the Army department that helped create the military guided missile, the antimissle missile, and the guided-missile-launched accelerated particle-beam-firing satellite killer didn’t really hit me until years later when I understood just how we were able to make history.

I always thought of myself as just a little man from a little American town in western Pennsylvania. And I didn’t assess the weight of our accomplishments at Army R&D — especially how we harvested the technology coming out of the Roswell crash — until 35 years later after I left the Army when I sat down to write my memoirs for an entirely different book. That was when I reviewed by old journals, remembered some of the memos that I’d written to General Trudeau, and understood that the story of what happed in the days after the Roswell crash was perhaps the most significant story of the past 50 years.

So — believe it or not — this is the story of what happened in the days after Roswell. And how a small group of military intelligence officers changed the course of human History.
In memory of Lt. Gen. Arthur G. Trudeau. This great man was my superior as chief of U.S. Army Research and Development. He was a man of great courage. He put on a sergeant’s helmet and fought with his men at “Pork Chop Hill” in Korea. He was deeply religious and went on “retreats” at Loyola. He was the most brilliant man I have ever known, who only gave me one outstanding order: “Watch things for me, Phil. The rest do not understand.”

His accomplishments changed the World for the better. Any succees I had, I attribute to him and to his leadership.
“Be sure you’re right …
then go ahead.”
— Davy Crockett
Chapter 1 – “The Roswell Desert”

The night hugs the ground and swallows you up as you drive out of Albuquerque and into the desert. As you head East along 40 and then South along 285 to Roswell, there’s only you and the tiny universe ahead of you defined by your headlights. On either side — beyond the circle of light — there is only scrub and sand. The rest is all darkness that closes in behind you, flooding where you’ve been under a giant ocean of black, and pushes you forward along the few hundred feet of road directly ahead.

The sky is different out there — different from any sky you’ve ever seen before. The black is so clear that it looks like stars shining through it are tiny windows from the beginning of time. Millions of them, going on forever. On a hot summer night, you can sometimes see flashes of heat lightning explode in the distance. Somewhere it is light for an instant … then the darkness returns.

But summer is the rainy season in the New Mexico desert. And thunderstorms assemble over you out of nowhere and pound the Earth with rain and lighting, pummeling the darkness with crashes of thunder, shaking the ground until you feel the earth is breaking apart … and then disappears. The ranchers out there will tell you that the local storms can go on all night, bouncing off the arroyos like pinballs in play until they expend themselves over the horizon.

That’s what it was like 50 years ago on a night much like this. Although I wasn’t there on that night, I’ve heard many different versions. Many of them go like this:
Base radar at the Army’s 509th airfield outside the town of Roswsell had been tracking strange blips all night on July 1, 1947. So had the radar at nearby White Sands — the Army’s guided-missile base where test launches of German V2 rockets had been taking place since the end of the War — and at the nuclear-testing facility at Alamogordo. The blips would appear at one corner of the screen and dart across at seemingly impossible speeds for aircraft, only to disappear off another corner. Then they’d start up again. No earthly craft could have maneuvered at such speeds and changed direction so sharply. It was a signature that no one could identify.

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

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

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

The radar anomalies continued into the next night as Dan Wilmot — owner of a hardware store in Roswell — set up chairs on his front porch after dinner to watch the streaks of lightning flash across the sky in the distance. Shortly before 10:00 that evening, the lightning grew more intense and the ground shook under the explosions of thunder from a summer storm that pounded the chaparral off in the Northwest of the city. Dan and his wife watched the spectacle from beneath the dry safety of their porch roof. It was as if each new bolt of lightning were a “spear” that rent the heavens themselves.

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

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

To the civilians in Roswell, nothing was amiss. Summer thunderstorms were common. The reports of flying saucers in the newspapers and over the radio were simply circus sideshow amusements. And an object streaking across the sky that so attracted the Wimots’ attention could have been nothing more than the “shooting star” you make a wish on if you’re lucky enough to see it before it disappears forever in a puff of flame. Soon it would be the July 4th weekend. And the Wilmots, Steve Robinson, and thousands of other local residents were looking forward to the unofficial start of the summer holiday.

But at the 509th, there was no celebrating. The isolated incidents of unidentified radar blips at Roswell and White Sands continued to increase over the next couple of days until it looked like a steady stream of airspace violations. Now it was becoming more than serious. There was no denying that a traffic pattern of strange aircraft overflights was emerging in the skies over the New Mexico desert where — with impunity — these unidentifiable radar blips hovered above and then darted away from our most secret military installations. By the time the military’s own aircraft scrambled, the intruders were gone.

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

By now, Army Counter-Intelligence– the highly-secret command sector which in 1947 operated almost as much in the civilian sector as it did in the military — had spun up to its highest alert and ordered a full deployment of its most experienced crack WWII operatives out to Roswell. CIC personnel had begun to arrive from Washington when the first reports of strange radar blips were filed through intelligence channels and kept coming as the reports continued to pile up with increasing urgency over the next 48 hours. Officers and enlisted man alike disembarked from the transport planes and changed into civilian clothes for the investigation into enemy activities on the area. They joined up with base intelligence officers like Maj. Jesse Marcel and Steve Arnold, a counter-intelligence non-com who had served at the Roswell base during WWII when the first nuclear bombing mission against Hiroshima was launched from there in August 1945, just 2 years earlier.

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

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

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

Even before the radar officer called the 509th base commander — Cool William Blanchard — reporting that radar indicated the crash of an unidentified aircraft to the North and West of Roswell, the CIC dispatch team had already mobilized to deploy an immediate -response crash-and-retrieval team to locate and secure the crash site. They believed that this was an enemy aircraft that had slipped through our radar defense system either from South America or over the Canadian border and had taken photos of top-secret military installations.

They also wanted to keep civilians away just in case — they said — there was any radiation from the craft’s propulsion system, which allowed it to make hairpin turns at 3,000 mph. Nobody knew how this thing was powered. And nobody knew whether any personnel had ejected from the aircraft and were wandering around the desert. “Bull” Blanchard green-lighted the retrieval mission to out there as soon as possible, taking with them all the night-patrol equipment they could scare up; all the 2-and-a-half tone trucks that they could roll; and the base’s “low-boy” flatbed wreckers to bring the aircraft back. If it was a crash, they wanted to get it under wraps in a hanger before any civilian authorities could get their hands on it and blab to the newspapers.

But the air controllers at the 509th weren’t the only ones who thought they saw an aircraft go down. On the outskirts of the city, ranchers, families camping in the desert, and residents saw an aircraft that exploded in a bright light between flashes of lightning and plummeted to earth in the direction of Corona — the neighboring town to the North of Roswell. Chavez County Sheriff George Wilcox started receiving calls in his office shortly after midnight on the morning of the 5th that an airplane had crashed in the deserted. He notified the Roswell Fire Department that he would dispatch men as soon as he had an approximate location. No sense pulling fire apparatus out of the station to chase something through the desert unless they knew where it was. Besides, Wilcox didn’t like rolling the trucks out of town just in case there a fire in the city that needed all the apparatus they could throw at it — especially the pumpers.

However, finding the crash site didn’t take long. A group of Indian artifact hunters camping in the scrub brush North of Roswell had also seen the pulsating light overhead; heard a burning hiss and the strange, ground-shaking “thunk” of a crash nearby in the distance; and followed the sound to a group of low hills just over a rise. Before they even inspected the smoking wreckage, they radioed the crash-site location into Sheriff’s Wilcox’s office, which dispatched the fire department to a spot about 37 miles North and West of the city.

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

And by about 4:30 that morning, a single pumper and police car were bouncing through the desert taking Pine Lodge Road west to where Sheriff Wilcox had directed them. Neither the sheriff nor the fire department knew that a military retrieval team was also on its way to the site with orders to secure the location and — by any means necessary — prevent the unauthorized dissemination of any informant about the crash.

It was still dark when from another direction, Steve Arnold — riding “shotgun” in one of the staff cars in the convoy of recovery vehicles from the 509th — reached the crash-site first. Even before their tracks rolled into position, an MP lieutenant from the first jeep posted a picket of sentries. And an engineer ordered his unit to string a series of floodlights around the area. Then Arnold’s car pulled up and he got his own first glimpse of the wreckage.

But it wasn’t really wreckage at all — not in the way he had seen plane crashes during the War. From what he could make out through the purple darkness, the dark-skinned craft seemed mostly intact and had lost no large pieces. Sure, there were bits-and-pieces of debris all over the place. But the aircraft itself hadn’t broken apart on impact the way a normal airplane would. And the whole scene was still shrouded in darkness.

Then, the staff cars and jeeps — that had accompanied the trucks — lined up head-on to the crash and threw their headlights against the arroyo to supplement the floodlights that were still being strung by the engineers. In the sudden intersecting beams of headlights, Arnold could see that — indeed — the soft-cornered delta-shaped eggshell type of craft was essentially in one piece, even though it had embedded its nose hard into the embankment of the arroyo with its tail high in the air. Heat was still rising off the debris even though — according to the base radar at the 509th — the crash probably took place before midnight on the 4th. Then Arnold heard the brief sizzle of a battery charging up and the hum of a gasoline generator. That’s when the string of lights came up and the whole site suddenly looked like a baseball field before a big night game.

In the stark light of the military searchlights, Arnold saw the entire landscape of the crash. He thought it looked more like a crash landing because the craft was intact except for a split seam running lengthwise along the side and the steep 45_ degree angle of the craft’s incline. He assumed it was a ‘craft’, even though it was like no airplane that he had ever seen. It was small. But it looked more like the flying wing shape of an old Curtis than an ellipse or a saucer. And it had 2 tail fins on the top sides of the delta’s feet that pointed up-and-out. He angled himself as close to the split seam of the crash as he could without stepping in front of the workers in hazardous-material suits who were checking the site for radiation.

And that was when he saw them in the shadow. Little dark gray figures — maybe 4 or 4-and-a-half feet in length — sprawled across the ground.

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

Arnold looked around the perimeter of light and saw another figure — motionless but “menacing” nevertheless — and another leaning against a small rise in the desert sand. There was a 5th figure near the opening of the craft. As radiation technicians gave the ‘all-clear’ and medics ran to the bodies with stretchers, Arnold sneaked a look through the rip in the aircraft and stared out through the top. Jehosaphat! It looked like the Sun was already up.

Just to make sure, Steve Arnold looked around the outside again and — sure enough — it was still too dark to call it daylight. But through the top of the craft 00 as if he were looking through a lens — Arnold could see an eerie stream of light. Not daylight or lamplight, but light nevertheless. He had never seen anything like that before and thought that maybe this was a weapon the Russians or somebody else had developed.

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

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

“Halt!” the sentry screamed at the small figure that had gotten up and was trying desperately to climb over the hill.

“Halt!” the sentry yelled again and brought his M1 rifle to bear. Other soldiers ran toward the hill as the figure slipped in the sand, started to slide down again, caught his footing, and climbed again. The sound of soldiers locking-and-loading rounds in their chambers carried loud across the desert through the predawn darkness.

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

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

“Fuck,” the officer spit again. “Arnold!”

Steve Arnold snapped to attention.

“You and your men get out there and stop those civilians from crossing this perimeter.” He motioned to the small convoy of emergency vehicles approaching them from the East. He knew they had to be police or county sheriff. Then he called out, “Medics!”

Arnold jumped to at once. And by the time the medics were loading the little creature on a stretcher, he was already setting up a perimeter of C IC personnel and sentries to block the site from the flashing lights and churning sand far in the distance to the South of them. He heard the officer order the medics to load the bodies on stretchers, pack them into the back of whatever 2-and-a-half ton GMC he could pull off the line, and drive them back to the base immediately.

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

As the soldiers formed an arm-in-arm “search and rescue” grid — some on their hands-and-knees — to clean the area of any pieces of debris, devices, or chunks of wreckage, the huge retrieval crane that had been deployed from the air base hoisted the surprisingly light flying object out of its impact crater in the arroyo and swayed it above the long flatbed Ford that accompanied the convoy of Army trucks. A small squad of MPs were deployed to face the civilian convoy of emergency vehicles quickly approaching the site. They fixed bayonets and lowered their M1 barrels at the whirlwind of sand directly in front of them.

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

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

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

By the time Dwyer’s field truck pulled around to the area the soldiers had pointed out, whatever it was that had crashed was sitting on the flatbed, still clamped to the hovering crane. 3-or-4 soldiers were working on the coupling and securing the object to the truck with chains-and-cable. But for something that had dropped out of the sky in a fireball — which was how the police described it — Dwyer noted that the object looked almost unscathed. He couldn’t see any cracks in the object’s skin and there were no pieces that had broken off.

Then the soldiers dropped an olive tarp over the flatbed and the object was completely camouflaged. An Army captain walked over to one of the police units parked directly in front of the fire truck. And behind the officer stood a line of bayonet-wielding soldiers sporting MP armbands.

“You guys head on back,” Dwyer heard the captain tell one of the Roswell police officers. “We’ve got the area secured.”

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

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

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

“What about them?” he asked.

“Hey! Get those things loaded!” the captain shouted at the enlisted men loading the stretchers into the truck. “You didn’t see anything here tonight, Officer,” he told the driver of the police unit. “t all.”

“But, I gotta …”

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

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

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

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

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

The whole site was scattered with articles that Dwyer assumed had fallen out of the craft when it hit. He could see the indentation in the arroyo where it looked like the object embedded itself and followed with his eyes the pattern of debris stretching out from the small crater into the darkness beyond the floodlights. The soldiers were crawling all over on the hands-and-knees with scraping devices and carrying sacks, or walking in straight lines waving metal-detectors in front of them. They were sweeping the area clean — it seemed to him — so that any curiosity seekers who floated out here during the day would find nothing to reveal the identify of what had been there.

Dwyer reached down to pick up a patch of a dull gray metallic cloth-like material that seemed to shine up at him from the sand. He stuffed into his fist and rolled it into a ball. Then he released it and the metallic fabric snapped back into shape without any creases or folds. He though no one was looking him, so he stuffed it into the pocket of his fire jacket to bring back to the firehouse.

He would later show it to his young daughter, who 45 years later — and long after the piece of metallic fabric itself had disappeared into history — would describe it on television documentaries to millions of people. But that night in July 1947, if Dwyer though he was ‘invisible’, he was wrong.

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

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

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

“Not me, Sergeant,” Dwyer said.

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

“Caught this fireman wandering around in the debris, Sir,” the sergeant reported.

Marcel obviously recognized Dwyer — although the two weren’t friends — and gave him what the fireman only remembered as an agonized look. “You got to get out of here,” he said. “And never tell anyone where you were or what you saw.”

Dwyer nodded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nobody moved him out of the way or told him to vacate the area. In fact, no one even spoke to him. Danzer just looked down as the line of soldiers passed him. And there it was, strapped tightly to a stretcher that 2 bearers were carrying into the base hospital right through the main door. Danzer looked at it. It looked at him. And as their eyes met, Danzer knew in an instant that he was not looking down at a human being. It was a creature from somewhere else.

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

“What the hell was that?” he asked no ne in particular. Then he felt like he had been hit from the front four of the Notre Dame football team.

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

“Just who are you, mister?” the captain bellowed into Danzer’s ear. Even before he could answer, 2 other officers walked up and began demanding what authorization Danzer had to be on the base.

These guys weren’t kidding, Danzer thought to himself. They looked ugly and were working themselves up into a serious lather. For a few tense minutes, Roy Danzer thought he would never see his family again. He was that scared. But then a major approached and broke into the shouting.

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

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

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

“Yes, Sir,” Danzer said. He was truly afraid now.

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

“Captain,” the major broke in.

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

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

“Yest, Sir!” Danzer just about shouted as he extricated himself from the grip of the MPs on either side of him and broke for his pickup truck on the other side of the base. He didn’t even look back to see the team of soldiers carrying the body bas of the remaining creatures into the hospital where — before there were any other briefings — the creatures were prepared for autopsy like bagged game waiting to be dressed.

The rest of the story about that week has become the subject of History. First, 509th base commander Bull Blanchard authorized the release of the “flying saucer” story that was picked up by news services and carried around the Country. Then General Roger Ramey at the 8th Army Air Base headquarters in Texas ordered Maj. Jesse Marcel to go back before the Press and retract the flying saucer story. This time, Marcel was ordered to say that he’d made a mistake and realized the debris had actually come from a weather balloon.

Swallowing a story that he himself never believed, Jesse Marcel posed with some faked debris from an actual balloon and confessed to an error he never could have made — even on a bad day. It was a confession that would haunt him the rest of his life until — decades later and shortly before he died — he would retract his public story and restate that he had actually retrieved an alien spacecraft that night in the Roswell desert.

Meanwhile in the days and weeks after the crash and retrieval, Army Intelligence and CIC personnel fanned out through Roswell and neighboring communities to suppress whatever information they could. With ill-advised threats of violence, actual physical intimidation, and — according to some of the rumors — at least one murder, Army officers bludgeoned the community into silence.

Mac Brzel — one of the civilians near whose property the crash took place and one of the visitors to the site — was allegedly bribed and threatened. He suddenly became silent about what he had seen in the desert even after he had told friends and newspeople that he’d retrieved pieces from a downed spacecraft. Officers from the Chavez County Sheriff’s Department and other law-enforcement agencies were forced to comply with the Army edit that the incident outside of Roswell was a matter of National Security and was not to be discussed.

“It never happened,” the Army decreed. And civilian authorities complied. Even the local Roswell radio station news correspondents — John McBoyle from KSWS and Walt Whitmore, Sr. from KGFL, who had conducted interviews with witnesses to the debris field — were forced to submit to the official line that the Army imposed and never broadcast their reports.

For some of the civilians who claimed to have experienced intimidation from the Army officers who flooded into Roswell after the crash, the trauma remained with them for the rest of their lives. One was Dan Dwyer’s daughter, who was a young child in July 1947 and who endured the sight of a huge, helmeted Army officer — his expression obscured by sunglasses — looming over her in her mother’s kitchen and telling her that if she didn’t forget what she had been told by her father, she and the rest of her family would simply disappear in the desert. Sally — who had played with the metallic fabric that her father had brought back to the firehouse that morning and had heard his description of the little people carried away on stretchers — quaked in terror as the officer finally got her to admit that she had seen nothing, heard nothing, and handled nothing.

“It never happened,” he hissed at her. “And there’s nothing you will ever say about it for the rest of your life because we will be there and we will know it,” he repeated it over-and-over again, slapping a police baton into his palm with a loud <crack> at every word. Even today, tears form at the corners of her eyes as she describes the scene and remembers the expression of her mother — who had been told to leave the kitchen while the officer spoke to Sally. It’s tough for a kid to see her parents so terrorized into silence that they will deny the truth before their eyes.

Roy Danzer’s daughter, too, was frightened at the sight of her father when he came home from the base that morning on July 5, 1947. He wouldn’t talk about what had gone on there, of course, even though the town was about with rumors that creatures from outer space had invaded Roswell. Wasn’t it true that all the children in town knew about it and there had been stories about flying saucers in newspapers for weeks. It was even on the radio.

But Roy Danzer wouldn’t say a word in front of his daughter. She heard her parents talking through the closed door of her bedroom at night and caught snippets of conversations about little creatures and “they’ll kill us all”. But she buried these in a part of her memory that she never visited until her father — shortly before his death — told her what really happened at the base that day in July when the convoy arrived out of the desert.

Steve Arnold stayed in Roswell, finishing out his official re-enlistment with the Army and — without his direct knowledge — remaining a part of my own team right through the 1960s. Some say he works for the government still, carrying out a job that fell to him right out of the New Mexico skies, pumping out disinformation from the Army or the CIA or whomever, perpetuating a camouflage story that — 50 years later — has taken on a life of its own and goes forward like a tale out of a Dickens novel, simply on inertia. You can see Steve today walking around Roswell, visiting old friends from his Army days, giving interviews on television to the news crews that periodically pay visits to the folks at Roswell who want to talk about those days in the summer of 1947.

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

By the time the first week of July 1947 was over, the crash outside of Roswell might as well have never taken place. Like the night that engulfs you as you drive through the expanse of desert and chaparral toward Roswell, so the night of silence engulfed the story of Roswell itself for over 30 years.
These are the stories as I heard them as people later told them to me. I wasn’t there at Roswell that night. I didn’t see these events for myself. I only heard them years later when the task fell to me to make something out of all this. But the debris from the crash of the object that was either caused by lightning — or by our powerful radar installations, some say — and fell out of the sky that night was on its way to a collision course with my life.

Our paths would cross officially at the Pentagon in the 1960s even though — for a very brief moment in 1947 when I was a young major at Fort Riley, fresh from the glory of victory in Europe — I would see something that I would tuck away in my memory and hope-against-hope that I would never see again for the rest of my life!
Chapter 2 – “Convoy to Fort Riley”
I can remember a time when I was so young and feeling so invincible that there was nothing in the world I was afraid of. I had faced down fear in North Africa. With General Patton’s army, I stood toe-to-toe against the artillery in Rommel’s Panzer Divisions and gave them better than they dished out to us. We were an army of young men from a country that hadn’t started the war but found itself right in the midst of it before we even got out of church the Sunday that Pearl Harbor was attacked. The next thing we knew, Hitler declared war on us and we were fighting in Europe.
But by 1942, we drove the Germans right out of Africa and jumped across the sea to Sicily. Then — while Mussolini was still reeling from the punches — we invaded Italy and fought our way up the Peninsula until we came to Rome. We were the first invading army to conquer Rome since the Middle Ages, and obviously the first invading army from the New World to ever occupy Rome.

But there we were by early 1944, sitting in Rome after Mussolini fled and the German front collapsing all around us. And as a too-young captain in Army Intelligence, I was ordered to oversee the formation of a civilian government under Allied military rule in the magical city of my ancestors that I’d only read about in history books. Pope Pius himself offered me an audience to discuss our plans for the city government. You can’t even dream this stuff up. It has to happen to you in real life, and then you pinch yourself to make sure that you don’t wake up in your bed outside of Pittsburgh on a winter morning.

I stayed in Rome for 3 years from the months before the landing at Normandy in 1944, when the German front lines were still only a few miles south of Rome and our boys were slugging their way up the slopes of Monte Casino, to early 1947 when I was shipped back home. My wife and I threw everything we had into the trunk of a used Chevy convertible and drove across the farmland state routes of peacetime America from Pennsylvania to Kansas. I’d been away for 5 years. But now I was home!

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

Having been in Africa and Europe for so many years, I was anxious to see America again. By this time, its people were not stooping under the weight of the Depression nor in factories nor in uniform sweating out a desperate war across 2 oceans. This was an America exultant in victory. You could see it as you drove through the small towns of Southern Ohio and Illinois and then across the Mississippi. We didn’t stop overnight to see St. Louis or even to linger on the Kansas side of the river. I was so excited to be a career officer that we didn’t stop driving until we pulled straight into Fort Riley and set up an apartment in nearby Junction City, where we would live while they got our house ready on the base.

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

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

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

In intelligence school dur9ng those first months, we reviewed not only the rudiments of good intelligence gathering — interrogation of enemy prisoners, analysis of raw intelligence data, and the like — but we also learned the basics of administration and how to run a wartime intelligence unit called the ‘aggressor force’. None of us realized during those early days how quickly our newly acquired skills would be tested nor where our enemies would choose to fight. But those were confident days as the weather turned warmer on the plains and the days grew long with the coming of summer.

Before the War broke out and when I was in high school back in California, Pennsylvania — my hometown — I was something of a bowler. It was a sport that I wanted to get back to when the War ended. So when I got to Fort Riley, one of the first places I looked up was the bowling alley on the base which had been build in one of the former stables. Fort Riley was a former cavalry base — the home of Custer’s 7th Cavalry — and still had a polo field after the War. I started practicing my bowling again and was soon rolling enough strikes that the enlisted men who bowled there began talking to me about my game. Before too many months had passed, M.Sgt. Bill Brown — the men called him “Brownie” — stopped me when I was changing out of my bowling shoes and said he wanted to talk.

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

“Sergeant?” I asked.

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

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

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

“You want me for your team?” I asked. I was pretty surprised because officers weren’t supposed to fraternize with enlisted men at that time. Things are very different now. But 50 years ago, it was a different world — even for much of the officer corps that started out as draftees and went through officer training.

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

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

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

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

I told him that I’d get back to him on it because I wanted to check on the rules — if there were any — for myself. In fact, officers and enlisted personnel were allowed to compete on the same athletic teams and — in very short order — I jointed the team along with Dave Bender, John Miller, Brownie, and Sal Federico. We became quite a remarkable team, winning most of our matches, more than a few trophies, and had lots of exciting moments when we made the impossible splits and bowled our way all the way to the state finals. We ultimately won the Army Bowling Championships. And that trophy sits on my desk to this very day. Magically, the barrier between officer and enlisted man seemed to drop. And that’s the real point of this story.

Through the months that I spent on the team, I became friends with Bender, Miller, Federico, and Brown. We didn’t socialize much except for the bowling. But we also didn’t stand on ceremony with each other, and I liked it that way. I found that a lot of the career intelligence officers also liked to see some of the barriers drop because sometimes men will speak with more honesty to you if you don’t throw what’s on your shoulders into their faces every time you talk to them. So I became friends with these guys. And that’s what got me into the veterinary building on Sunday night, July 6, 1947.

I remember how hot it had been that whole weekend of July 4th celebrations and fireworks. These were the days before everybody had to have air-conditioning. So we just sweltered inside the offices at the base and swatted away the fat lazy flies that buzzed around looking for hot dog crumbs or landing on chunks of picle relish. By Sunday, the celebrations were over,; guys who’d had too much beer had been dragged off to their barracks by members of their company before the MPs got hold of them; and the base was settling down to the business of the week. Nobody seemed to take much notice of the 5 deuce-and-a-halfs and side-by-side low-boy trailers that had pulled into the base that afternoon full of cargo from Fort Bliss in Texas on their way to Air Materiel Command at Wright Field in Ohio.

If you had looked at the cargo manifests that the drivers were carrying, you’d have seen lists itemizing landing-gear-assembly struts for B29s, wingtank pods for vintage P51s, piston rings for radial aircraft engines, 10 crates of Motorola walkie-talkies, and you wouldn’t think anything of the shipment except for the fact that it was going the wrong way. These spare parts were usually shipped from Wright Field to bases like Fort Bliss rather than the other way around. But of course, I wouldn’t know that until years later when the real cargo on those trucks fell straight onto my desk as if it had dropped out of the sky.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brown popped his head out from behind the door.

“You know what’s in here?” he asked.

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

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

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

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

“What is all this stuff?” I asked.

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

It was the silliest thing I’d ever heard. Enlisted men’s tall stories that floated from base-to-base getting more inflated with every lap around the track. Maybe I wasn’t the world’s smartest guy. But I had enough engineering and intelligence schooling to pick my way around pieces of wreckage and come up with 2 plus 2. We walked over to the tarpaulin-shrouded boxes, and I threw back the edge of the canvas.

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

“I’ll watch outside for you, Major.”

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

There were about 30-odd wooden crates nailed shut and stacked together against the far wall of the building. The light switches were the “push” type, and I didn’t know which switch tripped what circuit. So I used my flashlight and stumbled around until my eyes got used to the darkness and shadows. I didn’t want to start pulling apart the nails. So I set the flashlight off to one side where it could throw light on the stack and then searched for a box that could open easily.

Then I found an oblong box off to one side with a wide seam under the top that looked like it had already been opened. It looked like either the strangest weapons crate you’d ever see or the smallest shipping crate for a coffin. Maybe this was the box that Brownie had seen. I brought the flashlight over and set it high on the wall so that it would throw as broad a beam as possible. Then I set to work on the crate.

The top was already loose. I was right — this one had just been opened. I jimmied the top back-and-forth, continuing to loosen the nails that had been pried up with a nail claw until I felt them come out of the wood. Then I worked along the sides of the 5-foot or so box until the top was loose all the way around. Not knowing which end of the box was the front, I picked up the top and slid it off the edge. Then I lowered the flashlight, looked inside … and my stomach rolled right up into my throat and I almost became sick right then-and-there.

Whatever they’d crated this way, it was a coffin. But not like any coffin that I had seen before. The contents — enclosed in a thick glass container — were submerged in a thick light blue liquid, almost as heavy as a gelling solution of diesel fuel. But the object was floating — actually suspended — and not sitting on the bottom with a fluid over top. It was soft and shiny as the underbelly of a fish. At first, I thought it was a dead child that they were shipping somewhere. But this was no child.

It was a 4-foot human-shaped figure with arms, bizarre-looking 6-fingered hands — I didn’t see a thumb — thin legs and feet, and an oversized incandescent lightbulb-shaped head that looked like was floating over a balloon gondola for a chin. I know that I must have cringed at first. But then I had the urge to pull of the top of the liquid container and touch the pale gray skin. I couldn’t tell whether it was skin because it also looked like a very thin one-piece head-to-toe fabric covering the creature’s flesh.

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

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

I could see no damage to the creature’s body and no indication that it had been involved in any accident. There was no blood. Its limbs seemed intact, and I could find no lacerations on the skin or through the gray fabric. I looked through the crate encasing the container of liquid for any paperwork or shipping invoice or anything that would describe the nature or origin of this thing.

What I found was an intriguing Army Intelligence document describing the creature as an inhabitant of a craft that had crash-landed in Roswell, New Mexico earlier that week and a routing manifest for this creature to the log-in officer at the Air Materiel Command at Wright Field, and from him to Walter Reed Army Hospital morgue’s pathology section where — I suppose — the creature would be autopsied and stored. It was not a document that I was meant to see for sure. So I tucked it back in the envelope against the inside wall of the crate.

I allowed myself more time to look at the creature than I should have, I suppose, because that night I missed the time checks on the rest of my rounds and believed that I would have to come up with a pretty good explanation for the lateness of my other stops to verify the sentry assignments. But what I was looking at was worth any trouble that I’d get into the next day. This thing was truly fascinating … and at the same time utterly horrible. It challenged every conception that I had. And I hoped against hope that I was looking at some form of atomic human mutation. I knew that I couldn’t ask anybody about it.

And because I hoped I would never see its like again, I came up with explanation-after-explanation for its existence, despite what I’d read on the enclosed document: It was shipped here from Hiroshima … it was the result of a Nazi genetic experiment … it was a dead circus freak … it was anything but what I knew it said it was. What it had to be. An extraterrestrial.

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

Once outside the building, I rejoined Brownie at his post.

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

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

 

Chapter 3 – “The Roswell Artifacts”

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

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

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

I was asking President Eisenhower for a personal favor — to let me out of my 5th year on the White House National Security staff so that I could pick up the command of my own anti-aircraft guided-missile battalion being formed up in Red Canyon, New Mexico. Ike had once promised me a command of my own when I returned from Korea and was posted to the White House. And in 1957, the opportunity came up — a juicy assignment at a high-security base with the coveted green tabs and all the trappings. Train and command an anti-aircraft battalion to use the Army’s most secret new surface-to-air missile, and then take it to Germany for some front-line target practice right where the Russians could see us.

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

Those were my memories this afternoon as I stood outside the back door of General Trudeau’s office on the 3rd floor of the outer ring of the Pentagon. It was 1961, 4 years after I left the White House and put on my uniform again to stand guard across the electronic no-man’s-land of radar sweeps and photo sensors just a few kilometers west of the Iron Curtain. Ike had retired to his farm in Pennsylvania. My new boss was General Arthur Trudeau, one of the last “fighting generals” from the Korean War.

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

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

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

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

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

I knew his code. The Cold War was at its height. There were enemies all around us — in government, within the intelligence services, and within the White House itself. Those of us in military intelligence who knew the truth about how much danger the Country was in were very circumspect about what we said — even to each other — and where we said it. Looking back on it now from the safe distance of 40 years, it’s hard to believe that even as big 8-cylinder American cars rolled off the assembly lines into suburban drives and television antennas sprung up on roofs of brand-new houses in thousands of subdivisions around the Country, we were in the midst of a treacherous war of nerves.

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

A handful of us knew the awful truth about Korea. We lost it not because we were beaten on the battlefield, but because we were compromised from within. The Russian advisers fighting alongside the North Koreans were given our plans even before they reached those of us on MacArthur’s staff. And when we threw our best technology into the field and into the air, the Soviets had already formulated plans to capture it and take it back to Russia. When the time came to talk peace at Panmunjom and negotiate a POW exchange, I knew where those Americans were — 10 miles across the border, and who would not be coming home. And there were people right inside our own government who let them stay there in prison camps, where some of them might be alive to this very day.

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

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

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

The General had put me in an office on the 2nd floor of the outer ring directly under him. That way — as I would soon find out — whenever he needed me in a hurry, I could get upstairs and through the back door before anybody even knew where I was.

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

My specific assignment was to the Research&Development Division’s Foreign Technology desk, what I thought would be a pretty dry post because it mainly required me to keep up on the kinds of weapons and research that our allies were doing. Read the intelligence reports; review films of weapons tests; debrief scientist and the research people at universities on what their colleagues overseas were doing; and write up proposals for weapons that the Army might need. It was important and it had its share of “cloak and dagger”. But after what I’d been through in Rome chasing down the Gestapo and SS officers that the Nazis left behind and the Soviet NKVD units masquerading themselves as Italian Communist partisans, it seemed like a great opportunity to help General Trudeau keep some of the Army’s ideas out of the hands of the other military services. But then I didn’t know what was inside that file cabinet.

The Army generally categorized the types of weapons research that it was doing into 2 basic groups — domestic and foreign. There was the research that sprang out of work going on in the United States and research by people overseas. I knew that I’d be keeping track of what the French were doing with advanced helicopter design, and whether the British would be able to build a practical vertical takeoff-and-landing fighter — something we’d given up on after WWII. Then there was the German big gun — the V3, granddaughter of “Big Bertha” that the Germans threatened Paris with during the First World War. We had found the barrel assemblies of the German artillery pieces near Calais after we invaded Normandy and knew that the Nazis were working on something like that — like their jet engine fighter and new Panzer tank — could have changed the outcome of the War if they’d held us off any longer at the Battle of the Bulge.

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

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

“It’s going to take you a little longer than that, Phil,” Trudeau said. Now he was almost laughing — something he didn’t do very much in those days. In fact, the only time I remember him laughing that way was after he heard that his name had been put up to command the U.S. forces in Vietnam. He also heard that they wanted me to head up the intelligence section for the Army Special Forces command in Vietnam. We both knew that the Army mission in Vietnam was headed for disaster because it was a think-tank war. And the people in the “think-tank” were more worried about restraining the Army than in wiping out the Vietcong. So Trudeau had a plan. “Well either win the war or get court-martialed,” he said. “But they’ll know we were there!.”

And he laughed when he said that the same way he was laughing as he told me to take my time with the contents of the file cabinet. “You’ll want to think about this before you start writing any reports,” he said. I couldn’t help but pick up the nervousness in his voice — forcing itself through his laughter, the same sound over the phone that got me nervous when I heard it the first time. There really was something here he wasn’t telling me.

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

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

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

The General didn’t wait for me to answer him. He left me standing there in his office and walked out to the reception room, where I heard him giving orders into a speakerphone. He had barely clicked off the speaker and walked back to where I was standing when 4 enlisted men pulling a hand truck showed up, saluted, and stood there at attention while Trudeau kept looking at me. He didn’t say anything. He turned to the enlisted men instead.

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

Then he turned back to me. “Why don’t you take some time with this, Phil.” He paused. “But not too much time.

“Sergeant” — he turned his attention back to the enlisted man with the shortest haircut — “please see the Colonel back to his own office below.”

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

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

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

I remembered a hot July night 14 years before at Fort Riley when I was the young intelligence officer after having just been shipped back from Rome. I remembered being hustled into a storage hangar by one of the sentries — a fellow member of the Fort Riley bowling team. What he pointed to under the thick olive tarp that night was also very, very secret. And I held my breath, hoping that what was inside this cabinet wasn’t anything like what I saw that night in Kansas, July 6, 1947.

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

Then after I went to the White House and saw all the National Security Council memos describing the “incident” and talking about the “package” and the “goods”, I knew that the strange figure that I’d seen floating in liquid in a casket within a casket at Fort Riley wasn’t just a bad dream I could forget about. Nor could I forget about the radar anomalies at the Red Canyon missile ranger or the strange alerts over Ramstein air base in West Germany. I only hoped all of it would never catch up with me again, and I could go through the rest of my Army career in some kind of peace.

But it was not to be. There — mangled like somebody else’s junk — were the trinkets I knew would involve me in something deeper than I had ever wanted. Whatever else I had to do in this lift, here was a job that would change it all.

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

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

General Trudeau peeked his head around the door.

“Look inside?” he asked.

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

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

“They’d probably kill me,” I said.

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

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

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

This had all the makings of a plot — pure and simple.

“Look, who’s our biggest problem?” I asked. But it was a pro forma question because I already knew the answer.

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

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

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

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

“Anybody know I have this?” I asked.

“Everybody knows that if you’re poking around something, it’s got to be important,” he said. “So don’t act like the cat that ate the canary. They’re watching you as much as they’re watching me.” Then he walked to the doorway, looked down both ends of the hall, and turned back to me. “But move this thing along. Because we could be out of this office in under a year, and I don’t want to have to worry about running out of time on this.”

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

I didn’t take the file apart that night, even after another nondescript wooden crate that looked like something you ship vegetables in was carted to my office by an equally nondescript Army corporal. I didn’t go through the material the next night, either.

But over the following week — whenever I could be sure that no one was around who could pop in without warning — I moved the material from the box into the file and allowed myself time to look at it. It was just like falling through the looking glass into a different world — a puzzle of separate pieces that only vaguely captured what had been in the memos that I’d read over at the White House. No wonder no one had really wanted anything to do with this junk, which held out the promise of a whole world we knew nothing about but that as far back as 1947, the government had decided to keep an absolute secret.

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

First, there were the tiny, clear, single-filament, flexible glass-like wires twisted together through a kind of gray harness as if they were cables going into a junction. They were narrow filaments, thinner than copper wire. As I held the harness of strands up to the light from my desk, I could see an eerie glow coming through them as if they were conducting the faint light and breaking it up into different colors. When the personnel at the retrieval site in the desert outside of Roswell pulled this piece out of the wreckage of the delta-shaped object, they thought it was some sort of wiring device — a “harness” is what they said — or maybe some of them thought it was a junction box or electrical relay. But whatever they thought it was, they believed there was nothing like it on this planet. As I turned the object over in my hand, I figured — from the way the individual filaments flexed back-and-forth but didn’t break, and the way they were able to conduct a light beam along their length — they were a wire of some sort. But for what purpose, I didn’t have a clue.

Then there were the thin 2-inch-around matte gray oyster cracker-shaped wafers of a material that looked like plastic but had tiny road maps of wires barely raised/etched along the surface. They were the size of a 25-cent piece. But the etchings on the surface reminded me of squashed insects with their hundred legs spread out at right angles from a flat body. Some were more rounded or elliptical. It was a circuit — anyone could figure that out by 1961, especially when you put it under a magnifying glass — but from the way these wafers were stacked on each other, this was a circuitry unlike any other I had even seen. I couldn’t figure out how to plug it in and what kind of current it carried.

But it was clearly a wire circuitry of a sort that came from a larger board of wafers on board the flying craft. My hand shook ever so slightly as I held these pieces. Not because they themselves were scary, but because I was awed — just for a few seconds — about the momentous nature of this find. It was like an architectural treasure trove, the discoveries of some long-departed culture, a Rosetta stone, even though whoever crashed onto the desert floor was still very active and roaming around our most secrete Army and Air Force bases.

I was most interested in the file descriptions accompanying a 2-ppiece set of dark elliptical eyepieces as thin as skin. The Walter Reed pathologists said they adhered to the lenses of the extraterrestrial creatures’ eyes and seemed to reflect existing light — even in what looked like complete darkness — so as to illuminate and intensify images in the darkness to allow their wearer to pick out shapes. The reports had said that the pathologists at Walter Reed hospital who autopsied one of these creatures tried to peer through them in the darkness to watch the one-or-two Army sentries and medical orderlies walking down a corridor adjacent to the pathology lab. These figures were illuminated in a greenish-orange, depending on how they moved, but the pathologists could see only their outer shape. And when they got close to each other, their shapes blended into a single form. But they could also see the outlines of furniture and wall and objects on desktops.

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

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

There was a written description and a sketch of another device too, like a short stubby flashlight almost with a self-contained power source that was nothing at all like a battery. The scientists at Wright Field who examined it said that they couldn’t see the beam of light shoot out of it. But when they pointed the pencil-like flashlight at a wall, they could see a tiny circle or red light. But there was no actual beam from the end of what seemed liked a lens to the wall as there would have been if you were playing a flashlight off on a distant object. When they passed an object in front of the source of the light, it interrupted it. But the beam was so intense that the object began smoking. They played with this device a lot before they realized that it was an alien cutting device like a blowtorch. One time they floated some smoke across the light, and suddenly the whole beam took shape. What had been invisible suddenly had a round, micro-thin, tunnel-like shape to it. Why did the inhabitants of this craft have a cutting device like this aboard their ship? It wasn’t until later when I read military reports of cattle mutilations in which entire organs were removed without any visible trauma to the surrounding cell tissue, that I realized that the light-beam cutting torch that I thought was in the Roswell file was actually a surgical implement — just like a scalpel — that was being used by the aliens in medical experiments on our livestock.

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

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

Outside the Pentagon, there was a battle starting up all over again set to rage just as it had during the Truman and Eisenhower presidencies. Whose intelligence was accurate? Whose was truthful? Who was trying to manipulate the White House, and who believed that by coloring-or-twisting fact that he could change the course of History?

John Kennedy was leading a young administration capable of making extraordinary mistakes. And there were people at the heart of his administration whose own views of how the World should work were inspiring them to distort facts, misstate intentions, and disregard obvious realities in the hope that their views would prevail.

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

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

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

Now, all I could think about was what I’d seen that night in 1947 and — worse — what-in-the-world I was going to do with all this stuff next. I’d asked myself “why me?” hundred-of-times since that night in the Pentagon. And asked why after 14 years and my experience at Fort Riley, I had become the inheritor of the Roswell file. But I had not answers then and no answers now. If General Trudeau had meant for this to happen when he took over R&D 3 years before I got there, I’ll never know. He never gave me any reasons — only orders. But since he was the master strategizer, I sometimes think he believed I must have had some experience with alien encounters and wouldn’t be “spooked” by working with the technology from the Roswell file.

I never asked him about it — at strange as that seems — because the military being what it is, you don’t ask. You simply do. So now as then, I don’t question. I only remember that I went forward from that night to put into development as much of the Roswell file as I could and believed that whatever happened, I was doing the right thing.
Chapter 4 – “Inside the Pentagon at the Foreign Technology Desk”

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So with the sides drawn and tensions between the various bureaus and services within the Pentagon, it didn’t take me long in those first few weeks to learn the politics of my new job. With the field reports, scientific analysis, medical autopsies, and technological debris from the Roswell crash that I had under lock-and-key, my first rule was to be as circumspect as possible and to draw no attention to myself. I’d learned this skill when I served on MacArthur’s staff in Korea 10 years earlier. I had to be the little man who wasn’t there. If people don’t think you’re there, they talk. And that’s when you learn things.

And within those first few weeks, I saw and learned a lot about how the politics of the Roswell discovery had matured over the 14 years since the crash and since the intense discussions at the White house after Eisenhower became president. Each of the different branches of the military had been protecting its own cache of Roswell-related files and had been actively seeking to gather as much new Roswell material as possible.

Certainly all the services had their own reports from examiners at Walter Reed and Bethesda concerning the nature of the alien physiology. Mine were in my “nut file” along with the drawings. It was pretty clear, also — from the way the Navy and Air Force were formulating their respective plans for advanced military-technology hardware — that many of the same pieces of technology in my files were probably shared by the other services. But nobody was bragging because everybody wanted to know what the other guy had. But since — officially — Roswell had never happened in the first place, there was no technology to develop.

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

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

There were real stories, however, that wouldn’t go away no matter how many times somebody official stepped up to say the story was false. For example, I picked up the rumors pretty quickly concerning the UFO that the Air Force was supposed to be keeping at Edwards AFB in California and the research they were conducting on the spacecraft’s technology — especially its electromagnetic-wave propulsion system. [StealthSkater note: is this was Bob Lazar was talking about?]

There were also rumors circling around the Air Force about the early harvesting of Roswell technology in the design of the all-wing bombers. But I didn’t know how much stock to put in them. The Army had been developing an all-wing design since right after World War I. And within a year after the Roswell crash, Jack Northrop’s company began test flights of their YB49 flying wing recon/bomber models. The YB49’s quadruple vertical tail fins were so uncannily reminiscent of the head-on Roswell craft sketches in our files that it was hard not to make a connection between the spacecraft and the bomber. But the flying wing’s development took place over 10 years before I got to the Foreign Technology desk, so I had no direct evidence relating the bomber to the spacecraft. [StealthSkater note: More recently, the B-2 stealth bomber had its basis in Northrop’s “flying wing”. And the 1970s’ “Have Blue” and “Tacit Blue” stealth prototypes looked like what Corso said was the Roswell craft.]

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

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

Trudeau was right. In the rumor bank from which everybody in the Pentagon made deposits and withdrawals, the Air Force was sitting on the “Holy Grail” — an spaceship itself and maybe even a live extraterrestrial. Nobody knew for sure. We knew that after it became a separate branch of the military in 1948, the Air Force kept some of the Roswell artifacts in Wright Field outside of Dayton, Ohio because that’s where “the cargo” was shipping, stopping off in Fort Riley along the way. But the Air Force was primarily interested in how things fly. So whatever R&D they worked on was focused on how their planes could evade radar and outfly the Soviets — no matter where we got the technology from.

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

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

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

That left the Army.

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

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

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

However we were going to camouflage our development of the Roswell technology, it had to be within the existing way we did business so no one would recognize any difference. We operated on a normal defense development projects budget of well into the billions in 1960. Most of it was allocated to the analysis of new weapons systems. Just within our own bureau, we had contracts with the Nation’s biggest defense companies with whom we maintained almost daily communications. … … … … …

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

But now it had to change. General Trudeau was looking for the grand endgame development scheme. It began with researching the history of how the whole file — the field reports, autopsy information, descriptions of the items found in the wreckage, and the bits-and-pieces of Roswell technology themselves — came into the possession of Army R&D.

Luckily for me, the whole Roswell story was still unknown outside the highest military circles in 1961. Retired Major Jesse Marcel — the intelligence officer at the 509th who had been at the crash site in July, 1947 and who had given the initial reports of a spacecraft — would not yet tell his story in public for at least another 10 years. Everyone else connected to the incident was either dead or sworn to silence.

The Air Force — which moved quickly to take over management of the Roswell affair and ongoing UFO contacts and sightings — still kept everything that they learned highly classified under the Air Force Intelligence Command and waged a push-and-pull war with the CIA for information about sightings and ongoing contacts with anything extraterrestrial. These really were not my concerns yet. But they would be.

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

In the early hours after the cargo arrived in Texas, there was so much confusion about what was found and what wasn’t found that Army officers — who were in charge of the entire retrieval operation — quickly scraped together both a cover story and a plan to silence all the military and civilian witnesses to the recovery.

The cover story was easy. General Ramey ordered Maj. Jesse Marcel to recant his “flying saucer” story and pose for a news photo with debris from a weather balloon, which he described as the wreckage that the retrieval team recovered from outside Roswell. Marcel followed orders, and the “flying saucer” officially became a weather balloon.

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

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

By the next morning — July 8 — the suppression of the crash story was in full operation. The Army had already issued a new cover story to the Press by the time that CIC officers had gotten to the witnesses and — using threats and outright promises of cash money — forced them to recant their statements about what they saw. Rancher Mac Brazel — who first said that he had been at the site during the recovery and had described the strange debris — disappeared for 2 days and then showed up in town driving a new pickup truck and denying that he’d ever seen anything. CIC officers turned up at people’s homes and spoke quietly to parents about what their children had learned. Whatever people thought was happening, Army personnel said wasn’t; and it would have to stay that way.

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

The silencing worked so well that for the next 30 years, the story seemed to have been swallowed up by the quiet emptiness of desert where all things are worn down to a fine grade of sameness. But belying the quiet that settled over Roswell a thousand miles away, part of the U.S. military went on wartime alert as bits-and-pieces of the craft reached their destinations. One of those destinations — Lt. Gen. Nathan Twining’s desk at Wright Field — was the focal point from which the Roswell artifacts would reach the Foreign Technology desk at the Pentagon.

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

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

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

Although I never saw the actual memos from President Truman to General Twining regarding his trip to New Mexico, I had heard stories about secret orders that Truman had issued to Twining directing him to New Mexico to investigate the reports of the crash and to report directly to the White House on what he had found. I believe that it was General Twining’s initial report to the President that confirmed that the Army had retrieved something from the desert, and might have suggested the need for the formation of an “advisory group” to develop policy about whatever was discovered. And remember, in those first 48 hours, nobody really knew what this was.

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

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

General Twining had seen the material for himself. And even before he returned to Wright Field, he’d conferred with the rocket scientists who were part of his brain trust at Alamogordo. Now, during the remainder of the summer months, he quietly compiled a report that he would deliver to President Truman and an ad hoc group of military, government, and civilian officials who would ultimately became the chief policy makers for what would become an ongoing contact with extraterrestrials over the ensuing 50 years. And as stories of the Roswell crash and other UFO sightings around U.S. military bases began to filter in through the command chain of the armed services, General Twining also needed to establish a lower security channel along which he could exchange information with other commands that were not cleared all the way to the top.

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

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

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

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

He described the aircraft as it had been reported in the sightings — a “light reflective or metallic substance”; “absence of a trail except in those few instances when the object was operating under high performance conditions”; “circular or elliptical in shape, flat on bottom and domed on the top”; flights in formation consisting of from “3 to 9 objects”; and no sound except for those instances when “a substantial rumbling roar was noted”. The objects moved quickly for aircraft at that time, he noted to General Schulgen — at level flight speed above 300 knots.

Were the United States to build such an aircraft — especially one with a range of over 7,000 miles — the cost, commitment, administrative and development overhead, and drain on existing high-technology projects required that the entire project should be independent or outside of the normal weapons-development bureaucracy. In other words — as I interpreted the memo — Twining was suggesting to the commander of the Army Air Force that were the Air Force — which would become a separate branch of the military by the following year — to attempt to exploit the technology that had quite literally been dropped into its lap, it had to do so separately and independently from any normal weapons-development program. The descriptions of the super-secret projects at Nellis Air Force Base (or Area 51) at the Nevada desert seem to fit the profile of the kind of recommendation that General Twining was making, especially the employment of the “skunk works” group at Lockheed in the development of the Stealth fighter and B2 bomber.

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

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

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

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

Finally, the General promised the Army Air Forces command that the Air Materiel Command would continue to investigate the phenomenon within its own resources in order to define its nature further, and it would route any more information that it developed through channels. 3 days after the memo — On September 26, 1947 — General Twining gave his report on the Roswell crash and its implications for the United States to President Truman and a short list of officials he convened to begin the management of this top-secret combination of inquiry, police development, and “ops”. This working group — which included Adm. Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, Dr. Vannevar Bush, Secretary James Forrestal, Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg, Dr. Detlev Bronk, Dr. Jerome Hunsaker, Sidney W. Souers, Gordon Gray, Dr. Donald Menzel, Gen. Robert M. Montague, Drl. Lloyd V. Berkner, and Gen. Nathan Twining himself — became the nucleus for an ongoing 50-year operation that some people have called “Majestic-12”.

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

But the plan didn’t stop with the creation of the working group. In fact, the operation very quickly developed into something far more sophisticated because General Twining’s “flying discs” simply wouldn’t go away. As more information on sightings and encounters came rolling in through every imaginable channel — from police officers taking reports from frightened citizens to airline pilots tracking strange objects in the sky — “the group” realized that they needed policies on how to handle what was turning into a mass-media phenomenon.

They needed a mechanism for processing the thousands of flying saucer reports that could be anything from a real crash or close encounter to a couple of bohunks tossing a pie tin into the air and snapping its picture with their Aunt Harriet’s Kodak Brownie. The group also had to assess the threat from the Soviet Union and Iron Curtain countries — assuming, of course, that flying saucers were restricted to North America — and gather intelligence on what kinds of information our allies had on flying saucers as well.

And it still had to process the Roswell technology and figure out how it could be used. So from the original group, there developed a whole tree structure of loosely confederated committees and subgroups –sometimes complete organizations like the Air Force “Project Blue Book” — all kept separate by administrative firewalls so that there would be no information leakage, but all controlled from the top.

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

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

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

And that’s how 12 years later, the Roswell technology turned up in an old combination-locked military file cabinet carted into my new Pentagon office by two of the biggest enlisted men that I had ever seen.
Chapter 5 – “The Cover-Up”

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Soviet agents were everywhere, Central Intelligence group director Adm. Roscoe Hillenkoetter — a member of President Truman’s advisory group on UFOs — informed the President. A top-down counter-intelligence operation had to be put in place immediately, he recommended, or every plant the military had to evaluate what they’d retrieved from Roswell would be compromised.

There were a million questions. Were these flying objects the prelude to something much bigger? Were they communicating with the Soviets? Were they allied wsith the Soviets? Were they probing our defenses for a planetary invasin? We had already assumed that the behavior of these aircraft was hostile, but what did they want?

Meanwhile, other reports of civilian flying saucer sightings were turning up in newspapers and coming in through local police. Even airline pilots were seeing strange lights. There wasn’t much time to act. A secret this big about flying saucers was bound to get out and cause untold panic among the civilian population unless an elaborate camouflage was established. And worse, we had to keep the Soviets away from this until we knew what we had. We needed a plan. And right away.

Some have said that it was Secretary of Defense James Forrestal’s idea. Others said the whole scheme belonged to Central Intelligence director Hillenkoeteer. I, frankly, don’t know first-hand because when the plan was hatched, I was sweating out the end of the summer at Fort Riley, still trying to shake out of my mind the image of that ghoulishly unearthly thing I’d seen floating in its container. But whoever said it first was saying the obvious, according to the people on Eisenhower’s National Security staff whom I worked with 6 years later. Maybe it was Forrestal after all who was the only person in the Cabinet who could have spoken to Truman that bluntly just a little over 2 years after the man had inherited the office from FDR and was already a very unpopular president.

“It’s like this,” I had heard President Truman was told. “We’re in a real pickle here. Nate Twining says he doesn’t know what-the-hell this thing is except that if the Soviets get a hold of it, it’ll change the shape of things to come for sure.”

“You fellas going to write up some report for me?” the President asked.

“General Twining says that he’d rather do it as a briefing, Sir, for the time being,” Admiral Hillenkoetter suggested. “For your ears only. Then we have to have a working task group to manage this whole issue.”

Maybe the working group — whatever it was going to be called — would come up with a report analyzing the situation as soon as they reviewed what General Twining was putting under lock-and-key at Wright Field. But nobody wanted to speculate until they knew what was there.

“Maybe you should sit down with General Twining first,” both Forrestal and Hillenkoetter suggested. They knew that Harry Truman liked to get first-hand reports from people who had seen the situation with their own eyes. FDR was corporate and knew how to digest reports. But Truman was different. He knew how to run a haberdashery store. If a hat didn’t fit, he’d have to go back to the factory to find out why. It was the same with General Twining, who’d been at the crash sites himself. If Truman wanted answers, he’d have to see it through the eyes of someone who had been there.

“Does he know what these SOBs are after” Truman asked, referring to the aliens in the crashed saucer.

“That’s one of the questions we want to address,” they said.

“How do you plan to do it?”

Forrestal and Hillenkoetter explained that they wanted the President to hear what General Twining had to say and then convene a group a military, civilian, and intelligence personnel with strong old-school ties of trust for one another. In this way, whatever decisions they made wouldn’t have to be memo-ed all over the place, thus risking the possibilities of leaks and tip-offs to the Soviets. “We don’t want the newspapers or radio people getting their hands on any of this, either,” they told the President.

“Winchell would crucify me with this if he found out what were doing,” Truman was reported to have said at that meeting. Nobody “in the know” liked President Truman very much. And he could appreciate it.

“It’s just like the Manhattan Project, Mr. President,” Admiral Hillenkoetter reminded him. “It was war. We couldn’t tell anyone. This is war. Same thing.”

Then they explained that after they had convened a working group, they would task out the research of the technology while keeping it from the Soviet spy machine already operating at full bore within the Government.

“We hide it from the Government itself,” the secretary explained.

“Create a whole new level of security classifications just for this,” the Central Intelligence director said. “Any information we decide to release — even internally — we downgrade so the people getting the information never have the security clearance that allows them all the way to the top. The only way to hide it from the Russians is to hide it from ourselves.”

But the President was still thinking about the difficulties of keeping an operation this far-reaching out of the news, especially when “flying saucers” had become one of the hottest news items to talk about. What was he supposed to say when people ask the government about the flying disc stories? He asked, pressing for details that still had to be established. How could they research these strange creatures without the news getting out? And how could they analyze the wealth of physical material Hillenkoetter had described to him without bringing people from outside government? President Truman simply didn’t see how this “government-within-a-government” camouflage idea could work without the whole thing spinning out of control. Despite Forrestal’s assurances, the President remained skeptical.

“And there’s one final point,” Truman was said to have brought up to his Central Intelligence group director and Secretary of Defense. It was a question so basic that its apparent naiveté belied an ominous threat that it suggested was just over the horizon. “Do we ever tell the American people what really happened?”

There was silence.

Don’t ask me how I know. My old friend and enemy from the KGB wouldn’t tell me how he knew, and I didn’t press him. But accept it as fact from the only source that could know — just as I did back when was told — that neither the Secretary of Defense nor the Director of Intelligence had considered a disclosure like this as even a remote possibility.

“Well,” President Truman said, “do we?”

On November 7, 1944 — the day that FDR was elected to his 4th and final term — his chief adviser Harry Hopkins had described the new Vice-President Harry Truman as a man who couldn’t block a hat but who shouldn’t be underestimated. And James Forrestal — the man to whom he was speaking at the time — now understood what he meant as the Secretary sat across from the now-President Harry Truman.

This was a basic ‘Yes’/’No’ question. And although Forrestal and Hillenkoetter had a knee-jerk reflex ‘No’ answer, Forrestal quickly saw that it wasn’t that easy. As wartime administrators, their first response was naturally to disclose nothing, abiding by the old saw that “what the people don’t know, they don’t need to know”. But President Truman — who had not come from a military background — had seen something that neither Forrestal nor Hillenkoetter had seen. If these ships could evade our radar and land anywhere at will, what would stop them from landing in front of the White House or — for that matter — the Kremlin? Certainly not the U.S. Army Air Force.

“So what do we say when they land,” I’m told that Truman continued, “and create more panic in the streets than if we’d disclosed what we think we know now?”

“But we really don’t know anything,” the Director of Intelligence said. “Not a thing until we analyze what we’ve retrieved.”

But both the Secretary of Defense and Director of Intelligence agreed with President Truman that he was right to be skeptical — especially on his final point about disclosure.

… … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … …

Within 3 months after he’d been dispatched to New Mexico to learn what had happened at Roswell, General Twining met with President Truman as Hillenkoetter and Forrestal had suggested. He explained exactly what he believed the Army had pulled out of the desert. It was almost beyond comprehension, he described to the President — nothing that could have come from this planet. If the Russians were working on something like this, it was so secret that not even their own military commanders knew anything about it, and the United States would have to establish a crash program just to prepare a defense. So it was Twining’s assertion that what they found outside of Roswell was — in his words — “not of this Earth”.

Now President Truman had heard it — he told Forrestal after Twining had left for Ohio — “directly from the horse’s mouth”. And he was convinced. This was bigger than the Manhattan Project, and required that it be managed on a larger scale and obviously for a longer period. The group proposed by Forrestal and Hillenkoetter had to consider what they were really managing and for how long. Were they only trying to keep one secret — that an extraterrestrial alien spaceship crashed at Roswell? Or were they hiding what would quickly become the largest military R&D undertaking in History — the management of what would become America’s relationship with extraterrestrials?

General Twining had made it clear in his preliminary analysis that they were investigating the whole phenomenon of flying discs, including Roswell and any other encounter that happened to take place. These were hostile entities, the General said, who — if they were on a peaceful mission — would have not avoided contact by taking evasive maneuvers even as they penetrated our airspace and observed our most secret military installations. They had a technology vastly superior to ours, which we had to study and exploit in case they turned more aggressive. If we were forced to fight a war in outer space, we would have to understand the nature of the enemy better, especially if it came to preparing the American people for an enemy they had to face. So investigate first, he suggested, but prepare for the day when the whole undertaking would have to be disclosed.

This, Truman could understand. He had trusted Twining to manage this potential crisis from the moment that Forrestal had alerted him that the crash had taken place. And Twining had done a brilliant job. He kept the lid on the story and brought back everything that he could under one roof. He understood as Twining described to him the strangeness of the spacecraft that seemed to have no engines, no fuel, nor any apparent methods of propulsion, yet outflew our fastest fighters; the odd child-like creatures who were inside, and how one of them was killed by a gunshot; the way you could see daylight through the inside of the craft even though the Sun had not yet risen; thin beams of light that you couldn’t see until they hit an object, and then burned right through it; and on and on, more questions than answers. It would take years to find these answers — Truman had said — and it was beyond the immediate capacity of our military to do anything about it. This will take a lot of manpower, the General said, and most of the work will have to be done in secret.

General Twining showed photographs of these alien beings and autopsy reports that suggested that they were too human — they had to be related to our species in some way. They were obviously intelligent and able to communicate — witnesses at the scene had reported — by some sort of thought projection unlike any mental telepathy you’d see at a carnival show. [StealthSkater note: real-time interactive remote-viewing?] … … … … … … … … …

At the very least, Twining had suggested, the crescent-shaped craft looked so uncomfortably like the German Horten wings our flyers had seen at the end of the War that he had to suspect the Germans had bumped into something we didn’t know about. And his conversations with Wernher von Braun and Willey Ley at Alamogordo in the days after the crash confirmed this. They didn’t want to be thought of as verruckt but intimated that there was a deeper story about what the Germans had engineered.

No, the similarity between the Horten wing and the craft they had pulled out of the arroyo was no accident. We always wondered how the Germans were able to incorporate such advanced technology into their weapons development in so short a time and during the Great Depression. Did they have help? Maybe we were now as lucky as the Germans and broke of a piece of this technology for ourselves. With an acceleration capability and maneuverability we’d never seen before, this craft would keep American aircraft engineers busy for years just incorporating what they could see into immediate designs.

The issue of security was paramount. But so we questions of disclosure, the President reminded him. This thing was too big to hide, and getting bigger all the time while reporters were just like dogs on a scent. So just putting a higher security classification on it and threatening anybody who came too close wasn’t enough to hide a secret this big. You couldn’t prevent leaks. And eventually it would all have to come out anyway. General Twining should think about that before the group made any final decisions, the President advised.

… … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … …

Unless the “working group” established a long-term plan for protecting and developing the Roswell project, the secrets would soon leak out. I understand that it was General Twining who pointed out to the grap that — in fact — the story had already leaked out. It was leaked, he said, hours after the crash and then retracted. In fact, people were still talking about it in New Mexico. But after the Army’s weather balloon story, the national newspapers were treating the flying disc reports as the delusions of people who had seen too many “Buck Rogers” movies. The national press was already doing the committee’s work.
What was really needed, Twining suggested, was a method for gathering the information about continuing UFO activity — especially crashes, high-probability sightings by pilots or the military, or actual physical encounters with individuals — and surreptitiously filtering that information to the group while coming up with practical explanations that would turning “flying discs” into completely identifiable and explainable phenomena. Under the cover of explaining away all the flying disc activity, the appropriate agencies represented b y members of the working group would be free to research the real flying disc phenomenon as they deemed appropriate.

But through it all, Twining stressed, there had to be a way of maintaining full deniability of the flying disc phenomenon while actually preparing the public for a disclosure by gradually desensitizing them to the potential terror of confronting a more powerful biological entity from a different world. It would have to be — General Twining suggested — at the same time both the greatest cover-up and great public relations program ever undertaken.

The group agreed that these were the requirements of the endeavor they would undertake. They would form nothing less than a government within the government — sustaining itself from presidential administration to presidential administration regardless of whatever political party took power — and ruthlessly guarding their secrets while evaluating every new bit of information on flying saucers they received. But at the same time, they would allow disclosure of some of the most far-fetched information — whether true or not — because it would help create a climate of public attitude that would be able to accept the existence of extraterrestrial life without a general sense of panic.

“It will be,” General Twining said, “a case where the cover-up is the disclosure and the disclosure is the cover-up,. Deny everything, but let the public sentiment take its course. Let skepticism do our work for us until the truth becomes common acceptance.”

Meanwhile, the group agreed to establish an information-gathering project, ultimately named “Blue Book” and managed explicitly by the Air Force, which would serve public relations purposes by allowing individuals to file reports on flying disc sightings. While the “Blue Book” field officers attributed commonplace explanations to the reported sightings, the entire Project was a mechanism to acquire photographic records of flying saucer activity for evaluation and research. The most intriguing sightings that had the highest probability of being truly unidentified objects would be bumped upstairs to the working group for dissemination to the authorized agencies carrying on the research. For my purposes, when I entered the Pentagon, the general category of all flying disc phenomena research and evaluation was referred to simply as “foreign technology”.

 

Chapter 6 – “The Strategy”

There is an old story that I once heard about keeping secrets.

A group of men were trying to protect their deepest secrets from the rest of the World. They took their secrets and hid them in a shack whose very location was a secret. But the secret location was soon discovered, and in it was discovered the secrets that the group was hiding. But before every secret could be revealed, the men quickly built a second shack where they stored those secrets that they still kept to themselves.

Soon, the second shack was discovered and the group realized that they would have to give up some secrets to protect the rest. So they again moved quickly to build a third shack and protect whatever secrets they could. This process repeated itself over-and-over until anyone wanting to find out what the secrets were had to start at the first shack and work their way from shack-to-shack until they came to where they could go no further because they didn’t know the location of the next shack.

For 50 years, this was the very process by which the secrets of Roswell were protected by various serial incarnations of an ad hoc confederation of top-secret working groups throughout different branches of the government. And it is still going on today.

Were you to search through every government document to find the declassified secrets of Roswell and the contact we maintained with the aliens who were visiting us before and have been doing so ever since, you would find code-named project after code-named project, each with its own file; security classification; military or government administration; oversight mechanism; some form of budget; and even reports of highly-classified documents. All of these projects were started to accomplish part of the same task: manage our ongoing relationship with the alien visitors that we discovered at Roswell. However, at each level, once the security had been breached for whatever reason — even by design — part of the secret was disclosed through declassification while the rest was dragged into a new classified project or moved to an existing one that had not been compromised.

It makes perfect sense, especially to those of us who understand the government is not some monolithic piece of granite that never moves or reacts. To those of us inside the military/government machine, the government is dynamic, highly reactive, and even proactive when it comes to devising ways to protect its most closely held secrets. For all the years after Roswell, we weren’t just one step ahead of people wanting to know what really happed. We were a hundred steps ahead, a thousand, or even more. In fact, we never hid the truth from anybody. We just camouflaged it. It was always there. People just didn’t know what to look for or recognize it for what it was when they found it . And then found it over-and-over again.

Project “Blue Book” was created to make the general public happy that they had a mechanism for reporting what they saw. Projects “Grudge” and “Sign” were of a higher security to allow the military to process sightings and encounter reports that couldn’t be explained away as balloons, geese, or the planet Venue. “Blue Fly” and “Twinkle” had other purposes, as did scores of other camouflage projects like “Horizon”, “HARP,” “Rainbow”, and even the Space Defense Initiative — all of which had something to do with alien technology.

But no one ever knew it. And when reporters were actually given truthful descriptions of alien encounters, they either fell on the floor laughing or sold the story to the tabloids, who would print a drawing a large-headed, almond-eyed, 6-fingered alien. Again, everybody laughed. But that’s what these things really look like because I saw the one they trucked up to Wright Field.

Meanwhile as each new project was created and administered — another “bread crumb” for anyone pursuing the secrets to find — we were gradually releasing bits-and-pieces of information to those we knew would make something out of it. Flying saucers did truly buzz over Washington, DC in 1952. There are plenty of photographs and radar reports to substantiate it. But we denited it while encouraging science fiction writers to make movies like “The Man from Planet X” to blow off some of the pressure concerning the truth about flying discs. This was called camouflage through limited disclosure. And it worked. If people could enjoy it as entertainment, get duly frightened, and follow trails to nowhere that the working group had planted, then they’d be less likely to stumble over what we were really doing.

… … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … …

Actually, knowing how the material got into the Foreign Technology files was critically important because it meant that it was dispatched there originally. Even if it had been neglected over the years, it was clear that the Foreign Technology desk of the R&D system was its intended destination — part of the original plan. And I even had the documents from General Twining’s own files to substantiate this. Not that I would have ever revealed them at that time. General Twining — more than anyone else during those years after the War — understood the sensitive and protected nature of the R&D budget. And now that I understood how the camouflage was to take place, I also how brilliant the general’s plan was. R&D — although important and turning over records like topsoil from the Nazi weapons-development files captured after the War — was kind of a backwater railroad junction.

Unnoticed by most officers on their way to the top and not called upon in the late 1940s to do much more than record keeping, it turned out to be the perfect hideaway when the CIA hirelings came sniffing through the Pentagon in the early 1950s looking for anything they could find on the Roswell technology. Unless the were part of the “working group” from the start, not even members of the Eisenhower White House National Security staff knew that R&D was the repository of Roswell artifacts. I was there. I can vouch for that.

In fact, it wasn’t until I saw the files for myself and reverse-traced their path to my doorstep that I realized what General Twining and the working group had accomplished. By the time I had arrived at the White House, though, it was all ancient history. People were more worried about the sighting information deluging Project Blue Book every day than they were about the all-but-forgotten story of Roswell.

But my mind was drifting and General Trudeau was still speaking to me. He wanted to know what my research had uncovered and what I had learned about Roswell during my years at the White House, what I’d seen, how far the concentric circles of the group and the people who worked for them went.

“Phil, we both know that the ‘package’ you have is no surprise,” he said very flatly.

I didn’t respond substantively. And he didn’t expect me to, because to do would have meant breaching security confidentiality that I’d sworn to maintain when I was assigned to the NSC staff at the White House.

“You don’t have to say anything officially,” he continued. “And I don’t expect you to. But can you give me your impressions of how people working for the ‘group’ talked about the package?”

“I wasn’t working for the ‘group’, General,” I said. “And whatever I saw or heard was only because it happened to pass by, not because I was supposed to do anything about it.”

But he pushed me to remember whether the NSC staff had any direct dealings with the group, and how much the Central Intelligence staffers at the White House pressed to get any information they could about what the group was doing.

Of course, I remembered the questions going back-and-forth about what might have happened at Roswell; about what was really behind Blue Book; and about all those lights buzzing the Washington Monument back in 1952. I didn’t have anything substantive to tell my boss about my involvement. But his questions helped me put together a bigger picture than I though I knew. From my perspective in 1961 — especially after reviewing everything I could about what happened in the days after the Roswell crash — I could see very clearly the things that I didn’t understand back in 1955. I didn’t know why the CIA was so aggressively agitated about the repeated stories of flying saucer sightings, or why they kept searching for any information about the technology from Roswell. I certainly didn’t volunteer any information, mainly because nobody asked me — about having seen parts of “the cargo” as it passed through Fort Riley. I just played position, representing the Army as the military member of the National Security Staff. But I listened to everything that I heard like a fly on the wall.

General Trudeau’s questions forced me to ask myself what the “big picture” was that he saw. He was obviously looking for something in my descriptions of the architecture of the ‘group’ — as I had learned it from my review of the history — and of the staffers on the lower security classification periphery as I understood it from my experiences at the White House. He really wanted to know how the bureaucracy worked; how much activity the ‘group’ itself generated; what kinds of policy questions came up in my presence; and whether I was asked to comment informally on anything having to do with issues of the ‘group’.

Did Admiral Hillenkoetter host many briefings for President Eisenhower where Generals Twining, Smith, Montague, and Vandenberg were present? General W.B. Smith had replaced Secretary Forrestal after he committed suicide during the second year of the Truman administration. Were Professor Menzel and Drs. Bush and Berkner visitors to the White House on regular occasions? Did they meet at the White House with Admiral Hillenkoetter or the generals? What was the level of presence of the CIA staffers at the White House through all of this. And did I recognize anyone from the Joint Research and Development Board or the Atomic Energy Commission at any briefings chaired by Admiral Hillenkoetter?

Through General Trudeau’s questions, I could see not only that he knew his history as well as I did about how the original ‘group’ was formed and how it must have operated, but he also had a sense of what kind of problem was facing the military R&D and how much leeway he had to solve it. Like most ad hoc creations of government, the ‘group’ must have at some point become as self-serving as every other joint committee eventually became the longer it functioned and the more its job increased. As the camouflage about flying discs grew, so did the role of the ‘group’.

Only it didn’t have the one thing most government committees had: the ability to draw upon other areas of the government for more resources. This ‘group’ was above top-secret and — officially — had no right to exist. Therefore, as its functions grew over the new 10 years to encompass the investigations of more flying saucer sightings and the research into more encounters with alien aircraft or with the extraterrestrials themselves — its resources became stretched so thin that it had to create reasons for drawing upon other areas of the Government.

Accordingly, task-defined subgroups were formed to handle specific areas of investigation or research. These had to have had lower security classifications even if only because the number of personnel involved couldn’t have been cleared that quickly to respond to the additional work the ‘group’ was taking on. In fact, the work of the ‘group’ must have become unmanageable. Bits and pieces of information slipped out, and the ‘group’ had to determine what it could let go into the public record and what had to be protected at all costs. As in the story about the shacks, the ‘group’ members retreated to create new protected structures for the information they had to preserve.

The official camouflage was sagging under the weight of the information the ‘group’ had to investigate and the pressure of time they were allotted. Soon the military representatives found that — just as we did in Korea — they really couldn’t trust the career intelligence people — especially the CIA — because they seemed to have a different agenda. Maybe the military became resistant to giving up all the information it was collecting independently to the central group? Maybe — in the absence of any actual legislation establishing how the group’s work was to be paid for — the military saw valuable and formidable weapons opportunities slip through its fingers to the CIA’s budget? Maybe — and I know this is what happened — a power struggle developed within the ‘group’ itself.

The whole structure of the “working group” had changed, too, since the late 1940s when it was formed. What started out as a close-knit group of old friends from prep school had become an unmanageable mess within 5 years. Many “pieces of the pie” were floating around. And the different military branches wanted to break off chunks of the black budget so that you needed an entire administration just to manage the mangers of the cover-up.

Therefore at some point near the middle of the Eisenhower administration, seams opened up in the grand camouflaging scheme where nobody knew what anybody else was doing. Because of the cover-up, nobody really had a need to know. So nobody knew anything. The only people who wanted to get their hands on information and hardware belong to the CIA. But nobody — even those who vaguely understood what had happened 14 years earlier — trusted the CIA. Officially, then, nobody knew anything and nothing happened.

Through the 1950s, a cascade effect developed. What had started out as a single-purpose camouflage operation was breaking up into smaller units. Command-and-control functions started to weaken and — just like a submarine that breaks up on the bottom of the ocean — debris in the form of information bubbled to the surface. Army CIC — once a powerful force to keep the Roswell story itself suppressed — had weakened under the combined encroachments of the CIA and the FBI. It was during this period that my old friend J. Edgar Hoover — never happy at being kept out of any loop — jumped into the circle and very quietly began investigating the Roswell incident. This shook things up and very soon afterward, other government agencies — the ones with official reporting responsibilities — began poking around as well.

For all intents and purposes, the original scheme to perpetrate a camouflage was defunct by the late 1950s. Its functions were now managed by a series of individual groups within the military and civilian intelligence agencies, all still sharing limited information with each other, each pursuing its own individual research and investigation; and each — astonishingly — still acting as if some super intelligence ‘group’ was still in command. But like the “Wizard of Oz”, there was no super intelligence ‘group’. Its functions had been absorbed by the groups beneath it. But nobody bothered to tell anyone because a “super group” was never supposed to exist officially in the first place. That which did not exist officially could not go out of existence officially. Hence, right through the next 40 years, the remnants of what once was a “super group” went through the motions. But the real activities were carried out by individual agencies that believed on blind faith that they were being managed by higher-ups. … … … … … … … … That’s what the great flying saucer camouflage was like by the time President Kennedy was inaugurated.

“There’s nobody home, Phil,” General Trudeau told me as we compare our notes at that morning’s briefing. “Nobody home except us. We have to make our own policy.”

I was a soldier and followed orders. But Trudeau was a general — the product of a political process, stamped with congressional approval, and reporting to a civilian executive. Generals are made by the government, not by the Army. They sit between the government and the vast military machine and from the Army Chief of Staff all the way down to the brigadiers at bases around the World, generals create the way military policy is supposed to work. And on the morning of this briefing over cups of coffee in his inner office of the 3rd floor of the Pentagon, Lieutenant General Trudeau was going to make policy and do the very thing that over 10 years of secret work groups and committees and research planning had failed to do: exploit the Roswell technology.

“I need you to tell me that you found a way to make something out of this mess,” General Trudeau told me. “There must be some piece of technology in your file that will make a weapon, that we can use for one of our helicopters. What do we have in there, Phil?” Then he said, “Time is now of the essence. We have to do something because nobody else will.”

In the great cloud of unknowing that had descended upon the Pentagon with respect to the Roswell package, the 5-or-6 of us in the Navy, Air Force, and Army — who actually knew what we had — didn’t confide in anyone outside his own branch of the military. And certainly didn’t talk to the CIA. So, in a way that could only happen inside the military bureaucracy, the cover-up became covered up from the cover-up, leaving the few of us “in the know” free to do whatever we wanted.

General Trudeau and I were all alone there insofar as the “package” went. Whatever vestige of the ‘group’ remained had simply lost track of the material delivered to Foreign Technology 14 years earlier. And the General was right — nobody was home, and our enemies inside government were capitalizing on whatever information they could find. The Roswell package was one of the prizes. And if we didn’t do anything with it, the Russians would. And they were onto us.

Our own military intelligence personnel told us that the Soviets were trafficking so heavily in our military secrets that they knew things about us in the Kremlin before we knew them in Congress. The Army at least knew that the KGB had penetrated the CIA, and the leadership of the CIA had been an integral part of the ‘working group’ on flying discs since the early 1950s. Thus, whatever secrets the ‘group’ thought they had, they certainly were not secrets to the KGB.

But here’s what kept the roof from falling in on all of us. The KGB and the CIA weren’t really the adversaries everybody thought them to be. They spied on each other, but for practical purposes. And also because each agency had thoroughly penetrated the other, they behaved just like the same organization. They were all professional spies in a single extended agency playing the same intelligence game and trafficking in information.

Information is power to be used. You don’t simply give it away to your government’s political leadership — whether it’s the Republicans, the Tories, or the Communists — just because they tell you to. You can’t trust the politicians, but you can trust other spies. At least that’s what spies believe, so their primary loyalty is to their own group and the other groups playing the same game. The CIA, KGB, British Secret Service, and a whole host of other foreign intelligence agencies were loyal to themselves and to their profession first … and to their respective government last.

That’s one of the reasons that we in the military knew that the professional KGB leadership — not the Communist Party officers who were only inside for political reasons — were keeping as much information from the Soviet government as the CIA was keeping from our government. Professional spy organizations like the CIA and KGB tend to exist only to preserve themselves. And that’s why neither the U.S. military nor the Russian military trusted them. If you look at how the great spy wars of the Cold War played out, you’ll see how the KGB and CIA acted like one organization — lots of professional courtesy, lots of shared information to make sure nobody got fired, and a few human sacrifices now-and-then just to keep everybody honest. But when it came down to loyalty, the CIA was loyal to the KGB and vice versa.

I believed they had a rationale for what they did. I know they thought the rest of us were too stupid to keep the World safe. And that by sharing information, theyu kept us out of a nuclear war. I believe this because I knew enough KGB agents during my time and got enough bits-and-pieces of information off-the-record to give me a picture of the Soviet Union during the 1950s and 1960s that’s very different from what you’d read on the front page of the New York Times.

… … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … …

Our collective experiencing dodging the CIA and the KGB only meant that when General Trudeau wanted the CIA kept out of our deliberations at all cost, it was because he knew that everything we discussed would be a topic of conversations at the KGB within 24 hours. And faster if it were serious enough for the KGB to get their counterparts in the CIA to throw a “monkey wrench” into things.

How do I know all this? The same way I knew how the KGB stayed one step ahead of us during the Korean War and were able to advise their friends — the North Koreans — how to hold POWs back during the exchange. We had leaks inside the Kremlin just like they had leaks inside the White House. What General Trudeau and I knew in Army R&D, our counterparts in the Navy and Air Force also believed. The CIA was the enemy. You trust no one. So when it became to the General even before 1961 that no one remembered what the Army had appropriated at Roswell, whatever we had was ours to develop according to our own strategy. But we had to do it so as not to allow the CIA — and ultimately our government’s enemies — to appropriate it from us. So when General Trudeau said we have to run “radio silent” on the Roswell package, I knew exactly what he was talking about.

Logic — and clearly not my military genius — dictated the obvious course. If nobody knows what you have, don’t announce it. But if you think you can make something out of what you have, make it. Use any resources at your disposal, but don’t say anything to anyone about what you’re doing. The only people in the room when we came up with our plan were the General and myself. And he promised, “I won’t say anything if you don’t, Phil.”

“There’s nobody in here but us brooms, General,” I answered.

So we began to devise a strategy.

“Hypothetically, Phil,” Trudeau laid the question out, “what’s the best way to exploit what we have without anybody knowing we’re doing anything special?”

“Simple, General,” I answered. “We don’t do anything special.”

“You have a plan?” he asked.

“More of an idea than a plan,” I began. “But it starts like this. It’s what you asked: If we don’t want anybody to think we’re doing anything out of the ordinary, we don’t do anything out of the ordinary. When General Twining made his original recommendations to President Truman and the Army, he didn’t suggest they do anything with this ‘nut file’ other than what they ordinarily do. Business as usual. That’s how this whole ‘secret group’ operated. Nobody did anything special. What they did was organize according to a business plan even though the operation was something that hadn’t been done before. That’s the camouflage: don’t change a thing, but use your same procedures to handle this alien technology.”

“So how do you recommend we operate?” he asked. I think he already figured out what I was saying, but he wanted me to spell it out so we could start moving my ‘nut file’ out of the Pentagon and out of the encroaching shadow of the CIA.

“We start the same way this desk has always started with reports,” I said. “I’ll write up reports on the alien technology just like it’s an intelligence report on any piece of foreign technology. What I see, what I think the potential may be, where we might be able to develop, what company we should take it to, and what kind of contract we should draw up.”

“Where will you start?” the General asked.

“I’ll line up everything in the ‘nut file’,” I began. “Everything from what’s obvious to what I can’t make heads-or-tails out of. And I’ll go to scientists with clearance who we can trust — Oberth and von Braun — for advice.”

“I see what you mean,” Trudeau acknowledged. “Sure. We’ll line up our defense contractors, too. See which ones have ongoing development contracts that allow us to feed your development projects right into them.”

“Exactly. That way, the existing defense contract becomes the cover for what we’re developing,” I said. “Nothing is ever out of the ordinary because we’ve never started up something that hasn’t already been started up in a previous contract.”

“It’s just like a big mix-and-match,” Trudeau described it.

“Only what we’re doing, General, is mixing technology we’re developing in with technology not of this Earth,” I said. “And we’ll let the companies we’re contracting with apply for the patents themselves.”

“Of course,” Trudeau realized. “If they own the patent, we will have completely reverse-engineered the technology.”

“Yes, Sir. That’s right. Nobody will ever know. We won’t even tell the companies we’re working with where this technology comes from. As far as the World will know, the history of the patent is the history of the invention.”

“It’s the perfect cover, Phil,” the General said. “Where will you start?”

“I’ll write up my first analysis and recommendation tonight,” I promised. “There’s not a moment to lose.”
The photographs in my file — I began my report that night over the autopsy reports, which I attached — show a being of about 4 feet tall. The body seemed decomposed, and the photos themselves aren’t of much use except to the curious. It’s the medical reports that are of interest. The organs, bones, and skin composition are different from ours. The being’s heart and lungs are bigger than a human’s. The bones are thinner but seem stronger as if the atoms are aligned differently for a greater tensile strength. The skin also shows a different atomic alignment in a way that appears the skin is supposed to protect the vital organs from cosmic ray or wave action or gravitational forces that we don’t yet understand.

The overall medical report suggests that the medical examiners are more surprised at the similarities between the being found in the spacecraft (note: NSC reports refer to this creature as an ‘Extraterrestrial Biological Entity [EBE]’) and human beings than they are at the differences, especially the brain which is bigger in the EBE but not at all unlike ours.
I wrote on into the first of many nights that year, drafting rough notes that I would later type into formal reports that no one would ever see except General Trudeau, reaching conclusions that seemed more science fiction than real. I was most happy not because I was finally working on these files but — oddly enough — because when I sat down to write, I believed these reports would never see the light of day. In the harsh reality of the everyday world, they sound — even now as I remember them — fantastic. Even more fantastic, I remember, were the startling conclusions I allowed myself to come to. Was this really me writing? Or was it somebody else? Where did these ideas come from?

If we consider biological factors that affect human beings — like long distance runners whose hearts and lungs are larger than average, hill and mountain dwellers whose lung capacity is greater than those who live closer to sea level, and even natural athletes whose striated muscle alignment is different from those who are not athletes — can we not assume that the EBEs who have fallen into our possession represent the end process of genetic engineering designed to adapt them to long space voyages within an electromagnetic wave environment at speeds which create the physical conditions described by Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity? (Note for the record: Dr. Hermann Oberth suggests that we consider the Roswell craft from the New Mexico desert not a spacecraft but a time machine. His technical report on propulsion will follow.)
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Chapter 8 – “The Project Gets Under Way”

“This is a helluva report, Phil,” General Trudeau said, looking up from the paper-clipped sheaf of typewritten sheets I’d handed him the first thing in the morning. I’d been waiting at my desk since before 6:00 when I got back to the Pentagon, taking looks outside the building every once in a while as the bright orange reflection of the rising Sun that exploded in a distant window and looked as if it had caught fire. “What’d you do, stay up all night writing it?”

“I put in some work after hours,” I said. “I don’t want to spend too much time in the ‘nut file’ when people are supposed to be working.”

The General laughed as he fingered through the paperwork. But you could see that he was impressed. As much as I wanted to denigrate the Roswell file in front of him as a bunch of drawers full of stuff that people would put me away for, we both knew that it contained much of the future of R&D.

Military research and development agencies were under growing pressure from the Congress to put some success points on the scoreboard or get out of the rocket-launching business for good. Early failures to life off the Navy’s WAC Corporal and the Army Redstone had made laughingstocks out of the American rocket program while the Soviets were showing off their success like basketball players on fancy layups across the court. The Army’s “Project Horizon” moon-base project was sitting in its own file cabinet gathering dust. And there was also a growing concern among the military that we’d be pushed into taking over the failed French mission in Indochinca to keep the Viewcong, Pathet Lao, and Khmer Rouge from making the whole area communist. It was a war that we could not win but that would drain our resources from the real battlefront in Eastern Europe.

So, even more than scoring some field goals, General Trudeau needed projects going into development to keep the civilian agencies from cutting us back and diverting our resources. Now my boss held my first report in his hands and knew that our strategic plan had some rational grounding. He pushed for a tactical plan.

“We know what we want to do,” he said. “Now … how do we do it?”

“I’ve been thinking about that too, General,” I said. “And here’s how I’d like to start.”

I explained that I wanted to compile a list of all our technical human resources, like the rocket scientists from Germany then still working at Alamogordo and White Sands. I’d met more than my share of our rocket-fuel and guidance specialists in the guided-missile program during my years at Red Canyon in command of the Nike battalion.

But we were working with theoretical scientists as well — men with experience who could combine the cold precision of an engineer with the speculative vision of a free thinker. These were the people that I wanted to assemble into a brain trust — people I could talk to about strange artifacts and devices that had no basis in Earthly reality. They were the scientists who could tell me what the potential was in items like wafer-shaped plywood-thin pieces of silicon with mysterious silver etchings on them.

“And once you have this ‘brain trust’,” General Trudeau asked, “then what?”

“Match them up with technologies,” I said. I admitted that we were “flying blind” on much of the material that we had. We couldn’t go out to the general scientific and academic communities to ask them what we had because we would very quickly lose control of our secrets. Besides, a lot of it had to do with weaponry. And there were very strict rules on what we could and could not disclose without the appropriate clearances. But our brain trust would be invaluable. And — with the proper orientation and security checks — they would keep our secrets, too, just as they had since the end of World War II.

“Which of the scientists do you have in mind?” Trudeau asked, taking out the little black leather-covered notepad that he kept in his inside pocket.

“I was thinking of Robert Sarbacher,” I said. “Wernher von Braun, of course. Hans Kohler. Hermann Oberth. John von Neumann.”

“How much do they know about Roswell?” Trudeau wanted to know. If they’d been consulted on the Roswell material back in 1947 — as I knew that von Braun had been by General Twining — then we weren’t revealing any secrets. If they had never been informed about the crash, then we were going out on a limb by sharing information that was still classified above top-secret.

But I assured him that all of them knew something about Roswell because of their connection with the Research and Development Board. During the Eisenhower administration, information about the classified research and data collection projects into extraterrestrials was routinely filtered to the Office of Research and Development because the head of the Research and Development Board had been one of the original members of the ‘group’.

“I was at the White House when Sarbacher was on the board, General,” I told my boss. “So I can be pretty sure that he was ‘in the know’. And Hermann Oberth,” I admitted to Trudeau. “He already told me that he believed that the objects we saw popping up on our radar screens at Red Canyon and then disappearing as if they were never there were probably the same kinds of extraterrestrial aircraft that we picked up at Roswell. So he knew, but I don’t know how.”

“Well, that’s good news at least, the General said. “I’d rather not be the one authorizing the release of classified information to anyone who didn’t know it beforehand. And I don’t want to put you in the position, Phil, of having to explain to any higher-ups why you decided to release top-secret information to people without clearances — even in the interest of National Security.”

I appreciated that. But for our plan to work, we needed the technical and scientific expertise people like von Braun, Oberth, and Sarbacher could bring to any reverse-engineering and product-development programs.

“How will you approach them?” Trudeau asked.

“We’ll have to begin by taking an inventory of all of the defense industry contracts we’re currently managing, General,” I said. “Line up the contracts and systems that we’re developing with the materials in the ‘nut file’ to see where they fit in. Then bring in the scientists to consult on making sure we know what we think we have. That is, if they can figure out what we have.”

“Let’s go through a potential product list first,” the General suggested. “Then see where our contracts line up and where the scientists can help. And you know what happens then?” Trudeau asked.

I wasn’t sure where he was going to take this.

“We’re sticking you back in civilian clothes and sending you on the road to visit our friends in these defense contractors.”

“I don’t even get to keep my battle ribbons,” I joked.

“I don’t want anyone to know,” General Trudeau explained, “that some lieutenant colonel on the CIA’s ‘Most Wanted’ list is traveling to our biggest defense contractors with a mysterious briefcase full of nobody-knows-what. You might as well wear a sign,” he laughed. “We have to get to work on that list.”

That same afternoon, I went back to my report on the EBE [see “Chatper 7”] and his craft and began to list the riddles it contained and the opportunities for the discovery of products it presented to us. The entire event was like an enigma to us because every conventional requirement that one would expect to have found at the crash site, in the craft, or even in the EBEs themselves was missing.

Where was the engine or the power supply for the craft? It had neither jet engineers nor propellers. It had no rocket propulsion like the V2 missiles, nor did it carry any fuel. At Norton Air Force Base — where the craft eventually was hangared — engineers marveled at the thin amalgam of the most refined copper and purest silver they had ever seen that covered the ship’s underside. The metal was remarkable for its conductivity, as if the entire craft was an electrical circuit offering no resistance to the flow of current. Yet it was something our military engineers could not replicate.

By the 1950s at Norton AFB, at least 2 prototypes of the alien craft had been fabricated. But neither had the power source of the craft that had crashed. In its stead were crude attempts at nuclear fission generators. But they were I ineffective and dangerous. Even the portable nuclear generators that would power the primitive Soviet and American satellites in the 1960s were insufficient for the needs of the replicated spacecraft. So the question remained: what powered the Roswell spacecraft?

I reviewed all my discoveries in a checklist:

● The crescent-shaped space vehicle also had no traditional navigational controls as we understood them. There were no control sticks, wheels, throttles, pedals, cables, flaps, or rudders. How did the creatures pilot this ship? And how did they control the speed, accelerating from a near stationary hover above a given spot — like a helicopter — to speeds in excess of 7,000 mph in a matter of seconds?

● What protected the creatures from the tremendous g-forces they would have to have pulled in any conventional aircraft? Our own pilots in World War II had to wear special devices as they pulled up out of dives that kept the oxygen from flowing out of their brains and causing them to black out. But we found nothing in the flight suits of the creatures that indicated that they faced the same problem. Yet their craft should have pulled 10 times the g-forces our own pilots did. And so we couldn’t figure out how they managed this.

No controls, no protection, no power supply, no fuel — these were the riddles I listed. Alongside the, I noted that:

● The craft itself was an electrical circuit.

● The flight suites — “flight skins” is a better description — that the creatures wore were made of a substance whose atomic structure was elongated and strengthened lengthwise sos as to provide a directional flow to any current applied to it.

The engineers who first discovered this were amazed at the pure conductivity of these “skins” — functionally like the skin of the craft itself — and their obvious ability to protect the wearer while at the same time vectoring some kind of electronic field. Where was the physical junction of the circuit between the pilot and the ship? Was it turned ‘on’ and ‘off’ somehow by the pilot himself through a switch that we didn’t know about?

Alongside the riddle of the apparent absence of navigational controls, I listed the sensorized headband that so intrigued the officers at Roswell’s Walker Field and fascinated me as well. If — as we all suspected — this device picked up the electronic signatures from the creatures’ oversized brains, what did it do with them?

I believed — and our industrial product development from the 1960s through today as the brain-wave-control helmets finally came into service ultimately confirmed — that these headbands translated the brain’s electronic signals into system commands that controlled speed, direction, and elevation. Maybe the headbands had to be calibrated or “tuned” to each individual pilot. Or maybe the pilots — since I believed they were genetically-engineered beings biologically manufactured especially for flight or long-term exploration — had to be calibrated to the headband. Either way, the headbands were the interface between the pilot and the ship. [StealthSkater note: makes me think of the fabled Montauk Chair] But that still didn’t resolve the question of the lack of cables, gears, or wires.

Maybe the answer lay not in the lack of structural controls but in the way the suit, the headband, the creatures’ brains, and the entire worked together. In other words, when I looked at the possible function of the entire system, the synchronicity between the brain interface in the headband, the pure conductivity of the spacecraft, and the elongated structure of the space skins — which also acted like a circuit — I could see how directional instruction could have been translated by the headbands into some form of current flowing through the skins and into the series of raised deck panels where there were indentations for the creatures’ hands.

The indications on these panels — as the Roswell field reports described them — looked like the handprints pressed into the concrete at the old Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood. Were the directional commands a series of electronic instructions transmitted directly from the creatures’ brains along their bodies and through the panels into the ship itself as if the ship were only an extension of the creature’s body? For that to have been the case, something was still missing. The engine.

Again, I settled on the idea of function over structure. The debris and the spacecraft indicated that an engine didn’t somehow fall out of the craft when it crashed. A conventional engine was never there in the first place. What we found was that the craft seemed to have had the ability to store as well as conduct a vast amount of current. What if the craft itself were the engine, imparted with a steady current from another source that it stored as if it were a giant capacitor? This would be like charging the battery in an electric car and running it until the battery was drained.

Sound far-fetched? It’s not much different from filling up a car with gas at the pump and driving until the tank is dry. Or fueling a plane and making sure you land before the fuel is gone. I suspected the Roswell craft was simply a capacitor that stored current that was controlled or vectored by the pilot, and was able to be recharged in some way or could recharge itself with some form of built-in generator.

That would have explained the power supply — I noted alongside the riddle of the missing engine –but what was the means of propulsion and direction? If there was a force that functioned the same way that thrust does, it wasn’t immediately obvious how it was created and vectored. As early as September 1947, scientists who had gone to the Air Materiel Command at Wright Field to see the debris were speculating that the electronic potential of the Roswell craft reminded them of the German and British antigravity experiments of the 1920s and 1930s. General Twining was reported to have said — more than once — that the name of the Serbian electrical engineer and inventor of alternating current — Nikola Tesla — kept bubbling up in the conversation because the scientists examining the damaged craft described the way it must have converted an electromagnetic field into an antigravity field. And of course, the craft itself reminded them of the German experimental fighter aircraft that made their appearance near the end of the War but that had been in development ever since the 1930s.

Tesla and a number of other European scientists had been pioneers in the conversion of circumscribed small-area antigravity fields out of electromagnetic fields. However, the effort to develop true antigravity aircraft never came to fruition among conventional aircraft manufacturers because gasoline, jet, and rocket engines provided a perfectly good weapons technology.

But the theory of electromagnetic antigravity propulsion was not unknown even if it was not well understood and — without a power source like a small portable nuclear fission generator — not at all feasible. But what if the flying craft already carried enough electric potential and storage capacity to retain its power, just like a very advanced “flying battery”? Then it might have all the power it needed to propagate and vector a wave directionally by shifting its magnetic poles. If the magnetic field theory experiments carried out by engineers and electric energy pioneers Paul Biefeld and Townsend Brown in the 1920s at the California Institute for Advanced Studies were accurately reported — and the U.S. military as well as scientific record keepers at Hoover’s young Federal Bureau of Investigation kept very close tabs on what these engineers were doing — then the technology theory for antigravity flight existed before World War II.

In fact, prototypes for vertical takeoff and landing disc-shaped aircraft had been on the drawing boards at the California Institute since before the War. It was just that in the United States, nobody paid them much attention. The Germans did develop and had flown flying discs. Or so the intelligence reports read, even though they had no impact on the outcome of the War other than stimulating a race between the United States and the USSR to gather as much of the German technology as possible.

Thus, even though engineers had attempted to build vertical takeoff and flying-wing aircraft before and had succeeded, the Roswell spacecraft — because it was so truly functional and outflew anything we had as well as traveled in space — represented a practical technological challenge to the scientists visiting the Air Materiel Command. We knew what the EBEs did. We just couldn’t duplicate how they did it. My reports for Army R&D were analyses of the types of technology that we had to develop to either challenge this spacecraft militarily with a credible defense or build one ourselves.

In my notes to General Trudeau, I reviewed for him all the technological implications that I believed were relevant in any discussion about what could be harvested from the Roswell craft. I also wrote up what I understood about the magnetic field technology and how unconventional designers and engineers had drafted prototypes for these “anti-gravs” earlier in the century.

All of this pointed in one direction, I suggested: that we now had a craft and could farm out to industry the components that comprised this electromagnetic antigravity drive and brain-wave-directed navigational controls. We had to dole them out piecemeal once we broke them down into developable units — each of which could have its own engineering track. For that, we’d need the advice of the scientists who would eventually comprise our brain trust — individuals that we could rely on and whom we could talk to about the Roswell debris. These were scientists who routinely worked with our prime defense contractors and could tell us whom to approach in their R&D divisions for secure and private consultations.

I was hoping that the evaluation of the kinds of things we were able learn from the EBE and his craft that I was preparing for General Trudeau would lead me toward the solution of some of the physiological problems we knew our astronauts would encounter in spaceflight. In the early 1960s, astronauts from both the United States and the USSR had made their first orbital flights and had experienced more than a few negative physical symptoms from the weightless environment during the mission. Despite our official claims that humans could travel safely in space, our doctors knew that even short periods of weightlessness were extremely disorienting to some of our astronauts. And the longer the flight, the more uncomfortable the symptoms could become. We were worried about loss of physical strength, reduced muscle capability in the heart and diaphragm, reduction of lung capacity, and loss of tensile strength in the bones.

Yet, scattered across the desert floor outside of Roswell were creatures who seemed completely adapted to spaceflight. Just to be able to examine these entities was an enormous opportunity. But I knew that we had the ability to harvest what we could observe about aliens. So again, alongside the speculations that I had made about the EBEs and their craft, I list what I thought were the major possibilities of developing products to enable us to travel in space for extended periods of time.

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Beyond the issues concerning the training potential of astronauts for conventionally powered spaceflight, the examination of the EBE bodies and the ship’s possible propulsion system raised other intriguing questions. What if — in addition to having been bioengineered for interstellar travel — the EBEs were not subjected to the kinds of forces that Human pilots would routinely face? If the EBEs utilized a wave-propagation technology as an antigravity drive and navigation system, then they traveled inside some form of adjustable electromagnetic wave. I suggested to General Trudeau that we should study the potential physiological effects on humans of long-term exposure to the kinds of energy spillage generated by the propagation of an electromagnetic field. Biologists needed to determine how feasible such a form of space travel would be based upon whether energy radiation would disrupt the cellular activity of the human body. Perhaps the external one-piece skins worn by the EBEs afforded them protection against the effects of being enclosed in a portable electromagnetic field.

Although Army R&D never conducted these studies because the medical issues surrounding space travel were subsumed by NASA under contracts with the military, indirect medical research was conducted years later. Studies surrounding the physiological effects on person living near high-voltage power-transmission lines and persons using extendable-antenna hand-held cellular telephones both proved inconclusive. While some people argued that there were higher incidences of cancer among both groups, other studies argued just the opposite or found other reasons for any incidences of cancer.

I believe a definitive piece of research on the effects of low-energy or ELM wave exposure still needs to be done because, ultimately — even more than atomic energy or ion drives — magnetic field generation will be the system that will propel our near-planetary voyages from 2050 through the early 22nd century. Beyond that, for humans to reach destinations beyond the solar system technology will require a radically different form of propulsion that will enable them to reach velocities at-or-beyond the speed-of-light. [StealthSkater note: or avoid the relativistic limit altogether by finding some way to “fold” space or Macroscopic quantum tunnel]

Thus did my second report cover the opportunities for research presented to us by the autopsies of the EBEs and from the crash of their vehicle. To my mind, it was nothing less than a confirmation that the research into electromagnetics in the 1920s and the highly experimental saucer- and crescent-shaped development of aircraft by the Allies and Axis powers would have led to an entirely new generation of airships.

I know that my reports were read by the higher-ups in the military because top-secret research has continued right through to the present on a whole range of designs and propulsion systems from the Stealth fighter and B2 bomber to prototypes for a very high-altitude suborbital interceptor aircraft — developed at Nellis and Edwards, now on the drawing board — which can hover in place and fly at speeds over 7,000 mph.

Once I finished my report on the opportunities we could possibly derive from the EBEs and the craft, I turned my attention to compiling a short list of immediate opportunities that I believed to be achievable by the Army R&D’s Foreign Technology Division from a reverse-engineering of items retrieved from the crash. These were specific things — not “theoretical” as were questions about the physiology of the EBE or the description of its craft. But while some might call them purely mundane, each of these artifacts — as a direct result of Army R&D’s intervention — helped spawn an entire technological industry from which came new products and military weapons.

Among the Roswell artifacts and the questions and issues that arose from the Roswell crash — on my preliminary list that needed resolution for development scheduling or simple inquiries to our military scientific community — were:

● image intensifiers, which ultimately became “night vision”
● fiber optics
● supertenacity fibers
● lasers
● molecular alignment metallic alloys
● integrated circuits and micro-miniaturization of logic boards
● HARP (High Altitude Research Project)
● Project Horizon (moon base)
● portable atomic generators (ion propulsion drive)
● irradiated food
● “third brain” guidance systems (EBE headbands)
● particle beams (“Star Wars” anti-missile energy weapons)
● electromagnetic propulsion systems
● depleted uranium projectiles

For each of the items on my list, General Trudeau went into his human resources file and found the names of scientists working on government defense projects or in allied research projects at universities where I could turn for active and some consultation. I wasn’t surprised to see Wernher von Braun turn up under every rocket-propulsion issue. Von Braun had gone on record in 1959 by announcing that the U.S. military had acquired a new technology as a result of top-secret research in unidentified flying objects. Nor was I surprised to see John von Neumann’s name next to the mention of the strange-looking silver-imprinted silicon wafers that I thought looked like elliptical-shaped crackers. “If these are what I think they might be,” General Trudeau said, “printed circuitry — there’s only one person we can talk to.”

Dr. Robert Sarbacher was an especially important contact person on our list of scientists because he had worked on the Research and Development Board during the Eisenhower administration. Not only had Sarbacher been consulted by member of Admiral Hillenkoetter’s and General Vandenberg’s “working grou;” on UFOs during the 1950s, he was part of the original decision that General Twining made to bring all of the Roswell debris back to Wright Field for preliminary examination before farming it out to the military research community.

As early as 1950, Sarbacher — commenting on the nature of the debris — said that he was sure that the light and tough materials were being analyzed very carefully by government laboratories which had taken possession of the debris after the crash. Because he was already knowledgeable about the Roswell debris, Dr. Sarbacher ws another obvious candidate for an Army R&D “brain trust”.

We also listed Dr. Wilbert Smith who — in a memo to the controller of telecommunications in November 1950 — had urged the government of Canada to investigate the nature of alien technology that the United States had retrieved from crashed extraterrestrial vehicles and that was at that time being studied by Vannevar Bush. Dr. Smith — who had learned of the U.S. investigation from Sarbacher — said that regardless whether UFOs fit into our belief system or not, the fact was that we had acquired them and it was important for us to harvest the technology they contained. He implored the government to make a substantial effort to utilize alien technology.

General Trudeau joked that although Dr. Smith knew that we had acquired advanced technology at Roswell, he didn’t really know what it was. “I can’t wait to see his face when you open your friefcase in front of him, Phil,” the General said, thinking about how his old friend had always wanted to know the specifics of what he had secreted away in 1947.

Each of thse scientists had maintained existing relationships with any number of defense contractors during the 1950s. General Trudeau also had relationships with the Army contractors who were developing new weapons systems for the military within one part of the company while another part was harvesting some of the same technology for consumer products development. These were companies — Bell Labs, IBM, Monsanto, Dow, General Electric, and Hughes — that General Trudeau wanted to talk to about the list of technological products that we’d compiled from our R&D Roswell ‘nut file’.

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References

1. “The Day After Roswell”, Col. Philip J. Corso (ret) with William J. Birnes
Simon & Schuster, Inc., ISBN 0-671-01756-X, 1997.