The Day After Roswell (10 page)

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

But both the secretary of defense and director of intelligence
agreed with President Truman that he was right to be skeptical,
especially on his final point about disclosure.

“So can we postpone coming to any conclusions at
least until after you’ve meet with General
Twining?” Admiral Hillenkoetter asked. “I think
he’ll provide some of the answers we’re all looking
for. ”

While Adm. Roscoe Hillenkoetter and James Forrestal were
briefing President Truman on their plan for the working group, Gen.
Nathan P. Twining was completing his preliminary analysis of the
reports and material sent to Wright Field. Almost immediately, he
dispatched the remains of the aliens to the Bethesda Naval Hospital and
the Walter Reed Army Hospital for further analysis by the two military
services. The aircraft itself remained at Wright Field but, as he would
promise in his memo to the Army Air Forces command, General Twining was
preparing to distribute the material from the wreckage among the
different military and civilian bureaus for further evaluation.
He’d already been cautioned by Admiral Hillenkoetter that new
security classifications had been put in place regarding the Roswell
intelligence package. No one within the military other than names he
would receive from the President himself had the full security
clearance to learn the complete story. about Roswell that Twining would
deliver to the President and other members of a working group.

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

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

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

General Twining showed photographs of these alien beings and
autopsy reports that suggested they were too human; they had to be
related to our species in some way. They were obviously intelligent and
able to communicate, witnesses at the scene had reported, by some sort
of thought projection unlike any mental telepathy you’d see
at a carnival show. We didn’t know whether they came from a
planet like Mars in our own solar system or from some galaxy we could
barely see with our strongest telescopes. But they possessed a military
technology whose edges we could understand and exploit, even if only
for self defense against the Soviets. But by studying what these
extraterrestrials had we might be able to build a defense system
against them as well.

At the very least, Twining had suggested, the crescent shaped
craft looked so uncomfortably like the German Horten wings our flyers
had seen at the end of the war that he had to suspect the Germans had
bumped into something we didn’t know about. And his
conversations with Wernher von Braun and Willy Ley at Alamogordo in the
days after the crash confirmed this. They didn’t want to be
thought of as but intimated that there was a deeper story about what
the Germans had engineered. No, the similarity between the Horten wing
and the craft they had pulled out of the arroyo was no accident. We
always wondered how the Germans were able to incorporate such advanced
technology into their weapons development in so short a time and during
the Great Depression. Did they have help? Maybe we were now as lucky as
the Germans and broke off a piece of this technology for ourselves.
With an acceleration capability and maneuverability we’d
never seen before, this craft would keep American aircraft engineers
busy for years just incorporating what they could see into immediate
designs.

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

Central Intelligence Director Adm. Roscoe Hillenkoetter
Secretary of Defense James Forrestal Lt. Gen. Nathan Twining of the AAF
and then USAF Air Material Command Professor Donald Menzel, Harvard
astronomer and Naval Intelligence cryptography expert Vannevar Bush,
Joint Research and Development Board Chairman Detlev Bronk, Chairman of the National Research Council and
biologist who would ultimately be named to the National Advisory
Committee on Aeronautics. Gen. Robert Montague, who was General Twining’s
classmate at West Point, Commandant of Fort Bliss with operational
control over the command at White Sands Gordon Gray, President
Truman’s Secretary of the Army and chairman of the
CIA’s Psychological Strategy Board Sidney Souers, Director of
the National Security Council Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg, Central
Intelligence Group Director prior to Roscoe Hillenkoetter and then USAF
Chief of Staff in 1948 Jerome Hunsaker, aircraft engineer and Director of the
National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics Lloyd Berkner, member of the
Joint Research and Development Board.

Unless this group established a long term plan for protecting
and developing the Roswell project, the secrets would soon leak out. I
understand that it was General Twining who pointed out to the group
that, in fact, the story had already leaked out. It was leaked, he
said, hours after the crash and then retracted. In fact, people were
still talking about it in New Mexico, but after the army’s
weather balloon story, the national newspapers were treating the flying
disk reports as the delusions of people who had seen too many Buck
Rogers movies. The national press was already doing the
committee’s work.

What was really needed, Twining suggested, was a method for
gathering the information about continuing UFO activity - especially
crashes, high probability sightings by pilots or the military, or
actual physical encounters with individuals - and surreptitiously
filtering that information to the group while coming up with practical
explanations that would turn unidentified flying disks into completely
identifiable and explainable phenomena. Under the cover of explaining
away all the flying disk activity, the appropriate agencies represented
by members of the working group would be free to research the real
flying disk phenomenon as they deemed appropriate. But through it all,
Twining stressed, there had to be a way of maintaining full deniability
of the flying disk phenomenon while actually preparing the public for a
disclosure by gradually desensitizing them to the potential terror of
confronting a more powerful biological entity from a different world.
It would have to be, General Twining suggested, at the same time both
the greatest cover-up and greatest public relations program ever
undertaken.

The group agreed that these were the requirements of the
endeavor they would undertake. They would form nothing less than a
government within the government, sustaining itself from presidential
administration to presidential administration regardless of whatever
political party took power, and ruthlessly guarding their secrets while
evaluating every new bit of information on flying saucers they
received. But at the same time, they would allow disclosure of some of
the most farfetched 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 disk sightings. While the Blue
Book field officers attributed commonplace explanations to the reported sightings, the entire project was a mechanism to
acquire photographic records of flying saucer activity for evaluation
and research. The most intriguing sightings that had the highest
probability of being truly unidentified objects would be bumped
upstairs to the working group for dissemination to the authorized
agencies carrying on the research. For my purposes, when I entered the
Pentagon, the general category of all flying disk phenomena research
and evaluation was referred to simply as “foreign technology.
”

The Strategy there is an old story I once heard about keeping
secrets. A group of men were trying to protect their deepest secrets
from the rest of the world. They took their secrets and hid them in a
shack whose very location was a secret. But the secret location was
soon discovered and in it was discovered the secrets that the group was
hiding. But before every secret could be revealed, the men quickly
built a second shack where they stored those secrets they still kept to
themselves. Soon, the second shack was discovered and the group
realized they would have to give up some secrets to protect the rest.
So they again moved quickly to build a third shack and protect whatever
secrets they could. This process repeated itself over and over until
anyone wanting to find out what the secrets were had to start at the
first shack and work their way from shack to shack until they came to
where they could go no further because they didn’t know the
location of the next shack. For fifty years this was the very process
by which the secrets of Roswell were protected by various serial
incarnations of an ad hoc confederation of top-secret working groups
throughout different branches of the government, and it is still going
on today.

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

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

Project “Blue Book” was created to make
the general public happy that they had a mechanism for reporting what
they saw. Projects “Grudge” and
“Sign” were of a higher security to allow the
military to process sightings and encounter reports that
couldn’t easily be explained away as balloons, geese, or the
planet Venus. Blue Fly and Twinkle had other purposes, as did scores of
other camouflage projects like Horizon, HARP, Rainbow, and even the
Space Defense Initiative, all of which had something to do with alien
technology. But no one ever knew it. And when reporters were actually
given truthful descriptions of alien encounters, they either fell on
the floor laughing or sold the story to the tabloids, who’d
print a drawing of a large headed, almond eyed, six fingered alien.
Again, everybody laughed. But that’s what these things really
look like because I saw the one they trucked up to Wright Field.

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

As General Twining had suggested in his report to the Army Air
Forces, “foreign technology” was the category to
which research on the alien artifacts from Roswell was to be delegated.
Foreign technology was one of the great catch all terms, encompassing
everything from researching French air force engineering advances on
helicopter blades to captured Russian MiGs flown in from Cuba by savvy
pilots who could negotiate our southern radar perimeter better than our
own pilots. So what if a few pieces of technological debris from a
strange crescent shaped hovering wing turned up in an old file
somewhere in the army’s foreign technology files? If nobody
asked about it - and nobody did because foreign technology was just too
damned dull for most reporters to hang around - we didn’t
have to say anything about it. Besides, most foreign technology stuff
was classified anyway because it dealt with weapons development we were
hiding from the Soviets and most reporters knew it. Foreign technology
was the absolute perfect cover. All I had to do was figure out what to
do with the stuff I had. And General Trudeau wasn’t in the
mood to wait any longer.

“Come on, Phil, let’s go. ” The
general’s voice suddenly filled the room over the blown
speaker hum of my desk intercom. I put down my coffee and headed up the
stairway to the back door of his inner office. This was a routine that
repeated itself three, sometimes four times a day. The general always
liked to get briefed in person because even in the most secure areas of
the Pentagon, the walls tended to listen and remember our conversations.

Our sessions were always private, and from the way our
conversation bounced back and forth among different topics, if it
weren’t for his three stars and my pair of leaves, you
wouldn’t even think you were listening to a pair of army
officers. It was cordial and friendly, but my boss was my boss and,
even after we both retired like two old war horses put out to pasture,
our meetings were never informal.

“So now you figured out how the package
arrived?” he asked me after I sat down. I had figured it out by going through all of
the files I could get my hands on and tracing the path of the Roswell
information from the 509th to Fort Bliss and from there to Wright
Field, the dissemination point.

General Trudeau motioned for me to sit down and I settled into
a chair. It was already ten thirty in the morning so I knew
there’d be at least two other sit down briefings that day.

“I know it didn’t come by the parcel
service, ” I said. “I don’t think they
have a truck that big. ”

“Does that help you figure out what we should
do?” he asked.

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

Unnoticed by most officers on their way to the top and not
called upon in the late 1940s to do much more than record keeping, it
turned out to be the perfect hideaway when the CIA hirelings came
sniffing through the Pentagon in the early 1950s looking for anything
they could find on the Roswell technology. Unless they were part of the
working group from the start, not even members of the Eisenhower White
House National Security staff knew that R&D was the repository
of Roswell artifacts. I was there. I can vouch for that. In fact, it
wasn’t until I saw the files for myself and reverse traced
their path to my doorstep that I realized what General Twining and the
working group had accomplished. By the time I had arrived at the White
House, though, it was all ancient history. People were more worried
about the sighting information deluging Project Blue Book every day
than they were about the all but forgotten story of Roswell.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Through General Trudeau’s questions I could see not
only that the general knew his history almost as well as I did about
how the original group was formed and how it must have operated, but he
also had a sense of what kind of problem was facing the military
R&D and how much leeway he had to solve it. Like most ad hoc
creations of government, the group must have at some point become as
self-serving as every other joint committee eventually became the
longer it functioned and the more its job increased. As the camouflage
about flying disks grew, so did the role of the group. Only the group
didn’t have the one thing most government committees had :
the ability to draw upon other areas of the government for more
resources. This group was above top secret and, officially, had no
right to exist. Therefore, as its functions grew over the next ten
years to encompass the investigations of more flying saucer sightings
and the research into more encounters with alien aircraft or with the
extraterrestrials themselves, its resources became stretched so thin
that it had to create reasons for drawing upon other areas of the
government.

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