The Day After Roswell (28 page)

When General Trudeau read my full report, he asked me to speak
to the scientists who consulted with us as part of a brain trust and
develop a technical discussion, as speculative as we needed it to be
with no restrictions whatsoever, in which we integrated what we had in
our Roswell files with what intelligence we had on the types of testing
the Soviets were conducting.

“Don’t worry about how it’s
going to be circulated, Phil, ” General Trudeau assured me.
“I want to show it to only a few members of the House and
Senate Defense appropriations committees and they’ve promised
to keep it confidential. ”

“I know you want this right away, General,
” I said. “Can I have the rest of the day to work
on it?”

“You can have until tomorrow morning, ” he
said. “Because after lunch tomorrow you and I are meeting with the Senate
subcommittee and I want to read them this report. “

I told my wife that I’d be home late in the morning
for a change of uniform and then I was going over to Capitol Hill for a
meeting. Then I ordered up a couple of sandwiches, put a new pot of
coffee on, and settled in at the office for a long night.

“The present design and configuration of our ICBMs
is adequate, ” I wrote onto my legal pad, crossed out the
sentence, and then wrote it again. “However internal changes
are necessary, especially within the warhead capsule. ”

What I would recommend would be nothing less than radical. We
needed an entirely new navigational computer system that would take
advantage of the transistorized circuitry now coming into development
and projected for the marketplace by the late 1960s.

I suggested we model the missile’s on board computer
on the design of an actual dual hemisphere brain with one hemisphere or
lobe receiving global positioning data from orbiting satellites. The
other hemisphere will control the missile functions such as thrusters,
positioning changes, and booster stage separation. It will receive data
through a low frequency transmission from the other lobe. The control
lobe will also transmit missile flight telemetry to the positioning
lobe so that the two computers will function together in tandem. This,
I reasoned, would make the system more difficult to jam. If our global
positioning satellite detected a threat from an incoming antimissile
missile, it would relay that information to the warhead, whose control
computer would direct the thrusters to fire so as to take evasive
action before the final target approach.

In as much as I believed it was through the application and
amplification of low frequency brain waves that the EBEs navigated the
craft that we found at Roswell, our implementation of this technology
might enable us also to use our brains to control the flight of
objects. We could use some form of a brain wave system to navigate our
ICBM warhead final stage vehicles if their on board radar detected a
threat from an antiballistic missile. We could also use this system to
home in on incoming enemy warhead launchers even if they were capable
of taking some evasive action.

If we designed the missile the way I suggested, by the time it
had been locked into its final trajectory, its detonation would be set
so that even if it were knocked off course it would still explode and
cause enough collateral damage that it would count as a hit. Enough of
our ICBMs could get through, we reasoned, so as to overwhelm not only
the Soviet guided missile forces but pose a realistic threat to their
population centers. Meanwhile, the technology we developed for changing
the flights of our incoming ICBMs could be applied as a template to our
own antimissile missiles so as to neutralize any Soviet missile threat.

My conclusion: “An appropriation of $300 million
must be requested for the coming FY 1963 as a urgent crash development
appropriation. ”

I read my own notes from the envelope handed over by Harold
Brown and looked back at him.

“Colonel, ” Brown’s assistant
said. “We understand the urgency of your request last year
and we appreciate your reasons for fighting for it now. ”

“But the Defense Department is simply not going to
allow the army to go forward with an antimissile missile at this time.
Not in1963, ” Mr. Brown said.

“When?” I asked.

“At a time, ” the army colonel said,
“when the impact of our deploying this system will be greater
than it is now. The Russians know we have a bead on the type of
satellites they’re putting up and we can take them out in a
heartbeat, much faster than they can take out ours. ”

I began to answer, but Harold Brown got up to leave. We shook
hands and he walked toward the door. The army colonel remained in front
of my desk. “Maybe just you and I can have a word, Colonel
Corso, ” he said. My own associate on Senator
Thurmond’s committee left the office also.

“In the Pentagon, we understand that your early
research into the technology of the antiballistic missile is the real
reason for your support, Colonel Corso, ” the project manager
said. “It’s in good hands. ”

But I can tell you he didn’t know the real reason,
the EBEs. Only General Trudeau understood the secret agenda that lay
beneath the research into the project.

“But when do you think development will
start?” I asked.

“In just a couple of years we’ll have
lunar spacecraft orbiting the moon, ” he said.
“We’ll have orbiting satellites mapping every inch
of the Soviet Union. We’ll see what they can throw against
us. Then we’ll  have exactly the kind of
antimissile  missile you  proposed because then even
the Congress will see the reason for it. ”

“But until then… ” I began.

“Until then, ” the colonel said,
“all we can do is wait. ”It would take another
twenty years for the beginnings of an antimissile to be deployed. And
it would also take a president who was willing to recognize the threat
from the extraterrestrials to force an antimissile weapon through a
hostile Congress.

My Last Year in R&D: The Hoover Files, Fiber Optics, Supertenacity, and Other Artifacts

I BARELY PICKED MY HEAD UP FROM THE PILES OF TECHNICAL
proposals on my desk during the winter months of 1961. The work
didn’t even stop for the Christmas holiday, when most of
Washington likes to take a break and head for the West Virginia
mountains or the Maryland countryside. I was traveling a lot during the
final months of 1961, seeing weapons undergo testing at proving grounds
around the country, meeting with university researchers on such diverse
items as the preservation of food or the conversion of spent atomic
pile material into weapons, and developing intelligence reports for
General Trudeau on the kinds of technologies that might shape weapons
development into the next decade.

With my other eye, I was keeping a look out for any reports
going to the Air Intelligence Command about UFO sightings that I
thought Army Intelligence should be thinking about. The AIC was the
next step in classification from the Project Blue Book people. Its job,
besides the obvious task of moving any urgent UFO reports up the ladder
of secrecy to the next levels where they would disappear behind the
veil of camouflage, was to classify the type of event or incident the
sighting seemed to indicate. Usually that meant separating real
aircraft sightings that needed to be investigated for pure military
intelligence purposes from either true UFO sightings that needed to be
processed by whatever elements of the original working group were on
watch or false sightings that needed to be sent back down to Blue Book
to be debunked. The AIC loved it when it had actual false sightings it
could send back: an obvious meteorite that they could confirm, some
visual anomaly having to do with an alignment of planets, or, best of
all, a couple of clowns somewhere that decided to pull a Halloween
prank and scare the locals. There were guys running around wheat fields
with snowshoes or submitting photos of flying frozen pie tins to the
local papers. Then the folks at Blue Book could release the story to
the press, and everybody patted themselves on the back for the job they
were all doing. Life could be fun in the early 1960s, especially if you
didn’t know the truth.

Moving into 1962, Army Intelligence was lit up with rumors
about potential threats coming in from all over the place. The
anti-Castro Cubans were mad about the President’s refusal to
support the Bay of Pigs invasion and were looking for revenge; Castro
was mad about the Bay of Pigs invasion and was looking to get back at
us; Khrushchev was still furious about the U2 and the Bay of Pigs and
thinking Kennedy was a pushover, would soon jump on an opportunity to
force us into some humiliating compromise. The Russians were on the
verge of sending manned spacecraft into extended orbital flights and
robot probes out to explore Venus. We were way behind in the space race
and none of the services had the budget or the ability to get us back
into the fight. NASA was telling the President they would have to dig
in, develop the technology base, and, by the middle of the decade, put
on a show for the whole world. But now, as the year turned, it was all
silent running until we could put something up we could brag about.

The army was making ominous noises about events in Southeast
Asia. The more the army pushed to get troops on the ground, the more
the Kennedy administration refused to get involved. The army was
telling the President we would eventually be sucked into a war we could
not win and the events would control us instead of our controlling
them. Later that same year, I would be offered the job of director of
intelligence for the Army Special Forces units already operating in the
Southeast Asian theater. At about the same time the army said it was
going to name Gen. Arthur Trudeau as the commander of all U.S. forces
in South Vietnam. As our names were being circulated, General Trudeau
confided to me that he doubted we would get the jobs. And if we did, he
said, it would be a toss-up as to who would be the most unhappy, the
Vietcong or the U.S. Army.

“If they send us over there, Phil, ” he
said after one of our morning briefings, “one of two things
will happen. Either we’ll both get court martialed or
we’ll win the damn war. Either way the army’s not
going to like the way we do business. ”

As usual, General Trudeau was right. Before the end of 1962
and right about the time the old man was making up his mind whether to
retire or not, his name was vetoed as the commander of all U.S. forces
in Vietnam and I was told to stay at my desk. The handwriting was on
the wall: Vietnam was going to be a political war run by the
disinformation specialists at the CIA and fought under a cloud of
unknowing. Unfortunately, history proved us to be correct. By the time
Richard Nixon surrendered to the Chinese and we crawled out of
Southeast Asia a few years later, we would learn, I hope for the last
time, what it was like to be humiliated on the battlefield and then
eviscerated at the negotiating table.

The new year brought J. Edgar Hoover over to the Pentagon. The
FBI director was growing increasingly anxious at all the Roswell
stories circulating like ice cold currents deep under the ocean
throughout NASA and the civilian intelligence agencies. Somebody was
conspiring about something, and that meant the FBI should get involved,
especially if the CIA was messing around in domestic issues. Hoover
didn’t like the CIA and he especially didn’t like
the cozy relationship he thought President Kennedy had with the CIA
because he believed his boss, the President’s brother, was
keeping him on a short leash when it came to taking on the agency about
territorial issues. Hoover knew, but didn’t believe, that
after the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy had become very suspicious of the
intelligence information he was getting from the CIA. By the end of
1962, the President would learn from his own brother, who would learn
from me, just how deliberately flawed the information coming out of the
CIA was. And I would also learn, when I worked for Senator Russell on
the Warren Commission in 1964, how that had sealed his fate.

But in 1962, still near the height of his power, J. Edgar
Hoover was as territorial as any lifetime bureaucrat in Washington
could be. And when somebody stepped on his toes, or when he thought
someone had stepped on his toes, he kept kicking them until the guy was
dead. Even his own agents knew what it was like to get on his bad side.
I was as territorial in my own way as the FBI director was in his, and
during my years at the White House under President Eisenhower, we had
established a professional relationship. If he needed to know something that bore on some KGB agent nosing
around the government, I helped him out. If I needed to find something
out on the qt. about somebody I needed to take out of the bureaucratic
loop, he would tell me what he knew. We never established any formal
relationships in the 1950s, but we let each know who we thought the bad
guys were.

In the 1950s, Hoover got interested in the rumors about
Roswell because anything the CIA got their teeth into made him nervous.
If it were only the military running a cover-up, he could live with
that, although he thought the military never should have run the OSS
during World War II. But once he suspected the CIA was part of the
Roswell story, he wanted in. But in my years on the White House staff,
there wasn’t much I could tell him. It wouldn’t be
until 1961 that I got my hands on what really happened at Roswell, and
then I didn’t have to contact him. He called me.

We found we could help each other. Besides being territorial,
J. Edgar Hoover was an information fanatic. If there was a bit of
information floating around, whether it was rumor or truth, Hoover was
obsessive about putting it into his files. Information was such a
valuable commodity to him, he was willing to trade for it with anybody
in government he trusted. I wanted information, too. I was going out to
meetings with scientists and university researchers whose loyalties I
couldn’t verify. I had to be very circumspect about the
technological information I was delivering, and many times I needed to
know whether a particular chemist or physicist had ever been suspected
of dealing with the Communists or, worse, was on the payroll of the CIA.

In retrospect I can see how all this smacks of the thinking of
Senator Joe McCarthy, but I was at the White House during the army
McCarthy hearings and I can tell you straight out that Joe McCarthy -
unwittingly - was the best friend the Communists ever had in
government. Single handedly, Senator McCarthy helped give
respectability to a bunch of people who would never have had it
otherwise. He turned behaving in contempt of Congress into a heroic act
by his very tactics, and the Communists in government were laughing at
the free rein he gave them. All they had to do was provide him with a
human sacrifice every now and then, someone completely unimportant or
actually innocent of any wrong doing, and McCarthy pilloried them on
television. But when he turned against the US. Army, he crossed into my
territory and we had to shut him down.

The Communists used McCarthy to give them good press and open
up an area where they could work while the anti-Communists were made to
look like fools. I told this to Robert Kennedy, who as a young lawyer
had been a member of Roy Cohn’s investigative staff working
for the McCarthy subcommittee and who had learned firsthand what it was
like to be completely misled into self destructive behavior. It was a
mistake, he confided to me, that he would never make again. 
Unfortunately, his brother’s enemies were his own, and he was
misled into thinking that being president would allow him to settle the
score.

But in January of 1962 all that was on my mind was
reestablishing a relationship with J. Edgar Hoover so that I could
pursue my agenda while keeping a lookout for who might be dangerous out
there in the academic community. Now I had something to bargain with
for the information I wanted. Not only did I have the bits and pieces
of the Roswell story that I knew Hoover wanted, I also had information
about the domestic activities of the CIA. Hoover was more than
interested in sharing information, and we continued to talk right
through 1962 until I left the army and went over to Senator
Thurmond’s staff. Our relationship continued right
through1963. And in 1964, when I was an investigator for Senator
Russell on the Warren Commission and Hoover was pursuing his own
independent investigation into the President’s assassination,
he and I could only stare at one another again on either side of the
abyss of that crime. Stacked up against the enormity of what had
happened, Hoover and I both understood that there are some battles you
cannot win. So you leave them alone so you can fight another day.

I’m not sure whether J. Edgar Hoover ever really
believed that the Roswell story was true, an absolute conspiracy to
cover up something else, or just a delusion that became mass hysteria
out there in the desert. There were so many details buried in army
memos and maintained under layers of cover stories fabricated by
military intelligence experts that he couldn’t possibly know
the truth. But like the good cop that he was, he took information
wherever he could find it and kept on searching for something that made
sense. If the army saw a threat to our society, then Hoover thought
there was a threat. And whenever he could follow up a report of a
sighting with a very discreet appearance by a pair of FBI agents to
interview the witnesses and get away with it, he did. He was more than
willing to share that information with me, and that was how I found out
about some of the unpublicized cattle mutilation stories in the early
1960s.

My J. Edgar Hoover connection was important to me as I began
my work in the early weeks of 1962 because the level of research into
the types of projects we were developing became very intense. The
rumors of General Trudeau’s appointment to the Southeast Asia
command and my selection as intelligence director for the Green Berets
in Southeast Asia, as vague and unconfirmed as they were, set a
deadline for the general and me to push our projects forward because we
knew we had only a year or so left on our tenure at R&D. So
when the FBI director and I would talk, I had questions ready to ask.
No information we ever shared was in writing, and any notes that I took
from the conversations we had I later destroyed after committing them
to memory or taking action on the things he said. Even to this day,
although FBI agents have contacted me about records supposedly still
left in the old files, I don’t know what notes the FBI
director took about our conversations and what specific actions he ever
took. Because we trusted each other and remained in contact once every
six months or so even after I left government service, I never followed
up on anything I said and never asked for any verification of
information in the files. I think Hoover appreciated that.

By February of 1962 I had lined my nut file projects up for an
end run that would take me to the end of the year and either South
Vietnam or retirement. The first folder on the desktop was the
“glass filaments. ”

Fiber Optics

Members of the retrieval team who foraged around inside the
spacecraft on the morning of the discovery told Colonel Blanchard back
at the 509th that they were amazed they couldn’t find any
conventional wiring. Where were the electrical connections? they asked,
because obviously the vehicle had electronics. They didn’t
understand the function of the printed circuit wafers they found, but,
even more important, they were completely mystified by the single glass
filaments that ran through the panels of the ship. At first, some of
the scientists thought that they comprised the missing wiring that also
had the engineers so confused as they packed the