The Day After Roswell (13 page)

Much of the attention during the preliminary and later
autopsies of the creatures focused on the size, nature, and anatomy of
their brains. Much credence also was given to the first hand
descriptions of on scene witnesses who said they received impressions
from the dying creature that it was suffering and in great pain. No one
heard the creature make any sounds, so any impressions, Army
Intelligence personnel assumed, would have to have been created through
some type of empathic projection or outright mental telepathy. But
witnesses said they heard no “words” in their mind,
only the resonance of a shared or projected impression much simpler
than a sentence but far more complex because they were able to share
with the creature a sense not only of suffering but of profound
sadness, as if it were in mourning for the others who perished on board
the craft. These witness reports intrigued me more than any other
information we took from the crash site.

The medical examiners believed that the alien brain, way
oversized in comparison with the human brain and in proportion to the
creature’s tiny stature, had four distinct sections. The
creatures were dead and the brains had begun to decompose by the time
they were removed from the soft spongy skulls that felt to the doctors
more like palatal cartilage than the hard bone of a human cranium. Even
had the creatures been alive when they were examined, 1947 medical
technology didn’t have ultrasound scanning or the high
resonance tomography of today’s radiology labs. Accordingly,
there was no way for the doctors to evaluate the nature of the cranial
lobes, or “spheres, ” as they called them in the
report. Thus, despite the rampant speculation about the nature of the
creatures’ brains - thought projection, psychokinetic powers,
and the like - no hard evidence existed of anything, and the reports
were very light on real scientific data.

Where the possibility of some evidence about the workings of
the alien brains did exist was in what I referred to in my reports
as the“headbands”. Among the artifacts we retrieved
were devices that looked something like headbands but had neither
adornment nor decoration of any kind. Embedded by some very advanced
kind of vulcanizing process into a form of flexible plastic were what
we now know to have been electrical conductors or sensors, similar to
the conductors on an electroencephalograph or polygraph. This band was
fitted around the part of the alien cranium just above the ears where
the skull began to expand to accommodate the large brain. At the time,
the field reports from the crash and the subsequent analysis at Wright
Field indicated that the engineers at the Air Material Command thought
these might be communication devices, like the throat mikes our pilots
wore during World War II. But, as I would find out when I evaluated the
device and sent it into the market for reverse-engineering, this was a
throat mike only in a way that a primitive stylus can be considered the
forerunner of the color laser-imaging printer.

Suffice it to say that in the few hours the material was at
Walker Field in Roswell, more than one officer at the 509th gingerly
slipped this thing over his head and tried to figure out what it did.
At first it did nothing. There were no buttons, no switches, no wires,
nothing that could even be considered to have been a control panel. So
no one knew how to turn it on or off. Moreover, the band was not really
adjustable, though it had enough elasticity to have been one size fits
all for the creatures whose skulls were large enough to accommodate
them. However, the reports I read stated, the few officers whose heads
were just large enough to have made contact with the full array of
conductors got the shocks of their lives. In their descriptions of the
headband, these officers reported everything from a low tingling
sensation inside their heads to a searing headache and a brief array of
either dancing or exploding colors on the insides of their eyelids as
they rotated the device around their head and brought the sensors into
contact with different parts of their skull.

These eyewitness reports suggested to me that the sensors
stimulated different parts of the brain while at the same time
exchanged information with the brain. Again, using the analogy of an
EEC, these devices were a very sophisticated mechanism for translating
the electrical impulses inside the creatures’ brains into
specific commands. Perhaps these headband devices comprised the pilot
interface of the ship’s navigational and propulsion system
combined with a long range communications device. At first I didn’t
know, but it was only when we began development of the long brain wave
research project toward the end of my tenure at the Pentagon that I
realized just what we had and how it might be developed. It took a long
time to harvest this technology, but fifty years after Roswell,
versions of these devices eventually became a component of the
navigational control system for some of the army’s most
sophisticated helicopters and will soon be on the American consumer
electronics market as user input devices for personal computer games.

The first Army Air Force analysts and engineers both at the
509th and at Wright Field were also bedeviled by the lack of any
traditional controls and propulsion system in the crashed vehicle.
Looking at their reports and the artifacts from the perspective of
1961, however, I imagined that the keys to understanding what made the
craft go and directed its flight lay not only within the craft itself
but in the relationship between the pilots and the craft. If we
hypothesized a brainwave guidance system that was as specific to the
pilots’ electronic signature as it was to the
spacecraft’s, then we were looking at an entirely
revolutionary concept of guided flight in which the pilot was the
system. Imagine transportation devices in which the key to the ignition
is a digitized code derived from your electroencephalographic signature
and is read automatically upon your donning some sort of sensorized
headband. That’s the way I believed the spacecraft was
navigated, by direct interaction between the electronic waves generated
within the minds of the pilots and the craft’s directional
controls. The electronic brain signals were interpreted and transmitted
by the headband devices, which served as interfaces.

I never managed to obtain a copy of the Bethesda autopsy of
the alien body the navy received from General Twining. I only had the
army report. The remaining bodies were kept in storage at Wright Field
initially. Then they were split up among the services. When the air
force became a separate branch of the service, the remaining bodies,
stored at Wright, along with the spacecraft, were sent to Norton Air
Force Base in California, where the air force began experiments to
replicate the technology of the vehicle. This made sense. The air force
cared about the flight capabilities of the craft and how to build
defenses against it.

Experiments were carried out at Norton and ultimately at
Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, at the famous Groom Lake site where
the Stealth technology was developed. The army cared only for the
weapons systems aboard the craft and how they could be re-engineered
for our own use. The original Roswell spacecraft remained at Norton,
however, where the air force and CIA maintained a kind of alien
technology museum, the final resting place of the Roswell spacecraft.
But experiments in replicated alien craft continued to be carried on
through the years as engineers tried to adapt the propulsion and
navigation systems to our level of technology. This continues to this
very day almost in plain sight for people with security clearance who
are taken to where the vehicles are kept. Over the years, the
replicated vehicles have become an ongoing, inner circle saga among top
ranking military officers and members of the government, especially the
favored senators and members of the House who vote along military
lines. Those who are shown the secrets are immediately bound by
national secrecy legislation and cannot reveal what they saw. Thus, the
official camouflage is maintained despite the large number of people
who really know the truth. I admit I’ve never seen the craft
at Norton with my own eyes, but enough reports passed across my desk
during my years at Foreign Technology so that I knew what the secret
was and how it was maintained.

There were no conventional technological explanations for the
way the Roswell craft’s propulsion system operated. There
were no atomic engines, no rockets, no jets, nor any propeller driven
form of thrust. Those of us in R&D from all three branches of
the service tried for years to adapt the craft’s drive system
to our own technology, but, through the 1960s and 1970s, fell short of
getting it operational. The craft was able to displace gravity through
the propagation of magnetic wave, controlled by shifting the magnetic
poles around the craft so as to control, or vector, not a propulsion
system but the repulsion force of like charges. Once they realized
this, engineers at our country’s primary defense contractors
raced among themselves to figure out how the craft could retain its
electric capacity and how the pilots who navigated it could live within
the energy field of a wave. At issue was not only a great discovery,
but the nuts-and-bolts chance to land multibillion dollar development
contracts for a whole generation of military air and undersea craft.

The initial revelations into the nature of the spacecraft and
its pilot interface came very quickly during the first few years of
testing at Norton. The air force discovered that the entire vehicle
functioned just like a giant capacitor. In other words, the craft itself
stored the energy necessary to propagate the magnetic wave that
elevated it, allowed it to achieve escape velocity from the
earth’s gravity, and enabled it to achieve speeds of over
seven thousand miles per hour. The pilots weren’t affected by
the tremendous g-forces that build up in the acceleration of
conventional aircraft because to aliens inside, it was as if gravity
was being folded around the outside of the wave that enveloped the
craft. Maybe it was like traveling inside the eye of a hurricane. But
how did the pilots interface with the wave form they were generating?

I reported to General Trudeau that the secret to this system
could be found in the single-piece skin-tight coveralls spun around the
creatures. The lengthwise atomic alignment of the strange fabric was a
clue to me that somehow the pilots became part of the electrical
storage and generation of the craft itself. They didn’t just
pilot or navigate the vehicle; they became part of the electrical
circuitry of the vehicle, vectoring it in a way similar to the way you
order a voluntary muscle to move. The vehicle was simply an extension
of their own bodies because it was tied into their neurological systems
in ways that even today we are just beginning to utilize.

So the creatures were able to survive extended periods living
inside a high energy wave by becoming the primary circuit in the
control of the wave. They were protected by their suits, which enclosed
them head to feet, but their suits enabled them to become one with the
vehicle, literally part of the wave. In 1947 this was a technology so
new to us that it was as frightening as it was frustrating. If we could
only develop the power source necessary to generate a consistently well
defined magnetic wave around a vehicle, we could harness a technology
which would have surpassed all forms of rocket and jet propulsion.
It’s a process we’re still trying to master today,
fifty years after the craft fell into our possession.

I pushed myself through the night to complete the report for
the general. At least I wanted him to see that our strategy held out
the probability that even in a basic evaluation of the material were
covered, the seeds were there for specific products we could develop. I
wanted to start the entire process by writing him a background report
about the nature of the beings we’d autopsied and what we
could understand of the technology from an analysis of their spacecraft.

By the time I finished, it was already just before sun up, and
I looked like hell. This was the day I was going to drop my report on
the general’s desk, first thing. I’d snap right to
attention in front of him and say, “Here’s that
report you were waiting for, General, ” confident it
contained more than he ever thought it would because the subject was
that new and complicated. But I wanted to be clean shaven and in a
clean, crisp shirt. That’s what I wanted. I didn’t
even need any sleep because my optimism and confidence at that moment
were more powerful than anything a few hours of sleep could give me. I
knew I was onto something here, something that could change the world.
Here in the basement of the Pentagon, lying close to dormancy for over
a decade, were secrets my predecessors had just begun to discover
before they were stopped. Maybe it had been the Korean War, maybe the
CIA or other intelligence agencies had cast a pall over
R&D’s operation, but those days were over now. I was
at the Foreign Technology desk and the responsibility for this material
was mine, just like General Twining had said it should be fourteen
years ago.

In those drawers I had found the puzzle pieces for a whole new
age of technology. Things that were only twinkles in the minds of
engineers and scientists were right here in front of me as hard, cold
artifacts of an advanced culture. Craft that navigated by brain waves
and floated on a wave of electromagnetic energy, creatures who look
through devices that helped them turn night into day, and beams of
light so narrow and focused you couldn’t see them until they
bounced off an object far away.

For years scientists had thought about what it would have been
like to travel in space, especially since the Russians first put up
their Sputnik. Plans for a military operated moon base had been
developed by the army in the 1950s under the leadership of Gen. Arthur
Trudeau at R&D but were ultimately shelved because of the
formation of NASA. Those plans had tried to confront the issues of
space travel for prolonged periods of time and adjusting to a low
gravity state on the moon. But here, right in front of us, was the
evidence of how an alien culture had adapted itself to long range space
travel, different gravities, and the exposure to energy particles and
waves crashing into a spacecraft by the billions. All we had to do was
marshal the vast array of resources in the military and industry at
R&D’s disposal and harvest that technology. It was
all laid out for us, if we knew how to use it. This was the beginning
and I was right there on the cusp of it.