The Day After Roswell (14 page)

So in the first few minutes of glimmering light just on the
edge of the horizon, a promise of the day to come, I took off for home,
for a shower, a shave, a pot of coffee, and the crispest new uniform I
could find. I was driving east into the dawn of a brand new age, my
report right alongside me in my briefcase on the front seat. There
would be other reports and the details of long term complicated
projects to confront me in the future, I knew, but this was the first,
the foundation, the beam of light into a hidden past and an uncertain
future. But it was a light, and that’s what was important. No
time for sleep now. There was too much to do.

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 first thing that morning. I’d been
waiting at my desk since before six 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 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 our 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
lift off the navy’s WAC Corporal and the army Redstone had
made laughing stocks out of the American rocket program while the
Soviets were showing off their success like basketball players on fancy
lay-ups right 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
Indochina to keep the Vietcong, Pathet Lao, and Khmer Rouge from making
the whole area Communist. It was a war we could not win but that would
drain our resources from the real battle front 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 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 own 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 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 in1947, as I knew Wernher 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. General Trudeau needed to know how dangerous it was to bring
these scientists into the loop. 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 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 before hand. 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 strategies.

“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. “Lineup the
contracts and systems 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 and
his craft and began to list the riddles it contained and the
opportunities for the discovery of product it presented to us. The
entire event was like an enigma to us because every conventional
requirement 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 engines 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 Air
Force Base, at least two 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 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 of 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 seven thousand miles per hour
in a matter of seconds?

• What protected the creatures from the tremendous
g-forces they would have had 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 blackout. 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 ten times the g-forces our
own pilots did, 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.

Along side them I listed that:

• The craft itself was an electrical circuit.

• That the flight suits - “flight
skins” is a better description - the creatures wore were made
of a substance whose atomic structure was elongated, strengthened
lengthwise, so 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 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. 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 craft 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 instructions 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 indentations
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’s dry, or fueling
a plane and making sure you land before the fuel’s 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 along side
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 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 Material 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.