The Day After Roswell (16 page)

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 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 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 technology at
Roswell, he didn’t really know what it was. “I
can’t wait to see his face when you open your briefcase 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 these 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.

“You begin calling our scientist friends,
” General Trudeau announced. “And make whatever
appointments you want. ”

“Where are you going to be, General?” I
asked.

“I’m going to be taking some trips, too,
” he said. “First to the chief of staff to make
sure we have the discretionary budget we’re going to need.
Then to some of the people I want you to talk to once you have the
backing from the scientific community for the projects on your list.
”

“Where to first?” I asked.

“What do you like?” the general shot right
back to me.

“We’ve been working with image intensifies
for some time, ” I said. “We even got our hands on
devices the Germans were working on at the end of the war. ”

“Well then, why don’t you make a very
preliminary trip over to Fort Belvoir, ” General Trudeau
said. “They’ve had a night vision project in the
works for the past ten years, but it’s got nothing over what
you have in your file. ”

“I’ll get over there first thing,
” I said.

“Yes, Phil, but you get out of that uniform and into
a real lawyer suit, ” the general ordered. “And
don’t take your staff car. ” He saw me raise my
eyebrows. “All you’re going to do is feed a
project, ”Trudeau continued, “that’s been
under way since right after the war. They’ve got stuff, but
you’re going to give them a giant leap. Once you’ve
fed them, you’ll disappear and I’ll assign a night
vision project manager here to see the development through. ”
I prepared to leave his office. “No one will know, Phil,
” he said. “Just like you thought, the Roswell
night viewer will put a seed of an idea in someone’s mind
over at Fort Belvoir and it will become part of along project history.
It will disappear just like you into the history of the product
development. ”

“Yes, sir, ” I said. I was beginning to
realize just how lonely this job could be.

“You still have a suit that fits?” the
general asked.

“I think so, ” I answered.
“Maybe what I wore over at the White House is a little out of
style, but it’ll pass. ”

“Good luck, Phil, ” General Trudeau said.
“Make sure no one knows where you’re going and I’ll make
sure you have all the budget you need. “

This was the beginning. I saluted, but the general just stuck
out his hand and I shook it. We both realized in that moment, as we
were striking out on our own, just how momentous this was about to
become. A lieutenant general allocating money for his development
budget and a lieutenant colonel looking for someone to develop an
innocuous-looking eye shield an unknown GI had picked up out of the
sand near a UFO crashed into a rock in the lonely desert outside of
Roswell in a lightning storm fourteen years ago.

What a pair we must have made.

THE PROJECT HAD OFFICIALLY BEGUN.

General Trudeau marched down the hall to his boss at the
Pentagon to begin the process of funding the new items we’d
identified in our Foreign Technology budget, and I went home that
evening and tried on my official White House three piece suit.
President Eisenhower once told me that he always trusted a man who wore
a vest, and I never forgot it. Although there were times when the
President asked me to wear my uniform for special meetings when I had
to look military, I usually wore suits every day to work. But after my
years at the Red Canyon missile base and in combat uniform in Germany,
I lost the knack of wearing civilian clothes. Nevertheless, here I was
again, after all those years, wearing a suit just like any other
nine-to-five commuting Joe as I headed toward Fort Belvoir, perhaps the
army’s most important base in the entire Washington Military
District.

Fort Belvoir was one of those military posts where the mundane
activity of training and weapons testing was an effective cover for
what came to be known as the secret life of Fort Belvoir. It sat
comfortably within thirty minutes of the Pentagon, and it was where
some of the army’s most top secret research into UFO
technology was also taking place. Belvoir housed the Army Engineering
School and, for former artillery and missile officers like myself,
maintained a vital information database about ballistics testing and
the development of new weapons. But on the secret side of the
ledger, Fort Belvoir was home to the Signal School where officers for
the National Security Council who had top secret crypto clearance were
trained.

Even years after I retired from active duty, stories lingered
about the records of UFOs that were stored at Fort Belvoir, including
photos and even motion pictures of military retrievals of downed
extraterrestrial craft. What very few people knew was that an elite
secret air force unit operated out of Fort Belvoir - ostensibly an army
base - that was responsible for retrievals of downed UFOs. That was how
Fort Belvoir became a repository of classified UFO footage. Those
secrets remained at Fort Belvoir over the years and were closely
guarded while the installation remained shrouded in mystery. For those
who suspect what information was kept at the base, Fort Belvoir remains
a central part of the legends surrounding the official military cover
up of UFOs.

Me, I was on my way there to talk about the night vision
project to see what German World War II files they were keeping on the
infrared viewfinders the Nazis were trying to deploy for their night
fighting troops. These were cumbersome, unwieldy devices that left
infantry hampered and weighed down. They were never effective in the
war but held out the enormous promise of opening up the night as a
battlefield where an army could maneuver around its blind and helpless
enemy. That was the promise that tantalized both the Soviets and
American forces as we closed in on Germany’s most secret
weapons facilities during the final months of the war.

Our forces secured all of the German records on mountable
weapons night viewers and headpieces, but it wasn’t until we
looked inside the crashed Roswell vehicle and saw a hazy daylight
through the view ports that we realized just what the potential of
night viewing could be. We understood in those few moments after the
vehicle was brought back to Wright Field and General Twining made his
initial report that we were the blind and helpless enemy through the
eyes of the EBEs. These creatures controlled our night skies, observing
us with an ease that we didn’t enjoy until we had deployed
our own night-viewing goggles years later and leveled the playing field
against them and the Soviet client forces arrayed against us.

My very proper looking deep blue Oldsmobile might not have
been a secret weapon in America’s arsenal, but it was
carrying a description of one of the tiny components of what would be
one of our most effective Cold War weapons. Guerrilla armies used the
night itself on their familiar home territory as a tactical weapon that
allowed them to move right past enemy positions without being spotted.
They could secure a battlefield advantage as if they were invisible.
But equip a patrol with night viewers, mount night viewers on tanks and
observation vehicles, hover over a battlefield at night in helicopter
gunships equipped for night vision, and suddenly the night becomes day
and the invisible enemy appears in your gunsights like prey for the
hunter.

To the EBEs, we were that prey, and we knew they were
monitoring our defenses, surveilling the aircraft we scrambled to chase
them, and hovering above the experimental satellites we launched. We
could see them with our radar, I had seen them on our scopes with my
own eyes, and we knew their presence wasn’t benign. But they
had an advantage over us that we couldn’t overcome unless we
acquired the technological ability to put up enough of a defense to
make their cost too high to engage in any large scale warfare. Not only
was it an advantage that forced us to scrape whatever technology we
could off the edge of our encounters with them; it was one of the many
factors that forced us into a silence about the alien presence. If
there was no public enemy, there would be no pressure from the public
to do anything about it. So we simply denied all extraterrestrial
activity because no aliens meant no military responsibility to counter
their threat. But all the while we were still planning, measuring their
hostile intentions, and pushing through weapons development that might
reduce their advantage.

It would have been next to impossible to stage a military
build up that would help us fight extraterrestrial enemies had we not
had a lot of help from our old adversaries, the Soviets and the
Chinese. The Soviets made no bones about their intentions to dominate
the world through Communist revolutionary coups and set about
immediately to challenge us even before World War II ended. By 1948,
the Iron Curtain had dropped over Eastern Europe and the Soviets were
trying to back us into a position of appeasement. In 1949, Mao Tse-tung
drove Chiang Kai-shek out of mainland China to the island of Taiwan,
and the United States had another major Communist adversary trying to
impose its will upon its Asian neighbors. We first tasted their blood
in Korea and would soon almost choke on it in Vietnam, Laos, Thailand,
and Cambodia.

Those were hard times, made even harder because the U.S.
military also knew that not just the free world but the whole world was
under a military threat from a power far greater than the combined
forces of the Soviet Union and the Republic of China. We
didn’t know what the EBEs wanted at first, but we knew that
between the cattle mutilations, surveillance of our secret weapons
installations, reports of strange abductions of human beings, and their
consistent buzzing of our unmanned and manned space launches, the EBEs
weren’t just friendly visitors looking for a polite way to
say “Hello, we mean you no harm. ” They meant us
harm, and we knew it. The problem was we couldn’t do anything
about it at first, and anything we did try to do had to be done in
complete secrecy or it would set off a worldwide panic, we believed.

This was where the Cold War turned out to be a tremendous
opportunity for us, because it allowed us to upgrade our military,
preparedness in public to fight the Communists while secretly creating
an arsenal and strategy to defend ourselves against the
extraterrestrials. In short, the Cold War, while real enough and
dangerous enough, was also a cover for us to develop a planetary
tracking and defense system that looked into space as well as into the
Soviets’ backyard. And the Soviets were doing the exact same
thing we were, looking up at the same time they were looking down.

In an only tacitly acknowledged cooperative endeavor, the
Soviets and the Americans, while each one was explicitly using the Cold
War to gain an advantage over the other, both sought to develop a
military capability to defend ourselves against extraterrestrials.
There were very subtle indications of this policy in the types of
weapons both countries developed as well as in our behavior toward one
another every time one side came close to pushing the button. I can
tell you definitively because I was there when we avoided nuclear war
because both military commands were able to pull back when they stared
over the cliff into the flaming volcano of war that threatened to
engulf all of us at least four times between 1945 and 1975 - the Berlin
airlift, the Chinese invasion of Korea, the Cuban missile crisis, and
the Yom Kippur War - and probably many more.

By the time President Nixon returned from China, having agreed
to turn over Vietnam to the Communists, he had effectively turned the
Soviets’ flank in the Cold War. For the next decade, the
Soviets felt caught between the Chinese, with whom they’d
fought border wars in the past, and the United States. When President
Ronald Reagan demonstrated to Mikhail Gorbachev that the United States
was capable of deploying an effective antimissile missile defense and
sought Soviet cooperation in turning it against the extraterrestrials,
all pretext of the Cold War ended and the great Soviet monolith in
Eastern Europe began to crumble.

But the Cold War worked its magic for both superpowers by
allowing them to prepare defenses against the extraterrestrials without
ever having to disclose to the public what they were really doing. When
you examine it, the record itself should have showed that another
agenda was present throughout the Cold War. After all, why did each
side really have ten or more times the number of warheads needed to
completely destroy the other side’s nuclear missile arsenal
as well as their major population centers? The real story behind the
vast missile arsenals, the huge fleets of bombers, and the ICBM
submarine platforms that both sides deployed was the threat to the
aliens that if they occupied a portion of our planet, we had the fire
power to obliterate them. If they attacked either the United States or
the Soviet Union so as to render one of the arsenals inoperable, we had
enough missiles to spare to make them pay so heavy a price for starting
a war, it wasn’t even worth trying. That was part of our
secret agenda behind the huge military buildups of the 1950s and1960s:
sacrifice a portion of the planet so that the rest of us could live. It
enabled the United States and USSR to intimidate one another, but it
also worked for the heads of the military intelligence agencies as a
way to intimidate any extraterrestrial cultures. Nobody wrote any memos
about this because weapons deployment during the Cold War was the cover
for the secret agenda against the extraterrestrials.

Sure, there was a gamesmanship going on during those forty
years from 1948 through 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down. Each side
tried to get the other to spend more money than they really had to so
as to weaken the economy. Our CIA consistently gave us false estimates
because they were feeding us KGB information while, I know, we tried to
do the same thing to the Soviets. And if the Soviets could have won the
Cold War as bloodlessly as possible, they would have done so. But in
the end, as the futility of mutual destruction made World War III
unfightable, our real attention became more focused on the common
enemy: the extraterrestrials who refused to go away.

There were subtle and not so subtle hints during the entire
Cold War that a hidden agenda was in play. Most people just
didn’t know where to look. For those who did, and there were
and are plenty of them, the answers were in plain view. Although there
was heavy censorship and the threat of ruined careers, plenty of
military and civilian sources reported flying saucer sightings. Stories
of abductions - while most were either fantasies, nightmares, or memory
screens for other events in the so called abductee’s
childhood - continued to abound. Some were true, and this caused great
consternation among members of the UFO working group. If the government
couldn’t protect private citizens from abductions by
extraterrestrials, then would that not signify a breakdown in
governmental authority? That was a worry, but it didn’t come
to pass.

Similarly, if too many flying saucers were seen by too many
people at the same time, wouldn’t it become obvious that the
military forces of the superpowers couldn’t protect their
populations? For a time it was true, but the public never realized it.
Soon we were able to upgrade our ability to defend our airspace so that
we could amass large numbers of interceptors against the
EBEs’ limited resources and pose a real threat to them. They
backed off and probed our defenses only when it seemed safe. Thus, the
race among the superpowers to spend billions of dollars to build the
fastest and best interceptors had a true double purpose. We needed all
these planes because they gave the super powers a flexible response
alternative to simply obliterating themselves with guided missiles, but
at the same time both superpowers were developing the air defense
technology to defend the planet against the extraterrestrials.

Everybody wants the best and fastest plane, of course, so that
we can out fly and out shoot the enemy we know about. But we were also
defending our skies against an enemy we didn’t admit to
having. The second agenda was always there and the Cold War provided
the budgetary impetus the military needed : We were building aircraft
to protect against flying saucers. And in a very real measure, we
succeeded.

Both the United States and USSR were sensitive to another area
where the extraterrestrials were aggressing upon our military personnel
: our respective space exploration programs. From the very beginning of
our endeavors to put satellites in orbit, the extraterrestrials have
been surveilling and then actively interfering with our launch vehicles
and in some cases the manned and unmanned payloads themselves by
buzzing them, jamming radio transmissions, causing electrical problems
with the spacecrafts’ systems, or causing mechanical
malfunctions. American astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts have separately
reported sightings of UFOs so routinely that it’s become
commonplace. The audio/video transmission downlink between space
capsules and NASA, however, is a secure scrambled signal so that
commentary about UFOs shadowing the spacecraft can’t be
picked up by private listeners. Even then, the astronauts are
specifically instructed not to report UFO sightings until they are
debriefed once they’ve landed.