The Day After Roswell (17 page)

Astronaut Gordon Cooper, for example, reported that when he
was a fighter pilot over Germany in the 1950s, he scrambled with other
Sabre Jet fighter pilots to intercept a formation of UFOs flying over
his base, but when his fighter group got too close, the formation of
UFOs flew away. Cooper also described film that he saw at Edwards Air
Force base in California in 1957 of a UFO landing. He said that he sent
the film to Washington and followed up on it with the officers at
Project Blue Book, but they never responded to his queries.

Similarly, X-15 pilot Joe Walker revealed that his 1961
mission in setting a new world air speed record was also to hunt for
UFOs during his high altitude flights. He also said that he filmed UFOs
during an X-15 flight a year later in 1962. Other reports persisted
about Mercury 7 astronauts being shadowed by UFOs and about Neil
Armstrong’s having seen an alien base on the moon during the
Apollo 11  flyover and landing. NASA has, of course, not
admitted to any of this, and, very correctly, it’s been
treated as a matter of high national security.

An extraterrestrial presence on the moon, whether it was true
or not in the 1950s, was an issue of such military importance that it
was about to become a subject for National Security Council debate
before Admiral Hillenkoetter and Generals Twining and Vandenberg pulled
it back under their working group’s security classification.
The issue never formally reached the National Security Council,
although Army R&D under the new command of General Trudeau in
1958 quickly developed preliminary plans for Horizon, a moon base
construction project designed to provide the United States with a
military observation presence on the lunar surface. Started in the late
1950s and set for completion between 1965 and1967, Horizon was supposed
to establish defensive fortifications on the moon against a Soviet
attempt to use it as a military base, an early warning surveillance system against a Soviet missile
attack, and, most importantly, a surveillance and defense against UFOs.
It was, to be blunt, a plan to establish a skirmish line in space to
protect the earth against a surprise attack. But Horizon was side
tracked when the National Space and Aeronautics Act gave control over
space exploration to the civilian NASA, effectively eliminating the
military branches from pursuing their own projects until much later in
the1970s.

Fears of an attack to probe our planet’s ability to
defend itself were running rampant at National Security and through the
military chiefs of staff during the middle 1950s. After he retired from
the army, even Gen. Douglas MacArthur got into the fray, urging the
military to prepare itself for what he felt would be the next major
war. He told the New York Times in 1955 that “The nations of
the world will have to unite for the next war will be an interplanetary
war. The nations of the Earth must someday make a common front against
attack by people from other planets. ” The public took little
notice of that comment, but it was, in fact, a disclosure of the
strategic thinking of the military back in the 1950s and explains part
of the paranoia the government was displaying about all information
relating to the flying saucers and unidentified aircraft. Part of the
military response to what they perceived as threats from
extraterrestrials was, first, to analyze the specific ways that alien
spacecraft “passively” disrupt our defenses and
world wide communications through electrical and magnetic field
interference and develop circuitry hardened against it. Second, General
Trudeau and his counterparts in the other branches of the military at
the Pentagon charged with strategic planning looked at the aggressive
behaviors of the EBEs. They didn’t just shadow or surveil our
spacecraft in orbit; they buzzed us and tried to create such havoc with
our communications systems that NASA more than once had to rethink
astronaut safety in the Mercury and Gemini programs. Years later, there
was even some speculation among Army Intelligence analysts who had been
out of the NASA strategy loop that the Apollo moon landing program was
ultimately abandoned because there was no way to protect the astronauts
from possible alien threats.

The alien spacecraft were also aggressively buzzing our
frontline defenses in Eastern Europe, either looking for blind spots or
weaknesses, or - which is what I believed because I was there and saw
it with my own eyes - probing our radar to see how quickly we
responded. We’d see blips shoot across our screens that we
couldn’t identify and suddenly they’d disappear.
Then they’d reappear, only this time even closer to our
airfields or missile launchers. Once we determined that we
weren’t being probed by Soviet or East German aircraft, we
sometimes decided not to respond to the threats. Many times
they’d just go away. But other times they would play cat and
mouse, edging ever closer until we had to respond. That’s
what they were looking for, how quickly we could respond and pick them
upon our targeting radars or catch up to them with our interceptors.
Whenever we’d get just about there for an aerial sighting,
they’d take off out of the atmosphere at speeds over 7,500
miles an hour. If we tried to follow, they’d play us along
until our fliers had to return.

Our only successes in defending against them, back in the
late1950s and early 1960s, occurred when we were able to get a firm
tracking radar lock. Then when we locked our targeting radars on, the
signals that missiles were supposed to follow to the target, it somehow
interfered with their navigational ability and the vehicle’s
flight became erratic. If we were especially fortunate and able to
boost the signal before they broke away, we could actually bring them
down. Sometimes we actually got lucky enough to score a hit with a
missile before the UFO could take any evasive action, which an army air
defense battalion did with an antiaircraft missile near Ramstein Air
Force Base in Germany in May 1974. The spacecraft managed to crash land
in a valley. The craft was retrieved and flown back to Nellis Air Force
Base in Nevada. The Roswell crash was different. There was much
speculation that it was a combination of the desert lightning storm and
our persistent tracking radars at Alamogordo and the 509th that helped
bring down the alien vehicle over the New Mexico desert in 1947.

Then there were the suspected cattle mutilations and reported
abductions, perhaps the most direct form of intervention in our culture
short of a direct attack upon our installations. While debates broke
out among the debunkers - who said these were a combination of hoaxes,
attacks by every day predators on cattle, psychological flashback
memories of episodes of childhood abuse in the cases of reported
abductees, and out and out fabrications of the media - field
investigators found they could not explain away some of the cattle
mutilations, especially where laser surgery seemed to be used, and
psychologists found alarming similarities in the descriptions of
abductees who had no knowledge of one another’s stories. The
military intelligence community regarded these stories of mutilations
and abductions very seriously. They worked up descriptions of at least
three separate scenarios in which(1) the EBEs were simply conducting scientific experiments on
earthly life forms and collecting whatever specimens they could without
causing too much disruption and alerting us; (2) the EBEs were actively
collecting specimens and conducting experiments so as to determine
whether this was a hospitable environment for them to inhabit, and any
disruption they caused was of no concern to them; and(3) all of the experimentation and specimen collection were
the prelude to some kind of infiltration or invasion of our planet. We
did not know their motives, but could only assume the worst and,
therefore, needed to defend ourselves however we could.

While never disclosing it publicly, military intelligence
analysts supported the view that Earth was already under some form of
probing attack by one or more alien cultures who were testing both our
ability and resolve to defend ourselves. Without ever directly
addressing whether contacts between the aliens and Earth governments
had already taken place - because the notes and minutes of the
Hillenkoetter working group were never released to the Chiefs of Staff
or to their intelligence officers - the heads of the armed services
decided collectively that it was better to plan for war rather than be
surprised.

At the same time, the civilian leaders of the
nation’s space program at NASA decided that military
intelligence was overreacting to the shadowing and buzzing of our
spacecraft. NASA, which had been holding as highly confidential any
reports of extraterrestrial activity surrounding our space vehicles,
nevertheless decided to adopt an internal official “wait and
watch” attitude because they believed that it would have been
impossible to launch an explicitly military defensive space program and
still achieve the civilian scientific aims at the same time. So NASA
agreed to go covert. As a cover, NASA, in1961, agreed to cooperate with
military planners to work a “second tier” space
program within and covered up by the civilian scientific missions. They
agreed to open up a confidential “back channel”
communications link to military intelligence regarding any hostile
activities conducted by the EBEs against our spacecraft even if these
included only shadowing or surveillance. I was aware of this through my
contacts in the military intelligence community. What NASA
didn’t tell military intelligence, of course, was that they
already had an even more classified back channel to the Hillenkoetter
working group and were keeping them updated on every single alien
spacecraft appearance the astronauts reported, especially during the
early series of Apollo flights when the EBE craft began buzzing the
lunar modules on successive missions after they thrusted out of earth
orbit. Even though military intelligence was kept out of the
operational loop between NASA and the working group, I and a few others
still had contacts in the civilian intelligence community that kept us
informed. And the army and air force managed to find at least 122
photos taken by astronauts on the moon that showed some evidence of an
alien presence. It was a startling find and was one of many reasons
that the Reagan administration pushed so hard for the Space Defense
Initiative in 1981.

In 1960, upon the confidential approval of the working group
and at the request of the National Security Agency, which was concerned
about the vulnerability of its U2 flights, NASA agreed to allow some of
its missions to become covers for military surveillance satellites.
These satellites, although approved for surveillance of Soviet ICBM
activity, were also supposed to spot alien activity in remote portions
of the earth. Maybe, in the 1960s, we didn’t have the
technology we have now to intercept their ships, but by using new
satellite surveillance techniques we believed we’d be able to
pick up the signatures of an alien presence on the face of our planet.
If we made it too difficult for them to set up shop with bases on
Earth, military intelligence planners speculated, maybe they would
simply go away. This was another example of how Cold War strategy was
utilized for the dual purpose of trying to surveil extraterrestrial
activity under the cover of surveilling Soviet activity.

However, throughout the 1960s, critical projects were started
at the Foreign Technology desk to protect vital command and control
systems, including the hardening of communications and defense computer
circuitry by burying components sensitive to electromagnetic pulses,
the same kind of energy generated after a nuclear explosion as well as
by the EBE spacecraft. In fact, so important was our research into the
effects of the electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, that ever since the late
1950s the Department of Defense has been simulating EMP to determine
how to protect the circuitry in its planes, tanks, missiles, and ships
from being disabled by it. EMP generators were established at a number
of facilities around the country, including the Harry Diamond
Laboratories in Philadelphia, Maryland, for the army and the EMP
Empress I and II simulators for the navy in the middle of Chesapeake
Bay and another one at China lake in California. The air force set up
EMP simulators at Kirkland Air Force Base in New Mexico and the army
additional facilities at White Sands, New Mexico, and at the Redstone
arsenal in Alabama. We also initiated the crash development of night
vision equipment to enable our troops to see at night the same way the
EBEs did, finally enabling us to get a footing, if not an equal
footing, with the aliens so that we could force them to some kind of
stale mate. It was only then that we began to realize what their
intentions were and the startling secrets about their existence on this
planet.

It was night vision that was on my mind today as I was zipped
through the sentry post at the main gate and very quickly buzzed into
the development laboratories wing at Fort Belvoir by an army specialist
4 who seemed surprised that I wasn’t in uniform.

“Colonel Corso, ” Dr. Paul Fredericks,
technology development consultant to the night vision section at Fort
Belvoir, said as he extended his hand and walked me over to what must
have been his prized tobacco colored leather chair. It was way
oversized for his small office and was obviously his favorite seat. I
was duly appreciative of the honor and courtesy he was according me.
“General Trudeau told me you were bringing us some remarkable
information about one of the projects we have in development here.
”

“I hope it’s helpful to you, Dr.
Fredericks, ” I began. “I’m not a
physicist, but I think we have something that might speed up the
research time line and show some new possibilities. ”

“Anything that could help, Colonel, ” he
said as I opened up my briefcase and began to spread out what I had.
“Anything at all. ”