The Day After Roswell (22 page)

Despite the civilian opposition to the army’s plan,
General Trudeau wrote that the army had no choice but to advocate its
plans for a moon base. “The United States intelligence
community agrees that the Soviet Union may accomplish a manned lunar
landing at anytime after 1965. ” This, he said, would
establish a Soviet precedent for claiming the lunar surface as Soviet
territory which, even in and of itself, could precipitate the next war
if the United States also tried to establish a presence there. Being
second was no option. “As the Congress has noted, ”
General Trudeau continued, “we are caught in a stream in
which we have no choice but to proceed. ” .

However, as hard as we tried to get Project Horizon into full
funding and development, we were stopped. The nation’s space
program had become the property of the civilian space agency, and NASA
had its own agenda and its own schedule for space exploration. We were
successful in discrete projects like Corona, but it would not
relinquish to the army the control necessary to establish a moon base
under the terms of a Project Horizon.

I became General Trudeau’s point man for the project
in Washington. I was able to lobby for it, and Horizon also became an
effective cover for all of the technological development I was
overseeing out of the Roswell file. No one knew just how much of the
Roswell technology would wind up getting into development because of
the military issues Horizon implicitly proposed about the presence of
extraterrestrials and their hostile intentions. After his first full
year in office, President Kennedy also saw the value in Project Horizon
even though he was in no position to dismantle NASA or order NASA
to cede control to the army for the development of a base on the moon.

But I think we eventually made our point to the President
because he ultimately saw the value in a moon base. Shortly after I
testified before the Senate in a closed, top secret session about how
the KGB had penetrated the CIA and was actually dictating some of our
intelligence estimates since before the Korean War, Attorney General
Robert Kennedy, who read that secret testimony, asked me to come over
to the Justice Department for a visit.

We came to a meeting of the minds that day. I know that I
convinced him that the official intelligence the President was
receiving through his agencies was not only faulty, it was deliberately
flawed. Robert Kennedy began to see that those of us over at the
Pentagon were not just a bunch of old soldiers looking for a war. He
saw that we really did see a threat and that the United States was
truly compromised by Soviet penetration of our most secret agencies.

We didn’t talk about Roswell or any aliens. I never
told him about extraterrestrials, but I was able to convince him that
if the Soviets got to the moon before we did, victory in the Cold War
might just belong to them by the end of this decade. Bobby Kennedy
suspected that there was another agenda to the army’s desire
to deploy a lunar outpost for military as well as for scientific and
commercial purposes and, without ever acknowledging that agenda,
promised that he would talk about it with the President.

I can only tell you that it was a mark of achievement for me
personally when President John Kennedy announced to the nation shortly
after my meeting with Bobby at the Justice Department that it was one
of his goals that the United States put a manned expedition on the moon
before the end of the 1960s. He got it! Maybe he couldn’t let
the army have another Manhattan Project. That was another era and
another war. But Jack Kennedy did understand, I believe, the real
consequences of the Cold War and what might have happened if the
Russians had put a manned lander on the moon before we did.

The way history turned out, it was our lunar expeditions, one
after the other throughout the 1960s, that not only caught the
world’s attention but showed all our enemies that the United
States was determined to stake out its territory and defend the moon.
Nobody was looking for an out and out war, especially the EBEs who
tried to scare us away from the moon and their own base there more
times than even I know. They buzzed our ships, interfered with our
communications, and sought to threaten us by their physical presence.
But we continued and persevered. Ultimately, we reached the moon and
sent enough manned expeditions to explore the lunar surface that they
effectively challenged the EBEs for control over our own skies and
sphere of space, the very sphere General Trudeau was talking about in
the Project Horizon memoranda ten years earlier. And although the
Horizon proposal projected a lunar landing by1967, it presupposed that
the army would begin creating the bureaucracy to manage the effort and
build the hardware as early as1959. Because of NASA and civilian
management of space exploration, the United States took longer to reach
the moon than we had originally assumed and, of course, never did build
the permanent base we had planned for in the original Horizon proposal.

I knew, even though I was no longer in the army in 1969, that
our success at lunar exploration had demonstrated that we were
exercising control and that the EBEs would not have free rein over our
skies. It also demonstrated that if there were any deals to be made,
any proxy relationships to establish, the Soviets were not the ones to
deal with. By the beginning of the 1970s, as the Apollo lunar landings
continued, it was clear that the tide had turned and we had gained some
of the advantage in dealing with the EBEs that we were seeking way back
in the 1950s.

But for me, back in 1961, staring at the mammoth Project
Horizon report on my desk and realizing that the entire civilian
science establishment was mobilizing against this endeavor, I knew that
small victories would have to suffice until the big ones could be won.
And I took out the printed silicon wafers we’d pulled from
the Roswell spacecraft wreckage and told myself that these would
comprise the next project I would get into development. I barely knew
what they were, but, if the scientists at White Sands Proving Grounds
were right about what they portended, this was a victory we would
relish long after the political battles over Project Horizon were over.

The Integrated Circuit Chip:

From the Roswell Crash Site to Silicon Valley

WITH THE NIGHT-VISION IMAGE INTENSIFIER PROJECT UNDER way at
Fort Belvoir and the Project Horizon team trying to swim upstream
against the tide of civilian management of the U.S. space program, I
turned my attention to the next of the Roswell crash fragments that
looked especially intriguing: the charred semiconductor wafers that had
broken off some larger device. I hadn’t made these my
priorities at first, not knowing what they really were, until General
Trudeau asked me to take a closer look.

“Talk to some of the rocket scientists down at
Alamogordo about these things, Phil, ” he said. “I
think they’ll know what we should do with them. ”

I knew that in the days immediately following the crash,
General Twining had met with the Alamogordo group of the Air Material
Command and had described some of the debris to them. But I
didn’t know how detailed his descriptions were or whether
they even knew about the wafers we had in our file.

“I want to talk to some of the scientists up here,
too, ” I said. “Especially, I want to see some of
the engineers from the defense contractors. Maybe they can figure out
what the engineering process is for these things. ”

“Go over to Bell Labs, Phil, ” General
Trudeau also suggested. “ The transistor came out of their
shop and these things look a lot like transistorized circuits.
”

I’d heard that General Twining had worked very
closely with both Bell Labs and Motorola on communications research
during the war, afterwards at the Alamogordo test site for V2 missile
launches, and after the Roswell crash. Whether he had brought them any
material from the crash or showed them the tiny silicon chips was a
matter of pure speculation. I only know that the entire field of
circuit miniaturization took a giant leap in 1947 with the invention of
the transistor and the first solid state components. By the late
1950s,transistors had replaced the vacuum tube in radios and had turned
the wall-sized wooden box of the 1940s into the portable plastic radio
you could hear blaring away at the shore on a hot July Sunday. The
electronics industry had taken a major technological jump in less than
ten years, and I had to wonder privately whether any Roswell material
had gotten out that I didn’t know about prior to my taking
over Foreign Technology in 1961.

I didn’t realize it at first when I showed those
silicon wafers to General Trudeau, but I was to become very quickly and
intimately involved with the burgeoning computer industry and a very
small, completely invisible, cog in an assembly line process that
fifteen years later would result in the first microcomputer systems and
the personal computer revolution.

Over the course of the years since I joined the army in 1942,
my career took me through the stages of vacuum tube based devices, like
our radios and radars in World War II, to component chassis. These were
large circuitry units that, if they went down, could be changed in
sections, smaller sections, and finally to tiny transistors and
transistorized electronic components. The first army computers I saw
were room sized, clanking vacuum tube monsters that were always
breaking down and, by today’s standards, took an eternity to
calculate even the simplest of answers. They were simply oil filled
data pots. But they amazed those of us who had never seen computers
work before.

At Red Canyon and in Germany, the tracking and targeting
radars we used were controlled by new transistorized chassis computers
that were compact enough to fit onto a truck and travel with the
battalion. So when I opened up my nut file and saw the charred matte
gray quarter sized, cracker shaped silicon wafers with the gridlines
etched onto them like tiny printed lines on the cover of a match book,
I could make an educated guess about their function even though
I’d never seen anything of the like before. I knew, however,
that our rocket scientists and the university researchers who worked
with the development laboratories at Bell, Motorola, and IBM would more
than understand the primary function of these chips and figure out what
we needed to do to make some of our own.

But first I called Professor Hermann Oberth for basic
background on what, if any, development might have taken place after
the Roswell crash. Dr. Oberth knew the Alamogordo scientists and
probably received second hand the substance of the conversations
General Twining had with his Alamogordo group in the hours after the
retrieval of the vehicle. And if General Twining described some of the
debris, did he describe these little silicon chips? And if he did, in
those months when the ENIAC - the first working computer - was just
cranking up at the Aberdeen Ordnance Testing Grounds in Maryland, what
did the scientists make of those chips?

“They saw these at the Walker Field hangar,
” Dr. Oberth told me. “All of them at Alamogordo
flew over to Roswell with General Twining to oversee the shipment to
Wright Field. ”

Oberth described what happened that day after the crash when a
team of AMC rocket scientists pored over the bits and pieces of debris
from the site. Some of the debris was packed for flight on B29s. Other
material, especially the crates that wound up at Fort Riley, were
loaded onto deuce and a halfs for the drive. Dr. Oberth said that years
later, von Braun had told him how those scientists who literally had to
stand in line to have their equations processed by the experimental
computer in Aberdeen Maryland were in awe of the microscopic circuitry
etched into the charred wafer chips that had spilled out of the craft.

von Braun had asked General Twining whether anyone at Bell
Labs was going to be contacted about this find. Twining seemed
surprised at first, but when von Braun told him about the experiments
on solid state components - material whose electrons don’t
need to be excited by heat in order to conduct current - Twining became
intrigued. What if these chips were components of a very advanced solid
state circuitry? von Braun asked him. What if one of the reasons the
army could find no electronic wiring on the craft were the layers of
these wafers that ran throughout the ship? These circuit chips could be
the nervous system of the craft, carrying signals and transmitting
commands just like the nervous system in a human body.

General Twining’s only experience had been with the
heavily insulated vacuum tube devices from World War II, where the
multistrand wires were covered with cloth. He’d never seen
metallic printed chips like these before. How did they work?
he’d asked von Braun.

The German scientist wasn’t sure, although he
guessed they worked on the same principle as the transistors that
laboratories were trying to develop to the point where they could be
manufactured commercially. It would completely transform the
electronics industry, von Braun explained to General Twining, nothing
short of a revolution. The Germans had been desperately trying to
develop circuitry of this sort during the war, but Hitler, convinced
the war would be over by 1941, told the German computer researchers
that the Wehrmacht  had no need for computers that had a
development timetable greater than one year. They’d all be
celebrating victory in Berlin before the end of the year.

But the research into solid state components that the Germans
had been doing and the early work at Bell Labs was nothing compared to
the marvel that Twining had shown von Braun and the other rocket
scientists in New Mexico. Under the magnifying glass, the group thought
they saw not just a single solid state switch but a whole system of
switches integrated into each other and comprising what looked like an
entire circuit or system of circuits. They couldn’t be sure
because no one had ever seen anything even remotely like this before.
But it showed them an image of what the future of electronics could be
if a way could be found to manufacture this kind of circuit on Earth.
Suddenly, the huge guidance control systems necessary to control the
flight of a rocket, which, in 1947, were too big to be squeezed into
the fuselage of the rocket, could be miniaturized so that the rocket
could have its own automatic guidance system. If we could duplicate
what the EBEs had, we, too, would have the ability to explore space. In
effect, the reverse engineering of solid state integrated circuitry
began in the weeks and months after the crash even though William
Shockley at Bell Labs was already working on a version of his
transistor as early as 1946.

In the summer of 1947, the scientists at Alamogordo were only
aware of the solid state circuit research under way at Bell Labs and
Motorola. So they pointed Nathan Twining to research scientists at both
companies and agreed to help him conduct the very early briefings into
the nature of the Roswell find. The army, very covertly, turned some of
the components over to research engineers for an inspection, and by the
early 1950s the transistor had been invented and transistorized
circuits were now turning up in consumer products as well as in
military electronics systems. The era of the vacuum tube, the single
piece of eighty year old technology upon which an entire generation of
communications devices including television and digital computers was
built, was now coming to a close with the discovery in the desert of an
entirely new technology.

The radio vacuum tube was a legacy of nineteenth century
experimentation with electric current. Like many historic scientific
discoveries, the theory behind the vacuum tube was uncovered almost by
chance, and nobody really knew what it was or cared much about it until
years later. The radio vacuum tube probably reached its greatest
utility from the 1930s through the 1950s, until the technology we
discovered at Roswell made it all but obsolete. The principle behind
the radio vacuum tube, first discovered by Thomas Edison in the 1880s
while he was experimenting with different components for his
incandescent lightbulb, was that current, which typically flowed in
either direction across a conductive material such as a wire, could be
made to flow in only one direction when passed through a vacuum. This
directed flow of current, called the “Edison effect,
” is the scientific principle behind the illumination of the
filament material inside the vacuum of the incandescent lightbulb, a
technology that has remained remarkably the same for over a hundred
years.

But the lightbulb technology that Edison discovered back in
the1880s, then put aside only to experiment with it again in the early
twentieth century, also had another equally important function. Because
the flow of electrons across the single filament wire went in only one
direction, the vacuum tube was also a type of automatic switch. Excite
the flow of electrons across the wire and the current flowed only in
the direction you wanted it to. You didn’t need to throw a
switch to turn on a circuit manually because the vacuum tube could do
that for you. Edison had actually discovered the first automatic
switching device, which could be applied to hundreds of electronic
products from the radio sets that I grew up with in the1920s to the
communications networks and radar banks of World War II and to the
television sets of the 1950s. In fact, the radio tube was the single
component that enabled us to begin the worldwide communications network
that was already in place by the early twentieth century.

Radio vacuum tubes also had another important application that
wasn’t discovered until experimenters in the infant science
of computers first recognized the need for them in the 1930s and then
again in the 1940s. Because they were switches, opening and closing
circuits, they could be programmed to reconfigure a computer to
accomplish different tasks. The computer itself had, in principle,
remained essentially the same type of calculating device that Charles
Babbage first invented in the 1830s. It was a set of internal gears or
wheels that acted as counters and a section of
“memory” that stored numbers until it was their
turn to be processed. Babbage’s computer was operated
manually by a technician who threw mechanical switches in order to
input raw numbers and execute the program that processed the numbers.

The simple principle behind the first computer, called by its
inventor the “Analytical Engine, ” was that the
same machine could process an infinite variety and types of
calculations by reconfiguring its parts through a switching mechanism.
The machine had a component for inputting numbers or instructions to
the processor; the processor itself, which completed the calculations;
a central control unit, or CPU, that organized and sequenced the tasks
to make sure the machine was doing the right job at the right time; a
memory area for storing numbers; and finally a component that output
the results of the calculations to a type of printer: the same basic
components you find in all computers even today.

The same machine could add, subtract, multiply, or divide and
even store numbers from one arithmetical process to the next. It could
even store the arithmetical computation instructions themselves from
job to job. And Babbage borrowed a punch card process invented by
Joseph Jacquard for programming weaving looms. Babbage’s
programs could be stored on series of punch cards and fed into the
computer to control the sequence of processing numbers. Though this may
sound like a startling invention, it was Industrial Revolution
technology that began in the late eighteenth century for the purely
utilitarian challenge of processing large numbers for the British
military. Yet, in concept, it was an entirely new principle in machine
design that very quietly started the digital revolution.

Because Babbage’s machine was hand powered and
cumbersome, little was done with it through the nineteenth century, and
by the1880s, Babbage himself would be forgotten. However, the practical
application of electricity to mechanical appliances and the delivery of
electrical power along supply grids, invented by Thomas Edison and
refined by Nikola Tesla, gave new life to the calculation machine. The
concept of an automatic calculation machine would, inspire American
inventors to devise their own electrically powered calculators to
process large numbers in a competition to calculate the 1890 U.S.
Census. The winner of the competition was Herman Hollerith, whose
electrically powered calculator was a monster device that not only
processed numbers but displayed the progress of the process on large
clocks for all to see. He was so successful that the large railroad
companies hired him to process their numbers. By the turn of the
century his company, the Computing Tabulating and Recording Company,
had become the single largest developer of automatic calculating
machines. By 1929, when Hollerith died, his company had become the
automation conglomerate, IBM.