The Day After Roswell (24 page)

Government military weapons spending and the requirements for
space exploration had already heavily funded the transistorized
component circuit. The radars and missiles I was commanding at Red
Canyon, New Mexico, in 1958 relied on miniaturized components for their
reliability and portability. New generations of tracking radars on the
drawing boards in 1960 were even more sophisticated and electronically
intelligent than the weapons I was aiming at Soviet targets in Germany.
In the United States, Japanese and Taiwanese radios that fit into the
palm of your hand were on the market. Computers like ENIAC, once the
size of a small warehouse, now occupied rooms no larger than closets
and, while still generating heat, no longer blew out because of
overheated radio vacuum tubes. Minicomputers, helped by government
R&D funding, were still a few years away from market, but were
already in a design phase. Television sets and stereophonic phonographs
that offered solid state electronics were coming on the market, and
companies like IBM, Sperry-Rand, and NCR were beginning to bring
electronic office machines onto the market. It was the beginning of a
new age of electronics, helped, in part, by government funding of basic
research into the development and manufacture of integrated circuit
products. But the real prize, the development of what actually had been
recovered at Roswell, was still a few years away. When it arrived,
again spurred by the requirements of military weapons development and
space travel, it caused another revolution.

The history of the printed circuit and the microprocessor is
also the history of a technology that allowed engineers to squeeze more
and more circuitry into a smaller and smaller space. It’s the
history of the integrated circuit, which developed throughout the
1960s, evolved into large scale integration by the early 1970s, very
large scale integration by the middle 1970s, just before the emergence
of the first real personal computers, and ultra large scale integration
by the early 1980s. Today’s 200 plus megahertz, multigigabyte
hard drive desktop computers are the results of the integrated circuit
technology that began in the 1960s and has continued to the present.
The jump from the basic transistorized integrated printed circuit of
the 1960s to large scale integration was made possible by the
development of the microprocessor in 1972.

Once the development process of engineering a more tightly
compacted circuit had been inspired by the invention of the transistor
in 1948, and fueled by the need to develop better, faster, and smaller
computers, it continued on a natural progression until the engineers at
Intel developed the first microprocessor, a four bit central processing
unit called the 4004, in 1972. This year marked the beginning of the
microcomputer industry, although the first personal microcomputers
didn’t appear on the market until the development of
Intel’s 8080A. That computer chip was the heart of the Altair
computer, the first product to package a version of a high level
programming language called BASIC, which allowed non-engineering types
to program the machine and create applications for it. Soon companies
like Motorola and Zilog had their own microprocessors on the market,
and by 1977 the Motorola 6502-powered Apple II was on the market,
joined by the 8080A Radio Shack, the Commodore PET, the Atari, and the
Heathkit. Operationally, at its very heart, the microprocessor shares
the same binary processing functions and large arrays of digital
switches as its ancestors, the big mainframes of the 1950s and 1960s
and the transistorized minis of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Functionally, the microprocessor also shares the same kinds of tasks as
Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine of the 1830s: reading
numbers, storing numbers, logically processing numbers, and outputting
the results. The microprocessor just puts everything into a much
smaller space and moves it along at a much faster speed.

In 1979, Apple Computer had begun selling the first home
computer floppy disk operating system for data and program storage that
kicked the microcomputer revolution into a higher gear. Not only could
users input data via a keyboard or tape cassette player, they could
store relatively large amounts of data, such as documents or
mathematical projections, on transportable, erasable, and
interchangeable Mylar disks that the computer was able to read. Now the
computer reached beyond the electronics hobbyist into the work place.
By the end of the year, MicroPro’s introduction of the first
fully functional word processor called WordStar, and Personal
Software’s release of the very first electronic spreadsheet
called VisiCalc, so transformed the workplace that the desktop computer
became a necessity for any young executive on his or her way up the
corporate ladder. And by the early 1980s, with the introduction of the
Apple Macintosh and the object oriented computer environment, not only
the workplace but the whole world looked like a very different place
than it did in the early 1960s. Even Dr. Vannevar Bush’s
concept of a type of research query language based not on a linear
outline but on an intellectual relationship to something embedded in a
body of text became a reality with the release of a computer program by
Apple called HyperCard.

It was as if from the year 1947 to 1980 a fundamental paradigm
shift in the ability of human kind to process information took place.
Computers themselves almost became something like a silicon based life
form, inspiring the carbon based life forms on planet Earth to develop
them, grow them, and even help them reproduce. With computer directed
process control programs now in place in virtually all major
industries, software that writes software, neural network based expert
systems that learn from their own experience in the real world, and
current experiments under way to grow almost microscopically thin
silicon based chips in the weightless environment of earth orbit may be
the forerunner of a time when automated orbital factories routinely
grow and harvest new silicon material for microprocessors more
sophisticated than we can even imagine at the present. Were all of this
to be true, could it not be argued that the silicon wafers we recovered
from Roswell were the real masters and space travelers and the EBE
creatures their hosts or servants? Once implanted successfully on
Earth, our culture having reached a point of readiness through its
development of the first digital computers, would not the natural
development stream, starting from the invention of the transistor, have
carried us to the point where we achieve a symbiotic relationship with
the silicon material that carries our data and enables us to become
more creative and successful?

Maybe the Roswell crash, which helped us develop the
technological basis for the weapons systems to protect our planet from
the EBEs, was also the mechanism for successfully implanting a
completely alien non-humanoid life form that survives from host to host
like a virus, a digital Ebola that we humans will carry to another
planet someday. Or what if an enemy wanted to implant the perfect
spying or sabotage mechanism into a culture? Then the implantation of
the microchip based circuit into our technology by the EBEs would be
the perfect method. Was it implanted as sabotage or as something akin
to the gift of fire? Maybe the Roswell crash in 1947 was an event
waiting to happen, like poisoned fruit dropping from the tree into a
playground. Once bitten, the poison takes effect.

“Hold your horses, Phil, ” General Trudeau
would say when I would speculate too much. “Remember,
you’ve got a bunch of scientists you need to talk to and the
people at Bell Labs are waiting to see your report when
you’ve finished talking to the Alamogordo group. ”

It was 1961 and the miniaturization of computer and electronic
circuitry had already begun, but my report to the general and
appointments he was arranging for me at Sperry-Rand, Hughes, and Bell
Labs were for meetings with scientists to determine how their
respective companies were proceeding with applying miniaturized
circuitry into designs for weapons systems. The inspiration for
microcircuitry had fallen out of the sky at Roswell and set the
development of digital computers off in an entirely new direction. It
was my job now to use the process of weapons development, especially
the development of guidance systems for ballistic missiles, to
implement the application of microcircuitry systems to these new
generations of weapons. General Trudeau and I were among the first
scouts in what would be the electronic battlefield of the 1980s.

“Don’t worry, General, I’ve got
my appointments all set up, ” I told him. I knew how carried
away I could get, but I was an intelligence officer first, and that
meant you start with a blank page and fill it in. “But I
think the people at Bell Labs have already seen these things before.
” And they actually did - in 1947.

The Laser

AS I WORKED MY WAY THROUGH THE LIST OF ITEMS IN MY NUT file,
writing advisory reports and recommendations to General Trudeau about
the potential of each item, I lost all concept of time. I could see, as
I drove up and down the Potomac shore to Fort Belvoir to check on the
progress of night vision at Martin Marietta, that the summer was coming
to an end and the leaves had started to change color. I could also see
that now it was already dark when I left the Pentagon. And it was dark
now when I set out for the Pentagon every morning. I’d gotten
into the habit of taking different routes to work just to make sure
that if the CIA had put a tail on me, I’d make him work
harder to stay up with me.

General Trudeau and I had settled down into a long daily
routine ourselves at R&D. We had our early morning meetings
about the Roswell file - he also called it the “junk
pile” because it was filled with so much debris and pieces of
items that had broken away from larger components - but we had buried
the Roswell material development projects themselves so deep inside the
regular functions of the R&D division that not even the other
officers who worked with us every day knew what was going on.
We’d categorized the work we did so carefully that when it
came time to discuss anything about Roswell, even if it had a bearing
on some other item we were working on at the time, we made sure that
either no one was at the office, or we were at a place where we
wouldn’t have to stop talking just because someone came into
the room.

My responsibility at Foreign Technology was to feed
R&D’s ongoing project development with information
and intelligence from sources outside the regular army channels. These
ran in interconnected rings through the Pentagon to defense industry
contractors to testing operations at army bases and to researchers at
universities or independent laboratories who were under contract with
us. If we were developing methods of preserving food, always trying to
come up with a better way to prepare field rations, and the Italians
and Germans had a process that seemed to work, it was my job to learn
about it and slip the information into the development process. Even
when there was no official development process underway for a specific
item, if something I learned was appropriate to anyone of the
army’s major commands, whether it was the Medical Corps, the
Signal Corps, the motor pool, ordnance, or even the Quartermaster
Corps, it was also my job to find a way to make that information
appropriate and drop it in without so much as a splash. This made the
perfect cover for what I was doing with the Roswell file as long as I
could find ways to slip the Roswell technology into the development
process so invisibly no one would ever able to find the Roswell on ramp
to the information highway.

For all the world to see, General Trudeau and I regularly met
to review the ongoing projects in Army R&D, those we had
inherited from the previous command and those we wanted to initiate on
our watch. Officers who’d been assigned to R&D before
we arrived had their own projects already in development, too, and the
general had assigned me the task of feeding those projects with
information and intelligence, no matter where it came from, without
disturbing either what the officers were doing or interfering with
their staffs. It was tricky because I had to work in the dark,
undercover even from my own colleagues whose reputations would have
been destroyed if word leaked out that they were dealing in
“flying saucer stuff. ” Yet at the same time, most
high ranking officers at the Pentagon and key members of their staffs
knew that Roswell technology was floating  through most of the
new projects under development. They were also vaguely, if not
specifically, aware of what had happened at Roswell itself and of the
current version of the Hillenkoetter/Bush/Twining working group, which
had personnel stationed at the Pentagon to keep tabs on what the
military was doing.

Uniting what I called my official “day
job” at R&D on regular projects and my undercover job
in the Roswell file, was my official, but many times informal, role as
General Trudeau’s deputy at the division. In that job, I
would carry out the general’s orders as they related to the
division and not specifically to any one project or another. If General
Trudeau needed information to help him redefine his budgetary
priorities or assemble information to help compile supplementary
development budgets, he’d often ask me to help or at least
give him advice. And I functioned as the general’s
intelligence officer as well, supporting him at meetings with
information, helping him present position papers, assisting him
whenever he had to hold briefings or meet with congressional
committees, and defending him and the division against the almost
weekly attacks on our turf from officers in the other military branches
or from the civilian development and intelligence agencies. Everybody
wanted to know what we knew, what we were spending, and what we were
spending it on. And we had no quarrel with telling anybody who wanted
to know exactly what kinds of goods the American people were getting
for their money except when it came to one category - Roswell.
That’s when the mantle of darkness would fall and our
memories about where certain things came from became very dim, as it
did with the dramatic improvement in night vision technology shortly
after the summer of 1961. Even our own people became very frustrated
with us when General Trudeau would turn to me at a meeting and say,
“You know that night vision information you sent over to Fort
Belvoir a while back? Where did you find that file, Phil?”
And if I couldn’t play dumb and say, “I
don’t think I ever came across this before, must be someone
else in charge, ” then I’d simply shrug and say,
“I don’t know, General, must have been in the files
somewhere. I’ll have to go back and look. ”

It was an act, and many of the officers who suspected we had a
stash of information somewhere knew we were covering up something. But
if they were career, they also knew how to play the Pentagon version of
steal the bacon. We had it and we were hiding it. No one would find out
anything unless we let them. So the general would typically hand off
anything having to do with military intelligence information to me and
I would usually find a way not only to lose the answer but to lose the
question as well. We became so practiced at this that entirely new
inventions could find their way into development at many different
places at the same time without anyone’s ever becoming aware of the source of the
technology, especially the officer who was assigned the task of project
manager within our very own division.

The CIA got so frustrated at not getting any information out
of us that they began keeping closer tabs on the Russian attaches
floating around Washington and working under their KGB controllers at
the embassies and consulates. Because the CIA knew how thoroughly our
universities had been penetrated they figured they’d get
information on the rebound by photographing what was inside the
photocopiers at the Russian embassy in Washington. And sure enough,
from the rumor mill circulating around the exchange of scientists
between industry and academia, the CIA knew that we were on to
something at Army R&D and kept the circle as tight around us as
they possibly could. So I had to keep close tabs on the general, not
letting him go into meetings, any meetings, unprotected and always
making sure that the CIA knew that they would have to climb over me to
get to General Trudeau and anything he knew. And the CIA knew that I
knew what they were doing and where their loyalties lay and also knew
that it would have to come to a showdown someday.

General Trudeau and I had quickly established our routine in
early1961, and our categorization of how we did our jobs seemed to be
working. Night vision was under development at Fort Belvoir, and
researchers who worked with us had made sure that the silicon wafer
chips had gotten to their colleagues at Bell Labs and assured us that a
new generation of  transistorized circuitry was already
finding its way into development. The silicon chips were a covert
reintroduction to the people at Bell Labs because the initial
introduction of the integrated circuit chips from the Roswell crash had
reached defense contractors as early as 1947 in the weeks after the
material reached Wright Field.

A similar history of introduction and reintroduction had
occurred with stimulated energy radiation, a weapon the early analysts
believed they were looking at in the wreckage of the Roswell craft.
Since directed energy radiation was a technology we’d already
deployed in World War II, seeing what they thought was a super advanced
version of that technology, so advanced as to be in a completely
different realm, so excited the analysts at Wright Field that they
wanted to get it out to research scientists as quickly as possible,
which they did. And by the early 1950s, a version of stimulated energy
radiation had found its way into the scientific community, which was
developing new products around the process of microwave generation.

Most Americans who were alive in the 1950s remember the
introduction of the microwave oven that helped us “live
better electrically” in our new modern kitchens. One of the
miracle appliances that burst onto the scene in the 1950s promised to
cook food in less than half the time of conventional ovens, even when
the food had been completely frozen. Marketed under a variety of brand
names including the now historic “Radar Range, ”
the microwave oven cooked whatever was inside not by the application of
pure heat, the way conventional ovens did, but by bombarding the food
with showers of tiny waves of electromagnetic radiation, usually only a
centimeter or so long. The waves would pass through the food, exciting
the water molecules deep inside and causing them to align and realign,
back and forth, with greater velocity. The molecular activity generated
heat from within and the food cooked from the inside out. Once you
enclosed it in the right kind of container to keep all the moisture
from evaporating, you had a quick cooked meal.

The theory behind the microwave oven that started us down the
long and profitable path of stimulated energy research was formulated
in 1945 with the first commercial microwave ovens rolling off the line
at Raytheon in Massachusetts in 1947 before any dissemination of either
intelligence or material from the crash of the Roswell spacecraft. But
in the wreckage of that craft, the scientists from the test firing
range at Alamogordo reported that the inhabitants of the craft seemed
to use very advanced wave stimulation instrumentation that, according
to their analysis, bore a relationship to the physics of a basic
microwave generator. The retrieval team that pulled the wreckage out of
the desert also found a short, stubby, internally powered flashlight
device that threw a pencil thin, intense beam of light for a short
distance that could actually cut through metal. This, the engineers at
Wright Field believed, was also based on wave stimulation. The
questions then were, how did the EBEs use wave stimulation and how
could we adapt it to military uses or slip it into the product
development already under way?

By 1954, when I was at the White House, the National Security
Council was already receiving reports of a theory, developed by Charles
H. Townes, that described how the atoms of a gas could be excited to
extraordinarily high energy levels by the application of bursts of
energy. The gas would release its excess energy as microwaves of a very
precise frequency that could be controlled. In theory, we thought, the
energy beam could be a signal to carry communications or an amplifier
for the signal. When the first maser was assembled at Bell Laboratories
in 1956, it was used as a timer because of the very exact calibration
of the wave frequency.

The maser, however, was only a forerunner of the product that
was to come, the laser, which would revolutionize every aspect of
technology it touched. It would also prove to be a weapon that would
help us deploy a realistic threat to the EBEs who seemed poised to
trigger a nuclear war between the superpowers. Where the maser was an
amplification of generated microwaves, the laser was an amplification
of light, and theories about how this might be accomplished were
circulating widely throughout the weapons development community even
before Bell Labs produced the first maser. I had seen the descriptions
of the EBE laser in reports about the Roswell crash, a beam of light so
thin that you couldn’t even see it until it landed on a
target. What was the purpose of this light generator? the Alamogordo
group had asked. It looked like a targeting or communications device,
seemed to have an almost limitless range, and, if the right power
source could be found to amplify the light beam to where it could
penetrate metal, the device could be used as a drill, a welder, or even
a devastating weapon.

Even while I was at the White House, all three branches of the
military were working with researchers in university laboratories to
develop a working laser. In theory, exciting the atoms of an element to
produce light energy in the same way that atoms of a gas were excited
to produce microwaves, lasers offered the tantalizing promise of a
directed energy beam that had such a wide variety of applications it
could become an almost universal utility for all divisions of the
military, even controlling warehouse inventory for the Quarter master
Corps. Finally, in 1958, the year after I left the White House, there
was a surge in research activity, especially at Columbia University
where, two years later, physicist Theodore Maiman constructed the first
working laser.

The first practical demonstration of the laser took place in
1960,and by the time I got to the Pentagon, General Trudeau had put it
on our list of priorities to develop for military purposes. Also,
because stimulated energy radiation devices were among the cache of
technological debris we recovered from Roswell, the U.S. development or
the laser encompassed the special urgent requirements of my Roswell
mission. I had to write a report to General Trudeau suggesting ways the
EBEs might have used laser technology in their missions on this planet
and how we could develop similar uses for it under the guise of a
conventional development program. In other words, once we guessed how
the aliens were using it, it was to become our developmental model for
similar applications.