The Day After Roswell (25 page)

We believed that the EBEs used lasers for navigation, by
bouncing beams off distant objects in space and homing in on them to
triangulate a course; for communication, by using the laser beam as a
carrier signal or as a signal in and of itself; for surveillance, by
painting potential targets with a beam; and for power transmission,
illumination, and even data storage. The strength and integrity of the
laser beam should have served as the EBEs’ primary method of
communication over vast distances or even as a way of storing
communications in packages for later delivery. However, it was the
EBEs’ use of directed energy as a medical tool and ultimately
as a potential weapon that sent shivers up and down our spines because
to our minds it was evidence of the aliens’ hostile
intentions. Whether they saw us as true enemies to be destroyed or
regarded all life on our planet as laboratory specimens to be
experimented with, the results from the animal carcasses picked up in
the field by our military nuclear, biological, and chemical recovery
teams and the civilian intelligence investigators could have been very
much the same.

In the Pentagon from 1961 to 1963,1 reviewed field reports
from local and state police agencies about the discoveries of dead
cattle whose carcasses looked as though they had been systematically
mutilated and reports from people who claimed to have been abducted by
aliens and experimented on. One of the common threads in these stories
were reports by the self described abductees of being subjected to some
sort of probing or even a form of surgery with controlled, intense,
pencil thin beams of light. Local police reported that when
veterinarians were called to the scene to examine the dead cattle left
in fields, they often found evidence not just that the
animal’s blood had been drained but that entire organs were
removed with such surgical skill that it couldn’t have been
the work of predators or vandals removing the organs for some depraved
ritual. Where there was evidence of crime of someone staging a bizarre
hoax, it was usually obvious from the clumsiness of the attempt and the
deliberate staging of the carcass. And in the overwhelming majority of
instances where the animal was killed by a predator who consumed its
blood and carried away internal organs, the evidence of teeth marks or
of a brief life and death struggle was also a clear indicator of what
had happened. But in those cases where investigators claimed to have
been baffled by what they found, the removal of the organs and the
draining of the animal’s blood - where blood had been
completely drained - were so sophisticated that there was almost no
peripheral damage to the surrounding tissue. There was even some
speculation, in the early 1960s, that whatever device the EBEs had
employed, it didn’t even cut through the surrounding tissue.
We had no medical instruments that even remotely approached what the
aliens could do. It was as though some device had simply excised the
organs with techniques that even went beyond our own surgical precision.

While I was on the White House National Security staff and
later when I was at the Pentagon, I was intrigued by these reports. I
also remember that both civilian and military intelligence personnel
attached to the staffs of individuals who worked for the Hillenkoetter
and Twining working group on UFOs in the 1950s were actively engaging
in research into the kinds of surgical methods that would produce
“crime scene evidence” like this. Could have been
the Russians, they thought at first. Given the tense climate of the
Cold War, a fear that the Soviets were experimenting with American
livestock to develop some form of toxin or biological weapon that would
devastate our cattle population was not unduly paranoid. It’s
sufficient to say, without going into any detail, that we were thinking
about the same kinds of weapons, so it was not far fetched to say that
we were projecting our own doomsday strategies onto what the Russians
might have done.

But it wasn’t the Soviets who were going after our
cattle. In fact the Soviet strategy for destabilizing the United States
was so sophisticated that it was only a strategy of playing nuclear
chicken with the Soviets that forced them to back down in the end. It
was the EBEs who were experimenting with organ harvesting, possibly for
transplant into other species or for processing into some sort of
nutrient package or even to create some sort of hybrid biological
entity. This is what people attached to the working group thought in
the 1950s and 1960s, and even though we had no solid intelligence at
the time that we were right, we operated on the assumption that no one
takes an organ just for the sheer pleasure of removing it. Although the
first public reports of cattle mutilations surfaced around 1967 in
Colorado, at the White House we were reading about the mutilation
stories that had been kept out of press as far back as the middle
1950s, especially in the area around Colorado. There was speculation,
also, that maybe pharmaceutical companies were responsible because they
could utilize the organs and soft tissues in biological
experimentation, but we dismissed that because the companies had their
own farms and could grow anything they wanted. Our intelligence
organizations and especially the working group believed that the cattle
mutilations that could not be obviously explained away as pranks,
predators, or ritual slaughter were the results of interventions by
extraterrestrials who were harvesting specific organs for
experimentation. So if our cattle were important enough to the EBEs to
get them to expose what they were doing, it was an important thing for
us to understand why. The EBEs were nothing if not coldly and
clinically efficient - their methodology reminded us of the Nazis - and
they didn’t waste time sitting around on the ground where
they were most vulnerable to attack or capture unless they had a darn
good reason for doing so.

We didn’t know their reasons back in the 1950s and
1960s and can only make educated guesses about them now, but back then
we were driven by a terror that unless we found ways to defend
ourselves against the EBEs we would be corralled by them and used for
replacement tissue or as a source of nutrition. In 1997 this may sound
like a nightmare out of a flying saucer horror movie, but in1957 this
was our thinking both in the White House and in the military. We
didn’t know, but we had irrefutable evidence that EBEs were
landing on farms, harvesting vital organs from livestock, and then just
leaving the carcasses on the ground because they knew we
couldn’t do anything about it.

The mutilations that interested the National Security
personnel seemed to have the same kind of modus operandi. Whoever went
after the animals seemed most interested in the mammary, digestive, and
reproductive organs, especially the uteruses from cows. In many cases
the eyes or throats were removed in a type of surgery in which the
demarcation line was almost microscopically thin and the surrounding
tissue showed that the incision had super heated and then blackened as
it cooled. But the crime scene and forensic specialists noted that in
any type of cut by a predatory animal or a human - even a skilled
surgeon - one would find evidence of some trauma in the surrounding
tissue such as swelling, contusions, or other forms of abrasion. In
these reports of mutilations, forensic examination showed no evidence
of collateral trauma or even inflammation. Therefore, they believed,
the cuts to extract the tissue were made so quickly and wounds were
sealed so fast that the surrounding tissue never was destroyed. This
meant that whoever was operating on these animals did so in a matter of
minutes. It was rare, therefore, that police would ever catch them in
the act. So if we couldn’t protect our livestock or react
intelligently to the stories of human abductions, except to debunk them
and make the abductees themselves think they were delusional, we had to
find weapons that would put us on a more equal footing with the EBEs.
One of those weapons, which had a wide application potential, was the
laser - light amplification through stimulated energy radiation - the
device the army found in the Roswell spacecraft and would later develop
as a weapon in cooperation with Hughes Aircraft.

Shortly after the first successful demonstration of a ruby red
laser at Columbia University, the three military branches realized they
had a winner. The following year, the results of the tests at Columbia,
the industry interest in developing laser based products, and the
Roswell report on stimulated energy all merged on my desk. Now it was
my turn to get involved and assemble the information to support laser
product development with military funds before the whole operation was
turned over to one of the R&D specialists who would take the
product through its next stages. That was the way our backfield worked:
I fed the play, made sure the snap got off, and then faded in behind
the blockers. By the time the ball carrier had made his way into the
secondary, I was already off the field. I never got the Heisman Trophy,
but I sure as hell moved the ball.

I began by listing the needs of the army for what the laser
might be able to accomplish. Based on what the army analysts reported
they saw in the Roswell ship, it seemed to me obvious that if the
Roswell laser was a cutting or surgical tool, the beam could also be
utilized as an advanced rapid firing weapon. With a beam so precise and
directed, the laser would also make an excellent range finder and
target manager for artillery. If the beam was capable of instantaneous
readjustment and fed into a computer, it would also be the perfect
targeting system for a tank, especially a tank on the move. Typically,
a tank must stop before it can fire because the gunner needs to have a
fixed firing platform from which he calculates range direction, and
other compensating factors. The laser can do all that while the vehicle
is moving and should therefore enable a tank to stay on the move while
firing. And if a laser can paint a target from a tank and find the
range, I speculated, it can do the same for a helicopter from air to
air and air to ground.

I suggested to General Trudeau that all the research we were
conducting into helicopter tactics, especially into the role of
helicopters as infantry support gun and rocket platforms, dove tailed
perfectly with the possibilities of the laser as a range finding
mechanism. We could paint friendly troops to locate them, identify our
foes, and illuminate potential targets with light invisible to all but
our own gunners. At the same time, our own bombs or missiles can home
in on the laser image we project onto a target, like a heat seeking
missile. Once painted, the target could evade the laser guided rocket
or shell only with great difficulty. For a stationary target such as a
fortification or artillery redoubt, a laser guided shell would be
particularly devastating because we could take it out with one or two
rounds instead of having to go back again and again to make sure
we’d found the target.

As a signal, a laser is so intense, refined, and perfectly
stable that it is almost impervious to any kind of disturbance. For
this reason, I wrote General Trudeau, the EBEs must have used an
advanced form of a laser for their communication, and we can, too. The
intensity of the beam and its highly refined focus mean that it can be
aimed with minute precision. Amplifying the power to boost the signal
should not distort the beam’s aim, which makes it perfect for
straight line long distance communication.

Lasers also have high capacities for carrying multiple
signals. Therefore, I wrote the general, we can pack a greater number
of transmission bands into a laser signal than we can with our
conventional signal carriers. This meant that we could literally flood
a battlefield with different kinds of communication channels, each
carrying different kinds of communication, some not even invented yet,
and have them securely carried by laser signals. For command and
control on the increasingly sophisticated electronic battlefield the
army was predicting for the 1970s, lasers would become the Signal Corps
workhorses.

General Trudeau said that he was also interested in an item
from one of the specification reports that other military observers
wrote that said that lasers could also serve as projection devices for
large screen displays. Lasers were so bright that displays could be
shown in rooms that didn’t have to be darkened. The general
saw the possibility of fully lit situation rooms with large screen
displays from satellite radar transmissions. The room would allow
computer operators to see what they were doing at their keyboards while
seeing the displays and listening to the briefing.

I suggested that the army cartography division would be
particularly interested in the accuracy of the laser derived
measurements for maps. That same measurement ability would also be able
to generate digital data for ground hugging infantry support
helicopters or low flying planes. Aircraft that could stay close to the
ground could avoid enemy radar and stay concealed until the last
minute. But unless there was a method for accurately charting the
topography, aircraft could find themselves scraping tree tops or
crashing into the side of a hill. If a laser could accurately transmit
topographic features to altitude control and navigational computers on
board attack aircraft, it would keep the aircraft safely above any
ground obstacles but close enough to the ground to remain concealed.
This ground hugging capability that I suggested to General Trudeau had
been suggested to me from the analysis reports of UFOs that also had
this capability. It was what enabled them to hover close to the ground
and to move rapidly at speeds over a thousand miles an hour at treetop
level without hitting anything. The laser type devices aboard the UFO
instantly fed the craft with the topographic features of the landscape
and the craft automatically adjusted to the terrain.