The Day After Roswell (26 page)

In late 1961, General Trudeau asked me to visit Fort Belvoir
again, this time to meet a Dr. Mark Johnston, one of aeronautical
research scientists from Hughes Aircraft. Fort Belvoir was one of the
safe houses for the Office of R&D to conduct meetings in
because it was a secure military facility. My comings and goings there
on Army R&D business were completely routine, even to the CIA
surveillance teams that would occasionally pick up my car coming out of
the Pentagon, and could be covered in our daily logs with references to
the ongoing projects that served as covers. My meeting with Johnston,
for example, was to talk about the Hughes helicopter development
program, not to give him my reports on the laser measuring devices we
believed were in the Roswell spacecraft. I briefed Johnston on what the
scientific team from Alamogordo believed was on the spacecraft, asked
him not to talk about it, and suggested that the Hughes team developing
the navigational radars for the helicopter project consider using the
newly developed lasers as terrain measuring apparatus and for target
acquisition.

“Yes, of course, ” I assured him.
“The Office of R&D would have a development budget
for the laser project if the R&D team at Hughes thought our
idea was feasible and they could develop it. ”

And that’s exactly what happened. Using the positive
results from the Columbia University test and the army weapons
specifications we drew up in R&D for the requirements of a
range finder, targeting, and tracking weapon, and with research grants
from the Pentagon, Hughes signed on as one of the contractors for the
military laser. Today, the laser has become the HEL, or High Energy
Laser, deployed by the army’s Space Defense Command as, among
other things, an antisatellite/antiwarhead weapon.

My meeting at Hughes was quick and direct. Like so many of the
research scientists I met with from Hughes, Dow, IBM, and Bell,
Johnston disappeared behind the work benches, computer screens, or test
tubes of the company’s back room and out of my sight forever.
When General Trudeau would ask me to follow up on the project months
later, a different company representative would meet with me and the
project would look just like any other Army R&D initiated
research contract. Any traces of Roswell or the nut file would be gone,
and the project would have been slipped into the normal R&D
functioning. Of course this device didn’t come out of the
Roswell incident. The incident was only a myth; it never took place.
This came out of the Foreign Technology desk, something the Italians or
French were working on and we picked up through our intelligence
sources.

Our work with laser products was becoming so successful by the
end of 1961 that General Trudeau was urging me to spread the wealth
around as many army bases as I could. I spoke to weapons experts at
Fort Riley, Kansas, for example, about the use of lasers by troops in
the field. Maybe as range finders, we suggested, or even as ways to
lock onto a target the way the air force was experimenting with
something they were calling “smart bombs. ” By
1964, after seeing the research into the feasibility of lasers that we
had commissioned, hand held range finders were being tested at army
bases around the country, and today, police forces use laser sights on
their weapons. Lasers became one of the army’s great
successes.

In one of our final pushes for the development of laser based
weapons systems, we argued successfully for a budget to develop laser
tracking systems for incoming missiles. This was a project we fought
hard for, over political opposition as well as opposition from the
other military branches, which were looking at our proposal as a
conventional method of tracking missiles. The laser was too new, they
argued. Atmospheric interference or heavy clouds would distort the
laser over long distances, they said. Or, they said, it would simply
take too much power and would have no portability. General Trudeau and
I had another agenda for this project that we couldn’t
readily share with anybody. We believed that lasers could be used not
just to track incoming missiles - that was obvious. We saw the lasers
too as our best weapon for not only tracking UFOs from the ground, from
aircraft, or from satellites but, if we could boost the power to the
necessary levels, for shooting them down. Shoot down a few of them, we
speculated, and they wouldn’t violate our airspaces with such
impunity. Equip our fighter planes or interceptors with laser firing
mechanisms and we could pose a credible threat to them. Equip our
satellites with laser firing mechanisms and we could triangulate a
firing pattern on the UFOs that might even keep them away from our
orbiting spacecraft. But all of this was speculation in late 1961.

Only a very few people in the other branches of R&D
even had a hint about what we were proposing. The National Aeronautics
and Space Administration had its own plans for developing laser
tracking systems and didn’t want to share any development
budget with the military, so there was very little help forth coming
from NASA. The air force and navy were guarding their own development
budgets for laser weapons, and we couldn’t trust the civilian
intelligence agencies at all. So General Trudeau and I began advocating
a plan as a cover to develop laser tracking and other sophisticated
types of surveillance projects. It was outrageous on the surface, but
it quickly found its adherents, and its real agenda could be completely
masked. We could never call it an anti-UFO device so we named it the
antimissile missile. It was one of the most successful projects ever to
come out of Army R&D. It owed most of its theory to our
discovery of the laser in the Roswell wreckage.

The Antimissile Missile Project

there were times during my tenure at the Pentagon when
something in the Roswell file had such resonance in my life that it
made me question whether there was some larger plan for my work.
I’ve read about the concept of synchronicity or confluence in
the years since I retired from the military and how things or events
tend to cluster around a common thread. Such a common thread was the
development of the antimissile missile that encompassed my work in
R&D at the Pentagon, my brief stint as a staff adviser to
Senator Strom Thurmond, and my years in Rome during the war and
occupation as the assistant chief of staff, Intelligence (G-2), Rome
Area Allied Command.

In early 1963, just after I left the Pentagon, Senator Strom
Thurmond asked me to join his staff as a consultant and adviser on
military and national security issues. Congress had just appropriated
$300 million to turn a fledgling plan to investigate the feasibility of
an antimissile missile program into a full development project. But it
ran right into a concrete barrier just as soon as it left the Senate.
Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara flatly refused to spend the money
because, he said, not only would it intensify the U.S.-Soviet arms
race, it would actually offend the Kremlin because it would put them on
notice that we were trying to deploy a first strike capability while
neutralizing their ICBMs. Worse, he said to the Congress, the United
States military simply didn’t need the weapon in the first
place.

Senator Thurmond was incensed and I was deeply worried.
McNamara just didn’t get it. He was completely misinformed
about how the Soviets reacted to any weapons deployment on our part.
They didn’t negotiate with us out of a sense of cooperation,
only a sense of necessity that it was in their best interests to do so.
If they thought we could knock out their ICBMs, that, more than
anything, would keep them honest. Hadn’t they backed down
over Cuba because they saw that Kennedy actually meant business when he
screwed up his resolve to order the navy to enforce the blockade? But
the CIA had McNamara’s ear and was giving him exactly the
information the disinformation specialists in the Kremlin wanted him to
have: don’t develop the antimissile missile.

General Trudeau and I had a secret agenda we had worked up the
previous year at the Pentagon. The antimissile missile, utilizing laser
targeting and tracking, was supposed to be the perfect mechanism for
getting the funds to develop a laser beam weapon we could ultimately
use to fire on UFOs. At least that was the way we’d planned
it. The general had gotten it through the Pentagon bureaucracy while I
covered his flank on the legislative side, testifying before the Armed
Services Committee on the efficacy of a weapon that was capable of
protecting American strategic forces with an umbrella. If any country
were foolish enough to attack the United States, the antimissile
missile would blunt their offensive and enable us not only to devastate
their military forces but hold their population centers hostage as well.

Not so, said the Defense Department. The deployment of an
antimissile missile would encourage our enemies to attack our cities
first and devastate our civilian population. What did it matter if we
had the ability to strike back when the damage to us had already been
done? The only thing that was keeping our civilian population centers
safe was each side’s ability to hold the other’s
nuclear forces hostage. If both sides devastated one
another’s nuclear forces, it would give each side time to
stop before a mutual destruction of the civilian populations.

But the secretary of defense didn’t understand war.
He especially hadn’t seen what lessons the Soviets learned
during World War II when their population centers had been devastated
and people were reduced to the point of starvation and cannibalized one
another for food. That kind of experience doesn’t
toughen  you against the ravages of war, it educates you. The
Soviets’ only hope for a victory in the Cold War was in our
putting down our guard and capitulating to them. By refusing to go
forward with the antimissile missile, the secretary of defense was
listening to arguments that were spoon fed to him, certainly without
his knowledge, by people in the civilian intelligence community who
were being manipulated by the KGB.

Senator Thurmond’s reaction to Bob
McNamara’s refusal to spend the antimissile missile
appropriation was to hold subcommittee hearings on this issue to find
out why. The Defense Department didn’t want to disclose
classified information about the capabilities of a proposed weapon and
our defense policy before a public session of Congress. So Fred
Buzhardt, who years later became President Nixon’s counsel,
suggested that Senator Thurmond invoke a senatorial privilege to close
a session of the Senate so that the issue of the antimissile missile
could be discussed in private before the full Senate. But first, we had
to request specific information from the Department of Defense, and
that task, because I was the Senator’s adviser for military
affairs, fell to me. No one knew that I was actually the officer who
had initially prepared the information for the antimissile missile
program to begin with and probably knew more about the documents than
anyone because less than a year earlier I had prepared them myself.

The first meeting with the Defense Department was held in my
new office in the basement of the Capitol Building. Secretary McNamara
sent his own scientific adviser, Harold Brown, who would later become
the secretary of defense himself, along with an army colonel who had
become the project officer for the antimissile missile development
program. Brown didn’t know who I was, but his assistant from
the army certainly did.

“Colonel, ” the army project officer began
as soon as I asked him a question about the request we’d sent
for information, and Harold Brown sat up straight in his chair.
Gradually, like chipping away parts of a granite block, I asked the
project officer about the specific details of the antimissile missile
program, how much of the budget allocation from previous Pentagon
funding they’d already spent, and what their development time
table would be if the current appropriation were spent for the current
phase of the project. Then I asked more technical questions about the
research into ground based radars,

satellite based radars, speculation into Soviet counter
antimissile missile strategies, and Soviet development of even bigger
and more mobile ICBMs that would present more imperative targets for
any antimissile missile system because we couldn’t take them
out in a first strike. Mounted on railway cars or trucks, mobile Soviet
missiles would be almost impossible to track even though they would
have to remain stationary for the liquid fueling process to be
completed.

“I see that my assistant keeps on calling you
colonel, Mr. Corso, ”Harold Brown said. “And you
certainly seem to know a lot of details on this subject. ”

“Yes, sir, ” I said. “I only
retired from the army a couple of months ago but while I was at the
Pentagon, I was the acting projects officer for the antimissile missile
program. ”

“Then there’s no use in holding back,
” Harold Brown said and finally smiled for the first time in
our meeting. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a folded
envelope. “Here are your copies of the complete details of
the project about which we briefed President Kennedy. It’s
all here. And I presume this is what you are looking for, officially,
” he said with a special emphasis on “officially.
” He knew that I knew what was in that envelope but
couldn’t disclose it before the Senate because it contained
classified information and I would be breaching the National Security
Act. However, by his giving me the material, much of it based on
information that I had developed myself and had privately briefed
Attorney General Robert Kennedy on in 1962, Brown was giving me the
full authorization to disclose. He probably realized that in private
sessions, I had talked generally about what was in the army file on the
antimissile missile - that was a form of senatorial privilege as long
as it wasn’t abused - but that I couldn’t go formal
with it. Now I could, and I appreciated Harold Brown’s candor.

The battle over the appropriation was about to be joined, but
I couldn’t look over the contents of the envelope, some of
which were my own notes, without thinking back to the sequence of
events that led to this meeting and to the project that ultimately was
developed as a result of it. It began earlier in 1962 as I was working
down the list of the priorities I had set for myself in the nut file.
In it was a medical report about the creatures that I was trying to
save until I had gotten all of the tangible items from Roswell into the
development process.

It was a report on the possible function and apparent
structure of the alien brain, a report that marveled at the similarities
between the KBH brain and the human brain. However, one item in the
report threw me for a complete loop. The medical examiner wrote that
measurements of brain activity taken from the EBE who was still barely
alive at Roswell showed that its electronic signature, at least what
they were able to measure with equipment in 1947, displayed a signal
similar to what we would call long, low frequency waves. And the
examiner referred to a description by one of the Roswell Army Air Field
doctors that the creature’s brain lobes seem to have been not
just physiologically and neurologically integrated but integrated by an
electromagnetic current as well.

I would have loved to dismiss this as the speculation of a
doctor who had no experience with this type of analysis and certainly
no experience with alien beings. Therefore, whatever he wrote was
nonsense and not worth the time it took to respond to it. File it back
in the cabinet and get on to other issues that could be turned into
viable projects. But the medical examiner’s report was more
disturbing than I was ready to admit because it took me back to a time
when I was the assistant chief of staff in Rome and made friends with
some of the members of the graduate faculty at the University of Rome.

I was a twenty five  year old captain at the time, a
former engineering undergraduate, way in over my head and learning my
job responsibilities each day, keeping one step ahead of my boss so he
wouldn’t find out that I didn’t really know
anything. In one of my visits to the university I met Dr. Gislero
Flesch, a professor of criminology and anthropology who lectured me on
what he called his theory and experiments on “the basis of
life. ” It was a wild and, I thought, supernatural theory on
what he called the filament within each cell. The filament was
activated by some cosmic action or form of electromagnetic radiation
that bombarded the earth continuously from outer space and resonated
against a constant refresh of electrical activity from the brain.

“Captain”  he would say whenever
he began some formal explanation. I also thought that he was always
surprised that someone so young could actually be dispatched from the
New World to administer law and justice in Rome, the capital of the
ancient world. The old professor also was scrupulous about showing
everyone, including his dimmest of students, extraordinary respect.
“The electromagnetic forces in the body are the least
understood, ”

he continued. “Yet they account for more activity
than anyone realizes.

As an engineering student whose whole experience with energy
had to do with verifiable experiments, I was more than skeptical at
first. How can you measure an electrical activity in the brain that you
cannot see? How can invisible waves of energy that you can’t
feel or see excite certain areas of the human cell, and what was their
purpose?

Professor Flesch introduced me to Professor Casmir Franck, one
of the first scientists to ever photograph brain waves. Professor
Franck became a friend because during my days in Rome, fighting off
Gestapo agents, Communist partisans, and the local crime families and
crime chieftains, I was always engaged in some type of warfare. But
when I had time off, I wanted to meet people, to stretch my experience,
to fall in love with the city of my own ancestors I had been assigned
to protect. So I sought out a network of friends to whom I could relate
and from whom I could learn. Professor Franck was just such a man.

In Franck’s first experiments he had used a rabbit
brain as a test subject. He measured what he said were the long, low
frequency waves animal brains generate and described how he was able to
trace the paths these waves took when they were transmitted from the
brain to the animal’s voluntary muscles. Certain muscles,
Professor Franck said, were attuned to respond to certain brain wave
lengths, waves of a specific frequency. In cases of muscle paralysis,
it’s not the muscle that’s necessarily damaged,
it’s the muscle’s tuning mechanism that becomes
disabled so that it no longer picks up the right frequency.
It’s like a radio, he said. If the radio can’t pick
up a signal, the radio isn’t necessarily broken; its antenna
or the crystal may need to be adjusted to the correct frequency. I was
a guest at his laboratory more than a few times and watched him carry
out his experiments with live rabbits, interfering with their
brains’ electromagnetic wave propagation by implanting
electrodes and seeing which muscles became cataleptic and which
responded. He said it was the frequency that was being altered because
once the animal was removed from the experimental table, it could walk
and hop as if nothing had ever happened.

Then Professor Franck introduced me to another one of his
colleagues, the celebrated research biologist and physician Doctor
Castellani, who had many years earlier isolated and identified the
disease called “sleeping sickness” and perfected
what during the1930s and 1940s became known as “Castellani
Ointments” as treatments for a variety of skin diseases.
Where other doctors, he said, had focused on treating only the symptoms
they could see on the skin, Doctor Castellani said that the problems of
many skin rashes, psoriasis, or inflammations that looked like
bacterial infections were, in fact, correctable by changing the
skin’s electromagnetic resonance. The ointments, he said,
didn’t attack the infection with drugs; they were chemical
reactants that changed the electrostatic condition of the skin,
allowing the long, low frequency waves from the brain to do the healing.