The Day After Roswell (30 page)

Again, I didn’t find out about it until much later,
but research into that very type of fabrication was already under way
by a scientist who would, years later, win a Nobel Prize. At a meeting
of the American Physical Society three years before, Dr. Richard
Feynman gave a theoretical speculative assessment of the possibilities
of creating substances whose molecular structure was so condensed that
the resulting material might have radically different properties from
the non-compressed version of the same material. For example, Feynman
suggested, if scientists could create material in which the molecular
structures were not only compressed but arranged differently from conventional molecular structures, the scientists might be
able to alter the physical properties of the substance to suit specific
applications.

This seemed like brand new stuff to the American Physical
Society. In reality, though, compressed molecular structures were one
of the discoveries that had been made by some of the original
scientific analytical groups both at Alamogordo right after the Roswell
crash and at the Air Material Command at Wright Field, which took
delivery of the material. As a young atomic physicist, Richard Feynman
was a colleague of many of the postwar atomic specialists who were in
the army’s and then the air force’s guided missile
program as well as the nuclear weapons program in the 1950s. Although I
never saw any memos to this effect, Feynman was reported to have been
in contact with members of the Alamogordo group of the Air Material
Command and knew about some of the finds at the Roswell crash site.
Whether these discoveries suggested theories to him about the potential
properties of compressed molecular structures or whether his ideas were
also extensions of his theories about the quantum mechanics behavior of
electrons, for which he won the Nobel Prize, I don’t know.
But Dr. Feynman’s theories about compressed molecular
structures dove tailed with the army efforts to replicate the
supertenacity fiber composition and extrusion processes. By the middle
of the 1960s work was under way not only at large industrial ceramics
and chemical companies in the United States but in university research
laboratories here, and in Europe, Asia, and India.

With my questions about who was conducting research into
supertenacity fibers answered and learning where that research was
taking place, I could turn my attention to other applications of the
technology to see whether the army could help move the development
along faster or whether any collateral development was possible to
create products in advance of the supertenacity fibers. Our scientists
told us that one way to simulate the effect of supertenacity was in the
cross alignment of composite layers of fabric. This idea was the
premise for the army’s search for a type of body armor that
would protect against the skin piercing injuries of explosive shrapnel
and rounds fired from guns.

“Now this won’t protect you against
contusions, ” General Trudeau told me after a meeting with
Army Medical Corps researchers at Walter Reed. “And the
concussive shock from an impact will still be strong enough to kill
anybody, but at least it’s supposed to keep the round from
tearing through your body. ”

I thought about the many blunt trauma wounds you see in a
battle and could imagine the impact a large round would leave even if
it couldn’t penetrate the skin. But through the
general’s impetus and the contacts he set up for me at Du
Pont and Monsanto, we aggressively pursued the research into the
development of a cross aligned material for bulletproof vests. I hand
carried the field descriptions of the fabric found at Roswell to my
meetings at these Companies and showed the actual fabric to scientists
who visited us in Washington. This was not an item we wanted to risk
carrying around the country. By 1965, Du Pont had announced the
creation of the Kevlar fabric that, by 1973, was brought to market as
the Kevlar bulletproof vest that’s in common use today in the
armed Services and law enforcement agencies. I don’t know how
many thousands of lives have been saved, but every time I hear of a
police officer whose Kevlar vest protected him from a fatal chest or
back wound, I think back to those days when we were just beginning to
consider the value of cross aligned layers of supertenacity material
and am thankful that our office played a part in the
product’s development.

Our search for supertenacity materials also resulted in the
development of composite plastics and ceramics that with stood heat and
the pressures of high speed air maneuvers and were also invisible to
radar. The cross stitched supertenacity fibers on the skin of the
Roswell vehicle, which I believe had been spun on, also became an
impetus for an entirely new generation of attack and strategic aircraft
as well as composite materials for future designs of attack helicopters.

One of the great rumors that floated around for years after
the Roswell story became public with the testimony of retired Army Air
Force major Jesse Marcel before he died was that Stealth technology
aircraft were the result of what we learned at Roswell. That is true,
but it was not a direct transfer of technology. Army Intelligence knew
that under certain conditions the EBE spacecraft had the ability to
hide their radar signature, but we didn’t know how they did
it. We also had pieces of the Roswell spacecraft’s skin,
which was a composite of supertenacity molecular aligned fibers. As far
as I know, we’ve still not managed to recreate the exact
process to manufacture this composite, just like we’ve not
been able to duplicate the electromagnetic drive and navigation system
that enabled the Roswell vehicle to fly even though we have that
vehicle and others at either Norton, Edwards, and Nellis Air Force
bases. But through the study of how this material worked and what its
properties are, we’ve replicated composites and rolled an
entirely new generation of aircraft off the assembly line.

Although the American public first heard about the existence
of a Stealth technology in President Jimmy Carter’s campaign
against President Ford in 1976, we didn’t see the Stealth in
action until the air attacks on Iraq during the Persian Gulf War.
There, the Stealth fighter, completely invisible to Iraqi radar,
launched the first high risk assaults on the Iraqi air force air
defense system and operated with almost complete impunity. Invisible to
radar, invisible to heat seeking missiles, striking out of the night
sky like demons, the Stealth fighters, with their flying wing almost
crescent shaped, look uncannily like the space vehicle that crashed
into the arroyo outside of Roswell. But appearances aside, the
composite skin of the Stealth that helps make it invisible to almost
all forms of detection was inspired by the Army R&D research
into the skin of the Roswell aircraft that we sectioned apart for
distribution to laboratories around the country.

Depleted Uranium Invisible Artillery Shells

For the air force, Stealth technology meant that aircraft
could approach a target invisible to radar and maintain that advantage
throughout the mission. For the army, Stealth technology for its
helicopters provides an incredible advantage in mounting search and
destroy, Special Forces recon, or counter insurgency missions deep into
enemy territory. But the possibility of a Stealth artillery shell,
which we conceived of at R&D in 1962, would have allowed us
something armies have sought ever since the first deployment of
artillery by a Western European army at Henry V’s victory at
Agincourt in the early fifteenth century. Certainly Napoleon would have
wanted this ability when he deployed his artillery against the British
line at Waterloo. So would the Germans in World War I when their
artillery pounded the Allied forces hunkered down in their trenches and
again at the Battle of the Bulge in 1944 when those of us stationed in
Rome could only pray that our boys could hang on until the clouds broke
and our bombers could hit the German emplacements.

In all artillery battles, once a shell is fired, it can be
tracked by an observer back to its source and then return fire can be
directed against whoever is firing. But as the range of artillery
increased and we found ways to camouflage guns, we became proficient in
hiding artillery until the advent of battlefield radar, which allows
the trajectory of shells to be tracked back to their source. 
But imagine if the shell were composed of a material that rendered it
invisible to radar? That was the possibility we proposed to General
Trudeau: an invisible artillery shell, I suggested to him in his office
one morning as we were designing the plan for research and development
of composite materials. On the night battlefield of the future you
could deploy weapons that were invisible even to radar tracking planes
flying over head behind the lines. Shells would start falling, and the
enemy wouldn’t know where they were coming from until after
we had the advantage of five or more unanswered salvos. By then, and
with the advantage of surprise, the damage might well be done. If we
were using mechanized artillery, we could set up positions, fire a
series of quick salvos, redeploy, and set up again.

The secret lay not just in the same Stealth aircraft
technology but also in the development of a Stealth ceramic that could
withstand tremendous explosive barrel pressures and still maintain an
integrity through the arc of its trajectory. The search for just such a
molecularly aligned composite ceramic was inspired by the composite
material of the Roswell spacecraft. In analysis after analysis, the
army tried to determine how the extraterrestrials fabricated the
material that formed the hull of the spacecraft but was unable to do
so. The search for the kind of molecularly aligned composite began in
the1950s even before General Trudeau took command of R&D,
continued during my tenure at Foreign Technology when the early
“Stealth” experimentation began at Lockheed that
resulted in the F117 fighter and Stealth bomber, and continues right
through to today.

The general was also more than interested in the kinds of
warheads we would propose for just such a shell, a warhead that did
come into use in 1961 and was successfully deployed during the Gulf
War. And we had a suggestion for a round that we thought could change
the nature of the kinds of battles we projected we’d be
fighting against the Warsaw Pact forces, a warhead fabricated out of
depleted uranium. This was a way to utilize the stockpile of uranium we
foresaw we’d have as a result of spent fuel from commercial
nuclear reactors, reactors powering U.S. Navy vessels, and the nuclear
reactors the army was developing for its own bases and for delivery to
bases overseas.

Depleted uranium was a dense, heavy metal, so dense in fact
that conventional armament was no match for a high speed round tipped
with it. Its ability to penetrate even the toughest of tank armor and
detonate once it was inside the enemy vehicle meant that a single round
fired from one of our own tanks equipped with a laser range finder
would disable, if not completely destroy, an enemy tank. Depleted
uranium would give us a decided advantage on a European battlefield on
which we knew we’d be outnumbered two or three to one by the
Warsaw Pact or in China where sheer numbers alone would mean that
either we’d be overwhelmed or we’d have to resort
to nuclear weapons. The depleted uranium shell kept us from having to
go nuclear.

Privately, I suggested to General Trudeau that depleted
uranium also fulfilled our hidden agenda. It was another weapon in a
potential arsenal we were building against hostile extraterrestrials.
If depleted uranium could penetrate armor, might the heaviness of the
element enable it to penetrate the composite skin of the spacecraft,
especially if the spacecraft were on the ground? I suggested that it
certainly merited development at the nearby Aberdeen Proving Grounds in
Maryland, and if it proved worthwhile, it was a weapon we should deploy.

Even though the composite ceramic Stealth round is still an
elusive dream in weapons development, the depleted uranium tipped war
head saw action in the Gulf War, where it didn’t just disable
the tanks of the Iraqi Republican Guard, it exploded them into pieces.
Fired from the laser range finder equipped Abrams tanks, TOW missile
launchers, or even from Hedgehog infantry support aircraft, the
depleted uranium tipped warheads wreaked havoc in the Gulf. They were
one of the great weapons development successes of Army R&D that
came out of what we learned from the Roswell crash.

HARP -  The High-Altitude Research Project

HARP was another project whose need for research and
development was suggested to us by the challenge posed by flying
saucers. They could out fly our own aircraft, we had no guided missiles
that could bring them down, and we didn’t have any guns that
could shoot them down. We were also exploring weapons systems that had
a double or triple use, and HARP, or “the big gun,
” was one such system. Essentially, Project HARP was the
brainchild of Canadian gunnery expert and scientist Dr. Gerald Bull.
Bull had studied the threat posed by the German “Big
Bertha” in World War I and the Nazi V3 supergun toward the
end of World War II. He realized that long range, high powered
artillery was not only a practical solution to launching heavy payload
shells, it was very affordable once the initial research and
development phase was completed. Mass produced big guns and their
ordinance, assembled in stages right on the site, could provide
enormous firepower well back from the front lines to any army. They
would become a strategic weapon to rain nuclear destruction down on
enemy population centers or military staging areas.

Dr. Bull had also suggested that the gun could be retasked as
a launch vehicle, blasting huge rounds into orbit, which could then be
jettisoned, like the booster stage of a rocket, so the payload warhead
could thrust itself into position. This would require a minimum amount
of rocket fuel and could effectively push a string of satellites into
orbit very quickly, almost like an artillery barrage. If the army
needed to put special satellites into orbit in a hurry or, better
still, explosive satellites that would pose a threat to orbiting
extraterrestrial vehicles, the big gun was one method of accomplishing
this mission.