The Day After Roswell (31 page)

There was still a third potential to the supergun. General
Trudeau foresaw the ability of this weapon to launch rounds that could
ultimately be placed into a lunar orbit. Especially if hostilities
broke out between the United States and USSR or, as we expected,
between Earth military forces and the extraterrestrials, we could
resupply a military moon base without having to rely on rocket launch
facilities, which would demand long turn around times and be very
vulnerable to attack. A camouflaged supergun, even a series of
superguns, would allow us all the benefits of a field artillery or
quick response antiaircraft unit, but with a piece that could launch
payloads into space. It was this combination of capabilities that
delighted General Trudeau because it enabled one R&D project to
help create many different systems.

The United States, Canada, and the British military combined
their joint expertise to find ways to develop Dr. Bull’s
supergun with General Trudeau, I believe, becoming one of
Bull’s staunchest supporters. But by the time military budget
decisions had to be made to fund the weapon, all of the governments
military establishments had become committed to the guided missile and
rocket launched space vehicle rather than a supergun. While the weapon
had some potential, the United States, UK, and Canada were too far
along with their own missile programs to start up a completely new type
of weapon. And in the end, they decided to end the research while still
keeping close tabs on Bull’s efforts to sell his technology
to other powers, especially governments in the Middle East.

Through the 1980s, Gerald Bull, whom I had met at a reception
honoring General Trudeau in 1986, Entered into negotiations with the
Israelis as well as with the Iraqis and perhaps even the Iranians. The
decade long war between Saddam Hussein and Iran proved a fertile sales
territory for weapons merchants in general, and particularly for Gerald
Bull, who was courted by both sides. In the end, he cut his deal with
the Iranians, testing experimental versions of a supergun and planning
to build the monster weapon before the British intervened and seized
shipments of gun barrel units before they were shipped out of the
country. By this time, Dr. Bull may have become a liability to the
Iraqis, as well as to the Israelis and to the United States as well,
and was shot to death outside his apartment in Belgium before the
outbreak of the Gulf War.

Like Jules Verne’s character Barbicane in From the
Earth to the Moon, Bull had a vision of the potential of a long range
artillery piece. Unlike Barbicane, he came very close to proving it a
practical way of launching vehicles into space. The murder of Gerald
Bull has never been solved, and whatever secrets he still possessed
about the assembly of a gun to launch vehicles into space probably died
with him in the hallway outside his apartment.

List of Omissions

As I worked through the stack of projects on my desk during
the spring months of 1962, I found I was devoting more of my time to
the Roswell file and less to some of the other projects under
development. It was apparent to me that the treasure trove
we’d retrieved from Roswell was beginning to pay off in ways
that not even I thought would happen. There were so many army research
projects under way, I told my boss, that were not foundering, but
sputtering along that could benefit from something similar found in the
Roswell wreckage it we could find the match between the two. Night
vision, lasers, and fiberoptic communication were obvious, I said to
him, but I was sure there were other areas we could find just by
looking at the problems posed by what we discovered from Roswell, not
just retrieved from the wreckage.

“Make it specific, Phil, ” the general
asked. “What do you mean?”

“If you just look at what we didn’t find
at the crash site, ” I said. “That goes a long way
to explaining the differences between what we are and what they are. It
also shows us what we need to develop if we’re going to
prepare for long periods of travel in space. ”

“Can you make me a list?” the general
asked. “There are a lot of ongoing research contracts out
there that could benefit from a list of things we’d have to
concern ourselves with if we’re going to be planning for
space travel in the next fifty years. ”

By the time our conversation was finished, General Trudeau had
asked me to prepare not only a list of what were called the
“omissions” at Roswell but a very brief report
detailing the areas where I thought development needed to take place.
So I assembled all the reports and information in the Roswell file and
began looking for what was missing that I might expect to find at a
space traveler’s crash site.

There was no mention in any of the reports of any food source
or nutrient, and no one discovered any food preparation units or stored
food on board the spacecraft, nor were there any refrigeration units
for food preservation. There was no water on the ship either for
drinking, washing, or flushing of waste, nor were there any waste or
garbage disposal facilities. The Roswell field reports said that the
retrieval team found something they thought was a first aid kit because
it contained material that a doctor said was for bandaging purposes,
but there were no medical facilities nor any medications. And finally,
the army retrieval team said there were no rest facilities at all on
board the ship; nothing that could be construed as a bunk or a bed.

From this available data the army assumed that this UFO was a
reconnaissance craft and could quickly return to a larger or mothership
where all of the missing items might be found. The other explanation
Dr. Hermann Oberth came up with was that this was a time dimensional
travel ship that didn’t traverse large distances in space.
Rather, it “jumped” from one time space to another
or from one dimension to another and instantly returned to its point of
origin. But this was just Dr. Oberth’s speculation, and he
would usually discount any of it the moment he believed I was taking it
as fact.

I believed, however, that the EBEs didn’t require
food or facilities for waste disposal because they were fabricated
beings, just like robots or androids, who had been created specifically
for space travel and the performance of specific tasks on the planets
they visited. Just like our lunar rover in the 1970s, which was a
robot, so these creatures had been programmed with specific tasks to
perform and carried them out. Perhaps their programming could be
updated or altered from a remote source, but they weren’t
life forms that required ongoing sustenance. They were the perfect
creatures for long voyages through space and for visiting other
planets. Human beings, however, weren’t robots and did
require sustenance. Therefore, it would be necessary to provide for
long term sustenance and waste disposal needs if humans were going to
travel long distances in space.

Other scientists from our R&D ad hoc brain trust
suggested that, indeed, this could have only been a scout ship that
either got caught in our tracking radars from the 509th or from
Alamogordo or was hit by lightning in the fierce electrical storm that
night. They believed that the ship was navigated by an electromagnetic
propulsion system. Other scientists suggested that even before we could
generate the necessary power to drive such a propulsion system, we
would have to have developed some form of a nuclear powered ion drive
first. As for the absence of food, scientists suggested that this would
pose a major drawback for long term human space exploration. Thus, in
my quick and dirty proposal for General Trudeau, I suggested that the
army had to complete the development of at least two items that I knew
had been in the R&D system for at least ten years: a food
supply that could never spoil and didn’t require
refrigeration and an atomic drive that could be assembled in space out
of components as the power plant for an interplanetary space craft.

Irradiated Foods

The general read my notes a few days later, and seemed
impressed. He knew from the memo I had left him the night before that
I’d be ready to talk about my omissions list the next day,
but he didn’t say anything to me right away Instead, he picked up the phone,
dialed a number, told someone at the other end that he’d be
right over, then looked up at me.

“Go get your hat, ” he said.
“Meet me on the helipad. We’ve been invited to
lunch. ”

Ten minutes later after the general’s helicopter had
picked us up, we circled the Pentagon once and were flown over to the
Quarter master Center.

An officer who shall remain anonymous met us at the helipad.
He saluted as we got off the chopper. “Thank you for joining
us. ”

He took us inside to a downstairs store room where he showed
off shelves and shelves of all types of meat, fruit, and vegetables.
“Look at this pork, ” he said.
“It’s been stored here unrefrigerated for months
and it’s completely free of trichina worm. ” He
held up a couple of loose eggs and a chicken breast. “Eggs,
unrefrigerated, and chicken. Completely free of bacterium salmonella.
And it’s the same for the seafood. ”

He escorted us along the shelves of food and, almost like a
salesman, presented the virtues of each of the items. The food was
wrapped, but not vacuum sealed, in a clear cellophane to keep it free
from dust and surface dirt, but it was not preserved in any manner that
I could determine.

“Free of fungus or any spores, ” he said
about the vegetables. “No mold or any insect infestations in
the fruit, ” he said. “And the milk, it’s
been here on the shelf for over two years and it’s not even
slightly sour. We’ve taken great steps to preserve food
completely without salting, smoking, refrigeration, freezing, or even
canning. ”

“Does this answer one of your questions,
Colonel?” General Trudeau asked as we looked at the stocks of
food that seemed completely resistant to spoilage.

The commanding general of the Quartermaster Center joined us
in the stockroom. “Pick your lunch, gentlemen, ” he
said and chose a thick steak for himself. “I’m
going to have this and, if you don’t mind, I’ll
take the liberty of ordering up the same thing for you, General
Trudeau, and you, too, Colonel. How about some potatoes and maybe some
strawberries for dessert. All fresh, delicious, and harmless.
” Then he paused. “And completely bombarded with
what some people would call lethal doses of radiation to destroy any
bacteria or infestation. ”

We were escorted upstairs to the commandant’s dining
room,

where we were joined by a number of other officers and
civilian research and food technology experts who described the process
of ionizing radiation to destroy the harmful bacteria while preserving
the food without canning or smoking. The irradiation process was so
complete that if the food were maintained in an antiseptic or dust free
atmosphere, it wouldn’t be attacked and would remain
uncontaminated. However, because the atmosphere was as dirty as any
other atmosphere inside any other building, the food was wrapped in
cellophane. Other foods were packaged in a clear plastic wrap and were
displayed for visitors like us just as if they were on supermarket
shelves.

“We first wanted to determine whether the whole
concept of irradiated food was safe, ” one of the engineers
explained. “So our first studies were made with food which
was irradiated and then stored in the frozen area. We fed these foods
to rats and noticed no harmful effects. Then we did the same thing
except this time we increased the radiation to six mega rads and then
froze the food. Again, no harmful effects. ”

His presentation continued while we ate, accompanied by charts
that showed how the sterilization rate was increased to try to find any
harmful effects on rats. Then they tested the irradiated and then
frozen food on human volunteers.

“But wait, ” I asked. “I still
don’t understand why you irradiated the food and then froze
it. ”

The engineer was waiting for this question because he had his
answer already prepared. He acted like he’d been asked it
many times before.  “Because, ” he said,
“we were testing only for harmful effects from the radiation,
not for spoilage, not for taste, not even for harmful effects from the
food itself even though we knew it had been sterilized and was tested
completely free from bacteria when it was defrosted. What we needed to
prove in field trials was the harmlessness to animals and humans of the
irradiation process. ”

Then he described the field trials to prove that irradiation
preserved food stored at room temperature. “We selected high
spoilage foods, ” he said. “Like the meats,
chicken, and especially the seafood. We also made composite foods like
stews which we fed to rats and dogs along with straight meat and then
straight tuna. We first irradiated a sample at three mega rads then
another sample at six mega rads and tested the animals over a period of
six months to see whether radiation became concentrated in any of their
organs or bones. ” He paused, letting the dramatic effect of
what he was going to say sink in while we were sinking our teeth into
the irradiated foods that resulted from the years of experimentation
throughout the 1950s. “No toxicological effects whatsoever.
And we were very thorough before we tested these foods on human
volunteers. ”

“What’s next?” I asked.

“We’re setting taste trials of favorite
foods at Fort Lee, Virginia, to see how troops in the field respond to
this. We think that before the end of the decade we’ll have a
variety of Meals Ready to Eat for troops in the field who have no
benefit of cooking facilities or refrigeration. ”

General Trudeau looked across the table at me and I nodded.
This was perfectly good food that was right up to any quality
you’d care to measure.