The Day After Roswell (32 page)

“Gentlemen, ” General Trudeau said as he
stood. As a three star general, he was the highest ranking officer in
the room, and when he spoke everyone was silent. “My
assistant believes that your work is of utmost importance to the U.S.
Army, our nation, and the world, and will contribute to our travel in
space. I am of the very same opinion. We are most impressed with your
test results and want to help you expand your operation and speed up
the testing process. The army needs what you’ve developed. In
the next two weeks, submit to me your supplementary budget to expand
your operation and I want it also included into next year’s
budget. ” Then he turned to me, nodded, and we thanked the
commanding general for lunch and walked out to General
Trudeau’s helicopter.

“How about that, Phil?” he asked.
“I think we checked off some of the items on your list right
on the spot. ”

The pilot helped the general into his seat and I got around on
the other side.

“So what do you think?” he asked again.

“I think if we move any faster we’ll have
the EBEs down here asking for some of our irradiated food, ”
I said.

General Trudeau laughed as we whisked off the helipad and
headed back for the short jump to the Pentagon. “Now you have
to get to work on finding out what you can about your atomic propulsion
system. If NASA ever gets it into its mind to push ahead with building
its space station, I’d like the military to have a power
source that can keep us up there for a while. If we can get a
surveillance window on our visitors, I want it sooner rather than
later. ”

And before the week was out, I was at Fort Belvoir, Virginia,
again looking at the developments the army had made in the development
of portable nuclear reactors.

Portable Atomics

A challenge posed to us directly by the army’s
retrieval of the Roswell craft and our further discovery that the craft
was not propelled by a conventional engine - either propeller, jet, or
rocket - pressed upon us the critical realization that if we were to
engage these extraterrestrial creatures in space we would need a
propulsion system that gave us a capability for long distance travel
similar to theirs. But we had no such system. The closest form of
energy we had that did not rely on a constant supply of fuel was atomic
power in a controlled, sustained reaction, and even that was far away
from development. However, at the close of the war the army had
operational control over atomic weapons because, under Gen. Leslie
Groves, director of the Manhattan Project, the army had established the
bureaucracy that developed and deployed the atomic bomb.

So for army engineers, struggling to find out how the Roswell
spacecraft was powered, atomic power was the easiest form of propulsion
to seize upon, in part because it was the most immediate. However, by
1947, a struggle was already breaking out within the Truman
administration over who would control nuclear power, a civilian
commission or the military. As the nation was making the transition
from wartime to peace time, the specter of a General Groves secretly
dictating how and in what manifestation atomic power would be used
frightened Truman’s advisers. So in the end, President Truman
made the decision to turn control of the nation’s nuclear
program over to a civilian commission. Thus, by 1947, the army was
getting out of running the nuclear power business, but that
didn’t mean that research into the military applications of
nuclear power plants stopped. We needed to develop nuclear reactors,
not only to manufacture nuclear power propulsion systems for naval
vessels and for on site installation of power generating stations, but
to experiment with ways nuclear power could be made portable in space by assembling systems in orbit from component parts.
This would enable us to maintain long term outposts in space and even
to power interplanetary vessels that could serve as a defensive force
against any extraterrestrial hostile forces. If this sounds like
science fiction, remember, it was 1947, and the nation had barely
gotten out of World War II before the Cold War had begun. War, not
peace, was on the mind of the military officers who were in charge of
the Roswell retrieval and analysis of the wreckage.

The army, I discovered from the “Army Atomic
Reactors” reports at Fort Belvoir, not only had a very
sophisticated portable reactor program under way, but had already built
one in cooperation with the air force for installation at the Sundance
Radar Station six miles out of Sundance, Wyoming, early in 1962. This
was a highly sophisticated piece of power generating apparatus that
provided steam heat to the radar station, electrical power for the
base, and a very precisely controlled separate power supply for the
delicately calibrated radar equipment. But this wasn’t the
first portable power plant, as most people thought it was.

The first portable nuclear reactor plant anywhere was for a
research facility in Greenland, under the Arctic ice cap, designed for
Camp Century, an Army Corps of Engineers project nine hundred miles
from the North Pole. Ostensibly operated by the Army Polar Research and
Development Center conducting experiments in the Arctic winter, Camp
Century was also a vital observation post in an early warning system
monitoring any Soviet activity at or near the North Pole and any
activity related to UFO sightings or landings.

During the years when I was at the White House, the UFO
working group had consistently pushed President Eisenhower to establish
a string of formal listening posts - electronic pickets staffed by army
and air force observers at the most remote parts of the planet - to
report on any UFO activity. General Twining’s group had
argued that if the EBEs had any plans to establish semipermanent Earth
bases, it wouldn’t be in a populated area or an area where
our military forces could monitor. It would be at the poles, in the
middle of the most desolate surroundings they could find, or even
underneath the ocean. The polar caps seemed like the most obvious
choices because during the 1950s we had no surveillance satellites that
could spot alien activity from orbit, nor did we have a permanent
presence at the two poles. It was thought that we wouldn’t be
able to put any sophisticated devices at the poles, either, because
doing so would require more power than we could transport. However, the
army’s Nuclear Power Program, developed in the1950s at Fort
Belvoir, provided us with the ability to install a nuclear powered base
anywhere on the planet.

In 1958, work was started on the Camp Century power plant,
which was to be constructed beneath the ice in Greenland. Initially
this was supposed to be top secret because we didn’t want the
Soviets to know what we were up to. Ultimately, however, the high
security classification proved too unwieldy for the army because too
many outside contractors were involved and the logistics,
transportation to Thule, Greenland, then installation on skids beneath
the ice pack created a cover story nightmare. So Army Intelligence
decided to drop the security classification entirely and treat the
entire plan as a scientific information gathering expedition by its
polar research group.

Just like the whole camouflage operation that had protected
the existence of the working group, Camp Century provided the perfect
cover for testing out a procedure for constructing a prefabricated,
prepackaged nuclear reactor under arduous conditions and flying it to
its site for final assembly. It also provided the army with a means of
testing the performance of the reactor and how it could be maintained
at an utterly desolate location in the harshest climate on the planet.

The plant was the first of its kind. It had a completely
modular construction that had separately packaged components for air
coolers, heat exchangers, switch gear, and the turbine generator. The
power plant also had a mechanism that used the recycled steam to melt
the ice cap surface to provide the camp’s water supply. The
entire construction was completed in only seventy seven days, and the
camp remained in operation from October 1960 to August 1963, when the
research mission completed its work. The entire operation was
successfully taken apart and placed in storage in 1964, and the site of
Camp Century was completely restored to its natural state.

I received reports about the camp’s operation during
the later months of 1962 after General Trudeau had asked me about the
feasibility of the army’s portable atomics program as a way
to instigate research into a launchable atomics program for generating
power in orbit. I was so enthusiastic about the success of our portable
atomics and the way they provided the research platform for the subsequent development of mobile atomics that I urged the
general to provide as much funding as R&D could to enable the
Fort Belvoir Army Nuclear Power Program to construct and test as many
mobile and portable power plants as possible. Each power plant gave us
a kind of a beachhead into remote areas of the world where the EBEs
might have wanted to establish a presence because they believed they
could go about it undetected. They were a kind of platform. Once we had
demonstrated the ability to protect remote areas of the earth,
we’d be in a better position to establish a presence in space.

The atomics program, which was in part a direct outgrowth of
the challenge posed to us from our analysis of the Roswell craft,
ultimately helped us develop portable atomic power plants, which are
now used to power Earth satellites as well as naval vessels. It showed
us that we could have portable atomic generators and gave the army a
longer reach than anybody might have thought. Ultimately, it allowed us
to maintain surveillance and staff remote listening posts. It also
provided the basis for research into launching nuclear power facilities
into space to become the power plants of new generations of
interplanetary vehicles. The portable atomics program allowed us to
experiment with ways we would develop atomic drives for our own space
exploration vehicles, which, we believed, would enable us to establish
military bases on the moon as well as on the planets near us in the
solar system.

And from our successes with atomics, we turned our attention
to the development of the weapons we could mount on surveillance
satellites in orbit, weapons we developed directly from what we found
in the flying saucer at Roswell.

“Tesla’s Death Ray” and

the Accelerated Particle Beam Weapon

Embedded in the army field reports and air material Command
engineering evaluations analyzing the Roswell craft were descriptions
of how the spacecraft might have utilized a form of energy known as
“directed energy, ” powerful beams of excited
electrons that could be precisely directed at any target. We
didn’t know very much about directed energy back in 1947, or
more precisely put, we didn’t know how much we knew because
in reality we knew a lot. But the information that had been readily
available since the 1930s was lying sequestered at a public storage
facility, under the authority of the federal government, over on the
Lower East Side of Manhattan in the notes of the mysterious inventor
Nikola Tesla, whose experiments and reputed discoveries have become the
stuff of bizarre but exciting legend.

The laser surgical cutting tool found in the Roswell wreckage
was one form of directed energy beam device whose ability to fire
rapidly and with precision revealed that the extraterrestrials had a
potential in weaponry far superior to ours. However, if the craft had
been brought down by lightning, itself a directed energy beam of one of
the highest magnitudes, then it revealed their vulnerability to bolts
of electrons. That stimulated the thinking of army scientists and
researchers into the analysis of the potential of a directed energy
beam weapon. Today, fifty years after the crash of the spacecraft at
Roswell, these weapons are far more than the device that the Emperor
Ming aimed at Earth in the Flash Gordon serials; they are a reality
that can be launched on a guided missile, separated from a booster,
aimed by an internal computer guidance system at any incoming device,
whether an ICBM warhead or a space vehicle, and fired with devastating
effect. This weapon has been a true Army R&D success story.

“The possibilities for benefits to the military are
enormous, ” I wrote to General Trudeau in my 1962 analysis of
the potential for directed energy weapons. “Although, as we
have seen, even the most rudimentary of directed energy products, the
microwave oven, has more than repaid the initial research and
development overhead through consumer product sales, it is the military
that will see the greatest benefits from directed energy and is already
seeing the potential from it in the applications that are being
projected for the laser which is only two years old. ”

The concept of a weapon that relied on a directed energy beam,
whatever the nature of that beam was, was not a completely new concept
to the military community, although its origins were totally shrouded
in secrecy. The first test of a directed energy weapon, a particle beam
accelerator code named Seesaw whose beam was to be aimed at incoming
guided missiles, was first conducted in 1958, two years before the
successful demonstration of the laser, by the Advanced Research
Projects Agency. Although the test took place the year that I was in
Red Canyon, New Mexico, I had known about the project first when I was
on the National Security Council at the White House and then again
after the successful experiments against a simulated target.

In theory, the particle beam weapon looked like it would work,
assuming the technological development of power generators, electrical
storage apparatus, and the computer software to aim and fire the
weapon. We already had a rough model for the particle beam weapon in
nature: the lightning bolt, a pure, intense beam of electrons firing
between opposite poles and destroying or incapacitating anything it hit
that was not grounded. Scientists from Benjamin Franklin to Nikola
Tesla have tried to chain the force of lightning as a power source. Now
the Advanced Research Projects Agency was experimenting with the theory
to apply it to a new and deadly weapon. If they could build the
hardware and write the software, the developers at ARPA decided they
would be able to generate an intense beam of either electrons or
neutral hydrogen atoms, aim it at an incoming target, and fire the
particle beam impulses that would travel near the speed of light and
excite the atoms in the target until they literally blew apart.
Whatever didn’t blow up would be destroyed electronically and
rendered useless.

Officially, the project would remain secret until funding
could be acquired and the technological development of the components
moved far enough along to allow us to build working prototypes. The
great fear of the developers at ARPA was that the Soviets, realizing
what we were trying to construct, would maximize their effort to build
one before we did, rendering our newly developed Atlas ICBM obsolete
before it even got to the launching pad.

The Advanced Research Projects Agency was a highly secretive
network of defense scientists, members of the industrial defense
contractor R&D community, and university researchers operating
either under the formula of a government grant or the tacit
acknowledgment of the Defense Department that their research would come
under government control at some point. ARPA was founded in1958, in
part, I believed, because up to then Army R&D had been a
disorganized department barely able to manage the core research
necessary to keep us technologically superior to our enemies. This
created a gap in research that the Advanced Research Projects Agency
was created to fill. Working on military defense oriented research,
many times far in advance of any concrete proposals for the development
of a weapons system or a product, ARPA often acted as a forward
skirmish line for the development of military weapons or simply
facilitated the basic scholarship necessary for the more concrete items
to be developed. However, too many times it was in conflict with the
military because ARPA had its own separate agenda, especially after
General Trudeau had reorganized the entire military R&D
apparatus and refocused it so that it ran like a machine.

In 1969, during the era of large main frame computers, under a
contract to develop a network of networks linking universities, defense
contractors, and the military, the ARPANET was born. And in the 1970s
after the Advanced Research Projects Agency changed its name to the
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, it instituted a
project to create an “internetting” of all the
existing computers on its system, instituting the software protocols
that would link networks running on different operating systems.
By1974, the Transmitting Control Protocol/Internet Protocol was born and the ARPANET became the Internet. In the late 1980s,
the European laboratory for Particle Physics launched a hypertext
language, originally conceived of by Vannevar Bush, as a search
mechanism on the Internet and by 1990 married it to a graphics user
Interface that combined hypertext and graphics. The World Wide Web was
born.

In 1958, when it was first developing the concepts behind the
particle beam weapon, ARPA was only a year old. It was formed in1957,
when I was still at the White House, in response to the Soviet
Union’s successful launch of Sputnik because the government
realized that the United States needed an independent research
organization to marshal the resources of the academic, scientific, and
industrial communities. ARPA was formed to fund basic research, and
even though it didn’t have a military orientation at the
outset, it quickly became associated with military projects because
that was where the government saw the greatest need for basic research
into scientific and technical areas.

There was another reason for the formation of ARPA that, at
least in theory, had a lot to do with the perceived threats facing the
United States and the need for basic research to respond to them. ARPA,
because it was a network deep inside the government and ultimately the
Department of Defense, could engage in research ostensibly far afield
from the immediate needs of the military services whose research and
development organizations were part of the command structure. ARPA
wasn’t. Although it reported to its own higherups in the
Defense Department and at the White House, it was not part of a command
structure and didn’t have to confine itself to the agendas of
the heads of the various special military corps.

ARPA didn’t just come into existence out of nowhere.
Its ancestor, the National Research Council, had been formed under
President Wilson to organize and marshal scientific research for
defense purposes and as a rival to the Naval Consulting Board, which
was run by Thomas Edison, who had gone on record as saying that the
country didn’t need a Naval Consulting Board at all. He
invited scientists he called a bunch of
“perfessers” down to his laboratory in New Jersey
to walk around the “scrap heap” to see how real
inventions were created. University researchers and corporate heads of
research and development were naturally appalled at what Edison thought
about government sponsored research for the war effort and rallied
around the NRC. If there were government grants to be handed our for basic defense research, the scientists who
worked for corporations, who needed help in basic research no matter
what its primary purpose was, were anxious to become associated with
this new organization.

University researchers argued, through the prestigious
National Academy of Sciences, that the National Research Council should
be an “arsenal of science” to protect the United
States through the application of its great brain trust in academia and
industrial contractors to issues of national defense through
technology. President Wilson agreed, and the NRC was born. One of the
first tasks given to the National Research Council was the development
of a submarine defense. Aircraft had not yet made a decisive appearance
on the battlefield at the outset of World War I, but the German U-boats
were ravaging the Atlantic fleets. The navy was desperately searching
for a way to detect submarines, and although Nikola Tesla had submitted
his plans for an energy beam detector that would send low frequency
waves through the water to reflect off any hidden objects, the National
Research Council thought the idea too esoteric and looked for a more
conventional technology. Tesla’s low energy wave
didn’t work well in water anyway, but years later
Tesla’s description of his invention was the basis for one of
the most important devices to come out of World War II,
“radar. ”

The National Research Council had established a pattern of
government support for basic research when it had an aspect to it that
could be developed for military purposes. It was the first time that
research scientists from the private sector, corporations,
academicians, bureaucrats, and the military were brought together to
solve mutual problems. Therefore, the Advanced Research Projects Agency
and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, son of
ARPA, were natural outgrowths of an ongoing government relationship.

The problem with ARPA was that it was political and had its
own agenda. It was not uncommon for conflicts to arise between the
Office of the Chief of Research and Development, General Trudeau, who
was operating within the military command structure, and ARPA over
money and the policy issues that arose between them. The staffs at ARPA
and in the Pentagon crossed swords on a number of occasions, and more
than once ARPA tried to lay the blame for its own shortcomings and
mistakes on the military. During the early years of the Vietnam War,
for example, ARPA tried to blame General Trudeau for mistakes in the
deployment of Agent Orange. But General Trudeau and R&D
weren’t responsible at all for Agent Orange. It was
ARPA’s baby from the start. But when the field reports
started coming in on the casualties Agent Orange was causing among our
own troops and ARPA said that it would testify before Congress that
General Trudeau was responsible, I hit the ceiling. I let the ARPA
staff people know that, protocol be damned, I would storm into the
congressional committees on military and veterans affairs and raise the
roof of the Capitol Building until everyone knew that ARPA was trying
to duck responsibility for negligence in the deployment of a bad
chemical. ARPA backed down, but the bad blood between us remained.

When the concept of an ARPA was first discussed at the White
House, I saw the potential as well as the problem, but I also knew that
a secret agenda driving everything was the policy of the UFO working
group. ARPA was an asset to them because they could network through the
university community and find out who had any information about UFOs
that they weren’t disclosing to the military, what technology
was being developed that had any relation to the problem of UFOs or
EBEs, and who in the academic or scientific community were coming up
with theories about the existence or intentions of EBEs. In other
words, in addition to being a conduit for research and research grants
that fit certain government/military profiles, ARPA was another
intelligence gathering agency, but dedicated to the academic and
scientific communities. If information was out there, ARPA was going to
find it and pay for its development.

Therefore, when the urgency of coming up with a technological
challenge to the Soviet space program arose in 1957, it was no surprise
to anyone who understood the requirements of a space defense that it
would be an organization like ARPA that would be given the mandate to
develop that military response. And given the challenge posed by the
Soviet satellite program, a particle beam weapon was the logical
direction such a response would take.

The United States had to develop a weapon that theoretically
could knock out the Soviet satellites or blind them so they
couldn’t take any surveillance photos. They had to gather
resources in the academic research community to see whether a talent
pool existed for the development of such a weapon. At the same time
they didn’t want to divert military research into exotic
weapons while the military was still trying to get its own satellites
into orbit. But rather than putting the plan directly into the hands of
the military R&D organizations, they followed a course probably
initially laid out for them by the protocols of the UFO working group
and went outside the formal military to an ad hoc research organization
that was not supposed to be involved in direct military research. When
I was at the White House, I could see the hand of the CIA behind this,
which immediately sent up a red flag for me because I knew that the
government was only creating another budget and research grant
bureaucracy the CIA would ultimately control.