The Day After Roswell (37 page)

On January 14, 1953, just before the inauguration of President
Eisenhower, CIA officials and air force officers met at the Pentagon at
the CIA’s invitation to discuss the UFO situation and what
our working group had learned up to that point. Officiated at first by
Dr. H. P. Robertson, a CIA employee and the director of the Weapons
Systems Evaluation Group in the office of the secretary of defense, the
group also had working group member Dr. Lloyd Berkner, a physicist and
one of the directors of the Brookhaven National Laboratories, as one of
its members. The Robertson Panel spent the next three days reviewing
case histories of UFO sightings assembled for them by Air Force
Intelligence and saw two films that contained footage of alleged flying
saucers. The panel concluded there was no threat to the United States
and recommended that the government should start debunking UFO
sightings in general. This, the CIA reported as late as 1988, was the
only official government response to UFO sightings.

Just over a year later, the White House agreed that it was
necessary to have some sort of policy governing the release of UFO
information to the press. In order to keep lower-level officers from
releasing unauthorized information - and by unauthorized the National
Security Council advising the President meant only that information
cleared by the working group - Gen. Nathan Twining, now the airforce
chief of staff, signed off on Air Force Regulation 200-2, which said
that it was permissible to release reports to the media only when the
object was identifiable, like swamp gas or a meteorite. But only the
Air Technical Intelligence Center could determine which objects were
identifiable and which weren’t. In other words, only the ATIC
could authorize the release of any information about UFOs, and they did
so only when the objects were clearly identifiable as common phenomena
and not flying saucers.

Throughout the 1950s, I witnessed the government become more
and more secretive about UFOs even though privately I thought that they
would get better information if they were more open about it. But I was
also a military officer and understood the necessity of keeping
information confidential until you understood what it was. Besides, the
Soviets were making great strides in the race to get into space and we
didn’t know if they were getting cooperation from the EBEs.
There truly was a war on, and I followed orders on the White House staff even as I watched the officers in the cover-up
begin to trip over their own feet time and again. The darkness was
closing in all around us.

In 1961, the air force began two secret projects that, in
effect, had been in operation since 1947 but had not been committed to
policy. “Moon Dust” had to do with the
establishment of recovery teams to retrieve and recover crashed or
grounded “foreign” space vehicles. But for all
intents and purposes, as far as the public was concerned the air force
was looking for Soviet satellites that had fallen out of the sky and
landed on Earth. But in reality the air force was establishing a
recovery of UFOs program just like the army had pulled the crashed UFO
out of the New Mexico desert fourteen years earlier. Then in Project
“Blue Fly, ” the air force authorized the immediate
delivery of foreign crashed space vehicles and any other item of
technical intelligence interest to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in
Dayton, Ohio, for evaluation. It was a repeat of General
Twining’s retrieval of the Roswell space vehicle from the
509th to Wright Field in 1947.

In 1962, one of the assistants to the secretary of defense,
Arthur Sylvester, told the press at a briefing that if the government
deemed it necessary for reasons of national security, it would not even
furnish information about UFOs to Congress, let alone the American
public. Now I was at the Pentagon and I fully understood how the air
force was moving to take control of the entire UFO situation. NASA had
the mandate from the President to manage space exploration, but the
military still had to defend against the UFO threat even though we were
being hampered at every turn.

Air Force projects “Saint” and
“Blue Gemini” years later were outgrowths of USAF
7795, a code number for the USAF’s first antisatellite
program, an aggressive operation designed to locate, track, and destroy
enemy surveillance satellites or, and more importantly, orbiting UFOs.
Using the technology we had developed at R&D, the air force,
and then the army, was taking the initial steps to defend the U.S.
missile system against Soviet attacks from space and defend the planet
against UFO intrusions.

“Saint” was an orbital UFO inspector
satellite, a version of a standard Agenda B satellite that the CIA had been using, that
had an onboard TV camera and tracking and targeting radar system. Its
job was surveillance. Find a potential enemy satellite or UFO
lurking in orbit and lock onto it with a TV camera and with radar. Once
the lock was in place, Blue Gemini, the
“killer” satellite, would move in. One of the
projects developed by Hughes Aircraft, a prime air defense contractor
and satellite builder, Blue Gemini was the military version of
NASA’s manned Gemini capsule. Its mission, purely and simply,
was to swoop in from a higher orbit and kill or disable an enemy
satellite or a UFO. If possible, the Blue Gemini would try to
“capture” a UFO in orbit by rendering it immobile
and waiting for a manned military astronaut mission to “space
walk” over and retrieve whatever we could. Both of these
weapons, under the cover of other missions, of course, were eventually
deployed, and today they form one of the lines of defense in an
antimissile and anti-UFO surveil-lance system.

Saint and Blue Gemini were important first steps in our war
against the UFOs. The technology that came out of Army R&D in
the 1960s, retrieved from the aliens themselves, led directly to our
ability to put up such a defense against the aliens even though in the
hours after the crash at Roswell our situation looked completely
hopeless. Like many of the products that came out of R&D and
were used for military purposes, they had consumer uses. And today, if
you look on the small dish digital direct broadcast television
satellite antennas that are being marketed all across the country,
you’ll see Hughes’s own brand. It’s an
example of how technology originally earmarked for the military winds
up as the most basic and everyday consumer product.

On December 17, 1969, the secretary of the air force announced
the termination of Project Blue Book. He said that Blue
Book’s review of more than thirteen thousand cases had
yielded no information that there was a threat to national security in
any way and that, in effect, since every sighting processed by Blue
Book had been identified as something earthly and not extraterrestrial,
there were, by definition, no such things as unidentified flying
objects. Blue Book had done its job and now could report that our skies
were safe. But Blue Book had been pure public relations from the start,
and the military’s evaluation of UFOs continued uninterrupted.

In 1975 and early 1976, air force nuclear weapons repositories
at Loring AFB in Maine, the all-important and sensitive Strategic Air
Command facility at Minot, North Dakota, and other facilities in
Montana, Michigan, and even the Royal Canadian Air Force Base at Falcon
bridge in Ontario had been seriously encroached upon by UFOs. These
weren’t just random sightings. UFOs actually con-

ducted surveillance and scanning operations at the bases that
resulted in security alerts and classified reports to Washington about
the intrusions.

Then NASA finally got a project up and running to scan for
radio transmissions from any advanced civilizations whose signals we
could pick up. Called the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence and
endorsed by the late Carl Sagan, SETI, which has since been
discontinued, was not only a set of receivers around the world but a
set of international protocols governing what would happen if contact
was made with an extraterrestrial civilization.

For over fifty years, now, the war against UFOs has continued
as we tried to defend ourselves against their intrusions. The Hughes
hunter-killer satellites of the 1970s were our first steps in deploying
a planetary defense system that held any real threat against the EBEs.
When, late in the 1970s, we realized that a directed-energy weapon and
high-energy laser were even more effective than exploding satellites,
our defensive ability was enhanced even further. We recognized that by
applying both the technology we found at Roswell and Tesla’s
vision of a particle beam to our own antisatellite missiles and laser
targeting equipment, we could achieve the rapid aim/rapid fire
capability that these type of defenses demanded. But we were still
playing cover-up games even though the Russians were now finally
acknowledging that maybe cooperation between the superpowers was called
for to meet a common threat.

In the 1980s, both President Reagan and Chairman Gorbachev
recognized the need for cooperation against a common enemy. While
neither officially owned up to the threat of EBEs and alien
hostilities, both acknowledged that if the United States and the Soviet
Union could lay aside their differences and participate in a shared
policy to defend the space around the earth, then both superpowers
would benefit. For his part, President Reagan pushed hard for the rapid
development and deployment of a space-based defense technology to
defend the planet. Called the Strategic Defense Initiative, and
derisively dubbed “Star Wars” by the press, the SDI
was described in 1985 in President Reagan’s own words as
“a defensive shield that won’t hurt people but will
knock down nuclear weapons before they can hurt people. ”

Briefly, the Strategic Defense Initiative was described by the
White House and the military as a space-based defense system to protect
the United States from an all-out nuclear attack by the Soviet Union.
It would include satellites that could detect a massive nuclear
launch within seconds, orbiting lasers to destroy the first wave of
missiles, laser-equipped submarines that could defend against the next
round of attacks, and a ground-based missile system providing the last
line of defense. In addition, the SDI also included what I thought was
the best of its weapons, a missile-launched kinetic energy beam weapon
that locked onto incoming warheads or low-orbiting space vehicles and
knocked out their electronics with a particle beam. The elegant aspect
to the kinetic energy beam weapon was that you couldn’t
really defend against it. Lasers, even high-energy lasers, had their
shortcomings in that once a laser beam bounced off a surface, the
surrounding energy envelope protected the surface from subsequent
pulses. You either knocked out your target right away or shielded it
against subsequent hits. But with a particle-beam weapon, you
penetrated the surface, just like micro waving a piece of meat,
destroyed its electronics to render it useless, and then broke it apart
or melted it from within.

Amidst the warnings that the SDI wouldn’t work, was
a giant unscientific gamble and a corporate giveaway,
couldn’t provide the massive shield against nuclear missiles,
would violate the ABM treaty President Johnson had negotiated with the
Russians, and was a giant waste of the taxpayers’ money,
guess what?

It worked!

We didn’t have to shoot down thousands of Soviet
incoming warheads, and the Soviets never really cared about the ABM
treaty in the first place because they knew they weren’t
going to launch a first strike and neither would we. We both knew who
the real targets of the SDI were, and it wasn’t a bunch of
ICBM warheads. It was the UFOs, alien spacecraft thinking themselves
invulnerable and invisible as they soared around the edges of our
atmosphere, swooping down at will to destroy our communications with
EMP bursts, buzz our spacecraft, colonize our lunar surface, mutilate
cattle in their own horrendous biological experiments, and even abduct
human beings for their medical tests and hybridization of the species.
And what was worse, we had to let them do it because we had no weapon
to defend ourselves.

These creatures weren’t benevolent alien beings who
had come to enlighten human beings. They were genetically altered
humanoid automatons, cloned biological entities, actually, who were
harvesting biological specimens on Earth for their own experimentation.
As long as we were incapable of defending ourselves, we had to
allow them to intrude as they wished. And that was part of what the
working group had to deal with. We had negotiated a kind of surrender
with them as long as we couldn’t fight them. They dictated
the terms because they knew what we most feared was disclosure. Hide
the truth and the truth becomes your enemy. Disclose the truth and it
becomes your weapon. We hid the truth and the EBEs used it against us
until 1974 when we had our first real shootdown of an alien craft over
Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany.

They had tried to disrupt our space program for years -
Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and even the Space Shuttle. They buzzed our
capsules traveling through space, interfered with our transmissions,
and pulsed us with EMP bursts just like we used to do to the Soviet
surface ships when we would hit them with a radar burst so massive it
would send their earphone-wearing radar and sonar techs howling in pain
down to the ship’s dispensary. But when the EBEs did it to
us, we had no response. That was before the SDI.

Once launched and tested, our space-based high-energy lasers,
or HELs, acted like the lightning bolts on the nights of July 3 and
4,1947, that so thoroughly disrupted the electromagnetic wave
propagators in the spacecraft flying over Roswell that the pilots
couldn’t retain control of their own vehicle. We eventually
realized that what happened then was that a natural version of an
advanced particle-beam burst actually brought a UFO down even as it
tried to escape. When we deployed our advanced particle-beam weapon and
tested it in orbit for all to see, the EBEs knew and we knew they knew
that we had our defense of the planet in place.