The Day After Roswell (38 page)

Gorbachev, believe it or not, was also pleased because
President Reagan guaranteed that the United States would throw its
defensive shield around the Soviet Union, too. Sure, the two leaders
shook hands and embraced one another in public. What they had achieved
together, cooperating when they were supposed to be fighting, was
nothing short of miraculous. Whatever we were fighting over became
minimally important in the face of a threat from creatures who were so
superior to us in technology that we were their farm animals to be
harvested as they pleased. But when the United States and USSR agreed,
in the early 1980s, not to fight each other over this territory or that
territory, to cooperate so as to defeat the common foe, we were
unbeatable. Now, as the Space Shuttle docks with the Mir and the
astronauts and cosmonauts share a toast of vodka from their plastic squeeze tubes and look out into the darkest
reaches of space, they know that there is an electronic shield around
them. Now that the war is just about over and we defend our beachhead,
the truth will ultimately be revealed. The real truth behind a
fifty-year history of a war that looked like the ultimate defeat for
human kind amidst a Cold War that threatened us with nuclear
annihilation can now finally be told because we prevailed. It was
because in the dark hours just before dawn in July of 1947 the army,
only dimly recognizing that we were on the edge of a potential
cataclysmic event, pulled the crashed space vehicle out of the desert
and harvested its parts just like the inhabitants of that vehicle
wanted to harvest us. In those moments, even though we might have
fallen over ourselves in the darkness of the next fifty years, we set
in motion the processes that brought us to an initial resolution with a
military power greater than us. It helped us in our confrontation with
the Russians and, if we don’t lose our way, will help us
manage the threats to come. When that truth of alien intervention in
our planet’s affairs and our ongoing contact with an alien
culture is finally revealed, it won’t be frightening even
though it will be a shock.

The night closes in around you in the desert, exposing your
deepest terrors of childhood bogeymen to the desolation of the
landscape and the blackness of the sky. So, even inside your car you
keep on chattering to keep the night away.

“And that’s what I think about all of it,
UFOs, the Cold War, all of it, ” I told my companion in the
car sitting next to me as we drove south through the New Mexican desert
toward the town of Roswell. “I may be over eighty now, but
that’s what I think. ”

The night was swallowing us up as our car twisted around the
curves on the crowned road surface, still warm and wet on a summer
night from passing thunderstorms, heading toward lights we knew were
over the horizon but still could not see.

“The Cold War, the missile crisis of 1962, the
worldwide alert in1973, all history now, don’t you
think?” I asked. “Maybe it was a good thing that
the aliens forced us to defend the planet. At least it kept us in a
Cold War even though we were using real bullets. ”

“And what makes you think the Cold War is over,
tovarisch?” my friend asked as he carefully took out a
cigarette, lit it, and blew the smoke out the window.
“American cigarettes, ” he said. “Am I not the most bourgeois decadent person you’ve ever met?
But what would the Amerikanskis  have done without
me?“

And I laughed to myself and counted the million stars across
the desert sky as far as I could see. Cattle sleeping near the scrub
and sand fences along the side of the lonely state route, a coyote now
and then running through the beams of our headlights, and the sound of
my friend’s breath as he blew the column of smoke into the
desert air. It was a night just like this, lightning crackling off in
the distance and a thunderclap rolling across the desert floor, a night
just like this.

And what looked like a bright shooting star blazed very bright
in an arc from south to north and disappeared over a rise as we
continued toward Roswell into the darkness of the New Mexico night.

BACK IN THE 1950S, I REMEMBER WATCHING A TELEVISION SERIES called I Led Three Lives about the exploits of Herbert A.
Philbrick, who described the “fantastic but true”
story of his life as a member of a Communist Party cell and an
undercover operative for the FBI. Years later, when I got to Army
R&D, I remember thinking about how my own story was also
“fantastic but true” and how what General Trudeau
and I did helped to change the course of history. Very few people knew
that what was coming out of Foreign Technology during the early 1960s
had some basis in a crash of a UFO that
“officially” never took place. Lives were
distorted, careers destroyed, children frightened into submission by
Army Counterintelligence bogeymen, businessmen in Roswell threatened
with financial ruination and even worse if anybody told the story of
what happened. But they were all loyal Americans, and even though some
might have had their doubts about hiding the truth, they went along
with what the army wanted.

Many people have criticized the army and the government for
maintaining the Roswell cover-up not only at the time but also through
the years. For that, I need to say a word in defense of what the army
did. It’s easy to criticize if you weren’t an adult
back then or someone who didn’t understand the politics that
governed our thinking at that point in American history. We had not yet
fully made the transition from a nation at war to a nation at peace. And there was Harry Truman, still reeling from his sudden
ascendancy to the presidency, toughened into steel by his decision to
drop the atomic bombs on Japan, and now faced with the monumental
impact of a crash landing of a strange craft on American soil. Was it
Soviet? Did it belong to a foreign power? Was it hostile? We simply
didn’t know and weren’t about to say anything until
we knew what it was.

Was it a flying saucer? The last time a public announcement of
a landing by extraterrestrials took place, even though it was
entertainment, panic ensued. In the aftermath of the war and the fears
surrounding the Cold War, we didn’t want to risk another
panic. So the military recommended and the White House agreed to clam
up. Just like the secrecy surrounding the Manhattan Project, no word
gets out. And for the next fifty years that policy, once put into
place, governed the behavior of the U.S. government and the military
about the existence of UFOs and the crash at Roswell.

You can also ask how the government was able to keep this
secret for so long. Has there been any other cover-up so efficient and
thorough that it went on, unbeknownst to succeeding presidents, year
after year until it was finally stopped? In fact, there was just such a
cover-up, started in the war, but continued as a matter of policy by
Truman in 1947, code-named “Shamrock. ” Secretary
of Defense James Forrestal, one of the original members of the UFO
working group, convinced his boss President Truman in 1947 to continue
working with International Telephone and Telegraph, Western Union, and
RCA to make their international communications traffic available for
inspection by U.S. military intelligence services. Even though its
initial purpose was to monitor any communications of military
significance, such as the transmission of military secrets, there were
no controls on what was inspected and what was not. This program
continued for the next twenty-eight years and kept secret from every
president until it was terminated under the Ford administration in 1975.

Does Shamrock mean that UFOs exist? Of course not. But it does
reveal the capability of the U.S. government to keep an ongoing
operation secret from even the president of the United States, much
like the UFO working group also under James Forrestal.

So what do I think about all of this, about what happened and
what I did? I believe that because at the time I was so much in the
routine of a military intelligence officer, I didn’t really
stop to think about the implications of UFOs and EBEs. I understood
that we were fighting a Cold War with the Soviets and a skirmish war
with extraterrestrials. I believed that their intentions were, and
still are, hostile, and I believe that we took the steps necessary to
develop the weapons that can blunt their threat. In fact, the U.S.
military has better, more accurate, and more powerful weapons for
killing UFOs than were deployed in the movie Independence Day.

We can knock these guys down tomorrow with high-energy lasers
and directed particle-beam weapons that come right out of a Star Wars
movie. And these aren’t fiction, they’re fact. If
you want to know more, pay a visit to the U.S. Army Space Command Web
site on the Internet. These missile-launched HELs are the pride of our
planetary defense system and a direct result of President
Reagan’s courage in pushing for the Strategic Defense
Initiative when every-one said it wouldn’t work. And that SDI
was a direct result of the work General Trudeau and I did at Army
R&D in 1962.

Sometimes things just work the way they’re supposed
to. Some-times, once in a very long while, you get the chance to save
your country, your planet, and even your species at the same time. And
when that time comes, as Davy Crockett once said: Be sure
you’re right, then go ahead.