The Day After Roswell (7 page)

There was a written description and a sketch of another
device, too, like a short, stubby flashlight almost with a
self-contained power source that was nothing at all like a battery. The
scientists at Wright Field who  examined it said they
couldn’t see the beam of light shoot out of it, but when they
pointed the pencil-like flashlight at a wall, they could see a tiny
circle of red light, but there was no actual beam from the end of what
seemed like a lens to the wall as there would have been if you were
playing a flashlight off on a distant object. When they passed an
object in front of the source of the light, it interrupted it, but the
beam was so intense the object began smoking. They played with this
device a lot before they realized that it was an alien cutting device
like a blowtorch. One time they floated some smoke across the light and
suddenly the whole beam took shape. What had been invisible suddenly
had a round, micro thin, tunnel-like shape to it. Why did the
inhabitants of this craft have a cutting device like this aboard their
ship? It wasn’t until later, when I read military reports of
cattle mutilations in which entire organs were removed without any
visible trauma to the surrounding cell  tissue, that I
realized that the light beam cutting torch I thought was in the Roswell
file was actually a surgical implement, just like a scalpel, that was
being used by the aliens in medical experiments on our livestock.

Then there was the strangest device of all, a headband,
almost, with electrical signal pickup devices on either side. I could
figure out no use for this thing whatsoever unless whoever used it did
so as a fancy hair band. It seemed to be a one size fits all headpiece
that did nothing, at least not for humans. Maybe it picked up brain
waves like an electroencephalogram and projected a chart. But no
private experiment conducted on it seemed to do anything at all. The
scientists didn’t even determine how to plug it in or what
its source of power was because it came with no batteries or diagrams.

There were nights I’d spread these articles all
around me as if they were indeed Christmas presents. There were nights
when I’d just take one thing out and turn it around until I
almost memorized what it looked like from different angles before
putting it back. The days were passing and, without having been told
directly by Trudeau, I knew that he was getting anxious. We’d
sit at meetings together when other people were around and he
couldn’t say anything, and I could almost hear his insides
burst. There were times when we were alone and Trudeau almost
didn’t want to broach our shared secret.

Outside the Pentagon there was a battle starting up all over
again set to rage just as it had during the Truman and Eisenhower
presidencies. Whose intelligence was accurate? Whose was truthful? Who
was trying to manipulate the White House and who believed that by
coloring or twisting fact that he could change the course of history?
John Kennedy was leading a young administration capable of making
extraordinary mistakes. And there were people at the heart of his
administration whose own views of how the world should work were
inspiring them to distort facts, misstate intentions, and disregard
obvious realities in the hope that their views would prevail. Worse,
there were those, deep within a secret government within the government, who had been placed there by the spymasters at the
Kremlin. And it was those individuals we had the greatest reason to
fear. Right now, Army R&D had stewardship over these bits and
pieces of foreign technology from Roswell. How long we would have them
I did not know. So, over a late night pot of coffee in General
Trudeau’s office, he decided that we would move this material
out, out to defense contractors, out to where scientists would see it
and where, under the guise of top secrecy, it would be in the system
before the CIA could stow it where no one would find it except the very
people we were trying to hide it from.

“This is the devil’s plan, General,
” I said to Trudeau that night. “What makes you
think we can get away with it?”

“Not we, Phil, ” he said. “You.
You’re the one who’s going to get away with it.
I’ll just keep them off your back long enough until you do.
”

Now, all I could think about was what I’d seen that
night in 1947 and, worse, what in the world I was going to do with all
this stuff next. I’d asked myself “why
me?” hundreds of times since that night in the Pentagon. And
asked why after fourteen years and my experience at Fort Riley I had
become the inheritor of the Roswell file. But I had no answers then and
no answers now. If General Trudeau had meant for this to happen when he
took over R&D three years before I got there, I’ll
never know. He never gave me any reasons, only orders. But since he was
the master strategizer, I sometimes think he believed I must have had
some experience with alien encounters and wouldn’t be spooked
by working with the technology from the Roswell file.

I never asked him about it, as strange as that seems, because
the military being what it is, you don’t ask. You simply do.
So, now as then, I don’t question. I only remember that I
went forward from that night to put into development as much of the
Roswell file as I could and believed that whatever happened, I was
doing the right thing.

Inside the Pentagon at the Foreign Technology Desk

the pentagon never sleeps.

And neither did I in those first few weeks at the R&D
Foreign Technology desk as I racked my brain to come up with a strategy
I could recommend to my boss. Amidst the constant twenty four hour
motion of an office building where someone is always working, I spent
more time at my desk than I did at home. Evenings, weekends, early
mornings before the sunrise set the windows across the river in
Washington an orange blaze, you could find me staring at the four
drawer file cabinet against my corner wall. I’d fiddle with
the combination lock, sometimes so absorbed in coming up with a
strategy for these strange artifacts that I’d forget the
sequence of numbers and have to wait until my brain reset itself. And
always, just outside my office was the pent up urgency of crisis, the
cocked trigger of a military machine always poised to attack anywhere,
anytime, at the sound of a voice on the other end of a scrambled phone
behind the soft colored walls of an inner office along the miles of
corridors on the inner or outer ring.

You think of the Pentagon as something of an amorphous entity
with a single mind set and a single purpose. It’s probably
the same way most people see the structure of the American military:
one army, one goal, everybody marches together. But that’s
almost totally false. The American military - and its home office, the
Pentagon is just like any other big business with hundreds of different
bureaus, many in direct and explicit competition with each other for
the same resources and with different agendas and tactical goals. The
separate military branches have different goals when it comes to how
America should be defended and wars fought, and it’s not
uncommon for differences to emerge even within the same branch of the
service.

I was plunged right into this in my first weeks back in D.C.
Debates were still going on from World War II, sixteen years before,
and all of this formed the backdrop of Roswell. There was a huge
wrangling within the navy between the aircraft carrier advocates from
World War II and the submariners under Adm. Hyman Rickover, who saw the
big flat tops as herds of elephants, slow and vulnerable. Subs, on the
other hand, running almost forever on nuclear fuel, could slip deep
beneath the sea, lay a thousand or so miles off enemy territory, and
blast away at his most vulnerable targets with multiple warhead ICBMs.
No way our enemies would escape destruction as long as we had our
submarine fleet. So who needs another aircraft carrier with its screen
of destroyers and other escorts when just one sub can deliver a
knockout punch anywhere, anytime, without enemy orbiting intel
satellites snapping pictures of its every move? Look what our subs did
to the Japanese in the Pacific; look what the German U-boats did to us
in the Atlantic. But you couldn’t convince the navy brass of
all that in the 1960s.

Like the navy, the air force had different advocates for
different goals, and so did the army. And when there are competing
agendas and strategies articulated by some of the best and brightest
people ever to graduate from universities, war colleges, and the ranks
of officers, you have hard nosed people playing high stakes games
against one other for the big prizes: the lion’s share of the
military budget. And, at the very center of it all, the place where the
dollars get spent, are the weapons development people who work for
their respective branches of the military.

And that’s right where I was in the early days of
1961 shortly after John F. Kennedy came to town to begin his new
administration. I had only just returned to Washington from the front
lines of a war that nobody thought of as a real war except for us, the
guys who were there. It was easier during a real war, like Korea. Your
objective is to push the other guy back as far as you can, kill as many
of his people as you can, and force him to surrender. You have a very
pragmatic strategy: You try it and if it works you keep on doing it
until it stops working. But on the front lines in Germany, where the
battles were only fought with electron beams, threats, and feints, you
had to assess how many soldiers might  be killed or how many
planes you could  bring down if the shooting were to start for
real. For Americans this was the Cold War, the combined military
machines of two massive superpowers each capable of obliterating each
other the moment either one perceived a material weakness in the
other’s ability to retaliate.

So you had a chess game played and replayed every day around
the world in scores of different war rooms where different scenarios
were formulated to see who would win. It was all a game of numbers and
strategies with different armed services around the world winning and
losing battles on computers - very elegant and precise. But what very
few people outside of government knew was that the Cold War was really
a Hot War, fought with real bullets and real casualties, only no one
could step forward to admit it because the front lines were within the
very government capitals of the countries that were fighting it. I saw
this with my own eyes right here in Washington, where the war had been
going on since 1947.

So with the sides drawn and tensions between the various
bureaus and services within the Pentagon, it didn’t take me
long in those first few weeks to learn the politics of my new job. With
the field reports, scientific analyses, medical autopsies, and
technological debris from the Roswell crash I had under lock and key,
my first rule was to be as circumspect as possible, draw no attention
to myself. I’d learned this skill when I served on
MacArthur’s staff in Korea ten years earlier: I had to be the
little man who wasn’t there. If people don’t think
you’re there, they talk. That’s when you learn
things.

And within those first few weeks I saw and learned a lot about
how the politics of the Roswell discovery had matured over the fourteen
years since the crash and since the intense discussions at the White
House after Eisenhower became president. Each of the different branches
of the military had been protecting its own cache of Roswell - related
files and had been actively seeking to gather as much new Roswell
material as possible. Certainly all the services had their own reports
from examiners at Walter Reed and Bethesda concerning the nature of the
alien physiology. Mine were in my nut file along with the drawings. It
was pretty clear, also, from the way the navy and air force were
formulating their respective plans for advanced military technology
hardware, that many of the same pieces of technology in my files were
probably shared by the other services. But nobody was bragging because
everybody wanted to know what the other guy had. But since, officially,
Roswell had never happened in the first place, there was no technology
to develop.

On the other hand, the curiosity among weapons and
intelligence  people within the services was rabid. Nobody
wanted to come in second place in the silent, unacknowledged alien
technology development race going on at the Pentagon as each service
quietly pursued its version of a secret Roswell weapon. I
didn’t know what the air force or navy had or what they might
have been developing from their respective files on Roswell, but I
assumed each service had something and was trying to find out what I
had. That would have been a good intelligence procedure. If you were in
the know about what was retrieved from Roswell, you kept your ears open
for snippets of information about what was being developed by another
branch of the military, what was going before the budget committees for
funding, or what defense contractors were developing a specific
technology for the services. If you weren’t in the Roswell
loop, but were too curious for your own good, you could be spun around
by the swirling rumor mill that the Roswell race had kicked up among
competing weapons development people in the services and wind up
chasing nothing more than dust devils that vanished down the halls as
soon as you turned the corner on them.

There were real stories, however, that wouldn’t go
away no matter how many times somebody official stepped up to say the
story was false. For example, I picked up the rumors pretty quickly
concerning the UFO the air force was supposed to be keeping at Edwards
Air Force Base in California and the research they were conducting on
the spacecraft’s technology, especially its electromagnetic
wave propulsion system. There were also rumors circling around the air
force about the early harvesting of Roswell technology in the design of
the all-wing bombers, but I didn’t know how much stock to put
in them. The army had been developing an all-wing design since right
after World War I, and within a year after the Roswell crash Jack
Northrop’s company began test flights of their YB49 flying
wing recon/bomber models. The YB49’s quadruple vertical tail
fins were so uncannily reminiscent of the head on Roswell craft
sketches in our files that it was hard not to make a connection between
the spacecraft and the bomber. But the flying wing’s
development took place over ten years before I got to the Foreign Technology desk, so I
had no direct evidence relating the bomber to the spacecraft.

General Trudeau was right, though, when he said that people at
the Pentagon were watching Army R&D because they thought we
were onto something. People wanted to know what Foreign Technology was
working on, especially the more exotic things in our portfolio just to
make sure, the memos read, that we weren’t duplicating
budgetary resources by spending twice or three times for the same
thing. There was a lot of talk and pressure from the Joint Chiefs of
Staff about technology sharing and joint weapons development, but my
boss wanted us to keep what we had to ourselves, especially what he
jokingly kept calling “the alien harvest. ”

As if the eyes of the other military services
weren’t enough, we also had to contend with the analysts from
the Central Intelligence Agency. Under the guise of coordination and
cooperation, the CIA was amalgamating as much power as it could.
Information is power, and the more the CIA tried to learn about the
army weapons development program, the more nervous it made all of us at
the center of R&D.

Acquaintances of mine in the agency had dropped hints, shortly
after I took over the Foreign Technology desk, that if I needed any
intelligence about what other countries were developing, they could
help me out. But one hand washes the other, and they dropped hints that
if I had any clues about where any stray pieces of “the
cargo, ” or “the package” as the Roswell
artifacts were commonly referred to within the military, might be
found, they would surely appreciate it if I let them know. After the
third time my CIA contacts bumped into me and whispered this proposal
for exchanges of information into my ear, I told my boss that our
friends might be anxious about what we had.

“You really put me on the hot seat, General,
” I said to Trudeau over one of our morning briefings at the
end of my first month on the job. I was still working on the strategy
for the nut file and, thankfully, my boss hadn’t pressured me
yet to come up with recommendations for the plan. But it was coming.
“How does the CIA know what we have?”

“They’re guessing, I suppose, ”
he said. “And figuring it out by the process of elimination.
Look, everybody suspects what the air force has. ”

Trudeau was right. In the rumor bank from which everybody in the Pentagon made deposits and withdrawals, the air force was
sitting on the Holy Grail - a spaceship itself and maybe even a live
extraterrestrial. Nobody knew for sure. We knew that after it became a
separate branch of the military in 1948, the air force kept some of the
Roswell artifacts at Wright Field outside of Dayton, Ohio, because
that’s where “the cargo” was shipped,
stopping off in Fort Riley along the way. But the air force was
primarily interested in how things fly, so whatever R&D they
worked on was focused on how their planes could evade radar and out fly
the Soviets no matter where we got the technology from.

“And, ” he continued,
“I’m sure the agency fellows would love to get into
the Naval Intelligence files on Roswell if they’ve not done
so already. ”

With its advanced submarine technology and missile launching
nuclear subs, the navy was struggling with its own problem in figuring
out what to do about UUOs or USOs - Unidentified Submerged Objects, as
they came to be called. It was a worry in naval circles, particularly
as war planners advanced strategies for protracted submarine warfare in
the event of a first strike. Whatever was flying circles around our
jets since the 1950s, evading radar at our top secret missile bases
like Red Canyon, which I saw with my own eyes, could plunge right into
the ocean, navigate down there just as easy as you please, and surface
halfway around the world without so much as leaving an underwater
signature we could pick up. Were these USOs building bases at the
bottom of oceanic basins beyond the dive capacity of our best
submarines, even the Los Angeles-class jobbies that were only on the
drawing boards? That’s what the chief of Naval Operations had
to find out, so the navy was occupied with fighting its own war with
extraterrestrial craft in the air and under the sea.

That left the army.

“But they don’t know for sure what we
have, Phil, ” Trudeau continued. He’d been talking
the whole time. “And they’re busting a gut to find
out. ”

“So we have to keep on doing what we do without
letting them know what we have, General, ” I said.
“And that’s what I’m working on.
” And I was. Even though I wasn’t sure how
we’d do it, I knew the business of R&D
couldn’t change just because we had Roswell crash artifacts
in our possession.