The Day After Roswell

by William J. Birnes

  This, Truman could understand. He had trusted Twining to manage this potential crisis from the moment Forrestal had alerted him that the crash had taken place. And Twining had done a brilliant job. He kept the lid on the story and brought back everything that he could under one roof. He understood as Twining described to him the strangeness of the spacecraft that seemed to have no engines, no fuel, nor any apparent methods of propulsion, yet outflew our fastest fighters; the odd childlike creatures who were inside and how one of them was killed by a gunshot; the way you could see daylight through the inside of the craft even though the sun had not yet risen; the swatches of metallic fabric that they couldn’t burn or melt; thin beams of light that you couldn’t see until they hit an object and then burned right through it, and on and on; more questions than answers. It would take years to find these answers, Twining had said, and it was beyond the immediate capacity of our military to do anything about it. This will take a lot of manpower, the general said, and most of the work will have to be done in secret.

  General Twining showed photographs of these alien beings and autopsy reports that suggested they were too human; they had to be related to our species in some way. They were obviously intelligent and able to communicate, witnesses at the scene had reported, by some sort of thought projection unlike any mental telepathy you’d see at a carnival show. We didn’t know whether they came from a planet like Mars in our own solar system or from some galaxy we could barely see with our strongest telescopes. But they possessed a military technology whose edges we could understand and exploit, even if only for self-defense against the Soviets. But by studying what these extraterrestrials had we might be able to build a defense system against them as well.

  At the very least, Twining had suggested, the crescent-shaped craft looked so uncomfortably like the German Horten wings our flyers had seen at the end of the war that he had to suspect the Germans had bumped into something we didn’t know about. And his conversations with Wernher von Braun and Willy Ley at Alamogordo in the days after the crash confirmed this. They didn’t want to be thought of as verrückt but intimated that there was a deeper story about what the Germans had engineered. No, the similarity between the Horten wing and the craft they had pulled out of the arroyo was no accident. We always wondered how the Germans were able to incorporate such advanced technology into their weapons development in so short a time and during the Great Depression. Did they have help? Maybe we were now as lucky as the Germans and broke off a piece of this technology for ourselves. With an acceleration capability and maneuverability we’d never seen before, this craft would keep American aircraft engineers busy for years just incorporating what they could see into immediate designs.

  The issue of security was paramount, but so were questions of disclosure, the President reminded him. This thing was too big to hide and getting bigger all the time while reporters were just like dogs on a scent. So just putting a higher security classification on it and threatening anybody who came too close wasn’t enough to hide a secret this big. You couldn’t prevent leaks, and eventually it would all have to come out anyway. General Twining should think about that before the group made any final decisions, the President advised.

  By the middle of September it was obvious to every member of President Truman’s working group, which included the following:

  Central Intelligence Director Adm. Roscoe Hillenkoetter

  Secretary of Defense James Forrestal

  Lt. Gen. Nathan Twining of the AAF and then USAF Air Materiel Command

  Professor Donald Menzel, Harvard astronomer and Naval Intelligence cryptography expert

  Vannevar Bush, Joint Research and Development Board Chairman

  Detlev Bronk, Chairman of the National Research Council and biologist who would ultimately be named to the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics

  Gen. Robert Montague, who was General Twining’s classmate at West Point, Commandant of Fort Bliss with operational control over the command at White Sands

  Gordon Gray, President Truman’s Secretary of the Army and chairman of the CIA’s Psychological Strategy Board

  Sidney Souers, Director of the National Security Council

  Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg, Central Intelligence Group Director prior to Roscoe Hillenkoetter and then USAF Chief of Staff in 1948

  Jerome Hunsaker, aircraft engineer and Director of the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics

  Lloyd Berkner, member of the Joint Research and Development Board

  Unless this group established a long-term plan for protecting and developing the Roswell project, the secrets would soon leak out. I understand that it was General Twining who pointed out to the group that, in fact, the story had already leaked out. It was leaked, he said, hours after the crash and then retracted. In fact, people were still talking about it in New Mexico, but after the army’s weather balloon story, the national newspapers were treating the flying disk reports as the delusions of people who had seen too many Buck Rogers movies. The national press was already doing the committee’s work.

  What was really needed, Twining suggested, was a method for gathering the information about continuing UFO activity—especially crashes, high-probability sightings by pilots or the military, or actual physical encounters with individuals—and surreptitiously filtering that information to the group while coming up with practical explanations that would turn unidentified flying disks into completely identifiable and explainable phenomena. Under the cover of explaining away all the flying disk activity, the appropriate agencies represented by members of the working group would be free to research the real flying disk phenomenon as they deemed appropriate. But through it all, Twining stressed, there had to be a way of maintaining full deniability of the flying disk phenomenon while actually preparing the public for a disclosure by gradually desensitizing them to the potential terror of confronting a more powerful biological entity from a different world. It would have to be, General Twining suggested, at the same time both the greatest cover-up and greatest public relations program ever undertaken.

  The group agreed that these were the requirements of the endeavor they would undertake. They would form nothing less than a government within the government, sustaining itself from presidential administration to presidential administration regardless of whatever political party took power, and ruthlessly guarding their secrets while evaluating every new bit of information on flying saucers they received. But at the same time, they would allow disclosure of some of the most far-fetched information, whether true or not, because it would help create a climate of public attitude that would be able to accept the existence of extraterrestrial life without a general sense of panic.

  “It will be,” General Twining said, “a case where the cover-up is the disclosure and the disclosure is the cover-up. Deny everything, but let the public sentiment take its course. Let skepticism do our work for us until the truth becomes common acceptance.”

  Meanwhile, the group agreed to establish an information-gathering project, ultimately named Blue Book and managed explicitly by the air force, which would serve public relations purposes by allowing individuals to file reports on flying disk sightings. While the Blue Book field officers attributed commonplace explanations to the reported sightings, the entire project was a mechanism to acquire photographic records of flying saucer activity for evaluation and research. The most intriguing sightings that had the highest probability of being truly unidentified objects would be bumped upstairs to the working group for dissemination to the authorized agencies carrying on the research. For my purposes, when I entered the Pentagon, the general category of all flying disk phenomena research and evaluation was referred to simply as “foreign technology.”

  CHAPTER 6

  The Strategy

  There is an old story I once heard about keeping secrets. A group of men were trying to protect their deepest secrets from the rest of the world. They took their secrets and hid them in a shack whose very location was a secret. But
the secret location was soon discovered and in it was discovered the secrets that the group was hiding. But before every secret could be revealed, the men quickly built a second shack where they stored those secrets they still kept to themselves. Soon, the second shack was discovered and the group realized they would have to give up some secrets to protect the rest. So they again moved quickly to build a third shack and protect whatever secrets they could. This process repeated itself over and over until anyone wanting to find out what the secrets were had to start at the first shack and work their way from shack to shack until they came to where they could go no further because they didn’t know the location of the next shack. For fifty years this was the very process by which the secrets of Roswell were protected by various serial incarnations of an ad hoc confederation of top-secret working groups throughout different branches of the government, and it is still going on today.

  Were you to search through every government document to find the declassified secrets of Roswell and the contact we maintained with the aliens who were visiting us before and have been doing so ever since, you would find code-named project after code-named project, each with its own file, security classification, military or government administration, oversight mechanism, some form of budget, and even reports of highly classified documents. All of these projects were started to accomplish part of the same task: manage our ongoing relationship with the alien visitors we discovered at Roswell. However, at each level, once the security had been breached for whatever reason—even by design—part of the secret was disclosed through declassification while the rest was dragged into a new classified project or moved to an existing one that had not been compromised.

  It makes perfect sense, especially to those of us who understand that the government is not some monolithic piece of granite that never moves or reacts. To those of us inside the military/government machine the government is dynamic, highly reactive, and even proactive when it comes to devising ways to protect its most closely held secrets. For all the years after Roswell we weren’t just one step ahead of people wanting to know what really happened, we were a hundred steps ahead, a thousand, or even more. In fact, we never hid the truth from anybody, we just camouflaged it. It was always there, people just didn’t know what to look for or recognize it for what it was when they found it. And they found it over and over again.

  Project “Blue Book” was created to make the general public happy that they had a mechanism for reporting what they saw. Projects “Grudge” and “Sign” were of a higher security to allow the military to process sightings and encounter reports that couldn’t easily be explained away as balloons, geese, or the planet Venus. Blue Fly and Twinkle had other purposes, as did scores of other camouflage projects like Horizon, HARP, Rainbow, and even the Space Defense Initiative, all of which had something to do with alien technology. But no one ever knew it. And when reporters were actually given truthful descriptions of alien encounters, they either fell on the floor laughing or sold the story to the tabloids, who’d print a drawing of a large-headed, almond-eyed, six-fingered alien. Again, everybody laughed. But that’s what these things really look like because I saw the one they trucked up to Wright Field.

  Meanwhile, as each new project was created and administered, another bread crumb for anyone pursuing the secrets to find, we were gradually releasing bits and pieces of information to those we knew would make something out of it. Flying saucers did truly buzz over Washington, D.C., in 1952, and there are plenty of photographs and radar reports to substantiate it. But we denied it while encouraging science fiction writers to make movies like The Man from Planet X to blow off some of the pressure concerning the truth about flying disks. This was called camouflage through limited disclosure, and it worked. If people could enjoy it as entertainment, get duly frightened, and follow trails to nowhere that the working group had planted, then they’d be less likely to stumble over what we were really doing. And what were we really doing?

  As General Twining had suggested in his report to the Army Air Forces, “foreign technology” was the category to which research on the alien artifacts from Roswell was to be delegated. Foreign technology was one of the great catch-all terms, encompassing everything from researching French air force engineering advances on helicopter blades to captured Russian MiGs flown in from Cuba by savvy pilots who could negotiate our southern radar perimeter better than our own pilots. So what if a few pieces of technological debris from a strange crescent-shaped hovering wing turned up in an old file somewhere in the army’s foreign technology files? If nobody asked about it—and nobody did because foreign technology was just too damned dull for most reporters to hang around—we didn’t have to say anything about it. Besides, most foreign-technology stuff was classified anyway because it dealt with weapons development we were hiding from the Soviets and most reporters knew it. Foreign technology was the absolute perfect cover. All I had to do was figure out what to do with the stuff I had. And General Trudeau wasn’t in the mood to wait any longer.

  “Come on, Phil, let’s go.” The general’s voice suddenly filled the room over the blown-speaker hum of my desk intercom. I put down my coffee and headed up the stairway to the back door of his inner office. This was a routine that repeated itself three, sometimes four times a day. The general always liked to get briefed in person because even in the most secure areas of the Pentagon, the walls tended to listen and remember our conversations.

  Our sessions were always private, and from the way our conversation bounced back and forth among different topics, if it weren’t for his three stars and my pair of leaves, you wouldn’t even think you were listening to a pair of army officers. It was cordial and friendly, but my boss was my boss and, even after we both retired like two old warhorses put out to pasture, our meetings were never informal.

  “So now you figured out how the package arrived?” he asked me after I sat down. I had figured it out by going through all of the files I could get my hands on and tracing the path of the Roswell information from the 509th to Fort Bliss and from there to Wright Field, the dissemination point.

  General Trudeau motioned for me to sit down and I settled into a chair. It was already ten-thirty in the morning so I knew there’d be at least two other sit-down briefings that day.

  “I know it didn’t come by the parcel service,” I said. “I don’t think they have a truck that big.”

  “Does that help you figure out what we should do?” he asked.

  Actually, knowing how the material got into the Foreign Technology files was critically important because it meant that it was dispatched there originally. Even if it had been neglected over the years, it was clear that the Foreign Technology desk of the R&D system was its intended destination, part of the original plan. And I even had the documents from General Twining’s own files to substantiate this. Not that I would have ever revealed them at that time. General Twining, more than anyone else during those years after the war, understood the sensitive and protected nature of the R&D budget. And now that I understood how the camouflage was to take place, I also saw how brilliant the general’s plan was. R&D, although important and turning over records like topsoil from the Nazi weapons-development files captured after the war, was kind of a backwater railroad junction.

  Unnoticed by most officers on their way to the top and not called upon in the late 1940s to do much more than record keeping, it turned out to be the perfect hideaway when the CIA hirelings came sniffing through the Pentagon in the early 1950s looking for anything they could find on the Roswell technology. Unless they were part of the working group from the start, not even members of the Eisenhower White House National Security staff knew that R&D was the repository of Roswell artifacts. I was there. I can vouch for that. In fact, it wasn’t until I saw the files for myself and reverse-traced their path to my doorstep that I realized what General Twining and the working group had accomplished. By the time I had arrived at the White House, though, it was all ancient history. People were more worr
ied about the sighting information deluging Project Blue Book every day than they were about the all-but-forgotten story of Roswell.

  But my mind was drifting and the general was still speaking. He wanted to know what my research had uncovered and what I had learned about Roswell during my years at the White House, what I’d seen, how far the concentric circles of the group and the people who worked for them went.

  “Phil, we both know that the package you have is no surprise,” he said very flatly.

  I didn’t respond substantively, and he didn’t expect me to, because to do so would have meant breaching security confidentiality that I’d sworn to maintain when I was assigned to the NSC staff at the White House.

  “You don’t have to say anything officially,” he continued. “And I don’t expect you to. But can you give me your impressions of how people working for the group talked about the package?”

  “I wasn’t working for the group, General,” I said. “And whatever I saw or heard was only because it happened to pass by, not because I was supposed to do anything about it.”

  But he pushed me to remember whether the NSC staff had any direct dealings with the group and how much the Central Intelligence staffers at the White House pressed to get any information they could about what the group was doing. Of course I remembered the questions going back and forth about what might have happened at Roswell, about what was really behind Blue Book, and about all those lights buzzing the Washington Monument back in 1952. I didn’t have anything substantive to tell my boss about my involvement, but his questions helped me put together a bigger picture than I thought I knew. From my perspective in 1961, especially after reviewing everything I could about what happened in the days after the Roswell crash, I could see very clearly the things that I didn’t understand back in 1955. I didn’t know why the CIA was so aggressively agitated about the repeated stories of flying saucer sightings or why they kept searching for any information about the technology from Roswell. I certainly didn’t volunteer any information, mainly because nobody asked me, about having seen parts of “the cargo” as it passed through Fort Riley. I just played position, representing the army as the military member of the National Security Staff, but I listened to everything I heard like a fly on the wall.