The Day After Roswell

by William J. Birnes

  The medical examiners believed that the alien brain, way oversized in comparison with the human brain and in proportion to the creature’s tiny stature, had four distinct sections. The creatures were dead and the brains had begun to decompose by the time they were removed from the soft spongy skulls that felt to the doctors more like palatal cartilage than the hard bone of a human cranium. Even had the creatures been alive when they were examined, 1947 medical technology didn’t have ultrasound scanning or the high-resonance tomography of today’s radiology labs. Accordingly, there was no way for the doctors to evaluate the nature of the cranial lobes, or “spheres,” as they called them in the report. Thus, despite the rampant speculation about the nature of the creatures’ brains—thought projection, psychokinetic powers, and the like—no hard evidence existed of anything, and the reports were very light on real scientific data.

  Where the possibility of some evidence about the workings of the alien brains did exist was in what I referred to in my reports as the “headbands.” Among the artifacts we retrieved were devices that looked something like headbands but had neither adornment nor decoration of any kind. Embedded by some very advanced kind of vulcanizing process into a form of flexible plastic were what we now know to have been electrical conductors or sensors, similar to the conductors on an electroencephalograph or polygraph. This band was fitted around the part of the alien cranium just above the ears where the skull began to expand to accommodate the large brain. At the time, the field reports from the crash and the subsequent analysis at Wright Field indicated that the engineers at the Air Materiel Command thought these might be communication devices, like the throat mikes our pilots wore during World War II. But, as I would find out when I evaluated the device and sent it into the market for reverse-engineering, this was a throat mike only in a way that a primitive stylus can be considered the forerunner of the color laser-imaging printer.

  Suffice it to say that in the few hours the material was at Walker Field in Roswell, more than one officer at the 509th gingerly slipped this thing over his head and tried to figure out what it did. At first it did nothing. There were no buttons, no switches, no wires, nothing that could even be considered to have been a control panel. So no one knew how to turn it on or off. Moreover, the band was not really adjustable, though it had enough elasticity to have been one-size-fits-all for the creatures whose skulls were large enough to accommodate them. However, the reports I read stated, the few officers whose heads were just large enough to have made contact with the full array of conductors got the shocks of their lives. In their descriptions of the headband, these officers reported everything from a low tingling sensation inside their heads to a searing headache and a brief array of either dancing or exploding colors on the insides of their eyelids as they rotated the device around their head and brought the sensors into contact with different parts of their skull.

  These eyewitness reports suggested to me that the sensors stimulated different parts of the brain while at the same time exchanged information with the brain. Again, using the analogy of an EEG, these devices were a very sophisticated mechanism for translating the electrical impulses inside the creatures’ brains into specific commands. Perhaps these headband devices comprised the pilot interface of the ship’s navigational and propulsion system combined with a long-range communications device. At first I didn’t know, but it was only when we began development of the long brain-wave research project toward the end of my tenure at the Pentagon that I realized just what we had and how it might be developed. It took a long time to harvest this technology, but fifty years after Roswell, versions of these devices eventually became a component of the navigational control system for some of the army’s most sophisticated helicopters and will soon be on the American consumer electronics market as user-input devices for personal computer games.

  The first Army Air Force analysts and engineers both at the 509th and at Wright Field were also bedeviled by the lack of any traditional controls and propulsion system in the crashed vehicle. Looking at their reports and the artifacts from the perspective of 1961, however, I imagined that the keys to understanding what made the craft go and directed its flight lay not only within the craft itself but in the relationship between the pilots and the craft. If we hypothesized a brain-wave guidance system that was as specific to the pilots’ electronic signature as it was to the spacecraft’s, then we were looking at an entirely revolutionary concept of guided flight in which the pilot was the system. Imagine transportation devices in which the key to the ignition is a digitized code derived from your electroencephalographic signature and is read automatically upon your donning some sort of sensorized headband. That’s the way I believed the spacecraft was navigated, by direct interaction between the electronic waves generated within the minds of the pilots and the craft’s directional controls. The electronic brain signals were interpreted and transmitted by the headband devices, which served as interfaces.

  I never managed to obtain a copy of the Bethesda autopsy of the alien body the navy received from General Twining. I only had the army report. The remaining bodies were kept in storage at Wright Field initially. Then they were split up among the services. When the air force became a separate branch of the service, the remaining bodies, stored at Wright, along with the spacecraft, were sent to Norton Air Force Base in California, where the air force began experiments to replicate the technology of the vehicle. This made sense. The air force cared about the flight capabilities of the craft and how to build defenses against it.

  Experiments were carried out at Norton and ultimately at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, at the famous Groom Lake site where the Stealth technology was developed. The army cared only for the weapons systems aboard the craft and how they could be reengineered for our own use. The original Roswell spacecraft remained at Norton, however, where the air force and CIA maintained a kind of alien technology museum, the final resting place of the Roswell spacecraft. But experiments in replicated alien craft continued to be carried on through the years as engineers tried to adapt the propulsion and navigation systems to our level of technology. This continues to this very day, almost in plain sight for people with security clearance who are taken to where the vehicles are kept. Over the years, the replicated vehicles have become an ongoing, inner-circle saga among top-ranking military officers and members of the government, especially the favored senators and members of the House who vote along military lines. Those who are shown the secrets are immediately bound by national secrecy legislation and cannot reveal what they saw. Thus, the official camouflage is maintained despite the large number of people who really know the truth. I admit I’ve never seen the craft at Norton with my own eyes, but enough reports passed across my desk during my years at Foreign Technology so that I knew what the secret was and how it was maintained.

  There were no conventional technological explanations for the way the Roswell craft’s propulsion system operated. There were no atomic engines, no rockets, no jets, nor any propeller-driven form of thrust. Those of us in R&D from all three branches of the service tried for years to adapt the craft’s drive system to our own technology, but, through the 1960s and 1970s, fell short of getting it operational. The craft was able to displace gravity through the propagation of magnetic wave, controlled by shifting the magnetic poles around the craft so as to control, or vector, not a propulsion system but the repulsion force of like charges. Once they realized this, engineers at our country’s primary defense contractors raced among themselves to figure out how the craft could retain its electric capacity and how the pilots who navigated it could live within the energy field of a wave. At issue was not only a great discovery, but the nuts-and-bolts chance to land multibillion-dollar development contracts for a whole generation of military air and undersea craft.

  The initial revelations into the nature of the spacecraft and its pilot interface came very quickly during the first few years of testing at Norton. The air force discovered that the entire vehicle functi
oned just like a giant capacitor. In other words, the craft itself stored the energy necessary to propagate the magnetic wave that elevated it, allowed it to achieve escape velocity from the earth’s gravity, and enabled it to achieve speeds of over seven thousand miles per hour. The pilots weren’t affected by the tremendous g-forces that build up in the acceleration of conventional aircraft because to aliens inside, it was as if gravity was being folded around the outside of the wave that enveloped the craft. Maybe it was like traveling inside the eye of a hurricane. But how did the pilots interface with the wave form they were generating?

  I reported to General Trudeau that the secret to this system could be found in the single-piece skin-tight coveralls spun around the creatures. The lengthwise atomic alignment of the strange fabric was a clue to me that somehow the pilots became part of the electrical storage and generation of the craft itself. They didn’t just pilot or navigate the vehicle; they became part of the electrical circuitry of the vehicle, vectoring it in a way similar to the way you order a voluntary muscle to move. The vehicle was simply an extension of their own bodies because it was tied into their neurological systems in ways that even today we are just beginning to utilize.

  So the creatures were able to survive extended periods living inside a high-energy wave by becoming the primary circuit in the control of the wave. They were protected by their suits, which enclosed them head to feet, but their suits enabled them to become one with the vehicle, literally part of the wave. In 1947 this was a technology so new to us that it was as frightening as it was frustrating. If we could only develop the power source necessary to generate a consistently well-defined magnetic wave around a vehicle, we could harness a technology which would have surpassed all forms of rocket and jet propulsion. It’s a process we’re still trying to master today, fifty years after the craft fell into our possession.

  I pushed myself through the night to complete the report for the general. At least I wanted him to see that our strategy held out the probability that even in a basic evaluation of the material we recovered, the seeds were there for specific products we could develop. I wanted to start the entire process by writing him a background report about the nature of the beings we’d autopsied and what we could understand of the technology from an analysis of their spacecraft.

  By the time I finished, it was already just before sunup, and I looked like hell. This was the day I was going to drop my report on the general’s desk, first thing. I’d snap right to attention in front of him and say, “Here’s that report you were waiting for, General,” confident it contained more than he ever thought it would because the subject was that new and complicated. But I wanted to be clean-shaven and in a clean, crisp shirt. That’s what I wanted. I didn’t even need any sleep because my optimism and confidence at that moment were more powerful than anything a few hours of sleep could give me. I knew I was onto something here, something that could change the world. Here in the basement of the Pentagon, lying close to dormancy for over a decade, were secrets my predecessors had just begun to discover before they were stopped. Maybe it had been the Korean War, maybe the CIA or other intelligence agencies had cast a pall over R&D’s operation, but those days were over now. I was at the Foreign Technology desk and the responsibility for this material was mine, just like General Twining had said it should be fourteen years ago.

  In those drawers I had found the puzzle pieces for a whole new age of technology. Things that were only twinkles in the minds of engineers and scientists were right here in front of me as hard, cold artifacts of an advanced culture. Craft that navigated by brain waves and floated on a wave of electromagnetic energy, creatures who look through devices that helped them turn night into day, and beams of light so narrow and focused you couldn’t see them until they bounced off an object far away.

  For years scientists had thought about what it would have been like to travel in space, especially since the Russians first put up their Sputnik. Plans for a military-operated moon base had been developed by the army in the 1950s under the leadership of Gen. Arthur Trudeau at R&D but were ultimately shelved because of the formation of NASA. Those plans had tried to confront the issues of space travel for prolonged periods of time and adjusting to a low-gravity state on the moon. But here, right in front of us, was the evidence of how an alien culture had adapted itself to long-range space travel, different gravities, and the exposure to energy particles and waves crashing into a spacecraft by the billions. All we had to do was marshal the vast array of resources in the military and industry at R&D’s disposal and harvest that technology. It was all laid out for us, if we knew how to use it. This was the beginning and I was right there on the cusp of it.

  So in the first few minutes of glimmering light just on the edge of the horizon, a promise of the day to come, I took off for home, for a shower, a shave, a pot of coffee, and the crispest new uniform I could find. I was driving east into the dawn of a brand-new age, my report right alongside me in my briefcase on the front seat. There would be other reports and the details of long-term complicated projects to confront me in the future, I knew, but this was the first, the foundation, the beam of light into a hidden past and an uncertain future. But it was a light, and that’s what was important. No time for sleep now. There was too much to do.

  CHAPTER 8

  The Project Gets Under Way

  “This is a helluva report, Phil,” General Trudeau said, looking up from the paper-clipped sheaf of typewritten sheets I’d handed him first thing that morning. I’d been waiting at my desk since before six when I got back to the Pentagon, taking looks outside the building every once in a while as the bright orange reflection of the rising sun that exploded in a distant window and looked as if it had caught fire. “What’d you do, stay up all night writing it?”

  “I put in some work after hours,” I said. “I don’t want to spend too much time in the nut file when people are supposed to be working.”

  The general laughed as he fingered through the paperwork, but you could see he was impressed. As much as I wanted to denigrate the Roswell file in front of him as a bunch of drawers full of stuff that people would put me away for, we both knew that it contained much of the future of our R&D.

  Military research and development agencies were under growing pressure from the Congress to put some success points on the scoreboard or get out of the rocket-launching business for good. Early failures to lift off the navy’s WAC Corporal and the army Redstone had made laughingstocks out of the American rocket program while the Soviets were showing off their success like basketball players on fancy layups right across the court. The army’s Project Horizon moon-base project was sitting in its own file cabinet gathering dust. And there was also a growing concern among the military that we’d be pushed into taking over the failed French mission in Indochina to keep the Vietcong, Pathet Lao, and Khmer Rouge from making the whole area Communist. It was a war we could not win but that would drain our resources from the real battlefront in Eastern Europe.

  So, even more than scoring some field goals, General Trudeau needed projects going into development to keep the civilian agencies from cutting us back and diverting our resources. Now my boss held my first report in his hands and knew that our strategic plan had some rational grounding. He pushed for a tactical plan.

  “We know what we want to do,” he said. “Now, how do we do it?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that, too, General,” I said. “And here’s how I’d like to start.”

  I explained that I wanted to compile a list of all our technical human resources, like the rocket scientists from Germany then still working at Alamogordo and White Sands. I’d met more than my share of our rocket-fuel and guidance specialists in the guided-missile program during my years at Red Canyon in command of the Nike battalion. But we were working with theoretical scientists as well, men with experience who could combine the cold precision of an engineer with the speculative vision of a free thinker. These were the people I wanted to assemb
le into a brain trust, people I could talk to about strange artifacts and devices that had no basis in earthly reality. They were the scientists who could tell me what the potential was in items like wafer-shaped plywood-thin pieces of silicon with mysterious silver etchings on them.

  “And once you have this brain trust,” General Trudeau asked, “then what?”

  “Match them up with technologies,” I said. I admitted that we were flying blind on much of the material that we had. We couldn’t go out to the general scientific and academic communities to ask them what we had because we would very quickly lose control of our own secrets. Besides, a lot of it had to do with weaponry, and there were very strict rules on what we could and could not disclose without the appropriate clearances. But our brain trust would be invaluable. And, with the proper orientation and security checks, they would keep our secrets, too, just as they had since the end of World War II.

  “Which of the scientists do you have in mind?” Trudeau asked, taking out the little black leather-covered notepad he kept in his inside pocket.

  “I was thinking of Robert Sarbacher,” I said. “Wernher von Braun, of course. Hans Kohler. Hermann Oberth. John von Neumann.”