“How much do they know about Roswell?” Trudeau wanted to know. If they’d been consulted on the Roswell material back in 1947, as I knew Wernher von Braun had been by General Twining, then we weren’t revealing any secrets. If they had never been informed about the crash, then we were going out on a limb by sharing information that was still classified above top secret. General Trudeau needed to know how dangerous it was to bring these scientists into the loop. But I assured him that all of them knew something about Roswell because of their connection with the Research and Development Board. During the Eisenhower administration information about the classified research and data collection projects into extraterrestrials was routinely filtered to the Office of Research and Development because the head of the Research and Development Board had been one of the original members of the group.
“I was at the White House when Sarbacher was General,” I told my boss. “So I can be pretty sure he was in the know. And Hermann Oberth,” I admitted to Trudeau. “He already told me that he believed that the objects we saw popping up on our radar screens at Red Canyon and then disappearing as if they were never there were probably the same kinds of extraterrestrial aircraft that we picked up at Roswell. So he knew, but I don’t know how.”
“Well, that’s good news, at least,” the general said. “I’d rather not be the one authorizing the release of classified information to anyone who didn’t know it beforehand. And I don’t want to put you in the position, Phil, of having to explain to any higher-ups why you decided to release top-secret information to people without clearances, even in the interest of national security.”
I appreciated that, but for our plan to work, we needed the technical and scientific expertise people like von Braun, Oberth, and Sarbacher could bring to any reverse-engineering and product-development strategies.
“How will you approach them?” Trudeau asked.
“We’ll have to begin by taking an inventory of all of the defense industry contracts we’re currently managing, General,” I said. “Line up the contracts and systems we’re developing with the materials in the nut file to see where they fit in. Then bring in the scientists to consult on making sure we know what we think we have, that is, if they can figure out what we have.”
“Let’s go through a potential product list first,” the general suggested. “Then see where our contracts line up and where the scientists can help. And you know what happens then,” Trudeau asked.
I wasn’t sure where he was going to take this.
“We’re sticking you back in civilian clothes and sending you on the road to visit our friends in these defense contractors.”
“I don’t even get to keep my battle ribbons,” I joked.
“I don’t want anyone to know,” General Trudeau explained, “that some lieutenant colonel on the CIA’s Most Wanted list is traveling to our biggest defense contractors with a mysterious briefcase full of nobody knows what. You might as well wear a sign,” he laughed. “We have to get to work on that list.”
That same afternoon I went back to my report on the EBE and his craft and began to list the riddles it contained and the opportunities for the discovery of product it presented to us. The entire event was like an enigma to us because every conventional requirement one would expect to have found at the crash site, in the craft, or even in the EBEs themselves was missing.
Where was the engine or the power supply for the craft? It had neither jet engines nor propellers. It had no rocket propulsion like the V2 missiles, nor did it carry any fuel. At Norton Air Force Base, where the craft eventually was hangared, engineers marveled at the thin amalgam of the most refined copper and purest silver they had ever seen that covered the ship’s underside. The metal was remarkable for its conductivity, as if the entire craft was an electrical circuit offering no resistance to the flow of current. Yet it was something our military engineers could not replicate. By the 1950s at Norton Air Force Base, at least two prototypes of the alien craft had been fabricated, but neither had the power source of the craft that had crashed. In its stead were crude attempts at nuclear fission generators, but they were ineffective and dangerous. Even the portable nuclear generators that would power the primitive Soviet and American satellites in the 1960s were insufficient for the needs of the replicated spacecraft. So the question remained, what powered the Roswell spacecraft?
I reviewed all of my discoveries in a checklist:
The crescent-shaped space vehicle also had no traditional navigational controls as we understood them. There were no control sticks, wheels, throttles, pedals, cables, flaps, or rudders. How did the creatures pilot this ship and how did they control the speed, accelerating from a near stationary hover above a given spot, like a helicopter, to speeds in excess of seven thousand miles per hour in a matter of seconds?
What protected the creatures from the tremendous g-forces they would have had to have pulled in any conventional aircraft? Our own pilots in World War II had to wear special devices as they pulled up out of dives that kept the oxygen from flowing out of their brains and causing them to black out. But we found nothing in the flight suits of the creatures that indicated that they faced the same problem. Yet their craft should have pulled ten times the g-forces our own pilots did, so we couldn’t figure out how they managed this.
No controls, no protection, no power supply, no fuel: these were the riddles I listed.
Alongside them I listed that:
The craft itself was an electrical circuit.
That the flight suits—“flight skins” is a better description—the creatures wore were made of a substance whose atomic structure was elongated, strengthened lengthwise, so as to provide a directional flow to any current applied to it.
• • •
The engineers who first discovered this were amazed at the pure conductivity of these skins, functionally like the skin of the craft itself, and their obvious ability to protect the wearer while at the same time vectoring some kind of electronic field. Where was the physical junction of the circuit between the pilot and the ship? Was it turned on and off somehow by the pilot himself through a switch we didn’t know about?
Alongside the riddle of the apparent absence of navigational controls I listed the sensorized headband that so intrigued the officers at Roswell’s Walker Field and fascinated me as well. If, as we all suspected, this device picked up the electronic signatures from the creatures’ oversized brains, what did it do with them? I believed—and our industrial product development from the 1960s through today as the brain-wave-control helmets finally came into service ultimately confirmed—that these headbands translated the brain’s electronic signals into system commands that controlled speed, direction, and elevation. Maybe the headbands had to be calibrated or tuned to each individual pilot, or maybe the pilots—since I believed they were genetically engineered beings biologically manufactured especially for flight or long-term exploration—had to be calibrated to the headband. Either way, the headbands were the interface between the pilot and the ship. But that still didn’t resolve the question of the lack of cables, gears, or wires.
Maybe the answer lay not in the lack of structural controls but in the way the suit, the headband, the creatures’ brains, and the entire craft worked together. In other words, when I looked at the possible function of the entire system, the synchronicity between the brain interface in the headband, the pure conductivity of the spacecraft, and the elongated structure of the space skins, which also acted like a circuit, I could see how directional instructions could have been translated by the headbands into some form of current flowing through the skins and into the series of raised deck panels where there were indentations for the creatures’ hands. The indentations on these panels, as the Roswell field reports described them, looked like the handprints pressed into the concrete at the old Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood. Were the directional commands a series of electronic instructions transmitted directly from the creatures’ brains along their bodies and th
rough the panels into the ship itself as if the ship were only an extension of the creature’s body? For that to have been the case, something was still missing. The engine.
Again, I settled on the idea of function over structure. The debris and the spacecraft indicated that an engine didn’t somehow fall out of the craft when it crashed. A conventional engine was never there in the first place. What we found was that the craft seemed to have had the ability to store as well as conduct a vast amount of current. What if the craft itself were the engine, imparted with a steady current from another source that it stored as if it were a giant capacitor? This would be like charging the battery in an electric car and running it until the battery was drained. Sound far-fetched? It’s not much different from filling up a car with gas at the pump and driving until the tank’s dry, or fueling a plane and making sure you land before the fuel’s gone. I suspected the Roswell craft was simply a capacitor that stored current that was controlled or vectored by the pilot and was able to be recharged in some way or could recharge itself with some form of built-in generator.
That would have explained the power supply, I noted alongside the riddle of the missing engine, but what was the means of propulsion and direction? If there was a force that functioned the same way thrust does, it wasn’t immediately obvious how it was created and vectored. As early as September 1947, scientists who had gone to the Air Materiel Command at Wright Field to see the debris were speculating that the electronic potential of the Roswell craft reminded them of the German and British antigravity experiments of the 1920s and 1930s. General Twining was reported to have said more than once that the name of the Serbian electrical engineer and inventor of alternating current, Nikola Tesla, kept bubbling up in the conversation because the scientists examining the damaged craft described the way it must have converted an electromagnetic field into an antigravity field. And, of course, the craft itself reminded them of the German experimental fighter aircraft that made their appearance near the end of the war but that had been in development ever since the 1930s.
Tesla and a number of other European scientists had been pioneers in the conversion of circumscribed small-area antigravity fields out of electromagnetic fields. However, the effort to develop true antigravity aircraft never came to fruition among conventional aircraft manufacturers because gasoline, jet, and rocket engines provided a perfectly good weapons technology. But the theory of electromagnetic antigravity propulsion was not unknown even if it was not well understood and, without a power source like a small portable nuclear fission generator, not at all feasible. But, what if the flying craft already carried enough electric potential and storage capacity to retain its power, just like a very advanced flying battery? Then it might have all the power it needed to propagate and vector a wave directionally by shifting its magnetic poles. If the magnetic field theory experiments carried out by engineers and electrical energy pioneers Paul Biefeld and Townsend Brown in the 1920s at the California Institute for Advanced Studies were accurately reported—and the U.S. military as well as scientific record keepers at Hoover’s young Bureau of Investigation kept very close tabs on what these engineers were doing—then the technological theory for antigravity flight existed before World War II.
In fact, prototypes for vertical takeoff and landing disk-shaped aircraft had been on the drawing boards at the California Institute since before the war. It was just that in the United States nobody paid them much attention. The Germans did develop and had flown flying disks, or so the intelligence reports read, even though they had no impact on the outcome of the war other than stimulating a race between the United States and the USSR to gather as much of the German technology as possible. Thus, even though engineers had attempted to build vertical takeoff and flying-wing aircraft before and had succeeded, the Roswell spacecraft, because it was so truly functional and outflew anything we had—as well as traveled in space—represented a practical technological challenge to the scientists visiting the Air Materiel Command. We knew what the EBEs did, we just couldn’t duplicate how. My reports for Army R&D were analyses of the types of technology that we had to develop to either challenge this spacecraft militarily with a credible defense or build one ourselves.
In my notes to General Trudeau, I reviewed for him all the technological implications that I believed were relevant in any discussion about what could be harvested from the Roswell craft. I also wrote up what I understood about the magnetic field technology and how unconventional designers and engineers had drafted prototypes for these “antigravs” earlier in the century. All of this pointed in one direction, I suggested: that we now had a craft and could farm out to industry the components that comprised this electromagnetic antigravity drive and brain-wave-directed navigational controls. We had to dole them out piecemeal once we broke them down into developable units, each of which could have its own engineering track. For that we’d need the advice of the scientists who would eventually comprise our brain trust, individuals we could rely on and whom we could talk to about the Roswell debris. These were scientists who routinely worked with our prime defense contractors and could tell us whom to approach in their R&D divisions for secure and private consultations.
I was hoping that the evaluation of the kinds of things we were able to learn from the EBE and his craft that I was preparing for General Trudeau would lead me toward the solution of some of the physiological problems we knew our astronauts would encounter in spaceflight. In the early 1960s, astronauts from both the United States and the USSR had made their first orbital flights and had experienced more than a few negative physical symptoms from the weightless environment during the mission. Despite our official claims that humans could travel safely in space, our doctors knew that even short periods of weightlessness were extremely disorienting to some of our astronauts, and the longer the flight, the more uncomfortable the symptoms could become. We were worried about loss of physical strength, reduced muscle capability in the heart and diaphragm, reduction of lung capacity, and loss of tensile strength in the bones.
Yet, scattered across the desert floor outside of Roswell were creatures who seemed completely adapted to spaceflight. Just to be able to examine these entities was an enormous opportunity, but I knew we had the ability to harvest what we could observe about aliens. So, again, alongside the speculations I had made about the EBEs and their craft I listed what I thought were the major possibilities of developing product to enable us to travel in space for extended periods of time.
Renewable oxygen and food supplies were obvious directions to take, and by the 1960s, NASA engineers were already designing ways to recharge the atmosphere inside a capsule and provide for food storage. We helped. It was Army R&D and our plan for developing an irradiation process for food that even today provides the basis for nonrefrigerated food supplies on board spacecraft. But beyond that were real issues of health and survival. Merely getting human beings into earth orbit or even launching them into lunar orbit and bringing them back safely were straightforward engineering projects. But the readaptation of the human body to earth gravity after an extended period of weightlessness or reduced gravity was a far more intractable problem to solve. The physiology of the EBEs provided an important clue. Besides the development of supertenacity fibers that would protect the astronauts and the skin of the spacecraft and the development of a food-preservation process that would neutralize all the bacteria that cause spoilage, we needed to examine the ways we trained our astronauts physically so that they would be more adaptable to periods of weightlessness and spatial disorientation. At the same time we needed to develop nutritional packages that would not place undue stress on a digestive system that needed to compensate for deprivation of gravity.
Since there were no food-preparation facilities on board the spacecraft, we didn’t know how they stored or processed food or even what they ate, if anything at all. However, my concern over a process to preserve food for space travel was prompted by the obvious challenge posed by the spacecraft itse
lf. If we were going to travel in space, and it was clear from what the army found at Roswell that at least one culture had developed the technology to do so, then R&D had to find a way to feed our pilots in space. Therefore, we needed to develop a process to preserve food for space missions that didn’t require refrigeration facilities and the consumption of excessive amounts of energy.
The problem of long-term space travel still hasn’t been solved, in part because we continue to rely upon conventional means of propulsion that subject our astronauts to great periods of physical stress, especially during takeoff. We also have no magic way for astronauts to readjust to earth gravity after a long ride in an orbiting space station like the Russian Mir or our own planned station early in the next century. Manned trips to Mars, also on the drawing boards for early in the twenty-first century, will also be a problem because they will last for months and subject our astronauts to a great deal of stress.
I suggested to General Trudeau in my report that although this wasn’t explicitly an Army R&D mission, NASA should begin the preparation of astronaut candidates from the time they’re still in school. “If we train our astronauts from the time they’re children the same way we do with potential athletes at sports camps and provide the most promising candidates with flight training and military or government scholarships to ROTC colleges, we will create a cadre of officers physically adaptable and scholastically trained to enter the next generation of space travel,” I wrote. I know that General Trudeau passed this recommendation along because NASA itself opened a space-training camp for future astronauts within a few years after my retirement from the service.
Beyond the issues concerning the training potential of astronauts for conventionally powered spaceflight, the examination of the EBE bodies and the ship’s possible propulsion system raised other intriguing questions. What if, in addition to having been bioengineered for interstellar travel, the EBE’s weren’t subjected to the kinds of forces human pilots would routinely face? If the EBEs utilized a wave-propagation technology as an antigravity drive and navigation system, then they traveled inside some form of adjustable electromagnetic wave. I suggested to General Trudeau that we should study the potential physiological effects on humans of long-term exposure to the kinds of energy spillage generated by the propagation of an electromagnetic field. Biologists needed to determine how feasible such a form of space travel would be based upon whether energy radiation would disrupt the cellular activity of the human body. Perhaps the external one-piece skins worn by the EBEs afforded them protection against the effects of being enclosed in a portable electromagnetic field.
The Day After Roswell Page 14
