The Day After Roswell

by William J. Birnes

  We knew that the Soviets would very quickly find out about the program, but that wasn’t such a bad thing. We reasoned that there was no way, given the CIA’s penetration by the KGB, to keep the program completely covert, but if the Soviets knew we were able to watch them it might keep them honest. And Khrushchev wouldn’t have to worry about our deliberately violating his airspace, so he was off the hook at the Kremlin and thankful for it. All we had to do was keep it out of the public arena and we’d be home free. The whole program rested on our being able to slip what we now called “Corona” into the existing Discoverer program without a whisper in the air, the Soviets would go along without a protest, and we would get our surveillance photos.

  We added an additional incentive for the Soviets to discourage them from getting their friends in the CIA to leak the story to friendly journalists and blowing the cover on the whole operation. We encouraged them to participate with us in the hidden agenda of Corona: surveillance of potential alien crash landings. Army Intelligence, upon Eisenhower’s and the NSC’s express approval, let it be known to their counterparts in the Soviet military that any aerial intelligence we developed as a result of Corona that revealed the presence of aliens on Soviet territory would be shared with the military. What they did with the information, we said, we really didn’t care. But the military was more than grateful. The professional military didn’t trust the commissars in the Communist Party any more than we did and hated being under their collective thumb. Thus, in a perverse way, although we were tipping off the Russian military about alien activity in their territory, we really weren’t sharing information with the Communists because of the deep division within the Soviet government between the Communist Party and the military.

  Our incentive worked and the KGB encouraged the CIA—even I was surprised at how effectively they worked together—not to leak the story. Now it was up to the air force and the skunk-works division at Lockheed to build the Corona surveillance satellite out of the public arena and load the vehicle into the Discoverer rocket right under the noses of the American press. It was one of the trickiest operations of the Cold War because the Russians knew what we were doing, NASA was making the entire project happen, but the American press, hungry for even the smallest tidbit of spaceflight information, had to be kept completely in the dark. If necessary, we had to lie to them, provide them with cover stories, completely trick them into thinking that all the American people had to think about was the little chimp that was blasted into orbit wearing his custom-sized space helmet. And we didn’t have much time to do it because we knew the Soviets were trying to embarrass Ike at the end of his term by bringing down one of our U2 planes with a live pilot inside. We were now in a race against the Soviets to replace the U2 with the Corona, even though the Soviets understood and accepted what we were doing every step of the way. It was one of the ironies of the Cold War.

  The engineers at Lockheed designed the satellite camera package to fit neatly into the payload cone of the Discoverer capsule. They worked under brutal time constraints because President Eisenhower was putting pressure on the National Security Council to cut off the U2 overflights completely. The old general knew it was just a matter of time before the Soviets would capture a living American pilot, extract his confession, and march him in front of the television cameras to the humiliation of the United States. Eisenhower was a man of his word who disliked politicians because they always sought the expedient solution, not the most honorable one. Eisenhower disliked expedience for expediency’s sake and always preferred to take the most directly honest path whenever he could. But, as Khrushchev complained about the U2 flights, Ike always denied we were sending them. It was such an obvious lie that Khrushchev kept goading Eisenhower about exposing himself that way. “We will shoot one of them down, you’ll see,” he kept telling Eisenhower whenever he complained. “Then what will you say?”

  But President Eisenhower denied the existence of the U2, put down the telephone, and turned on his own staff, furious that they had put him into such an untenable situation. “Stop the flights,” he ordered. But the CIA kept pushing for one more flight. It was serving a purpose, they argued. They were learning about the Russian air defense system at the same time they were surveilling possible areas of alien spacecraft activity. With or without the Russians’ knowledge, the U2s denied the extraterrestrials a complete camouflage because of our high-resolution aerial surveillance. I don’t know whether we actually found any evidence of an alien landing on Russian territory from our U2 surveillance, but the extraterrestrials certainly could see that we were able to surveil the Soviet Union, and their knowledge of our capability served as a deterrent to roaming the vast areas of the Soviet Union with impunity.

  The CIA claimed the U2s were so important to our national security that they were even ready to sacrifice one of their own pilots. However, I also believe that the KGB moles who had penetrated them wanted Eisenhower to be embarrassed before the entire world. And when Francis Gary Powers took off in May 1960, they had their chance.

  There is still a great deal of doubt about the shootdown of Powers’s U2. His mission was to fly over the most sensitive Soviet missile installations and make himself a target. We believed the Russian SAMs couldn’t reach his altitude. But, whether Powers fell asleep at the stick because of oxygen deprivation or whether his CIA controllers forced him to a lower altitude to get better photos or even to make himself a more provocative target, we’ll never know. I believe that Powers was probably startled out of a low-oxygen lethargy by the explosion of a SAM close enough to force him to lose control. His plane was not hit by the missile. The U2 was the type of aircraft that was very difficult to fly. Powers probably pulled into a stall and was unable to bring it back. As his plane spun toward the ground and Powers became too disoriented to regain control, he pulled on the lever next to his seat, blew the canopy off, and ejected.

  Powers was captured alive, paraded before cameras, and forced to confess that he was spying on the Soviet Union. Khrushchev had his excuse to cancel a summit meeting with Eisenhower and put on one of the great performances of his career in front of the Supreme Soviet. Eisenhower, as he had most feared, was publicly humiliated and forced to admit to Khrushchev that he had sent the U2s over the Soviet Union. He promised Khrushchev that the U2 flights would end, eliminating a valuable surveillance tool and potentially blinding us not only to what the Soviet Union was doing but potentially to what the extraterrestrials were doing in Asia as well. It was a terrible experience for the old man, who believed he had been compromised by his own administration.

  All the while during the final months of preparations before Gary Powers’s U2 flight, NASA was completing the engineering details to insert the Corona payload into the Discoverer payload. If all went well, the first launch of Corona would give the National Security Council the results they wanted and the U2 program would come to an end because it had been made obsolete by Corona. Then Gary Powers was shot down and the U2 program came to an end because Eisenhower terminated it. We were blind. Then Discoverer was launched from Cape Canaveral and those of us in the army and air force missile programs who were aware of Corona and what was at stake in the mission held our collective breaths. If it worked, we had eyes. If it failed, our best surveillance opportunity would have failed.

  You can imagine the jubilation at the Pentagon when the Corona payload was recovered and we developed the first photos. They were better than what we had gotten from the U2, and the Corona was completely invisible to the Soviets. Khrushchev hid the information from his own Supreme Soviet, and Eisenhower certainly didn’t make a public statement to the American people. We were back in the photo-intelligence business, and in addition to keeping tabs on Soviet missile developments, we had a way to track any possible EBE attempt to set up a base in the remotest parts of Asia, Africa, or South America. We were gaining parity with the EBEs, a small victory, but a victory nevertheless.

  What satisfied me the most about Project Corona, I
thought as I reached the outskirts of Washington on my way back from Fort Belvoir, was that it was elegant as well as successful. Just like the ease with which we had slipped the Roswell night visor into the development and engineering stream at Fort Belvoir, so had we slipped the Corona photo-surveillance payload directly into the ongoing Discoverer program, reverse-engineering Discoverer to make the payload fit. No one realized what we had accomplished or how effectively the military utilized traditional programs as a cover for their own secret weapons-development systems.

  At the same time, we knew we were gaining on the aliens. With each successful start of a new project, some based on the Roswell technology, others initiated specifically to counter the alien capabilities we had discovered at Roswell, we believed we were advancing our game piece to the next square. We believed that no matter how hostile the aliens’ intentions were, they didn’t have the raw power to launch a global war against us. They would study us, infiltrate us, wear us down until we might not be able to resist them, but they had neither the intention nor the capability, we believed, of destroying the planet so as to take it for themselves. In that, we held the upper hand.

  But what we needed was a real outpost in a location that would enable us to establish a strategic advantage, a base to strike at them far enough away so that we wouldn’t create a panic on Earth. We needed a base on the moon. It was something the army had dreamed about from the very first months after our encounters with the aliens outside of Roswell and something we had tried to fund without the public’s knowledge. It was an ambitious project that had bounced around from skeptic to skeptic inside the military for over a year before it landed in front of me. And when I took over the Foreign Technology desk, it was a project we almost had.

  CHAPTER 11

  Project Moon Base

  “I envision expeditious development of the proposal to establish a lunar outpost to be of critical importance to the U.S. Army of the future. This evaluation is apparently shared by the Chief of Staff in view of his expeditious approval and enthusiastic endorsement of initiation of the study,” General Trudeau wrote to the chief of ordnance in March 1959, in support of the army’s “Project HORIZON,” a strategic plan for deploying a military outpost on the surface of the moon. It was the army’s most ambitious response to the threat from extraterrestrials and, by the time I arrived at the Pentagon, it was one of the projects that General Trudeau had handed off to me to get moving.

  “The boys at NASA are taking over the whole rocket-launching business, Phil,” he said. “And the army’s not even getting the scraps left on the table.”

  I had just left the White House when the National Aeronautics and Space Act was passed in 1958, and I knew what that had portended. It transferred the responsibility of space from the military services to a civilian-run agency that was supposed to fulfill the U.S. promises to other countries for the demilitarization of space. It was a laudable goal, anyone would argue: demilitarize space so that countries could explore and experiment without the risk of losing their space vehicles or satellites to hostile activities. For the United States and the Russians the agreement meant that our respective astronauts and cosmonauts wouldn’t make war on each other. Good idea. But someone forgot to tell it to the extraterrestrials, who had been systematically violating our planet’s airspace for decades, if not centuries, and had already set up a base of operations on the moon.

  For General Trudeau and much of the U.S. military command, the Soviets’ ability to put high-payload vehicles and cosmonauts into orbit with relative ease was a frightening prospect. Unless the United States challenged Soviet technology with our own ongoing launch program and expanded our satellite surveillance, the army believed it would cede an all-important strategic advantage to the Soviet Union. By 1960, we were reaching a critical juncture. Because of the development window and the time it took to get projects through development, programs started too late in the 1960s would be hopelessly obsolete by 1970, when the Soviets were expected to have established a presence in space.

  As in the U2 program, we had another agenda that concerned us more than just the Soviets’ ability to threaten us with a nuclear-missile capability from space. We were also very much aware of the ability of a dominant military power on Earth to establish its own version of a treaty with extraterrestrials. We had already seen how Stalin negotiated a separate nonaggression pact with Hitler, allowing the Germans to stabilize its Eastern front and invade Western Europe. We didn’t want to see Khrushchev gain so much unchallenged power in space that the extraterrestrials would readily agree to some kind of accommodation with him guaranteeing both of them a degree of freedom to dominate the political affairs of our planet. This may seem paranoid now, in the 1990s, but in the late 1950s this was exactly the thinking of the military intelligence community.

  General Trudeau’s concerns were the concerns of anybody who knew the truth about an alien presence around our planet and their abilities to drop on top of us from out of nowhere just like they had done in Roswell, in Washington, D.C., in 1952, and in countless other places around the world. And we didn’t know if any one of these sightings could turn into a full-fledged landing in force or if an invasion hadn’t already begun. If they could turn the Soviet government into a client state with a proxy army, there might be no checking their ability to exercise their will to colonize our planet, appropriate our natural resources, or, if the cattle mutilations and stories of abductions were true, conduct with complete impunity an organized experimentation or testing program on the life-forms of this planet. In the absence of any information to disprove our fears, it was the military’s obligation to project the worst possible scenario. That’s why the army pushed for Project HORIZON. We had to have a plan.

  The Horizon documents were straightforward in expressing their concerns: We needed to put a fully armed military outpost on the moon first because if the Soviets achieved this objective before we did, we would be in the position of having to storm a hill or secure a military position. We would rather be the defenders of a strongly fortified enclave than the attackers. Our outpost had to be strong enough to withstand an assault and have enough personnel to conduct scientific experiments and continual surveillance of the earth and its airspace.

  Initially, General Trudeau argued, the outpost must be of sufficient size and contain sufficient equipment to permit the survival and moderate constructive activity of from ten to twenty personnel at a minimum. It must allow for expansion of the permanent facilities, resupply, and rotation of personnel to guarantee the maximum amount of time for a sustained occupancy. The general not only wanted the outpost to establish a beachhead on the moon, he wanted it to be permanent and able to sustain itself for long periods without support from the earth. Therefore, location and design were critical and required, in the army’s view, a triangulation station of moon-to-Earth baseline space surveillance system that facilitated: (1) communication with and optimum observation of the earth, (2) routine travel between the moon and the earth, (3) the best possible exploration capability not only of the immediate area of the lunar surface but long-range exploration expeditions and, most importantly from the army’s perspective, (4) the military defense of the moon base. The army’s primary objective was to establish the first permanent manned installation on the moon and nothing less. The military potential of the moon was paramount, but the mission allowed for an ongoing investigation of the commercial and scientific potentials of the outpost as well.

  The army wanted to make Horizon conform to existing national policy on space exploration, even insofar as the demilitarization of space was concerned. But it was tough because all of us in the military services who had come in contact with the Roswell file believed that we were already under some form of attack. Demilitarizing space only meant playing into the hands of a culture that had displayed a hostile intent toward us. But we also realized that overtly establishing a military presence in space would encourage the Soviets to match us step for step and result in a
n arms race in outer space that would exacerbate Cold War tensions. Armaments in space might be more difficult to control, and the chance of an accidental military exchange could have easily precipitated a crisis on Earth. Thus, the whole problem of what to do about establishing a military presence in space was a conundrum. Horizon was the army’s attempt to accomplish its military objectives within the context of the government’s demilitarization policy.

  The army faced another obstacle in its plans from the members of the Roswell working group who were still establishing and enforcing policy at levels above top secret. The working group correctly saw that any independent military expedition into space, especially for the purpose of establishing an outpost on the moon, had a high probability of encountering extraterrestrials. In this encounter, there was no guarantee that a military exchange would not ensue or, at the very least, a military report would be filed. Even if these reports were kept top secret, given the military bureaucracy and the presence of legislative oversight it was highly unlikely that the press would not learn about military encounters with aliens. Thus, the basic premise of the working group and its entire mission, the camouflage of our discovery of alien life-forms visiting and probably threatening Earth, would be undermined and years of successful operations might easily be brought to an unsatisfactory end. No, the working group would rather have the exploration of space in the hands of a civilian agency whose bureaucracy could be more easily controlled and whose personnel would be handpicked, at least at the outset, by the members of the working group.