The Day After Roswell

by William J. Birnes

  In its plan for a separate administration and management structure within the structure of the army, Project Horizon was designed to be the largest research, development, and deployment operation in the army’s history. Larger than the Manhattan Project, Horizon could easily have become a completely separate unit within the army itself. As such, Horizon was perceived as an immediate threat to the other branches of the military as well as to the civilian space agencies. The navy had its own pet plan for establishing undersea bases that would harvest the commercial and scientific opportunities at the bottom of the oceans while at the same time, and more importantly, establishing an antisubmarine defense that would counter the threat from Soviet nuclear submarines. We suspected that the navy plans, like our own plans for a moon base, also gave the navy the capability of carrying out surveillance tracking of unidentified undersea objects if, in fact, that’s what the EBEs were sending to Earth.

  Despite the civilian opposition to the army’s plan, General Trudeau wrote that the army had no choice but to advocate its plans for a moon base. “The United States intelligence community agrees that the Soviet Union may accomplish a manned lunar landing at any time after 1965.” This, he said, would establish a Soviet precedent for claiming the lunar surface as Soviet territory which, even in and of itself, could precipitate the next war if the United States also tried to establish a presence there. Being second was no option. “As the Congress has noted,” General Trudeau continued, “we are caught in a stream in which we have no choice but to proceed.”

  However, as hard as we tried to get Project Horizon into full funding and development, we were stopped. The nation’s space program had become the property of the civilian space agency, and NASA had its own agenda and its own schedule for space exploration. We were successful in discrete projects like Corona, but it would not relinquish to the army the control necessary to establish a moon base under the terms of a Project Horizon.

  I became General Trudeau’s point man for the project in Washington. I was able to lobby for it, and Horizon also became an effective cover for all of the technological development I was overseeing out of the Roswell file. No one knew just how much of the Roswell technology would wind up getting into development because of the military issues Horizon implicitly proposed about the presence of extraterrestrials and their hostile intentions. After his first full year in office, President Kennedy also saw the value in Project Horizon even though he was in no position to dismantle NASA or order NASA to cede control to the army for the development of a base on the moon.

  But I think we eventually made our point to the President because he ultimately saw the value in a moon base. Shortly after I testified before the Senate in a closed, top-secret session about how the KGB had penetrated the CIA and was actually dictating some of our intelligence estimates since before the Korean War, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, who read that secret testimony, asked me to come over to the Justice Department for a visit.

  We came to a meeting of the minds that day. I know that I convinced him that the official intelligence the President was receiving through his agencies was not only faulty, it was deliberately flawed. Robert Kennedy began to see that those of us over at the Pentagon were not just a bunch of old soldiers looking for a war. He saw that we really did see a threat and that the United States was truly compromised by Soviet penetration of our most secret agencies. We didn’t talk about Roswell or any aliens. I never told him about extraterrestrials, but I was able to convince him that if the Soviets got to the moon before we did, victory in the Cold War might just belong to them by the end of this decade. Bobby Kennedy suspected that there was another agenda to the army’s desire to deploy a lunar outpost for military as well as for scientific and commercial purposes and, without ever acknowledging that agenda, promised that he would talk about it with the President.

  I can only tell you that it was a mark of achievement for me personally when President John Kennedy announced to the nation shortly after my meeting with Bobby at the Justice Department that it was one of his goals that the United States put a manned expedition on the moon before the end of the 1960s. He got it! Maybe he couldn’t let the army have another Manhattan Project. That was another era and another war. But Jack Kennedy did understand, I believe, the real consequences of the Cold War and what might have happened if the Russians had put a manned lander on the moon before we did.

  The way history turned out, it was our lunar expeditions, one after the other throughout the 1960s, that not only caught the world’s attention but showed all our enemies that the United States was determined to stake out its territory and defend the moon. Nobody was looking for an out-and-out war, especially the EBEs who tried to scare us away from the moon and their own base there more times than even I know. They buzzed our ships, interfered with our communications, and sought to threaten us by their physical presence. But we continued and persevered. Ultimately, we reached the moon and sent enough manned expeditions to explore the lunar surface that they effectively challenged the EBEs for control over our own skies and sphere of space, the very sphere General Trudeau was talking about in the Project Horizon memoranda ten years earlier. And although the Horizon proposal projected a lunar landing by 1967, it presupposed that the army would begin creating the bureaucracy to manage the effort and build the hardware as early as 1959. Because of NASA and civilian management of space exploration, the United States took longer to reach the moon than we had originally assumed and, of course, never did build the permanent base we had planned for in the original Horizon proposal.

  I knew, even though I was no longer in the army in 1969, that our success at lunar exploration had demonstrated that we were exercising control and that the EBEs would not have free rein over our skies. It also demonstrated that if there were any deals to be made, any proxy relationships to establish, the Soviets were not the ones to deal with. By the beginning of the 1970s, as the Apollo lunar landings continued, it was clear that the tide had turned and we had gained some of the advantage in dealing with the EBEs that we were seeking way back in the 1950s.

  But for me, back in 1961, staring at the mammoth Project Horizon report on my desk and realizing that the entire civilian science establishment was mobilizing against this endeavor, I knew that small victories would have to suffice until the big ones could be won. And I took out the printed silicon wafers we’d pulled from the Roswell spacecraft wreckage and told myself that these would comprise the next project I would get into development. I barely knew what they were, but, if the scientists at White Sands Proving Grounds were right about what they portended, this was a victory we would relish long after the political battles over Project Horizon were over.

  CHAPTER 12

  The Integrated Circuit Chip:

  From the Roswell Crash Site to Silicon Valley

  With the night-vision image intensifier project under way at Fort Belvoir and the Project Horizon team trying to swim upstream against the tide of civilian management of the U.S. space program, I turned my attention to the next of the Roswell crash fragments that looked especially intriguing: the charred semiconductor wafers that had broken off some larger device. I hadn’t made these my priorities at first, not knowing what they really were, until General Trudeau asked me to take a closer look.

  “Talk to some of the rocket scientists down at Alamogordo about these things, Phil,” he said. “I think they’ll know what we should do with them.”

  I knew that in the days immediately following the crash, General Twining had met with the Alamogordo group of the Air Materiel Command and had described some of the debris to them. But I didn’t know how detailed his descriptions were or whether they even knew about the wafers we had in our file.

  “I want to talk to some of the scientists up here, too,” I said. “Especially, I want to see some of the engineers from the defense contractors. Maybe they can figure out what the engineering process is for these things.”

  “Go over to Bell Labs, Phil,” General Trud
eau also suggested. “The transistor came out of their shop and these things look a lot like transistorized circuits.”

  I’d heard that General Twining had worked very closely with both Bell Labs and Motorola on communications research during the war, afterwards at the Alamogordo test site for V2 missile launches, and after the Roswell crash. Whether he had brought them any material from the crash or showed them the tiny silicon chips was a matter of pure speculation. I only know that the entire field of circuit miniaturization took a giant leap in 1947 with the invention of the transistor and the first solid-state components. By the late 1950s, transistors had replaced the vacuum tube in radios and had turned the wall-sized wooden box of the 1940s into the portable plastic radio you could hear blaring away at the shore on a hot July Sunday. The electronics industry had taken a major technological jump in less than ten years, and I had to wonder privately whether any Roswell material had gotten out that I didn’t know about prior to my taking over Foreign Technology in 1961.

  I didn’t realize it at first when I showed those silicon wafers to General Trudeau, but I was to become very quickly and intimately involved with the burgeoning computer industry and a very small, completely invisible, cog in an assembly-line process that fifteen years later would result in the first microcomputer systems and the personal computer revolution.

  Over the course of the years since I joined the army in 1942, my career took me through the stages of vacuum-tube-based devices, like our radios and radars in World War II, to component chassis. These were large circuitry units that, if they went down, could be changed in sections, smaller sections, and finally to tiny transistors and transistorized electronic components. The first army computers I saw were room-sized, clanking vacuum-tube monsters that were always breaking down and, by today’s standards, took an eternity to calculate even the simplest of answers. They were simply oil-filled data pots. But they amazed those of us who had never seen computers work before.

  At Red Canyon and in Germany, the tracking and targeting radars we used were controlled by new transistorized chassis computers that were compact enough to fit onto a truck and travel with the battalion. So when I opened up my nut file and saw the charred matte gray quarter-sized, cracker-shaped silicon wafers with the gridlines etched onto them like tiny printed lines on the cover of a matchbook, I could make an educated guess about their function even though I’d never seen anything of the like before. I knew, however, that our rocket scientists and the university researchers who worked with the development laboratories at Bell, Motorola, and IBM would more than understand the primary function of these chips and figure out what we needed to do to make some of our own.

  But first I called Professor Hermann Oberth for basic background on what, if any, development might have taken place after the Roswell crash. Dr. Oberth knew the Alamogordo scientists and probably received secondhand the substance of the conversations General Twining had with his Alamogordo group in the hours after the retrieval of the vehicle. And if General Twining described some of the debris, did he describe these little silicon chips? And if he did, in those months when the ENIAC—the first working computer—was just cranking up at the Aberdeen Ordnance Testing Grounds in Maryland, what did the scientists make of those chips?

  “They saw these at the Walker Field hangar,” Dr. Oberth told me. “All of them at Alamogordo flew over to Roswell with General Twining to oversee the shipment to Wright Field.”

  Oberth described what happened that day after the crash when a team of AMC rocket scientists pored over the bits and pieces of debris from the site. Some of the debris was packed for flight on B29s. Other material, especially the crates that wound up at Fort Riley, were loaded onto deuce-and-a-halfs for the drive. Dr. Oberth said that years later, von Braun had told him how those scientists who literally had to stand in line to have their equations processed by the experimental computer in Aberdeen Maryland were in awe of the microscopic circuitry etched into the charred wafer chips that had spilled out of the craft.

  Von Braun had asked General Twining whether anyone at Bell Labs was going to be contacted about this find. Twining seemed surprised at first, but when von Braun told him about the experiments on solid-state components—material whose electrons don’t need to be excited by heat in order to conduct current—Twining became intrigued. What if these chips were components of a very advanced solid-state circuitry? von Braun asked him. What if one of the reasons the army could find no electronic wiring on the craft were the layers of these wafers that ran throughout the ship? These circuit chips could be the nervous system of the craft, carrying signals and transmitting commands just like the nervous system in a human body.

  General Twining’s only experience had been with the heavily insulated vacuum-tube devices from World War II, where the multistrand wires were covered with cloth. He’d never seen metallic printed chips like these before. How did they work? he’d asked von Braun.

  The German scientist wasn’t sure, although he guessed they worked on the same principle as the transistors that laboratories were trying to develop to the point where they could be manufactured commercially. It would completely transform the electronics industry, von Braun explained to General Twining, nothing short of a revolution. The Germans had been desperately trying to develop circuitry of this sort during the war, but Hitler, convinced the war would be over by 1941, told the German computer researchers that the Wehrmacht had no need for computers that had a development timetable greater than one year. They’d all be celebrating victory in Berlin before the end of the year.

  But the research into solid-state components that the Germans had been doing and the early work at Bell Labs was nothing compared to the marvel that Twining had shown von Braun and the other rocket scientists in New Mexico. Under the magnifying glass, the group thought they saw not just a single solid-state switch but a whole system of switches integrated into each other and comprising what looked like an entire circuit or system of circuits. They couldn’t be sure because no one had ever seen anything even remotely like this before. But it showed them an image of what the future of electronics could be if a way could be found to manufacture this kind of circuit on Earth. Suddenly, the huge guidance-control systems necessary to control the flight of a rocket, which, in 1947, were too big to be squeezed into the fuselage of the rocket, could be miniaturized so that the rocket could have its own automatic guidance system. If we could duplicate what the EBEs had, we, too, would have the ability to explore space. In effect, the reverse-engineering of solid-state integrated circuitry began in the weeks and months after the crash even though William Shockley at Bell Labs was already working on a version of his transistor as early as 1946.

  In the summer of 1947, the scientists at Alamogordo were only aware of the solid-state circuit research under way at Bell Labs and Motorola. So they pointed Nathan Twining to research scientists at both companies and agreed to help him conduct the very early briefings into the nature of the Roswell find. The army, very covertly, turned some of the components over to research engineers for an inspection, and by the early 1950s the transistor had been invented and transistorized circuits were now turning up in consumer products as well as in military electronics systems. The era of the vacuum tube, the single piece of eighty-year-old technology upon which an entire generation of communications devices including television and digital computers was built, was now coming to a close with the discovery in the desert of an entirely new technology.

  The radio vacuum tube was a legacy of nineteenth-century experimentation with electric current. Like many historic scientific discoveries, the theory behind the vacuum tube was uncovered almost by chance, and nobody really knew what it was or cared much about it until years later. The radio vacuum tube probably reached its greatest utility from the 1930s through the 1950s, until the technology we discovered at Roswell made it all but obsolete. The principle behind the radio vacuum tube, first discovered by Thomas Edison in the 1880s while he was experimenting with different com
ponents for his incandescent lightbulb, was that current, which typically flowed in either direction across a conductive material such as a wire, could be made to flow in only one direction when passed through a vacuum. This directed flow of current, called the “Edison effect,” is the scientific principle behind the illumination of the filament material inside the vacuum of the incandescent lightbulb, a technology that has remained remarkably the same for over a hundred years.

  But the lightbulb technology that Edison discovered back in the 1880s, then put aside only to experiment with it again in the early twentieth century, also had another equally important function. Because the flow of electrons across the single filament wire went in only one direction, the vacuum tube was also a type of automatic switch. Excite the flow of electrons across the wire and the current flowed only in the direction you wanted it to. You didn’t need to throw a switch to turn on a circuit manually because the vacuum tube could do that for you. Edison had actually discovered the first automatic switching device, which could be applied to hundreds of electronic products from the radio sets that I grew up with in the 1920s to the communications networks and radar banks of World War II and to the television sets of the 1950s. In fact, the radio tube was the single component that enabled us to begin the worldwide communications network that was already in place by the early twentieth century.

  Radio vacuum tubes also had another important application that wasn’t discovered until experimenters in the infant science of computers first recognized the need for them in the 1930s and then again in the 1940s. Because they were switches, opening and closing circuits, they could be programmed to reconfigure a computer to accomplish different tasks. The computer itself had, in principle, remained essentially the same type of calculating device that Charles Babbage first invented in the 1830s. It was a set of internal gears or wheels that acted as counters and a section of “memory” that stored numbers until it was their turn to be processed. Babbage’s computer was operated manually by a technician who threw mechanical switches in order to input raw numbers and execute the program that processed the numbers.