The Day After Roswell

by William J. Birnes

  I had seen the descriptions of the EBE laser in reports about the Roswell crash, a beam of light so thin that you couldn’t even see it until it landed on a target. What was the purpose of this light generator? the Alamogordo group had asked. It looked like a targeting or communications device, seemed to have an almost limitless range, and, if the right power source could be found to amplify the light beam to where it could penetrate metal, the device could be used as a drill, a welder, or even a devastating weapon.

  Even while I was at the White House, all three branches of the military were working with researchers in university laboratories to develop a working laser. In theory, exciting the atoms of an element to produce light energy in the same way that atoms of a gas were excited to produce microwaves, lasers offered the tantalizing promise of a directed-energy beam that had such a wide variety of applications it could become an almost universal utility for all divisions of the military, even controlling warehouse inventory for the Quartermaster Corps. Finally, in 1958, the year after I left the White House, there was a surge in research activity, especially at Columbia University where, two years later, physicist Theodore Maiman constructed the first working laser.

  The first practical demonstration of the laser took place in 1960, and by the time I got to the Pentagon, General Trudeau had put it on our list of priorities to develop for military purposes. Also, because stimulated-energy radiation devices were among the cache of technological debris we recovered from Roswell, the U.S. development of the laser encompassed the special urgent requirements of my Roswell mission. I had to write a report to General Trudeau suggesting ways the EBEs might have used laser technology in their missions on this planet and how we could develop similar uses for it under the guise of a conventional development program. In other words, once we guessed how the aliens were using it, it was to become our developmental model for similar applications.

  We believed that the EBEs used lasers for navigation, by bouncing beams off distant objects in space and homing in on them to triangulate a course; for communication, by using the laser beam as a carrier signal or as a signal in and of itself; for surveillance, by painting potential targets with a beam; and for power transmission, illumination, and even data storage. The strength and integrity of the laser beam should have served as the EBEs’ primary method of communication over vast distances or even as a way of storing communications in packages for later delivery. However, it was the EBEs’ use of directed energy as a medical tool and ultimately as a potential weapon that sent shivers up and down our spines because to our minds it was evidence of the aliens’ hostile intentions. Whether they saw us as true enemies to be destroyed or regarded all life on our planet as laboratory specimens to be experimented with, the results from the animal carcasses picked up in the field by our military nuclear, biological, and chemical recovery teams and the civilian intelligence investigators could have been very much the same.

  In the Pentagon from 1961 to 1963, I reviewed field reports from local and state police agencies about the discoveries of dead cattle whose carcasses looked as though they had been systematically mutilated and reports from people who claimed to have been abducted by aliens and experimented on. One of the common threads in these stories were reports by the self-described abductees of being subjected to some sort of probing or even a form of surgery with controlled, intense, pencil-thin beams of light. Local police reported that when veterinarians were called to the scene to examine the dead cattle left in fields, they often found evidence not just that the animal’s blood had been drained but that entire organs were removed with such surgical skill that it couldn’t have been the work of predators or vandals removing the organs for some depraved ritual. Where there was evidence of crime of someone staging a bizarre hoax, it was usually obvious from the clumsiness of the attempt and the deliberate staging of the carcass. And in the overwhelming majority of instances where the animal was killed by a predator who consumed its blood and carried away internal organs, the evidence of teeth marks or of a brief life-and-death struggle was also a clear indicator of what had happened. But in those cases where investigators claimed to have been baffled by what they found, the removal of the organs and the draining of the animal’s blood—where blood had been completely drained—were so sophisticated that there was almost no peripheral damage to the surrounding tissue. There was even some speculation, in the early 1960s, that whatever device the EBEs had employed, it didn’t even cut through the surrounding tissue. We had no medical instruments that even remotely approached what the aliens could do. It was as though some device had simply excised the organs with techniques that even went beyond our own surgical precision.

  While I was on the White House National Security staff and later when I was at the Pentagon, I was intrigued by these reports. I also remember that both civilian and military intelligence personnel attached to the staffs of individuals who worked for the Hillenkoetter and Twining working group on UFOs in the 1950s were actively engaging in research into the kinds of surgical methods that would produce “crime scene evidence” like this. Could have been the Russians, they thought at first. Given the tense climate of the Cold War, a fear that the Soviets were experimenting with American livestock to develop some form of toxin or biological weapon that would devastate our cattle population was not unduly paranoid. It’s sufficient to say, without going into any detail, that we were thinking about the same kinds of weapons, so it was not far-fetched to say that we were projecting our own doomsday strategies onto what the Russians might have done.

  But it wasn’t the Soviets who were going after our cattle. In fact the Soviet strategy for destabilizing the United States was so sophisticated that it was only a strategy of playing nuclear chicken with the Soviets that forced them to back down in the end. It was the EBEs who were experimenting with organ harvesting, possibly for transplant into other species or for processing into some sort of nutrient package or even to create some sort of hybrid biological entity. This is what people attached to the working group thought in the 1950s and 1960s, and even though we had no solid intelligence at the time that we were right, we operated on the assumption that no one takes an organ just for the sheer pleasure of removing it. Although the first public reports of cattle mutilations surfaced around 1967 in Colorado, at the White House we were reading about the mutilation stories that had been kept out of press as far back as the middle 1950s, especially in the area around Colorado. There was speculation, also, that maybe pharmaceutical companies were responsible because they could utilize the organs and soft tissues in biological experimentation, but we dismissed that because the companies had their own farms and could grow anything they wanted. Our intelligence organizations and especially the working group believed that the cattle mutilations that could not be obviously explained away as pranks, predators, or ritual slaughter were the results of interventions by extraterrestrials who were harvesting specific organs or for experimentation. So if our cattle were important enough to the EBEs to get them to expose what they were doing, it was an important thing for us to understand why. The EBEs were nothing if not coldly and clinically efficient—their methodology reminded us of the Nazis—and they didn’t waste time sitting around on the ground where they were most vulnerable to attack or capture unless they had a darn good reason for doing so.

  We didn’t know their reasons back in the 1950s and 1960s and can only make educated guesses about them now, but back then we were driven by a terror that unless we found ways to defend ourselves against the EBEs we would be corralled by them and used for replacement tissue or as a source of nutrition. In 1997 this may sound like a nightmare out of a flying saucer horror movie, but in 1957 this was our thinking both in the White House and in the military. We didn’t know, but we had irrefutable evidence that EBEs were landing on farms, harvesting vital organs from livestock, and then just leaving the carcasses on the ground because they knew we couldn’t do anything about it.

  The mutilations that interested the Natio
nal Security personnel seemed to have the same kind of modus operandi. Whoever went after the animals seemed most interested in the mammary, digestive, and reproductive organs, especially the uteruses from cows. In many cases the eyes or throats were removed in a type of surgery in which the demarcation line was almost microscopically thin and the surrounding tissue showed that the incision had superheated and then blackened as it cooled. But the crime scene and forensic specialists noted that in any type of cut by a predatory animal or a human—even a skilled surgeon—one would find evidence of some trauma in the surrounding tissue such as swelling, contusions, or other forms of abrasion. In these reports of mutilations, forensic examination showed no evidence of collateral trauma or even inflammation. Therefore, they believed, the cuts to extract the tissue were made so quickly and wounds were sealed so fast that the surrounding tissue never was destroyed. This meant that whoever was operating on these animals did so in a matter of minutes. It was rare, therefore, that police would ever catch them in the act. So if we couldn’t protect our livestock or react intelligently to the stories of human abductions, except to debunk them and make the abductees themselves think they were delusional, we had to find weapons that would put us on a more equal footing with the EBEs. One of those weapons, which had a wide application potential, was the laser—light amplification through stimulated energy radiation—the device the army found in the Roswell spacecraft and would later develop as a weapon in cooperation with Hughes Aircraft.

  Shortly after the first successful demonstration of a ruby red laser at Columbia University, the three military branches realized they had a winner. The following year, the results of the tests at Columbia, the industry interest in developing laser-based products, and the Roswell report on stimulated energy all merged on my desk. Now it was my turn to get involved and assemble the information to support laser product development with military funds before the whole operation was turned over to one of the R&D specialists who would take the product through its next stages. That was the way our backfield worked: I fed the play, made sure the snap got off, and then faded in behind the blockers. By the time the ball carrier had made his way into the secondary, I was already off the field. I never got the Heisman Trophy, but I sure as hell moved the ball.

  I began by listing the needs of the army for what the laser might be able to accomplish. Based on what the army analysts reported they saw in the Roswell ship, it seemed to me obvious that if the Roswell laser was a cutting or surgical tool, the beam could also be utilized as an advanced rapid-firing weapon. With a beam so precise and directed, the laser would also make an excellent range finder and target manager for artillery. If the beam was capable of instantaneous readjustment and fed into a computer, it would also be the perfect targeting system for a tank, especially a tank on the move. Typically, a tank must stop before it can fire because the gunner needs to have a fixed firing platform from which he calculates range, direction, and other compensating factors. The laser can do all that while the vehicle is moving and should therefore enable a tank to stay on the move while firing. And if a laser can paint a target from a tank and find the range, I speculated, it can do the same for a helicopter from air to air and air to ground.

  I suggested to General Trudeau that all the research we were conducting into helicopter tactics, especially into the role of helicopters as infantry support gun and rocket platforms, dovetailed perfectly with the possibilities of the laser as a range-finding mechanism. We could paint friendly troops to locate them, identify our foes, and illuminate potential targets with light invisible to all but our own gunners. At the same time, our own bombs or missiles can home in on the laser image we project onto a target, like a heat-seeking missile. Once painted, the target could evade the laser-guided rocket or shell only with great difficulty. For a stationary target such as a fortification or artillery redoubt, a laser-guided shell would be particularly devastating because we could take it out with one or two rounds instead of having to go back again and again to make sure we’d found the target.

  As a signal, a laser is so intense, refined, and perfectly stable that it is almost impervious to any kind of disturbance. For this reason, I wrote General Trudeau, the EBEs must have used an advanced form of a laser for their communication, and we can, too. The intensity of the beam and its highly refined focus mean that it can be aimed with minute precision. Amplifying the power to boost the signal should not distort the beam’s aim, which makes it perfect for straight-line long-distance communication.

  Lasers also have high capacities for carrying multiple signals. Therefore, I wrote the general, we can pack a greater number of transmission bands into a laser signal than we can with our conventional signal carriers. This meant that we could literally flood a battlefield with different kinds of communication channels, each carrying different kinds of communication, some not even invented yet, and have them securely carried by laser signals. For command and control on the increasingly sophisticated electronic battlefield the army was predicting for the 1970s, lasers would become the Signal Corps workhorses.

  General Trudeau said that he was also interested in an item from one of the specification reports that other military observers wrote that said that lasers could also serve as projection devices for large-screen displays. Lasers were so bright that displays could be shown in rooms that didn’t have to be darkened. The general saw the possibility of fully lit situation rooms with large-screen displays from satellite radar transmissions. The room would allow computer operators to see what they were doing at their keyboards while seeing the displays and listening to the briefing.

  I suggested that the army cartography division would be particularly interested in the accuracy of the laser-derived measurements for maps. That same measurement ability would also be able to generate digital data for ground-hugging infantry support helicopters or low-flying planes. Aircraft that could stay close to the ground could avoid enemy radar and stay concealed until the last minute. But unless there was a method for accurately charting the topography, aircraft could find themselves scraping treetops or crashing into the side of a hill. If a laser could accurately transmit topographic features to altitude control and navigational computers on board attack aircraft, it would keep the aircraft safely above any ground obstacles but close enough to the ground to remain concealed. This ground-hugging capability that I suggested to General Trudeau had been suggested to me from the analysis reports of UFOs that also had this capability. It was what enabled them to hover close to the ground and to move rapidly at speeds over a thousand miles an hour at treetop level without hitting anything. The laser-type devices aboard the UFO instantly fed the craft with the topographic features of the landscape and the craft automatically adjusted to the terrain.

  In late 1961, General Trudeau asked me to visit Fort Belvoir again, this time to meet a Dr. Mark Johnston, one of aeronautical research scientists from Hughes Aircraft. Fort Belvoir was one of the safe houses for the Office of R&D to conduct meetings in because it was a secure military facility. My comings and goings there on Army R&D business were completely routine, even to the CIA surveillance teams that would occasionally pick up my car coming out of the Pentagon, and could be covered in our daily logs with references to the ongoing projects that served as covers. My meeting with Johnston, for example, was to talk about the Hughes helicopter-development program, not to give him my reports on the laser measuring devices we believed were in the Roswell spacecraft. I briefed Johnston on what the scientific team from Alamogordo believed was on the spacecraft, asked him not to talk about it, and suggested that the Hughes team developing the navigational radars for the helicopter project consider using the newly developed lasers as terrain measuring apparatus and for target acquisition.

  “Yes, of course,” I assured him. “The Office of R&D would have a development budget for the laser project if the R&D team at Hughes thought our idea was feasible and they could develop it.”

  And that’s exactly what happened. Using the pos
itive results from the Columbia University test and the army weapons specifications we drew up in R&D for the requirements of a range-finder, targeting, and tracking weapon, and with research grants from the Pentagon, Hughes signed on as one of the contractors for the military laser. Today, the laser has become the HEL, or High Energy Laser, deployed by the army’s Space Defense Command as, among other things, an antisatellite/antiwarhead weapon.

  My meeting at Hughes was quick and direct. Like so many of the research scientists I met with from Hughes, Dow, IBM, and Bell, Johnston disappeared behind the workbenches, computer screens, or test tubes of the company’s back room and out of my sight forever. When General Trudeau would ask me to follow up on the project months later, a different company representative would meet with me and the project would look just like any other Army R&D–initiated research contract. Any traces of Roswell or the nut file would be gone, and the project would have been slipped into the normal R&D functioning. Of course this device didn’t come out of the Roswell incident. The incident was only a myth; it never took place. This came out of the Foreign Technology desk, something the Italians or French were working on and we picked up through intelligence sources.

  Our work with laser products was becoming so successful by the end of 1961 that General Trudeau was urging me to spread the wealth around as many army bases as I could. I spoke to weapons experts at Fort Riley, Kansas, for example, about the use of lasers by troops in the field. Maybe as range finders, we suggested, or even as ways to lock onto a target the way the air force was experimenting with something they were calling “smart bombs.” By 1964, after seeing the research into the feasibility of lasers that we had commissioned, handheld range finders were being tested at army bases around the country, and today, police forces use laser sights on their weapons. Lasers became one of the army’s great successes.