In one of our final pushes for the development of laser-based weapons systems, we argued successfully for a budget to develop laser tracking systems for incoming missiles. This was a project we fought hard for, over political opposition as well as opposition from the other military branches, which were looking at our proposal as a conventional method of tracking missiles. The laser was too new, they argued. Atmospheric interference or heavy clouds would distort the laser over long distances, they said. Or, they said, it would simply take too much power and would have no portability. General Trudeau and I had another agenda for this project that we couldn’t readily share with anybody. We believed that lasers could be used not just to track incoming missiles—that was obvious. We saw the lasers too as our best weapon for not only tracking UFOs from the ground, from aircraft, or from satellites but, if we could boost the power to the necessary levels, for shooting them down. Shoot down a few of them, we speculated, and they wouldn’t violate our airspaces with such impunity. Equip our fighter planes or interceptors with laser-firing mechanisms and we could pose a credible threat to them. Equip our satellites with laser firing mechanisms and we could triangulate a firing pattern on the UFOs that might even keep them away from our orbiting spacecraft. But all of this was speculation in late 1961.
Only a very few people in the other branches of R&D even had a hint about what we were proposing. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration had its own plans for developing laser tracking systems and didn’t want to share any development budget with the military, so there was very little help forthcoming from NASA. The air force and navy were guarding their own development budgets for laser weapons, and we couldn’t trust the civilian intelligence agencies at all. So General Trudeau and I began advocating a plan as a cover to develop laser tracking and other sophisticated types of surveillance projects. It was outrageous on the surface, but it quickly found its adherents, and its real agenda could be completely masked. We could never call it an anti-UFO device so we named it the antimissile missile. It was one of the most successful projects ever to come out of Army R&D. It owed most of its theory to our discovery of the laser in the Roswell wreckage.
CHAPTER 14
The Antimissile Missile Project
There were times during my tenure at the Pentagon when something in the Roswell file had such resonance in my life that it made me question whether there was some larger plan for my work. I’ve read about the concept of synchronicity or confluence in the years since I retired from the military and how things or events tend to cluster around a common thread. Such a common thread was the development of the antimissile missile that encompassed my work in R&D at the Pentagon, my brief stint as a staff adviser to Senator Strom Thurmond, and my years in Rome during the war and occupation as the assistant chief of staff, Intelligence (G-2), Rome Area Allied Command.
In early 1963, just after I left the Pentagon, Senator Strom Thurmond asked me to join his staff as a consultant and adviser on military and national security issues. Congress had just appropriated $300 million to turn a fledgling plan to investigate the feasibility of an antimissile missile program into a full development project. But it ran right into a concrete barrier just as soon as it left the Senate. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara flatly refused to spend the money because, he said, not only would it intensify the U.S.-Soviet arms race, it would actually offend the Kremlin because it would put them on notice that we were trying to deploy a first-strike capability while neutralizing their ICBMs. Worse, he said to the Congress, the United States military simply didn’t need the weapon in the first place.
Senator Thurmond was incensed and I was deeply worried. McNamara just didn’t get it. He was completely misinformed about how the Soviets reacted to any weapons deployment on our part. They didn’t negotiate with us out of a sense of cooperation, only a sense of necessity that it was in their best interests to do so. If they thought we could knock out their ICBMs, that, more than anything, would keep them honest. Hadn’t they backed down over Cuba because they saw that Kennedy actually meant business when he screwed up his resolve to order the navy to enforce the blockade? But the CIA had McNamara’s ear and was giving him exactly the information the disinformation specialists in the Kremlin wanted him to have: don’t develop the antimissile missile.
General Trudeau and I had a secret agenda we had worked up the previous year at the Pentagon. The antimissile missile, utilizing laser targeting and tracking, was supposed to be the perfect mechanism for getting the funds to develop a laser-beam weapon we could ultimately use to fire on UFOs. At least that was the way we’d planned it. The general had gotten it through the Pentagon bureaucracy while I covered his flank on the legislative side, testifying before the Armed Services Committee on the efficacy of a weapon that was capable of protecting American strategic forces with an umbrella. If any country were foolish enough to attack the United States, the antimissile missile would blunt their offensive and enable us not only to devastate their military forces but hold their population centers hostage as well.
Not so, said the Defense Department. The deployment of an antimissile missile would encourage our enemies to attack our cities first and devastate our civilian population. What did it matter if we had the ability to strike back when the damage to us had already been done? The only thing that was keeping our civilian population centers safe was each side’s ability to hold the other’s nuclear forces hostage. If both sides devastated one another’s nuclear forces, it would give each side time to stop before a mutual destruction of the civilian populations.
But the secretary of defense didn’t understand war. He especially hadn’t seen what lessons the Soviets learned during World War II when their population centers had been devastated and people were reduced to the point of starvation and cannibalized one another for food. That kind of experience doesn’t toughen you against the ravages of war, it educates you. The Soviets’ only hope for a victory in the Cold War was in our putting down our guard and capitulating to them. By refusing to go forward with the antimissile missile, the secretary of defense was listening to arguments that were spoon-fed to him, certainly without his knowledge, by people in the civilian intelligence community who were being manipulated by the KGB.
Senator Thurmond’s reaction to Bob McNamara’s refusal to spend the antimissile missile appropriation was to hold subcommittee hearings on this issue to find out why. The Defense Department didn’t want to disclose classified information about the capabilities of a proposed weapon and our defense policy before a public session of Congress. So Fred Buzhardt, who years later became President Nixon’s counsel, suggested that Senator Thurmond invoke a senatorial privilege to close a session of the Senate so that the issue of the antimissile missile could be discussed in private before the full Senate. But first, we had to request specific information from the Department of Defense, and that task, because I was the Senator’s adviser for military affairs, fell to me. No one knew that I was actually the officer who had initially prepared the information for the antimissile missile program to begin with and probably knew more about the documents than anyone because less than a year earlier I had prepared them myself.
The first meeting with the Defense Department was held in my new office in the basement of the Capitol Building. Secretary McNamara sent his own scientific adviser, Harold Brown, who would later become the secretary of defense himself, along with an army colonel who had become the project officer for the antimissile missile development program. Brown didn’t know who I was, but his assistant from the army certainly did.
“Colonel,” the army project officer began as soon as I asked him a question about the request we’d sent for information, and Harold Brown sat up straight in his chair. Gradually, like chipping away parts of a granite block, I asked the project officer about the specific details of the antimissile missile program, how much of the budget allocation from previous Pentagon funding they’d already spent, and what their development timetable would be if the curre
nt appropriation were spent for the current phase of the project. Then I asked more technical questions about the research into ground-based radars, satellite-based radars, speculation into Soviet counter-antimissile missile strategies, and Soviet development of even bigger and more mobile ICBMs that would present more imperative targets for any antimissile missile system because we couldn’t take them out in a first strike. Mounted on railway cars or trucks, mobile Soviet missiles would be almost impossible to track even though they would have to remain stationary for the liquid fueling process to be completed.
“I see that my assistant keeps on calling you colonel, Mr. Corso,” Harold Brown said. “And you certainly seem to know a lot of details on this subject.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “I only retired from the army a couple of months ago but while I was at the Pentagon, I was the acting projects officer for the antimissile missile program.”
“Then there’s no use in holding back,” Harold Brown said and finally smiled for the first time in our meeting. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a folded envelope. “Here are your copies of the complete details of the project about which we briefed President Kennedy. It’s all here. And I presume this is what you are looking for, officially,” he said with a special emphasis on “officially.” He knew that I knew what was in that envelope but couldn’t disclose it before the Senate because it contained classified information and I would be breaching the National Security Act. However, by his giving me the material, much of it based on information that I had developed myself and had privately briefed Attorney General Robert Kennedy on in 1962, Brown was giving me the full authorization to disclose. He probably realized that in private sessions, I had talked generally about what was in the army file on the antimissile missile—that was a form of senatorial privilege as long as it wasn’t abused—but that I couldn’t go formal with it. Now I could, and I appreciated Harold Brown’s candor.
The battle over the appropriation was about to be joined, but I couldn’t look over the contents of the envelope, some of which were my own notes, without thinking back to the sequence of events that led to this meeting and to the project that ultimately was developed as a result of it. It began earlier in 1962 as I was working down the list of the priorities I had set for myself in the nut file. In it was a medical report about the creatures that I was trying to save until I had gotten all of the tangible items from Roswell into the development process.
It was a report on the possible function and apparent structure of the alien brain, a report that marveled at the similarities between the EBE brain and the human brain. However, one item in the report threw me for a complete loop. The medical examiner wrote that measurements of brain activity taken from the EBE who was still barely alive at Roswell showed that its electronic signature, at least what they were able to measure with equipment in 1947, displayed a signal similar to what we would call long, low-frequency waves. And the examiner referred to a description by one of the Roswell Army Air Field doctors that the creature’s brain lobes seem to have been not just physiologically and neurologically integrated but integrated by an electromagnetic current as well.
I would have loved to dismiss this as the speculation of a doctor who had no experience with this type of analysis and certainly no experience with alien beings. Therefore, whatever he wrote was nonsense and not worth the time it took to respond to it. File it back in the cabinet and get on to other issues that could be turned into viable projects. But the medical examiner’s report was more disturbing than I was ready to admit because it took me back to a time when I was the assistant chief of staff in Rome and made friends with some of the members of the graduate faculty at the University of Rome.
I was a twenty-five-year-old captain at the time, a former engineering undergraduate, way in over my head and learning my job responsibilities each day, keeping one step ahead of my boss so he wouldn’t find out that I didn’t really know anything. In one of my visits to the university I met Dr. Gislero Flesch, a professor of criminology and anthropology who lectured me on what he called his theory and experiments on “the basis of life.” It was a wild and, I thought, supernatural theory on what he called the filament within each cell. The filament was activated by some cosmic action or form of electromagnetic radiation that bombarded the earth continuously from outer space and resonated against a constant refresh of electrical activity from the brain.
“Capitaine,” he would say whenever he began some formal explanation. I also thought that he was always surprised that someone so young could actually be dispatched from the New World to administer law and justice in Rome, the capital of the ancient world. The old professor also was scrupulous about showing everyone, including his dimmest of students, extraordinary respect. “The electromagnetic forces in the body are the least understood,” he continued. “Yet they account for more activity than anyone realizes.”
As an engineering student whose whole experience with energy had to do with verifiable experiments, I was more than skeptical at first. How can you measure an electrical activity in the brain that you cannot see? How can invisible waves of energy that you can’t feel or see excite certain areas of the human cell, and what was their purpose?
Professor Flesch introduced me to Professor Casmiro Franck, one of the first scientists to ever photograph brain waves. Professor Franck became a friend because during my days in Rome, fighting off Gestapo agents, Communist partisans, and the local crime families and crime chieftains, I was always engaged in some type of warfare. But when I had time off, I wanted to meet people, to stretch my experience, to fall in love with the city of my own ancestors I had been assigned to protect. So I sought out a network of friends to whom I could relate and from whom I could learn. Professor Franck was just such a man.
In Franck’s first experiments he had used a rabbit brain as a test subject. He measured what he said were the long, low-frequency waves animal brains generate and described how he was able to trace the paths these waves took when they were transmitted from the brain to the animal’s voluntary muscles. Certain muscles, Professor Franck said, were attuned to respond to certain brain wavelengths, waves of a specific frequency. In cases of muscle paralysis, it’s not the muscle that’s necessarily damaged, it’s the muscle’s tuning mechanism that becomes disabled so that it no longer picks up the right frequency. It’s like a radio, he said. If the radio can’t pick up a signal, the radio isn’t necessarily broken; its antenna or the crystal may need to be adjusted to the correct frequency. I was a guest at his laboratory more than a few times and watched him carry out his experiments with live rabbits, interfering with their brains’ electromagnetic wave propagation by implanting electrodes and seeing which muscles became cataleptic and which responded. He said it was the frequency that was being altered because once the animal was removed from the experimental table, it could walk and hop as if nothing had ever happened.
Then Professor Franck introduced me to another one of his colleagues, the celebrated research biologist and physician Doctor Castellani, who had many years earlier isolated and identified the disease called “sleeping sickness” and perfected what during the 1930s and 1940s became known as “Castellani Ointments” as treatments for a variety of skin diseases. Where other doctors, he said, had focused on treating only the symptoms they could see on the skin, Doctor Castellani said that the problems of many skin rashes, psoriasis, or inflammations that looked like bacterial infections were, in fact, correctable by changing the skin’s electromagnetic resonance. The ointments, he said, didn’t attack the infection with drugs; they were chemical reactants that changed the electrostatic condition of the skin, allowing the long, low-frequency waves from the brain to do the healing.
All three men were using these electromagnetic waves to promote healing in ways I considered astounding. They made claims about the ability of electromagnetic treatments to affect the speed at which cells divide and tumors grow. They claimed that through directed electromagnetic wave propagation they co
uld cure heart disease, arthritis, all types of bacteriological infections that interfered with cell function, and even certain forms of cancer.
If this sounds like something supernatural in 1997, imagine how it must have sounded to the ears of a young and inexperienced intelligence officer in 1944 who was so far out of his element that the older, seasoned British intelligence laughed at his age. They laughed until they saw what happened to the Gestapo agents who were trying to reinfiltrate Rome behind the Allied front lines and met up with my men on the back streets and alleys. That’s when the laughing stopped.
I spent many hours with Professors Flesch, Franck, and Castellani in Rome and watched them experiment with all kinds of small animals. They didn’t have the research funds nor the endorsements of the medical societies to allow them to expand their work or to treat patients with their unconventional methods. Thus, much of their work found its way into research monographs, articles in academic journals, or university lectures at symposiums. And I left Rome in the spring of 1947, said my good-byes to the friends I had made at the University of Rome, and put their work—relegated once again to the supernatural—out of my mind as I concentrated on my new jobs at Fort Riley, the White House, Red Canyon, Germany, and the Pentagon. Then on the day that I came across the speculative report on the structure of the alien brain from Roswell, everything Professors Flesch, Franck, and Castellani said came back to me like a clap of thunder. Here I was again, staring at a piece of loose-leaf paper that was staring right back at me and forcing me to consider ideas and notions from over ten years ago that challenged everything science back then was telling us about the way the brain worked.
While I reviewed the reports about the autopsied alien brain and what the medical examiner thought the low-frequency waves meant when he applied current to the tissue, I also saw reports from an army military liaison attached to the Stalingrad consulate office that described Soviet experiments with psychics who were attempting to exercise some form of kinetic mind control over objects traveling through the air, directing them from one spot to another. These reports, written in the late 1950s, gave General Trudeau a lot of concern because they showed the Soviets were onto something.
The Day After Roswell Page 24
