The Day After Roswell

by William J. Birnes

  “These fellas don’t waste their time, Phil,” the general told me at one of our morning briefings after I had dropped off the reports the day before so he could look them over. “If they’re looking into this stuff, then they know there’s something there.”

  “You don’t think this report is just a lot of speculation?” I asked. I knew from the expression on his face that it was a question I shouldn’t have asked.

  “If you thought this was just speculation, Colonel,” he said very abruptly, “then you wouldn’t be passing the buck up to me to tell you that.” General Trudeau had a way of bringing you up short when he thought you said something stupid. And what I had said was very stupid for an officer with my training and experience. He also knew I was worried or else I wouldn’t have tried to back off so quickly. “You’re right to be worried about this,” he said, his tone softening when he saw how I was looking at him. “You’d be right if you sat in your office and sweated bullets over what this means. And you know exactly what worries the both of us. Do I have to say it?”

  No, he didn’t. It was obvious. If the Soviets had gotten their hands on some of the apparatus from any one of the alien spacecraft that had gone down since 1947—and I didn’t know how many there were—they’d have figured out by now that the aliens had used some form of brain-wave control for navigation. How they directed their thoughts or translated them into an electronic circuit, we didn’t know. But we knew that there were no steering wheels or conventional methods of control on the spacecraft, and the headbands we found with the electronic sensors on them were designed to pick up some form of signal from the brain. The analysts at Wright Field believed that the sensors on the headbands corresponded with points on the multilobed alien brain that generated low-frequency waves, so the headbands formed an integral part of the circuit. If we were able to figure that out, the Soviets were certainly capable of figuring that out as well. Besides, the general didn’t have to say it because I thought it: What if the Soviets, all alone in space the way they were in the early 1960s, had some communication with the aliens that we didn’t have? Who said the EBEs had to be anti-Communist anyway?

  General Trudeau also shared with me some intelligence reports that described antimissile missile tests the Soviets had conducted with very powerful tracking radar. We’d known about their radars because I’d seen them work during exercises in Germany when each side would test the other’s responses over the East German border. Their radars and their ability to lock onto aircraft was just as good as ours. But what the general showed me were reports that described the Soviets firing intercept missiles at incoming ICBM vehicles and exploding the intercept warheads so as to knock out the navigational systems on the aggressor missiles. One of those test intercepts had been conducted successfully right through an atomic cloud on one of the Soviet missile test ranges in Asia. This was especially disturbing because anyone who knows anything about the nature of an atomic cloud knows that the electromagnetic pulse immediately knocks out any form of electronics. That’s also how we knew what the signatures were of the alien UFOs that buzzed our ships and bases. So much of our nonhardened power was knocked out by the pulse that we knew an electromagnetic wave had hit us. So if the Soviets could harden their antimissile missile guidance system to home in on a target through an electromagnetically charged atomic cloud, they were using a technology significantly more advanced than ours, and it spelled trouble.

  “When you were in Germany commanding the Nike battalion,” the general asked me, still holding the reports in his hand, “you experimented with tight evasive maneuvers in drone target practice, didn’t you?”

  The general’s memory served him correctly. Our antiaircraft battalion deployed the Nike, one of the most advanced guided antiaircraft missiles of its time. The Nike was a radar-guided missile. And the Hawk was a heat-seeking missile that could be locked onto its target by tracking radar and then, when launched, would home in on the target’s heat exhaust. So, even if a pilot tried to evade the missiles, the fast-moving Hawk warheads would catch up to him and blow off his engine. If it were a tail-engine fighter, it would effectively end his mission and he’d probably have to eject. If it were a wing-engined bomber, then, with one of his wing-mounted engines shot off, the pilot would probably have to turn for home because he wouldn’t have the power to carry the payload of bombs to the target.

  “When we were shooting at drones in simulated bombing formation, we scored a perfect shootdown again and again, but when pilots used extremely fast evasive maneuvers against our missiles, we couldn’t hit them,” I said.

  “Explain how that worked,” he asked.

  “Nike antiaircraft missiles move like boats on water,” I explained. “They cut wide arcs and get an angle to home in on their targets. Any early evasive maneuvers the fighter pilot makes, the missile compensates for and stays on course toward his heat source. But if the pilot is able to evade at the very last minute of the Nike’s trajectory, the missile will fly right by and can’t recover. Bomber pilots have to stay in formation and keep on course if they’re going to hit their target and have enough fuel to get home, so their evasive patterns are strictly limited. For fighter pilots, it’s much easier so any MiG, just like any of our Phantoms, can outmaneuver a Nike any day.”

  “So if the Soviets have something that can take out missile warheads through an atomic cloud and are using devices that may have come from an alien technology, we have something to worry about,” the general said.

  “We’d have a lot to worry about,” I agreed. “We have nothing even remotely like this, except for the laser tracking system, but that’s years away from any sort of deployment even assuming we can get the President to ask Congress to give us the money to develop it.”

  General Trudeau slammed his palm on the desk with enough force to shake the entire office. I’m sure his clerk sitting just outside thought I was getting bawled out for something, but that was the general’s way of reinforcing a decision he was making. “Phil, you are the antimissile missile projects officer for the time being. I don’t care whatever the hell else you have to do, you write me up a report on what we discussed here and then put together a proposal I can use to get us some money to develop this thing,” he said. “I know we’re on the right track, even if we’re in a strange arena. Thought control,” he said, speculating about how the power of the human brain could be harnessed to the navigation of a guided missile. “Well, if the Russians are looking at it seriously, then we’d better do the same thing before they blindside us like they did with Sputnik.”

  “Why me?” I said to myself as I walked down the stairs to my office. This was like an assignment to write a term paper when there wasn’t even any research you could use and still be called sane. I had to write about the hardware and systems applications of navigational control, not medical or biological functions per se, but that made it all the more difficult. I remembered my son telling me that he was able to fix gasoline engines that had broken down and electrical motors that were no longer putting out power because he believed the moving parts spoke to him. As way out as I thought that sounded at the time, walking back to my office now and thinking about what the Soviets were playing with, maybe my kid didn’t sound so crazy after all. It was something I’d have to research.

  If the information that Professors Flesch, Franck, and Castellani conveyed to me back in Rome fifteen years ago had any validity, then the vague references in the Roswell report that I’d read probably had validity as well. So I began.

  “The references to EBE brain function in the medical examiner’s reports from Roswell,” I wrote in my opening memo to General Trudeau, suggest new avenues of research to us in the guidance and navigational control of machines. The electromagnetic integration of the alien brain lobes and the possible integration with other brain functions including kinesthetic capability—the ability to move objects—over long distance is startling and sounds more like science fiction than fact. But if we can establish a correl
ation with long, low-frequency waves and this electromagnetic integration, it will be a way to identify a measurable phenomenon with a process we do not understand. Initially, I recommend we study the phenomenon in an effort to apply our findings to gathering and utilizing any data we can develop concerning long, low-frequency waves and electromagnetic integration so as to marry it to our existing guidance and control hardware systems and create a new state of the art in missile tracking.

  A caveat: The Central Intelligence Agency has begun a program in which they work with “seers,” as they call them, parapsychologists who they expect will give them the same capability as the KGB’s “Psychotronic Technology” training. Both intelligence agencies are skirting the edges of our military’s approach and we must be careful not to let our research fall into their cauldron. We would be discredited and possibly stopped from proceeding both from efforts from our own side and from protests by the Soviets should they find out. Therefore I recommend that the background of our experimentation with long low-frequency brain waves and any source material be completely expunged along with any historical data relevant to this analysis.

  • • •

  My basis for our proposed antimissile missile was the Soviets’ own success with controlling the trajectory of an ICBM warhead in flight and the success they had in targeting incoming warheads with their own antimissile missile in development.

  “In recent months,” I wrote, it has come to our attention that the Soviets can change the trajectory of an ICBM after launch once it is on its way to a target. In addition, the Soviets have twice tested an antimissile missile fired through an atomic cloud at an approaching ICBM. Therefore, a technical proposal must be drawn up as soon as possible for:

  1.An antimissile missile that will be able to lock onto an incoming ICBM and stay locked on through all evasive maneuvers and destroy it before it reaches its target, and

  2.All circuitry must be hardened to withstand radiation, blast, heat, and electromagnetic pulse from an atomic detonation up to and including the intensity of the Russian bomb explosion of 60 megatons.

  Premise:

  Our present antiaircraft missiles centered around the Nike-Ajax, Nike-Hercules, and the Hawk are not adequate against ICBMs thus rendering us virtually defenseless against such an attack. Present systems cannot remain locked onto an incoming ICBM or find the target to destroy if it changes trajectory, which capability the latest Soviet test models indicate the enemy may be able to deploy within the decade. Our spy satellites will be able to locate the Soviet warheads once they are launched, but the Soviets are also developing the capability to disable our surveillance satellites either with orbiting nuclear weapons to destroy them or send them out of orbit. At the very least, Soviet capability to generate an electromagnetic pulse through a nuclear detonation in space will render our satellites electronically blind. Secret intelligence reports confirm that the Soviets have already disabled two of our satellites and one launched by the British. We, therefore, have a two-fold problem, not only must the antimissile missile circuitry be hardened but the spy satellite circuitry must also be hardened from radiation, ion emissions, and ELM pulses. But because of the nuclear test ban treaty, the United States will not have the opportunity to run actual tests so we will have to scale our data up from our existing test results to arrive at figures we can only assume are accurate.

  • • •

  When General Trudeau read my full report, he asked me to speak to the scientists who consulted with us as part of a brain trust and develop a technical discussion, as speculative as we needed it to be with no restrictions whatsoever, in which we integrated what we had in our Roswell files with what intelligence we had on the types of testing the Soviets were conducting.

  “Don’t worry about how it’s going to be circulated, Phil,” General Trudeau assured me. “I want to show it to only a few members of the House and Senate Defense appropriations committees and they’ve promised to keep it confidential.”

  “I know you want this right away, General,” I said. “Can I have the rest of the day to work on it?”

  “You can have until tomorrow morning,” he said. “Because after lunch tomorrow you and I are meeting with the Senate subcommittee and I want to read them this report.”

  I told my wife that I’d be home late in the morning for a change of uniform and then I was going over to Capitol Hill for a meeting. Then I ordered up a couple of sandwiches, put a new pot of coffee on, and settled in at the office for a long night.

  “The present design and configuration of our ICBMs is adequate,” I wrote onto my legal pad, crossed out the sentence, and then wrote it again. “However internal changes are necessary, especially within the warhead capsule.”

  What I would recommend would be nothing less than radical. We needed an entirely new navigational computer system that would take advantage of the transistorized circuitry now coming into development and projected for the marketplace by the late 1960s.

  I suggested we model the missile’s onboard computer on the design of an actual dual-hemisphere brain with one hemisphere or lobe receiving global positioning data from orbiting satellites. The other hemisphere will control the missile functions such as thrusters, positioning changes, and booster stage separation. It will receive data through a low-frequency transmission from the other lobe. The control lobe will also transmit missile flight telemetry to the positioning lobe so that the two computers will function together in tandem. This, I reasoned, would make the system more difficult to jam. If our global positioning satellite detected a threat from an incoming antimissile missile, it would relay that information to the warhead, whose control computer would direct the thrusters to fire so as to take evasive action before the final target approach.

  Inasmuch as I believed it was through the application and amplification of low-frequency brain waves that the EBEs navigated the craft that we found at Roswell, our implementation of this technology might enable us also to use our brains to control the flight of objects. We could use some form of a brain-wave system to navigate our ICBM warhead final-stage vehicles if their onboard radar detected a threat from an antiballistic missile. We could also use this system to home in on incoming enemy warhead launchers even if they were capable of taking some evasive action.

  If we designed the missile the way I suggested, by the time it had been locked into its final trajectory, its detonation would be set so that even if it were knocked off course it would still explode and cause enough collateral damage that it would count as a hit. Enough of our ICBMs could get through, we reasoned, so as to overwhelm not only the Soviet guided-missile forces but pose a realistic threat to their population centers. Meanwhile, the technology we developed for changing the flights of our incoming ICBMs could be applied as a template to our own antimissile missiles so as to neutralize any Soviet missile threat.

  My conclusion: “An appropriation of $300 million must be requested for the coming FY 1963 as a urgent crash development appropriation.”

  • • •

  I read my own notes from the envelope handed over by Harold Brown and looked back at him.

  “Colonel,” Brown’s assistant said. “We understand the urgency of your request last year and we appreciate your reasons for fighting for it now.”

  “But the Defense Department is simply not going to allow the army to go forward with an antimissile missile at this time. Not in 1963,” Mr. Brown said.

  “When?” I asked.

  “At a time,” the army colonel said, “when the impact of our deploying this system will be greater than it is now. The Russians know we have a bead on the type of satellites they’re putting up and we can take them out in a heartbeat, much faster than they can take out ours.”

  I began to answer, but Harold Brown got up to leave. We shook hands and he walked toward the door. The army colonel remained in front of my desk. “Maybe just you and I can have a word, Colonel Corso,” he said. My own associate on Senator Thurmond’s committee left t
he office also.

  “In the Pentagon, we understand that your early research into the technology of the antiballistic missile is the real reason for your support, Colonel Corso,” the project manager said. “It’s in good hands.”

  But I can tell you he didn’t know the real reason, the EBEs. Only General Trudeau understood the secret agenda that lay beneath the research into the project.

  “But when do you think development will start?” I asked.

  “In just a couple of years we’ll have lunar spacecraft orbiting the moon,” he said. “We’ll have orbiting satellites mapping every inch of the Soviet Union. We’ll see what they can throw against us. Then we’ll have exactly the kind of antimissile missile you proposed because then even the Congress will see the reason for it.”

  “But until then . . .” I began.

  “Until then,” the colonel said, “all we can do is wait.”

  It would take another twenty years for the beginnings of an antimissile to be deployed. And it would also take a president who was willing to recognize the threat from the extraterrestrials to force an antimissile weapon through a hostile Congress.

  CHAPTER 15

  My Last Year in R&D:

  The Hoover Files, Fiber Optics, Supertenacity, and Other Artifacts

  I barely picked my head up from the piles of technical proposals on my desk during the winter months of 1961. The work didn’t even stop for the Christmas holiday, when most of Washington likes to take a break and head for the West Virginia mountains or the Maryland countryside. I was traveling a lot during the final months of 1961, seeing weapons undergo testing at proving grounds around the country, meeting with university researchers on such diverse items as the preservation of food or the conversion of spent atomic-pile material into weapons, and developing intelligence reports for General Trudeau on the kinds of technologies that might shape weapons development into the next decade.