Gorbachev, believe it or not, was also pleased because President Reagan guaranteed that the United States would throw its defensive shield around the Soviet Union, too. Sure, the two leaders shook hands and embraced one another in public. What they had achieved together, cooperating when they were supposed to be fighting, was nothing short of miraculous. Whatever we were fighting over became minimally important in the face of a threat from creatures who were so superior to us in technology that we were their farm animals to be harvested as they pleased. But when the United States and USSR agreed, in the early 1980s, not to fight each other over this territory or that territory, to cooperate so as to defeat the common foe, we were unbeatable. Now, as the Space Shuttle docks with the Mir and the astronauts and cosmonauts share a toast of vodka from their plastic squeeze tubes and look out into the darkest reaches of space, they know that there is an electronic shield around them.
Now that the war is just about over and we defend our beachhead, the truth will ultimately be revealed. The real truth behind a fifty-year history of a war that looked like the ultimate defeat for humankind amidst a Cold War that threatened us with nuclear annihilation can now finally be told because we prevailed. It was because in the dark hours just before dawn in July of 1947 the army, only dimly recognizing that we were on the edge of a potential cataclysmic event, pulled the crashed space vehicle out of the desert and harvested its parts just like the inhabitants of that vehicle wanted to harvest us. In those moments, even though we might have fallen over ourselves in the darkness of the next fifty years, we set in motion the processes that brought us to an initial resolution with a military power greater than us. It helped us in our confrontation with the Russians and, if we don’t lose our way, will help us manage the threats to come. When that truth of alien intervention in our planet’s affairs and our ongoing contact with an alien culture is finally revealed, it won’t be frightening even though it will be a shock.
• • •
The night closes in around you in the desert, exposing your deepest terrors of childhood bogeymen to the desolation of the landscape and the blackness of the sky. So, even inside your car you keep on chattering to keep the night away.
“And that’s what I think about all of it, UFOs, the Cold War, all of it,” I told my companion in the car sitting next to me as we drove south through the New Mexican desert toward the town of Roswell. “I may be over eighty now, but that’s what I think.”
The night was swallowing us up as our car twisted around the curves on the crowned road surface, still warm and wet on a summer night from passing thunderstorms, heading toward lights we knew were over the horizon but still could not see.
“The Cold War, the missile crisis of 1962, the worldwide alert in 1973, all history now, don’t you think?” I asked. “Maybe it was a good thing that the aliens forced us to defend the planet. At least it kept us in a Cold War even though we were using real bullets.”
“And what makes you think the Cold War is over, tovarisch?” my friend asked as he carefully took out a cigarette, lit it, and blew the smoke out the window. “American cigarettes,” he said. “Am I not the most bourgeois decadent person you’ve ever met? But what would the Amerikanskis have done without me?”
And I laughed to myself and counted the million stars across the desert sky as far as I could see. Cattle sleeping near the scrub and sand fences along the side of the lonely state route, a coyote now and then running through the beams of our headlights, and the sound of my friend’s breath as he blew the column of smoke into the desert air. It was a night just like this, lightning crackling off in the distance and a thunderclap rolling across the desert floor, a night just like this.
And what looked like a bright shooting star blazed very bright in an arc from south to north and disappeared over a rise as we continued toward Roswell into the darkness of the New Mexico night.
AFTERWORD
Back in the 1950s, I remember watching a television series called I Led Three Lives about the exploits of Herbert A. Philbrick, who described the “fantastic but true” story of his life as a member of a Communist Party cell and an undercover operative for the FBI. Years later, when I got to Army R&D, I remember thinking about how my own story was also “fantastic but true” and how what General Trudeau and I did helped to change the course of history. Very few people knew that what was coming out of Foreign Technology during the early 1960s had some basis in a crash of a UFO that “officially” never took place. Lives were distorted, careers destroyed, children frightened into submission by Army Counterintelligence bogeymen, businessmen in Roswell threatened with financial ruination and even worse if anybody told the story of what happened. But they were all loyal Americans, and even though some might have had their doubts about hiding the truth, they went along with what the army wanted.
Many people have criticized the army and the government for maintaining the Roswell cover-up not only at the time but also through the years. For that, I need to say a word in defense of what the army did. It’s easy to criticize if you weren’t an adult back then or someone who didn’t understand the politics that governed our thinking at that point in American history. We had not yet fully made the transition from a nation at war to a nation at peace. And there was Harry Truman, still reeling from his sudden ascendancy to the presidency, toughened into steel by his decision to drop the atomic bombs on Japan, and now faced with the monumental impact of a crash landing of a strange craft on American soil. Was it Soviet? Did it belong to a foreign power? Was it hostile? We simply didn’t know and weren’t about to say anything until we knew what it was.
Was it a flying saucer? The last time a public announcement of a landing by extraterrestrials took place, even though it was entertainment, panic ensued. In the aftermath of the war and the fears surrounding the Cold War, we didn’t want to risk another panic. So the military recommended and the White House agreed to clam up. Just like the secrecy surrounding the Manhattan Project, no word gets out. And for the next fifty years that policy, once put into place, governed the behavior of the U.S. government and the military about the existence of UFOs and the crash at Roswell.
You can also ask how the government was able to keep this secret for so long. Has there been any other cover-up so efficient and thorough that it went on, unbeknownst to succeeding presidents, year after year until it was finally stopped? In fact, there was just such a cover-up, started in the war, but continued as a matter of policy by Truman in 1947, code-named “Shamrock.” Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, one of the original members of the UFO working group, convinced his boss President Truman in 1947 to continue working with International Telephone and Telegraph, Western Union, and RCA to make their international communications traffic available for inspection by U.S. military intelligence services. Even though its initial purpose was to monitor any communications of military significance, such as the transmission of military secrets, there were no controls on what was inspected and what was not. This program continued for the next twenty-eight years and kept secret from every president until it was terminated under the Ford administration in 1975.
Does Shamrock mean that UFOs exist? Of course not. But it does reveal the capability of the U.S. government to keep an ongoing operation secret from even the president of the United States, much like the UFO working group also under James Forrestal.
So what do I think about all of this, about what happened and what I did? I believe that because at the time I was so much in the routine of a military intelligence officer, I didn’t really stop to think about the implications of UFOs and EBEs. I understood that we were fighting a Cold War with the Soviets and a skirmish war with extraterrestrials. I believed that their intentions were, and still are, hostile, and I believe that we took the steps necessary to develop the weapons that can blunt their threat. In fact, the U.S. military has better, more accurate, and more powerful weapons for killing UFOs than were deployed in the movie Independence Day.
We can knock these gu
ys down tomorrow with high-energy lasers and directed particle-beam weapons that come right out of a Star Wars movie. And these aren’t fiction, they’re fact. If you want to know more, pay a visit to the U.S. Army Space Command Website on the Internet. These missile-launched HELs are the pride of our planetary defense system and a direct result of President Reagan’s courage in pushing for the Strategic Defense Initiative when everyone said it wouldn’t work. And that SDI was a direct result of the work General Trudeau and I did at Army R&D in 1962.
Sometimes things just work the way they’re supposed to. Sometimes, once in a very long while, you get the chance to save your country, your planet, and even your species at the same time. And when that time comes, as Davy Crockett once said:
• • •
Be sure you’re right, then go ahead.
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The Day After Roswell Page 34
