The Day After Roswell (36 page)

The story ran in the Boston Globe and the Washington Post
within days, forcing the President back to Washington to confront a
crisis that would go down in history as one of the defining moments of
the Kennedy administration. Robert Kennedy knew that the White House
was getting faulty intelligence from the CIA, and John Kennedy knew
that he had to strike a middle course between the CIA people who told
him everything would be OK if he let Khrushchev off the hook and his
own air force chief, Curtis LeMay, who wanted him to invade Cuba.

Very wisely, President Kennedy didn’t invade Cuba.
He also didn’t back down, at least in public. Our blockade of
Cuba turned the Russian navy around and humiliated Nikita Khrushchev,
whose gambit had failed. President Kennedy traded off some obsolete
missiles in Turkey to give Khrushchev something he could take back to
the Kremlin. But we knew all along that when we deployed our Polaris
submarines in the Mediterranean and North Seas, we’d have
more firepower packed and ready to go against the Soviets than we ever
had in Turkey, and the Soviets wouldn’t even know it was
there. Besides, we knew the Turks would never let us fire our missiles
against the Russians from their soil. They were afraid that the
Russians would use the missiles as an excuse to attack Turkey, but the
Kremlin knew that, too, and knew we wanted an excuse to get out of
Turkey graciously.

So it worked all the way around, and President Kennedy got the
bragging rights to drawing a line right across the ocean where the
Russian navy could not cross, firing a shot across their bows in the
open ocean, and making them turn around in open water and sail back
home. Before the whole world the Russians had backed down. President
Kennedy was a hero.

But I had made some powerful new enemies and could see the end
of my own career in the army like the distant sign on an empty
expressway coming up at eighty miles an hour that reads
“Freeway Ends.“ I now devoted myself to packing away the
Roswell files for those whom they would go to after me and writing my
own notes for the work that I might find myself in after I left the
army. Who could have realized that within months I’d be
sitting in an office on Capitol Hill looking across the desk at one of
my own successors who was there as the scientific adviser to the
secretary of defense. I may have stepped on the toes of some of the
most powerful people in Washington, but it was still the good fight and
I was, above all, still a soldier in the Cold War and still fighting
the stealth war against the strategies of the EBEs, who were becoming
more aggressive in their appearances over defense installations,
cities, and our manned and unmanned space probes. Even the Russian
intelligence services had begun to complain about the mysterious
goings-on with their space probes. But they couldn’t come
right out and tell us the reasons why. We had to figure those out for
ourselves.

If the Cold War sounded complex and chaotic in the early
1960s as Kennedy juggled the strategies of Truman and Eisenhower while
recognizing that he couldn’t trust his own intelligence
services, imagine what it was like when you factored in the
“other” cold war or, as some have called it, the
“real” cold war against the extraterrestrials. It
was becoming like the elephant in a room that everybody knows is there
but keeps denying it. Its presence is so massive that you have to walk
around it. Its trunk swings with such a force that you have to duck
when it sweeps over your head. Watch out that the big elephant feet
don’t crush your toes when he plants them, and you
don’t want to step too close to the elephant’s
backside lest you get buried in what comes out.

In other words, dealing with the Soviets was just a big mess
that we had to accommodate while we all sat down at the same dinner
table. The Soviets and the Americans, pretending to break bread while
not blowing up the world. Yet each of us looking for the advantage
while we watched one another’s hands the entire time. You
watch your enemy’s hands, he watches your hands, and whatever
you can do with your feet you do. Meanwhile your enemy’s
doing the same thing.

The army’s hands were tied by the cover-up, the
refusal of the government to let us take on the alien threat with our
full resources because we had to pussyfoot around the truth. But more
than a few congressmen knew about the cover-up, were as concerned as we
were about the intrusions of the EBEs, the human abductions, and
the cattle mutilations, and supported the military’s agenda
for a program of speeded weapons development in space.

We were convinced that whoever the UFO extraterrestrials were,
they were tampering with our planet, operating with impudence, and
manipulating us constantly and secretly. But it was a secret that had
our full compliance because we were unwilling to admit the truth and
fight the war. Those of us in the military who knew what was happening
also felt that we could be experiencing an invasion that was more of an
infiltration. They were compromising our very systems of defense and
government, I suggested, and then, by the time the conflict opened up,
we would already be open and vulnerable. If the EBEs had been around
long enough, I once suggested to General Trudeau, might they have seen
the Trojan stowing that huge wooden horse the Greeks left for them
right through the open gates of their city?

For his part, General Trudeau, in the months before he
retired, made a number of appearances before Congress. He argued
consistently that the army did have a real place in space and we had a
capability in missile defense that he had proven at Los Alamos and at
the guided-missile and Redstone command at Huntsville, Alabama.
Moreover, the army had been able to use German scientists in the months
immediately after the fighting in Europe had ended. It wasn’t
just a matter of who could get the biggest budget, General Trudeau
testified. In fact, he offered in a briefing before the Congressional
Committee on Science and Astronautics, if the space effort was to be
completely taken away from the army, then it should be given lock,
stock, and barrel to the air force. At least, he said, the air force
was a military service and had officers and enlisted personnel who knew
how to fight. But, at least in the early years, Congress and the
President decided that NASA should control the space program. By the
end of the 1960s, however, they had reversed that decision and realized
that there was a serious military aspect to space exploration.

General Trudeau also had his allies among the major defense
contractors we worked with. Not only scientists but members of the
boards of directors suspected that the army had an urgency in
developing weapons for use in space. Some of them even realized that we
must have had a hidden agenda because each of the projects we proposed, like Horizon and the energy weapons, seemed
designed for a war with enemies far more powerful and elusive than the
Soviets. When he would address industrial groups on matters of
technical intelligence and applied engineering, General Trudeau
received what I could only call a “knowing”
response. He himself once wrote in his unpublished memoirs that when he
was invited to give an address to one of the companies we worked with,
the people who showed up were the decision makers. He said:

I think on every occasion that I went out, the chairman of the
board was there, the chief executive officer who was usually the
president, and an impressive cross section of their senior corporate
officers or directors. I might say even when I went to Sperry-Rand, no
less a person than General MacArthur honored me by his presence at
dinner, and he didn’t turn out for many.

General Trudeau was the father of the ballistic missile and
the person who, from the 1950s through the 1960s, made sure that our
armed forces adapted the ballistic missile for our own use. His
presence at Sperry-Rand with MacArthur, his boss in Korea, was all the
more important because General MacArthur knew the truth about UFOs and
commented that the army was girding itself to fight in space. And he
didn’t mean fighting the Russians in space, he meant the
extraterrestrials.

But we were fighting so deeply immersed in the darkness of our
own official denial that the fantastic nature of the truth, the ongoing
effects of the truth, and the capitulation of the civilian intelligence
services to some crazed blueprint they had for world order based upon
an international government sometimes made us doubt our own senses.
However, when you looked at what I called the secret history of the
United States since 1947, you knew that the invisible elephant was
walking through the room. A better analogy is the concept of the black
hole. Black holes, the ultra dense remains of stars that have collapsed
upon themselves, swallow up light and gravity and, compressing them in
like a galactic compactor into something that only subatomic particle
physicists can describe and that can’t actually be
“seen. ” Only their effects can be determined from
the way light and gravity seem to behave around them. So you guess that
a black hole might be present in a specific region of space when light and gravity around it bend almost like the way water
circulates around the drain at the bottom of your sink.
That’s what the truth looked like in the region around our
Cold War strategy and the development of any ultra-high-tech or exotic
weapons. It might have made sense in 1947, but by 1962, the refusal of
the government to admit the war it was fighting was getting in the way
of actually fighting the war.

Since 1947 and the formation of the working group, each new
layer of bureaucracy operating within the black hole of UFO strategy
and  intelligence  gathering found  itself
more enmeshed in the confusion of what was true and what was false than
the previous {layer. Like legions of blind soldiers, they bumped into
one another in the night, upset one another’s plans, and
thought that friends were foes and vice versa. In the absence of a
clear policy that could be maintained from generation to generation,
the strategy for dealing with the EBEs became tangled up in its own web.

After December 1947 when Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg, the air force
chief of staff, directed the air force to evaluate and track UFO
sightings - this in response to the working group - Project
“Sign” began at the Air Technical Intelligence
Center. Sign was so critical that even J. Edgar Hoover in 1947 issued
Bureau Bulletin 59ordering that all future reports of UFOs should not
be investigated by FBI agents but sent, instead, to the air force.

Although officially not looking for UFOs, the air force
Project Sign examined 243 sightings and submitted its report in
February *1949. But at the same time Sign was doing its evaluation, the
Air Technical Intelligence Center issued its own document called an
“Estimate of the Situation.” Basically, but
naively, the document came to the conclusion that we were dealing with
extraterrestrial interlopers who were observing us from UFOs. But
General Vandenberg, in the words of one of the officers I later ran
into at the Pentagon, “had a cow, and not a mutilated one.
”

“Colonel, ” this officer said,
“steam was coming out of the old man’s ears he was
so furious. Just be glad you weren’t there. ”

So I asked this officer why General Vandenberg was so steamed.
After all, he ordered the report in the first place. Why
didn’t he just agree with General Twining and Admiral
Hillenkoetter to ask the President to begin releasing the information?

“Are you crazy?” this officer said. The
year was 1956 and I had been sent over from the White House for a
briefing at the Pentagon.

“Don’t you remember what happened when
that Orson Welles ‘War of the Worlds’ broadcast was
on the radio? We had near riots in the cities because they thought that
thing was real. Can you imagine what would happen if it really
happened? If our own government said that flying saucers had landed
just like on the radio, only this time we caught one and
they’re still coming back? Think about it. Riots, looting,
people going insane because they thought aliens were destroying the
planet. ”

He was right. And what was worse, the aliens were setting up
for some sort of hostile act, whatever it was.

When General Vandenberg read the “Estimate of the
Situation,” he fumed and ordered the whole report burned to ashes
before anyone else could read it. It was one of the last official
government assessments of the UFO situation ever to get even close to
being distributed before the real cover-up clamped down.

But the grumblings about the absence of government policy
concerning UFO reports continued. Project “Grudge”
listed and evaluated 244 UFO sightings. Then in 1949 a memo that came
out of the CIA’s Office of Scientific Investigation was very
apprehensive about unexplained sightings of flying objects. Then in
1952 another CIA memo came to light; from the head of the Office of
Scientific Investigations Weapons and Equipment Division it also
complained about our lack of knowledge and police in the area of UFO
sightings. Now even the CIA, it seemed, was at odds with itself at its
various levels of bureaucracy over what to do about UFOs. Generals
Twining. and Vandenberg had had enough. In 1952, the air force formally
initiated Project Blue Book. At least if we weren’t going to
do anything about UFOs publicly, we had to have a way to salve the
public’s fear about UFO sightings. Blue Book was that salve.

Whatever the working group was supposed to be doing in 1952, it
wasn’t satisfying the National Security Council,
which ordered the CIA to determine whether the existence of UFOs would
create a danger for the United States. Of course, the CIA already knew,
because two of its intelligence directors had been members of
the working group, that UFOs were displaying hostile intentions not
only to the United States but to the Soviets, the Italians,
and the Scandinavians as well. All of NATO was trying to figure out a
response to the UFO threat without triggering a reaction from
the Soviets. That was one of the reasons, thirty years later,
President Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev could come to a meeting of the
minds about UFOs that ultimately brought an end to the need
for a Cold War.