|
CHAPTER 7
The EBE
Therefore, perhaps we should consider the EBEs as described in the
medical autopsy reports humanoid robots rather then life forms,
specifically engineered for long distance travel through space or
time.
A hot Washington summer morning had already settled over the Potomac
like a wet towel on the day I finished the first of my reports for
General Trudeau. And what a report it was. It set the tone for all
of the other reports and recommendations I was to make for the
general over the next two years. It began with the biggest find we
had: the alien extraterrestrial itself.
Had I not read the medical examiner’s report of the alien from
Walter Reed with my own eyes and reviewed the 1947 army photographs
and sketches, I would have called any description of this creature
pure science fiction; that is, had I not seen either this or its
twin suspended in a transparent crypt at Fort Riley. But here it was
again, just a yellowing sheaf of papers and a few cracked glossy
prints in a brown folder sitting among scores of odds and ends, bits
of debris, and strange devices in my nut file.
Even stranger to me than the medical examiner’s report was my
reaction: What could we exploit from this entity? I wrote the
general that “whether we found an ‘extraterrestrial biological
entity’ is not as important in the R&D arena as are the ways we can
develop what we learn from it so that man can travel in space. “
This quickly became the overriding concern with all of the Roswell
artifacts and the general format for all of my reports. Once I
swallowed back the “oh wow” aspect to all of this life altering
information - and sometimes it took a very big swallow - I was still
left with the job of sorting out what looked promising for R&D to
develop from what seemed beyond our realistic grasp for the present.
I began with the EBE.
The medical report and supporting photographs in front of me
suggested that the creature was remarkably well adapted for long
distance space travel. For example, biological time, the Walter Reed
medical examiners hypothesized, must have passed very slowly for the
entity because it possessed a very slow metabolism, evidenced, they
said, by the enormous capacities of the huge heart and lungs.
The
physiology of this thing indicated that this was not a creature
whose body had to work hard to sustain it. A larger heart, my ME’s
report read, meant that it took fewer beats than an average human
heart to drive the thin, milky, almost lymphatic like fluid through
a limited, more primitive looking, and apparently reduced capacity
circulatory system. As a result, the biological clock beat more
slowly than a human’s and probably allowed the creature to travel
great distances in a shorter biological time than humans.
The heart was very decomposed by the time the Walter Reed
pathologists got their hands on it. It seemed to
them that our atmosphere was quite toxic to the creature’s organs.
Given the time that passed between the
crash of the vehicle and the creature’s arrival at Walter Reed, it
decomposed all of the organs far more rapidly
than it would have decomposed human organs. This fact particularly
impressed me because I had seen one of
these things, if not the very one described in the report, suspended
in a gel-like substance at Fort Riley.
So
whatever exposure it must have had was very minimal by human
standards because the medical personnel at
the 509th’s Walker Field got it into a liquid preservation state
very quickly. Nevertheless, the Walter Reed
pathologists were unable to determine with any certainty the
structure of the creature’s heart except to guess
that because it functioned as a passive blood storage facility as
well as a pumping muscle that it didn’t work the
same way as did a four chambered human heart. They said the alien
heart seemed to have had internal
diaphragm like muscles that worked less hard than
human heart muscle did because the creatures were meant to survive
within a reduced gravity as we understand gravity.
As camels store water, so did this creature store whatever
atmosphere it breathed in the large capacity of its lungs. The lungs
functioned in ways similar to a camel’s humps or to our scuba tanks
and released atmosphere very slowly into the creature’s system.
Because of the large heart and the storage function we believed it
had, we also surmised that it took far less breathable atmosphere to
sustain the creature, thereby reducing the need for carrying large
volumes of atmosphere along on the voyage.
Perhaps the aircraft had
a means of recirculating its atmosphere, recycling spent or waste
air back into the craft. Moreover, because the creatures were only
four or to feet tall, the large lungs occupied a far greater
percentage of the chest cavity than human lungs did, further
impressing the pathologists who examined the creatures’ remains.
This also indicated to us that perhaps we were dealing with an
entity specifically engineered for long distance travel.
If we believed the heart and lungs seemed bioengineered for long
distance travel so, too, was the creature’s skeletal tissue.
Although it was in a state of advanced decomposition, the creature’s
bones looked to the army medical examiners to be fibrous, actually
thinner than comparable human bones such as the ribs, sternum,
clavicle, and pelvis. Pathologists speculated that the bones were
more flexible than human bones and had a resiliency that might be
related to the function of shock absorbers. More brittle human bones
might more easily shatter under the stresses these alien entities
must have been routinely subjected to. However, with a flexible
skeletal frame, these entities appeared well suited for potential
shocks and physical traumas of extreme forces and could withstand
the fractures that would cripple human space travelers in a similar
environment.
The military recovery team at the Roswell site had reported that the
two creatures still alive after the crash had difficulty breathing
our atmosphere. Whether that was because they were suddenly tossed
out of their craft, unprotected, into our gravity envelope or
whether our atmosphere itself was toxic to them, we don’t know. We
also don’t know whether the one creature who died very shortly after
the crash was struggling to breathe because he was fatally wounded
by gunshots or because of other reasons.
Military witnesses
recounted different stories about the creature that survived and
tried to run. Some said it was struggling to breathe from the moment
the military had secured the area; others said that it was gasping
only after it had been shot by one of the sentries. My guess was
that it was the alien’s sudden exposure to the earth’s strong
gravity that caused the creature to panic at first. That could have
been one reason his breathing seemed labored. Then, after he fled
and was shot, he was struggling to breathe because of his wounds.
The medical examiner’s report mentioned nothing about toxic gases or
the kind of atmosphere he believed the creatures naturally breathed.
If the Roswell craft were a scout or surveillance ship, as the
military analysts back at Wright believed, then it
was also more than likely that the creatures never intended to exit
the craft. This was a craft equipped with a
device that was capable of penetrating our nighttime or utilizing
the temperature differentials of different objects
to create a visual image, enabling the occupants to navigate and
observe in darkness. And because it could elude our interceptors and
appear and disappear on our radar screens at will, we believed that
the occupants simply stayed inside and observed rather than roamed
about. Perhaps other types of craft deployed from this same culture
were equipped to land and carry out missions and therefore had
breathing and antigravity apparatus on board for its crew that
permitted them to exit the craft without suffering any consequences.
The medical examiner didn’t speculate on this.
What did intrigue those who inspected the aircraft once it was
shipped to Wright Field was the complete absence of any food
preparation facilities. Nor were there any stored foodstuffs on
board. At a time when space travel was a science fiction writer’s
fantasy, military analysts were already at work formulating ideas
for how just such a technology could be practically implemented. It
was not for travel to other planets, but for navigation around the
earth because that’s the technology that military planners believed
the Germans were developing as an extension of their V2 rocket
program.
If you’re going to put airmen into earth orbit, how do you
process their waste products, provide adequate oxygen, and sustain
them during prolonged periods? Clearly, after you’ve developed a
launch vehicle with enough thrust to put a craft into earth orbit,
keeping it there long enough for it to accomplish a mission is the
next problem to tackle. The Roswell craft seemed to have tackled it
because somehow it got here from somewhere else. But there was no
indication of how such household problems as food preparation and
the disposal of waste were solved.
There was much speculation from the different medical analysts about
what these beings were composed of and what could have sustained
them. First of all, doctors were more tantalized by the similarities
the creatures shared with us than they were concerned about the
differences. Rather than hideous-looking insects or the reptilian
man-eaters that attacked Earth in War of the Worlds, these beings
looked like little versions of us, only different. It was eerie.
While doctors couldn’t figure out how the entities’ essential body
chemistry worked, they determined that they contained no new basic
elements. However, the reports that I had suggested new combinations
of organic compounds that required much more evaluation before
doctors could form any opinions. Of specific interest was the fluid
that served as blood but also seemed to regulate bodily functions in
much the same way glandular secretions do for the human body. In
these biological entities, the blood system and lymphatic systems
seem to have been combined. And if an exchange of nutrients and
waste occurred within their systems, that exchange could have only
taken place through the creature’s skin or the outer protective
covering they wore because there were no digestive or waste systems.
The medical report revealed that the creatures were enclosed within
a one piece protective covering like a jumpsuit or outer skin in
which the atoms were aligned so as to provide a great tensile
strength and flexibility. One examiner wrote that it reminded him of
a spider’s web, which appears very fragile but is, in fact, very
strong. The unique qualities of a spiderweb result from the
alignment of fibers that provide great tenacity because they’re able
to stretch under great pressure, yet display a resiliency that
allows them to snap back into shape even after the shock of an
impact. Similarly, the creature’s spacesuit or outer skin appeared
to be stretched around it as if it were literally spun over the
creature and seized up around it, providing a perfect skin-tight
protective fit. The doctors had never seen anything like it before.
I think I finally understood it years later, after I had left the
Pentagon and I was buying a Christmas tree. As I stood there in the
frosty air, I watched as the young man who prepared the tree for
transport inserted it, top first, into a stubby barrel like device
that automatically spun a twine mesh covering around the branches to
keep them in place for the trip home. After I got home I had to cut
through the mesh with a knife to remove the tree and separate the
branches. This tree set up reminded me specifically of the medical
report on the creature from the Roswell crash, and I imagined that
maybe the spinning process of the creature’s outer garment resembled
something like this.
The lengthwise alignment of the fibers in the suit also prompted the
medical analysts to suggest that the suit might have been capable of
protecting the wearer against the low energy cosmic rays that would
routinely bombard any craft during a space journey. The interior
organs of the creature seemed so fragile and oversized that the
Walter Reed medical analysts imagined that without the suit the
entity would have been vulnerable to the cumulative physical trauma
from a constant energy particle bombardment. Space travel without
protection from subatomic particle bombardment might subject the
traveler to the same kind of effects he’d experience if he were
cooked in a microwave oven. The particle bombardment inside the
craft, if heavy enough to constitute a shower, would so excite and
accelerate the creature’s atomic structure that the resulting heat
energy would literally cook the entity up.
The Walter Reed doctors were also fascinated by the nature of the
creature’s inner skin. It resembled, although
their preliminary reports didn’t go into any chemical analysis, a
thin layer of fatty tissue unlike any they’d ever seen
before. And it was completely permeable, as if it were constantly
exchanging chemicals back and forth with the
combination blood/lymphatic system. Was this the way the creatures
nourished themselves during their journeys
and was this how waste was processed? The very small mouths and the
lack of a human digestive system
troubled the doctors at first because they didn’t know how these
things were sustained. But their hypothesis that
they processed chemicals released from their skin and maybe even
recirculated waste chemicals would have explained the lack of any
food preparation or waste processing facilities on the craft. I
speculated, however, that they didn’t require food or facilities for
waste disposal because they weren’t actual life forms, only a kind
of robot or android.
Another explanation, of course, suggested by the engineers at Wright
Field, is that there would have been no need for food preparation
facilities had this craft been only a small scout ship that didn’t
venture far from a larger craft. The creatures’ low metabolism meant
that they could survive extended periods away from the main craft by
subsisting on some form of military prepackaged foods until they
returned to base. Neither the Wright Field engineers nor the Walter
Reed medical examiners had an explanation for the lack of waste
disposal on board the craft, nor could they explain how the
creatures’ waste was processed. Maybe I was speculating too far
about robots or androids when I was writing my report for General
Trudeau, but I kept thinking, also, that the skin analysis that I
was reading sounded more akin to the skin of a houseplant than the
skin of a human being. That, too, could have been another
explanation for the lack of food or waste facilities.
Much of the attention during the preliminary and later autopsies of
the creatures focused on the size, nature, and anatomy of their
brains. Much credence also was given to the first hand descriptions
of on scene witnesses who said they received impressions from the
dying creature that it was suffering and in great pain. No one heard
the creature make any sounds, so any impressions, Army Intelligence
personnel assumed, would have to have been created through some type
of empathic projection or outright mental telepathy.
But witnesses
said they heard no “words” in their mind, only the resonance of a
shared or projected impression much simpler than a sentence but far
more complex because they were able to share with the creature a
sense not only of suffering but of profound sadness, as if it were
in mourning for the others who perished on board the craft. These
witness reports intrigued me more than any other information we took
from the crash site.
The medical examiners believed that the alien brain, way oversized
in comparison with the human brain and in proportion to the
creature’s tiny stature, had four distinct sections. The creatures
were dead and the brains had begun to decompose by the time they
were removed from the soft spongy skulls that felt to the doctors
more like palatal cartilage than the hard bone of a human cranium.
Even had the creatures been alive when they were examined, 1947
medical technology didn’t have ultrasound scanning or the high
resonance tomography of today’s radiology labs.
Accordingly, there
was no way for the doctors to evaluate the nature of the cranial
lobes, or “spheres, “ as they called them in the report. Thus,
despite the rampant speculation about the nature of the creatures’
brains - thought projection, psychokinetic powers, and the like - no
hard evidence existed of anything, and the reports were very light
on real scientific data.
Where the possibility of some evidence about the workings of the
alien brains did exist was in what I referred to in my reports as
the ”headbands”. Among the artifacts we retrieved were devices that
looked something like headbands but had neither adornment nor
decoration of any kind. Embedded by some very advanced kind of
vulcanizing process into a form of flexible plastic were what we now
know to have been electrical conductors or sensors, similar to the
conductors on an electroencephalograph or polygraph.
This band was
fitted around the part of the alien cranium just above the ears
where the skull began to expand to accommodate the large brain. At
the time, the field reports from the crash and the subsequent
analysis at Wright Field indicated that the engineers at the Air
Materiel Command thought these might be communication devices, like
the throat mikes our pilots wore during World War II. But, as I
would find out when I evaluated the device and sent it into the
market for reverse-engineering, this was a throat mike only in a way
that a primitive stylus can be considered the forerunner of the
color laser-imaging printer.
Suffice it to say that in the few hours the material was at Walker
Field in Roswell, more than one officer at the 509th gingerly
slipped this thing over his head and tried to figure out what it
did. At first it did nothing. There were no buttons, no switches, no
wires, nothing that could even be considered to have been a control
panel. So no one knew how to turn it on or off. Moreover, the band
was not really adjustable, though it had enough elasticity to have
been one size fits all for the creatures whose skulls were large
enough to accommodate them. However, the reports I read stated, the
few officers whose heads were just large enough to have made contact
with the full array of conductors got the shocks of their lives.
In
their descriptions of the headband, these officers reported
everything from a low tingling sensation inside their heads to a
searing headache and a brief array of either dancing or exploding
colors on the insides of their eyelids as they rotated the device
around their head and brought the sensors into contact with
different parts of their skull.
These eyewitness reports suggested to me that the sensors stimulated
different parts of the brain while at the
same time exchanged information with the brain. Again, using the
analogy of an EEC, these devices were a very
sophisticated mechanism for translating the electrical impulses
inside the creatures’ brains into specific
commands. Perhaps these headband devices comprised the pilot
interface of the ship’s navigational and
propulsion system combined with a
long range communications device.
At first I didn’t know, but it was
only when we began development of the
long brain wave research project toward the end of my tenure at the
Pentagon that I realized just what we had
and how it might be developed. It took a long time to harvest this
technology, but fifty years after Roswell, versions of these devices
eventually became a component of the navigational control system for
some of the army’s most sophisticated helicopters and will soon be
on the American consumer electronics market as user input devices
for personal computer games.
The first Army Air Force analysts and engineers both at the 509th
and at Wright Field were also bedeviled by the lack of any
traditional controls and propulsion system in the crashed vehicle.
Looking at their reports and the artifacts from the perspective of
1961, however, I imagined that the keys to understanding what made
the craft go and directed its flight lay not only within the craft
itself but in the relationship between the pilots and the craft. If
we hypothesized a brainwave guidance system that was as specific to
the pilots’ electronic signature as it was to the spacecraft’s, then
we were looking at an entirely revolutionary concept of guided
flight in which the pilot was the system.
Imagine transportation
devices in which the key to the ignition is a digitized code derived
from your electroencephalographic signature and is read
automatically upon your donning some sort of sensorized headband.
That’s the way I believed the spacecraft was navigated, by direct
interaction between the electronic waves generated within the minds
of the pilots and the craft’s directional controls. The electronic
brain signals were interpreted and transmitted by the headband
devices, which served as interfaces.
I never managed to obtain a copy of the Bethesda autopsy of the
alien body the navy received from General Twining. I only had the
army report. The remaining bodies were kept in storage at Wright
Field initially. Then they were split up among the services. When
the air force became a separate branch of the service, the remaining
bodies, stored at Wright, along with the spacecraft, were sent to
Norton Air Force Base in California, where the air force began
experiments to replicate the technology of the vehicle. This made
sense. The air force cared about the flight capabilities of the
craft and how to build defenses against it.
Experiments were carried out at Norton and ultimately at Nellis Air
Force Base in Nevada, at the famous
Groom Lake site where the
Stealth technology was developed. The army cared only for the
weapons systems aboard the craft and how they could be re-engineered
for our own use. The original Roswell spacecraft remained at Norton,
however, where the air force and CIA maintained a kind of alien
technology museum, the final resting place of the Roswell
spacecraft. But experiments in replicated alien craft continued to
be carried on through the years as engineers tried to adapt the
propulsion and navigation systems to our level of technology. This
continues to this very day almost in plain sight for people with
security clearance who are taken to where the vehicles are kept.
Over the years, the replicated vehicles have become an ongoing,
inner circle saga among top ranking military officers and members of
the government, especially the favored senators and members of the
House who vote along military lines. Those who are shown the secrets
are immediately bound by national secrecy legislation and cannot
reveal what they saw. Thus, the official camouflage is maintained
despite the large number of people who really know the truth. I
admit I’ve never seen the craft at Norton with my own eyes, but
enough reports passed across my desk during my years at Foreign
Technology so that I knew what the secret was and how it was
maintained.
There were no conventional technological explanations for the way
the Roswell craft’s propulsion system operated. There were no atomic
engines, no rockets, no jets, nor any propeller driven form of
thrust. Those of us in R&D from all three branches of the service
tried for years to adapt the craft’s drive system to our own
technology, but, through the 1960s and 1970s, fell short of getting
it operational. The craft was able to displace gravity through the
propagation of magnetic wave, controlled by shifting the magnetic
poles around the craft so as to control, or vector, not a propulsion
system but the repulsion force of like charges.
Once they realized
this, engineers at our country’s primary defense contractors raced
among themselves to figure out how the craft could retain its
electric capacity and how the pilots who navigated it could live
within the energy field of a wave. At issue was not only a great
discovery, but the nuts-and-bolts chance to land multibillion dollar
development contracts for a whole generation of military air and
undersea craft.
The initial revelations into the nature of the spacecraft and its
pilot interface came very quickly during the first
few years of testing at Norton. The air force discovered that the
entire vehicle functioned
just like a giant capacitor. In other words, the craft itself stored
the energy necessary to propagate the magnetic wave that elevated
it, allowed it to achieve escape velocity from the earth’s gravity,
and enabled it to achieve speeds of over seven thousand miles per
hour. The pilots weren’t affected by the tremendous g-forces that
build up in the acceleration of conventional aircraft because to
aliens inside, it was as if gravity was being folded around the
outside of the wave that enveloped the craft. Maybe it was like
traveling inside the eye of a hurricane. But how did the pilots
interface with the wave form they were generating?
I reported to General Trudeau that the secret to this system could
be found in the single-piece skin-tight coveralls spun around the
creatures. The lengthwise atomic alignment of the strange fabric was
a clue to me that somehow the pilots became part of the electrical
storage and generation of the craft itself. They didn’t just pilot
or navigate the vehicle; they became part of the electrical
circuitry of the vehicle, vectoring it in a way similar to the way
you order a voluntary muscle to move. The vehicle was simply an
extension of their own bodies because it was tied into their
neurological systems in ways that even today we are just beginning
to utilize.
So the creatures were able to survive extended periods living inside
a high energy wave by becoming the primary circuit in the control of
the wave. They were protected by their suits, which enclosed them
head to feet, but their suits enabled them to become one with the
vehicle, literally part of the wave. In 1947 this was a technology
so new to us that it was as frightening as it was frustrating. If we
could only develop the power source necessary to generate a
consistently well defined magnetic wave around a vehicle, we could
harness a technology which would have surpassed all forms of rocket
and jet propulsion. It’s a process we’re still trying to master
today, fifty years after the craft fell into our possession.
I pushed myself through the night to complete the report for the
general. At least I wanted him to see that our strategy held out the
probability that even in a basic evaluation of the material were
covered, the seeds were there for specific products we could
develop. I wanted to start the entire process by writing him a
background report about the nature of the beings we’d autopsied and
what we could understand of the technology from an analysis of their
spacecraft.
By the time I finished, it was already just before sun up, and I
looked like hell. This was the day I was going to drop my report on
the general’s desk, first thing. I’d snap right to attention in
front of him and say, “Here’s that report you were waiting for,
General, “ confident it contained more than he ever thought it would
because the subject was that new and complicated. But I wanted to be
clean shaven and in a clean, crisp shirt. That’s what I wanted. I
didn’t even need any sleep because my optimism and confidence at
that moment were more powerful than anything a few hours of sleep
could give me. I knew I was onto something here, something that
could change the world.
Here in the basement of the Pentagon, lying
close to dormancy for over a decade, were secrets my predecessors
had just begun to discover before they were stopped. Maybe it had
been the Korean War, maybe the CIA or other intelligence agencies
had cast a pall over R&D’s operation, but those days were over now.
I was at the Foreign Technology desk and the responsibility for this
material was mine, just like General Twining had said it should be
fourteen years ago.
In those drawers I had found the puzzle pieces for a whole new age
of technology. Things that were only twinkles in the minds of
engineers and scientists were right here in front of me as hard,
cold artifacts of an advanced culture. Craft that navigated by brain
waves and floated on a wave of electromagnetic energy, creatures who
look through devices that helped them turn night into day, and beams
of light so narrow and focused you couldn’t see them until they
bounced off an object far away.
For years scientists had thought about what it would have been like
to travel in space, especially since the Russians first put up their
Sputnik. Plans for a military operated moon base had been developed
by the army in the 1950s under the leadership of Gen. Arthur Trudeau
at R&D but were ultimately shelved because of the formation of
NASA.
Those plans had tried to confront the issues of space travel for
prolonged periods of time and adjusting to a low gravity state on
the moon. But here, right in front of us, was the evidence of how an
alien culture had adapted itself to long range space travel,
different gravities, and the exposure to energy particles and waves
crashing into a spacecraft by the billions. All we had to do was
marshal the vast array of resources in the military and industry at
R&D’s disposal and harvest that technology. It was all laid out for
us, if we knew how to use it. This was the beginning and I was right
there on the cusp of it.
So in the first few minutes of glimmering light just on the edge of
the horizon, a promise of the day to come, I took off for home, for
a shower, a shave, a pot of coffee, and the crispest new uniform I
could find. I was driving east into the dawn of a brand new age, my
report right alongside me in my briefcase on the front seat. There
would be other reports and the details of long term complicated
projects to confront me in the future, I knew, but this was the
first, the foundation, the beam of light into a hidden past and an
uncertain future. But it was a light, and that’s what was important.
No time for sleep now. There was too much to do.
Back to
Contents
Back to Vida en Nuestra Galaxia
Back
to Zeta Reticuli Interaction With Earth
|