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 CHAPTER 8
 
 The Project Gets Under Way
 
 “THIS IS A HELLUVA REPORT, PHIL,“ GENERAL TRUDEAU SAID,
			looking up from the paper clipped sheaf of typewritten sheets I’d 
			handed him first thing that morning. I’d been waiting at my desk 
			since before six when I got back to the Pentagon, taking looks 
			outside the building every once in a while as the bright orange 
			reflection of the rising sun that exploded in a distant window and 
			looked as if it had caught fire.
 
				
				“What’d you do, stay up all night 
			writing it?”  
				“I put in some work after hours,“ I said. “I don’t want to spend 
			too much time in the nut file when people are supposed to be 
			working.“  
			The general laughed as he fingered through the paperwork, but you 
			could see he was impressed. As much as I wanted to denigrate the 
			Roswell file in front of him as a bunch of drawers full of stuff 
			that people would put me away for, we both knew that it contained 
			much of the future of our R&D.  
			 Military research and development agencies were under growing 
			pressure from the Congress to put some success points on the 
			scoreboard or get out of the rocket launching business for good. 
			Early failures to lift off the navy’s WAC Corporal and the army 
			Redstone had made laughing stocks out of the American rocket program 
			while the Soviets were showing off their success like basketball 
			players on fancy lay-ups right across the court. The army’s 
			
			Project 
			Horizon moon base project was sitting in its own file cabinet 
			gathering dust. And there was also a growing concern among the 
			military that we’d be pushed into taking over the failed French 
			mission in Indochina to keep the Vietcong, Pathet Lao, and Khmer 
			Rouge from making the whole area Communist. It was a war we could 
			not win but that would drain our resources from the real battle 
			front in Eastern Europe.
 
			 So, even more than scoring some field goals, General Trudeau needed 
			projects going into development to keep the civilian agencies from 
			cutting us back and diverting our resources. Now my boss held my 
			first report in his hands and knew that our strategic plan had some 
			rational grounding. He pushed for a tactical plan.
 
				
				“We know what we want to do, “ he said. “Now, how do we do it?” 
				“I’ve been thinking about that, too, General, “ I said. “And here’s 
			how I’d like to start. “
 
			I explained that I wanted to compile a list of all our technical 
			human resources, like the rocket scientists from Germany then still 
			working at Alamogordo and White Sands. I’d met more than my share of 
			our rocket fuel and guidance specialists in the guided missile 
			program during my years at Red Canyon in command of the Nike 
			battalion.  
			  
			But we were working with theoretical scientists as well, 
			men with experience who could combine the cold precision of an 
			engineer with the speculative vision of a free thinker. These were 
			the people I wanted to assemble into a brain trust, people I could 
			talk to about strange artifacts and devices that had no basis in 
			earthly reality. They were the scientists who could tell me what the 
			potential was in items like wafer shaped plywood thin pieces of 
			silicon with mysterious silver etchings on them.  
				
				“And once you have this brain trust, “ General Trudeau asked, “then 
			what?” “Match them up with technologies, “ I said. I admitted that we were 
			flying blind on much of the material that we had.
 
			We couldn’t go out 
			to the general scientific and academic communities to ask them what 
			we had because we would very quickly lose control of our own 
			secrets. Besides, a lot of it had to do with weaponry, and there 
			were very strict rules on what we could and could not disclose 
			without the appropriate clearances. But our brain trust would be 
			invaluable. And, with the proper orientation and security checks, 
			they would keep our secrets, too, just as they had since the end of 
			World War II.  
				
				“Which of the scientists do you have in mind?” Trudeau asked, taking 
			out the little black leather covered notepad he kept in his inside 
			pocket. “I was thinking of Robert Sarbacher, “ I said. “Wernher vonBraun, of 
			course. Hans Kohler. Hermann Oberth. John von Neumann. “
 “How much do they know about Roswell?”
 
			Trudeau wanted to know. If 
			they’d been consulted on the Roswell
			material back in1947, as I knew Wernher von Braun had been by 
			General Twining, then we weren’t revealing any
			secrets. If they had never been informed about the crash, then we 
			were going out on a limb by sharing 
			information that was still classified above top secret. General 
			Trudeau needed to know how dangerous it was to 
			bring these scientists into the loop.    
			But I assured him that all of 
			them knew something about Roswell because of
			their connection with the Research and Development Board. During the 
			Eisenhower administration information 
			about the classified research and data collection projects into 
			extraterrestrials was routinely filtered to the Office 
			of Research and Development because the head of the Research and 
			Development Board had been one of the original members of the group.
			 
				
				“I was at the White House when Sarbacher was on the board, General, 
			“ I told my boss. “So I can be pretty sure he was in the know. And 
			Hermann Oberth, “ I admitted to Trudeau. “He already told me that he 
			believed that the objects we saw popping up on our radar screens at 
			Red Canyon and then disappearing as if they were never there were 
			probably the same kinds of extraterrestrial aircraft that we picked 
			up at Roswell. So he knew, but I don’t know how. “ “Well, that’s good news, at least, “ the general said. “I’d rather 
			not be the one authorizing the release of classified information to 
			anyone who didn’t know it before hand. And I don’t want to put you 
			in the position, Phil, of having to explain to any higher ups why 
			you decided to release top secret information to people without 
			clearances, even in the interest of national security. “
 
			I appreciated that, but for our plan to work, we needed the 
			technical and scientific expertise people like von Braun, Oberth, 
			and Sarbacher could bring to any reverse engineering and product 
			development strategies.  
				
				"Will you approach them?” Trudeau asked.
				“We’ll have to begin by taking an inventory of all of the defense 
			industry contracts we’re currently managing, General, “ I said. 
			“Lineup the contracts and systems we’re developing with the 
			materials in the nut file to see where they fit in. Then bring in 
			the scientists to consult on making sure we know what we think we 
			have, that is, if they can figure out what we have. “
 “Let’s go through a potential product list first, “ the general 
			suggested. “Then see where our contracts line up and where the 
			scientists can help. And you know what happens then, “ Trudeau 
			asked.
 I wasn’t sure where he was going to take this.
 “We’re sticking you back in civilian clothes and sending you on the 
			road to visit our friends in these defense contractors. “
 “I don’t even get to keep my battle ribbons, “ I joked.
 “I don’t want anyone to know, “ General Trudeau explained, “that 
			some lieutenant colonel on the CIA’s Most Wanted list is traveling 
			to our biggest defense contractors with a mysterious briefcase full 
			of nobody knows what. You might as well wear a sign, “ he laughed. 
			“We have to get to work on that list. “
 
			That same afternoon I went back to my report on the 
			EBE and his 
			craft and began to list the riddles it contained and the 
			opportunities for the discovery of product it presented to us. The 
			entire event was like an enigma to us because every conventional 
			requirement one would expect to have found at the crash site, in the 
			craft, or even in the EBEs themselves was missing.  
			 Where was the engine or the power supply for the craft? It had 
			neither jet engines nor propellers. It had no 
			rocket propulsion like the V2 missiles, nor did it carry any fuel. 
			At Norton Air Force Base, where the craft eventually 
			was hangared, engineers marveled at the thin amalgam of the most 
			refined copper and purest silver they had
			ever seen that covered the ship’s underside. The metal was 
			remarkable for its conductivity, as if the entire craft 
			was an electrical circuit offering no resistance to the flow of 
			current.
 
			  
			Yet it was something our military engineers
			could not replicate. By the 1950s at Norton Air Force Base, at least 
			two prototypes of the alien craft had been 
			fabricated, but neither had the power source of the craft that had 
			crashed. In its stead were crude attempts at 
			nuclear fission generators, but they were ineffective and dangerous. 
			Even the portable nuclear generators that 
			would power the primitive Soviet and 
			American satellites in the 1960s were insufficient for the needs of 
			the replicated spacecraft. So the question remained, what powered 
			the Roswell spacecraft?  
			 I reviewed all of my discoveries in a checklist:
 
				
					
					
					The crescent shaped space vehicle also had no traditional 
			navigational controls as we understood them. 
					
					There were no control sticks, wheels, throttles, pedals, cables, 
			flaps, or rudders. 
					
					How did the creatures pilot this ship and how did 
			they control the speed, accelerating from a near stationary hover 
			above a given spot, like a helicopter, to speeds in excess of seven 
			thousand miles per hour in a matter of seconds? 
					
					What protected the creatures from the tremendous g-forces they 
			would have had to have pulled in any conventional aircraft? 
					 
			Our own 
			pilots in World War II had to wear special devices as they pulled up 
			out of dives that kept the oxygen from flowing out of their brains 
			and causing them to blackout. But we found nothing in the flight 
			suits of the creatures that indicated that they faced the same 
			problem. Yet their craft should have pulled
			ten times the g-forces our own pilots did, so we couldn’t figure out 
			how they managed this. No controls, no protection, no power supply, 
			no fuel: these were the riddles I listed.  
			  
			Along side them I listed that:  
				
				• The craft itself was an electrical circuit. 
				• That the flight suits - “flight skins” is a better description - 
			the creatures wore were made of a substance whose atomic structure 
			was elongated, strengthened lengthwise, so as to provide a 
			directional flow to any current applied to it.
 
			The engineers who first discovered this were amazed at the pure 
			conductivity of these skins, functionally like the skin of the craft 
			itself, and their obvious ability to protect the wearer while at the 
			same time vectoring some kind of electronic field. 
			  
			Where was the 
			physical junction of the circuit between the pilot and the ship? Was 
			it turned on and off somehow by the pilot himself through a switch 
			we didn’t know about?  
			 Alongside the riddle of the apparent absence of navigational 
			controls I listed the sensorized headband that so intrigued the 
			officers at Roswell’s Walker Field and fascinated me as well. If, as 
			we all suspected, this device picked up the electronic signatures 
			from the creatures’ oversized brains, what did it do with them? I 
			believed - and our industrial product development from the 1960s 
			through today as the brain wave control helmets finally came into 
			service ultimately confirmed - that these headbands translated the 
			brain’s electronic signals into system commands that controlled 
			speed, direction, and elevation.
 
			  
			Maybe the headbands had to be 
			calibrated or tuned to each individual pilot, or maybe the pilots - 
			since I believed they were genetically engineered beings 
			biologically manufactured especially for flight or long term 
			exploration had to be calibrated to the headband. Either way, the 
			headbands were the interface between the pilot and the ship. But 
			that still didn’t resolve the question of the lack of cables, gears, 
			or wires.  
			 Maybe the answer lay not in the lack of structural controls but in 
			the way the suit, the headband, the creatures’ brains, and the 
			entire craft worked together. In other words, when I looked at the 
			possible function of the entire system, the synchronicity between 
			the brain interface in the headband, the pure conductivity of the 
			spacecraft, and the elongated structure of the space skins, which 
			also acted like a circuit, I could see how directional instructions 
			could have been translated by the headbands into some form of 
			current flowing through the skins and into the series of raised deck 
			panels where there were indentations for the creatures’ hands.
 
			  
			The 
			indentations on these panels, as the Roswell field reports described 
			them, looked like the handprints pressed into the concrete at the 
			old Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood. Were the directional 
			commands a series of electronic instructions transmitted directly 
			from the creatures’ brains along their bodies and through the panels 
			into the ship itself as if the ship were only an extension of the 
			creature’s body? For that to have been the case, something was still 
			missing. The engine.  
			 Again, I settled on the idea of function over structure. The debris 
			and the spacecraft indicated that an engine didn’t somehow fall out 
			of the craft when it crashed. A conventional engine was never there 
			in the first place. What we found was that the craft seemed to have 
			had the ability to store as well as conduct a vast amount of 
			current. What if the craft itself were the engine, imparted with a 
			steady current from another source that it stored as if it were a 
			giant capacitor? This would be like charging the battery in an 
			electric car and running it until the battery was drained. Sound far 
			fetched?
 
			  
			It’s not much different from filling up a car with gas at 
			the pump and driving until the tank’s dry, or fueling a plane and 
			making sure you land before the fuel’s gone. I suspected the Roswell 
			craft was simply a capacitor that stored current that was controlled 
			or vectored by the pilot and was able to be recharged in some way or 
			could recharge itself with some form of built in generator.  
			 That would have explained the power supply, I noted along side the 
			riddle of the missing engine, but what was the means of propulsion 
			and direction? If there was a force that functioned the same way 
			thrust does, it wasn’t immediately obvious how it was created and 
			vectored. As early as September 1947, scientists who had gone to the 
			Air Materiel Command at Wright Field to see the debris were 
			speculating that the electronic potential of the Roswell craft 
			reminded them of the German and British antigravity experiments of 
			the 1920s and 1930s.
 
			  
			General Twining was reported to have said more 
			than once that the name of the Serbian electrical engineer and 
			inventor of alternating current, 
			Nikola Tesla, kept bubbling up in 
			the conversation because the scientists examining the damaged craft 
			described the way it must have converted an electromagnetic field 
			into an antigravity field. And, of course, the craft itself reminded 
			them of the German experimental fighter aircraft that made their 
			appearance near the end of the war but that had been in development 
			ever since the 1930s.  
			 Tesla and a number of other European scientists had been pioneers in 
			the conversion of circumscribed small 
			area antigravity fields out of electromagnetic fields. However, the 
			effort to develop true antigravity aircraft never 
			came to fruition among conventional aircraft manufacturers because 
			gasoline, jet, and rocket engines provided 
			a perfectly good weapons technology. But the theory of 
			electromagnetic antigravity propulsion was not 
			unknown even if it was not well understood and, without a power 
			source like a small portable nuclear fission 
			generator, not at all feasible. But, what if the flying craft 
			already carried enough electric potential and storage 
			capacity to retain its power, just like a very advanced flying 
			battery?
 
			  
			Then it might have all the power it needed
			to propagate and vector a wave directionally by shifting its 
			magnetic poles. If the magnetic field theory experiments carried out 
			by engineers and electrical energy pioneers Paul Biefeld and 
			Townsend Brown in the 1920s at the California Institute for Advanced 
			Studies were accurately reported - and the U.S. military as well as 
			scientific record keepers at the Bureau of Investigation kept very 
			close tabs on what these engineers were doing - then the 
			technological theory for antigravity flight existed before World War 
			II.  
			 In fact, prototypes for vertical takeoff and landing disk shaped 
			aircraft had been on the drawing boards at the California Institute 
			since before the war. It was just that in the United States nobody 
			paid them much attention. The Germans did develop and had flown 
			flying disks, or so the intelligence reports read, even though they 
			had no impact on the outcome of the war other than stimulating a 
			race between the United States and the USSR to gather as much of the 
			German technology as possible.
 
			  
			Thus, even though engineers had 
			attempted to build vertical takeoff and flying wing aircraft before 
			and had succeeded, the Roswell spacecraft, because it was so truly 
			functional and outflew anything we had - as well as traveled in 
			space - represented a practical technological challenge to the 
			scientists visiting the Air Materiel Command. We knew what the EBEs 
			did, we just couldn’t duplicate how. My reports for Army R&D were 
			analyses of the types of technology that we had to develop to either 
			challenge this spacecraft militarily with a credible defense or 
			build one ourselves.  
			 In my notes to General Trudeau, I reviewed for him all the 
			technological implications that I believed were relevant in any 
			discussion about what could be harvested from the Roswell craft. I 
			also wrote up what I understood about the magnetic field technology 
			and how unconventional designers and engineers had drafted 
			prototypes for these “antigravs” earlier in the century. All of this 
			pointed in one direction, I suggested : that we now had a craft and 
			could farm out to industry the components that comprised this 
			electromagnetic antigravity drive and brain wave directed 
			navigational controls. We had to dole them out piece meal once we 
			broke them down into developable units, each of which could have its 
			own engineering track.
 
			  
			For that we’d need the advice of the 
			scientists who would eventually comprise our brain trust, 
			individuals we could rely on and whom we could talk to about the 
			Roswell debris. These were scientists who routinely worked with our 
			prime defense contractors and could tell us whom to approach in 
			their R&D divisions for secure and private consultations.  
			 I was hoping that the evaluation of the kinds of things we were able 
			to learn from the EBE and his craft that I was preparing for 
			General 
			Trudeau would lead me toward the solution of some of the 
			physiological problems we knew our astronauts would encounter in 
			space flight. In the early 1960s, astronauts from both the United 
			States and the USSR had made their first orbital flights and had 
			experienced more than a few negative physical symptoms from the 
			weightless environment during the mission. Despite our official 
			claims that humans could travel safely in space, our doctors knew 
			that even short periods of weightlessness were extremely 
			disorienting to some of our astronauts, and the longer the flight, 
			the more uncomfortable the symptoms could become. We were worried 
			about loss of physical strength, reduced muscle capability in the 
			heart and diaphragm, reduction of lung capacity, and loss of tensile 
			strength in the bones.
 
			 Yet, scattered across the desert floor outside of Roswell were 
			creatures who seemed completely adapted to space flight. Just to be 
			able to examine these entities was an enormous opportunity, but I 
			knew we had the ability to harvest what we could observe about 
			aliens. So, again, along side the speculations I had made about the 
			EBEs and their craft I listed what I thought were the major 
			possibilities of developing product to enable us to travel in space 
			for extended periods of time.
 
 
			Renewable oxygen and food supplies were obvious directions to take, 
			and by the 1960s, NASA engineers were already designing ways to 
			recharge the atmosphere inside a capsule and provide for food 
			storage. We helped. It was Army R&D and our plan for developing an 
			irradiation process for food that even today provides the basis for 
			non-refrigerated food supplies on board spacecraft. But beyond that 
			were real issues of health and survival. Merely getting human beings 
			into earth orbit or even launching them into lunar orbit and 
			bringing them back safely were straight forward engineering 
			projects. But the readaptation of the human body to earth gravity 
			after an extended period of weightlessness or reduced gravity was a 
			far more intractable problem to solve. The physiology of the EBEs 
			provided an important clue.  
			  
			Besides the development of super 
			tenacity fibers that would protect the astronauts and the skin of 
			the spacecraft and the development of a food preservation process 
			that would neutralize all the bacteria that cause spoilage, we 
			needed to examine the ways we trained our astronauts physically so 
			that they would be more adaptable to periods of weightlessness and 
			spatial disorientation. At the same time we needed to develop 
			nutritional packages that would not place undue stress on a 
			digestive system that needed to compensate for deprivation of 
			gravity.  
			 Since there were no food preparation facilities on board the 
			spacecraft, we didn’t know how they stored or processed food or even 
			what they ate, if anything at all. However, my concern over a 
			process to preserve food for space travel was prompted by the 
			obvious challenge posed by the spacecraft itself. If we were going 
			to travel in space, and it was clear from what the army found at 
			Roswell that at least one culture had developed the technology to do 
			so, then R&D had to find a way to feed our pilots in space. 
			Therefore, we needed to develop a process to preserve food for space 
			missions that didn’t require refrigeration facilities and the 
			consumption of excessive amounts of energy.
 
 The problem of long term space travel still hasn’t been solved, in 
			part because we continue to rely upon conventional means of 
			propulsion that subject our astronauts to great periods of physical 
			stress, especially during takeoff. We also have no magic way for 
			astronauts to readjust to earth gravity after a long ride in an 
			orbit in space station like the Russian Mir or our own planned 
			station early in the next century. Manned trips to Mars, also on the 
			drawing boards for early in the twenty-first century, will also be a 
			problem because they will last for months and subject our astronauts 
			to a great deal of stress.
 
			 I suggested to General Trudeau in my report that although this 
			wasn’t explicitly an Army R&D mission, NASA should begin the 
			preparation of astronaut candidates from the time they’re still in 
			school.
 
				
				“If we train our astronauts from the time they’re children 
			the same way we do with potential athletes at sports camps and 
			provide the most promising candidates with flight training and 
			military or government scholarships to ROTC colleges, we will create 
			a cadre of officers physically adaptable and scholastically trained 
			to enter the next generation of space travel, “ I wrote.  
			 I know that 
			General Trudeau passed this recommendation along because NASA itself 
			opened a space training camp for future astronauts within a few 
			years after my retirement from the service.  
			 Beyond the issues concerning the training potential of astronauts 
			for conventionally powered space flight, the examination of the EBE 
			bodies and the ship’s possible propulsion system raised other 
			intriguing questions. What if, in addition to having been 
			bioengineered for interstellar travel, the EBE’s weren’t subjected 
			to the kinds of forces human pilots would routinely face? If the 
			EBEs utilized a wave propagation technology as an antigravity drive 
			and navigation system, then they traveled inside some form of 
			adjustable electromagnetic wave. I suggested to General Trudeau that 
			we should study the potential physiological effects on humans of 
			long term exposure to the kinds of energy spillage generated by the 
			propagation of an electromagnetic field.
 
			  
			Biologists needed to 
			determine how feasible such a form of space travel would be based 
			upon whether energy radiation would disrupt the cellular activity of 
			the human body. Perhaps the external one piece skins worn by the EBEs afforded them protection against the effects of being enclosed 
			in a portable electromagnetic field.  
			 Although Army R&D never conducted these studies because the medical 
			issues surrounding space travel were subsumed by NASA under 
			contracts with the military, indirect medical research was conducted 
			years later. Studies surrounding the physiological effects on 
			persons living near high voltage power transmission lines and 
			persons using extendable antenna hand held cellular telephones both 
			proved inconclusive. While some people argued that there were higher 
			incidences of cancer among both groups, other studies argued just 
			the opposite or found other reasons for any incidences of cancer.
 
			  
			I 
			believe that a definitive piece of research on the effects of low 
			energy or 
			ELM wave exposure still needs to be done because, 
			ultimately, even more than atomic energy or ion drives, magnetic 
			field generation will be the system that will propel our near 
			planetary voyages from 2050 through the early twenty second century. 
			Beyond that, for humans to reach destinations beyond the solar 
			system technology will require a radically different form of 
			propulsion that will enable them to reach velocities at or beyond 
			the speed of light.  
			 Thus did my second report cover the opportunities for research 
			presented to us by the autopsies of the EBEs and from the crash of 
			their vehicle. To my mind, it was nothing less than a confirmation 
			that the research into electromagnetics in the 1920s and the highly 
			experimental saucer and crescent shaped development of aircraft by 
			the Allies and Axis powers would have led to an entirely new 
			generation of airships. I know that my reports were read by the 
			higher ups in the military because top secret research has continued 
			right through to the present on a whole range of designs and 
			propulsion systems from the Stealth fighter and bomber to prototypes 
			for a very high altitude suborbital interceptor aircraft, developed 
			at Nellis and Edwards, now on the drawing board, which can hover in 
			place and fly at speeds over seven thousand miles per hour.
 
			 Once I finished my report on the opportunities we could possibly 
			derive from the EBEs and the craft, I turned my attention to 
			compiling a short list of immediate opportunities I believed 
			achievable by the Army R&D’s Foreign Technology Division from a 
			reverse engineering of items retrieved from the crash. These were 
			specific things, not as theoretical as questions about the 
			physiology of the EBE or the description of its craft. But, while 
			some might call them purely mundane, each of these artifacts, as a 
			direct result of Army R&D’s intervention, helped spawn an entire 
			technological industry from which came new products and military 
			weapons.
 
			 Among the Roswell artifacts and the questions and issues that arose 
			from the Roswell crash, on my preliminary list that needed 
			resolution for development scheduling or simple inquiries to our 
			military scientific community were:
 
				
					
					• Image intensifiers, which ultimately became “night vision” 
					• Fiber optics
 • Super-tenacity fibers
 • Lasers
 • Molecular alignment metallic alloys
 • Integrated circuits
 • Microminiaturization of logic boards
 • HARP (High Altitude Research Project)
 • 
					
					Project Horizon (moon base)
 • Portable atomic generators (ion 
			propulsion drive)
 • Irradiated food
 • Third brain guidance systems (EBE
			headbands)
 • Particle beams (“Star Wars” 
			antimissile energy weapons)
 • Electromagnetic propulsion 
			systems
 • Depleted uranium projectiles
 
			For each of the items on my list, General Trudeau went into his 
			human resources file and found the names of scientists working on 
			government defense projects or in allied research projects at 
			universities where I could turn for advice and some consultation. I 
			wasn’t surprised to see Wernher von Braun turn up under every rocket 
			propulsion issue. von Braun had gone on record in 1959 by announcing 
			that the U.S. military had acquired a new technology as a result of 
			top secret research in unidentified flying objects. Nor was I 
			surprised to sec John von Neumann’s name next to the mention of the 
			strange looking silver imprinted silicon wafers that I thought 
			looked like elliptical shaped crackers.  
				
				“If these are what I think 
			they might be, “ General Trudeau said, “printed circuitry, there’s 
			only one person we can talk to. “  
			Dr. Robert Sarbacher was an especially important contact person on 
			our list of scientists because he had worked on the Research and 
			Development Board during the Eisenhower administration. Not only had 
			Sarbacher been consulted by members of Admiral Hillenkoetter’s and 
			General Vandenberg’s working group on UFOs during the 1950s, he was 
			part of the original decision General Twining made to bring all of 
			the Roswell debris back to Wright Field for preliminary examination 
			before farming it out to the military research community.  
			  
			As early 
			as 1950, Sarbacher, commenting on the nature of the debris, said 
			that he was sure the light and tough materials were being analyzed 
			very carefully by government laboratories that had taken possession 
			of the debris after the crash. Because he was already knowledgeable 
			about the Roswell debris, Dr. Sarbacher was another obvious 
			candidate for an Army R&D brain trust.  
			 We also listed Dr. Wilbert Smith, who, in a memo to the controller 
			of telecommunications in November 1950, had urged the government of 
			Canada to investigate the nature of alien technology the United 
			States had retrieved from crashed extraterrestrial vehicles and that 
			was at that time being studied by Vannevar Bush. Dr. Smith, who had 
			learned of the U.S. investigation from Sarbacher, said that 
			regardless whether UFOs fit into our belief system or not, the fact 
			was we had acquired them and it was important for us to harvest the 
			technology they contained. He implored the government to make a 
			substantial effort to utilize alien technology. General Trudeau 
			joked that although Dr. Smith knew that we had acquired technology 
			at Roswell, he didn’t really know what it was. “I can’t wait to see 
			his face when you open your briefcase in front of him, Phil, “ the 
			general said, thinking about how his old friend had always wanted to 
			know the specifics of what he had secreted away in 1947.
 
			 Each of these scientists had maintained existing relationships with 
			any number of defense contractors during 
			the 1950s. General Trudeau also had relationships with the army 
			contractors who were developing new weapons 
			systems for the military within one part of the company while 
			another part was harvesting some of the same 
			technology for consumer products development. These were 
			companies—Bell Labs, IBM, Monsanto, Dow, 
			General Electric, and 
			Hughes - that General Trudeau wanted to talk to about the list of 
			technological products that we’d compiled from our R&D Roswell nut 
			file.
 
				
				“You begin calling our scientist friends, “ General Trudeau 
			announced. “And make whatever appointments you want. “ “Where are you going to be, General?” I asked.
 “I’m going to be taking some trips, too, “ he said. “First to the 
			chief of staff to make sure we have the discretionary budget we’re 
			going to need. Then to some of the people I want you to talk to once 
			you have the backing from the scientific community for the projects 
			on your list. “
 “Where to first?” I asked.
 “What do you like?” the general shot right back to me.
 “We’ve been working with image intensifies for some time, “ I said. 
			“We even got our hands on devices the Germans were working on at the 
			end of the war. “
 “Well then, why don’t you make a very preliminary trip over to Fort 
			Belvoir,“ General Trudeau said.
 
				“They’ve had a night vision project 
			in the works for the past ten years, but it’s got nothing over what 
			you have in your file. “ “I’ll get over there first thing, “ I said.
 “Yes, Phil, but you get out of that uniform and into a real lawyer 
			suit, “ the general ordered. “And don’t take your staff car.“ He 
			saw me raise my eyebrows. “All you’re going to do is feed a project,“ Trudeau continued, “that’s been under way since right after the 
			war. They’ve got stuff, but you’re going to give them a giant leap. 
			Once you’ve fed them, you’ll disappear and I’ll assign a night 
			vision project manager here to see the development through.“ I 
			prepared to leave his office.
 
				“No one will know, Phil, “ he said. 
			“Just like you thought, the Roswell night viewer will put a seed of 
			an idea in someone’s mind over at Fort Belvoir and it will become 
			part of along project history. It will disappear just like you into 
			the history of the product development. “ “Yes, sir, “ I said. I was beginning to realize just how lonely this 
			job could be.
 “You still have a suit that fits?” the general asked.
 “I think so,“ I answered. “Maybe what I wore over at the White 
			House is a little out of style, but it’ll pass.“
 “Good luck, Phil, “ General Trudeau said. “Make sure no one 
			knows where you’re going and I’ll make sure you have all the budget 
			you need. “
 
			This was the beginning. I saluted, but the general just stuck out 
			his hand and I shook it. We both realized in that moment, as we were 
			striking out on our own, just how momentous this was about to 
			become. A lieutenant general allocating money for his development 
			budget and a lieutenant colonel looking for someone to develop an 
			innocuous-looking eye shield an unknown GI had picked up out of the 
			sand near a UFO crashed into a rock in the lonely desert outside of 
			Roswell in a lightning storm fourteen years ago.  
			 What a pair we must have made.
 
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