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CHAPTER 13
The Laser
AS I WORKED MY WAY THROUGH THE LIST OF ITEMS IN MY NUT file, writing
advisory reports and recommendations to General Trudeau about the
potential of each item, I lost all concept of time. I could see, as
I drove up and down the Potomac shore to Fort Belvoir to check on
the progress of night vision at Martin Marietta, that the summer was
coming to an end and the leaves had started to change color. I could
also see that now it was already dark when I left the Pentagon. And
it was dark now when I set out for the Pentagon every morning. I’d
gotten into the habit of taking different routes to work just to
make sure that if the CIA had put a tail on me, I’d make him work
harder to stay up with me.
General Trudeau and I had settled down into a long daily routine
ourselves at R&D. We had our early morning meetings about the
Roswell file - he also called it the “junk pile” because it was
filled with so much debris and pieces of items that had broken away
from larger components - but we had buried the Roswell material
development projects themselves so deep inside the regular functions
of the R&D division that not even the other officers who worked with
us every day knew what was going on. We’d categorized the work we
did so carefully that when it came time to discuss anything about
Roswell, even if it had a bearing on some other item we were working
on at the time, we made sure that either no one was at the office,
or we were at a place where we wouldn’t have to stop talking just
because someone came into the room.
My responsibility at Foreign Technology was to feed R&D’s ongoing
project development with information and intelligence from sources
outside the regular army channels. These ran in interconnected rings
through the Pentagon to defense industry contractors to testing
operations at army bases and to researchers at universities or
independent laboratories who were under contract with us. If we were
developing methods of preserving food, always trying to come up with
a better way to prepare field rations, and the Italians and Germans
had a process that seemed to work, it was my job to learn about it
and slip the information into the development process.
Even when
there was no official development process underway for a specific
item, if something I learned was appropriate to anyone of the army’s
major commands, whether it was the Medical Corps, the Signal Corps,
the motor pool, ordnance, or even the Quartermaster Corps, it was
also my job to find a way to make that information appropriate and
drop it in without so much as a splash. This made the perfect cover
for what I was doing with the Roswell file as long as I could find
ways to slip the Roswell technology into the development process so
invisibly no one would ever able to find the Roswell on ramp to the
information highway.
For all the world to see, General Trudeau and I regularly met to
review the ongoing projects in Army R&D, those we had inherited from
the previous command and those we wanted to initiate on our watch.
Officers who’d been assigned to R&D before we arrived had their own
projects already in development, too, and the general had assigned
me the task of feeding those projects with information and
intelligence, no matter where it came from, without disturbing
either what the officers were doing or interfering with their
staffs. It was tricky because I had to work in the dark, undercover
even from my own colleagues whose reputations would have been
destroyed if word leaked out that they were dealing in “flying
saucer stuff. “
Yet at the same time, most high ranking officers at
the Pentagon and key members of their staffs knew that Roswell
technology was floating through most of the new projects under
development. They were also vaguely, if not specifically, aware of
what had happened at Roswell itself and of the current version of
the Hillenkoetter/Bush/Twining working group, which had personnel
stationed at the Pentagon to keep tabs on what the military was
doing.
Uniting what I called my official “day job” at R&D on regular
projects and my undercover job in the Roswell file, was my official,
but many times informal, role as General Trudeau’s deputy at the
division. In that job, I would carry out the general’s orders as
they related to the division and not specifically to any one project
or another. If General Trudeau needed information to help him
redefine his budgetary priorities or assemble information to help
compile supplementary development budgets, he’d often ask me to help
or at least give him advice.
And I functioned as the general’s
intelligence officer as well, supporting him at meetings with
information, helping him present position papers, assisting him
whenever he had to hold briefings or meet with congressional
committees, and defending him and the division against the almost
weekly attacks on our turf from officers in the other military
branches or from the civilian development and intelligence agencies.
Everybody wanted to know what we knew, what we were spending, and
what we were spending it on. And we had no quarrel with telling
anybody who wanted to know exactly what kinds of goods the American
people were getting for their money except when it came to one
category - Roswell.
That’s when the mantle of darkness would fall
and our memories about where certain things came from became very
dim, as it did with the dramatic improvement in night vision
technology shortly after the summer of 1961. Even our own people
became very frustrated with us when General Trudeau would turn to me
at a meeting and say,
“You know that night vision information you
sent over to Fort Belvoir a while back? Where did you find that
file, Phil?” And if I couldn’t play dumb and say, “I don’t think I
ever came across this before, must be someone else in charge, “ then
I’d simply shrug and say, “I don’t know, General, must have been in
the files somewhere. I’ll have to go back and look. “
It was an act, and many of the officers who suspected we had a stash
of information somewhere knew we
were covering up something. But if they were career, they also knew
how to play the Pentagon version of steal
the bacon. We had it and we were hiding it. No one would find out
anything unless we let them. So the general
would typically hand off anything having to do with military
intelligence information to me and I would usually
find a way not only to lose the answer but to lose the question as
well. We became so practiced at this that
entirely new inventions could find their way into development at
many different places at the same time without
anyone’s ever becoming aware of the source of the technology,
especially the officer who was assigned the task of project manager
within our very own division.
The CIA got so frustrated at not getting any information out of us
that they began keeping closer tabs on the Russian attaches floating
around Washington and working under their KGB controllers at the
embassies and consulates. Because the CIA knew how thoroughly our
universities had been penetrated they figured they’d get information
on the rebound by photographing what was inside the photocopiers at
the Russian embassy in Washington. And sure enough, from the rumor
mill circulating around the exchange of scientists between industry
and academia, the CIA knew that we were on to something at Army R&D
and kept the circle as tight around us as they possibly could. So I
had to keep close tabs on the general, not letting him go into
meetings, any meetings, unprotected and always making sure that the
CIA knew that they would have to climb over me to get to General
Trudeau and anything he knew. And the CIA knew that I knew what they
were doing and where their loyalties lay and also knew that it would
have to come to a showdown someday.
General Trudeau and I had quickly established our routine in
early1961, and our categorization of how we did our jobs seemed to
be working. Night vision was under development at Fort Belvoir, and
researchers who worked with us had made sure that the silicon wafer
chips had gotten to their colleagues at Bell Labs and assured us
that a new generation of transistorized circuitry was already
finding its way into development. The silicon chips were a covert
reintroduction to the people at Bell Labs because the initial
introduction of the integrated circuit chips from the Roswell crash
had reached defense contractors as early as 1947 in the weeks after
the material reached Wright Field.
A similar history of introduction and reintroduction had occurred
with stimulated energy radiation, a weapon the early analysts
believed they were looking at in the wreckage of the Roswell craft.
Since directed energy radiation was a technology we’d already
deployed in World War II, seeing what they thought was a super
advanced version of that technology, so advanced as to be in a
completely different realm, so excited the analysts at Wright Field
that they wanted to get it out to research scientists as quickly as
possible, which they did. And by the early 1950s, a version of
stimulated energy radiation had found its way into the scientific
community, which was developing new products around the process of
microwave generation.
Most Americans who were alive in the 1950s remember the introduction
of the microwave oven that helped us “live better electrically” in
our new modern kitchens. One of the miracle appliances that burst
onto the scene in the 1950s promised to cook food in less than half
the time of conventional ovens, even when the food had been
completely frozen. Marketed under a variety of brand names including
the now historic “Radar Range, “ the microwave oven cooked whatever
was inside not by the application of pure heat, the way conventional
ovens did, but by bombarding the food with showers of tiny waves of
electromagnetic radiation, usually only a centimeter or so long.
The
waves would pass through the food, exciting the water molecules deep
inside and causing them to align and realign, back and forth, with
greater velocity. The molecular activity generated heat from within
and the food cooked from the inside out. Once you enclosed it in the
right kind of container to keep all the moisture from evaporating,
you had a quick cooked meal.
The theory behind the microwave oven that started us down the long
and profitable path of stimulated energy research was formulated in
1945 with the first commercial microwave ovens rolling off the line
at Raytheon in Massachusetts in 1947 before any dissemination of
either intelligence or material from the crash of the Roswell
spacecraft. But in the wreckage of that craft, the scientists from
the test firing range at Alamogordo reported that the inhabitants of
the craft seemed to use very advanced wave stimulation
instrumentation that, according to their analysis, bore a
relationship to the physics of a basic microwave generator.
The
retrieval team that pulled the wreckage out of the desert also found
a short, stubby, internally powered flashlight device that threw a
pencil thin, intense beam of light for a short distance that could
actually cut through metal. This, the engineers at Wright Field
believed, was also based on wave stimulation. The questions then
were, how did the EBEs use wave stimulation and how could we adapt
it to military uses or slip it into the product development already
under way?
By 1954, when I was at the White House, the National Security
Council was already receiving reports of a theory, developed by
Charles H. Townes, that described how the atoms of a gas could be
excited to extraordinarily high energy levels by the application of
bursts of energy. The gas would release its excess energy as
microwaves of a very precise frequency that could be controlled. In
theory, we thought, the energy beam could be a signal to carry
communications or an amplifier for the signal. When the first maser
was assembled at Bell Laboratories in 1956, it was used as a timer
because of the very exact calibration of the wave frequency.
The maser, however, was only a forerunner of the product that was to
come, the laser, which would revolutionize every aspect of
technology it touched. It would also prove to be a weapon that would
help us deploy a realistic threat to the EBEs who seemed poised to
trigger a nuclear war between the superpowers. Where the maser was
an amplification of generated microwaves, the laser was an
amplification of light, and theories about how this might be
accomplished were circulating widely throughout the weapons
development community even before Bell Labs produced the first
maser. I had seen the descriptions of the EBE laser in reports about
the Roswell crash, a beam of light so thin that you couldn’t even
see it until it landed on a target.
What was the purpose of this
light generator? the Alamogordo group had asked. It looked like a
targeting or communications device, seemed to have an almost
limitless range, and, if the right power source could be found to
amplify the light beam to where it could penetrate metal, the device
could be used as a drill, a welder, or even a devastating weapon.
Even while I was at the White House, all three branches of the
military were working with researchers in university laboratories to
develop a working laser. In theory, exciting the atoms of an element
to produce light energy in the same way that atoms of a gas were
excited to produce microwaves, lasers offered the tantalizing
promise of a directed energy beam that had such a wide variety of
applications it could become an almost universal utility for all
divisions of the military, even controlling warehouse inventory for
the Quarter master Corps. Finally, in 1958, the year after I left
the White House, there was a surge in research activity, especially
at Columbia University where, two years later, physicist Theodore Maiman constructed the first working laser.
The first practical demonstration of the laser took place in
1960,and by the time I got to the Pentagon, General Trudeau had put
it on our list of priorities to develop for military purposes. Also,
because stimulated energy radiation devices were among the cache of
technological debris we recovered from Roswell, the U.S. development
or the laser encompassed the special urgent requirements of my
Roswell mission. I had to write a report to General Trudeau
suggesting ways the EBEs might have used laser technology in their
missions on this planet and how we could develop similar uses for it
under the guise of a conventional development program. In other
words, once we guessed how the aliens were using it, it was to
become our developmental model for similar applications.
We believed that the EBEs used lasers for navigation, by bouncing
beams off distant objects in space and homing in on them to
triangulate a course; for communication, by using the laser beam as
a carrier signal or as a signal in and of itself; for surveillance,
by painting potential targets with a beam; and for power
transmission, illumination, and even data storage. The strength and
integrity of the laser beam should have served as the EBEs’ primary
method of communication over vast distances or even as a way of
storing communications in packages for later delivery.
However, it
was the EBEs’ use of directed energy as a medical tool and
ultimately as a potential weapon that sent shivers up and down our
spines because to our minds it was evidence of the aliens’ hostile
intentions. Whether they saw us as true enemies to be destroyed or
regarded all life on our planet as laboratory specimens to be
experimented with, the results from the animal carcasses picked up
in the field by our military nuclear, biological, and chemical
recovery teams and the civilian intelligence investigators could
have been very much the same.
In the Pentagon from 1961 to 1963,1 reviewed field reports from
local and state police agencies about the discoveries of dead cattle
whose carcasses looked as though they had been systematically
mutilated and reports from people who claimed to have been abducted
by aliens and experimented on. One of the common threads in these
stories were reports by the self described abductees of being
subjected to some sort of probing or even a form of surgery with
controlled, intense, pencil thin beams of light.
Local police
reported that when veterinarians were called to the scene to examine
the dead cattle left in fields, they often found evidence not just
that the animal’s blood had been drained but that entire organs were
removed with such surgical skill that it couldn’t have been the work
of predators or vandals removing the organs for some depraved
ritual. Where there was evidence of crime of someone staging a
bizarre hoax, it was usually obvious from the clumsiness of the
attempt and the deliberate staging of the carcass. And in the
overwhelming majority of instances where the animal was killed by a
predator who consumed its blood and carried away internal organs,
the evidence of teeth marks or of a brief life and death struggle
was also a clear indicator of what had happened.
But in those cases
where investigators claimed to have been baffled by what they found,
the removal of the organs and the draining of the animal’s blood -
where blood had been completely drained - were so sophisticated that
there was almost no peripheral damage to the surrounding tissue.
There was even some speculation, in the early 1960s, that whatever
device the EBEs had employed, it didn’t even cut through the
surrounding tissue. We had no medical instruments that even remotely
approached what the aliens could do. It was as though some device
had simply excised the organs with techniques that even went beyond
our own surgical precision.
While I was on the White House National Security staff and later
when I was at the Pentagon, I was intrigued by these reports. I also
remember that both civilian and military intelligence personnel
attached to the staffs of individuals who worked for the
Hillenkoetter and Twining working group on UFOs in the 1950s were
actively engaging in research into the kinds of surgical methods
that would produce “crime scene evidence” like this.
Could have been the Russians, they thought at first. Given the tense
climate of the Cold War, a fear that the
Soviets were experimenting with American livestock to develop some
form of toxin or biological weapon that
would devastate our cattle population was not unduly paranoid. It’s
sufficient to say, without going into any
detail, that we were thinking about the same kinds of weapons, so it
was not far fetched to say that we were projecting our own doomsday
strategies onto what the Russians might have done.
But it wasn’t the Soviets who were going after our cattle. In fact
the Soviet strategy for destabilizing the United States was so
sophisticated that it was only a strategy of playing nuclear chicken
with the Soviets that forced them to back down in the end. It was
the EBEs who were experimenting with organ harvesting, possibly for
transplant into other species or for processing into some sort of
nutrient package or even to create some sort of hybrid biological
entity.
This is what people attached to the working group thought in
the 1950s and 1960s, and even though we had no solid intelligence at
the time that we were right, we operated on the assumption that no
one takes an organ just for the sheer pleasure of removing it.
Although the first public reports of cattle mutilations surfaced
around 1967 in Colorado, at the White House we were reading about
the mutilation stories that had been kept out of press as far back
as the middle 1950s, especially in the area around Colorado.
There
was speculation, also, that maybe pharmaceutical companies were
responsible because they could utilize the organs and soft tissues
in biological experimentation, but we dismissed that because the
companies had their own farms and could grow anything they wanted.
Our intelligence organizations and especially the working group
believed that the cattle mutilations that could not be obviously
explained away as pranks, predators, or ritual slaughter were the
results of interventions by extraterrestrials who were harvesting
specific organs for experimentation.
So if our cattle were important
enough to the EBEs to get them to expose what they were doing, it
was an important thing for us to understand why. The EBEs were
nothing if not coldly and clinically efficient - their methodology
reminded us of the Nazis - and they didn’t waste time sitting around
on the ground where they were most vulnerable to attack or capture
unless they had a darn good reason for doing so.
We didn’t know their reasons back in the 1950s and 1960s and can
only make educated guesses about them now, but back then we were
driven by a terror that unless we found ways to defend ourselves
against the EBEs we would be corralled by them and used for
replacement tissue or as a source of nutrition. In 1997 this may
sound like a nightmare out of a flying saucer horror movie, but
in1957 this was our thinking both in the White House and in the
military. We didn’t know, but we had irrefutable evidence that EBEs
were landing on farms, harvesting vital organs from livestock, and
then just leaving the carcasses on the ground because they knew we
couldn’t do anything about it.
The mutilations that interested the National Security personnel
seemed to have the same kind of modus operandi. Whoever went after
the animals seemed most interested in the mammary, digestive, and
reproductive organs, especially the uteruses from cows. In many
cases the eyes or throats were removed in a type of surgery in which
the demarcation line was almost microscopically thin and the
surrounding tissue showed that the incision had super heated and
then blackened as it cooled.
But the crime scene and forensic
specialists noted that in any type of cut by a predatory animal or a
human - even a skilled surgeon - one would find evidence of some
trauma in the surrounding tissue such as swelling, contusions, or
other forms of abrasion. In these reports of mutilations, forensic
examination showed no evidence of collateral trauma or even
inflammation.
Therefore, they believed, the cuts to extract the
tissue were made so quickly and wounds were sealed so fast that the
surrounding tissue never was destroyed. This meant that whoever was
operating on these animals did so in a matter of minutes. It was
rare, therefore, that police would ever catch them in the act. So if
we couldn’t protect our livestock or react intelligently to the
stories of human abductions, except to debunk them and make the
abductees themselves think they were delusional, we had to find
weapons that would put us on a more equal footing with the EBEs. One
of those weapons, which had a wide application potential, was the
laser - light amplification through stimulated energy radiation -
the device the army found in the Roswell spacecraft and would later
develop as a weapon in cooperation with Hughes Aircraft.
Shortly after the first successful demonstration of a ruby red laser
at Columbia University, the three military branches realized they
had a winner. The following year, the results of the tests at
Columbia, the industry interest in developing laser based products,
and the Roswell report on stimulated energy all merged on my desk.
Now it was my turn to get involved and assemble the information to
support laser product development with military funds before the
whole operation was turned over to one of the R&D specialists who
would take the product through its next stages. That was the way our
backfield worked: I fed the play, made sure the snap got off, and
then faded in behind the blockers. By the time the ball carrier had
made his way into the secondary, I was already off the field. I
never got the Heisman Trophy, but I sure as hell moved the ball.
I began by listing the needs of the army for what the laser might be
able to accomplish. Based on what the army analysts reported they
saw in the Roswell ship, it seemed to me obvious that if the Roswell
laser was a cutting or surgical tool, the beam could also be
utilized as an advanced rapid firing weapon. With a beam so precise
and directed, the laser would also make an excellent range finder
and target manager for artillery. If the beam was capable of
instantaneous read adjustment and fed into a computer, it would also
be the perfect targeting system for a tank, especially a tank on the
move.
Typically, a tank must stop before it can fire because the
gunner needs to have a fixed firing platform from which he
calculates range direction, and other compensating factors. The
laser can do all that while the vehicle is moving and should
therefore enable a tank to stay on the move while firing. And if a
laser can paint a target from a tank and find the range, I
speculated, it can do the same for a helicopter from air to air and
air to ground.
I suggested to General Trudeau that all the research we were
conducting into helicopter tactics, especially into the role of
helicopters as infantry support gun and rocket platforms, dove
tailed perfectly with the possibilities of the laser as a range
finding mechanism. We could paint friendly troops to locate them,
identify our foes, and illuminate potential targets with light
invisible to all but our own gunners. At the same time, our own
bombs or missiles can home in on the laser image we project onto a
target, like a heat seeking missile. Once painted, the target could
evade the laser guided rocket or shell only with great difficulty.
For a stationary target such as a fortification or artillery
redoubt, a laser guided shell would be particularly devastating
because we could take it out with one or two rounds instead of
having to go back again and again to make sure we’d found the
target.
As a signal, a laser is so intense, refined, and perfectly stable
that it is almost impervious to any kind of disturbance. For this
reason, I wrote General Trudeau, the EBEs must have used an advanced
form of a laser for their communication, and we can, too. The
intensity of the beam and its highly refined focus mean that it can
be aimed with minute precision. Amplifying the power to boost the
signal should not distort the beam’s aim, which makes it perfect for
straight line long distance communication.
Lasers also have high capacities for carrying multiple signals.
Therefore, I wrote the general, we can pack a greater number of
transmission bands into a laser signal than we can with our
conventional signal carriers. This meant that we could literally
flood a battlefield with different kinds of communication channels,
each carrying different kinds of communication, some not even
invented yet, and have them securely carried by laser signals. For
command and control on the increasingly sophisticated electronic
battlefield the army was predicting for the 1970s, lasers would
become the Signal Corps workhorses.
General Trudeau said that he was also interested in an item from one
of the specification reports that other military observers wrote
that said that lasers could also serve as projection devices for
large screen displays. Lasers were so bright that displays could be
shown in rooms that didn’t have to be darkened. The general saw the
possibility of fully lit situation rooms with large screen displays
from satellite radar transmissions. The room would allow computer
operators to see what they were doing at their keyboards while
seeing the displays and listening to the briefing.
I suggested that the army cartography division would be particularly
interested in the accuracy of the laser derived measurements for
maps. That same measurement ability would also be able to generate
digital data for ground hugging infantry support helicopters or low
flying planes. Aircraft that could stay close to the ground could
avoid enemy radar and stay concealed until the last minute. But
unless there was a method for accurately charting the topography,
aircraft could find themselves scraping tree tops or crashing into
the side of a hill. If a laser could accurately transmit topographic
features to altitude control and navigational computers on board
attack aircraft, it would keep the aircraft safely above any ground
obstacles but close enough to the ground to remain concealed.
This
ground hugging capability that I suggested to General Trudeau had
been suggested to me from the analysis reports of UFOs that also had
this capability. It was what enabled them to hover close to the
ground and to move rapidly at speeds over a thousand miles an hour
at treetop level without hitting anything. The laser type devices
aboard the UFO instantly fed the craft with the topographic features
of the landscape and the craft automatically adjusted to the
terrain.
In late 1961, General Trudeau asked me to visit Fort Belvoir again,
this time to meet a Dr. Mark Johnston, one of aeronautical research
scientists from Hughes Aircraft. Fort Belvoir was one of the safe
houses for the Office of R&D to conduct meetings in because it was a
secure military facility. My comings and goings there on Army R&D
business were completely routine, even to the CIA surveillance teams
that would occasionally pick up my car coming out of the Pentagon,
and could be covered in our daily logs with references to the
ongoing projects that served as covers. My meeting with Johnston,
for example, was to talk about the Hughes helicopter development
program, not to give him my reports on the laser measuring devices
we believed were in the Roswell spacecraft.
I briefed Johnston on
what the scientific team from Alamogordo believed was on the
spacecraft, asked him not to talk about it, and suggested that the
Hughes team developing the navigational radars for the helicopter
project consider using the newly developed lasers as terrain
measuring apparatus and for target acquisition.
“Yes, of course, “ I assured him. “The Office of R&D would have a
development budget for the laser project if the R&D team at Hughes
thought our idea was feasible and they could develop it. “
And that’s exactly what happened. Using the positive results from
the Columbia University test and the army weapons specifications we
drew up in R&D for the requirements of a range finder, targeting,
and tracking weapon, and with research grants from the Pentagon,
Hughes signed on as one of the contractors for the military laser.
Today, the laser has become the HEL, or High Energy Laser, deployed
by the army’s Space Defense Command as, among other things, an antisatellite/antiwarhead weapon.
My meeting at Hughes was quick and direct. Like so many of the
research scientists I met with from Hughes,
Dow, IBM, and Bell, Johnston disappeared behind the work benches,
computer screens, or test tubes of the
company’s back room and out of my sight forever. When General
Trudeau would ask me to follow up on the
project months later, a different company representative would meet
with me and the project would look just like
any other Army R&D initiated research contract. Any traces of
Roswell or the nut file would be gone, and the
project would have been slipped into the normal R&D functioning. Of
course this device didn’t come out of the Roswell incident. The
incident was only a myth; it never took place. This came out of the
Foreign Technology desk, something the Italians or French were
working on and we picked up through our intelligence sources.
Our work with laser products was becoming so successful by the end
of 1961 that General Trudeau was urging me to spread the wealth
around as many army bases as I could. I spoke to weapons experts at
Fort Riley, Kansas, for example, about the use of lasers by troops
in the field. Maybe as range finders, we suggested, or even as ways
to lock onto a target the way the air force was experimenting with
something they were calling “smart bombs. “ By 1964, after seeing
the research into the feasibility of lasers that we had
commissioned, hand held range finders were being tested at army
bases around the country, and today, police forces use laser sights
on their weapons. Lasers became one of the army’s great successes.
In one of our final pushes for the development of laser based
weapons systems, we argued successfully for a budget to develop
laser tracking systems for incoming missiles. This was a project we
fought hard for, over political opposition as well as opposition
from the other military branches, which were looking at our proposal
as a conventional method of tracking missiles.
The laser was too
new, they argued. Atmospheric interference or heavy clouds would
distort the laser over long distances, they said. Or, they said, it
would simply take too much power and would have no portability.
General Trudeau and I had another agenda for this project that we
couldn’t readily share with anybody. We believed that lasers could
be used not just to track incoming missiles - that was obvious. We
saw the lasers too as our best weapon for not only tracking UFOs
from the ground, from aircraft, or from satellites but, if we could
boost the power to the necessary levels, for shooting them down.
Shoot down a few of them, we speculated, and they wouldn’t violate
our airspaces with such impunity.
Equip our fighter planes or
interceptors with laser firing mechanisms and we could pose a
credible threat to them. Equip our satellites with laser firing
mechanisms and we could triangulate a firing pattern on the UFOs
that might even keep them away from our orbiting spacecraft. But all
of this was speculation in late 1961.
Only a very few people in the other branches of R&D even had a hint
about what we were proposing. The National Aeronautics and Space
Administration had its own plans for developing laser tracking
systems and didn’t want to share any development budget with the
military, so there was very little help forth coming from NASA. The
air force and navy were guarding their own development budgets for
laser weapons, and we couldn’t trust the civilian intelligence
agencies at all.
So General Trudeau and I began advocating a plan as
a cover to develop laser tracking and other sophisticated types of
surveillance projects. It was outrageous on the surface, but it
quickly found its adherents, and its real agenda could be completely
masked. We could never call it an anti-UFO device so we named it the
antimissile missile. It was one of the most successful projects ever
to come out of Army R&D. It owed most of its theory to our discovery
of the laser in the Roswell wreckage.
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