CHAPTER 14

The Antimissile Missile Project

there were times during my tenure at the Pentagon when something in the Roswell file had such resonance in my life that it made me question whether there was some larger plan for my work. I’ve read about the concept of synchronicity or confluence in the years since I retired from the military and how things or events tend to cluster around a common thread. Such a common thread was the development of the antimissile missile that encompassed my work in R&D at the Pentagon, my brief stint as a staff adviser to Senator Strom Thurmond, and my years in Rome during the war and occupation as the assistant chief of staff, Intelligence (G-2), Rome Area Allied Command.

In early 1963, just after I left the Pentagon, Senator Strom Thurmond asked me to join his staff as a consultant and adviser on military and national security issues. Congress had just appropriated $300 million to turn a fledgling plan to investigate the feasibility of an antimissile missile program into a full development project. But it ran right into a concrete barrier just as soon as it left the Senate. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara flatly refused to spend the money because, he said, not only would it intensify the U.S.-Soviet arms race, it would actually offend the Kremlin because it would put them on notice that we were trying to deploy a first strike capability while neutralizing their ICBMs. Worse, he said to the Congress, the United States military simply didn’t need the weapon in the first place.

Senator Thurmond was incensed and I was deeply worried. McNamara just didn’t get it. He was completely misinformed about how the Soviets reacted to any weapons deployment on our part. They didn’t negotiate with us out of a sense of cooperation, only a sense of necessity that it was in their best interests to do so. If they thought we could knock out their ICBMs, that, more than anything, would keep them honest. Hadn’t they backed down over Cuba because they saw that Kennedy actually meant business when he screwed up his resolve to order the navy to enforce the blockade? But the CIA had McNamara’s ear and was giving him exactly the information the disinformation specialists in the Kremlin wanted him to have: don’t develop the antimissile missile.

General Trudeau and I had a secret agenda we had worked up the previous year at the Pentagon. The antimissile missile, utilizing laser targeting and tracking, was supposed to be the perfect mechanism for getting the funds to develop a laser beam weapon we could ultimately use to fire on UFOs. At least that was the way we’d planned it. The general had gotten it through the Pentagon bureaucracy while I covered his flank on the legislative side, testifying before the Armed Services Committee on the efficacy of a weapon that was capable of protecting American strategic forces with an umbrella. If any country were foolish enough to attack the United States, the antimissile missile would blunt their offensive and enable us not only to devastate their military forces but hold their population centers hostage as well.

Not so, said the Defense Department. The deployment of an antimissile missile would encourage our enemies to attack our cities first and devastate our civilian population. What did it matter if we had the ability to strike back when the damage to us had already been done? The only thing that was keeping our civilian population centers safe was each side’s ability to hold the other’s nuclear forces hostage. If both sides devastated one another’s nuclear forces, it would give each side time to stop before a mutual destruction of the civilian populations.

But the secretary of defense didn’t understand war. He especially hadn’t seen what lessons the Soviets learned during World War II when their population centers had been devastated and people were reduced to the point of starvation and cannibalized one another for food. That kind of experience doesn’t toughen you against the ravages of war, it educates you. The Soviets’ only hope for a victory in the Cold War was in our putting down our guard and capitulating to them. By refusing to go forward with the antimissile missile, the secretary of defense was listening to arguments that were spoon fed to him, certainly without his knowledge, by people in the civilian intelligence community who were being manipulated by the KGB.

Senator Thurmond’s reaction to Bob McNamara’s refusal to spend the antimissile missile appropriation was to hold subcommittee hearings on this issue to find out why. The Defense Department didn’t want to disclose classified information about the capabilities of a proposed weapon and our defense policy before a public session of Congress. So Fred Buzhardt, who years later became President Nixon’s counsel, suggested that Senator Thurmond invoke a senatorial privilege to close a session of the Senate so that the issue of the antimissile missile could be discussed in private before the full Senate.

But first, we had to request specific information from the Department of Defense, and that task, because I was the Senator’s adviser for military affairs, fell to me. No one knew that I was actually the officer who had initially prepared the information for the antimissile missile program to begin with and probably knew more about the documents than anyone because less than a year earlier I had prepared them myself.

The first meeting with the Defense Department was held in my new office in the basement of the Capitol Building. Secretary McNamara sent his own scientific adviser, Harold Brown, who would later become the secretary of defense himself, along with an army colonel who had become the project officer for the antimissile missile development program. Brown didn’t know who I was, but his assistant from the army certainly did.

“Colonel, “ the army project officer began as soon as I asked him a question about the request we’d sent for information, and Harold Brown sat up straight in his chair. Gradually, like chipping away parts of a granite block, I asked the project officer about the specific details of the antimissile missile program, how much of the budget allocation from previous Pentagon funding they’d already spent, and what their development time table would be if the current appropriation were spent for the current phase of the project.

Then I asked more technical questions about the research into ground based radars, satellite based radars, speculation into Soviet counter antimissile missile strategies, and Soviet development of even bigger and more mobile ICBMs that would present more imperative targets for any antimissile missile system because we couldn’t take them out in a first strike. Mounted on railway cars or trucks, mobile Soviet missiles would be almost impossible to track even though they would have to remain stationary for the liquid fueling process to be completed.

“I see that my assistant keeps on calling you colonel, Mr. Corso, “Harold Brown said. “And you certainly seem to know a lot of details on this subject. “
“Yes, sir, “ I said. “I only retired from the army a couple of months ago but while I was at the Pentagon, I was the acting projects officer for the antimissile missile program. “
“Then there’s no use in holding back, “ Harold Brown said and finally smiled for the first time in our meeting. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a folded envelope. “Here are your copies of the complete details of the project about which we briefed President Kennedy. It’s all here. And I presume this is what you are looking for, officially, “ he said with a special emphasis on “officially. “

He knew that I knew what was in that envelope but couldn’t disclose it before the Senate because it contained classified information and I would be breaching the National Security Act. However, by his giving me the material, much of it based on information that I had developed myself and had privately briefed Attorney General Robert Kennedy on in 1962, Brown was giving me the full authorization to disclose. He probably realized that in private sessions, I had talked generally about what was in the army file on the antimissile missile - that was a form of senatorial privilege as long as it wasn’t abused - but that I couldn’t go formal with it. Now I could, and I appreciated Harold Brown’s candor.

The battle over the appropriation was about to be joined, but I couldn’t look over the contents of the envelope, some of which were my own notes, without thinking back to the sequence of events that led to this meeting and to the project that ultimately was developed as a result of it. It began earlier in 1962 as I was working down the list of the priorities I had set for myself in the nut file. In it was a medical report about the creatures that I was trying to save until I had gotten all of the tangible items from Roswell into the development process.

It was a report on the possible function and apparent structure of the alien brain, a report that marveled at the similarities between the KBH brain and the human brain. However, one item in the report threw me for a complete loop. The medical examiner wrote that measurements of brain activity taken from the EBE who was still barely alive at Roswell showed that its electronic signature, at least what they were able to measure with equipment in 1947, displayed a signal similar to what we would call long, low frequency waves. And the examiner referred to a description by one of the Roswell Army Air Field doctors that the creature’s brain lobes seem to have been not just physiologically and neurologically integrated but integrated by an electromagnetic current as well.

I would have loved to dismiss this as the speculation of a doctor who had no experience with this type of analysis and certainly no experience with alien beings. Therefore, whatever he wrote was nonsense and not worth the time it took to respond to it. File it back in the cabinet and get on to other issues that could be turned into viable projects.

But the medical examiner’s report was more disturbing than I was ready to admit because it took me back to a time when I was the assistant chief of staff in Rome and made friends with some of the members of the graduate faculty at the University of Rome.

I was a twenty five year old captain at the time, a former engineering undergraduate, way in over my head and learning my job responsibilities each day, keeping one step ahead of my boss so he wouldn’t find out that I didn’t really know anything. In one of my visits to the university I met Dr. Gislero Flesch, a professor of criminology and anthropology who lectured me on what he called his theory and experiments on “the basis of life. “ It was a wild and, I thought, supernatural theory on what he called the filament within each cell. The filament was activated by some cosmic action or form of electromagnetic radiation that bombarded the earth continuously from outer space and resonated against a constant refresh of electrical activity from the brain.

“Captain” he would say whenever he began some formal explanation. I also thought that he was always surprised that someone so young could actually be dispatched from the New World to administer law and justice in Rome, the capital of the ancient world. The old professor also was scrupulous about showing everyone, including his dimmest of students, extraordinary respect.

“The electromagnetic forces in the body are the least understood, “ he continued. “Yet they account for more activity than anyone realizes.

As an engineering student whose whole experience with energy had to do with verifiable experiments, I was more than skeptical at first. How can you measure an electrical activity in the brain that you cannot see? How can invisible waves of energy that you can’t feel or see excite certain areas of the human cell, and what was their purpose?

Professor Flesch introduced me to Professor Casmir Franck, one of the first scientists to ever photograph brain waves. Professor Franck became a friend because during my days in Rome, fighting off Gestapo agents, Communist partisans, and the local crime families and crime chieftains, I was always engaged in some type of warfare. But when I had time off, I wanted to meet people, to stretch my experience, to fall in love with the city of my own ancestors I had been assigned to protect. So I sought out a network of friends to whom I could relate and from whom I could learn. Professor Franck was just such a man.

In Franck’s first experiments he had used a rabbit brain as a test subject. He measured what he said were the long, low frequency waves animal brains generate and described how he was able to trace the paths these waves took when they were transmitted from the brain to the animal’s voluntary muscles. Certain muscles, Professor Franck said, were attuned to respond to certain brain wave lengths, waves of a specific frequency. In cases of muscle paralysis, it’s not the muscle that’s necessarily damaged, it’s the muscle’s tuning mechanism that becomes disabled so that it no longer picks up the right frequency.

It’s like a radio, he said. If the radio can’t pick up a signal, the radio isn’t necessarily broken; its antenna or the crystal may need to be adjusted to the correct frequency. I was a guest at his laboratory more than a few times and watched him carry out his experiments with live rabbits, interfering with their brains’ electromagnetic wave propagation by implanting electrodes and seeing which muscles became cataleptic and which responded. He said it was the frequency that was being altered because once the animal was removed from the experimental table, it could walk and hop as if nothing had ever happened.

Then Professor Franck introduced me to another one of his colleagues, the celebrated research biologist and physician Doctor Castellani, who had many years earlier isolated and identified the disease called “sleeping sickness” and perfected what during the1930s and 1940s became known as “Castellani Ointments” as treatments for a variety of skin diseases.

Where other doctors, he said, had focused on treating only the symptoms they could see on the skin, Doctor Castellani said that the problems of many skin rashes, psoriasis, or inflammations that looked like bacterial infections were, in fact, correctable by changing the skin’s electromagnetic resonance. The ointments, he said, didn’t attack the infection with drugs; they were chemical reactants that changed the electrostatic condition of the skin, allowing the long, low frequency waves from the brain to do the healing.

All three men were using these electromagnetic waves to promote healing in ways I considered astounding. They made claims about the ability of electromagnetic treatments to affect the speed at which cells divide and tumors grow. They claimed that through directed electromagnetic wave propagation they could cure heart disease, arthritis, all types of bacteriological infections that interfered with cell function, and even certain forms of cancer.

If this sounds like something supernatural in 1997, imagine how it must have sounded to the ears of a young and inexperienced intelligence officer in 1944 who was so far out of his element that the older, seasoned British intelligence laughed at his age. They laughed until they saw what happened to the Gestapo agents who were trying to reinfiltrate Rome behind the Allied front lines and met up with my men on the back streets and alleys. That’s when the laughing stopped.

I spent many hours with Professors Flesch, Franck, and Castellani in Rome and watched them experiment with all kinds of small animals. They didn’t have the research funds nor the endorsements of the medical societies to allow them to expand their work or to treat patients with their unconventional methods. Thus, much of their work found its way into research monographs, articles in academic journals, or university lectures at symposiums. And I left Rome in the spring of 1947, said my good-byes to the friends I had made at the University of Rome, and put their work - relegated once again to the supernatural - out of my mind as I concentrated on my new jobs at Fort Riley, the White House, Red Canyon, Germany, and the Pentagon.

Then on the day that I came across the speculative report on the structure of the alien brain from Roswell, everything Professors Flesch, Franck, and Castellani said came back to me like a clap of thunder. Here I was again, staring at a piece of loose leaf paper that was staring right back at me and forcing me to consider ideas and notions from over ten years ago that challenged everything science back then was telling us about the way the brain worked.

While I reviewed the reports about the autopsied alien brain and what the medical examiner thought the low frequency waves meant when he applied current to the tissue, I also saw reports from an army military liaison attached to the Stalingrad consulate office that described Soviet experiments with psychics who were attempting to exercise some form of kinetic mind control over objects traveling through the air, directing them from one spot to another. These reports, written in the late 1950s, gave General Trudeau a lot of concern because they showed the Soviets were onto something.

“These fellas don’t waste their time, Phil, “ the general told me a tone of our morning briefings after I had dropped off the reports the day before so he could look them over. “If they’re looking into this stuff, then they know there’s something there. “
“You don’t think this report is just a lot of speculation?” I asked. I knew from the expression on his face that it was a question I shouldn’t have asked.
“If you thought this was just speculation, Colonel, “ he said very abruptly, “then you wouldn’t be passing the buck up to me to tell you that. “

General Trudeau had a way of bringing you up short when he thought you said something stupid. And what I had said was very stupid for an officer with my training and experience. He also knew I was worried or else I wouldn’t have tried to back off so quickly. “You’re right to be worried about this, “ he said, his tone softening when he saw how I was looking at him. “You’d be right if you sat in your office and sweated bullets over what this means. And you know exactly what worries the both of us. Do I have to say it?”

No, he didn’t. It was obvious. If the Soviets had gotten their hands on some of the apparatus from any one of the alien spacecraft that had gone down since 1947 - and I didn’t know how many there were - they’d have figured out by now that the aliens had used some form of brain wave control for navigation. How they directed their thoughts or translated them into an electronic circuit, we didn’t know. But we knew that there were no steering wheels or conventional methods of control on the spacecraft, and the headbands we found with the electronic sensors on them were designed to pick up some form of signal from the brain.

The analysts at Wright Field believed that the sensors on the headbands corresponded with points on the multi lobed alien brain that generated low frequency waves, so the headbands formed an integral part of the circuit. If we were able to figure that out, the Soviets were certainly, capable of figuring that out as well. Besides, the general didn’t have to say it because I thought it: What if the Soviets, all alone in space the way they were in the early 1960s, had some communication with the aliens that we didn’t have? Who said the EBEs had to be anti-Communist anyway?

General Trudeau also shared with me some intelligence reports that described antimissile missile tests the Soviets had conducted with very powerful tracking radar. We’d known about their radars because I’d seen them work during exercises in Germany when each side would test the other’s responses over the East German border.

Their radars and their ability to lock onto aircraft was just as good as ours. But what the general showed me were reports that described the Soviets firing intercept missiles at incoming ICBM vehicles and exploding the intercept warheads so as to knock out the navigational systems on the aggressor missiles. One of those test intercepts had been conducted successfully right through an atomic cloud on one of the Soviet missile test ranges in Asia. This was especially disturbing because anyone who knows anything about the nature of anatomic cloud knows that the electromagnetic pulse immediately knocks out any form of electronics.

That’s also how we knew what the signatures were of the alien UFOs that buzzed our ships and bases. So much of our non-hardened power was knocked out by the pulse that we knew an electromagnetic wave had hit us. So if the Soviets could harden their antimissile missile guidance system to home in on a target through an electromagnetically charged atomic cloud, they were using a technology significantly more advanced than ours, and it spelled trouble.

“When you were in Germany commanding the Nike battalion, “ the general asked me, still holding the reports in his hand, “you experimented with tight evasive maneuvers in drone target practice, didn’t you?”

The general’s memory served him correctly. Our antiaircraft battalion deployed the Nike, one of the most advanced guided antiaircraft missiles of its time. The Nike was a radar guided missile.

And the Hawk was a heat seeking missile that could be locked onto its target by tracking radar and then, when launched, would home in on the target’s heat exhaust. So, even if a pilot tried to evade the missiles, the fast moving Hawk warheads would catch up to him and blow off his engine. If it were a tail engine fighter, it would effectively end his mission and he’d probably have to eject. If it were a wing engined bomber, then, with one of his wing mounted engines shot off, the pilot would probably have to turn for home because he wouldn’t have the power to carry the payload of bombs to the target.

“When we were shooting at drones in simulated bombing formation, we scored a perfect shoot down again and again, but when pilots used extremely fast evasive maneuvers against our missiles, we couldn’t hit them, “ I said.
“Explain how that worked, “ he asked.
“Nike antiaircraft missiles move like boats on water, “ I explained.

“They cut wide arcs and get an angle to home in on their targets. Any early evasive maneuvers the fighter pilot makes, the missile compensates for and stays on course toward his heat source. But if the pilot is able to evade at the very last minute of the Nike’s trajectory, the missile will fly right by and can’t recover. Bomber pilots have to stay in formation and keep on course if they’re going to hit their target and have enough fuel to get home, so their evasive patterns are strictly limited. For fighter pilots, it’s much easier so any MiG, just like any of our Phantoms, can out maneuver a Nike any day. “
“So if the Soviets have something that can take out missile warheads through an atomic cloud and are using devices that may have come from an alien technology, we have something to worry about, “ the general said.
“We’d have a lot to worry about, “ I agreed. “We have nothing even remotely like this, except for the laser tracking system, but that’s years away from any sort of deployment even assuming we can get the President to ask Congress to give us the money to develop it. “

General Trudeau slammed his palm on the desk with enough force to shake the entire office. I’m sure his clerk sitting just outside thought I was getting bawled out for something, but that was the general’s way of reinforcing a decision he was making.

“Phil, you are the antimissile missile projects officer for the time being. I don’t care whatever the hell else you have to do, you write me up a report on what we discussed here and then put together a proposal I can use to get us some money to develop this thing, “ he said. “I know we’re on the right track, even if we’re in a strange arena. Thought control, “ he said, speculating about how the power of the human brain could be harnessed to the navigation of a guided missile.

“Well, if the Russians are looking at it seriously, then we’d better do the same thing before they blindside us like the did with Sputnik. “
“Why me?” I said to myself as I walked down the stairs to my office.

This was like an assignment to write a term paper when there wasn’t even any research you could use and still be called sane. I had to write about the hardware and systems applications of navigational control, not medical or biological functions per se, but that made it all the more difficult. I remembered my son telling me that he was able to fix gasoline engines that had broken down and electrical motors that were no longer putting out power because he believed the moving parts spoke to him. As way out as I thought that sounded at the time, walking back to my office now and thinking about what the Soviets were playing with, maybe my kid didn’t sound so crazy after all. It was something I’d have to research.

If the information that Professors Flesch, Franck, and Castellani conveyed to me back in Rome fifteen years ago had any validity, then the vague references in the Roswell report that I’d read probably had validity as well. So I began.

“The references to EBE brain function in the medical examiner’s reports from Roswell, “ I wrote in my opening memo to General Trudeau, suggest new avenues of research to us in the guidance and navigational control of machines.

The electromagnetic integration of the alien brain lobes and the possible integration with other brain functions including kinesthetic capability - the ability to move objects - over long distance is startling and sounds more like science fiction than fact. But if we can establish a correlation with long, low frequency waves and this electromagnetic integration, it will be a way to identify a measurable phenomenon with a process we do not understand. Initially, I recommend we study the phenomenon in an effort to apply our findings to gathering and utilizing any data we can develop concerning long, low frequency waves and electromagnetic integration so as to marry it to our existing guidance and control hardware systems and create a new state of the art in missile tracking.

A caveat: The Central Intelligence Agency has begun a program in which they work with “seers, “ as they call them, parapsychologists who they expect will give them the same capability as the KGB’s “Psychotronic Technology” training. Both intelligence agencies are skirting the edges of our military’s approach and we must be careful not to let our research fall into their cauldron. We would be discredited and possibly stopped from proceeding both from efforts from our own side and from protests by the Soviets should they find out. Therefore I recommend that the background of our experimentation with long low frequency brain waves and any source material be completely expunged along with any historical data relevant to this analysis.

My basis for our proposed antimissile missile was the Soviets’ own success with controlling the trajectory of an ICBM warhead in flight and the success they had in targeting incoming warheads with their own antimissile missile in development.
 

“In recent months, “ I wrote, it has come to our attention that the Soviets can change the trajectory of an ICBM after launch once it is on its way to a target. In addition, the Soviets have twice tested an antimissile missile fired through an atomic cloud at an approaching ICBM. Therefore, a technical proposal must be drawn up as soon as possible for:

1. An antimissile missile that will be able to lock onto an incoming ICBM and stay locked on through all evasive maneuvers and destroy it before it reaches its target, and
2. All circuitry must be hardened to withstand radiation, blast, heat, and electromagnetic pulse from an atomic detonation up to and including the intensity of the Russian bomb explosion of 60 megatons.

Premise:
Our present antiaircraft missiles centered around the Nike-Ajax, Nike-Hercules, and the Hawk are not adequate against ICBMs thus rendering us virtually defenseless against such an attack. Present systems cannot remain locked onto an incoming ICBM or find the target to destroy if it changes trajectory, which capability the latest Soviet test models indicate the enemy may be able to deploy within the decade.

Our spy satellites will be able to locate the Soviet warheads once they are launched, but the Soviets are also developing the capability to disable our surveillance satellites either with orbiting nuclear weapons to destroy them or send them out of orbit. At the very least, Soviet capability to generate an electromagnetic pulse through a nuclear detonation in space will render our satellites electronically blind. Secret intelligence reports confirm that the Soviets have already disabled two of our satellites and one launched by the British.

We, therefore, have a two fold problem, not only must the antimissile missile circuitry be hardened but the spy satellite circuitry must also be hardened from radiation, ion emissions, and ELM pulses. But because of the nuclear test ban treaty, the United States will not have the opportunity to run actual tests so we will have to scale our data up from our existing test results to arrive at figures we can only assume are accurate.

When General Trudeau read my full report, he asked me to speak to the scientists who consulted with us as part of a brain trust and develop a technical discussion, as speculative as we needed it to be with no restrictions whatsoever, in which we integrated what we had in our Roswell files with what intelligence we had on the types of testing the Soviets were conducting.

“Don’t worry about how it’s going to be circulated, Phil, “ General Trudeau assured me. “I want to show it to only a few members of the House and Senate Defense appropriations committees and they’ve promised to keep it confidential. “
“I know you want this right away, General, “ I said. “Can I have the rest of the day to work on it?”
“You can have until tomorrow morning, “ he said. “Because after lunch tomorrow you and I are meeting with the Senate subcommittee and I want to read them this report. “

I told my wife that I’d be home late in the morning for a change of uniform and then I was going over to Capitol Hill for a meeting. Then I ordered up a couple of sandwiches, put a new pot of coffee on, and settled in at the office for a long night.

“The present design and configuration of our ICBMs is adequate, “ I wrote onto my legal pad, crossed out the sentence, and then wrote it again. “However internal changes are necessary, especially within the warhead capsule. “

What I would recommend would be nothing less than radical. We needed an entirely new navigational computer system that would take advantage of the transistorized circuitry now coming into development and projected for the marketplace by the late 1960s.

I suggested we model the missile’s on board computer on the design of an actual dual hemisphere brain with one hemisphere or lobe receiving global positioning data from orbiting satellites. The other hemisphere will control the missile functions such as thrusters, positioning changes, and booster stage separation. It will receive data through a low frequency transmission from the other lobe.

The control lobe will also transmit missile flight telemetry to the positioning lobe so that the two computers will function together in tandem. This, I reasoned, would make the system more difficult to jam. If our global positioning satellite detected a threat from an incoming antimissile missile, it would relay that information to the warhead, whose control computer would direct the thrusters to fire so as to take evasive action before the final target approach.

In as much as I believed it was through the application and amplification of low frequency brain waves that the EBEs navigated the craft that we found at Roswell, our implementation of this technology might enable us also to use our brains to control the flight of objects. We could use some form of a brain wave system to navigate our ICBM warhead final stage vehicles if their on board radar detected a threat from an antiballistic missile. We could also use this system to home in on incoming enemy warhead launchers even if they were capable of taking some evasive action.

If we designed the missile the way I suggested, by the time it had been locked into its final trajectory, its detonation would be set so that even if it were knocked off course it would still explode and cause enough collateral damage that it would count as a hit. Enough of our ICBMs could get through, we reasoned, so as to overwhelm not only the Soviet guided missile forces but pose a realistic threat to their population centers. Meanwhile, the technology we developed for changing the flights of our incoming ICBMs could be applied as a template to our own antimissile missiles so as to neutralize any Soviet missile threat.

My conclusion:

“An appropriation of $300 million must be requested for the coming FY 1963 as a urgent crash development appropriation. “

I read my own notes from the envelope handed over by Harold Brown and looked back at him.

“Colonel, “ Brown’s assistant said. “We understand the urgency of your request last year and we appreciate your reasons for fighting for it now. “
“But the Defense Department is simply not going to allow the army to go forward with an antimissile missile at this time. Not in1963, “ Mr. Brown said.
“When?” I asked.
“At a time, “ the army colonel said, “when the impact of our deploying this system will be greater than it is now. The Russians know we have a bead on the type of satellites they’re putting up and we can take them out in a heartbeat, much faster than they can take out ours. “

I began to answer, but Harold Brown got up to leave. We shook hands and he walked toward the door. The army colonel remained in front of my desk.

“Maybe just you and I can have a word, Colonel Corso, “ he said. My own associate on Senator Thurmond’s committee left the office also.

“In the Pentagon, we understand that your early research into the technology of the antiballistic missile is the real reason for your support, Colonel Corso, “ the project manager said. “It’s in good hands. “
But I can tell you he didn’t know the real reason, the EBEs. Only General Trudeau understood the secret agenda that lay beneath the research into the project.
“But when do you think development will start?” I asked.
“In just a couple of years we’ll have lunar spacecraft orbiting the moon, “ he said. “We’ll have orbiting satellites mapping every inch of the Soviet Union. We’ll see what they can throw against us. Then we’ll have exactly the kind of antimissile missile you proposed because then even the Congress will see the reason for it. “ “But until then ... “ I began.
“Until then, “ the colonel said, “all we can do is wait. “It would take another twenty years for the beginnings of an antimissile to be deployed. And it would also take a president who was willing to recognize the threat from the extraterrestrials to force an antimissile weapon through a hostile Congress.

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