CHAPTER 17

Star Wars

Toward the spring of 1962, General Trudeau told me of his intention to retire. He was not going to be the commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, he’d been told. The old man had charged up too many hills during his years in the army, rifle in hand, and fired back in the face of the enemy. Whatever he felt inside him, and General Trudeau was only human and nothing more, he never showed fear. He was unrelenting in the execution of his orders, unyielding when people opposed him, and he never ducked away from a fight.

Those who knew him either respected or feared him, but they never discounted him. A West Point graduate, he was born into a generation of U.S. military officers who had absolutely no doubts about what was right and what was wrong, and he marched through two wars and a series of commands, including the head of U.S. Army Intelligence, secure in the knowledge that he was on the right side.

These were great qualities in a wartime commander, but, as both General Trudeau and I found out, they could be the very things that make you vulnerable in a Cold War army of politicians angling for power as they fought an enemy who could not be seen and whose presence was only indirectly felt.

“There are no more Pork Chop Hills, Phil, “ General Trudeau told me after he had learned that General Maxwell Taylor with the support of the army leadership had passed him over for the South Vietnam command. It meant that this was his last command and that he would retire as lieutenant general.

“And I’m afraid this is a war the army’s going to fight by means of a political process instead of on the killing field. “
“We would win it if we were going there, General, “ I said, fury welling up in my chest. “You and I know what we learned in Korea. “
Maybe the general could see my face getting flushed because he said, “No, we probably would have gotten court martialed because of what we learned in Korea. Just think what they would do to us if we were to win the war. “

Then he laughed in a way that told me he was looking forward to his retirement. “We would have made the Communists look bad. You know you can’t do that, Phil. “

Even as we were speaking that afternoon toward the end of the summer, another Soviet trawler was heaving to at the entrance to the port of Havana, awaiting instructions for the off loading of its cargo while another one of our surveillance planes was circling high overhead snapping away its photos of the tarpaulins coming off the ICBMs laid out on the ship’s afterdeck. I didn’t know it yet, but a sequence of events was unfolding that would swirl me into one of the biggest controversies of my life just as the chilling truth about the attempts to colonize our planet and the harvesting of human beings and animals that were still going on made itself all too clear. A showdown was coming. It was just over the horizon. No one could see it, but a handful of us knew that something was stirring the waters just below the surface.

General Trudeau was saying his good-byes and started counting the days until he would change his uniform for civilian clothes and his office in the Pentagon for a corporate executive suite that befitted his experience as the commanding officer of some of our military’s most important divisions. He had been at the helm of R&D for six years after having commanded Army Intelligence for three years before that.

Although the general didn’t explicitly comment much on the incredible facts we had uncovered in the Roswell file because he considered it just part of his job, he did joke about it from time to time with his old friend Senator Strom Thurmond. More than once, I would take the back door into his inner office only to find Senator Thurmond and General Trudeau sitting on his couch and looking me up and down as I walked in.

“Art, “ Senator Thurmond would drawl, barely hiding his Cheshire cat smile, “what spooky things you think old Phil’s been into?”
“You been inside your junk file,’ Phil?” the general would ask.
“I would guess that you’re able to tell the future, Phil, “ Senator Thurmond said. “With what you’re readin’ you can predict any-thing. “
“Just acting like a good intelligence officer, Senator, “ I said, being as correct and noncommittal as possible in the presence of my commanding officer. “My job is to read intelligence and make analyses. “
“Well, they ain’t got nuthin’ on you, Phil, “ the senator said, and everybody in the room knew exactly what “they” meant even if we weren’t allowed to talk about “them” in public.

As for me? I was preparing my files for General Beech, the incoming chief of research and development, knowing that my own retirement would come at the end of 1962. So I would prepare to go silent about Roswell while setting up a run of about six months to push as many projects through as I could, including whatever was left in my nut file. Only I didn’t call it a nut file or anything after General Trudeau left. My new boss and I had a tacit agreement not to broadcast anything about Roswell or the files.

As the summer of 1962 came to an end, ominous reports were circulating all through Washington concerning Soviet freighters making their way into Cuban waters. The traffic was intense, but there was no response from our intelligence people on what was happening. The CIA was completely mum, and the word making its way through the Pentagon was that we were getting slapped around by the Soviets and were going to sit still for it. Whatever it was, friends of mine in Army Intelligence were saying, the CIA was going to downplay it because the Kennedy administration didn’t want a confrontation with the Soviet Union.

What was it? I kept asking, knowing all the while that the Soviets must have been playing around with something in Cuba and that’s why there were so many ships. Were they massing troops there? Was it a series of military exercises? My answer came in a shocking series of photographs, unmistakable surveillance photographs, that were leaked to me by my friends in an office of Army Intelligence so deep inside the Pentagon and so secret that you weren’t even allowed to take notes inside the room. I was asked, by officers who may still be alive and therefore shall go unnamed, to take a good look at the photographs they had developed from the spy planes over Cuba.

They said, “Memorize these, Colonel, because nobody can make any copies here. “ I couldn’t believe my eyes as I looked down at the glossies and then ran a magnifying glass over them just to make sure that I wasn’t seeing things. Nope, there they were, Soviet intermediate range ballistic missiles of the latest vintage. These babies could take out Washington in just minutes, and yet there they were, sitting outside of hangars only a few miles from our marine base at Guantanamo Bay.

Had Gen. Curtis LeMay seen these photos, I had to ask myself? LeMay, a veteran of Korean bombing runs, should have been drooling over his desk at the prospect of bombing the hell out of Castro just for thinking he could even park IRBMs so close to U.S. airspace. Yet no reaction from Washington at all. The army had nothing to say, the air force had nothing to say, and my navy friends were simply unresponsive. Somebody was putting the lid on this, and I was getting deeply worried. So I called one of my friends, New York senator Kenneth Keating, and asked him what he knew.

“What do you mean missiles, Colonel Corso?” he asked. “What missiles, where?”
It was October 1962.
“In Cuba, Senator, “ I said. “They’re sitting in Cuba waiting to be deployed on launchers. Don’t you know?”

The truth was Senator Keating did not, nor did Representative Mike Feighan, whom I also called. Both legislators knew better than to ask me where I found the photos or who gave them to me, but before they did or said anything, they wanted to know why I believed them to be authentic.

“They come from our best resources, “ I told them. “I could pick out the missiles myself. I know what they look like. And it’s not just a single photo but a series over weeks of tracking the delivery of them on the decks of Soviet freighters. They’re unmistakable, very damning. “

Senator Keating asked whether I knew for sure that President Kennedy had been informed of the presence of the missiles, but I told him there was no way of knowing. Privately, I would have been shocked if intelligence sources had kept this information away from the President because there were so many intelligence pathways to the Oval Office the President would have found out no matter who tried to keep the information away. So it was pretty clear to me that the administration was trying to keep the news from the American people so that neither the Russians nor the Cubans would be embarrassed and have their backs against the wall.

I also knew that by going to Senator Keating and Representative Feighan I was taking a huge risk. I was leaking information outside the military and executive chains of command to the legislative branch. But, that same April, I had already testified to Senator Dirksen’s committee on the administration of the Internal Security Act that it was my belief - and I had proof to back it up - that our intelligence services, particularly the Board of Estimate, had been penetrated by the KGB and as a result we lost a war in Korea that we should have won.

The testimony was regarded as classified and was never released. But it made its way to Attorney General Robert Kennedy, who promised me, in a private interview at the Justice Department, that he would personally make sure his brother, the President, read it. Now here it was a little more than six months later and whatever intelligence information the President was getting about a serious Soviet threat to U.S. security, it was clear that unless somebody stopped them, the Russians were going to get away with it. Not on my watch.

President Kennedy had gone up to Hyannis Port, and the vice president, Lyndon Johnson, a friend of Ken Keating’s from his days as Senate majority leader, was completely out of the decision-making loop within the White House. The rumors were that because of his association with Bobby Baker, there was going to be an investigation of the vice president and he might return as a member of the ticket in1964. So Senator Keating didn’t recommend going to Lyndon Johnson with this information. Besides, we had to get it right in front of the public so it couldn’t be swept away, leaving the White House free to ignore it until it was too late to force the Soviets’ hand. This was a gamble, of course, because the whole world could explode in our faces, but I knew that the only way to deal with the Russians was put their noses in it and teach them a lesson. Had we done that in Korea the way MacArthur wanted to, there probably wouldn’t have been a Vietnam War.

One of my old friends in the Washington press corps was Paul Scott, the syndicated political columnist whose pieces appeared in the Boston Globe and the Washington Post. If we gave him the story, it would find its way into the Globe and the Post at the same time, right in the President’s face and forcing him to act. I didn’t enjoy this, but there was no other way.

So Senator Keating, Mike Feighan, and I coordinated strategy. I called Scott and told him I had seen some photos and had an interpretation he needed to hear. We met, not at the Pentagon, and I described to him the copies of the photos that I had seen and explained, in very general terms and without revealing anything classified about our surveillance apparatus, how they were taken, why they were authentic, and what they meant.

“You understand that when I saw these cylinders, “ I said to him, drawing on a notepad the tiny barrels in the photos on the deck of a ship, “these are intermediate range ballistic missiles that can hit Washington, New York, or Boston within fifteen minutes after launch. We don’t even detect these babies until they’re just below orbit and coming down. That gives us maybe five minutes to get under our desks. But with nuclear warheads on them, anybody sitting anywhere near where they detonate is not going to be protected. “
“What’s the point?” he asked. “Why would the Cubans want to get into a war with the United States?”
“It’s not the Cubans, “ I explained. “It’s Soviet blackmail. They’re not going to turn a bunch of missiles over to Fidel Castro and put the trigger for a nuclear war in someone else’s hand. The Soviets will have complete control, they’ll have their own troops on the island, and they’ll threaten to launch them if we or anybody tries to throw Castro out. “
“Why are you telling me this?” he asked.
“Because, “ I said hoping for a sense of outrageous indignation in him that would motivate him to action, “the President already knows and won’t do anything about it. “
I was right; the newspaperman was in shock. He half suspected that Kennedy wanted to avoid any and all confrontation until he made it to his second term, but this was outright capitulation, he said. “He can’t get away with it. “
“Oh, yes, he can, “ I warned him. “If we don’t get the story out, it goes away. The President’s sticking his head in the sand and hoping nobody pulls it out. You have to run this in the Globe right when he’s in Massachusetts and force him to confront it. He flies back to Washington and it’s in the Post. Then the Soviets know that he knows and it’s all a complete mess. “
“But what if this sets off a war, “ Scott said.
“Over Cuba? Listen, not even Khrushchev’s own people are willing to sacrifice Moscow for Havana, “ I told him. “It’s a Russian gambit because the RGB told Khrushchev he could get away with it. He’s punishing us for the U2 and the Bay of Pigs. We have to standup to the Russians right here and now because if we don’t the Cold War’s over and we lost. It’s all about territory, and if we don’t defend our own hemisphere, we lose. If we make them back down, humiliate them, we win. “

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

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

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

But I had made some powerful new enemies and could see the end of my own career in the army like the distant sign on an empty expressway coming up at eighty miles an hour that reads “Freeway Ends. “ I now devoted myself to packing away the Roswell files for those whom they would go to after me and writing my own notes for the work that I might find myself in after I left the army. Who could have realized that within months I’d be sitting in an office on Capitol Hill looking across the desk at one of my own successors who was there as the scientific adviser to the secretary of defense.

I may have stepped on the toes of some of the most powerful people in Washington, but it was still the good fight and I was, above all, still a soldier in the Cold War and still fighting the stealth war against the strategies of the EBEs, who were becoming more aggressive in their appearances over defense installations, cities, and our manned and unmanned space probes. Even the Russian intelligence services had begun to complain about the mysterious goings-on with their space probes. But they couldn’t come right out and tell us the reasons why. We had to figure those out for ourselves.

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

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

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

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

For his part, General Trudeau, in the months before he retired, made a number of appearances before Congress. He argued consistently that the army did have a real place in space and we had a capability in missile defense that he had proven at Los Alamos and at the guided-missile and Redstone command at Huntsville, Alabama. Moreover, the army had been able to use German scientists in the months immediately after the fighting in Europe had ended. It wasn’t just a matter of who could get the biggest budget, General Trudeau testified. In fact, he offered in a briefing before the Congressional Committee on Science and Astronautics, if the space effort was to be completely taken away from the army, then it should be given lock, stock, and barrel to the air force.

At least, he said, the air force was a military service and had officers and enlisted personnel who knew how to fight. But, at least in the early years, Congress and the President decided that NASA should control the space program. By the end of the 1960s, however, they had reversed that decision and realized that there was a serious military aspect to space exploration.

General Trudeau also had his allies among the major defense contractors we worked with. Not only scientists but members of the boards of directors suspected that the army had an urgency in developing weapons for use in space. Some of them even realized that we must have had a hidden agenda because each of the projects we proposed, like Horizon and the energy weapons, seemed de-signed for a war with enemies far more powerful and elusive than the Soviets.

When he would address industrial groups on matters of technical intelligence and applied engineering, General Trudeau received what I could only call a “knowing” response. He himself once wrote in his unpublished memoirs that when he was invited to give an address to one of the companies we worked with, the people who showed up were the decision makers.

He said:

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

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

But we were fighting so deeply immersed in the darkness of our own official denial that the fantastic nature of the truth, the ongoing effects of the truth, and the capitulation of the civilian intelligence services to some crazed blueprint they had for world order based upon an international government sometimes made us doubt our own senses. However, when you looked at what I called the secret history of the United States since 1947, you knew that the invisible elephant was walking through the room. A better analogy is the concept of the black hole.

Black holes, the ultra dense remains of stars that have collapsed upon themselves, swallow up light and gravity and, compressing them in like a galactic compactor into something that only subatomic particle physicists can describe and that can’t actually be “seen. “ Only their effects can be determined from the way light and gravity seem to behave around them.

So you guess that a black hole might be present in a specific region of space when light and gravity around it bend almost like the way water circulates around the drain at the bottom of your sink. That’s what the truth looked like in the region around our Cold War strategy and the development of any ultrahigh-tech or exotic weapons. It might have made sense in 1947, but by 1962, the refusal of the government to admit the war it was fighting was getting in the way of actually fighting the war.

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

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

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

But General Vandenberg, in the words of one of the officers I later ran into at the Pentagon, “had a cow, and not a mutilated one. “

“Colonel, “ this officer said, “steam was coming out of the old man’s ears he was so furious. Just be glad you weren’t there. “
So I asked this officer why General Vandenberg was so steamed. After all, he ordered the report in the first place. Why didn’t he just agree with General Twining and Admiral Hillenkoetter to ask the President to begin releasing the information?
“Are you crazy?” this officer said. The year was 1956 and I had been sent over from the White House for a briefing at the Pentagon.
“Don’t you remember what happened when that Orson Welles ‘War of the Worlds’ broadcast was on the radio? We had near riots in the cities because they thought that thing was real. Can you imagine what would happen if it really happened? If our own government said that flying saucers had landed just like on the radio, only this time we caught one and they’re still coming back? Think about it. Riots, looting, people going insane because they thought aliens were destroying the planet. “

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

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

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

Whatever the working group was supposed to be doing in 1952, it wasn’t satisfying the National Security Council, which ordered the CIA to determine whether the existence of UFOs would create a danger for the United States. Of course, the CIA already knew, because two of its intelligence directors had been members of the working group, that UFOs were displaying hostile intentions not I only to the United States but to the Soviets, the Italians, and the Scandinavians as well. All of NATO was trying to figure out a response to the UFO threat without triggering a reaction from the Soviets.

That was one of the reasons, thirty years later, President Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev could come to a meeting of the minds about UFOs that ultimately brought an end to the need for a Cold War. On January 14, 1953, just before the inauguration of President Eisenhower, CIA officials and air force officers met at the Pentagon at the CIA’s invitation to discuss the UFO situation and what our working group had learned up to that point. Officiated at first by Dr. H. P. Robertson, a CIA employee and the director of the Weapons Systems Evaluation Group in the office of the secretary of defense, the group also had working group member Dr. Lloyd Berkner, a physicist and one of the directors of the Brookhaven National Laboratories, as one of its members.

The Robertson Panel spent the next three days reviewing case histories of UFO sightings assembled for them by Air Force Intelligence and saw two films that contained footage of alleged flying saucers. The panel concluded there was no threat to the United States and recommended that the government should start debunking UFO sightings in general. This, the CIA reported as late as 1988, was the only official government response to UFO sightings.

Just over a year later, the White House agreed that it was necessary to have some sort of policy governing the release of UFO information to the press. In order to keep lower-level officers from releasing unauthorized information - and by unauthorized the National Security Council advising the President meant only that information cleared by the working group - Gen. Nathan Twining, now the airforce chief of staff, signed off on Air Force Regulation 200-2, which said that it was permissible to release reports to the media only when the object was identifiable, like swamp gas or a meteorite. But only the Air Technical Intelligence Center could determine which objects were identifiable and which weren’t. In other words, only the ATIC could authorize the release of any information about UFOs, and they did so only when the objects were clearly identifiable as common phenomena and not flying saucers.

Throughout the 1950s, I witnessed the government become more and more secretive about UFOs even though privately I thought that they would get better information if they were more open about it. But I was also a military officer and understood the necessity of keeping information confidential until you understood what it was.

Besides, the Soviets were making great strides in the race to get into space and we didn’t know if they were getting cooperation from the EBEs. There truly was a war on, and I followed orders on the White House staff even as I watched the officers in the cover-up begin to trip over their own feet time and again.

The darkness was closing in all around us.

In 1961, the air force began two secret projects that, in effect, had been in operation since 1947 but had not been committed to policy. “Moon Dust” had to do with the establishment of recovery teams to retrieve and recover crashed or grounded “foreign” space vehicles. But for all intents and purposes, as far as the public was concerned the air force was looking for Soviet satellites that had fallen out of the sky and landed on Earth. But in reality the air force was establishing a recovery of UFOs program just like the army had pulled the crashed UFO out of the New Mexico desert fourteen years earlier. Then in Project “Blue Fly,“ the air force authorized the immediate delivery of foreign crashed space vehicles and any other item of technical intelligence interest to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, for evaluation. It was a repeat of General Twining’s retrieval of the Roswell space vehicle from the 509th to Wright Field in 1947.

In 1962, one of the assistants to the secretary of defense, Arthur Sylvester, told the press at a briefing that if the government deemed it necessary for reasons of national security, it would not even furnish information about UFOs to Congress, let alone the American public. Now I was at the Pentagon and I fully understood how the air force was moving to take control of the entire UFO situation. NASA had the mandate from the President to manage space exploration, but the military still had to defend against the UFO threat even though we were being hampered at every turn.

Air Force projects “Saint” and “Blue Gemini” years later were outgrowths of USAF 7795, a code number for the USAF’s first antisatellite program, an aggressive operation designed to locate, track, and destroy enemy surveillance satellites or, and more importantly, orbiting UFOs. Using the technology we had developed at R&D, the air force, and then the army, was taking the initial steps to defend the U.S. missile system against Soviet attacks from space and defend the planet against UFO intrusions.

“Saint” was an orbital UFO inspector satellite, a version of a standard Agenda B satellite that the CIA had been using, that had an onboard TV camera and tracking and targeting radar system. Its job was surveillance. Find a potential enemy satellite or UFO lurking in orbit and lock onto it with a TV camera and with radar. Once the lock was in place, Blue Gemini, the “killer” satellite, would move in. One of the projects developed by Hughes Aircraft, a prime air defense contractor and satellite builder, Blue Gemini was the military version of NASA’s manned Gemini capsule. Its mission, purely and simply, was to swoop in from a higher orbit and kill or disable an enemy satellite or a UFO.

If possible, the Blue Gemini would try to “capture” a UFO in orbit by rendering it immobile and waiting for a manned military astronaut mission to “space walk” over and retrieve whatever we could. Both of these weapons, under the cover of other missions, of course, were eventually deployed, and today they form one of the lines of defense in an antimissile and anti-UFO surveil-lance system.

Saint and Blue Gemini were important first steps in our war against the UFOs. The technology that came out of Army R&D in the 1960s, retrieved from the aliens themselves, led directly to our ability to put up such a defense against the aliens even though in the hours after the crash at Roswell our situation looked completely hopeless. Like many of the products that came out of R&D and were used for military purposes, they had consumer uses. And today, if you look on the small dish digital direct broadcast television satellite antennas that are being marketed all across the country, you’ll see Hughes’s own brand. It’s an example of how technology originally earmarked for the military winds up as the most basic and everyday consumer product.

On December 17, 1969, the secretary of the air force announced the termination of Project Blue Book. He said that Blue Book’s review of more than thirteen thousand cases had yielded no information that there was a threat to national security in any way and that, in effect, since every sighting processed by Blue Book had been identified as something earthly and not extraterrestrial, there were, by definition, no such things as unidentified flying objects. Blue Book had done its job and now could report that our skies were safe. But Blue Book had been pure public relations from the start, and the military’s evaluation of UFOs continued uninterrupted.

In 1975 and early 1976, air force nuclear weapons repositories at Loring AFB in Maine, the all-important and sensitive Strategic Air Command facility at Minot, North Dakota, and other facilities in Montana, Michigan, and even the Royal Canadian Air Force Base at Falcon bridge in Ontario had been seriously encroached upon by UFOs. These weren’t just random sightings. UFOs actually conducted surveillance and scanning operations at the bases that resulted in security alerts and classified reports to Washington about the intrusions.

Then NASA finally got a project up and running to scan for radio transmissions from any advanced civilizations whose signals we could pick up. Called the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence and endorsed by the late Carl Sagan, SETI, which has since been discontinued, was not only a set of receivers around the world but a set of international protocols governing what would happen if contact was made with an extraterrestrial civilization.

For over fifty years, now, the war against UFOs has continued as we tried to defend ourselves against their intrusions. The Hughes hunter-killer satellites of the 1970s were our first steps in deploying a planetary defense system that held any real threat against the EBEs. When, late in the 1970s, we realized that a directed-energy weapon and high-energy laser were even more effective than exploding satellites, our defensive ability was enhanced even further.

We recognized that by applying both the technology we found at Roswell and Tesla’s vision of a particle beam to our own antisatellite missiles and laser targeting equipment, we could achieve the rapid aim/rapid fire capability that these type of defenses demanded. But we were still playing cover-up games even though the Russians were now finally acknowledging that maybe cooperation between the superpowers was called for to meet a common threat.

In the 1980s, both President Reagan and Chairman Gorbachev recognized the need for cooperation against a common enemy. While neither officially owned up to the threat of EBEs and alien hostilities, both acknowledged that if the United States and the Soviet Union could lay aside their differences and participate in a shared policy to defend the space around the earth, then both superpowers would benefit.

For his part, President Reagan pushed hard for the rapid development and deployment of a space-based defense technology to defend the planet. Called the Strategic Defense Initiative, and derisively dubbed “Star Wars” by the press, the SDI was described in 1985 in President Reagan’s own words as “a defensive shield that won’t hurt people but will knock down nuclear weapons before they can hurt people. “

Briefly, the Strategic Defense Initiative was described by the White House and the military as a space-based defense system to protect the United States from an all-out nuclear attack by the Soviet Union. It would include satellites that could detect a massive nuclear launch within seconds, orbiting lasers to destroy the first wave of missiles, laser-equipped submarines that could defend against the next round of attacks, and a ground-based missile system providing the last line of defense. In addition, the SDI also included what I thought was the best of its weapons, a missile-launched kinetic energy beam weapon that locked onto incoming warheads or low-orbiting space vehicles and knocked out their electronics with a particle beam.

The elegant aspect to the kinetic energy beam weapon was that you couldn’t really defend against it. Lasers, even highenergy lasers, had their shortcomings in that once a laser beam bounced off a surface, the surrounding energy envelope protected the surface from subsequent pulses. You either knocked out your target right away or shielded it against subsequent hits. But with a particle-beam weapon, you penetrated the surface, just like micro waving a piece of meat, destroyed its electronics to render it useless, and then broke it apart or melted it from within.

Amidst the warnings that the SDI wouldn’t work, was a giant unscientific gamble and a corporate giveaway, couldn’t provide the massive shield against nuclear missiles, would violate the ABM treaty President Johnson had negotiated with the Russians, and was a giant waste of the taxpayers’ money, guess what?

It worked!

We didn’t have to shoot down thousands of Soviet incoming warheads, and the Soviets never really cared about the ABM treaty in the first place because they knew they weren’t going to launch a first strike and neither would we. We both knew who the real targets of the SDI were, and it wasn’t a bunch of ICBM warheads. It was the UFOs, alien spacecraft thinking themselves invulnerable and invisible as they soared around the edges of our atmosphere, swooping down at will to destroy our communications with EMP bursts, buzz our spacecraft, colonize our lunar surface, mutilate cattle in their own horrendous biological experiments, and even abduct human beings for their medical tests and hybridization of the species. And what was worse, we had to let them do it because we had no weapon to defend ourselves.

These creatures weren’t benevolent alien beings who had come to enlighten human beings. They were genetically altered humanoid automatons, cloned biological entities, actually, who were harvesting biological specimens on Earth for their own experimentation. As long as we were incapable of defending ourselves, we had to allow them to intrude as they wished. And that was part of what the working group had to deal with. We had negotiated a kind of surrender with them as long as we couldn’t fight them. They dictated the terms because they knew what we most feared was disclosure. Hide the truth and the truth becomes your enemy. Disclose the truth and it becomes your weapon. We hid the truth and the EBEs used it against us until 1974 when we had our first real shootdown of an alien craft over Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany.

They had tried to disrupt our space program for years - Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and even the Space Shuttle. They buzzed our capsules traveling through space, interfered with our transmissions, and pulsed us with EMP bursts just like we used to do to the Soviet surface ships when we would hit them with a radar burst so massive it would send their earphone-wearing radar and sonar techs howling in pain down to the ship’s dispensary. But when the EBEs did it to us, we had no response. That was before the SDI.

Once launched and tested, our space-based high-energy lasers, or HELs, acted like the lightning bolts on the nights of July 3 and 4,1947, that so thoroughly disrupted the electromagnetic wave propagators in the spacecraft flying over Roswell that the pilots couldn’t retain control of their own vehicle. We eventually realized that what happened then was that a natural version of an advanced particle-beam burst actually brought a UFO down even as it tried to escape. When we deployed our advanced particle-beam weapon and tested it in orbit for all to see, the EBEs knew and we knew they knew that we had our defense of the planet in place.

Gorbachev, believe it or not, was also pleased because President Reagan guaranteed that the United States would throw its defensive shield around the Soviet Union, too. Sure, the two leaders shook hands and embraced one another in public. What they had achieved together, cooperating when they were supposed to be fighting, was nothing short of miraculous. Whatever we were fighting over became minimally important in the face of a threat from creatures who were so superior to us in technology that we were their farm animals to be harvested as they pleased.

But when the United States and USSR agreed, in the early 1980s, not to fight each other over this territory or that territory, to cooperate so as to defeat the common foe, we were unbeatable. Now, as the Space Shuttle docks with the Mir and the astronauts and cosmonauts share a toast of vodka from their plastic squeeze tubes and look out into the darkest reaches of space, they know that there is an electronic shield around them. Now that the war is just about over and we defend our beachhead, the truth will ultimately be revealed.

The real truth behind a fifty-year history of a war that looked like the ultimate defeat for human kind amidst a Cold War that threatened us with nuclear annihilation can now finally be told because we prevailed. It was because in the dark hours just before dawn in July of 1947 the army, only dimly recognizing that we were on the edge of a potential cataclysmic event, pulled the crashed space vehicle out of the desert and harvested its parts just like the inhabitants of that vehicle wanted to harvest us. In those moments, even though we might have fallen over ourselves in the darkness of the next fifty years, we set in motion the processes that brought us to an initial resolution with a military power greater than us.

It helped us in our confrontation with the Russians and, if we don’t lose our way, will help us manage the threats to come. When that truth of alien intervention in our planet’s affairs and our ongoing contact with an alien culture is finally revealed, it won’t be frightening even though it will be a shock.

The night closes in around you in the desert, exposing your deepest terrors of childhood bogeymen to the desolation of the landscape and the blackness of the sky. So, even inside your car you keep on chattering to keep the night away.

“And that’s what I think about all of it, UFOs, the Cold War, all of it, “ I told my companion in the car sitting next to me as we drove south through the New Mexican desert toward the town of Roswell. “I may be over eighty now, but that’s what I think. “

The night was swallowing us up as our car twisted around the curves on the crowned road surface, still warm and wet on a summer night from passing thunderstorms, heading toward lights we knew were over the horizon but still could not see.

“The Cold War, the missile crisis of 1962, the worldwide alert in1973, all history now, don’t you think?” I asked. “Maybe it was a good thing that the aliens forced us to defend the planet. At least it kept us in a Cold War even though we were using real bullets. “
“And what makes you think the Cold War is over, tovarisch?” my friend asked as he carefully took out a cigarette, lit it, and blew the smoke out the window. “American cigarettes, “ he said. “Am I not the most bourgeois decadent person you’ve ever met? But what would the Amerikanskis have done without me?”

And I laughed to myself and counted the million stars across the desert sky as far as I could see. Cattle sleeping near the scrub and sand fences along the side of the lonely state route, a coyote now and then running through the beams of our headlights, and the sound of my friend’s breath as he blew the column of smoke into the desert air.

It was a night just like this, lightning crackling off in the distance and a thunderclap rolling across the desert floor, a night just like this.

And what looked like a bright shooting star blazed very bright in an arc from south to north and disappeared over a rise as we continued toward Roswell into the darkness of the New Mexico night.

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