AFTERWORD

BACK IN THE 1950's, I REMEMBER WATCHING A TELEVISION SERIES ...called "I Led Three Lives" about the exploits of Herbert A. Philbrick, who described the “fantastic but true” story of his life as a member of a Communist Party cell and an undercover operative for the FBI. Years later, when I got to Army R&D, I remember thinking about how my own story was also “fantastic but true” and how what General Trudeau and I did helped to change the course of history.

Very few people knew that what was coming out of Foreign Technology during the early 1960s had some basis in a crash of a UFO that “officially” never took place. Lives were distorted, careers destroyed, children frightened into submission by Army Counterintelligence bogeymen, businessmen in Roswell threatened with financial ruination and even worse if anybody told the story of what happened. But they were all loyal Americans, and even though some might have had their doubts about hiding the truth, they went along with what the army wanted.

Many people have criticized the army and the government for maintaining the Roswell cover-up not only at the time but also through the years. For that, I need to say a word in defense of what the army did. It’s easy to criticize if you weren’t an adult back then or someone who didn’t understand the politics that governed our thinking at that point in American history. We had not yet fully made the transition from a nation at war to a nation at peace.

And there was Harry Truman, still reeling from his sudden ascendancy to the presidency, toughened into steel by his decision to drop the atomic bombs on Japan, and now faced with the monumental impact of a crash landing of a strange craft on American soil. Was it Soviet? Did it belong to a foreign power? Was it hostile? We simply didn’t know and weren’t about to say anything until we knew what it was.

Was it a flying saucer? The last time a public announcement of a landing by extraterrestrials took place, even though it was entertainment, panic ensued. In the aftermath of the war and the fears surrounding the Cold War, we didn’t want to risk another panic. So the military recommended and the White House agreed to clam up. Just like the secrecy surrounding the Manhattan Project, no word gets out. And for the next fifty years that policy, once put into place, governed the behavior of the U.S. government and the military about the existence of UFOs and the crash at Roswell.

You can also ask how the government was able to keep this secret for so long. Has there been any other cover-up so efficient and thorough that it went on, unbeknownst to succeeding presidents, year after year until it was finally stopped? In fact, there was just such a cover-up, started in the war, but continued as a matter of policy by Truman in 1947, code-named “Shamrock. “

Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, one of the original members of the UFO working group, convinced his boss President Truman in 1947 to continue working with International Telephone and Telegraph, Western Union, and RCA to make their international communications traffic available for inspection by U.S. military intelligence services. Even though its initial purpose was to monitor any communications of military significance, such as the transmission of military secrets, there were no controls on what was inspected and what was not. This program continued for the next twenty-eight years and kept secret from every president until it was terminated under the Ford administration in 1975.

Does Shamrock mean that UFOs exist? Of course not. But it does reveal the capability of the U.S. government to keep an ongoing operation secret from even the president of the United States, much like the UFO working group also under James Forrestal.

So what do I think about all of this, about what happened and what I did? I believe that because at the time I was so much in the routine of a military intelligence officer, I didn’t really stop to think about the implications of UFOs and EBEs. I understood that we were fighting a Cold War with the Soviets and a skirmish war with extraterrestrials. I believed that their intentions were, and still are, hostile, and I believe that we took the steps necessary to develop the weapons that can blunt their threat. In fact, the U.S. military has better, more accurate, and more powerful weapons for killing UFOs than were deployed in the movie Independence Day.

We can knock these guys down tomorrow with high-energy lasers and directed particle-beam weapons that come right out of a Star Wars movie. And these aren’t fiction, they’re fact. If you want to know more, pay a visit to the U.S. Army Space Command Web site on the Internet. These missile-launched HELs are the pride of our planetary defense system and a direct result of President Reagan’s courage in pushing for the Strategic Defense Initiative when every-one said it wouldn’t work. And that SDI was a direct result of the work General Trudeau and I did at Army R&D in 1962.

Sometimes things just work the way they’re supposed to. Some-times, once in a very long while, you get the chance to save your country, your planet, and even your species at the same time. And when that time comes, as Davy Crockett once said: Be sure you’re right, then go ahead.

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