There were nights I’d spread these articles all around me as if they were indeed Christmas presents. There were nights when I’d just take one thing out and turn it around until I almost memorized what it looked like from different angles before putting it back. The days were passing and, without having been told directly by Trudeau, I knew that he was getting anxious. We’d sit at meetings together when other people were around and he couldn’t say anything, and I could almost hear his insides burst. There were times when we were alone and Trudeau almost didn’t want to broach our shared secret.
Outside the Pentagon there was a battle starting up all over again set to rage just as it had during the Truman and Eisenhower presidencies. Whose intelligence was accurate? Whose was truthful? Who was trying to manipulate the White House and who believed that by coloring or twisting fact that he could change the course of history? John Kennedy was leading a young administration capable of making extraordinary mistakes. And there were people at the heart of his administration whose own views of how the world should work were inspiring them to distort facts, misstate intentions, and disregard obvious realities in the hope that their views would prevail. Worse, there were those, deep within a secret government within the government, who had been placed there by the spymasters at the Kremlin. And it was those individuals we had the greatest reason to fear. Right now, Army R&D had stewardship over these bits and pieces of foreign technology from Roswell. How long we would have them I did not know. So, over a late-night pot of coffee in General Trudeau’s office, he decided that we would move this material out, out to defense contractors, out to where scientists would see it and where, under the guise of top secrecy, it would be in the system before the CIA could stow it where no one would find it except the very people we were trying to hide it from.
“This is the devil’s plan, General,” I said to Trudeau that night. “What makes you think we can get away with it?”
“Not we, Phil,” he said. “You. You’re the one who’s going to get away with it. I’ll just keep them off your back long enough until you do.”
Now, all I could think about was what I’d seen that night in 1947 and, worse, what in the world I was going to do with all this stuff next. I’d asked myself “why me?” hundreds of times since that night in the Pentagon. And asked why after fourteen years and my experience at Fort Riley I had become the inheritor of the Roswell file. But I had no answers then and no answers now. If General Trudeau had meant for this to happen when he took over R&D three years before I got there, I’ll never know. He never gave me any reasons, only orders. But since he was the master strategizer, I sometimes think he believed I must have had some experience with alien encounters and wouldn’t be spooked by working with the technology from the Roswell file.
I never asked him about it, as strange as that seems, because the military being what it is, you don’t ask. You simply do. So, now as then, I don’t question. I only remember that I went forward from that night to put into development as much of the Roswell file as I could and believed that whatever happened, I was doing the right thing.
CHAPTER 4
Inside the Pentagon at the Foreign Technology Desk
The Pentagon never sleeps.
And neither did I in those first few weeks at the R&D Foreign Technology desk as I racked my brain to come up with a strategy I could recommend to my boss. Amidst the constant twenty-four-hour motion of an office building where someone is always working, I spent more time at my desk than I did at home. Evenings, weekends, early mornings before the sunrise set the windows across the river in Washington an orange blaze, you could find me staring at the four-drawer file cabinet against my corner wall. I’d fiddle with the combination lock, sometimes so absorbed in coming up with a strategy for these strange artifacts that I’d forget the sequence of numbers and have to wait until my brain reset itself. And always, just outside my office was the pent-up urgency of crisis, the cocked trigger of a military machine always poised to attack anywhere, anytime, at the sound of a voice on the other end of a scrambled phone behind the soft-colored walls of an inner office along the miles of corridors on the inner or outer ring.
You think of the Pentagon as something of an amorphous entity with a single mind-set and a single purpose. It’s probably the same way most people see the structure of the American military: one army, one goal, everybody marches together. But that’s almost totally false. The American military—and its home office, the Pentagon—is just like any other big business with hundreds of different bureaus, many in direct and explicit competition with each other for the same resources and with different agendas and tactical goals. The separate military branches have different goals when it comes to how America should be defended and wars fought, and it’s not uncommon for differences to emerge even within the same branch of the service.
I was plunged right into this in my first weeks back in D.C. Debates were still going on from World War II, sixteen years before, and all of this formed the backdrop of Roswell. There was a huge wrangling within the navy between the aircraft carrier advocates from World War II and the submariners under Adm. Hyman Rickover, who saw the big flattops as herds of elephants, slow and vulnerable. Subs, on the other hand, running almost forever on nuclear fuel, could slip deep beneath the sea, lay a thousand or so miles off enemy territory, and blast away at his most vulnerable targets with multiple-warhead ICBMs. No way our enemies would escape destruction as long as we had our submarine fleet. So who needs another aircraft carrier with its screen of destroyers and other escorts when just one sub can deliver a knockout punch anywhere, anytime, without enemy orbiting intel satellites snapping pictures of its every move? Look what our subs did to the Japanese in the Pacific; look what the German U-boats did to us in the Atlantic. But you couldn’t convince the navy brass of all that in the 1960s.
Like the navy, the air force had different advocates for different goals, and so did the army. And when there are competing agendas and strategies articulated by some of the best and brightest people ever to graduate from universities, war colleges, and the ranks of officers, you have hard-nosed people playing high-stakes games against one other for the big prizes: the lion’s share of the military budget. And, at the very center of it all, the place where the dollars get spent, are the weapons-development people who work for their respective branches of the military.
And that’s right where I was in the early days of 1961 shortly after John F. Kennedy came to town to begin his new administration. I had only just returned to Washington from the front lines of a war that nobody thought of as a real war except for us, the guys who were there. It was easier during a real war, like Korea. Your objective is to push the other guy back as far as you can, kill as many of his people as you can, and force him to surrender. You have a very pragmatic strategy: You try it and if it works you keep on doing it until it stops working. But on the front lines in Germany, where the battles were only fought with electron beams, threats, and feints, you had to assess how many soldiers might be killed or how many planes you could bring down if the shooting were to start for real. For Americans this was the Cold War, the combined military machines of two massive superpowers each capable of obliterating each other the moment either one perceived a material weakness in the other’s ability to retaliate.
So you had a chess game played and replayed every day around the world in scores of different war rooms where different scenarios were formulated to see who would win. It was all a game of numbers and strategies with different armed services around the world winning and losing battles on computers—very elegant and precise. But what very few people outside of government knew was that the Cold War was really a Hot War, fought with real bullets and real casualties, only no one could step forward to admit it because the front lines were within the very government capitals of the countries that were fighting it. I saw this with my own eyes right here in Washington, where the war had been going on since 1947.
So with the sides drawn and tensions bet
ween the various bureaus and services within the Pentagon, it didn’t take me long in those first few weeks to learn the politics of my new job. With the field reports, scientific analyses, medical autopsies, and technological debris from the Roswell crash I had under lock and key, my first rule was to be as circumspect as possible, draw no attention to myself. I’d learned this skill when I served on MacArthur’s staff in Korea ten years earlier: I had to be the little man who wasn’t there. If people don’t think you’re there, they talk. That’s when you learn things.
And within those first few weeks I saw and learned a lot about how the politics of the Roswell discovery had matured over the fourteen years since the crash and since the intense discussions at the White House after Eisenhower became president. Each of the different branches of the military had been protecting its own cache of Roswell-related files and had been actively seeking to gather as much new Roswell material as possible. Certainly all the services had their own reports from examiners at Walter Reed and Bethesda concerning the nature of the alien physiology. Mine were in my nut file along with the drawings. It was pretty clear, also, from the way the navy and air force were formulating their respective plans for advanced military-technology hardware, that many of the same pieces of technology in my files were probably shared by the other services. But nobody was bragging because everybody wanted to know what the other guy had. But since, officially, Roswell had never happened in the first place, there was no technology to develop.
On the other hand, the curiosity among weapons and intelligence people within the services was rabid. Nobody wanted to come in second place in the silent, unacknowledged alien-technology-development race going on at the Pentagon as each service quietly pursued its version of a secret Roswell weapon. I didn’t know what the air force or navy had or what they might have been developing from their respective files on Roswell, but I assumed each service had something and was trying to find out what I had. That would have been a good intelligence procedure. If you were in the know about what was retrieved from Roswell, you kept your ears open for snippets of information about what was being developed by another branch of the military, what was going before the budget committees for funding, or what defense contractors were developing a specific technology for the services. If you weren’t in the Roswell loop, but were too curious for your own good, you could be spun around by the swirling rumor mill that the Roswell race had kicked up among competing weapons-development people in the services and wind up chasing nothing more than dust devils that vanished down the halls as soon as you turned the corner on them.
There were real stories, however, that wouldn’t go away no matter how many times somebody official stepped up to say the story was false. For example, I picked up the rumors pretty quickly concerning the UFO the air force was supposed to be keeping at Edwards Air Force Base in California and the research they were conducting on the spacecraft’s technology, especially its electromagnetic-wave propulsion system. There were also rumors circling around the air force about the early harvesting of Roswell technology in the design of the all-wing bombers, but I didn’t know how much stock to put in them. The army had been developing an all-wing design since right after World War I, and within a year after the Roswell crash Jack Northrop’s company began test flights of their YB49 flying wing recon/bomber models. The YB49’s quadruple vertical tail fins were so uncannily reminiscent of the head-on Roswell craft sketches in our files that it was hard not to make a connection between the spacecraft and the bomber. But the flying wing’s development took place over ten years before I got to the Foreign Technology desk, so I had no direct evidence relating the bomber to the spacecraft.
General Trudeau was right, though, when he said that people at the Pentagon were watching Army R&D because they thought we were onto something. People wanted to know what Foreign Technology was working on, especially the more exotic things in our portfolio just to make sure, the memos read, that we weren’t duplicating budgetary resources by spending twice or three times for the same thing. There was a lot of talk and pressure from the Joint Chiefs of Staff about technology sharing and joint weapons development, but my boss wanted us to keep what we had to ourselves, especially what he jokingly kept calling “the alien harvest.”
As if the eyes of the other military services weren’t enough, we also had to contend with the analysts from the Central Intelligence Agency. Under the guise of coordination and cooperation, the CIA was amalgamating as much power as it could. Information is power, and the more the CIA tried to learn about the army weapons-development program, the more nervous it made all of us at the center of R&D.
Acquaintances of mine in the agency had dropped hints, shortly after I took over the Foreign Technology desk, that if I needed any intelligence about what other countries were developing, they could help me out. But one hand washes the other, and they dropped hints that if I had any clues about where any stray pieces of “the cargo,” or “the package” as the Roswell artifacts were commonly referred to within the military, might be found, they would surely appreciate it if I let them know. After the third time my CIA contacts bumped into me and whispered this proposal for exchanges of information into my ear, I told my boss that our friends might be anxious about what we had.
“You really put me on the hot seat, General,” I said to Trudeau over one of our morning briefings at the end of my first month on the job. I was still working on the strategy for the nut file and, thankfully, my boss hadn’t pressured me yet to come up with recommendations for the plan. But it was coming. “How does the CIA know what we have?”
“They’re guessing, I suppose,” he said. “And figuring it out by the process of elimination. Look, everybody suspects what the air force has.”
Trudeau was right. In the rumor bank from which everybody in the Pentagon made deposits and withdrawals, the air force was sitting on the Holy Grail—a spaceship itself and maybe even a live extraterrestrial. Nobody knew for sure. We knew that after it became a separate branch of the military in 1948, the air force kept some of the Roswell artifacts at Wright Field outside of Dayton, Ohio, because that’s where “the cargo” was shipped, stopping off in Fort Riley along the way. But the air force was primarily interested in how things fly, so whatever R&D they worked on was focused on how their planes could evade radar and outfly the Soviets no matter where we got the technology from.
“And,” he continued, “I’m sure the agency fellows would love to get into the Naval Intelligence files on Roswell if they’ve not done so already.”
With its advanced submarine technology and missile-launching nuclear subs, the navy was struggling with its own problem in figuring out what to do about UUOs or USOs—Unidentified Submerged Objects, as they came to be called. It was a worry in naval circles, particularly as war planners advanced strategies for protracted submarine warfare in the event of a first strike. Whatever was flying circles around our jets since the 1950s, evading radar at our top-secret missile bases like Red Canyon, which I saw with my own eyes, could plunge right into the ocean, navigate down there just as easy as you please, and surface halfway around the world without so much as leaving an underwater signature we could pick up. Were these USOs building bases at the bottom of oceanic basins beyond the dive capacity of our best submarines, even the Los Angeles–class jobbies that were only on the drawing boards? That’s what the chief of Naval Operations had to find out, so the navy was occupied with fighting its own war with extraterrestrial craft in the air and under the sea.
That left the army.
“But they don’t know for sure what we have, Phil,” Trudeau continued. He’d been talking the whole time. “And they’re busting a gut to find out.”
“So we have to keep on doing what we do without letting them know what we have, General,” I said. “And that’s what I’m working on.” And I was. Even though I wasn’t sure how we’d do it, I knew the business of R&D couldn’t change just because we had Roswell crash artifacts in our possession.
At the Foreign Technologies desk, we kept an eye on what other countries were doing, ally or adversary, and how we could adapt it to our use. The French, the Italians, the West Germans, all of them had their own weapons systems and streams of development that seemed exotic by our standards yet had certain advantages. The Russians had gotten ahead of us in liquid rocket-propulsion systems and were using simpler, more efficient designs. My job was to evaluate the potential of the foreign technology and implement whatever we could. I’d get photos, designs, and specs of foreign weapons systems, like the French helicopter technology, for example, and bring it to American defense companies like Bell, Sikorski, or Hughes to see whether we could develop aspects of it for our own use. And it was the perfect cover for protecting the Roswell technology, but we still had to figure out what we wanted to do with it. It couldn’t simply stay in file cabinets or on shelves forever.
What we had retrieved from the Roswell crash and had managed to hold on to was probably the most closely guarded secret the army had. Yet it was nothing more than an orphan. Up until 1961, the army had come up with no plan to use the technology without revealing its nature or its source and in so doing blow the cover on the single biggest secret the government was keeping. There was no one bureau within the army charged with managing Roswell and other aspects of UFO encounters, as there was in the air force, and therefore nobody was keeping any public records of how the army got its hands on its Roswell technology in the first place and, consequently, no oversight mechanism. Everything up until 1961 was catch-as-catch-can, but now it had to change. General Trudeau was looking for the grand endgame development scheme. It began with researching the history of how the whole file—the field reports, autopsy information, descriptions of the items found in the wreckage, and the bits and pieces of Roswell technology themselves—came into the possession of Army R&D.
The Day After Roswell Page 7