Once the development process of engineering a more tightly compacted circuit had been inspired by the invention of the transistor in 1948, and fueled by the need to develop better, faster, and smaller computers, it continued on a natural progression until the engineers at Intel developed the first microprocessor, a four-bit central processing unit called the 4004, in 1972. This year marked the beginning of the microcomputer industry, although the first personal microcomputers didn’t appear on the market until the development of Intel’s 8080A. That computer chip was the heart of the Altair computer, the first product to package a version of a high-level programming language called BASIC, which allowed nonengineering types to program the machine and create applications for it. Soon companies like Motorola and Zilog had their own microprocessors on the market, and by 1977 the Motorola 6502-powered Apple II was on the market, joined by the 8080A Radio Shack, the Commodore PET, the Atari, and the Heathkit. Operationally, at its very heart, the microprocessor shares the same binary-processing functions and large arrays of digital switches as its ancestors, the big mainframes of the 1950s and 1960s and the transistorized minis of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Functionally, the microprocessor also shares the same kinds of tasks as Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine of the 1830s: reading numbers, storing numbers, logically processing numbers, and outputting the results. The microprocessor just puts everything into a much smaller space and moves it along at a much faster speed.
In 1979, Apple Computer had begun selling the first home computer floppy-disk operating system for data and program storage that kicked the microcomputer revolution into a higher gear. Not only could users input data via a keyboard or tape cassette player, they could store relatively large amounts of data, such as documents or mathematical projections, on transportable, erasable, and interchangeable Mylar disks that the computer was able to read. Now the computer reached beyond the electronics hobbyist into the workplace. By the end of the year, MicroPro’s introduction of the first fully functional word processor called WordStar, and Personal Software’s release of the very first electronic spreadsheet called VisiCalc, so transformed the workplace that the desktop computer became a necessity for any young executive on his or her way up the corporate ladder. And by the early 1980s, with the introduction of the Apple Macintosh and the object-oriented computer environment, not only the workplace but the whole world looked like a very different place than it did in the early 1960s. Even Dr. Vannevar Bush’s concept of a type of research query language based not on a linear outline but on an intellectual relationship to something embedded in a body of text became a reality with the release of a computer program by Apple called HyperCard.
It was as if from the year 1947 to 1980 a fundamental paradigm shift in the ability of humankind to process information took place. Computers themselves almost became something like a silicon-based life-form, inspiring the carbon-based life-forms on planet Earth to develop them, grow them, and even help them reproduce. With computer-directed process-control programs now in place in virtually all major industries, software that writes software, neural-network-based expert systems that learn from their own experience in the real world, and current experiments under way to grow almost microscopically thin silicon-based chips in the weightless environment of earth orbit may be the forerunner of a time when automated orbital factories routinely grow and harvest new silicon material for microprocessors more sophisticated than we can even imagine at the present. Were all of this to be true, could it not be argued that the silicon wafers we recovered from Roswell were the real masters and space travelers and the EBE creatures their hosts or servants? Once implanted successfully on Earth, our culture having reached a point of readiness through its development of the first digital computers, would not the natural development stream, starting from the invention of the transistor, have carried us to the point where we achieve a symbiotic relationship with the silicon material that carries our data and enables us to become more creative and successful?
Maybe the Roswell crash, which helped us develop the technological basis for the weapons systems to protect our planet from the EBEs, was also the mechanism for successfully implanting a completely alien nonhumanoid life-form that survives from host to host like a virus, a digital Ebola that we humans will carry to another planet someday. Or what if an enemy wanted to implant the perfect spying or sabotage mechanism into a culture? Then the implantation of the microchip-based circuit into our technology by the EBEs would be the perfect method. Was it implanted as sabotage or as something akin to the gift of fire? Maybe the Roswell crash in 1947 was an event waiting to happen, like poisoned fruit dropping from the tree into a playground. Once bitten, the poison takes effect.
• • •
“Hold your horses, Phil,” General Trudeau would say when I would speculate too much. “Remember, you’ve got a bunch of scientists you need to talk to and the people at Bell Labs are waiting to see your report when you’ve finished talking to the Alamogordo group.”
It was 1961 and the miniaturization of computer and electronic circuitry had already begun, but my report to the general and appointments he was arranging for me at Sperry-Rand, Hughes, and Bell Labs were for meetings with scientists to determine how their respective companies were proceeding with applying miniaturized circuitry into designs for weapons systems. The inspiration for microcircuitry had fallen out of the sky at Roswell and set the development of digital computers off in an entirely new direction. It was my job now to use the process of weapons development, especially the development of guidance systems for ballistic missiles, to implement the application of microcircuitry systems to these new generations of weapons. General Trudeau and I were among the first scouts in what would be the electronic battlefield of the 1980s.
“Don’t worry, General, I’ve got my appointments all set up,” I told him. I knew how carried away I could get, but I was an intelligence officer first, and that meant you start with a blank page and fill it in. “But I think the people at Bell Labs have already seen these things before.” And they actually did—in 1947.
CHAPTER 13
The Laser
As I worked my way through the list of items in my nut file, writing advisory reports and recommendations to General Trudeau about the potential of each item, I lost all concept of time. I could see, as I drove up and down the Potomac shore to Fort Belvoir to check on the progress of night vision at Martin Marietta, that the summer was coming to an end and the leaves had started to change color. I could also see that now it was already dark when I left the Pentagon. And it was dark now when I set out for the Pentagon every morning. I’d gotten into the habit of taking different routes to work just to make sure that if the CIA had put a tail on me, I’d make him work harder to stay up with me.
General Trudeau and I had settled down into a long daily routine ourselves at R&D. We had our early-morning meetings about the Roswell file—he also called it the “junk pile” because it was filled with so much debris and pieces of items that had broken away from larger components—but we had buried the Roswell material development projects themselves so deep inside the regular functions of the R&D division that not even the other officers who worked with us every day knew what was going on. We’d categorized the work we did so carefully that when it came time to discuss anything about Roswell, even if it had a bearing on some other item we were working on at the time, we made sure that either no one was at the office, or we were at a place where we wouldn’t have to stop talking just because someone came into the room.
My responsibility at Foreign Technology was to feed R&D’s ongoing project development with information and intelligence from sources outside the regular army channels. These ran in interconnected rings through the Pentagon to defense industry contractors to testing operations at army bases and to researchers at universities or independent laboratories who were under contract with us. If we were developing methods of preserving food, always trying to come up with a better way to prepare field rations, a
nd the Italians and Germans had a process that seemed to work, it was my job to learn about it and slip the information into the development process. Even when there was no official development process under way for a specific item, if something I learned was appropriate to any one of the army’s major commands, whether it was the Medical Corps, the Signal Corps, the motor pool, ordnance, or even the Quartermaster Corps, it was also my job to find a way to make that information appropriate and drop it in without so much as a splash. This made the perfect cover for what I was doing with the Roswell file as long as I could find ways to slip the Roswell technology into the development process so invisibly no one would ever able to find the Roswell on-ramp to the information highway.
For all the world to see, General Trudeau and I regularly met to review the ongoing projects in Army R&D, those we had inherited from the previous command and those we wanted to initiate on our watch. Officers who’d been assigned to R&D before we arrived had their own projects already in development, too, and the general had assigned me the task of feeding those projects with information and intelligence, no matter where it came from, without disturbing either what the officers were doing or interfering with their staffs. It was tricky because I had to work in the dark, undercover even from my own colleagues whose reputations would have been destroyed if word leaked out that they were dealing in “flying saucer stuff.” Yet at the same time, most high-ranking officers at the Pentagon and key members of their staffs knew that Roswell technology was floating through most of the new projects under development. They were also vaguely, if not specifically, aware of what had happened at Roswell itself and of the current version of the Hillenkoetter/Bush/Twining working group, which had personnel stationed at the Pentagon to keep tabs on what the military was doing.
Uniting what I called my official “day job” at R&D on regular projects and my undercover job in the Roswell file was my official, but many times informal, role as General Trudeau’s deputy at the division. In that job, I would carry out the general’s orders as they related to the division and not specifically to any one project or another. If General Trudeau needed information to help him redefine his budgetary priorities or assemble information to help compile supplementary development budgets, he’d often ask me to help or at least give him advice. And I functioned as the general’s intelligence officer as well, supporting him at meetings with information, helping him present position papers, assisting him whenever he had to hold briefings or meet with congressional committees, and defending him and the division against the almost weekly attacks on our turf from officers in the other military branches or from the civilian development and intelligence agencies. Everybody wanted to know what we knew, what we were spending, and what we were spending it on. And we had no quarrel with telling anybody who wanted to know exactly what kinds of goods the American people were getting for their money except when it came to one category—Roswell. That’s when the mantle of darkness would fall and our memories about where certain things came from became very dim, as it did with the dramatic improvement in night-vision technology shortly after the summer of 1961. Even our own people became very frustrated with us when General Trudeau would turn to me at a meeting and say, “You know that night-vision information you sent over to Fort Belvoir a while back? Where did you find that file, Phil?” And if I couldn’t play dumb and say, “I don’t think I ever came across this before, must be someone else in charge,” then I’d simply shrug and say, “I don’t know, General, must have been in the files somewhere. I’ll have to go back and look.”
It was an act, and many of the officers who suspected we had a stash of information somewhere knew we were covering up something. But if they were career, they also knew how to play the Pentagon version of steal the bacon. We had it and we were hiding it. No one would find out anything unless we let them. So the general would typically hand off anything having to do with military intelligence information to me and I would usually find a way not only to lose the answer but to lose the question as well. We became so practiced at this that entirely new inventions could find their way into development at many different places at the same time without anyone’s ever becoming aware of the source of the technology, especially the officer who was assigned the task of project manager within our very own division.
The CIA got so frustrated at not getting any information out of us that they began keeping closer tabs on the Russian attachés floating around Washington and working under their KGB controllers at the embassies and consulates. Because the CIA knew how thoroughly our universities had been penetrated they figured they’d get information on the rebound by photographing what was inside the photocopiers at the Russian embassy in Washington. And sure enough, from the rumor mill circulating around the exchange of scientists between industry and academia, the CIA knew that we were onto something at Army R&D and kept the circle as tight around us as they possibly could. So I had to keep close tabs on the general, not letting him go into meetings, any meetings, unprotected and always making sure that the CIA knew that they would have to climb over me to get to General Trudeau and anything he knew. And the CIA knew that I knew what they were doing and where their loyalties lay and also knew that it would have to come to a showdown someday.
General Trudeau and I had quickly established our routine in early 1961, and our categorization of how we did our jobs seemed to be working. Night vision was under development at Fort Belvoir, and researchers who worked with us had made sure that the silicon wafer chips had gotten to their colleagues at Bell Labs and assured us that a new generation of transistorized circuitry was already finding its way into development. The silicon chips were a covert reintroduction to the people at Bell Labs because the initial introduction of the integrated-circuit chips from the Roswell crash had reached defense contractors as early as 1947 in the weeks after the material reached Wright Field.
A similar history of introduction and reintroduction had occurred with stimulated-energy radiation, a weapon the early analysts believed they were looking at in the wreckage of the Roswell craft. Since directed-energy radiation was a technology we’d already deployed in World War II, seeing what they thought was a superadvanced version of that technology, so advanced as to be in a completely different realm, so excited the analysts at Wright Field that they wanted to get it out to research scientists as quickly as possible, which they did. And by the early 1950s, a version of stimulated-energy radiation had found its way into the scientific community, which was developing new products around the process of microwave generation.
Most Americans who were alive in the 1950s remember the introduction of the microwave oven that helped us “live better electrically” in our new modern kitchens. One of the miracle appliances that burst onto the scene in the 1950s promised to cook food in less than half the time of conventional ovens, even when the food had been completely frozen. Marketed under a variety of brand names including the now-historic “Radar Range,” the microwave oven cooked whatever was inside not by the application of pure heat, the way conventional ovens did, but by bombarding the food with showers of tiny waves of electromagnetic radiation, usually only a centimeter or so long. The waves would pass through the food, exciting the water molecules deep inside and causing them to align and realign, back and forth, with greater velocity. The molecular activity generated heat from within and the food cooked from the inside out. Once you enclosed it in the right kind of container to keep all the moisture from evaporating, you had a quick-cooked meal.
The theory behind the microwave oven that started us down the long and profitable path of stimulated-energy research was formulated in 1945 with the first commercial microwave ovens rolling off the line at Raytheon in Massachusetts in 1947 before any dissemination of either intelligence or material from the crash of the Roswell spacecraft. But in the wreckage of that craft, the scientists from the test-firing range at Alamogordo reported that the inhabitants of the craft seemed to use very advanced wave stimulation instrumentation that, acco
rding to their analysis, bore a relationship to the physics of a basic microwave generator. The retrieval team that pulled the wreckage out of the desert also found a short, stubby, internally powered flashlight device that threw a pencil-thin, intense beam of light for a short distance that could actually cut through metal. This, the engineers at Wright Field believed, was also based on wave stimulation. The questions then were, how did the EBEs use wave stimulation and how could we adapt it to military uses or slip it into the product development already under way?
By 1954, when I was at the White House, the National Security Council was already receiving reports of a theory, developed by Charles H. Townes, that described how the atoms of a gas could be excited to extraordinarily high energy levels by the application of bursts of energy. The gas would release its excess energy as microwaves of a very precise frequency that could be controlled. In theory, we thought, the energy beam could be a signal to carry communications or an amplifier for the signal. When the first maser was assembled at Bell Laboratories in 1956, it was used as a timer because of the very exact calibration of the wave frequency.
The maser, however, was only a forerunner of the product that was to come, the laser, which would revolutionize every aspect of technology it touched. It would also prove to be a weapon that would help us deploy a realistic threat to the EBEs who seemed poised to trigger a nuclear war between the superpowers. Where the maser was an amplification of generated microwaves, the laser was an amplification of light, and theories about how this might be accomplished were circulating widely throughout the weapons-development community even before Bell Labs produced the first maser.
The Day After Roswell Page 22