The Day After Roswell

by William J. Birnes

  Then he looked me very squarely in the eye and said the very thing that I was thinking. “You know this is their technology. It’s part of what enables them to have exploration missions. If it became our technology, too, we’d be able to, maybe we could keep up with them a little better.”

  Then he asked me for the army’s commitment. He explained that some of our research laboratories were already looking into the properties of glass as a signal conductor and this would not have to be research that was started from complete scratch. Those kinds of start-ups gave us concern at R&D because unless we covered them up completely, it would look like there was a complete break in a technological path. How do you explain that? But if there’s research already going on, no matter how basic, then just showing someone at the company one of these pieces of technology could give them all they need to reverse-engineer it so that it became our technology. But we’d have to support it as part of an arms-development research contract if the company didn’t already have a budget. This is what I wanted to do with this glass-filament technology.

  “Where is the best research on optical fibers being done?” I asked him.

  “Bell Labs,” he answered. “It’ll take another thirty years to develop it, but one day most of the telephone traffic will be carried on fiber-optic cable.”

  Army R&D had contacts at Bell just like other contractors we worked with, so I wrote a short memo and proposal to General Trudeau on the potential of optical fibers for a range of products that Professor Kohler and I discussed. I described the properties of what had been previously called a wiring harness, explained how it carried laser signals, and, most importantly, how these fibers actually bent a stream of light around a corner and conducted it the same way a wire conducts an electrical current. Imagine conducting a beam of high-intensity single-frequency light the same way you’d run a water line to a new bathroom, I wrote. Imagine the power and flexibility it provided the EBEs, especially when they used the light signal as a carrier for other coded information.

  This would enable the military to re-create its entire communications infrastructure and allow our new surveillance satellites to feed and store potential targeting information right into frontline command-and-control installations. The navy would be able to see the deployment of an entire enemy fleet, the air force could look down on approaching enemy squadrons and target them from above even if our planes were still on the ground, and for the army it would give us an undreamed-of strategic advantage. We could survey an entire battlefield, track the movements of troops from small patrols to entire divisions, and plot the deployments of tanks, artillery, and helicopters at the same time. The value of fiber-optic communication to the military would be immeasurable. And, I added, I was almost certain that a development push from the army to facilitate research on the complete reengineering of our country’s already antiquated telephone system would not be seen by any company as an unwarranted intrusion. I didn’t have to wait long for the general’s response.

  “Do it,” he ordered. “And get this under way fast. I’ll get you all the development allocation you need. Tell them that.” And before the end of that week, I had an appointment with a systems researcher at the Western Electric research facility outside of Princeton, New Jersey, right down the road from the Institute for Advanced Study. I told him it came out of foreign technology, something that the intelligence people picked up from new weapons the East Germans were developing but thought we could use.

  “If what you think you have,” he said over the phone, “is that interesting and shows us where our research is going, we’d be silly not to lend you an ear for an afternoon.”

  “I’ll need less than an afternoon to show you what I got,” I said. Then I packed my Roswell field reports into my briefcase, got myself an airline ticket for a flight to Newark Airport, and I was on my way.

  • • •

  Supertenacity Fibers

  Even before the 1960s, when I was still on the National Security staff, the army had begun to look for fibers for flak jackets, shrapnel-proof body armor, even parachutes, and a protective skin for other military items. Silk had always been the material of choice for parachutes because it was light, yet had an incredible tensile strength that allowed it to stretch, keep shape, and yet withstand tremendous forces. Whether the army’s search for what they called a “tenacity fiber” was prompted purely by its need to find better protection for its troops or because of what the retrieval team found at Roswell, I do not know. I suspect, however, that it was the discovery at the crash site that began the army’s search.

  Among the items in my Roswell file that we retained from the retrieval were strands of a fiber that even razors couldn’t cut through. When I looked at it under a magnifying glass, its dull grayness and almost matte finish belied the almost supernatural properties of this fiber. You could stretch it, twist it around objects, and subject it to a level of torque that would rend any other fiber, but this held up. Then, when you released the tension, it snapped back to its original length without any loss of tension in its original form. It reminded me of the filaments in a spiderweb. We became very interested in this material and began to study a variety of technologies, including spider silks because they, alone in nature, exhibit natural supertenacity properties.

  The spiders’ spinning of its silk begins in its abdominal glands as a protein that the spider extrudes through a narrow tube that forces all the molecules to align in the same direction, turning the protein into a rodlike, very long, single thread with a structure not unlike a crystal. The extrusion process not only aligns the protein molecules, the molecules are very compressed, occupying much less space than conventionally sized molecules. This combination of lengthwise aligned and supercompressed molecules gives this thread an incredible tenacity and the ability to stretch under enormous pressure while retaining its tensile strength and integrity. A single strand of this spider’s silk thread would have to be stretched nearly fifty miles before breaking and if stretched around the entire globe, it would weigh only fifteen ounces.

  Clearly, when the scientists at Roswell saw how this fiber—not cloth, not silk, but something like a ceramic—had encased the ship and formed the outer skin layer of the EBEs, they realized it was a very promising avenue for research. When I examined the material and recognized its similarity to spider thread, I realized that a key to producing this commercially would be to synthesize the protein and find a way to simulate the extrusion process. General Trudeau encouraged me to start contacting plastics and ceramics manufacturers, especially Monsanto and Dow, to find out who was doing research on supertenacity materials, especially at university laboratories. My quick poll paid off.

  I not only discovered that Monsanto was looking for a way to develop a mass-production process for a simulated spider silk, I also learned that they were already working with the army. Army researchers from the Medical Corps were trying to replicate the chemistry of the spider gene to produce the silk-manufacturing protein. Years later, after I’d left the army, researchers at the University of Wyoming and Dow Corning also began experiments on cloning the silk-manufacturing gene and developing a process to extrude the silk fibers into a usable substance that could be fabricated into a cloth.

  Our research and development liaison in the Medical Corps told me that the replication of a supertenacity fiber was still years away back in 1962, but that any help from Foreign Technology that we could give the Medical Corps would find its way to the companies they were working with and probably wouldn’t require a separate R&D budget. The development funding through U.S. government medical and biological research grants was more than adequate, the Medical Corps officer told me, to finance the research unless we needed to develop an emergency crash program. But I still remained fascinated by the prospect that something similar to a web spinner had spun the strands of supertenacity fabric around the spaceship. I knew that whatever that secret was, amalgamating a skin out of some sort of fabric or ceramic around our aircra
ft would give them the protection that the Roswell craft had and still be relatively lightweight.

  Again, I didn’t find out about it until much later, but research into that very type of fabrication was already under way by a scientist who would, years later, win a Nobel Prize. At a meeting of the American Physical Society three years before, Dr. Richard Feynman gave a theoretical speculative assessment of the possibilities of creating substances whose molecular structure was so condensed that the resulting material might have radically different properties from the noncompressed version of the same material. For example, Feynman suggested, if scientists could create material in which the molecular structures were not only compressed but arranged differently from conventional molecular structures, the scientists might be able to alter the physical properties of the substance to suit specific applications.

  This seemed like brand-new stuff to the American Physical Society. In reality, though, compressed molecular structures were one of the discoveries that had been made by some of the original scientific analytical groups both at Alamogordo right after the Roswell crash and at the Air Materiel Command at Wright Field, which took delivery of the material. As a young atomic physicist, Richard Feynman was a colleague of many of the postwar atomic specialists who were in the army’s and then the air force’s guided-missile program as well as the nuclear weapons program in the 1950s. Although I never saw any memos to this effect, Feynman was reported to have been in contact with members of the Alamogordo group of the Air Materiel Command and knew about some of the finds at the Roswell crash site. Whether these discoveries suggested theories to him about the potential properties of compressed molecular structures or whether his ideas were also extensions of his theories about the quantum mechanics behavior of electrons, for which he won the Nobel Prize, I don’t know. But Dr. Feynman’s theories about compressed molecular structures dovetailed with the army efforts to replicate the supertenacity fiber composition and extrusion processes. By the middle of the 1960s work was under way not only at large industrial ceramics and chemical companies in the United States but in university research laboratories here, and in Europe, Asia, and India.

  With my questions about who was conducting research into supertenacity fibers answered and learning where that research was taking place, I could turn my attention to other applications of the technology to see whether the army could help move the development along faster or whether any collateral development was possible to create products in advance of the supertenacity fibers. Our scientists told us that one way to simulate the effect of supertenacity was in the cross-alignment of composite layers of fabric. This idea was the premise for the army’s search for a type of body armor that would protect against the skin-piercing injuries of explosive shrapnel and rounds fired from guns.

  “Now this won’t protect you against contusions,” General Trudeau told me after a meeting with Army Medical Corps researchers at Walter Reed. “And the concussive shock from an impact will still be strong enough to kill anybody, but at least it’s supposed to keep the round from tearing through your body.”

  I thought about the many blunt-trauma wounds you see in a battle and could imagine the impact a large round would leave even if it couldn’t penetrate the skin. But through the general’s impetus and the contacts he set up for me at Du Pont and Monsanto, we aggressively pursued the research into the development of a cross-aligned material for bulletproof vests. I hand-carried the field descriptions of the fabric found at Roswell to my meetings at these companies and showed the actual fabric to scientists who visited us in Washington. This was not an item we wanted to risk carrying around the country. By 1965, Du Pont had announced the creation of the Kevlar fabric that, by 1973, was brought to market as the Kevlar bulletproof vest that’s in common use today in the armed services and law-enforcement agencies. I don’t know how many thousands of lives have been saved, but every time I hear of a police officer whose Kevlar vest protected him from a fatal chest or back wound, I think back to those days when we were just beginning to consider the value of cross-aligned layers of supertenacity material and am thankful that our office played a part in the product’s development.

  Our search for supertenacity materials also resulted in the development of composite plastics and ceramics that withstood heat and the pressures of high-speed air maneuvers and were also invisible to radar. The cross-stitched supertenacity fibers on the skin of the Roswell vehicle, which I believe had been spun on, also became an impetus for an entirely new generation of attack and strategic aircraft as well as composite materials for future designs of attack helicopters.

  One of the great rumors that floated around for years after the Roswell story became public with the testimony of retired Army Air Force major Jesse Marcel before he died was that Stealth technology aircraft were the result of what we learned at Roswell. That is true, but it was not a direct transfer of technology. Army Intelligence knew that under certain conditions the EBE spacecraft had the ability to hide their radar signature, but we didn’t know how they did it. We also had pieces of the Roswell spacecraft’s skin, which was a composite of supertenacity molecular-aligned fibers. As far as I know, we’ve still not managed to re-create the exact process to manufacture this composite, just like we’ve not been able to duplicate the electromagnetic drive and navigation system that enabled the Roswell vehicle to fly even though we have that vehicle and others at either Norton, Edwards, and Nellis Air Force bases. But through the study of how this material worked and what its properties are, we’ve replicated composites and rolled an entirely new generation of aircraft off the assembly line.

  Although the American public first heard about the existence of a Stealth technology in President Jimmy Carter’s campaign against President Ford in 1976, we didn’t see the Stealth in action until the air attacks on Iraq during the Persian Gulf War. There, the Stealth fighter, completely invisible to Iraqi radar, launched the first high-risk assaults on the Iraqi air force air-defense system and operated with almost complete impunity. Invisible to radar, invisible to heat-seeking missiles, striking out of the night sky like demons, the Stealth fighters, with their flying-wing almost crescent shaped, look uncannily like the space vehicle that crashed into the arroyo outside of Roswell. But appearances aside, the composite skin of the Stealth that helps make it invisible to almost all forms of detection was inspired by the Army R&D research into the skin of the Roswell aircraft that we sectioned apart for distribution to laboratories around the country.

  • • •

  Depleted-Uranium Invisible Artillery Shells

  For the air force, Stealth technology meant that aircraft could approach a target invisible to radar and maintain that advantage throughout the mission. For the army, Stealth technology for its helicopters provides an incredible advantage in mounting search-and-destroy, Special Forces recon, or counterinsurgency missions deep into enemy territory. But the possibility of a Stealth artillery shell, which we conceived of at R&D in 1962, would have allowed us something armies have sought ever since the first deployment of artillery by a Western European army at Henry V’s victory at Agincourt in the early fifteenth century. Certainly Napoleon would have wanted this ability when he deployed his artillery against the British line at Waterloo. So would the Germans in World War I when their artillery pounded the Allied forces hunkered down in their trenches and again at the Battle of the Bulge in 1944 when those of us stationed in Rome could only pray that our boys could hang on until the clouds broke and our bombers could hit the German emplacements.

  In all artillery battles, once a shell is fired, it can be tracked by an observer back to its source and then return fire can be directed against whoever is firing. But as the range of artillery increased and we found ways to camouflage guns, we became proficient in hiding artillery until the advent of battlefield radar, which allows the trajectory of shells to be tracked back to their source. But imagine if the shell were composed of a material that rendered it invisible to radar? That was the possib
ility we proposed to General Trudeau: an invisible artillery shell, I suggested to him in his office one morning as we were designing the plan for research and development of composite materials. On the night battlefield of the future you could deploy weapons that were invisible even to radar tracking planes flying overhead behind the lines. Shells would start falling, and the enemy wouldn’t know where they were coming from until after we had the advantage of five or more unanswered salvos. By then, and with the advantage of surprise, the damage might well be done. If we were using mechanized artillery, we could set up positions, fire a series of quick salvos, redeploy, and set up again.

  The secret lay not just in the same Stealth aircraft technology but also in the development of a Stealth ceramic that could withstand tremendous explosive barrel pressures and still maintain an integrity through the arc of its trajectory. The search for just such a molecularly aligned composite ceramic was inspired by the composite material of the Roswell spacecraft. In analysis after analysis, the army tried to determine how the extraterrestrials fabricated the material that formed the hull of the spacecraft but was unable to do so. The search for the kind of molecularly aligned composite began in the 1950s even before General Trudeau took command of R&D, continued during my tenure at Foreign Technology when the early “Stealth” experimentation began at Lockheed that resulted in the F117 fighter and Stealth bomber, and continues right through to today.

  The general was also more than interested in the kinds of warheads we would propose for just such a shell, a warhead that did come into use in 1961 and was successfully deployed during the Gulf War. And we had a suggestion for a round that we thought could change the nature of the kinds of battles we projected we’d be fighting against the Warsaw Pact forces, a warhead fabricated out of depleted uranium. This was a way to utilize the stockpile of uranium we foresaw we’d have as a result of spent fuel from commercial nuclear reactors, reactors powering U.S. Navy vessels, and the nuclear reactors the army was developing for its own bases and for delivery to bases overseas.