The Day After Roswell

by William J. Birnes

  Depleted uranium was a dense, heavy metal, so dense in fact that conventional armament was no match for a high-speed round tipped with it. Its ability to penetrate even the toughest of tank armor and detonate once it was inside the enemy vehicle meant that a single round fired from one of our own tanks equipped with a laser range finder would disable, if not completely destroy, an enemy tank. Depleted uranium would give us a decided advantage on a European battlefield on which we knew we’d be outnumbered two or three to one by the Warsaw Pact or in China where sheer numbers alone would mean that either we’d be overwhelmed or we’d have to resort to nuclear weapons. The depleted uranium shell kept us from having to go nuclear.

  Privately, I suggested to General Trudeau that depleted uranium also fulfilled our hidden agenda. It was another weapon in a potential arsenal we were building against hostile extraterrestrials. If depleted uranium could penetrate armor, might the heaviness of the element enable it to penetrate the composite skin of the spacecraft, especially if the spacecraft were on the ground? I suggested that it certainly merited development at the nearby Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland, and if it proved worthwhile, it was a weapon we should deploy.

  Even though the composite ceramic Stealth round is still an elusive dream in weapons development, the depleted-uranium-tipped warhead saw action in the Gulf War, where it didn’t just disable the tanks of the Iraqi Republican Guard, it exploded them into pieces. Fired from the laser range-finder-equipped Abrams tanks, TOW missile launchers, or even from Hedgehog infantry support aircraft, the depleted-uranium-tipped warheads wreaked havoc in the Gulf. They were one of the great weapons-development successes of Army R&D that came out of what we learned from the Roswell crash.

  • • •

  HARP—The High-Altitude Research Project

  HARP was another project whose need for research and development was suggested to us by the challenge posed by flying saucers. They could outfly our own aircraft, we had no guided missiles that could bring them down, and we didn’t have any guns that could shoot them down. We were also exploring weapons systems that had a double or triple use, and HARP, or “the big gun,” was one such system. Essentially, Project HARP was the brainchild of Canadian gunnery expert and scientist Dr. Gerald Bull. Bull had studied the threat posed by the German “Big Bertha” in World War I and the Nazi V3 supergun toward the end of World War II. He realized that long-range, high-powered artillery was not only a practical solution to launching heavy-payload shells, it was very affordable once the initial research and development phase was completed. Mass-produced big guns and their ordnance, assembled in stages right on the site, could provide enormous firepower well back from the front lines to any army. They would become a strategic weapon to rain nuclear destruction down on enemy population centers or military staging areas.

  Dr. Bull had also suggested that the gun could be retasked as a launch vehicle, blasting huge rounds into orbit, which could then be jettisoned, like the booster stage of a rocket, so the payload warhead could thrust itself into position. This would require a minimum amount of rocket fuel and could effectively push a string of satellites into orbit very quickly, almost like an artillery barrage. If the army needed to put special satellites into orbit in a hurry or, better still, explosive satellites that would pose a threat to orbiting extraterrestrial vehicles, the big gun was one method of accomplishing this mission.

  There was still a third potential to the supergun. General Trudeau foresaw the ability of this weapon to launch rounds that could ultimately be placed into a lunar orbit. Especially if hostilities broke out between the United States and USSR or, as we expected, between Earth military forces and the extraterrestrials, we could resupply a military moon base without having to rely on rocket-launch facilities, which would demand long turnaround times and be very vulnerable to attack. A camouflaged supergun, even a series of superguns, would allow us all the benefits of a field artillery or quick-response antiaircraft unit, but with a piece that could launch payloads into space. It was this combination of capabilities that delighted General Trudeau because it enabled one R&D project to help create many different systems.

  The United States, Canada, and the British military combined their joint expertise to find ways to develop Dr. Bull’s supergun with General Trudeau, I believe, becoming one of Bull’s staunchest supporters. But by the time military budget decisions had to be made to fund the weapon, all of the governments’ military establishments had become committed to the guided missile and rocket-launched space vehicle rather than a supergun. While the weapon had some potential, the United States, UK, and Canada were too far along with their own missile programs to start up a completely new type of weapon. And in the end, they decided to end the research while still keeping close tabs on Bull’s efforts to sell his technology to other powers, especially governments in the Middle East.

  Through the 1980s, Gerald Bull, whom I had met at a reception honoring General Trudeau in 1986, entered into negotiations with the Israelis as well as with the Iraqis and perhaps even the Iranians. The decade-long war between Saddam Hussein and Iran proved a fertile sales territory for weapons merchants in general, and particularly for Gerald Bull, who was courted by both sides. In the end, he cut his deal with the Iranians, testing experimental versions of a supergun and planning to build the monster weapon before the British intervened and seized shipments of gun barrel units before they were shipped out of the country. By this time, Dr. Bull may have become a liability to the Iraqis, as well as to the Israelis and to the United States as well, and was shot to death outside his apartment in Belgium before the outbreak of the Gulf War.

  Like Jules Verne’s character Barbicane in From the Earth to the Moon, Bull had a vision of the potential of a long-range artillery piece. Unlike Barbicane, he came very close to proving it a practical way of launching vehicles into space. The murder of Gerald Bull has never been solved, and whatever secrets he still possessed about the assembly of a gun to launch vehicles into space probably died with him in the hallway outside his apartment.

  • • •

  List of Omissions

  As I worked through the stack of projects on my desk during the spring months of 1962, I found I was devoting more of my time to the Roswell file and less to some of the other projects under development. It was apparent to me that the treasure trove we’d retrieved from Roswell was beginning to pay off in ways that not even I thought would happen. There were so many army research projects under way, I told my boss, that were not foundering, but sputtering along that could benefit from something similar found in the Roswell wreckage if we could find the match between the two. Night vision, lasers, and fiber-optic communication were obvious, I said to him, but I was sure there were other areas we could find just by looking at the problems posed by what we discovered from Roswell, not just retrieved from the wreckage.

  “Make it specific, Phil,” the general asked. “What do you mean?”

  “If you just look at what we didn’t find at the crash site,” I said. “That goes a long way to explaining the differences between what we are and what they are. It also shows us what we need to develop if we’re going to prepare for long periods of travel in space.”

  “Can you make me a list?” the general asked. “There are a lot of ongoing research contracts out there that could benefit from a list of things we’d have to concern ourselves with if we’re going to be planning for space travel in the next fifty years.”

  By the time our conversation was finished, General Trudeau had asked me to prepare not only a list of what were called the “omissions” at Roswell but a very brief report detailing the areas where I thought development needed to take place. So I assembled all the reports and information in the Roswell file and began looking for what was missing that I might expect to find at a space traveler’s crash site.

  There was no mention in any of the reports of any food source or nutrient, and no one discovered any food-preparation units or stored food on board the sp
acecraft, nor were there any refrigeration units for food preservation. There was no water on the ship either for drinking, washing, or flushing of waste, nor were there any waste- or garbage-disposal facilities. The Roswell field reports said that the retrieval team found something they thought was a first-aid kit because it contained material that a doctor said was for bandaging purposes, but there were no medical facilities nor any medications. And finally, the army retrieval team said there were no rest facilities at all on board the ship; nothing that could be construed as a bunk or a bed.

  From this available data the army assumed that this UFO was a reconnaissance craft and could quickly return to a larger or mother ship where all of the missing items might be found. The other explanation Dr. Hermann Oberth came up with was that this was a time/dimensional travel ship that didn’t traverse large distances in space. Rather, it “jumped” from one time/space to another or from one dimension to another and instantly returned to its point of origin. But this was just Dr. Oberth’s speculation, and he would usually discount any of it the moment he believed I was taking it as fact.

  I believed, however, that the EBEs didn’t require food or facilities for waste disposal because they were fabricated beings, just like robots or androids, who had been created specifically for space travel and the performance of specific tasks on the planets they visited. Just like our lunar rover in the 1970s, which was a robot, so these creatures had been programmed with specific tasks to perform and carried them out. Perhaps their programming could be updated or altered from a remote source, but they weren’t life-forms that required ongoing sustenance. They were the perfect creatures for long voyages through space and for visiting other planets. Human beings, however, weren’t robots and did require sustenance. Therefore, it would be necessary to provide for long-term sustenance and waste-disposal needs if humans were going to travel long distances in space.

  Other scientists from our R&D ad hoc brain trust suggested that, indeed, this could have only been a scout ship that either got caught in our tracking radars from the 509th or from Alamogordo or was hit by lightning in the fierce electrical storm that night. They believed that the ship was navigated by an electromagnetic propulsion system. Other scientists suggested that even before we could generate the necessary power to drive such a propulsion system, we would have to have developed some form of a nuclear-powered ion drive first. As for the absence of food, scientists suggested that this would pose a major drawback for long-term human space exploration. Thus, in my quick and dirty proposal for General Trudeau, I suggested that the army had to complete the development of at least two items that I knew had been in the R&D system for at least ten years: a food supply that could never spoil and didn’t require refrigeration and an atomic drive that could be assembled in space out of components as the power plant for an interplanetary spacecraft.

  • • •

  Irradiated Foods

  The general read my notes a few days later, and seemed impressed. He knew from the memo I had left him the night before that I’d be ready to talk about my omissions list the next day, but he didn’t say anything to me right away. Instead, he picked up the phone, dialed a number, told someone at the other end that he’d be right over, then looked up at me.

  “Go get your hat,” he said. “Meet me on the helipad. We’ve been invited to lunch.”

  Ten minutes later after the general’s helicopter had picked us up, we circled the Pentagon once and were flown over to the Quartermaster Center.

  An officer who shall remain anonymous met us at the helipad. He saluted as we got off the chopper. “Thank you for joining us.”

  He took us inside to a downstairs storeroom where he showed off shelves and shelves of all types of meat, fruit, and vegetables. “Look at this pork,” he said. “It’s been stored here unrefrigerated for months and it’s completely free of trichina worm.” He held up a couple of loose eggs and a chicken breast. “Eggs, unrefrigerated, and chicken. Completely free of bacterium salmonella. And it’s the same for the seafood.”

  He escorted us along the shelves of food and, almost like a salesman, presented the virtues of each of the items. The food was wrapped, but not vacuum-sealed, in a clear cellophane to keep it free from dust and surface dirt, but it was not preserved in any manner that I could determine.

  “Free of fungus or any spores,” he said about the vegetables. “No mold or any insect infestations in the fruit,” he said. “And the milk, it’s been here on the shelf for over two years and it’s not even slightly sour. We’ve taken great steps to preserve food completely without salting, smoking, refrigeration, freezing, or even canning.”

  “Does this answer one of your questions, Colonel?” General Trudeau asked as we looked at the stocks of food that seemed completely resistant to spoilage.

  The commanding general of the Quartermaster Center joined us in the stockroom. “Pick your lunch, gentlemen,” he said and chose a thick steak for himself. “I’m going to have this and, if you don’t mind, I’ll take the liberty of ordering up the same thing for you, General Trudeau, and you, too, Colonel. How about some potatoes and maybe some strawberries for dessert. All fresh, delicious, and harmless.” Then he paused. “And completely bombarded with what some people would call lethal doses of radiation to destroy any bacteria or infestation.”

  We were escorted upstairs to the commandant’s dining room, where we were joined by a number of other officers and civilian research and food-technology experts who described the process of ionizing radiation to destroy the harmful bacteria while preserving the food without canning or smoking. The irradiation process was so complete that if the food were maintained in an antiseptic or dust-free atmosphere, it wouldn’t be attacked and would remain uncontaminated. However, because the atmosphere was as dirty as any other atmosphere inside any other building, the food was wrapped in cellophane. Other foods were packaged in a clear plastic wrap and were displayed for visitors like us just as if they were on supermarket shelves.

  “We first wanted to determine whether the whole concept of irradiated food was safe,” one of the engineers explained. “So our first studies were made with food which was irradiated and then stored in the frozen area. We fed these foods to rats and noticed no harmful effects. Then we did the same thing except this time we increased the radiation to six megarads and then froze the food. Again, no harmful effects.”

  His presentation continued while we ate, accompanied by charts that showed how the sterilization rate was increased to try to find any harmful effects on rats. Then they tested the irradiated and then frozen food on human volunteers.

  “But wait,” I asked. “I still don’t understand why you irradiated the food and then froze it.”

  The engineer was waiting for this question because he had his answer already prepared. He acted like he’d been asked it many times before. “Because,” he said, “we were testing only for harmful effects from the radiation, not for spoilage, not for taste, not even for harmful effects from the food itself even though we knew it had been sterilized and was tested completely free from bacteria when it was defrosted. What we needed to prove in field trials was the harmlessness to animals and humans of the irradiation process.”

  Then he described the field trials to prove that irradiation preserved food stored at room temperature. “We selected high-spoilage foods,” he said. “Like the meats, chicken, and especially the seafood. We also made composite foods like stews which we fed to rats and dogs along with straight meat and then straight tuna. We first irradiated a sample at three megarads then another sample at six megarads and tested the animals over a period of six months to see whether radiation became concentrated in any of their organs or bones.” He paused, letting the dramatic effect of what he was going to say sink in while we were sinking our teeth into the irradiated foods that resulted from the years of experimentation throughout the 1950s. “No toxicological effects whatsoever. And we were very thorough before we tested these foods on human volunteers.”


  “What’s next?” I asked.

  “We’re setting taste trials of favorite foods at Fort Lee, Virginia, to see how troops in the field respond to this. We think that before the end of the decade we’ll have a variety of Meals Ready to Eat for troops in the field who have no benefit of cooking facilities or refrigeration.”

  General Trudeau looked across the table at me and I nodded. This was perfectly good food that was right up to any quality you’d care to measure.

  “Gentlemen,” General Trudeau said as he stood. As a three-star general, he was the highest-ranking officer in the room, and when he spoke everyone was silent. “My assistant believes that your work is of utmost importance to the U.S. Army, our nation, and the world, and will contribute to our travel in space. I am of the very same opinion. We are most impressed with your test results and want to help you expand your operation and speed up the testing process. The army needs what you’ve developed. In the next two weeks, submit to me your supplementary budget to expand your operation and I want it also included into next year’s budget.” Then he turned to me, nodded, and we thanked the commanding general for lunch and walked out to General Trudeau’s helicopter.

  “How about that, Phil?” he asked. “I think we checked off some of the items on your list right on the spot.”

  The pilot helped the general into his seat and I got around on the other side.

  “So what do you think?” he asked again.

  “I think if we move any faster we’ll have the EBEs down here asking for some of our irradiated food,” I said.

  General Trudeau laughed as we whisked off the helipad and headed back for the short jump to the Pentagon. “Now you have to get to work on finding out what you can about your atomic propulsion system. If NASA ever gets it into its mind to push ahead with building its space station, I’d like the military to have a power source that can keep us up there for a while. If we can get a surveillance window on our visitors, I want it sooner rather than later.”