The Day After Roswell

by William J. Birnes

  Since 1947 and the formation of the working group, each new layer of bureaucracy operating within the black hole of UFO strategy and intelligence gathering found itself more enmeshed in the confusion of what was true and what was false than the previous layer. Like legions of blind soldiers, they bumped into one another in the night, upset one another’s plans, and thought that friends were foes and vice versa. In the absence of a clear policy that could be maintained from generation to generation, the strategy for dealing with the EBEs became tangled up in its own web.

  After December 1947 when Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg, the air force chief of staff, directed the air force to evaluate and track UFO sightings—this in response to the working group—Project “Sign” began at the Air Technical Intelligence Center. Sign was so critical that even J. Edgar Hoover in 1947 issued Bureau Bulletin 59 ordering that all future reports of UFOs should not be investigated by FBI agents but sent, instead, to the air force.

  Although officially not looking for UFOs, the air force Project Sign examined 243 sightings and submitted its report in February 1949. But at the same time Sign was doing its evaluation, the Air Technical Intelligence Center issued its own document called an “Estimate of the Situation.” Basically, but naively, the document came to the conclusion that we were dealing with extraterrestrial interlopers who were observing us from UFOs. But General Vandenberg, in the words of one of the officers I later ran into at the Pentagon, “had a cow, and not a mutilated one.”

  “Colonel,” this officer said, “steam was coming out of the old man’s ears he was so furious. Just be glad you weren’t there.”

  So I asked this officer why General Vandenberg was so steamed. After all, he ordered the report in the first place. Why didn’t he just agree with General Twining and Admiral Hillenkoetter to ask the President to begin releasing the information?

  “Are you crazy?” this officer said. The year was 1956 and I had been sent over from the White House for a briefing at the Pentagon. “Don’t you remember what happened when that Orson Welles ‘War of the Worlds’ broadcast was on the radio? We had near riots in the cities because they thought that thing was real. Can you imagine what would happen if it really happened? If our own government said that flying saucers had landed just like on the radio, only this time we caught one and they’re still coming back? Think about it. Riots, looting, people going insane because they thought aliens were destroying the planet.”

  He was right. And what was worse, the aliens were setting up for some sort of hostile act, whatever it was.

  When General Vandenberg read the “Estimate of the Situation,” he fumed and ordered the whole report burned to ashes before anyone else could read it. It was one of the last official government assessments of the UFO situation ever to get even close to being distributed before the real cover-up clamped down.

  But the grumblings about the absence of government policy concerning UFO reports continued. Project “Grudge” listed and evaluated 244 UFO sightings. Then in 1949 a memo that came out of the CIA’s Office of Scientific Investigation was very apprehensive about unexplained sightings of flying objects. Then in 1952 another CIA memo came to light; from the head of the Office of Scientific Investigations Weapons and Equipment Division it also complained about our lack of knowledge and police in the area of UFO sightings. Now even the CIA, it seemed, was at odds with itself at its various levels of bureaucracy over what to do about UFOs. Generals Twining and Vandenberg had had enough. In 1952, the air force formally initiated Project Blue Book. At least if we weren’t going to do anything about UFOs publicly, we had to have a way to salve the public’s fear about UFO sightings. Blue Book was that salve.

  Whatever the working group was supposed to be doing in 1952, it wasn’t satisfying the National Security Council, which ordered the CIA to determine whether the existence of UFOs would create a danger for the United States. Of course, the CIA already knew, because two of its intelligence directors had been members of the working group, that UFOs were displaying hostile intentions not only to the United States but to the Soviets, the Italians, and the Scandinavians as well. All of NATO was trying to figure out a response to the UFO threat without triggering a reaction from the Soviets. That was one of the reasons, thirty years later, President Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev could come to a meeting of the minds about UFOs that ultimately brought an end to the need for a Cold War.

  On January 14, 1953, just before the inauguration of President Eisenhower, CIA officials and air force officers met at the Pentagon at the CIA’s invitation to discuss the UFO situation and what our working group had learned up to that point. Officiated at first by Dr. H. P. Robertson, a CIA employee and the director of the Weapons Systems Evaluation Group in the office of the secretary of defense, the group also had working group member Dr. Lloyd Berkner, a physicist and one of the directors of the Brookhaven National Laboratories, as one of its members. The Robertson Panel spent the next three days reviewing case histories of UFO sightings assembled for them by Air Force Intelligence and saw two films that contained footage of alleged flying saucers. The panel concluded there was no threat to the United States and recommended that the government should start debunking UFO sightings in general. This, the CIA reported as late as 1988, was the only official government response to UFO sightings.

  Just over a year later, the White House agreed that it was necessary to have some sort of policy governing the release of UFO information to the press. In order to keep lower-level officers from releasing unauthorized information—and by unauthorized the National Security Council advising the President meant only that information cleared by the working group—Gen. Nathan Twining, now the air force chief of staff, signed off on Air Force Regulation 200-2, which said that it was permissible to release reports to the media only when the object was identifiable, like swamp gas or a meteorite. But only the Air Technical Intelligence Center could determine which objects were identifiable and which weren’t. In other words, only the ATIC could authorize the release of any information about UFOs, and they did so only when the objects were clearly identifiable as common phenomena and not flying saucers.

  Throughout the 1950s, I witnessed the government become more and more secretive about UFOs even though privately I thought that they would get better information if they were more open about it. But I was also a military officer and understood the necessity of keeping information confidential until you understood what it was. Besides, the Soviets were making great strides in the race to get into space and we didn’t know if they were getting cooperation from the EBEs. There truly was a war on, and I followed orders on the White House staff even as I watched the officers in the cover-up begin to trip over their own feet time and again. The darkness was closing in all around us.

  In 1961, the air force began two secret projects that, in effect, had been in operation since 1947 but had not been committed to policy. “Moon Dust” had to do with the establishment of recovery teams to retrieve and recover crashed or grounded “foreign” space vehicles. But for all intents and purposes, as far as the public was concerned the air force was looking for Soviet satellites that had fallen out of the sky and landed on Earth. But in reality the air force was establishing a recovery of UFOs program just like the army had pulled the crashed UFO out of the New Mexico desert fourteen years earlier. Then in Project “Blue Fly,” the air force authorized the immediate delivery of foreign crashed space vehicles and any other item of technical intelligence interest to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, for evaluation. It was a repeat of General Twining’s retrieval of the Roswell space vehicle from the 509th to Wright Field in 1947.

  In 1962, one of the assistants to the secretary of defense, Arthur Sylvester, told the press at a briefing that if the government deemed it necessary for reasons of national security, it would not even furnish information about UFOs to Congress, let alone the American public. Now I was at the Pentagon and I fully understood how the air force was moving to take control of the entire UF
O situation. NASA had the mandate from the President to manage space exploration, but the military still had to defend against the UFO threat even though we were being hampered at every turn.

  Air Force projects “Saint” and “Blue Gemini” years later were outgrowths of USAF 7795, a code number for the USAF’s first antisatellite program, an aggressive operation designed to locate, track, and destroy enemy surveillance satellites or, and more importantly, orbiting UFOs. Using the technology we had developed at R&D, the air force, and then the army, was taking the initial steps to defend the U.S. missile system against Soviet attacks from space and defend the planet against UFO intrusions.

  “Saint” was an orbital UFO inspector satellite, a version of a standard Agenda B satellite that the CIA had been using, that had an onboard TV camera and tracking and targeting radar system. Its job was surveillance. Find a potential enemy satellite or UFO lurking in orbit and lock onto it with a TV camera and with radar. Once the lock was in place, Blue Gemini, the “killer” satellite, would move in. One of the projects developed by Hughes Aircraft, a prime air defense contractor and satellite builder, Blue Gemini was the military version of NASA’s manned Gemini capsule. Its mission, purely and simply, was to swoop in from a higher orbit and kill or disable an enemy satellite or a UFO. If possible, the Blue Gemini would try to “capture” a UFO in orbit by rendering it immobile and waiting for a manned military astronaut mission to “space walk” over and retrieve whatever we could. Both of these weapons, under the cover of other missions, of course, were eventually deployed, and today they form one of the lines of defense in an antimissile and anti-UFO surveillance system.

  Saint and Blue Gemini were important first steps in our war against the UFOs. The technology that came out of Army R&D in the 1960s, retrieved from the aliens themselves, led directly to our ability to put up such a defense against the aliens even though in the hours after the crash at Roswell our situation looked completely hopeless. Like many of the products that came out of R&D and were used for military purposes, they had consumer uses. And today, if you look on the small dish digital direct broadcast television satellite antennas that are being marketed all across the country, you’ll see Hughes’s own brand. It’s an example of how technology originally earmarked for the military winds up as the most basic and everyday consumer product.

  On December 17, 1969, the secretary of the air force announced the termination of Project Blue Book. He said that Blue Book’s review of more than thirteen thousand cases had yielded no information that there was a threat to national security in any way and that, in effect, since every sighting processed by Blue Book had been identified as something earthly and not extraterrestrial, there were, by definition, no such things as unidentified flying objects. Blue Book had done its job and now could report that our skies were safe. But Blue Book had been pure public relations from the start, and the military’s evaluation of UFOs continued uninterrupted.

  In 1975 and early 1976, air force nuclear weapons repositories at Loring AFB in Maine, the all-important and sensitive Strategic Air Command facility at Minot, North Dakota, and other facilities in Montana, Michigan, and even the Royal Canadian Air Force Base at Falconbridge in Ontario had been seriously encroached upon by UFOs. These weren’t just random sightings. UFOs actually conducted surveillance and scanning operations at the bases that resulted in security alerts and classified reports to Washington about the intrusions.

  Then NASA finally got a project up and running to scan for radio transmissions from any advanced civilizations whose signals we could pick up. Called the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence and endorsed by the late Carl Sagan, SETI, which has since been discontinued, was not only a set of receivers around the world but a set of international protocols governing what would happen if contact was made with an extraterrestrial civilization.

  For over fifty years, now, the war against UFOs has continued as we tried to defend ourselves against their intrusions. The Hughes hunter-killer satellites of the 1970s were our first steps in deploying a planetary defense system that held any real threat against the EBEs. When, late in the 1970s, we realized that a directed-energy weapon and high-energy laser were even more effective than exploding satellites, our defensive ability was enhanced even further. We recognized that by applying both the technology we found at Roswell and Tesla’s vision of a particle beam to our own antisatellite missiles and laser targeting equipment, we could achieve the rapid aim/rapid fire capability that these type of defenses demanded. But we were still playing cover-up games even though the Russians were now finally acknowledging that maybe cooperation between the superpowers was called for to meet a common threat.

  In the 1980s, both President Reagan and Chairman Gorbachev recognized the need for cooperation against a common enemy. While neither officially owned up to the threat of EBEs and alien hostilities, both acknowledged that if the United States and the Soviet Union could lay aside their differences and participate in a shared policy to defend the space around the earth, then both superpowers would benefit. For his part, President Reagan pushed hard for the rapid development and deployment of a space-based defense technology to defend the planet. Called the Strategic Defense Initiative, and derisively dubbed “Star Wars” by the press, the SDI was described in 1985 in President Reagan’s own words as “a defensive shield that won’t hurt people but will knock down nuclear weapons before they can hurt people.”

  Briefly, the Strategic Defense Initiative was described by the White House and the military as a space-based defense system to protect the United States from an all-out nuclear attack by the Soviet Union. It would include satellites that could detect a massive nuclear launch within seconds, orbiting lasers to destroy the first wave of missiles, laser-equipped submarines that could defend against the next round of attacks, and a ground-based missile system providing the last line of defense. In addition, the SDI also included what I thought was the best of its weapons, a missile-launched kinetic energy beam weapon that locked onto incoming warheads or low-orbiting space vehicles and knocked out their electronics with a particle beam. The elegant aspect to the kinetic energy beam weapon was that you couldn’t really defend against it. Lasers, even high-energy lasers, had their shortcomings in that once a laser beam bounced off a surface, the surrounding energy envelope protected the surface from subsequent pulses. You either knocked out your target right away or shielded it against subsequent hits. But with a particle-beam weapon, you penetrated the surface, just like microwaving a piece of meat, destroyed its electronics to render it useless, and then broke it apart or melted it from within.

  Amidst the warnings that the SDI wouldn’t work, was a giant unscientific gamble and a corporate giveaway, couldn’t provide the massive shield against nuclear missiles, would violate the ABM treaty President Johnson had negotiated with the Russians, and was a giant waste of the taxpayers’ money, guess what?

  It worked!

  We didn’t have to shoot down thousands of Soviet incoming warheads, and the Soviets never really cared about the ABM treaty in the first place because they knew they weren’t going to launch a first strike and neither would we. We both knew who the real targets of the SDI were, and it wasn’t a bunch of ICBM warheads. It was the UFOs, alien spacecraft thinking themselves invulnerable and invisible as they soared around the edges of our atmosphere, swooping down at will to destroy our communications with EMP bursts, buzz our spacecraft, colonize our lunar surface, mutilate cattle in their own horrendous biological experiments, and even abduct human beings for their medical tests and hybridization of the species. And what was worse, we had to let them do it because we had no weapon to defend ourselves.

  These creatures weren’t benevolent alien beings who had come to enlighten human beings. They were genetically altered humanoid automatons, cloned biological entities, actually, who were harvesting biological specimens on Earth for their own experimentation. As long as we were incapable of defending ourselves, we had to allow them to intrude as they
wished. And that was part of what the working group had to deal with. We had negotiated a kind of surrender with them as long as we couldn’t fight them. They dictated the terms because they knew what we most feared was disclosure. Hide the truth and the truth becomes your enemy. Disclose the truth and it becomes your weapon. We hid the truth and the EBEs used it against us until 1974 when we had our first real shootdown of an alien craft over Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany.

  They had tried to disrupt our space program for years—Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and even the Space Shuttle. They buzzed our capsules traveling through space, interfered with our transmissions, and pulsed us with EMP bursts just like we used to do to the Soviet surface ships when we would hit them with a radar burst so massive it would send their earphone-wearing radar and sonar techs howling in pain down to the ship’s dispensary. But when the EBEs did it to us, we had no response. That was before the SDI.

  Once launched and tested, our space-based high-energy lasers, or HELs, acted like the lightning bolts on the nights of July 3 and 4, 1947, that so thoroughly disrupted the electromagnetic wave propagators in the spacecraft flying over Roswell that the pilots couldn’t retain control of their own vehicle. We eventually realized that what happened then was that a natural version of an advanced particle-beam burst actually brought a UFO down even as it tried to escape. When we deployed our advanced particle-beam weapon and tested it in orbit for all to see, the EBEs knew and we knew they knew that we had our defense of the planet in place.