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 flat tops 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 between 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 allowing
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 out fly 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.
However we were going to camouflage our development of the
Roswell technology, it had to be within the existing way we did
business so no one would recognize any difference. We operated on a
normal defense development projects budget of well into the billions
in 1960, most of it allocated to the analysis of new weapons
systems. Just within our own bureau we had contracts with the
nation’s biggest defense companies with whom we maintained almost
daily communication. A lot of the research we conducted was in the
improvement of existing weapons based on the intelligence we
received about what our enemies were pointing at us: faster tanks,
heavier artillery, improved helicopters, better tasting MREs.
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, Sikorsky, 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 end game
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.
Luckily enough for me, the whole Roswell story was still unknown
outside the highest military circles in 1961. Retired major Jesse
Marcel, the intelligence officer at the 509th who had been at the
crash site in July 1947 and who had given the initial reports of a
spacecraft, would not yet tell his story in public for at least
another ten years. Everyone else connected to the incident was
either dead or sworn to silence.
The air force, which moved quickly to take over management of the
Roswell affair and ongoing UFO contacts and sightings, still kept
everything they learned highly classified under the Air Force
Intelligence Command and waged a push and pull war with the CIA for
information about sightings and ongoing contacts with anything
extraterrestrial. These really weren’t my concerns yet, but they
would be.
My research was not concerned with the crash at Roswell itself, nor
at Corona or at San Agustin - if those crashes did, in fact, occur
in early July 1947 - but on the day after Roswell, the day Bill
Blanchard from the 509th crated up the alien debris and shipped it
to Fort Bliss, where Gen. Roger Ramey’s staff determined its final
disposition and the official government history of the event began
to unfold.
In the early hours after the cargo arrived in Texas, there was so
much confusion about what was found and what wasn’t found that army
officers, who were in charge of the entire retrieval operation,
quickly scraped together both a cover story and a plan to silence
all the military and civilian witnesses to the recovery. The cover
story was easy. General Ramey ordered Maj. Jesse Marcel to recant
his “flying saucer” story and pose for a news photo with debris from
a weather balloon, which he described as the wreckage the retrieval
team recovered from outside Roswell. Marcel followed orders and the
flying saucer officially became a weather balloon.
The silencing of military witnesses was also accomplished easily
enough through top-down orders from
General Ramey to everyone at the 509th and at Fort Bliss to deny
that they were a part of any operation to
recover anything other than a balloon. Once the material left
Ramey’s command and arrived at Lt. Gen. Nathan P.Twining’s Air Materiel Command at Wright Field, all General
Ramey had to do was keep denying what he was already denying and it
was no longer his responsibility. Now it belonged to General
Twining, from whose desk a whole new era of army involvement with
the Roswell material began.
General Ramey treated the incident as a threat to national security
and deployed whatever forces he could to bring the material back for
evaluation and to suppress any rumors that might light a brushfire
of panic. Therefore, Ramey used the counter intelligence personnel
already posted to the 509th and ordered them deployed into the
civilian community as well as the military to use any means
necessary to suppress the story of the crash and retrieval. No news
should be allowed to get out, no speculation was to be tolerated,
and the story already circulating about a crashed flying saucer had
to be quashed.
By the next morning, July 8, the suppression of the crash story was
in full operation.
The army had already issued a new cover story to
the press by the time CIC officers had gotten to the witnesses and,
using threats and outright promises of cash, forced them to recant
their statements about what they saw. Rancher Mac Brazel, who first
said he had been at the site during the recovery and had described
the strange debris, disappeared for two days and then showed up in
town driving a new pickup truck and denying he’d ever seen anything.
CIC officers turned up at people’s houses and spoke quietly to
parents about what their children had learned. Whatever people
thought was happening, army personnel said, wasn’t, and it would
have to stay that way.
“You didn’t see a thing, “ they ordered. “Nothing happened here. Let
me hear you repeat that. “
The silencing worked so well that for the next thirty years the
story seemed to have been swallowed up by the quiet emptiness of
desert where all things are worn down to a fine grade of sameness.
But belying the quiet that settled over Roswell, a thousand miles
away, part of the U.S. military went on wartime alert as bits and
pieces of the craft reached their destinations. One of those
destinations, Lt. Gen. Nathan Twining’s desk at Wright Field, was
the focal point from which the Roswell artifacts would reach the
Foreign Technology desk at the Pentagon.
Among the first of the army’s top commands notified of the events
unfolding in Roswell in early July would have had to have been
Lieutenant General Twining’s Air Materiel Command at Wright Field,
where the Roswell debris was shipped. Nathan Twining has become
important to UFO researchers because of his association with a
number of highly secret meetings at the Eisenhower White House
having to do with the national security issues posed by the
discovery of UFOs and his relationship to National Security Special
Assistant Robert Cutler, who was the liaison between the NSC and
President Eisenhower when I was on the NSC staff in the 1950s.
The
silver-haired General Twining was the point man for initial research
and dissemination of Roswell related materials and, partly because
of the capability with which he administered the vital AMC at
Wright, he became part of an ad hoc group of top military and
civilian officials assembled by President Truman to advise him about
the Roswell discovery and its national security implications.
General Twining had been scheduled to travel to the West Coast in
early July 1947, but he canceled the trip,
remaining in New Mexico at the army’s air base at Alamogordo until
at least July 10. Alamogordo was important
not just because it was the nation’s nuclear weapons test site in
the 1940s and 1950s but because it was also a
field office of the AMC itself, where rocket scientists Wernher von
Braun and others were primarily based. Close by was the White Sands
guided missile base, where some of our military’s most advanced
tracking and embryonic targeting radars were deployed. These were
sensitive installations, especially during the UFO activity that
week, and it made perfect sense that immediately after the recovery
of the UFO the army general whose responsibility it would have been
to manage the retrieval was almost directly on-site conferring with
his top scientists.
Although I never saw the actual memos from President Truman to
General Twining regarding his trip to New Mexico, I had heard
stories about secret orders that Truman had issued to General
Twining directing him to New Mexico to investigate the reports of
the crash and to report directly to the White House on what he’d
found. I believe that it was General Twining’s initial report to the
President that confirmed that the army had retrieved something from
the desert and might have suggested the need for the formation of an
advisory group to develop policy about whatever was discovered. And,
remember, in those first forty-eight hours, nobody really knew what
this was.
By the time the Roswell debris had been shipped out of Fort Bliss
and had arrived at Wright Field, General
Twining had flown back from New Mexico to Wright to oversee the
analysis and evaluation of
the Roswell treasure trove. Twining moved quickly once back at his
office.
The alien bodies had to be autopsied in utmost secrecy and
the spacecraft and its contents analyzed, cataloged, and prepared
for dissemination to various facilities within the military. In as
much as everything about the crash was given the highest security
classification, stories had to be prepared for those with lower
security classifications but whose contributions could be important
to the creation of a credible cover story.
The official camouflage was almost as important to the military
in1947 as it was in 1961 when I took over. It was important because
as far as the army was concerned, 1947 was still wartime, a Cold
War, perhaps, but war nevertheless, and stories about military
hardware as valuable as the material retrieved from Roswell could
not be disclosed for fear that the Soviets would exploit it. Thus,
from day 1, the army treated its retrieval of the debris as if it
were an operation conducted in a wartime theater under battle
conditions. Roswell became military intelligence.
General Twining had seen the material for himself, and even before
he returned to Wright Field, he’d conferred with the rocket
scientists who were part of his brain trust at Alamogordo. Now,
during the remainder of the summer months, he quietly compiled a
report that he would deliver to President Truman and
an ad hoc group
of military, government, and civilian officials, who would
ultimately become the chief policy makers for what would become an
ongoing contact with extraterrestrials over the ensuing fifty years.
And as stories of the Roswell crash and other UFO sightings around
U.S. military bases began to filter in through the command chain of
the armed services, General Twining also needed to establish a lower
security channel along which he could exchange information with
other commands that were not cleared all the way to the top.
General Twining still reported to higher ups who, though they may
not have had the security clearance he had with regard to
extraterrestrial contact, nevertheless were his commanding officers
and routinely sought information from the AMC. Accordingly, General
Twining needed to maintain a quasi cover-up even within the
military.
The first of these reports was transmitted from General Twining to
the commanding general of Army Air Forces in Washington, dated
September 23, 1947. Written to the attention of Brig. Gen. George Schulgen, Twining’s memo addressed, in the most general of terms,
the official Air Materiel Command’s intelligence regarding “flying
discs. “ He drew a remarkable number of conclusions, most of which,
I had to surmise when I was on Eisenhower’s National Security
Council and then again when I got to the Pentagon, were based on
Twining’s own first hand experience with the sighting reports from
Roswell and other sighting reports as well as the materials
themselves, which were in the military’s possession.
Flying saucers or UFOs are not illusions, Twining says, referring to
the sighting of strange objects in the sky as “something real and
not visionary or fictitious. “ Even though he cites the possibility
that some of the sightings are only meteors or other natural
occurrences, he says that the reports are based upon real sightings
of actual objects” approximating the shape of a disc, of such
appreciable size as to be as large as man made aircraft. “
Considering that this report was never intended for public scrutiny,
especially in 1947, Twining marveled at the aircrafts’ operating
characteristics and went on record, drawing major conclusions about
the material he had and the reports he’d heard or read.
But, when he
wrote that the extreme maneuverability of the aircraft and their
“evasive” actions when sighted “or contacted” by friendly aircraft
and radar led him to believe that they were either “manually,
automatically, or remotely” flown, he not only suggested a guided
flight but imparted a hostile intent to their evasive maneuvers to
avoid contact. His characterization of the aircrafts’ behavior
revealed, even weeks after the physical encounter, that those
officers in the military who were now running the
yet-to-be-codenamed extraterrestrial contact project already
considered these objects and those entities who controlled them a
military threat.
He described the aircraft as it had been reported in the sightings:
a “light reflective or metallic surface, “
“absence of a trail
except in those few instances when the object was operating under
high performance conditions, “
“circular or elliptical in shape,
flat on bottom and domed on top, “
flights in formation consisting
of from “three to nine objects, “
and no sound except for those
instances when “a substantial rumbling roar was noted. “
The objects
moved quickly for aircraft at that time, he noted to General Schulgen, at level flight speeds above three hundred knots.
Were the United States to build such an aircraft, especially one
with a range of over seven thousand miles, the
cost, commitment, administrative and development overhead, and drain
on existing
high technology projects required that the entire project should be
independent or outside of the normal weapons development
bureaucracy. In other words, as I interpreted the memo, Twining was
suggesting to the commander of the Army Air Force that were the
airforce, which would become a separate branch of the military by
the following year, to attempt to exploit the technology that had
quite literally dropped into its lap, it had to do so separately and
independently from any normal weapons development program.
The
descriptions of the super secret projects at
Nellis Air Force Base
or Area 51 in the Nevada desert seem to fit the profile of the kind
of recommendation that General Twining was making, especially the
employment of the “skunk works” group at Lockheed in the development
of the Stealth fighter and B2 bomber.
Not revealing to the Army Air Forces command that Twining himself
had been ordered to visit bases in New Mexico in the hours after the
crash, the general advised his bosses that the military should
consider whether the flying disks were of domestic origin, “the
product of some high security project” already developed by the
United States outside of normal channels, or developed by a foreign
power that “has a form of propulsion possibly nuclear, which is
outside of our domestic knowledge. “ At the same time, weaving a
cover story that takes him out of the loop of reporting any of these
flying disks as a first hand observer, Twining writes that there is
a “lack of physical evidence in the shape of crash recovered
exhibits which would undeniably prove the existence of these
objects. “
But, even though General Twining has just written that there is no
evidence, he nevertheless recommends to his superiors that:
Headquarters, Army Air Forces issue a directive assigning a
priority, security classification and Code Name for a detailed study
of this matter to include the preparation of complete sets of all
available and pertinent data which will then be made available to
the Army, Navy, Atomic Energy Commission, JRDB, the Air Force
Scientific Advisory Group, NACA, and the RAND and NEPA projects for
comments and recommendations, with a preliminary report to be
forwarded within 15 days of receipt of the data and a detailed
report thereafter every 30 days as the investigation develops. A
complete interchange of data should be effected.
This was an important part of the memo, at least for me and my
research into how the army got the Roswell rile, because it
accounted for the army’s dissemination of the Roswell materials and
accompanying reports within only a couple of months after the
material’s arrival at Wright Field. When General Twining suggested
to his commanding officers at AAF that all the military branches as
well as existing government and civilian commissions needed to share
this information, the dispersal of the materials was already under
way. This is how the technology came into the possession of Army
R&D.
Finally, the general promised the Army Air Forces command that the
Air Materiel Command would continue to investigate the phenomenon
within its own resources in order to define its nature further and
it would route any more information it developed through channels.
Three days after the memo, on September 26,1947, General Twining
gave his report on the Roswell crash and its implications for the
United States to President Truman and a short list of officials he
convened to begin the management of this top-secret combination of
inquiry, police development, and “ops.“ This working group, which
included Adm. Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, Dr. Vannevar Bush, Secretary
James Forrestal, Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg, Dr. Detlev Bronk, Dr. Jerome
Hunsaker, Sidney W. Souers, Gordon Gray, Dr. Donald Menzel, Gen.
Robert M. Montague, Dr. Lloyd V. Berkner, and Gen. Nathan Twining
himself, became the nucleus for an ongoing fifty-year operation that
some people have called “Majestic-12. “
At the Eisenhower White House, it was simply referred to as “the
group, “ and in the days after Roswell it went
into operation just as smoothly as slipping your new 1949 Buick with
its “Dynaflow” automatic transmission into drive
and pulling away from the curb. In this way General Twining had
carefully orchestrated a complete cover-up of what had happened at
Roswell as well as a full scale, top-secret military R&D operation
to identify the nature of the phenomenon and assess its military
threat to the United States. It was as elegant as it was effective.
But the plan didn’t stop with the creation of the working group - in
fact, the operation very quickly developed
into something far more sophisticated because General Twining’s
“flying discs” simply wouldn’t go away. As more
information on sightings and encounters came rolling in through
every imaginable channel, from police officers
taking reports from frightened civilians to airline pilots
tracking strange objects in the sky, the group realized that they
needed policies on how to handle what was turning into a mass media
phenomenon. They needed a mechanism for processing the thousands of
flying saucer reports that could be anything from a real crash or
close encounter to a couple of bohunks tossing a pie tin into the
air and snapping its picture with their Aunt Harriet’s Kodak
Brownie.
The group also had to assess the threat from the Soviet
Union and Iron Curtain countries, assuming of course that flying
saucers weren’t restricted to North America, and gather intelligence
on what kinds of information our allies had on flying saucers as
well. And it still had to process the Roswell technology and figure
out how it could be used. So from the original group there developed
a whole tree structure of loosely confederated committees and
subgroups, sometimes complete organizations like the air force
Project Blue Book, all kept separate by administrative firewalls so
that there would be no information leakage, but all controlled from
the top.
With the initial and ongoing stories safely covered up, the plans
for the long term reverse engineering work on the Roswell technology
could begin. But who would do it? Where would the material reside?
And how could the camouflage of what the military was doing be
maintained amidst the push for new weapons, competition with the
Soviets, and the flying saucer mania that was sweeping the country
in the late 1940s?
General Twining had a plan for that, too. Just a
little over a year after the initial group meetings at the White
House, Air Force Intelligence, now that the air force had become a
separate service, issued a December 1948 report - 100-203-79 -
called “Analysis of Flying Object Incidents in the U.S.“ in which
UFOs are never referred to as extraterrestrial objects but as
elements of “foreign technology,“ which is actually the subject of
the report. The report, innocuous to most people because it doesn’t
say that flying saucers came from outer space, is actually one of
the first indications showing how the camouflage plan was supposed
to work over the ensuing years.
The writers of the report had located within the existing military
administrative structure the precise place where all research and
development into the flying disk phenomenon could be pursued not
only under a veil of secrecy but in the very place were no one could
be expected to look: the Foreign Technology desk. Here, the
materials could be deposited for safe keeping within the military
while army and air force brass decided what our existing industrial
and research technology allowed them to do. There could he as
weapons failed, secret experiments without fear of exposure, and,
most importantly, an ongoing discussion of how the United States
could develop this treasure trove of engineering information, all
within the very structure where it was supposed to take place. Just
don’t call it extraterrestrial; call it “foreign technology” and
throw it into the hopper with the rest of the mundane stuff the
foreign technology officers were supposed to do.
And that’s how, twelve years later, the Roswell technology turned up
in an old combination locked military file cabinet carted into my
new Pentagon office by two of the biggest enlisted men I’d ever
seen.
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