CHAPTER 8
The Project Gets Under Way
“THIS IS A HELLUVA REPORT, PHIL,“ GENERAL TRUDEAU SAID,
looking up from the paper clipped sheaf of typewritten sheets I’d
handed him first thing that morning. I’d been waiting at my desk
since before six when I got back to the Pentagon, taking looks
outside the building every once in a while as the bright orange
reflection of the rising sun that exploded in a distant window and
looked as if it had caught fire.
“What’d you do, stay up all night
writing it?”
“I put in some work after hours,“ I said. “I don’t want to spend
too much time in the nut file when people are supposed to be
working.“
The general laughed as he fingered through the paperwork, but you
could see he was impressed. As much as I wanted to denigrate the
Roswell file in front of him as a bunch of drawers full of stuff
that people would put me away for, we both knew that it contained
much of the future of our R&D.
Military research and development agencies were under growing
pressure from the Congress to put some success points on the
scoreboard or get out of the rocket launching business for good.
Early failures to lift off the navy’s WAC Corporal and the army
Redstone had made laughing stocks out of the American rocket program
while the Soviets were showing off their success like basketball
players on fancy lay-ups right across the court. The army’s
Project
Horizon moon base project was sitting in its own file cabinet
gathering dust. And there was also a growing concern among the
military that we’d be pushed into taking over the failed French
mission in Indochina to keep the Vietcong, Pathet Lao, and Khmer
Rouge from making the whole area Communist. It was a war we could
not win but that would drain our resources from the real battle
front in Eastern Europe.
So, even more than scoring some field goals, General Trudeau needed
projects going into development to keep the civilian agencies from
cutting us back and diverting our resources. Now my boss held my
first report in his hands and knew that our strategic plan had some
rational grounding. He pushed for a tactical plan.
“We know what we want to do, “ he said. “Now, how do we do it?”
“I’ve been thinking about that, too, General, “ I said. “And here’s
how I’d like to start. “
I explained that I wanted to compile a list of all our technical
human resources, like the rocket scientists from Germany then still
working at Alamogordo and White Sands. I’d met more than my share of
our rocket fuel and guidance specialists in the guided missile
program during my years at Red Canyon in command of the Nike
battalion.
But we were working with theoretical scientists as well,
men with experience who could combine the cold precision of an
engineer with the speculative vision of a free thinker. These were
the people I wanted to assemble into a brain trust, people I could
talk to about strange artifacts and devices that had no basis in
earthly reality. They were the scientists who could tell me what the
potential was in items like wafer shaped plywood thin pieces of
silicon with mysterious silver etchings on them.
“And once you have this brain trust, “ General Trudeau asked, “then
what?” “Match them up with technologies, “ I said. I admitted that we were
flying blind on much of the material that we had.
We couldn’t go out
to the general scientific and academic communities to ask them what
we had because we would very quickly lose control of our own
secrets. Besides, a lot of it had to do with weaponry, and there
were very strict rules on what we could and could not disclose
without the appropriate clearances. But our brain trust would be
invaluable. And, with the proper orientation and security checks,
they would keep our secrets, too, just as they had since the end of
World War II.
“Which of the scientists do you have in mind?” Trudeau asked, taking
out the little black leather covered notepad he kept in his inside
pocket. “I was thinking of Robert Sarbacher, “ I said. “Wernher vonBraun, of
course. Hans Kohler. Hermann Oberth. John von Neumann. “ “How much do they know about Roswell?”
Trudeau wanted to know. If
they’d been consulted on the Roswell
material back in1947, as I knew Wernher von Braun had been by
General Twining, then we weren’t revealing any
secrets. If they had never been informed about the crash, then we
were going out on a limb by sharing
information that was still classified above top secret. General
Trudeau needed to know how dangerous it was to
bring these scientists into the loop.
But I assured him that all of
them knew something about Roswell because of
their connection with the Research and Development Board. During the
Eisenhower administration information
about the classified research and data collection projects into
extraterrestrials was routinely filtered to the Office
of Research and Development because the head of the Research and
Development Board had been one of the original members of the group.
“I was at the White House when Sarbacher was on the board, General,
“ I told my boss. “So I can be pretty sure he was in the know. And
Hermann Oberth, “ I admitted to Trudeau. “He already told me that he
believed that the objects we saw popping up on our radar screens at
Red Canyon and then disappearing as if they were never there were
probably the same kinds of extraterrestrial aircraft that we picked
up at Roswell. So he knew, but I don’t know how. “ “Well, that’s good news, at least, “ the general said. “I’d rather
not be the one authorizing the release of classified information to
anyone who didn’t know it before hand. And I don’t want to put you
in the position, Phil, of having to explain to any higher ups why
you decided to release top secret information to people without
clearances, even in the interest of national security. “
I appreciated that, but for our plan to work, we needed the
technical and scientific expertise people like von Braun, Oberth,
and Sarbacher could bring to any reverse engineering and product
development strategies.
"Will you approach them?” Trudeau asked.
“We’ll have to begin by taking an inventory of all of the defense
industry contracts we’re currently managing, General, “ I said.
“Lineup the contracts and systems we’re developing with the
materials in the nut file to see where they fit in. Then bring in
the scientists to consult on making sure we know what we think we
have, that is, if they can figure out what we have. “ “Let’s go through a potential product list first, “ the general
suggested. “Then see where our contracts line up and where the
scientists can help. And you know what happens then, “ Trudeau
asked. I wasn’t sure where he was going to take this. “We’re sticking you back in civilian clothes and sending you on the
road to visit our friends in these defense contractors. “ “I don’t even get to keep my battle ribbons, “ I joked.
“I don’t want anyone to know, “ General Trudeau explained, “that
some lieutenant colonel on the CIA’s Most Wanted list is traveling
to our biggest defense contractors with a mysterious briefcase full
of nobody knows what. You might as well wear a sign, “ he laughed.
“We have to get to work on that list. “
That same afternoon I went back to my report on the
EBE and his
craft and began to list the riddles it contained and the
opportunities for the discovery of product it presented to us. The
entire event was like an enigma to us because every conventional
requirement one would expect to have found at the crash site, in the
craft, or even in the EBEs themselves was missing.
Where was the engine or the power supply for the craft? It had
neither jet engines nor propellers. It had no
rocket propulsion like the V2 missiles, nor did it carry any fuel.
At Norton Air Force Base, where the craft eventually
was hangared, engineers marveled at the thin amalgam of the most
refined copper and purest silver they had
ever seen that covered the ship’s underside. The metal was
remarkable for its conductivity, as if the entire craft
was an electrical circuit offering no resistance to the flow of
current.
Yet it was something our military engineers
could not replicate. By the 1950s at Norton Air Force Base, at least
two prototypes of the alien craft had been
fabricated, but neither had the power source of the craft that had
crashed. In its stead were crude attempts at
nuclear fission generators, but they were ineffective and dangerous.
Even the portable nuclear generators that
would power the primitive Soviet and
American satellites in the 1960s were insufficient for the needs of
the replicated spacecraft. So the question remained, what powered
the Roswell spacecraft?
I reviewed all of my discoveries in a checklist:
-
The crescent shaped space vehicle also had no traditional
navigational controls as we understood them.
-
There were no control sticks, wheels, throttles, pedals, cables,
flaps, or rudders.
-
How did the creatures pilot this ship and how did
they control the speed, accelerating from a near stationary hover
above a given spot, like a helicopter, to speeds in excess of seven
thousand miles per hour in a matter of seconds?
-
What protected the creatures from the tremendous g-forces they
would have had to have pulled in any conventional aircraft?
Our own
pilots in World War II had to wear special devices as they pulled up
out of dives that kept the oxygen from flowing out of their brains
and causing them to blackout. But we found nothing in the flight
suits of the creatures that indicated that they faced the same
problem. Yet their craft should have pulled
ten times the g-forces our own pilots did, so we couldn’t figure out
how they managed this. No controls, no protection, no power supply,
no fuel: these were the riddles I listed.
Along side them I listed that:
• The craft itself was an electrical circuit.
• That the flight suits - “flight skins” is a better description -
the creatures wore were made of a substance whose atomic structure
was elongated, strengthened lengthwise, so as to provide a
directional flow to any current applied to it.
The engineers who first discovered this were amazed at the pure
conductivity of these skins, functionally like the skin of the craft
itself, and their obvious ability to protect the wearer while at the
same time vectoring some kind of electronic field.
Where was the
physical junction of the circuit between the pilot and the ship? Was
it turned on and off somehow by the pilot himself through a switch
we didn’t know about?
Alongside the riddle of the apparent absence of navigational
controls I listed the sensorized headband that so intrigued the
officers at Roswell’s Walker Field and fascinated me as well. If, as
we all suspected, this device picked up the electronic signatures
from the creatures’ oversized brains, what did it do with them? I
believed - and our industrial product development from the 1960s
through today as the brain wave control helmets finally came into
service ultimately confirmed - that these headbands translated the
brain’s electronic signals into system commands that controlled
speed, direction, and elevation.
Maybe the headbands had to be
calibrated or tuned to each individual pilot, or maybe the pilots -
since I believed they were genetically engineered beings
biologically manufactured especially for flight or long term
exploration had to be calibrated to the headband. Either way, the
headbands were the interface between the pilot and the ship. But
that still didn’t resolve the question of the lack of cables, gears,
or wires.
Maybe the answer lay not in the lack of structural controls but in
the way the suit, the headband, the creatures’ brains, and the
entire craft worked together. In other words, when I looked at the
possible function of the entire system, the synchronicity between
the brain interface in the headband, the pure conductivity of the
spacecraft, and the elongated structure of the space skins, which
also acted like a circuit, I could see how directional instructions
could have been translated by the headbands into some form of
current flowing through the skins and into the series of raised deck
panels where there were indentations for the creatures’ hands.
The
indentations on these panels, as the Roswell field reports described
them, looked like the handprints pressed into the concrete at the
old Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood. Were the directional
commands a series of electronic instructions transmitted directly
from the creatures’ brains along their bodies and through the panels
into the ship itself as if the ship were only an extension of the
creature’s body? For that to have been the case, something was still
missing. The engine.
Again, I settled on the idea of function over structure. The debris
and the spacecraft indicated that an engine didn’t somehow fall out
of the craft when it crashed. A conventional engine was never there
in the first place. What we found was that the craft seemed to have
had the ability to store as well as conduct a vast amount of
current. What if the craft itself were the engine, imparted with a
steady current from another source that it stored as if it were a
giant capacitor? This would be like charging the battery in an
electric car and running it until the battery was drained. Sound far
fetched?
It’s not much different from filling up a car with gas at
the pump and driving until the tank’s dry, or fueling a plane and
making sure you land before the fuel’s gone. I suspected the Roswell
craft was simply a capacitor that stored current that was controlled
or vectored by the pilot and was able to be recharged in some way or
could recharge itself with some form of built in generator.
That would have explained the power supply, I noted along side the
riddle of the missing engine, but what was the means of propulsion
and direction? If there was a force that functioned the same way
thrust does, it wasn’t immediately obvious how it was created and
vectored. As early as September 1947, scientists who had gone to the
Air Materiel Command at Wright Field to see the debris were
speculating that the electronic potential of the Roswell craft
reminded them of the German and British antigravity experiments of
the 1920s and 1930s.
General Twining was reported to have said more
than once that the name of the Serbian electrical engineer and
inventor of alternating current,
Nikola Tesla, kept bubbling up in
the conversation because the scientists examining the damaged craft
described the way it must have converted an electromagnetic field
into an antigravity field. And, of course, the craft itself reminded
them of the German experimental fighter aircraft that made their
appearance near the end of the war but that had been in development
ever since the 1930s.
Tesla and a number of other European scientists had been pioneers in
the conversion of circumscribed small
area antigravity fields out of electromagnetic fields. However, the
effort to develop true antigravity aircraft never
came to fruition among conventional aircraft manufacturers because
gasoline, jet, and rocket engines provided
a perfectly good weapons technology. But the theory of
electromagnetic antigravity propulsion was not
unknown even if it was not well understood and, without a power
source like a small portable nuclear fission
generator, not at all feasible. But, what if the flying craft
already carried enough electric potential and storage
capacity to retain its power, just like a very advanced flying
battery?
Then it might have all the power it needed
to propagate and vector a wave directionally by shifting its
magnetic poles. If the magnetic field theory experiments carried out
by engineers and electrical energy pioneers Paul Biefeld and
Townsend Brown in the 1920s at the California Institute for Advanced
Studies were accurately reported - and the U.S. military as well as
scientific record keepers at the Bureau of Investigation kept very
close tabs on what these engineers were doing - then the
technological theory for antigravity flight existed before World War
II.
In fact, prototypes for vertical takeoff and landing disk shaped
aircraft had been on the drawing boards at the California Institute
since before the war. It was just that in the United States nobody
paid them much attention. The Germans did develop and had flown
flying disks, or so the intelligence reports read, even though they
had no impact on the outcome of the war other than stimulating a
race between the United States and the USSR to gather as much of the
German technology as possible.
Thus, even though engineers had
attempted to build vertical takeoff and flying wing aircraft before
and had succeeded, the Roswell spacecraft, because it was so truly
functional and outflew anything we had - as well as traveled in
space - represented a practical technological challenge to the
scientists visiting the Air Materiel Command. We knew what the EBEs
did, we just couldn’t duplicate how. My reports for Army R&D were
analyses of the types of technology that we had to develop to either
challenge this spacecraft militarily with a credible defense or
build one ourselves.
In my notes to General Trudeau, I reviewed for him all the
technological implications that I believed were relevant in any
discussion about what could be harvested from the Roswell craft. I
also wrote up what I understood about the magnetic field technology
and how unconventional designers and engineers had drafted
prototypes for these “antigravs” earlier in the century. All of this
pointed in one direction, I suggested : that we now had a craft and
could farm out to industry the components that comprised this
electromagnetic antigravity drive and brain wave directed
navigational controls. We had to dole them out piece meal once we
broke them down into developable units, each of which could have its
own engineering track.
For that we’d need the advice of the
scientists who would eventually comprise our brain trust,
individuals we could rely on and whom we could talk to about the
Roswell debris. These were scientists who routinely worked with our
prime defense contractors and could tell us whom to approach in
their R&D divisions for secure and private consultations.
I was hoping that the evaluation of the kinds of things we were able
to learn from the EBE and his craft that I was preparing for
General
Trudeau would lead me toward the solution of some of the
physiological problems we knew our astronauts would encounter in
space flight. In the early 1960s, astronauts from both the United
States and the USSR had made their first orbital flights and had
experienced more than a few negative physical symptoms from the
weightless environment during the mission. Despite our official
claims that humans could travel safely in space, our doctors knew
that even short periods of weightlessness were extremely
disorienting to some of our astronauts, and the longer the flight,
the more uncomfortable the symptoms could become. We were worried
about loss of physical strength, reduced muscle capability in the
heart and diaphragm, reduction of lung capacity, and loss of tensile
strength in the bones.
Yet, scattered across the desert floor outside of Roswell were
creatures who seemed completely adapted to space flight. Just to be
able to examine these entities was an enormous opportunity, but I
knew we had the ability to harvest what we could observe about
aliens. So, again, along side the speculations I had made about the
EBEs and their craft I listed what I thought were the major
possibilities of developing product to enable us to travel in space
for extended periods of time.
Renewable oxygen and food supplies were obvious directions to take,
and by the 1960s, NASA engineers were already designing ways to
recharge the atmosphere inside a capsule and provide for food
storage. We helped. It was Army R&D and our plan for developing an
irradiation process for food that even today provides the basis for
non-refrigerated food supplies on board spacecraft. But beyond that
were real issues of health and survival. Merely getting human beings
into earth orbit or even launching them into lunar orbit and
bringing them back safely were straight forward engineering
projects. But the readaptation of the human body to earth gravity
after an extended period of weightlessness or reduced gravity was a
far more intractable problem to solve. The physiology of the EBEs
provided an important clue.
Besides the development of super
tenacity fibers that would protect the astronauts and the skin of
the spacecraft and the development of a food preservation process
that would neutralize all the bacteria that cause spoilage, we
needed to examine the ways we trained our astronauts physically so
that they would be more adaptable to periods of weightlessness and
spatial disorientation. At the same time we needed to develop
nutritional packages that would not place undue stress on a
digestive system that needed to compensate for deprivation of
gravity.
Since there were no food preparation facilities on board the
spacecraft, we didn’t know how they stored or processed food or even
what they ate, if anything at all. However, my concern over a
process to preserve food for space travel was prompted by the
obvious challenge posed by the spacecraft itself. If we were going
to travel in space, and it was clear from what the army found at
Roswell that at least one culture had developed the technology to do
so, then R&D had to find a way to feed our pilots in space.
Therefore, we needed to develop a process to preserve food for space
missions that didn’t require refrigeration facilities and the
consumption of excessive amounts of energy.
The problem of long term space travel still hasn’t been solved, in
part because we continue to rely upon conventional means of
propulsion that subject our astronauts to great periods of physical
stress, especially during takeoff. We also have no magic way for
astronauts to readjust to earth gravity after a long ride in an
orbit in space station like the Russian Mir or our own planned
station early in the next century. Manned trips to Mars, also on the
drawing boards for early in the twenty-first century, will also be a
problem because they will last for months and subject our astronauts
to a great deal of stress.
I suggested to General Trudeau in my report that although this
wasn’t explicitly an Army R&D mission, NASA should begin the
preparation of astronaut candidates from the time they’re still in
school.
“If we train our astronauts from the time they’re children
the same way we do with potential athletes at sports camps and
provide the most promising candidates with flight training and
military or government scholarships to ROTC colleges, we will create
a cadre of officers physically adaptable and scholastically trained
to enter the next generation of space travel, “ I wrote.
I know that
General Trudeau passed this recommendation along because NASA itself
opened a space training camp for future astronauts within a few
years after my retirement from the service.
Beyond the issues concerning the training potential of astronauts
for conventionally powered space flight, the examination of the EBE
bodies and the ship’s possible propulsion system raised other
intriguing questions. What if, in addition to having been
bioengineered for interstellar travel, the EBE’s weren’t subjected
to the kinds of forces human pilots would routinely face? If the
EBEs utilized a wave propagation technology as an antigravity drive
and navigation system, then they traveled inside some form of
adjustable electromagnetic wave. I suggested to General Trudeau that
we should study the potential physiological effects on humans of
long term exposure to the kinds of energy spillage generated by the
propagation of an electromagnetic field.
Biologists needed to
determine how feasible such a form of space travel would be based
upon whether energy radiation would disrupt the cellular activity of
the human body. Perhaps the external one piece skins worn by the EBEs afforded them protection against the effects of being enclosed
in a portable electromagnetic field.
Although Army R&D never conducted these studies because the medical
issues surrounding space travel were subsumed by NASA under
contracts with the military, indirect medical research was conducted
years later. Studies surrounding the physiological effects on
persons living near high voltage power transmission lines and
persons using extendable antenna hand held cellular telephones both
proved inconclusive. While some people argued that there were higher
incidences of cancer among both groups, other studies argued just
the opposite or found other reasons for any incidences of cancer.
I
believe that a definitive piece of research on the effects of low
energy or
ELM wave exposure still needs to be done because,
ultimately, even more than atomic energy or ion drives, magnetic
field generation will be the system that will propel our near
planetary voyages from 2050 through the early twenty second century.
Beyond that, for humans to reach destinations beyond the solar
system technology will require a radically different form of
propulsion that will enable them to reach velocities at or beyond
the speed of light.
Thus did my second report cover the opportunities for research
presented to us by the autopsies of the EBEs and from the crash of
their vehicle. To my mind, it was nothing less than a confirmation
that the research into electromagnetics in the 1920s and the highly
experimental saucer and crescent shaped development of aircraft by
the Allies and Axis powers would have led to an entirely new
generation of airships. I know that my reports were read by the
higher ups in the military because top secret research has continued
right through to the present on a whole range of designs and
propulsion systems from the Stealth fighter and bomber to prototypes
for a very high altitude suborbital interceptor aircraft, developed
at Nellis and Edwards, now on the drawing board, which can hover in
place and fly at speeds over seven thousand miles per hour.
Once I finished my report on the opportunities we could possibly
derive from the EBEs and the craft, I turned my attention to
compiling a short list of immediate opportunities I believed
achievable by the Army R&D’s Foreign Technology Division from a
reverse engineering of items retrieved from the crash. These were
specific things, not as theoretical as questions about the
physiology of the EBE or the description of its craft. But, while
some might call them purely mundane, each of these artifacts, as a
direct result of Army R&D’s intervention, helped spawn an entire
technological industry from which came new products and military
weapons.
Among the Roswell artifacts and the questions and issues that arose
from the Roswell crash, on my preliminary list that needed
resolution for development scheduling or simple inquiries to our
military scientific community were:
• Image intensifiers, which ultimately became “night vision”
• Fiber optics • Super-tenacity fibers • Lasers
• Molecular alignment metallic alloys • Integrated circuits
• Microminiaturization of logic boards • HARP (High Altitude Research Project)
•
Project Horizon (moon base) • Portable atomic generators (ion
propulsion drive) • Irradiated food • Third brain guidance systems (EBE
headbands) • Particle beams (“Star Wars”
antimissile energy weapons) • Electromagnetic propulsion
systems • Depleted uranium projectiles
For each of the items on my list, General Trudeau went into his
human resources file and found the names of scientists working on
government defense projects or in allied research projects at
universities where I could turn for advice and some consultation. I
wasn’t surprised to see Wernher von Braun turn up under every rocket
propulsion issue. von Braun had gone on record in 1959 by announcing
that the U.S. military had acquired a new technology as a result of
top secret research in unidentified flying objects. Nor was I
surprised to sec John von Neumann’s name next to the mention of the
strange looking silver imprinted silicon wafers that I thought
looked like elliptical shaped crackers.
“If these are what I think
they might be, “ General Trudeau said, “printed circuitry, there’s
only one person we can talk to. “
Dr. Robert Sarbacher was an especially important contact person on
our list of scientists because he had worked on the Research and
Development Board during the Eisenhower administration. Not only had
Sarbacher been consulted by members of Admiral Hillenkoetter’s and
General Vandenberg’s working group on UFOs during the 1950s, he was
part of the original decision General Twining made to bring all of
the Roswell debris back to Wright Field for preliminary examination
before farming it out to the military research community.
As early
as 1950, Sarbacher, commenting on the nature of the debris, said
that he was sure the light and tough materials were being analyzed
very carefully by government laboratories that had taken possession
of the debris after the crash. Because he was already knowledgeable
about the Roswell debris, Dr. Sarbacher was another obvious
candidate for an Army R&D brain trust.
We also listed Dr. Wilbert Smith, who, in a memo to the controller
of telecommunications in November 1950, had urged the government of
Canada to investigate the nature of alien technology the United
States had retrieved from crashed extraterrestrial vehicles and that
was at that time being studied by Vannevar Bush. Dr. Smith, who had
learned of the U.S. investigation from Sarbacher, said that
regardless whether UFOs fit into our belief system or not, the fact
was we had acquired them and it was important for us to harvest the
technology they contained. He implored the government to make a
substantial effort to utilize alien technology. General Trudeau
joked that although Dr. Smith knew that we had acquired technology
at Roswell, he didn’t really know what it was. “I can’t wait to see
his face when you open your briefcase in front of him, Phil, “ the
general said, thinking about how his old friend had always wanted to
know the specifics of what he had secreted away in 1947.
Each of these scientists had maintained existing relationships with
any number of defense contractors during
the 1950s. General Trudeau also had relationships with the army
contractors who were developing new weapons
systems for the military within one part of the company while
another part was harvesting some of the same
technology for consumer products development. These were
companies—Bell Labs, IBM, Monsanto, Dow,
General Electric, and
Hughes - that General Trudeau wanted to talk to about the list of
technological products that we’d compiled from our R&D Roswell nut
file.
“You begin calling our scientist friends, “ General Trudeau
announced. “And make whatever appointments you want. “ “Where are you going to be, General?” I asked.
“I’m going to be taking some trips, too, “ he said. “First to the
chief of staff to make sure we have the discretionary budget we’re
going to need. Then to some of the people I want you to talk to once
you have the backing from the scientific community for the projects
on your list. “ “Where to first?” I asked. “What do you like?” the general shot right back to me.
“We’ve been working with image intensifies for some time, “ I said.
“We even got our hands on devices the Germans were working on at the
end of the war. “ “Well then, why don’t you make a very preliminary trip over to Fort
Belvoir,“ General Trudeau said.
“They’ve had a night vision project
in the works for the past ten years, but it’s got nothing over what
you have in your file. “ “I’ll get over there first thing, “ I said.
“Yes, Phil, but you get out of that uniform and into a real lawyer
suit, “ the general ordered. “And don’t take your staff car.“ He
saw me raise my eyebrows. “All you’re going to do is feed a project,“ Trudeau continued, “that’s been under way since right after the
war. They’ve got stuff, but you’re going to give them a giant leap.
Once you’ve fed them, you’ll disappear and I’ll assign a night
vision project manager here to see the development through.“ I
prepared to leave his office.
“No one will know, Phil, “ he said.
“Just like you thought, the Roswell night viewer will put a seed of
an idea in someone’s mind over at Fort Belvoir and it will become
part of along project history. It will disappear just like you into
the history of the product development. “ “Yes, sir, “ I said. I was beginning to realize just how lonely this
job could be. “You still have a suit that fits?” the general asked.
“I think so,“ I answered. “Maybe what I wore over at the White
House is a little out of style, but it’ll pass.“ “Good luck, Phil, “ General Trudeau said. “Make sure no one
knows where you’re going and I’ll make sure you have all the budget
you need. “
This was the beginning. I saluted, but the general just stuck out
his hand and I shook it. We both realized in that moment, as we were
striking out on our own, just how momentous this was about to
become. A lieutenant general allocating money for his development
budget and a lieutenant colonel looking for someone to develop an
innocuous-looking eye shield an unknown GI had picked up out of the
sand near a UFO crashed into a rock in the lonely desert outside of
Roswell in a lightning storm fourteen years ago.
What a pair we must have made.
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