CHAPTER 14
The Antimissile Missile Project
there were times during my tenure at the Pentagon when something in
the Roswell file had such resonance in my life that it made me
question whether there was some larger plan for my work. I’ve read
about the concept of synchronicity or confluence in the years since
I retired from the military and how things or events tend to cluster
around a common thread. Such a common thread was the development of
the antimissile missile that encompassed my work in R&D at the
Pentagon, my brief stint as a staff adviser to Senator Strom
Thurmond, and my years in Rome during the war and occupation as the
assistant chief of staff, Intelligence (G-2), Rome Area Allied
Command.
In early 1963, just after I left the Pentagon, Senator Strom
Thurmond asked me to join his staff as a consultant and adviser on
military and national security issues. Congress had just
appropriated $300 million to turn a fledgling plan to investigate
the feasibility of an antimissile missile program into a full
development project. But it ran right into a concrete barrier just
as soon as it left the Senate. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara
flatly refused to spend the money because, he said, not only would
it intensify the U.S.-Soviet arms race, it would actually offend the
Kremlin because it would put them on notice that we were trying to
deploy a first strike capability while neutralizing their ICBMs.
Worse, he said to the Congress, the United States military simply
didn’t need the weapon in the first place.
Senator Thurmond was incensed and I was deeply worried. McNamara
just didn’t get it. He was completely misinformed about how the
Soviets reacted to any weapons deployment on our part. They didn’t
negotiate with us out of a sense of cooperation, only a sense of
necessity that it was in their best interests to do so. If they
thought we could knock out their ICBMs, that, more than anything,
would keep them honest. Hadn’t they backed down over Cuba because
they saw that Kennedy actually meant business when he screwed up his
resolve to order the navy to enforce the blockade? But the CIA had
McNamara’s ear and was giving him exactly the information the
disinformation specialists in the Kremlin wanted him to have: don’t
develop the antimissile missile.
General Trudeau and I had a secret agenda we had worked up the
previous year at the Pentagon. The antimissile missile, utilizing
laser targeting and tracking, was supposed to be the perfect
mechanism for getting the funds to develop a laser beam weapon we
could ultimately use to fire on UFOs. At least that was the way we’d
planned it. The general had gotten it through the Pentagon
bureaucracy while I covered his flank on the legislative side,
testifying before the Armed Services Committee on the efficacy of a
weapon that was capable of protecting American strategic forces with
an umbrella. If any country were foolish enough to attack the United
States, the antimissile missile would blunt their offensive and
enable us not only to devastate their military forces but hold their
population centers hostage as well.
Not so, said the Defense Department. The deployment of an
antimissile missile would encourage our enemies to attack our cities
first and devastate our civilian population. What did it matter if
we had the ability to strike back when the damage to us had already
been done? The only thing that was keeping our civilian population
centers safe was each side’s ability to hold the other’s nuclear
forces hostage. If both sides devastated one another’s nuclear
forces, it would give each side time to stop before a mutual
destruction of the civilian populations.
But the secretary of defense didn’t understand war. He especially
hadn’t seen what lessons the Soviets learned
during World War II when their population centers had been
devastated and people were
reduced to the point of starvation and cannibalized one another for
food. That kind of experience doesn’t toughen you against the
ravages of war, it educates you. The Soviets’ only hope for a
victory in the Cold War was in our putting down our guard and
capitulating to them. By refusing to go forward with the antimissile
missile, the secretary of defense was listening to arguments that
were spoon fed to him, certainly without his knowledge, by people in
the civilian intelligence community who were being manipulated by
the KGB.
Senator Thurmond’s reaction to Bob McNamara’s refusal to spend the
antimissile missile appropriation was to hold subcommittee hearings
on this issue to find out why. The Defense Department didn’t want to
disclose classified information about the capabilities of a proposed
weapon and our defense policy before a public session of Congress.
So Fred Buzhardt, who years later became President Nixon’s counsel,
suggested that Senator Thurmond invoke a senatorial privilege to
close a session of the Senate so that the issue of the antimissile
missile could be discussed in private before the full Senate.
But
first, we had to request specific information from the Department of
Defense, and that task, because I was the Senator’s adviser for
military affairs, fell to me. No one knew that I was actually the
officer who had initially prepared the information for the
antimissile missile program to begin with and probably knew more
about the documents than anyone because less than a year earlier I
had prepared them myself.
The first meeting with the Defense Department was held in my new
office in the basement of the Capitol Building. Secretary McNamara
sent his own scientific adviser, Harold Brown, who would later
become the secretary of defense himself, along with an army colonel
who had become the project officer for the antimissile missile
development program. Brown didn’t know who I was, but his assistant
from the army certainly did.
“Colonel, “ the army project officer began as soon as I asked him a
question about the request we’d sent for
information, and Harold Brown sat up straight in his chair.
Gradually, like chipping away parts of a granite block, I
asked the project officer about the specific details of the
antimissile missile program, how much of the budget
allocation from previous Pentagon funding they’d already spent, and
what their development time table would
be if the current appropriation were spent for the current phase of
the project.
Then I asked more technical
questions about the research into ground based radars,
satellite based radars, speculation into Soviet counter antimissile
missile strategies, and Soviet development of even bigger and more
mobile ICBMs that would present more imperative targets for any
antimissile missile system because we couldn’t take them out in a
first strike. Mounted on railway cars or trucks, mobile Soviet
missiles would be almost impossible to track even though they would
have to remain stationary for the liquid fueling process to be
completed.
“I see that my assistant keeps on calling you colonel, Mr. Corso,
“Harold Brown said. “And you certainly seem to know a lot of details
on this subject. “ “Yes, sir, “ I said. “I only retired from the army a couple of
months ago but while I was at the Pentagon, I was the acting
projects officer for the antimissile missile program. “ “Then there’s no use in holding back, “ Harold Brown said and
finally smiled for the first time in our meeting. He reached into
his pocket and pulled out a folded envelope. “Here are your copies
of the complete details of the project about which we briefed
President Kennedy. It’s all here. And I presume this is what you are
looking for, officially, “ he said with a special emphasis on
“officially. “
He knew that I knew what was in that envelope but
couldn’t disclose it before the Senate because it contained
classified information and I would be breaching the National
Security Act. However, by his giving me the material, much of it
based on information that I had developed myself and had privately
briefed Attorney General Robert Kennedy on in 1962, Brown was giving
me the full authorization to disclose. He probably realized that in
private sessions, I had talked generally about what was in the army
file on the antimissile missile - that was a form of senatorial
privilege as long as it wasn’t abused - but that I couldn’t go
formal with it. Now I could, and I appreciated Harold Brown’s
candor.
The battle over the appropriation was about to be joined, but I
couldn’t look over the contents of the envelope, some of which were
my own notes, without thinking back to the sequence of events that
led to this meeting and to the project that ultimately was developed
as a result of it. It began earlier in 1962 as I was working down
the list of the priorities I had set for myself in the nut file. In
it was a medical report about the creatures that I was trying to
save until I had gotten all of the tangible items from Roswell into
the development process.
It was a report on the possible function and apparent structure of
the alien brain, a report that marveled at the similarities between
the KBH brain and the human brain. However, one item in the report
threw me for a complete loop. The medical examiner wrote that
measurements of brain activity taken from the EBE who was still
barely alive at Roswell showed that its electronic signature, at
least what they were able to measure with equipment in 1947,
displayed a signal similar to what we would call long, low frequency
waves. And the examiner referred to a description by one of the
Roswell Army Air Field doctors that the creature’s brain lobes seem
to have been not just physiologically and neurologically integrated
but integrated by an electromagnetic current as well.
I would have loved to dismiss this as the speculation of a doctor
who had no experience with this type of analysis and certainly no
experience with alien beings. Therefore, whatever he wrote was
nonsense and not worth the time it took to respond to it. File it
back in the cabinet and get on to other issues that could be turned
into viable projects.
But the medical examiner’s report was more
disturbing than I was ready to admit because it took me back to a
time when I was the assistant chief of staff in Rome and made
friends with some of the members of the graduate faculty at the
University of Rome.
I was a twenty five year old captain at the time, a former
engineering undergraduate, way in over my head and learning my job
responsibilities each day, keeping one step ahead of my boss so he
wouldn’t find out that I didn’t really know anything. In one of my
visits to the university I met Dr. Gislero Flesch, a professor of
criminology and anthropology who lectured me on what he called his
theory and experiments on “the basis of life. “ It was a wild and, I
thought, supernatural theory on what he called the filament within
each cell. The filament was activated by some cosmic action or form
of electromagnetic radiation that bombarded the earth continuously
from outer space and resonated against a constant refresh of
electrical activity from the brain.
“Captain” he would say whenever he began some formal explanation. I
also thought that he was always
surprised that someone so young could actually be dispatched from
the New World to administer law and justice
in Rome, the capital of the ancient world. The old professor also
was scrupulous about showing everyone,
including his dimmest of students, extraordinary respect.
“The
electromagnetic forces in the body are the least
understood, “
he continued. “Yet they account for more activity than anyone
realizes.
As an engineering student whose whole experience with energy had to
do with verifiable experiments, I was more than skeptical at first.
How can you measure an electrical activity in the brain that you
cannot see? How can invisible waves of energy that you can’t feel or
see excite certain areas of the human cell, and what was their
purpose?
Professor Flesch introduced me to Professor Casmir Franck, one of
the first scientists to ever photograph brain waves. Professor
Franck became a friend because during my days in Rome, fighting off
Gestapo agents, Communist partisans, and the local crime families
and crime chieftains, I was always engaged in some type of warfare.
But when I had time off, I wanted to meet people, to stretch my
experience, to fall in love with the city of my own ancestors I had
been assigned to protect. So I sought out a network of friends to
whom I could relate and from whom I could learn. Professor Franck
was just such a man.
In Franck’s first experiments he had used a rabbit brain as a test
subject. He measured what he said were the
long, low frequency waves animal brains generate and described how
he was able to trace the paths these
waves took when they were transmitted from the brain to the animal’s
voluntary muscles. Certain muscles,
Professor Franck said, were attuned to respond to certain brain wave
lengths, waves of a specific frequency. In
cases of muscle paralysis, it’s not the muscle that’s necessarily
damaged, it’s the muscle’s tuning mechanism that becomes disabled so
that it no longer picks up the right frequency.
It’s like a radio,
he said. If the radio can’t pick up a signal, the radio isn’t
necessarily broken; its antenna or the crystal may need to be
adjusted to the correct frequency. I was a guest at his laboratory
more than a few times and watched him carry out his experiments with
live rabbits, interfering with their brains’ electromagnetic wave
propagation by implanting electrodes and seeing which muscles became
cataleptic and which responded. He said it was the frequency that
was being altered because once the animal was removed from the
experimental table, it could walk and hop as if nothing had ever
happened.
Then Professor Franck introduced me to another one of his
colleagues, the celebrated research biologist and physician Doctor Castellani, who had many years earlier isolated and identified the
disease called “sleeping sickness” and perfected what during
the1930s and 1940s became known as “Castellani Ointments” as
treatments for a variety of skin diseases.
Where other doctors, he
said, had focused on treating only the symptoms they could see on
the skin, Doctor Castellani said that the problems of many skin
rashes, psoriasis, or inflammations that looked like bacterial
infections were, in fact, correctable by changing the skin’s
electromagnetic resonance. The ointments, he said, didn’t attack the
infection with drugs; they were chemical reactants that changed the
electrostatic condition of the skin, allowing the long, low
frequency waves from the brain to do the healing.
All three men were using these electromagnetic waves to promote
healing in ways I considered astounding. They made claims about the
ability of electromagnetic treatments to affect the speed at which
cells divide and tumors grow. They claimed that through directed
electromagnetic wave propagation they could cure heart disease,
arthritis, all types of bacteriological infections that interfered
with cell function, and even certain forms of cancer.
If this sounds like something supernatural in 1997, imagine how it
must have sounded to the ears of a young and inexperienced
intelligence officer in 1944 who was so far out of his element that
the older, seasoned British intelligence laughed at his age. They
laughed until they saw what happened to the Gestapo agents who were
trying to reinfiltrate Rome behind the Allied front lines and met up
with my men on the back streets and alleys. That’s when the laughing
stopped.
I spent many hours with Professors Flesch, Franck, and Castellani in
Rome and watched them experiment with
all kinds of small animals. They didn’t have the research funds nor
the endorsements of the medical societies to
allow them to expand their work or to treat patients with their
unconventional methods. Thus, much of their work
found its way into research monographs, articles in academic
journals, or university lectures at symposiums. And I
left Rome in the spring of 1947, said my good-byes to the friends I
had made at the University of Rome, and put
their work - relegated once again to the supernatural - out of my
mind as I concentrated on my new jobs at Fort
Riley, the White House, Red Canyon, Germany, and the Pentagon.
Then
on the day that I came across the
speculative report
on the structure of the alien brain from Roswell, everything
Professors Flesch, Franck, and Castellani said came back to me like
a clap of thunder. Here I was again, staring at a piece of loose
leaf paper that was staring right back at me and forcing me to
consider ideas and notions from over ten years ago that challenged
everything science back then was telling us about the way the brain
worked.
While I reviewed the reports about the autopsied alien brain and
what the medical examiner thought the low frequency waves meant when
he applied current to the tissue, I also saw reports from an army
military liaison attached to the Stalingrad consulate office that
described Soviet experiments with psychics who were attempting to
exercise some form of kinetic mind control over objects traveling
through the air, directing them from one spot to another. These
reports, written in the late 1950s, gave General Trudeau a lot of
concern because they showed the Soviets were onto something.
“These fellas don’t waste their time, Phil, “ the general told me a
tone of our morning briefings after I had dropped off the reports
the day before so he could look them over. “If they’re looking into
this stuff, then they know there’s something there. “ “You don’t think this report is just a lot of speculation?” I asked.
I knew from the expression on his face that it was a question I
shouldn’t have asked. “If you thought this was just speculation, Colonel, “ he said very
abruptly, “then you wouldn’t be passing the buck up to me to tell
you that. “
General Trudeau had a way of bringing you up short when
he thought you said something stupid. And what I had said was very
stupid for an officer with my training and experience. He also knew
I was worried or else I wouldn’t have tried to back off so quickly.
“You’re right to be worried about this, “ he said, his tone
softening when he saw how I was looking at him. “You’d be right if
you sat in your office and sweated bullets over what this means. And
you know exactly what worries the both of us. Do I have to say it?”
No, he didn’t. It was obvious. If the Soviets had gotten their hands
on some of the apparatus from any one of
the alien spacecraft that had gone down since 1947 - and I didn’t
know how many there were - they’d have
figured out by now that the aliens had used some form of brain wave
control for navigation. How they directed their thoughts or
translated them into an electronic circuit, we didn’t know. But we
knew that there were no steering wheels or conventional methods of
control on the spacecraft, and the headbands we found with the
electronic sensors on them were designed to pick up some form of
signal from the brain.
The analysts at Wright Field believed that
the sensors on the headbands corresponded with points on the multi
lobed alien brain that generated low frequency waves, so the
headbands formed an integral part of the circuit. If we were able to
figure that out, the Soviets were certainly, capable of figuring
that out as well. Besides, the general didn’t have to say it because
I thought it: What if the Soviets, all alone in space the way they
were in the early 1960s, had some communication with the aliens that
we didn’t have? Who said the EBEs had to be anti-Communist anyway?
General Trudeau also shared with me some intelligence reports that
described antimissile missile tests the Soviets had conducted with
very powerful tracking radar. We’d known about their radars because
I’d seen them work during exercises in Germany when each side would
test the other’s responses over the East German border.
Their radars
and their ability to lock onto aircraft was just as good as ours.
But what the general showed me were reports that described the
Soviets firing intercept missiles at incoming ICBM vehicles and
exploding the intercept warheads so as to knock out the navigational
systems on the aggressor missiles. One of those test intercepts had
been conducted successfully right through an atomic cloud on one of
the Soviet missile test ranges in Asia. This was especially
disturbing because anyone who knows anything about the nature of
anatomic cloud knows that the electromagnetic pulse immediately
knocks out any form of electronics.
That’s also how we knew what the
signatures were of the alien UFOs that buzzed our ships and bases.
So much of our non-hardened power was knocked out by the pulse that
we knew an electromagnetic wave had hit us. So if the Soviets could
harden their antimissile missile guidance system to home in on a
target through an electromagnetically charged atomic cloud, they
were using a technology significantly more advanced than ours, and
it spelled trouble.
“When you were in Germany commanding the Nike battalion, “ the
general asked me, still holding the reports in his hand, “you
experimented with tight evasive maneuvers in drone target practice,
didn’t you?”
The general’s memory served him correctly. Our antiaircraft
battalion deployed the Nike, one of the most advanced guided
antiaircraft missiles of its time. The Nike was a radar guided
missile.
And the Hawk was a heat seeking missile that could be locked onto
its target by tracking radar and then, when launched, would home in
on the target’s heat exhaust. So, even if a pilot tried to evade the
missiles, the fast moving Hawk warheads would catch up to him and
blow off his engine. If it were a tail engine fighter, it would
effectively end his mission and he’d probably have to eject. If it
were a wing engined bomber, then, with one of his wing mounted
engines shot off, the pilot would probably have to turn for home
because he wouldn’t have the power to carry the payload of bombs to
the target.
“When we were shooting at drones in simulated bombing formation, we
scored a perfect shoot down again and again, but when pilots used
extremely fast evasive maneuvers against our missiles, we couldn’t
hit them, “ I said. “Explain how that worked, “ he asked. “Nike antiaircraft missiles move like boats on water, “ I explained.
“They cut wide arcs and get an angle to home in on their targets.
Any early evasive maneuvers the fighter pilot makes, the missile
compensates for and stays on course toward his heat source. But if
the pilot is able to evade at the very last minute of the Nike’s
trajectory, the missile will fly right by and can’t recover. Bomber
pilots have to stay in formation and keep on course if they’re going
to hit their target and have enough fuel to get home, so their
evasive patterns are strictly limited. For fighter pilots, it’s much
easier so any MiG, just like any of our Phantoms, can out maneuver a
Nike any day. “ “So if the Soviets have something that can take out missile warheads
through an atomic cloud and are using devices that may have come
from an alien technology, we have something to worry about, “ the
general said. “We’d have a lot to worry about, “ I agreed. “We have nothing even
remotely like this, except for the laser tracking system, but that’s
years away from any sort of deployment even assuming we can get the
President to ask Congress to give us the money to develop it. “
General Trudeau slammed his palm on the desk with enough force to
shake the entire office. I’m sure his clerk sitting just outside
thought I was getting bawled out for something, but that was the
general’s way of reinforcing a decision he was making.
“Phil, you
are the antimissile missile projects officer for the time being. I
don’t care whatever the hell else you have to do, you write me up a
report on what we discussed here and then put together a proposal I
can use to get us some money to develop this thing, “ he said. “I
know we’re on the right track, even if we’re in a strange arena.
Thought control, “ he said, speculating about how the power of the
human brain could be harnessed to the navigation of a guided
missile.
“Well, if the Russians are looking at it seriously, then
we’d better do the same thing before they blindside us like the did
with Sputnik. “ “Why me?” I said to myself as I walked down the stairs to my office.
This was like an assignment to write a term paper when there wasn’t
even any research you could use and still be called sane. I had to
write about the hardware and systems applications of navigational
control, not medical or biological functions per se, but that made
it all the more difficult. I remembered my son telling me that he
was able to fix gasoline engines that had broken down and electrical
motors that were no longer putting out power because he believed the
moving parts spoke to him. As way out as I thought that sounded at
the time, walking back to my office now and thinking about what the
Soviets were playing with, maybe my kid didn’t sound so crazy after
all. It was something I’d have to research.
If the information that Professors Flesch, Franck, and Castellani
conveyed to me back in Rome fifteen years ago had any validity, then
the vague references in the Roswell report that I’d read probably
had validity as well. So I began.
“The references to EBE brain function in the medical examiner’s
reports from Roswell, “ I wrote in my opening
memo to General Trudeau, suggest new avenues of research to us in
the guidance and navigational control of
machines.
The electromagnetic integration of the alien brain lobes
and the possible integration with other brain
functions including kinesthetic capability - the ability to move
objects - over long distance is startling and sounds
more like science fiction than fact. But if we can establish a
correlation with long, low frequency waves and this
electromagnetic integration, it will be a way to identify a
measurable phenomenon with a process we do not
understand. Initially, I recommend we study the phenomenon in an
effort
to apply our findings to gathering and utilizing any data we can
develop concerning long, low frequency waves and electromagnetic
integration so as to marry it to our existing guidance and control
hardware systems and create a new state of the art in missile
tracking.
A caveat: The Central Intelligence Agency has begun a program in
which they work with “seers, “ as they call them, parapsychologists
who they expect will give them the same capability as the KGB’s
“Psychotronic Technology” training. Both intelligence agencies are
skirting the edges of our military’s approach and we must be careful
not to let our research fall into their cauldron. We would be
discredited and possibly stopped from proceeding both from efforts
from our own side and from protests by the Soviets should they find
out. Therefore I recommend that the background of our
experimentation with long low frequency brain waves and any source
material be completely expunged along with any historical data
relevant to this analysis.
My basis for our proposed antimissile missile was the Soviets’ own
success with controlling the trajectory of an ICBM warhead in flight
and the success they had in targeting incoming warheads with their
own antimissile missile in development.
“In recent months, “ I wrote,
it has come to our attention that the Soviets can change the
trajectory of an ICBM after launch once it is on its way to a
target. In addition, the Soviets have twice tested an antimissile
missile fired through an atomic cloud at an approaching ICBM.
Therefore, a technical proposal must be drawn up as soon as possible
for:
1. An antimissile missile that will be able to lock onto an incoming
ICBM and stay locked on through all evasive maneuvers and destroy it
before it reaches its target, and 2. All circuitry must be hardened to withstand radiation, blast,
heat, and electromagnetic pulse from an atomic detonation up to and
including the intensity of the Russian bomb explosion of 60
megatons.
Premise:
Our present antiaircraft missiles centered around the Nike-Ajax,
Nike-Hercules, and the Hawk are not adequate against ICBMs thus
rendering us virtually defenseless against such an attack. Present
systems cannot remain locked onto an incoming ICBM or find the
target to destroy if it changes trajectory, which capability the
latest Soviet test models indicate the enemy may be able to deploy
within the decade.
Our spy satellites will be able to locate the
Soviet warheads once they are launched, but the Soviets are also
developing the capability to disable our surveillance satellites
either with orbiting nuclear weapons to destroy them or send them
out of orbit. At the very least, Soviet capability to generate an
electromagnetic pulse through a nuclear detonation in space will
render our satellites electronically blind. Secret intelligence
reports confirm that the Soviets have already disabled two of our
satellites and one launched by the British.
We, therefore, have a
two fold problem, not only must the antimissile missile circuitry be
hardened but the spy satellite circuitry must also be hardened from
radiation, ion emissions, and ELM pulses. But because of the nuclear
test ban treaty, the United States will not have the opportunity to
run actual tests so we will have to scale our data up from our
existing test results to arrive at figures we can only assume are
accurate.
When General Trudeau read my full report, he asked me to speak to
the scientists who consulted with us as part of a brain trust and
develop a technical discussion, as speculative as we needed it to be
with no restrictions whatsoever, in which we integrated what we had
in our Roswell files with what intelligence we had on the types of
testing the Soviets were conducting.
“Don’t worry about how it’s going to be circulated, Phil, “ General
Trudeau assured me. “I want to show it to only a few members of the
House and Senate Defense appropriations committees and they’ve
promised to keep it confidential. “ “I know you want this right away, General, “ I said. “Can I have the
rest of the day to work on it?” “You can have until tomorrow morning, “ he said. “Because after
lunch tomorrow you and I are meeting with the Senate subcommittee
and I want to read them this report. “
I told my wife that I’d be home late in the morning for a change of
uniform and then I was going over to Capitol Hill for a meeting.
Then I ordered up a couple of sandwiches, put a new pot of coffee
on, and settled in at the office for a long night.
“The present design and configuration of our ICBMs is adequate, “ I
wrote onto my legal pad, crossed out the sentence, and then wrote it
again. “However internal changes are necessary, especially within
the warhead capsule. “
What I would recommend would be nothing less than radical. We needed
an entirely new navigational computer system that would take
advantage of the transistorized circuitry now coming into
development and projected for the marketplace by the late 1960s.
I suggested we model the missile’s on board computer on the design
of an actual dual hemisphere brain with one hemisphere or lobe
receiving global positioning data from orbiting satellites. The
other hemisphere will control the missile functions such as
thrusters, positioning changes, and booster stage separation. It
will receive data through a low frequency transmission from the
other lobe.
The control lobe will also transmit missile flight
telemetry to the positioning lobe so that the two computers will
function together in tandem. This, I reasoned, would make the system
more difficult to jam. If our global positioning satellite detected
a threat from an incoming antimissile missile, it would relay that
information to the warhead, whose control computer would direct the
thrusters to fire so as to take evasive action before the final
target approach.
In as much as I believed it was through the application and
amplification of low frequency brain waves that the EBEs navigated
the craft that we found at Roswell, our implementation of this
technology might enable us also to use our brains to control the
flight of objects. We could use some form of a brain wave system to
navigate our ICBM warhead final stage vehicles if their on board
radar detected a threat from an antiballistic missile. We could also
use this system to home in on incoming enemy warhead launchers even
if they were capable of taking some evasive action.
If we designed the missile the way I suggested, by the time it had
been locked into its final trajectory, its detonation would be set
so that even if it were knocked off course it would still explode
and cause enough collateral damage that it would count as a hit.
Enough of our ICBMs could get through, we reasoned, so as to
overwhelm not only the Soviet guided missile forces but pose a
realistic threat to their population centers. Meanwhile, the
technology we developed for changing the flights of our incoming
ICBMs could be applied as a template to our own antimissile missiles
so as to neutralize any Soviet missile threat.
My conclusion:
“An appropriation of $300 million must be requested
for the coming FY 1963 as a urgent crash development appropriation.
“
I read my own notes from the envelope handed over by Harold Brown
and looked back at him.
“Colonel, “ Brown’s assistant said. “We understand the urgency of
your request last year and we appreciate your reasons for fighting
for it now. “ “But the Defense Department is simply not going to allow the army to
go forward with an antimissile missile at this time. Not in1963, “
Mr. Brown said. “When?” I asked. “At a time, “ the army colonel said, “when the impact of our
deploying this system will be greater than it is now. The Russians
know we have a bead on the type of satellites they’re putting up and
we can take them out in a heartbeat, much faster than they can take
out ours. “
I began to answer, but Harold Brown got up to leave. We shook hands
and he walked toward the door. The army colonel remained in front of
my desk.
“Maybe just you and I can have a word, Colonel Corso, “ he
said. My own associate on Senator Thurmond’s committee left the
office also.
“In the Pentagon, we understand that your early research into the
technology of the antiballistic missile is the real reason for your
support, Colonel Corso, “ the project manager said. “It’s in good
hands. “ But I can tell you he didn’t know the real reason, the EBEs. Only
General Trudeau understood the secret agenda that lay beneath the
research into the project. “But when do you think development will start?” I asked.
“In just a couple of years we’ll have lunar spacecraft orbiting the
moon, “ he said. “We’ll have orbiting satellites mapping every inch
of the Soviet Union. We’ll see what they can throw against us. Then
we’ll have exactly the kind of antimissile missile you proposed
because then even the Congress will see the reason for it. “ “But
until then ... “ I began. “Until then, “ the colonel said, “all we can do is wait. “It would
take another twenty years for the beginnings of an antimissile to be
deployed. And it would also take a president who was willing to
recognize the threat from the extraterrestrials to force an
antimissile weapon through a hostile Congress.
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