Fiber Optics
Members of the retrieval team who foraged around inside the
spacecraft on the morning of the discovery told Colonel Blanchard
back at the 509th that they were amazed they couldn’t find any
conventional wiring.
Where were the electrical connections? they asked, because obviously
the vehicle had electronics. They didn’t
understand the function of the printed circuit wafers they found,
but, even more important, they were completely
mystified by the single glass filaments that ran through the panels
of the ship. At first, some of the scientists thought
that they comprised the missing wiring that also had the engineers
so confused as they packed the
craft for shipping. Maybe they were part of the wiring harness that
was broken in the crash. But these filaments had a strange property
to them.
The wire harness seemed to have broken loose from a control panel
and was separated into twelve frayed
filaments that looked something like quartz. When, back at the
509th’s hangar, officers from the retrieval team
applied light to one end of the filament, the other end emitted a
specific color. Different filaments emitted
different colors. The fibers - in reality glass crystal tubes - led
to a type of junction box where the fibers separated and went to different parts of the control panel that seemed to
acknowledge electrically the different color pulsing through the
tube.
Since the engineers evaluating the material at Roswell knew
that each color of light had its own specific wavelength, they
guessed that the frequency of the light wave activated a specific
component of the spacecraft’s control panel. But beyond that, the
engineers and scientists were baffled. They couldn’t even determine
the spacecraft’s power source, let alone what generated the power
for the light tubes. And, the most amazing thing of all was that the
filaments not only were flexible but still emitted light even when
they were bent back and forth like a paper clip.
How could light be
made to bend? the engineers wondered. This was one of the physical
mysteries of the Roswell craft that stayed hidden through the 1950s
until one of the Signal Corps liaisons, who routinely briefed
General Trudeau on the kinds of developments the Signal Corps was
looking for, told us about experiments in optical fibers going on at
Bell Labs.
The technology was still very new,
Hans Kohler told me during a
private briefing in early 1962, but the promise of using light as a
carrier of all kinds of signals through single filament glass
strands was holding great promise. He explained that the premise of
optical fibers was to have a filament of glass so fine and free of
any impurities that nothing would impede the light beam moving along
the center of the shaft. You also had to have a powerful light
source at one end, he explained, to generate the signal, and I
thought of the successful ruby laser that had been tested at
Columbia University. I knew the EBEs had integrated the two
technologies for their glass cable transmission inside the
spacecraft.
“But what makes the light bend?” I asked Professor Kohler, still
incredulous that the aliens seem to have been able to defy one of
our own laws of physics. “Is it some kind of an illusion?”
“It’s not a trick at all, “ the scientist explained. “It only looks
like an illusion because the fibers are so fine, you can’t see the
different layers without a microscope. “
He showed me, when I gave him the broken pieces of filament that I
still had in my nut file, that each strand, which looked like one
solid piece of material enclosing the circumference of a tiny tube,
was actually double layered. When you looked down the center of the
shaft you could see that around the outside of the filament was
another layer of glass. Dr. Kohler explained that the individual
light rays are reflected back toward the center by the layer of
glass around the outside of the fiber so that the light can’t
escape. By running the glass fibers around corners and, in the case
of the Roswell spacecraft, through the interior walls of the ship,
the aliens were able to bend light and focus it just like you can
direct the flow of water through a supply pipe. I’d never seen
anything like that before in my life.
Kohler explained that, just like lasers, the light can be made to
carry any sort of signal : light, sound, and even digital
information.
“There’s no resistance to the signal, “ he explained. “And you can
fit more information on to the light beam. “
I asked him how the EBEs might have used this type of technology. He
suggested that all ship’s communication, visual images, telemetry,
and any amplified signals that the vehicles sent or received from
other craft or from bases on the moon or on earth would use these
glass fiber cables.
“They seem to have an enormous capacity for carrying any kind of
load, “ he suggested. “And if a laser can amplify the signal, in
their most refined form, these cables can carry a multiplicity of
signals at the same time. “
I was more than impressed. Even before asking him about the specific
types of applications these might have for the army, I could see how
they could make battlefield communications more secure because the
signals would be stronger and less vulnerable to interference. Then
Professor Kohler began suggesting the uses of these fibers to carry
visual images photographed in tiny cameras from the weapons
themselves to controlling devices at the launcher.
“Imagine, “ he said, “being able to fire a missile and actually see
through the missile’s eye where it’s going. Imagine being able to
lock onto a target visually and even as it tries to evade the
missile, you can see it and make final adjustments. “
And Kohler
went on to describe the potential of how fiberoptics based sensors
could someday keep track of enemy movements on the ground, carry
data heavy visual signals from surveillance satellites, and pack
very complicated multichannel communications systems into small
spaces.
“The whole space program is dependent upon carrying data,
voice, and image, “he said. “But now, it takes too much space to
store all the relays and switches and there’s too much impedance to
the signal. It limits what we can do on a mission. But imagine if we
could adapt this technology to our own uses. “
Then he looked me very squarely in the eye and said the very thing
that I was thinking.
“You know this is their technology. It’s part
of what enables them to have exploration missions. If it became our
technology, too, we’d be able to, maybe we could keep up with them a
little better. “
Then he asked me for the army’s commitment. He explained that some
of our research laboratories were
already looking into the properties of glass as a signal conductor
and this would not have to be research that was
started from complete scratch. Those kinds of start ups gave us
concern at R&D because unless we covered
them up completely, it would look like there was a complete break in
a technological path. How do you explain that? But if there’s
research already going on, no matter how basic, then just showing
someone at the company one of these pieces of technology could give
them all they need to reverse engineer it so that it became our
technology. But we’d have to support it as part of an arms
development research contract if the company didn’t already have a
budget. This is what I wanted to do with this glass filament
technology.
“Where is the best research on optical fibers being done?” I asked
him.
“Bell Labs, “ he answered. “It’ll take another thirty years to
develop it, but one day most of the telephone traffic will be
carried on fiberoptic cable. “
Army R&D had contacts at Bell just like other contractors we worked
with, so I wrote a short memo and proposal to General Trudeau on the
potential of optical fibers for a range of products that Professor
Kohler and I discussed. I described the properties of what had been
previously called a wiring harness, explained how it carried laser
signals, and, most importantly, how these fibers actually bent a
stream of light around a corner and conducted it the same way a wire
conducts an electrical current. Imagine conducting a beam of high
intensity single frequency light the same way you’d run a water line
to a new bathroom, I wrote. Imagine the power and flexibility it
provided the EBEs, especially when they used the light signal as a
carrier for other coded information.
This would enable the military to recreate its entire communications
infrastructure and allow our new surveillance satellites to feed
find store potential targeting information right into frontline
command and control installations. The navy would be able to see the
deployment of an entire enemy fleet, the air force could look down
on approaching enemy squadrons and target them from above even if
our planes were still on the ground, and for the army it would give
us an undreamed of strategic advantage. We could survey an entire
battlefield, track the movements of troops from small patrols to
entire divisions, and plot the deployments of tanks, artillery, and
helicopters at the same time.
The value of fiberoptic communication
to the military would be immeasurable. And, I added, I was almost
certain that a development push from the army to facilitate research
on the complete reengineering of our country’s already antiquated
telephone system would not be seen by any company as an unwarranted
intrusion. I didn’t have to wait long for the general’s response.
“Do it, “ he ordered. “And get this under way fast. I’ll get you all
the development allocation you need. Tell them that. “ And before
the end of that week, I had an appointment with a systems researcher
at the Western Electric research facility outside of Princeton, New
Jersey, right down the road from the Institute for Advanced Study. I
told him it came out of foreign technology, something that the
intelligence people picked up from new weapons the East Germans were
developing but thought we could use.
“If what you think you have, “ he said over the phone, “is that
interesting and shows us where our research is going, we’d be silly
not to lend you an ear for an afternoon. “
“I’ll need less than an afternoon to show you what I got, “ I said.
Then I packed my Roswell field reports into my briefcase, got myself
an airline ticket for a flight to Newark Airport, and I was on my
way.
Super-tenacity Fibers
Even before the 1960s, when I was, still on the National Security
staff, the army had begun to look for fibers for flak jackets,
shrapnel proof body armor, even parachutes, and a protective skin
for other military items. Silk had always been the material of
choice for parachutes because it was light, yet had an incredible
tensile strength that allowed it to stretch, keep shape, and yet
withstand tremendous forces. Whether the army’s search for what they
called a “tenacity fiber” was prompted purely by its need to find
better protection for its troops or because of what the retrieval
team found at Roswell, I do not know. I suspect, however, that it
was the discovery at the crash site that began the army’s search.
Among the items in my Roswell file that we retained from the
retrieval were strands of a fiber that even razors couldn’t cut
through. When I looked at it under a magnifying glass, its dull
grayness and almost matte finish belied the almost supernatural
properties of this fiber. You could stretch it, twist it around
objects, and subject it to a level of torque that would rend any
other fiber, but this held up. Then, when you released the tension,
it snapped back to its original length without any loss of tension
in its original form. It reminded me of the filaments in a spiderweb.
We became very interested in this material and began to study a
variety of technologies, including spider silks because they, alone
in nature, exhibit natural super tenacity properties.
The spiders’ spinning of its silk begins in its abdominal glands as
a protein that the spider extrudes through a
narrow tube that forces all the molecules to align in the same
direction, turning the protein into a rod like, very
long, single thread with a structure not unlike a crystal. The
extrusion process not only aligns the protein molecules,
the molecules are very compressed, occupying much less space than
conventionally sized molecules. This
combination of lengthwise aligned and super compressed molecules
gives this thread an incredible tenacity and
the ability to stretch under enormous pressure while retaining its
tensile strength and integrity. A single strand of this
spider’s silk thread would have to be stretched nearly fifty miles
before breaking and if stretched around the entire globe, it would
weigh only fifteen ounces.
Clearly, when the scientists at Roswell saw how this fiber - not
cloth, not silk, but something like a ceramic - had
encased the ship and formed the outer skin layer of the EBEs, they
realized it was a very promising avenue for
research. When I examined the material and recognized its similarity
to spider thread, I realized that a key to
producing this commercially would be to synthesize the protein and
find a way to simulate the extrusion process. General Trudeau
encouraged me to start contacting plastics and ceramics
manufacturers, especially Monsanto and Dow, to find out who was
doing research on super-tenacity materials, especially at university
laboratories. My quick poll paid off.
I not only discovered that Monsanto was looking for a way to develop
a mass production process for a simulated spider silk, I also
learned that they were already working with the army. Army
researchers from the Medical Corps were trying to replicate the
chemistry of the spider gene to produce the silk manufacturing
protein. Years later, after I’d left the army, researchers at the
University of Wyoming and Dow Corning also began experiments on
cloning the silk manufacturing gene and developing a process to
extrude the silk fibers into a usable substance that could be
fabricated into a cloth.
Our research and development liaison in the Medical Corps told me
that the replication of a super-tenacity fiber was still years away
back in 1962, but that any help from Foreign Technology that we
could give the Medical Corps would find its way to the companies
they were working with and probably wouldn’t require a separate R&D
budget. The development funding through U.S. government medical and
biological research grants was more than adequate, the Medical Corps
officer told me, to finance the research unless we needed to develop
an emergency crash program. But I still remained fascinated by the
prospect that something similar to a web spinner had spun the
strands of super-tenacity fabric around the spaceship. I knew that
whatever that secret was, amalgamating a skin out of some sort of
fabric or ceramic around our aircraft would give them the protection
that the Roswell craft had and still be relatively lightweight.
Again, I didn’t find out about it until much later, but research
into that very type of fabrication was already
under way by a scientist who would, years later, win a Nobel Prize.
At a meeting of the American Physical Society
three years before, Dr. Richard Feynman gave a theoretical
speculative assessment of the possibilities of creating
substances whose molecular structure was so condensed that the
resulting material might have radically different
properties from the non-compressed version of the same material. For
example, Feynman suggested, if scientists
could create material in which the molecular structures were not
only compressed but arranged differently from
conventional molecular structures, the scientists might be able to
alter the physical properties of the substance to suit specific
applications.
This seemed like brand new stuff to the American Physical Society.
In reality, though, compressed molecular structures were one of the
discoveries that had been made by some of the original scientific
analytical groups both at Alamogordo right after the Roswell crash
and at the Air Materiel Command at Wright Field, which took delivery
of the material. As a young atomic physicist, Richard Feynman was a
colleague of many of the postwar atomic specialists who were in the
army’s and then the air force’s guided missile program as well as
the nuclear weapons program in the 1950s.
Although I never saw any
memos to this effect, Feynman was reported to have been in contact
with members of the Alamogordo group of the Air Materiel Command and
knew about some of the finds at the Roswell crash site. Whether
these discoveries suggested theories to him about the potential
properties of compressed molecular structures or whether his ideas
were also extensions of his theories about the quantum mechanics
behavior of electrons, for which he won the Nobel Prize, I don’t
know. But Dr. Feynman’s theories about compressed molecular
structures dove tailed with the army efforts to replicate the super-tenacity fiber composition and extrusion processes. By the
middle of the 1960s work was under way not only at large industrial
ceramics and chemical companies in the United States but in
university research laboratories here, and in Europe, Asia, and
India.
With my questions about who was conducting research into
super-tenacity fibers answered and learning where that research was
taking place, I could turn my attention to other applications of the
technology to see whether the army could help move the development
along faster or whether any collateral development was possible to
create products in advance of the super-tenacity fibers. Our
scientists told us that one way to simulate the effect of
super-tenacity was in the cross alignment of composite layers of
fabric. This idea was the premise for the army’s search for a type
of body armor that would protect against the skin piercing injuries
of explosive shrapnel and rounds fired from guns.
“Now this won’t protect you against contusions, “ General Trudeau
told me after a meeting with Army Medical Corps researchers at
Walter Reed. “And the concussive shock from an impact will still be
strong enough to kill anybody, but at least it’s supposed to keep
the round from tearing through your body. “
I thought about the many blunt trauma wounds you see in a battle and
could imagine the impact a large round would leave even if it
couldn’t penetrate the skin. But through the general’s impetus and
the contacts he set up for me at Du Pont and Monsanto, we
aggressively pursued the research into the development of a cross
aligned material for bulletproof vests. I hand carried the field
descriptions of the fabric found at Roswell to my meetings at these
Companies and showed the actual fabric to scientists who visited us
in Washington.
This was not an item we wanted to risk carrying
around the country. By 1965, Du Pont had announced the creation of
the Kevlar fabric that, by 1973, was brought to market as the Kevlar
bulletproof vest that’s in common use today in the armed Services
and law enforcement agencies. I don’t know how many thousands of
lives have been saved, but every time I hear of a police officer
whose Kevlar vest protected him from a fatal chest or back wound, I
think back to those days when we were just beginning to consider the
value of cross aligned layers of super-tenacity material and am
thankful that our office played a part in the product’s development.
Our search for supertenacity materials also resulted in the
development of composite plastics and ceramics that with stood heat
and the pressures of high speed air maneuvers and were also
invisible to radar. The cross stitched super-tenacity fibers on the
skin of the Roswell vehicle, which I believe had been spun on, also
became an impetus for an entirely new generation of attack and
strategic aircraft as well as composite materials for future designs
of attack helicopters.
One of the great rumors that floated around for years after the
Roswell story became public with the testimony of retired Army Air
Force major Jesse Marcel before he died was that Stealth technology
aircraft were the result of what we learned at Roswell. That is
true, but it was not a direct transfer of technology. Army
Intelligence knew that under certain conditions the EBE spacecraft
had the ability to hide their radar signature, but we didn’t know
how they did it. We also had pieces of the Roswell spacecraft’s
skin, which was a composite of super-tenacity molecular aligned
fibers.
As far as I know, we’ve still not managed to recreate the
exact process to manufacture this composite, just like we’ve not
been able to duplicate the electromagnetic drive and navigation
system that enabled the Roswell vehicle to fly even though we have
that vehicle and others at either Norton, Edwards, and Nellis Air
Force bases. But through the study of how this material worked and
what its properties are, we’ve replicated composites and rolled an
entirely new generation of aircraft off the assembly line.
Although the American public first heard about the existence of a
Stealth technology in President Jimmy Carter’s campaign against
President Ford in 1976, we didn’t see the Stealth in action until
the air attacks on Iraq during the Persian Gulf War. There, the
Stealth fighter, completely invisible to Iraqi radar, launched the
first high risk assaults on the Iraqi air force air defense system
and operated with almost complete impunity. Invisible to radar,
invisible to heat seeking missiles, striking out of the night sky
like demons, the Stealth fighters, with their flying wing almost
crescent shaped, look uncannily like the space vehicle that crashed
into the arroyo outside of Roswell.
But appearances aside, the
composite skin of the Stealth that helps make it invisible to almost
all forms of detection was inspired by the Army R&D research into
the skin of the Roswell aircraft that we sectioned apart for
distribution to laboratories around the country.
Depleted Uranium Invisible Artillery Shells
For the air force, Stealth technology meant that aircraft could
approach a target invisible to radar and maintain that advantage
throughout the mission. For the army, Stealth technology for its
helicopters provides an incredible advantage in mounting search and
destroy, Special Forces recon, or counter insurgency missions deep
into enemy territory. But the possibility of a Stealth artillery
shell, which we conceived of at R&D in 1962, would have allowed us
something armies have sought ever since the first deployment of
artillery by a Western European army at Henry V’s victory at
Agincourt in the early fifteenth century.
Certainly Napoleon would
have wanted this ability when he deployed his artillery against the
British line at Waterloo. So would the Germans in World War I when
their artillery pounded the Allied forces hunkered down in their
trenches and again at the Battle of the Bulge in 1944 when those of
us stationed in Rome could only pray that our boys could hang on
until the clouds broke and our bombers could hit the German
emplacements.
In all artillery battles, once a shell is fired, it can be tracked
by an observer back to its source and then return fire can be
directed against whoever is firing. But as the range of artillery
increased and we found ways to camouflage guns, we became proficient
in hiding artillery until the advent of battlefield radar, which
allows the trajectory of shells to be tracked back to their source.
But imagine if the shell were composed of a material that rendered
it invisible to radar? That was the possibility we proposed to
General Trudeau: an invisible artillery shell, I suggested to him in
his office one morning as we were designing the plan for research
and development of composite materials.
On the night battlefield of
the future you could deploy weapons that were invisible even to
radar tracking planes flying over head behind the lines. Shells
would start falling, and the enemy wouldn’t know where they were
coming from until after we had the advantage of five or more
unanswered salvos. By then, and with the advantage of surprise, the
damage might well be done. If we were using mechanized artillery, we
could set up positions, fire a series of quick salvos, redeploy, and
set up again.
The secret lay not just in the same Stealth aircraft technology but
also in the development of a Stealth ceramic that could withstand
tremendous explosive barrel pressures and still maintain an
integrity through the arc of its trajectory. The search for just
such a molecularly aligned composite ceramic was inspired by the
composite material of the Roswell spacecraft. In analysis after
analysis, the army tried to determine how the extraterrestrials
fabricated the material that formed the hull of the spacecraft but
was unable to do so.
The search for the kind of molecularly aligned
composite began in the1950s even before General Trudeau took command
of R&D, continued during my tenure at Foreign Technology when the
early “Stealth” experimentation began at Lockheed that resulted in
the F117 fighter and Stealth bomber, and continues right through to
today.
The general was also more than interested in the kinds of warheads
we would propose for just such a shell, a warhead that did come into
use in 1961 and was successfully deployed during the Gulf War. And
we had a suggestion for a round that we thought could change the
nature of the kinds of battles we projected we’d be fighting against
the Warsaw Pact forces, a warhead fabricated out of depleted
uranium. This was a way to utilize the stockpile of uranium we
foresaw we’d have as a result of spent fuel from commercial nuclear
reactors, reactors powering U.S. Navy vessels, and the nuclear
reactors the army was developing for its own bases and for delivery
to bases overseas.
Depleted uranium was a dense, heavy metal, so dense in fact that
conventional armament was no match for a high speed round tipped
with it. Its ability to penetrate even the toughest of tank armor
and detonate once it was inside the enemy vehicle meant that a
single round fired from one of our own tanks equipped with a laser
range finder would disable, if not completely destroy, an enemy
tank. Depleted uranium would give us a decided advantage on a
European battlefield on which we knew we’d be outnumbered two or
three to one by the Warsaw Pact or in China where sheer numbers
alone would mean that either we’d be overwhelmed or we’d have to
resort to nuclear weapons. The depleted uranium shell kept us from
having to go nuclear.
Privately, I suggested to General Trudeau that depleted uranium also
fulfilled our hidden agenda. It was another weapon in a potential
arsenal we were building against hostile extraterrestrials. If
depleted uranium could penetrate armor, might the heaviness of the
element enable it to penetrate the composite skin of the spacecraft,
especially if the spacecraft were on the ground? I suggested that it
certainly merited development at the nearby Aberdeen Proving Grounds
in Maryland, and if it proved worthwhile, it was a weapon we should
deploy.
Even though the composite ceramic Stealth round is still an elusive
dream in weapons development, the depleted uranium tipped war head
saw action in the Gulf War, where it didn’t just disable the tanks
of the Iraqi Republican Guard, it exploded them into pieces. Fired
from the laser range finder equipped Abrams tanks, TOW missile
launchers, or even from Hedgehog infantry support aircraft, the
depleted uranium tipped warheads wreaked havoc in the Gulf. They
were one of the great weapons development successes of Army R&D that
came out of what we learned from the Roswell crash.
HARP - The High-Altitude Research Project
HARP was another project whose need for research and development was
suggested to us by the challenge
posed by flying saucers. They could out fly our own aircraft, we had
no guided missiles that could bring them
down, and we didn’t have any guns that could shoot them down. We
were also exploring weapons systems that
had a double or triple use, and HARP, or “the big gun, “ was one
such system. Essentially, Project HARP was the
brainchild of Canadian gunnery expert and scientist Dr. Gerald Bull.
Bull had studied the threat posed by the
German “Big Bertha” in World War I and the Nazi V3 supergun toward
the end of World War II. He realized that
long range, high powered artillery was not only a practical solution
to launching heavy payload shells, it was very
affordable once the initial research and development phase was
completed.
Mass produced big guns and their
ordinance, assembled in stages right on the site, could provide
enormous firepower well back from the front lines
to any army. They would become a strategic weapon to rain nuclear
destruction down on enemy population
centers or military
staging areas.
Dr. Bull had also suggested that the gun could be retasked as a
launch vehicle, blasting huge rounds into orbit, which could then be
jettisoned, like the booster stage of a rocket, so the payload
warhead could thrust itself into position. This would require a
minimum amount of rocket fuel and could effectively push a string of
satellites into orbit very quickly, almost like an artillery
barrage. If the army needed to put special satellites into orbit in
a hurry or, better still, explosive satellites that would pose a
threat to orbiting extraterrestrial vehicles, the big gun was one
method of accomplishing this mission.
There was still a third potential to
the supergun. General Trudeau
foresaw the ability of this weapon to launch
rounds that could ultimately be placed into a lunar orbit.
Especially if hostilities broke out between the United
States and USSR or, as we expected, between Earth military forces
and the extraterrestrials, we could re-supply a
military moon base without having to rely on rocket launch
facilities, which would demand long turn around times and be very
vulnerable to attack. A camouflaged supergun, even a series of
superguns, would allow us all the benefits of a field artillery or
quick response antiaircraft unit, but with a piece that could launch
payloads into space. It was this combination of capabilities that
delighted General Trudeau because it enabled one R&D project to help
create many different systems.
The United States, Canada, and the British military combined their
joint expertise to find ways to develop Dr. Bull’s supergun with
General Trudeau, I believe, becoming one of Bull’s staunchest
supporters. But by the time military budget decisions had to be made
to fund the weapon, all of the governments military establishments
had become committed to the guided missile and rocket launched space
vehicle rather than a supergun. While the weapon had some potential,
the United States, UK, and Canada were too far along with their own
missile programs to start up a completely new type of weapon. And in
the end, they decided to end the research while still keeping close
tabs on Bull’s efforts to sell his technology to other powers,
especially governments in the Middle East.
Through the 1980s, Gerald Bull, whom I had met at a reception
honoring General Trudeau in 1986, Entered into negotiations with the
Israelis as well as with the Iraqis and perhaps even the Iranians.
The decade long war between Saddam Hussein and Iran proved a fertile
sales territory for weapons merchants in general, and particularly
for Gerald Bull, who was courted by both sides. In the end, he cut
his deal with the Iranians, testing experimental versions of a supergun and planning to build the monster weapon before the British
intervened and seized shipments of gun barrel units before they were
shipped out of the country. By this time, Dr. Bull may have become a
liability to the Iraqis, as well as to the Israelis and to the
United States as well, and was shot to death outside his apartment
in Belgium before the outbreak of the Gulf War.
Like Jules Verne’s character Barbicane in From the Earth to the
Moon, Bull had a vision of the potential of a long range artillery
piece. Unlike Barbicane, he came very close to proving it a
practical way of launching vehicles into space. The murder of Gerald
Bull has never been solved, and whatever secrets he still possessed
about the assembly of a gun to launch vehicles into space probably
died with him in the hallway outside his apartment.
List of Omissions
As I worked through the stack of projects on my desk during the
spring months of 1962, I found I was devoting more of my time to the
Roswell file and less to some of the other projects under
development. It was apparent to me that the treasure trove we’d
retrieved from Roswell was beginning to pay off in ways that not
even I thought would happen. There were so many army research
projects under way, I told my boss, that were not foundering, but
sputtering along that could benefit from something similar found in
the Roswell wreckage it we could find the match between the two.
Night vision, lasers, and
fiberoptic communication were obvious, I
said to him, but I was sure there were other areas we could find
just by looking at the problems posed by what we discovered from
Roswell, not just retrieved from the wreckage.
“Make it specific, Phil, “ the general asked. “What do you mean?”
“If you just look at what we didn’t find at the crash site, “ I
said. “That goes a long way to explaining the differences between
what we are and what they are. It also shows us what we need to
develop if we’re going to prepare for long periods of travel in
space. “
“Can you make me a list?” the general asked. “There are a lot of
ongoing research contracts out there that could benefit from a list
of things we’d have to concern ourselves with if we’re going to be
planning for space travel in the next fifty years. “
By the time our conversation was finished,
General Trudeau had asked
me to prepare not only a list of what were called the “omissions” at
Roswell but a very brief report detailing the areas where I thought
development needed to take place. So I assembled all the reports and
information in the Roswell file and began looking for what was
missing that I might expect to find at a space traveler’s crash
site.
There was no mention in any of the reports of any food source or
nutrient, and no one discovered any food preparation units or stored
food on board the spacecraft, nor were there any refrigeration units
for food preservation. There was no water on the ship either for
drinking, washing, or flushing of waste, nor were there any waste or
garbage disposal facilities. The Roswell field reports said that the
retrieval team found something they thought was a first aid kit
because it contained material that a doctor said was for bandaging
purposes, but there were no medical facilities nor any medications.
And finally, the army retrieval team said there were no rest
facilities at all on board the ship; nothing that could be construed
as a bunk or a bed.
From this available data the army assumed that this
UFO was a
reconnaissance craft and could quickly return
to a larger or mothership where all of the missing items might be
found. The other explanation Dr. Hermann Oberth came up with was that this was a time dimensional travel ship
that didn’t traverse large distances in space. Rather, it “jumped”
from one time space to another or from one dimension to another and
instantly returned to its point of origin. But this was just Dr. Oberth’s speculation, and he would usually discount any of it the
moment he believed I was taking it as fact.
I believed, however, that the EBEs didn’t require food or facilities
for waste disposal because they were fabricated beings, just like
robots or androids, who had been created specifically for space
travel and the performance of specific tasks on the planets they
visited. Just like our lunar rover in the 1970s, which was a robot,
so these creatures had been programmed with specific tasks to
perform and carried them out. Perhaps their programming could be
updated or altered from a remote source, but they weren’t life forms
that required ongoing sustenance. They were the perfect creatures
for long voyages through space and for visiting other planets. Human
beings, however, weren’t robots and did require sustenance.
Therefore, it would be necessary to provide for long term sustenance
and waste disposal needs if humans were going to travel long
distances in space.
Other scientists from our R&D ad hoc brain trust suggested that,
indeed, this could have only been a scout ship that either got
caught in our tracking radars from the 509th or from Alamogordo or
was hit by lightning in the fierce electrical storm that night. They
believed that the ship was navigated by an electromagnetic
propulsion system. Other scientists suggested that even before we
could generate the necessary power to drive such a propulsion
system, we would have to have developed some form of a nuclear
powered ion drive first. As for the absence of food, scientists
suggested that this would pose a major drawback for long term human
space exploration. Thus, in my quick and dirty proposal for General
Trudeau, I suggested that the army had to complete the development
of at least two items that I knew had been in the R&D system for at
least ten years: a food supply that could never spoil and didn’t
require refrigeration and an atomic drive that could be assembled in
space out of components as the power plant for an interplanetary
space craft.
Irradiated Foods
The general read my notes a few days later, and seemed impressed. He
knew from the memo I had left him
the night before that I’d be ready to talk about my omissions list
the next day, but he didn’t say
anything to me right away Instead, he picked up the phone, dialed a
number, told someone at the other end that he’d be right over, then
looked up at me.
“Go get your hat, “ he said. “Meet me on the helipad. We’ve been
invited to lunch. “
Ten minutes later after the general’s helicopter had picked us up,
we circled the Pentagon once and were flown over to the Quarter
master Center.
An officer who shall remain anonymous met us at the helipad. He
saluted as we got off the chopper. “Thank you for joining us. “
He took us inside to a downstairs store room where he showed off
shelves and shelves of all types of meat, fruit, and vegetables.
“Look at this pork, “ he said. “It’s been stored here unrefrigerated
for months and it’s completely free of trichina worm. “ He held up a
couple of loose eggs and a chicken breast. “Eggs, unrefrigerated,
and chicken. Completely free of bacterium salmonella. And it’s the
same for the seafood. “
He escorted us along the shelves of food and, almost like a
salesman, presented the virtues of each of the items. The food was
wrapped, but not vacuum sealed, in a clear cellophane to keep it
free from dust and surface dirt, but it was not preserved in any
manner that I could determine.
“Free of fungus or any spores, “ he said about the vegetables. “No
mold or any insect infestations in the fruit, “ he said.
“And the
milk, it’s been here on the shelf for over two years and it’s not
even slightly sour. We’ve taken great steps to preserve food
completely without salting, smoking, refrigeration, freezing, or
even canning. “
“Does this answer one of your questions, Colonel?” General Trudeau
asked as we looked at the stocks of food that seemed completely
resistant to spoilage.
The commanding general of the Quartermaster Center joined us in the
stockroom.
“Pick your lunch, gentlemen,“ he said and chose a thick
steak for himself.
“I’m going to have this and, if you don’t mind,
I’ll take the liberty of ordering up the same thing for you, General
Trudeau, and you, too, Colonel. How about some potatoes and maybe
some strawberries for dessert. All fresh, delicious, and harmless. “
Then he paused. “And completely bombarded with what some people
would call lethal doses of radiation to destroy any bacteria or
infestation. “
We were escorted upstairs to the commandant’s dining room,
where we were joined by a number of other officers and civilian
research and food technology experts who described the process of
ionizing radiation to destroy the harmful bacteria while preserving
the food without canning or smoking. The irradiation process was so
complete that if the food were maintained in an antiseptic or dust
free atmosphere, it wouldn’t be attacked and would remain
uncontaminated. However, because the atmosphere was as dirty as any
other atmosphere inside any other building, the food was wrapped in
cellophane. Other foods were packaged in a clear plastic wrap and
were displayed for visitors like us just as if they were on
supermarket shelves.
“We first wanted to determine whether the whole concept of
irradiated food was safe, “ one of the engineers explained. “So our
first studies were made with food which was irradiated and then
stored in the frozen area. We fed these foods to rats and noticed no
harmful effects. Then we did the same thing except this time we
increased the radiation to six mega rads and then froze the food.
Again, no harmful effects. “
His presentation continued while we ate, accompanied by charts that
showed how the sterilization rate was increased to try to find any
harmful effects on rats. Then they tested the irradiated and then
frozen food on human volunteers.
“But wait, “ I asked. “I still don’t understand why you irradiated
the food and then froze it. “
The engineer was waiting for this question because he had his answer
already prepared. He acted like he’d been asked it many times
before.
“Because,“ he said, “we were testing only for harmful
effects from the radiation, not for spoilage, not for taste, not
even for harmful effects from the food itself even though we knew it
had been sterilized and was tested completely free from bacteria
when it was defrosted. What we needed to prove in field trials was
the harmlessness to animals and humans of the irradiation process. “
Then he described the field trials to prove that irradiation
preserved food stored at room temperature.
“We selected high
spoilage foods, “ he said. “Like the meats, chicken, and especially
the seafood. We also made composite foods like stews which we fed to
rats and dogs along with straight meat and then straight tuna. We
first irradiated a sample at three mega rads then another sample at
six mega rads and tested the animals over a period of six months to
see whether radiation became concentrated in any of their organs or
bones.“ He paused, letting the dramatic effect of what he was going
to say sink in while we were sinking our teeth into the irradiated
foods that resulted from the years of experimentation throughout the
1950s.
“No toxicological effects whatsoever. And we were very
thorough before we tested these foods on human volunteers. “
“What’s next?” I asked.
“We’re setting taste trials of favorite foods at Fort Lee, Virginia,
to see how troops in the field respond to this. We think that before
the end of the decade we’ll have a variety of Meals Ready to Eat for
troops in the field who have no benefit of cooking facilities or
refrigeration. “
General Trudeau looked across the table at me and I nodded. This was
perfectly good food that was right up to any quality you’d care to
measure.
“Gentlemen, “ General Trudeau said as he stood. As a three star
general, he was the highest ranking officer in the room, and when he
spoke everyone was silent. “My assistant believes that your work is
of utmost importance to the U.S. Army, our nation, and the world,
and will contribute to our travel in space. I am of the very same
opinion. We are most impressed with your test results and want to
help you expand your operation and speed up the testing process. The
army needs what you’ve developed. In the next two weeks, submit to
me your supplementary budget to expand your operation and I want it
also included into next year’s budget. “
Then he turned to me,
nodded, and we thanked the commanding general for lunch and walked
out to General Trudeau’s helicopter.
“How about that, Phil?” he asked. “I think we checked off some of
the items on your list right on the spot. “
The pilot helped the general into his seat and I got around on the
other side.
“So what do you think?” he asked again.
“I think if we move any faster we’ll have the
EBEs down here asking
for some of our irradiated food, “ I said.
General Trudeau laughed as we whisked off the helipad and headed
back for the short jump to the Pentagon.
“Now you have to get to
work on finding out what you can about your atomic propulsion
system. If NASA ever gets it into its mind to push ahead with
building its space station, I’d like the military to have a power
source that can keep us up there for a while. If we can get a
surveillance window on our visitors, I want it sooner rather than
later. “
And before the week was out, I was at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, again
looking at the developments the army had made in the development of
portable nuclear reactors.
Portable Atomics
A challenge posed to us directly by the army’s retrieval of
the
Roswell craft and our further discovery that the craft was not
propelled by a conventional engine - either propeller, jet, or
rocket - pressed upon us the critical realization that if we were to
engage these extraterrestrial creatures in space we would need a
propulsion system that gave us a capability for long distance travel
similar to theirs. But we had no such system. The closest form of
energy we had that did not rely on a constant supply of fuel was
atomic power in a controlled, sustained reaction, and even that was
far away from development. However, at the close of the war the army
had operational control over atomic weapons because, under Gen.
Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project, the army had
established the bureaucracy that developed and deployed the atomic
bomb.
So for army engineers, struggling to find out how the Roswell
spacecraft was powered, atomic power was the
easiest form of propulsion to seize upon, in part because it was the
most immediate. However, by 1947, a struggle
was already breaking out within the Truman administration over who
would control nuclear power, a civilian
commission or the military. As the nation was making the transition
from wartime to peace time, the specter of a
General Groves secretly dictating how and in what manifestation
atomic power would be used frightened
Truman’s advisers.
So in the end, President Truman made the decision
to turn control of the nation’s nuclear
program over to a civilian commission. Thus, by 1947, the army was
getting out of running the nuclear power
business, but that didn’t mean that research into the military
applications of nuclear power plants stopped. We
needed to develop nuclear reactors, not only to manufacture nuclear
power propulsion systems for naval vessels
and for on site installation of power generating stations, but to
experiment with ways nuclear power could be
made portable in
space by assembling systems in orbit from component parts.
This
would enable us to maintain long term outposts in space and even to
power interplanetary vessels that could serve as a defensive force
against any extraterrestrial hostile forces. If this sounds like
science fiction, remember, it was 1947, and the nation had barely
gotten out of World War II before the Cold War had begun. War, not
peace, was on the mind of the military officers who were in charge
of the Roswell retrieval and analysis of the wreckage.
The army, I discovered from the “Army Atomic Reactors” reports at
Fort Belvoir, not only had a very sophisticated portable reactor
program under way, but had already built one in cooperation with the
air force for installation at the Sundance Radar Station six miles
out of Sundance, Wyoming, early in 1962. This was a highly
sophisticated piece of power generating apparatus that provided
steam heat to the radar station, electrical power for the base, and
a very precisely controlled separate power supply for the delicately
calibrated radar equipment. But this wasn’t the first portable power
plant, as most people thought it was.
The first portable nuclear reactor plant anywhere was for a research
facility in Greenland, under the Arctic ice cap, designed for Camp
Century, an Army Corps of Engineers project nine hundred miles from
the North Pole. Ostensibly operated by the Army Polar Research and
Development Center conducting experiments in the Arctic winter, Camp
Century was also a vital observation post in an early warning system
monitoring any Soviet activity at or near the North Pole and any
activity related to UFO sightings or landings.
During the years when I was at the White House, the UFO working
group had consistently pushed President Eisenhower to establish a
string of formal listening posts - electronic pickets staffed by
army and air force observers at the most remote parts of the planet
- to report on any UFO activity. General Twining’s group had argued
that if the EBEs had any plans to establish semipermanent Earth
bases, it wouldn’t be in a populated area or an area where our
military forces could monitor. It would be at the poles, in the
middle of the most desolate surroundings they could find, or even
underneath the ocean.
The polar caps seemed like the most obvious
choices because during the 1950s we had no surveillance satellites
that could spot alien activity from orbit, nor did we have a
permanent presence at the two poles. It was thought that we wouldn’t
be able to put any sophisticated devices at the poles, either,
because doing so would require more power than we could transport.
However, the army’s Nuclear Power Program, developed in the1950s at
Fort Belvoir, provided us with the ability to install a nuclear
powered base anywhere on the planet.
In 1958, work was started on the Camp Century power plant, which was
to be constructed beneath the ice in Greenland. Initially this was
supposed to be top secret because we didn’t want the Soviets to know
what we were up to. Ultimately, however, the high security
classification proved too unwieldy for the army because too many
outside contractors were involved and the logistics, transportation
to Thule, Greenland, then installation on skids beneath the ice pack
created a cover story nightmare. So Army Intelligence decided to
drop the security classification entirely and treat the entire plan
as a scientific information gathering expedition by its polar
research group.
Just like the whole camouflage operation that had protected the
existence of the working group, Camp
Century provided the perfect cover for testing out a procedure for
constructing a prefabricated, prepackaged
nuclear reactor under arduous conditions and flying it to its site
for final assembly. It also provided the army with a
means of testing the performance of the reactor and how it could be
maintained at an utterly desolate location in the harshest climate
on the planet.
The plant was the first of its kind. It had a completely modular
construction that had separately packaged components for air
coolers, heat exchangers, switch gear, and the turbine generator.
The power plant also had a mechanism that used the recycled steam to
melt the ice cap surface to provide the camp’s water supply. The
entire construction was completed in only seventy seven days, and
the camp remained in operation from October 1960 to August 1963,
when the research mission completed its work. The entire operation
was successfully taken apart and placed in storage in 1964, and the
site of Camp Century was completely restored to its natural state.
I received reports about the camp’s operation during the later
months of 1962 after General Trudeau had
asked me about the feasibility of the army’s portable atomics
program as a way to instigate research into a launchable atomics program for generating power in orbit. I was so
enthusiastic about the success of our
portable atomics and the way they provided the research platform for
the subsequent development of mobile atomics that I urged the
general to provide as much funding as R&D could to enable the Fort
Belvoir Army Nuclear Power Program to construct and test as many
mobile and portable power plants as possible.
Each power plant gave
us a kind of a beachhead into remote areas of the world where the EBEs might have wanted to establish a presence because they believed
they could go about it undetected. They were a kind of platform.
Once we had demonstrated the ability to protect remote areas of the
earth, we’d be in a better position to establish a presence in
space.
The atomics program, which was in part a direct outgrowth of the
challenge posed to us from our analysis of the Roswell craft,
ultimately helped us develop portable atomic power plants, which are
now used to power Earth satellites as well as naval vessels. It
showed us that we could have portable atomic generators and gave the
army a longer reach than anybody might have thought. Ultimately, it
allowed us to maintain surveillance and staff remote listening
posts. It also provided the basis for research into launching
nuclear power facilities into space to become the power plants of
new generations of interplanetary vehicles. The portable atomics
program allowed us to experiment with ways we would develop atomic
drives for our own space exploration vehicles, which, we believed,
would enable us to establish military bases on the moon as well as
on the planets near us in the solar system.
And from our successes with atomics, we turned our attention to the
development of the weapons we could mount on surveillance satellites
in orbit, weapons we developed directly from what we found in the
flying saucer at Roswell.