AFTERWORD
BACK IN THE 1950's, I REMEMBER WATCHING A TELEVISION SERIES
...called "I Led Three Lives" about the exploits of Herbert A. Philbrick,
who described the “fantastic but true” story of his life as a member
of a Communist Party cell and an undercover operative for the FBI.
Years later, when I got to Army R&D, I remember thinking about how
my own story was also “fantastic but true” and how what General
Trudeau and I did helped to change the course of history.
Very few
people knew that what was coming out of Foreign Technology during
the early 1960s had some basis in a crash of a UFO that “officially”
never took place. Lives were distorted, careers destroyed, children
frightened into submission by Army Counterintelligence bogeymen,
businessmen in Roswell threatened with financial ruination and even
worse if anybody told the story of what happened. But they were all
loyal Americans, and even though some might have had their doubts
about hiding the truth, they went along with what the army wanted.
Many people have criticized the army and the government for
maintaining the Roswell cover-up not only at
the time but also through the years. For that, I need to say a word
in defense of what the army did. It’s easy to
criticize if you weren’t an adult back then or someone who didn’t
understand the politics that governed our
thinking at that point in American history. We had not yet fully
made the transition from a nation at war to a
nation at peace.
And
there was Harry Truman, still reeling from his sudden ascendancy to
the presidency, toughened into steel by his decision to drop the
atomic bombs on Japan, and now faced with the monumental impact of a
crash landing of a strange craft on American soil. Was it Soviet?
Did it belong to a foreign power? Was it hostile? We simply didn’t
know and weren’t about to say anything until we knew what it was.
Was it a flying saucer? The last time a public announcement of a
landing by extraterrestrials took place, even though it was
entertainment, panic ensued. In the aftermath of the war and the
fears surrounding the Cold War, we didn’t want to risk another
panic. So the military recommended and the White House agreed to
clam up. Just like the secrecy surrounding the Manhattan Project, no
word gets out. And for the next fifty years that policy, once put
into place, governed the behavior of the U.S. government and the
military about the existence of UFOs and the crash at Roswell.
You can also ask how the government was able to keep this secret for
so long. Has there been any other cover-up so efficient and thorough
that it went on, unbeknownst to succeeding presidents, year after
year until it was finally stopped? In fact, there was just such a
cover-up, started in the war, but continued as a matter of policy by
Truman in 1947, code-named “Shamrock. “
Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, one of the original members of the UFO working group,
convinced his boss President Truman in 1947 to continue working with
International Telephone and Telegraph, Western Union, and RCA to
make their international communications traffic available for
inspection by U.S. military intelligence services. Even though its
initial purpose was to monitor any communications of military
significance, such as the transmission of military secrets, there
were no controls on what was inspected and what was not. This
program continued for the next twenty-eight years and kept secret
from every president until it was terminated under the Ford
administration in 1975.
Does Shamrock mean that UFOs exist? Of course not. But it does
reveal the capability of the U.S. government to keep an ongoing
operation secret from even the president of the United States, much
like the UFO working group also under James Forrestal.
So what do I think about all of this, about what happened and what I
did? I believe that because at the time I
was so much in the routine of a military intelligence officer, I
didn’t really stop to think about the implications of
UFOs and EBEs. I understood that we
were fighting a Cold War with the Soviets and a skirmish war with
extraterrestrials. I believed that their intentions were, and still
are, hostile, and I believe that we took the steps necessary to
develop the weapons that can blunt their threat. In fact, the U.S.
military has better, more accurate, and more powerful weapons for
killing UFOs than were deployed in the movie Independence Day.
We can knock these guys down tomorrow with high-energy lasers and
directed particle-beam weapons that come right out of a Star Wars
movie. And these aren’t fiction, they’re fact. If you want to know
more, pay a visit to the U.S. Army Space Command Web site on the
Internet. These missile-launched HELs are the pride of our planetary
defense system and a direct result of President Reagan’s courage in
pushing for the Strategic Defense Initiative when every-one said it
wouldn’t work. And that SDI was a direct result of the work General
Trudeau and I did at Army R&D in 1962.
Sometimes things just work the way they’re supposed to. Some-times,
once in a very long while, you get the
chance to save your country, your planet, and even your species at
the same time. And when that time comes,
as Davy Crockett once said: Be sure you’re right, then go ahead.
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