This book makes the sensational claim that debris from the 1947 UFO
crash at Roswell spurred the development of high technology in the U.S.,
thanks to reverse engineering after the author’s secret "leaks" to
defense contractors. Col.
Philip
J. Corso was an army intelligence officer for 21 years, and served
on Gen. MacArthur’s staff in Korea, on Eisenhower’s National Security
Council, and in the Pentagon under Lt. Gen. Arthur G. Trudeau.
It was for Trudeau
that Corso did his UFO work, mostly in the areas of
integrated circuits, lasers, and fiber optics. Corso also says that he
saw one of the alien bodies from Roswell in 1947, and that the Star Wars
program was developed as a deterrent to hostile UFO activity. In other
areas, Corso, who died in 1998 at the age of 83, and was a
something of a rabid right-winger who was deeply suspicious of the
comsymps at the CIA.
Either this book is essentially true or it isn’t. If not true, Corso
might be motivated by greed, or he might have been easily manipulated in
his old age. It’s also possible that there’s a larger disinformation
project in the works: if you read 50 books like this, and watch 100
episodes of "The X Files," you soon become politically neutralized ("Why
Johnny Can’t Dissent"). Even UFO researchers don’t know what to make of
this book. (Or perhaps the phrase should read, "Particularly UFO
researchers....")
The Day After Roswell A Former
Pentagon Official Reveals the U.S. Government’s Shocking UFO Cover-Up
by Colonel Philip Corso
"To say this is a
significant book, if not the most significant book to appear on a
UFO subject in decades can hardly be considered an exaggeration. If
even a portion of Corso’s extraordinary claims are true, the
implications are staggering. Corso has told a fascinating story, at
times cinematic, with enough meat to keep UFO researchers chewing
for years to come."
-- Peter Jordon
UFO Magazine
Colonel Corso’s background:
Military officer
during World War II and Army intelligence officer on General Douglas
MacArthur’s staff during the Korean War; member of the President
Eisenhower’s National Security Council as a Lt. Colonel for four
years; head of Foreign Technology in Army Research and Development at
the Pentagon in the early 1960s, where he was in charge of the
Roswell Files, the cache of UFO parts and information which,
"an Army retrieval team
. . . pulled out of the wreckage of a flying disk that had crashed
outside the town of Roswell in the New Mexico desert in the
early-morning darkness during the first week of July 1947."
Retired from the Army in
1963 with nineteen medals and ribbons; then served as National Security
specialist staff to U.S. Senators James Eastland and Strom
Thurmond; and subsequently has worked as a consultant and contracts
administrator in the private sector.
Revelations:
Colonel Corso tells that there were five extraterrestrials, 4-1/2
feet tall with greyish-brown skin, four-fingered hands and oversized
hairless heads, found at the Roswell UFO crash site, two of them still
alive. One tried to run away and was shot by nervous soldiers. The other
was still alive but dying when he arrived in the back of an Army truck
at Roswell Army Air Field.
He was Post Duty Officer at
Fort Riley, Kansas in 1947, the night a shipment of Roswell artifacts
arrived from Fort Bliss. Colonel Corso examined the shipment,
which included one of the dead extraterrestrials preserved in a thick
light-blue liquid. The shipment was destined for what is now called
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio. Corso speaks about
serving in President Eisenhower’s National Security Council, and seeing
the memos about the Roswell incident and the "goods" retrieved from it.
The Colonel divulges how he spearheaded the Army’s super-secret
reverse-engineering project that "seeded"
extraterrestrial technology at American
corporations such as IBM, Hughes Aircraft, Bell Labs,
and Dow Corning - without their knowledge. He describes the
devices found aboard the Roswell craft, and how they became the
precursors for today’s,
integrated circuit
chips
fiber optics
lasers
night-vision
equipment
super-tenacity
fibers (such as Kevlar plastic armor)
classified
discoveries, such as,
psychotronic
devices that can translate human thoughts into signals that
control machinery
Stealth aircraft
technology
Star Wars
particle-beam devices
He also discusses the role
that extraterrestrial technology played in shaping geopolitical policy
and events:
how it helped the
United States surpass the Russians in space
spurred elaborate
Army initiatives such as SDI (Star Wars Projects)
Project Horizon (to
place a military base on the Moon)
and ultimately
brought about the end of the Cold War
Colonel Corso also
said that captured UFOs were/are kept at Norton, Edwards and Nellis (Area
51) Air Force Bases. He said a UFO Working Group was set up
by President Truman in September, 1947, a group some call
MJ-12, and that it has functioned ever
since. In the 1950s two crude prototypes of antigravity craft
were constructed, but were powered by crude human nuclear fission
generators, and were inefficient and leaked radiation. He says that the
Star Wars program was always primarily to prepare for war against the
extraterrestrials in case of invasion.
It is no compliment to suggest that this is the most incredible book
published so far this year. Working for the head of Army research and
development in the early 1960s, Philip Corso claims to have taken
charge of a super-secret black project. His job was to `seed’
discoveries flowing from a continuing intensive study of artifacts
recovered from the UFO crash site at Roswell 15 years earlier with the
giants of the US defense industry. The result, he claims, was a slew of
inventions, from stealth technology and Kevlar body armor to fiber
optics, integrated circuitry and lasers.
Furthermore, we learn, the US authorities do indeed possess an autopsied
EBE (Extraterrestrial Biological Entity), the
Majestic-12 group was a reality, and
President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative was designed not to
shoot down Soviet ICBMs but to account for incoming UFOs.
Unsupported as this essentially is by anything other than the author’s
own word (the only other officer whose view are regularly cited to back
up all this stuff is Corso’s former boss, Lt Gen. Arthur Trudeau,
now conveniently deceased), it must be rated not only implausible but
actually insulting. For the author’s central thesis is little more than
an adaptation of Erich von Daniken’s views on ancient astronauts:
humanity is too backward
and too stupid to invent anything of worth finds itself and finds
itself utterly dependent on alien technology to make any progress.
(It can only be a matter of time before someone claims that the
steam engine was suggested to Watt by the MIB.)
The real problem with
The
Day After Roswell is not what it claims but what it doesn’t say.
At no point does Corso tell why he is relating his country’s
deepest secrets, nor how he is now able to expose the most efficient
cover-up ever mounted by the US government without incurring any
sanctions. He also fails to explain how, in the midst of the
ultra-competitive inter-service rivalries he describes, evidence for the
supposed Roswell recovery operation (which every previous authority has
made quite clear was masterminded by the US Air Force) ended up in Army
files in the first place.
Such difficulties are exacerbated by the fact that Corso’s claims -
extravagant and bizarre as there are - are not the only odd thing about
this book. There is also the problem of the author’s admission that he
failed to recognize the importance of the work he had done until, 35
years later, he sat down intending to write quite a different book about
his army years. Only then, he says, did he realize that his story was
"perhaps the most significant of the past 50 years".
Then there is the matter of the author’s apparently less than startling
military career. Lt. Col is not an exalted rank; moreover, Corso
had been promoted to Major as early as 1944, and thus received one
promotion in the remaining 19 years of his military career. This is not
the record of a high-flyer, much less that of a man supposedly
brilliant enough to be entrusted with his country’s most important
research project.
And, oddly enough, although a forward by US Senator Strom Thurmond
- Corso’s first civilian boss - lauds the author and his contribution to
the American Cold War effort, it scrupulously refrains from making any
mention of the book’s bizarre claims or Corso’s numerous alleged
triumphs in helping to back-engineer alien artifacts.
Can it be that Thurmond does not believe his former employee
himself? Can’t say I’d blame him if he didn’t.
