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CHAPTER 9
The Project Had Officially Begun
General Trudeau marched down the hall to his boss at the Pentagon to
begin the process of funding the new items we’d identified in our
Foreign Technology budget, and I went home that evening and tried on
my official White House three piece suit. President Eisenhower once
told me that he always trusted a man who wore a vest, and I never
forgot it. Although there were times when the President asked me to
wear my uniform for special meetings when I had to look military, I
usually wore suits every day to work.
But after my years at the Red
Canyon missile base and in combat uniform in Germany, I lost the
knack of wearing civilian clothes. Nevertheless, here I was again,
after all those years, wearing a suit just like any other
nine-to-five commuting Joe as I headed toward Fort Belvoir, perhaps
the army’s most important base in the entire Washington Military
District.
Fort Belvoir was one of those military posts where the mundane
activity of training and weapons testing was
an effective cover for what came to be known as the secret life of
Fort Belvoir. It sat comfortably within thirty
minutes of the Pentagon, and it was where some of the army’s most
top secret research into UFO technology was
also taking place. Belvoir housed the Army Engineering School and,
for former artillery and missile officers like
myself, maintained a vital information database about ballistics
testing and
the development of new weapons. But on the secret side of the
ledger, Fort Belvoir was home to the Signal School where officers
for the National Security Council who had top secret crypto
clearance were trained.
Even years after I retired from active duty, stories lingered about
the records of UFOs that were stored at Fort Belvoir, including
photos and even motion pictures of military retrievals of downed
extraterrestrial craft. What very few people knew was that an elite
secret air force unit operated out of Fort Belvoir - ostensibly an
army base - that was responsible for retrievals of downed UFOs. That
was how Fort Belvoir became a repository of classified UFO footage.
Those secrets remained at Fort Belvoir over the years and were
closely guarded while the installation remained shrouded in mystery.
For those who suspect what information was kept at the base, Fort
Belvoir remains a central part of the legends surrounding the
official military cover up of UFOs.
Me, I was on my way there to talk about the night vision project to
see what German World War II files they were keeping on the infrared
viewfinders the Nazis were trying to deploy for their night fighting
troops. These were cumbersome, unwieldy devices that left infantry
hampered and weighed down. They were never effective in the war but
held out the enormous promise of opening up the night as a
battlefield where an army could maneuver around its blind and
helpless enemy. That was the promise that tantalized both the
Soviets and American forces as we closed in on Germany’s most secret
weapons facilities during the final months of the war.
Our forces secured all of the German records on mountable weapons
night viewers and headpieces, but it wasn’t until we looked inside
the crashed Roswell vehicle and saw a hazy daylight through the view
ports that we realized just what the potential of night viewing
could be. We understood in those few moments after the vehicle was
brought back to Wright Field and General Twining made his initial
report that we were the blind and helpless enemy through the eyes of
the EBEs. These creatures controlled our night skies, observing us
with an ease that we didn’t enjoy until we had deployed our own
night-viewing goggles years later and leveled the playing field
against them and the Soviet client forces arrayed against us.
My very proper looking deep blue Oldsmobile might not have been a
secret weapon in America’s arsenal, but it was carrying a
description of one of the tiny components of what would be one of
our most effective Cold War weapons. Guerrilla armies used the night
itself on their familiar home territory as a tactical weapon that
allowed them to move right past enemy positions without being
spotted. They could secure a battlefield advantage as if they were
invisible. But equip a patrol with night viewers, mount night
viewers on tanks and observation vehicles, hover over a battlefield
at night in helicopter gunships equipped for night vision, and
suddenly the night becomes day and the invisible enemy appears in
your gunsights like prey for the hunter.
To the EBEs, we were that prey, and we knew they were monitoring our
defenses, surveilling the aircraft we scrambled to chase them, and
hovering above the experimental satellites we launched. We could see
them with our radar, I had seen them on our scopes with my own eyes,
and we knew their presence wasn’t benign. But they had an advantage
over us that we couldn’t overcome unless we acquired the
technological ability to put up enough of a defense to make their
cost too high to engage in any large scale warfare.
Not only was it
an advantage that forced us to scrape whatever technology we could
off the edge of our encounters with them; it was one of the many
factors that forced us into a silence about the alien presence. If
there was no public enemy, there would be no pressure from the
public to do anything about it. So we simply denied all
extraterrestrial activity because no aliens meant no military
responsibility to counter their threat. But all the while we were
still planning, measuring their hostile intentions, and pushing
through weapons development that might reduce their advantage.
It would have been next to impossible to stage a military build up
that would help us fight extraterrestrial enemies had we not had a
lot of help from our old adversaries, the Soviets and the Chinese.
The Soviets made no bones about their intentions to dominate the
world through Communist revolutionary coups and set about
immediately to challenge us even before World War II ended. By 1948,
the Iron Curtain had dropped over Eastern Europe and the Soviets
were trying to back us into a position of appeasement. In 1949, Mao
Tse-tung drove Chiang Kai-shek out of mainland China to the island
of Taiwan, and the United States had another major Communist
adversary trying to impose its will upon its Asian neighbors. We
first tasted their blood in Korea and would soon almost choke on it
in Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, and Cambodia.
Those were hard times, made even harder because the U.S. military
also knew that not just the free world but
the whole world was under a military threat from a power far greater
than the combined forces of the Soviet
Union and the Republic of China. We didn’t know what the EBEs wanted
at first, but we knew that between the
cattle mutilations, surveillance of our secret weapons
installations, reports of strange abductions of human beings,
and their consistent buzzing of our unmanned and manned space
launches, the EBEs weren’t just friendly visitors
looking for a polite way to say “Hello, we mean you no harm. “ They
meant us harm, and we knew it. The problem
was we couldn’t do anything about it at first, and anything we did
try to do had to be done in complete secrecy or it would set off a
worldwide panic, we believed.
This was where the Cold War turned out to be a tremendous
opportunity for us, because it allowed us to upgrade our military,
preparedness in public to fight the Communists while secretly
creating an arsenal and strategy to defend ourselves against the
extraterrestrials. In short, the Cold War, while real enough and
dangerous enough, was also a cover for us to develop a planetary
tracking and defense system that looked into space as well as into
the Soviets’ backyard. And the Soviets were doing the exact same
thing we were, looking up at the same time they were looking down.
In an only tacitly acknowledged cooperative endeavor, the Soviets
and the Americans, while each one was explicitly using the Cold War
to gain an advantage over the other, both sought to develop a
military capability to defend ourselves against extraterrestrials.
There were very subtle indications of this policy in the types of
weapons both countries developed as well as in our behavior toward
one another every time one side came close to pushing the button. I
can tell you definitively because I was there when we avoided
nuclear war because both military commands were able to pull back
when they stared over the cliff into the flaming volcano of war that
threatened to engulf all of us at least four times between 1945 and
1975 - the Berlin airlift, the Chinese invasion of Korea, the Cuban
missile crisis, and the Yom Kippur War - and probably many more.
By the time President Nixon returned from China, having agreed to
turn over Vietnam to the Communists, he had effectively turned the
Soviets’ flank in the Cold War. For the next decade, the Soviets
felt caught between the Chinese, with whom they’d fought border wars
in the past, and the United States. When President Ronald Reagan
demonstrated to Mikhail Gorbachev that the United States was capable
of deploying an effective antimissile missile defense and sought
Soviet cooperation in turning it against the extraterrestrials, all
pretext of the Cold War ended and the great Soviet monolith in
Eastern Europe began to crumble.
But the Cold War worked its magic for both superpowers by allowing
them to prepare defenses against the extraterrestrials without ever
having to disclose to the public what they were really doing. When
you examine it, the record itself should have showed that another
agenda was present throughout the Cold War. After all, why did each
side really have ten or more times the number of warheads needed to
completely destroy the other side’s nuclear missile arsenal as well
as their major population centers?
The real story behind the vast
missile arsenals, the huge fleets of bombers, and the ICBM submarine
platforms that both sides deployed was the threat to the aliens that
if they occupied a portion of our planet, we had the fire power to
obliterate them. If they attacked either the United States or the
Soviet Union so as to render one of the arsenals inoperable, we had
enough missiles to spare to make them pay so heavy a price for
starting a war, it wasn’t even worth trying. That was part of our
secret agenda behind the huge military buildups of the 1950s
and1960s: sacrifice a portion of the planet so that the rest of us
could live.
It enabled the United States and USSR to intimidate one
another, but it also worked for the heads of the military
intelligence agencies as a way to intimidate any extraterrestrial
cultures. Nobody wrote any memos about this because weapons
deployment during the Cold War was the cover for the secret agenda
against the extraterrestrials.
Sure, there was a gamesmanship going on during those forty years
from 1948 through 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down. Each side
tried to get the other to spend more money than they really had to
so as to weaken the economy. Our CIA consistently gave us false
estimates because they were feeding us KGB information while, I
know, we tried to do the same thing to the Soviets. And if the
Soviets could have won the Cold War as bloodlessly as possible, they
would have done so. But in the end, as the futility of mutual
destruction made World War III unfightable, our real attention
became more focused on the common enemy: the extraterrestrials who
refused to go away.
There were subtle and not so subtle hints during the entire Cold War
that a hidden agenda was in play. Most people just didn’t know where
to look. For those who did, and there were and are plenty of them,
the answers were in plain view.
Although there was heavy censorship
and the threat of ruined careers, plenty of military and civilian
sources reported flying saucer sightings. Stories of abductions -
while most were either fantasies, nightmares, or memory screens for
other events in the so called abductee’s childhood - continued to
abound. Some were true, and this caused great consternation among
members of the UFO working group. If the government couldn’t protect
private citizens from abductions by extraterrestrials, then would
that not signify a breakdown in governmental authority? That was a
worry, but it didn’t come to pass.
Similarly, if too many flying saucers were seen by too many people
at the same time, wouldn’t it become obvious that the military
forces of the superpowers couldn’t protect their populations? For a
time it was true, but the public never realized it. Soon we were
able to upgrade our ability to defend our airspace so that we could
amass large numbers of interceptors against the EBEs’ limited
resources and pose a real threat to them.
They backed off and probed
our defenses only when it seemed safe. Thus, the race among the
superpowers to spend billions of dollars to build the fastest and
best interceptors had a true double purpose. We needed all these
planes because they gave the super powers a flexible response
alternative to simply obliterating themselves with guided missiles,
but at the same time both superpowers were developing the air
defense technology to defend the planet against the
extraterrestrials.
Everybody wants the best and fastest plane, of course, so that we
can out fly and out shoot the enemy we know about. But we were also
defending our skies against an enemy we didn’t admit to having. The
second agenda was always there and the Cold War provided the
budgetary impetus the military needed : We were building aircraft to
protect against flying saucers. And in a very real measure, we
succeeded.
Both the United States and USSR were sensitive to another area where
the extraterrestrials were aggressing upon our military personnel :
our respective space exploration programs. From the very beginning
of our endeavors to put satellites in orbit, the extraterrestrials
have been surveilling and then actively interfering with our launch
vehicles and in some cases the manned and unmanned payloads
themselves by buzzing them, jamming radio transmissions, causing
electrical problems with the spacecrafts’ systems, or causing
mechanical malfunctions.
American astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts
have separately reported sightings of UFOs so routinely that it’s
become commonplace. The audio/video transmission downlink between
space capsules and NASA, however, is a secure scrambled signal so
that commentary about UFOs shadowing the spacecraft can’t be picked
up by private listeners. Even then, the astronauts are specifically
instructed not to report UFO sightings until they are debriefed once
they’ve landed.
Astronaut Gordon Cooper, for example, reported that when he was a
fighter pilot over Germany in the 1950s, he scrambled with other Sabre Jet fighter pilots to intercept a formation of UFOs flying
over his base, but when his fighter group got too close, the
formation of UFOs flew away. Cooper also described film that he saw
at Edwards Air Force base in California in 1957 of a UFO landing. He
said that he sent the film to Washington and followed up on it with
the officers at
Project Blue Book, but they never responded to his
queries.
Similarly, X-15 pilot Joe Walker revealed that his 1961 mission in
setting a new world air speed record was also
to hunt for UFOs during his high altitude flights. He also said that
he filmed UFOs during an X-15 flight a year later in
1962. Other reports persisted about Mercury 7 astronauts being
shadowed by UFOs and about Neil Armstrong’s having seen an alien
base on the moon during the Apollo 11 flyover and landing. NASA has,
of course, not admitted to any of this, and, very correctly, it’s
been treated as a matter of high national security.
An extraterrestrial presence on the moon, whether it was true or not
in the 1950s, was an issue of such military
importance that it was about to become a subject for National
Security Council debate before Admiral Hillenkoetter and Generals
Twining and Vandenberg pulled it back
under their working group’s security
classification. The issue never formally reached the National
Security Council, although Army R&D under the new
command of General Trudeau in 1958 quickly developed preliminary
plans for Horizon, a moon base construction
project designed to provide the United States with a military
observation presence on the lunar surface.
Started in
the late 1950s and set for completion between 1965 and1967, Horizon
was supposed to establish defensive
fortifications on the moon against a Soviet attempt to use it as a
military base, an
early warning surveillance system against a Soviet missile attack,
and, most importantly, a surveillance and defense against UFOs. It
was, to be blunt, a plan to establish a skirmish line in space to
protect the earth against a surprise attack. But Horizon was side
tracked when the National Space and Aeronautics Act gave control
over space exploration to the civilian NASA, effectively eliminating
the military branches from pursuing their own projects until much
later in the1970s.
Fears of an attack to probe our planet’s ability to defend itself
were running rampant at National Security and through the military
chiefs of staff during the middle 1950s. After he retired from the
army, even Gen. Douglas MacArthur got into the fray, urging the
military to prepare itself for what he felt would be the next major
war. He told the New York Times in 1955 that,
“The nations of the
world will have to unite for the next war will be an interplanetary
war. The nations of the Earth must someday make a common front
against attack by people from other planets. “
The public took
little notice of that comment, but it was, in fact, a disclosure of
the strategic thinking of the military back in the 1950s and
explains part of the paranoia the government was displaying about
all information relating to the flying saucers and unidentified
aircraft. Part of the military response to what they perceived as
threats from extraterrestrials was, first, to analyze the specific
ways that alien spacecraft “passively” disrupt our defenses and
world wide communications through electrical and magnetic field
interference and develop circuitry hardened against it. Second,
General Trudeau and his counterparts in the other branches of the
military at the Pentagon charged with strategic planning looked at
the aggressive behaviors of the EBEs.
They didn’t just shadow or surveil our spacecraft in orbit; they buzzed us and tried to create
such havoc with our communications systems that NASA more than once
had to rethink astronaut safety in the Mercury and Gemini programs.
Years later, there was even some speculation among Army Intelligence
analysts who had been out of the NASA strategy loop that the Apollo
moon landing program was ultimately abandoned because there was no
way to protect the astronauts from possible alien threats.
The alien spacecraft were also aggressively buzzing our frontline
defenses in Eastern Europe, either looking for
blind spots or weaknesses, or - which is what I believed because I
was there and saw it with my own eyes -
probing our radar to see how quickly we responded. We’d see blips
shoot across our screens that we couldn’t
identify and suddenly they’d disappear. Then they’d reappear, only
this time even closer to our airfields or missile
launchers. Once we determined that we weren’t being probed by Soviet
or East German aircraft, we sometimes
decided not to respond to the threats. Many times they’d just go
away.
But other times they would play cat and
mouse, edging ever closer until we had to respond. That’s what they
were looking for, how quickly we could respond and pick them upon
our targeting radars or catch up to them with our interceptors.
Whenever we’d get just about there for an aerial sighting, they’d
take off out of the atmosphere at speeds over 7,500 miles an hour.
If we tried to follow, they’d play us along until our fliers had to
return.
Our only successes in defending against them, back in the late1950s
and early 1960s, occurred when we were able to get a firm tracking
radar lock. Then when we locked our targeting radars on, the signals
that missiles were supposed to follow to the target, it somehow
interfered with their navigational ability and the vehicle’s flight
became erratic. If we were especially fortunate and able to boost
the signal before they broke away, we could actually bring them
down.
Sometimes we actually got lucky enough to score a hit with a
missile before the UFO could take any evasive action, which an army
air defense battalion did with an antiaircraft missile near Ramstein
Air Force Base in Germany in May 1974. The spacecraft managed to
crash land in a valley. The craft was retrieved and flown back to
Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada. The Roswell crash was different.
There was much speculation that it was a combination of the desert
lightning storm and our persistent tracking radars at Alamogordo and
the 509th that helped bring down the alien vehicle over the New
Mexico desert in 1947.
Then there were the suspected cattle mutilations and reported
abductions, perhaps the most direct form of
intervention in our culture short of a direct attack upon our
installations. While debates broke out among the
debunkers - who said these were a combination of hoaxes, attacks by
every day predators on cattle,
psychological flashback memories of episodes of childhood abuse in
the cases of reported abductees, and out
and out fabrications of the media - field investigators found they
could not explain away some of the cattle
mutilations, especially where laser surgery seemed to be used, and
psychologists found alarming similarities in the
descriptions of abductees who had no knowledge of one another’s
stories.
The military intelligence community
regarded these stories of mutilations and abductions very seriously.
They worked up descriptions of at least three
separate scenarios in which,
(1) the EBEs were simply conducting scientific experiments on
earthly life forms and collecting whatever specimens they could
without causing too much disruption and alerting us
(2) the EBEs were actively
collecting specimens and conducting experiments so as to
determine whether this was a hospitable environment for them to
inhabit, and any disruption they caused was of no concern to
them
(3) all of the experimentation and specimen collection were the
prelude to some kind of infiltration or invasion of our planet. We
did not know their motives, but could only assume the worst and,
therefore, needed to defend ourselves however we could
While never disclosing it publicly, military intelligence analysts
supported the view that Earth was already under some form of probing
attack by one or more alien cultures who were testing both our
ability and resolve to defend ourselves. Without ever directly
addressing whether contacts between the aliens and Earth governments
had already taken place - because the notes and minutes of the
Hillenkoetter working group were never released to the Chiefs of
Staff or to their intelligence officers - the heads of the armed
services decided collectively that it was better to plan for war
rather than be surprised.
At the same time, the civilian leaders of the nation’s space program
at NASA decided that military intelligence
was overreacting to the shadowing and buzzing of our spacecraft.
NASA, which had been holding as highly
confidential any reports of extraterrestrial activity surrounding
our space vehicles, nevertheless decided to adopt
an internal official “wait and watch” attitude because they believed
that it would have been impossible to
launch an explicitly military defensive space program and still
achieve the civilian scientific aims at the same
time.
So NASA agreed to go covert. As a cover, NASA, in1961, agreed
to cooperate with military planners to work
a “second tier” space program within and covered up by the civilian
scientific missions. They agreed to open up a
confidential “back channel” communications link to military
intelligence regarding any hostile activities
conducted by the EBEs against our spacecraft even if these included
only shadowing or surveillance. I was aware
of this through my contacts in the military intelligence community.
What NASA didn’t tell military intelligence, of
course, was that they already had
an even more classified back channel to the Hillenkoetter working
group and were keeping them updated on every single alien spacecraft
appearance the astronauts reported, especially during the early
series of Apollo flights when the EBE craft began buzzing the lunar
modules on successive missions after they thrusted out of earth
orbit.
Even though military intelligence was kept out of the
operational loop between NASA and the working group, I and a few
others still had contacts in the civilian intelligence community
that kept us informed. And the army and air force managed to find at
least 122 photos taken by astronauts on the moon that showed some
evidence of an alien presence. It was a startling find and was one
of many reasons that the Reagan administration pushed so hard for
the Space Defense Initiative in 1981.
In 1960, upon the confidential approval of the working group and at
the request of the National Security
Agency, which was concerned about the vulnerability of its U2
flights, NASA agreed to allow some of its missions
to become covers for military surveillance satellites. These
satellites, although approved for surveillance of Soviet
ICBM activity, were also supposed to spot alien activity in remote
portions of the earth. Maybe, in the 1960s, we
didn’t have the technology we have now to intercept their ships, but
by using new satellite surveillance techniques we believed we’d be
able to pick up the signatures of an alien presence on the face of
our planet. If we made it too difficult for them to set up shop with
bases on Earth, military intelligence planners speculated, maybe
they would simply go away. This was another example of how Cold War
strategy was utilized for the dual purpose of trying to surveil
extraterrestrial activity under the cover of surveilling Soviet
activity.
However, throughout the 1960s, critical projects were started at the
Foreign Technology desk to protect vital command and control
systems, including the hardening of communications and defense
computer circuitry by burying components sensitive to
electromagnetic pulses, the same kind of energy generated after a
nuclear explosion as well as by the EBE spacecraft. In fact, so
important was our research into the effects of the electromagnetic
pulse, or EMP, that ever since the late 1950s the Department of
Defense has been simulating EMP to determine how to protect the
circuitry in its planes, tanks, missiles, and ships from being
disabled by it.
EMP generators were established at a number of
facilities around the country, including the Harry Diamond
Laboratories in Philadelphia, Maryland, for the army and the EMP
Empress I and II simulators for the navy in the middle of Chesapeake
Bay and another one at China lake in California. The air force set
up EMP simulators at Kirkland Air Force Base in New Mexico and the
army additional facilities at White Sands, New Mexico, and at the
Redstone arsenal in Alabama. We also initiated the crash development
of night vision equipment to enable our troops to see at night the
same way the EBEs did, finally enabling us to get a footing, if not
an equal footing, with the aliens so that we could force them to
some kind of stale mate. It was only then that we began to realize
what their intentions were and the startling secrets about their
existence on this planet.
It was night vision that was on my mind today as I was zipped
through the sentry post at the main gate and very quickly buzzed
into the development laboratories wing at Fort Belvoir by an army
specialist 4 who seemed surprised that I wasn’t in uniform.
“Colonel Corso, Dr. Paul Fredericks, technology development
consultant to the night vision section at Fort Belvoir, said as he
extended his hand and walked me over to what must have been his
prized tobacco colored leather chair. It was way oversized for his
small office and was obviously his favorite seat. I was duly
appreciative of the honor and courtesy he was according me. “General
Trudeau told me you were bringing us some remarkable information
about one of the projects we have in development here. “
“I hope it’s helpful to you, Dr. Fredericks, “ I began. “I’m not a
physicist, but I think we have something that might speed up the
research time line and show some new possibilities. “
“Anything that could help, Colonel, “ he said as I opened up my
briefcase and began to spread out what I had. “Anything at all. “
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