I BARELY PICKED MY HEAD UP FROM THE PILES OF TECHNICAL proposals on my desk during the winter months of
1961. The work didn’t even stop for the Christmas holiday, when most of Washington likes to take a break and head for the West Virginia mountains or the Maryland countryside. I was traveling a lot during the final months of 1961, seeing weapons undergo testing at proving grounds around the country, meeting with university researchers on such diverse items as the preservation of food or the conversion of spent atomic pile material into weapons, and developing intelligence reports for General Trudeau on the kinds of technologies that might shape weapons development into the next decade.
With my other eye, I was keeping a look out for any reports going to the Air Intelligence Command about UFO sightings that I thought Army Intelligence should be thinking about. The AIC was the next step in classification from the Project Blue Book people. Its job, besides the obvious task of moving any urgent UFO reports up the ladder of secrecy to the next levels where they would disappear behind the veil of camouflage, was to classify the type of event or incident the sighting seemed to indicate.
Usually that meant separating real aircraft sightings that needed to be investigated for pure military intelligence purposes from either true UFO sightings that needed to be processed by whatever elements of the original working group were on watch or false sightings that needed to be sent back down to Blue Book to be debunked. The AIC loved it when it had actual false sightings it could send back: an obvious meteorite that they could confirm, some visual anomaly having to do with an alignment of planets, or, best of all, a couple of clowns somewhere that decided to pull a Halloween prank and scare the locals.
There were guys running around wheat fields with snowshoes or submitting photos of flying frozen pie tins to the local papers. Then the folks at Blue Book could release the story to the press, and everybody patted themselves on the back for the job they were all doing. Life could be fun in the early 1960s, especially if you didn’t know the truth.
Moving into 1962, Army Intelligence was lit up with rumors about potential threats coming in from all over the place. The anti-Castro Cubans were mad about the President’s refusal to support the Bay of Pigs invasion and were looking for revenge; Castro was mad about the Bay of Pigs invasion and was looking to get back at us; Khrushchev was still furious about the U2 and the Bay of Pigs and thinking Kennedy was a pushover, would soon jump on an opportunity to force us into some humiliating compromise.
The Russians were on the verge of sending manned spacecraft into extended orbital flights and robot probes out to explore Venus. We were way behind in the space race and none of the services had the budget or the ability to get us back into the fight. NASAwas telling the President they would have to dig in, develop the technology base, and, by the middle of the decade, put on a show for the whole world. But now, as the year turned, it was all silent running until we could put something up we could brag about.
The army was making ominous noises about events in Southeast Asia. The more the army pushed to get troops on the ground, the more the Kennedy administration refused to get involved. The army was telling the President we would eventually be sucked into a war we could not win and the events would control us instead of our controlling them. Later that same year, I would be offered the job of director of intelligence for the Army Special Forces units already operating in the Southeast Asian theater.
At about the same time the army said it was going to name Gen. Arthur Trudeauas the commander of all U.S. forces in South Vietnam. As our names were being circulated, General Trudeau confided to me that he doubted we would get the jobs. And if we did, he said, it would be a toss-up as to who would be the most unhappy, the Vietcong or the U.S. Army.
“If they send us over there, Phil, “ he said after one of our morning briefings, “one of two things will happen. Either we’ll both get court martialed or we’ll win the damn war. Either way the army’s not going to like the way we do business. “
As usual, General Trudeau was right. Before the end of 1962 and right about the time the old man was making up his mind whether to retire or not, his name was vetoed as the commander of all U.S. forces in Vietnam and I was told to stay at my desk. The handwriting was on the wall: Vietnam was going to be a political war run by the disinformation specialists at the CIA and fought under a cloud of unknowing. Unfortunately, history proved us to be correct. By the time Richard Nixon surrendered to the Chinese and we crawled out of Southeast Asia a few years later, we would learn, I hope for the last time, what it was like to be humiliated on the battlefield and then eviscerated at the negotiating table.
The new year broughtJ. Edgar Hooverover to the Pentagon. The FBI director was growing increasingly anxious at all the Roswell stories circulating like ice cold currents deep under the ocean throughout NASAand the civilian intelligence agencies. Somebody was conspiring about something, and that meant the FBIshould get involved, especially if the CIA was messing around in domestic issues. Hoover didn’t like the CIAand he especially didn’t like the cozy relationship he thought President Kennedy had with the CIA because he believed his boss, the President’s brother, was keeping him on a short leash when it came to taking on the agency about territorial issues.
Hoover knew, but didn’t believe, that after the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy had become very suspicious of the intelligence information he was getting from the CIA. By the end of 1962, the President would learn from his own brother, who would learn from me, just how deliberately flawed the information coming out of the CIA was. And I would also learn, when I worked for Senator Russell on the Warren Commission in 1964, how that had sealed his fate.
But in 1962, still near the height of his power, J. Edgar Hoover was as territorial as any lifetime bureaucrat in Washington could be. And when somebody stepped on his toes, or when he thought someone had stepped on his toes, he kept kicking them until the guy was dead. Even his own agents knew what it was like to get on his bad side. I was as territorial in my own way as the FBI director was in his, and during my years at the White House under President Eisenhower, we had established a professional relationship. If he needed to know something that bore on some KGB agent nosing around the government, I helped him out. If I needed to find something out on the qt. about somebody I needed to take out of the bureaucratic loop, he would tell me what he knew. We never established any formal relationships in the 1950s, but we let each know who we thought the bad guys were.
In the 1950s, Hoover got interested in the rumors about Roswell because anything the CIA got their teeth into made him nervous. If it were only the military running a cover-up, he could live with that, although he thought the military never should have run the OSS during World War II. But once he suspected the CIA was part of the Roswell story, he wanted in. But in my years on the White House staff, there wasn’t much I could tell him. It wouldn’t be until 1961 that I got my hands on what really happened at Roswell, and then I didn’t have to contact him. He called me.
We found we could help each other. Besides being territorial, J. Edgar Hoover was an information fanatic. If there was a bit of information floating around, whether it was rumor or truth, Hoover was obsessive about putting it into his files. Information was such a valuable commodity to him, he was willing to trade for it with anybody in government he trusted. I wanted information, too. I was going out to meetings with scientists and university researchers whose loyalties I couldn’t verify. I had to be very circumspect about the technological information I was delivering, and many times I needed to know whether a particular chemist or physicist had ever been suspected of dealing with the Communists or, worse, was on the payroll of the CIA.
In retrospect I can see how all this smacks of the thinking of Senator Joe McCarthy, but I was at the White House during the army McCarthy hearings and I can tell you straight out that Joe McCarthy- unwittingly - was the best friend the Communists ever had in government. Single handedly, Senator McCarthy helped give respectability to a bunch of people who would never have had it otherwise. He turned behaving in contempt of Congress into a heroic act by his very tactics, and the Communists in government were laughing at the free rein he gave them. All they had to do was provide him with a human sacrifice every now and then, someone completely unimportant or actually innocent of any wrong doing, and McCarthy pilloried them on television. But when he turned against the US. Army, he crossed into my territory and we had to shut him down.
The Communists used McCarthy to give them good press and open up an area where they could work while the anti-Communists were made to look like fools. I told this to Robert Kennedy, who as a young lawyer had been a member of Roy Cohn’s investigative staff working for the McCarthy subcommittee and who had learned firsthand what it was like to be completely misled into self destructive behavior. It was a mistake, he confided to me, that he would never make again. Unfortunately, his brother’s enemies were his own, and he was misled into thinking that being president would allow him to settle the score.
But in January of 1962 all that was on my mind was reestablishing a relationship with J. Edgar Hoover so that I could pursue my agenda while keeping a lookout for who might be dangerous out there in the academic community. Now I had something to bargain with for the information I wanted. Not only did I have the bits and pieces of the Roswell story that I knew Hoover wanted, I also had information about the domestic activities of the CIA. Hoover was more than interested in sharing information, and we continued to talk right through 1962 until I left the army and went over to Senator Thurmond’s staff.
Our relationship continued right through1963. And in 1964, when I was an investigator for Senator Russell on the Warren Commission and Hoover was pursuing his own independent investigation into the President’s assassination, he and I could only stare at one another again on either side of the abyss of that crime. Stacked up against the enormity of what had happened, Hoover and I both understood that there are some battles you cannot win. So you leave them alone so you can fight another day.
I’m not sure whether J. Edgar Hoover ever really believed that the Roswell story was true, an absolute conspiracy to cover up something else, or just a delusion that became mass hysteria out there in the desert. There were so many details buried in army memos and maintained under layers of cover stories fabricated by military intelligence experts that he couldn’t possibly know the truth. But like the good cop that he was, he took information wherever he could find it and kept on searching for something that made sense.
If the army saw a threat to our society, then Hoover thought there was a threat. And whenever he could follow up a report of a sighting with a very discreet appearance by a pair of FBI agents to interview the witnesses and get away with it, he did. He was more than willing to share that information with me, and that was how I found out about some of the unpublicized cattle mutilation stories in the early 1960s.
My J. Edgar Hoover connection was important to me as I began my work in the early weeks of 1962 because the level of research into the types of projects we were developing became very intense. The rumors of General Trudeau’s appointment to the Southeast Asia command and my selection as intelligence director for the Green Berets in Southeast Asia, as vague and unconfirmed as they were, set a deadline for the general and me to push our projects forward because we knew we had only a year or so left on our tenure at R&D.
So when the FBI director and I would talk, I had questions ready to ask. No information we ever shared was in writing, and any notes that I took from the conversations we had I later destroyed after committing them to memory or taking action on the things he said. Even to this day, although FBI agents have contacted me about records supposedly still left in the old files, I don’t know what notes the FBI director took about our conversations and what specific actions he ever took. Because we trusted each other and remained in contact once every six months or so even after I left government service, I never followed up on anything I said and never asked for any verification of information in the files. I think Hoover appreciated that.
By February of 1962 I had lined my nut file projects up for an end run that would take me to the end of the year and either South Vietnam or retirement. The first folder on the desktop was the “glass filaments. “
Fiber Optics
Members of the retrieval team who foraged around inside the spacecraft on the morning of the discovery told Colonel Blanchardback 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 Kohlertold 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 EBEshad 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 Monsantoand 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 Feynmangave 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 Pontand 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 fabricthat, 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 materialsalso 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
