It is here at the very beginning of the book that my first doubts arose about Corso's credibility: Despite his claim to have worked with that file for two years, he admits he has no idea exactly where or when the Roswell crash took place, or which officers were involved in the retrieval, because he neglected to retain any notes about such matters. In fact, he seems as confused about these centrally important details as any of the rest of us who make no claim to having access to the secret files.
In Corso's controversial saga the UFO occupants play only a very marginal role, and since his book is centrally about the behavior of human beings, any
Intelligent, attent ive reader is able to judge its plausibility. The first and most essential issue one must examine is this hypothetical question: if an alien spaceship did crash near Roswell two years after World War II, what can we reasonably expect would have been done with the recovered debris? Put simply, does Corso's account of the aftermath have the ring of truth?
It is surely safe to say that such exotic wreckage would be seen by those who had been informed about it as the most important collection of artifacts on earth. Was the crash the harbinger of an imminent extraterrestrial invasion? With such a potentially global crisis looming in the middle of a burgeoning Cold War with the Soviets, study of this debris would be undertaken immediately, using every available scientific resource. We would need to find out whatever we could about the biology and intentions of the alien crewmembers. We would have to examine minutely every aspect of the craft's technology and possible weaponry, and as soon as possible. A treasure-trove of material like this would galvanize everyone who had heard anything about its recovery.
In such a global crisis, virtually every informed scientist in the country, every aeronautical engineer, every physicist and every military expert would have ignored such trivial issues as interservice rivalry and collegial competition once he or she was asked to become part of this unprecedented scientific effort. Getting on the investigating team and being allowed into that building to work on those artifacts - even if it meant a commitment to years of secret labor - would have wrung gigantic personal sacrifices from almost any grateful researcher. Such a project would have gone to the top of virtually every priority list in every lab, branch of the government and military staff that had been made aware of such a find.
All of this is, of course, hypothetical, but eminently logical and reasonable. And we do have something of a precedent for such a situation. We know what happens now after such a relatively unimportant event as a "mere" domestic crash, an example being the 1996 fiery explosion of TWA flight 800 off the coast of Long Island. In this crash, which involved a major loss of life, a team of specially trained scientists and investigators was immediately assembled and flown to the site. A large area was sequestered to receive the wreckage and no expense was spared in the subsequent investigation. Security was tight
while the crashed aircraft was slowly reconstructed, bit by bit. Of necessity, the lines of authority were clear and the re-assembled craft was painstakingly studied for as long as it took to obtain scientific answers - in the case of TWA 800, the still uncertain reason the ship explod ed.
As an extension of this known scenario, let us imagine what would happen if the nearly intact wreckage of an advanced Russian MIG fighter had been recovered during the height of the Cold War. A team of scientists, aeronautical engineers and military experts with top secret security clearance would also have been assembled immediately. The team would have then begun to work virtually around the clock in the craft's secured hangar until the reconstructed MIG yielded every last one of its military and aeronautical secrets. In light of the threat the Soviet air forces posed, time would have been of the essence. History bears out the ability of scientists, government officials and members of the military to cooperate in near-perfect harmony under such emergency conditions. Examples from World War II, like the Manhattan Project which produced the atomic bomb and Project Enigma which broke the Nazi's secret codes, fully demonstrate our capabilities and efficiency.
Corso's version of how everyone acted when an alien spaceship fell into our hands is radically different. In 1961, fourteen long, critical years after the Roswell UFO had been recovered and, we can assume, studied down to every last filament and flake of metal, Philip Corso was a young junior officer in the Pentagon. He writes that in 1961 he was given a file cabinet containing bits and pieces of the Roswell debris. The cabinet also contained a few papers dealing with this stunning event, and he is ordered by his boss, General Trudeau, to see what he can make out of it all. When he asks the general about the rest of the wreckage, he is told that the material, along with the alien bodies, was long ago split up among the quarreling, competitive services. There is no hangar with all the debris arranged in an attempt at precise reconstruction, no top scientists working around the clock. It appears that because of chain-of-command confusion and inter-service rivalry, each of the military branches worked in a desultory, not to say incompetent way on whatever piece of the elephant they happened to be hold ing.
The thrust of Corso's book deals with how he, almost sin gle-handedly, began to decipher the Roswell artifacts by initiating a program of reverse-engineering. Everyone before him, he claims, had more or less forgotten about the fact that we possessed the wreckage of an alien spaceship, and it was only through his efforts and engineering perspicacity that in 1961 a serious study was finally undertaken. Because of the secret activities Corso initiated with military and civilian organizations, new strains of military hardware were developed from the Roswell wreckage. Ultimately, because of his work, we won the Cold War. A large claim, one might say, especially since Corso provides no names or documentation to help corroborate his role in this process of reverse-engineering. After thirty-six years and victory over Communism one would think that there must be dozens, even hundreds of people within the military-industrial complex who might be willing to come forward to corroborate parts of Corso's story and thus to share the spotlight.
Since Colonel Corso did serve in the Army Research and Development section, it is possible that some of his claims about his reverse-engineering of the Roswell debris might be true. Perhaps he was merely a later link in a process that had begun fourteen years earlier, immediately after the UFO crash. However, we can never sort out his exact role – if indeed there was one - until other corroborating witnesses come forward to tell their versions of the reverse-engineering story. But because I harbor so many doubts about Corso's general credibility, I find that for the time being I must reject all of his testimony. It's the old business of being only a little bit pregnant.
My doubts about Corso's reliability were deepened by his habit of presenting scene after scene in which he describes the precise behavior and the exact words of people like Harry Truman, Josef Stalin, General Nathan Twining, Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter and many others, despite the fact that he admits he was not actually present. Consider this example of Corso's melodramatic style and presumably razor-sharp memory: "Chairman Josef Stalin was furious. Red-faced and not even trying to hide the rage that erupted like an exploding volcano, Stalin held up a copy of the Roswell Daily Record for Tuesday, July 8, 1947, and threw it out onto the center of the table for any of the scientists in the room who could read English." Does anyone wonder
why Stalin would be waving around the newspaper from a small town in Arizona instead of a detailed intelligence report, conveniently in Russian, about the UFO crash? Does this passage's potboiler style raise any suspicions?
But if the reader is curious as to how he knows these inti mate details of Stalin's actions and demeanor, Corso provides an explanation: the scene was described to him by a close friend in the NKVD, then the acronym for the KGB, the Russian intelligence service. No particular informant is listed by name, even though at least thirty-six years have passed since Corso received this secret information. To name his informant now that the Russian intelligence files have been opened would compromise no one.
Crucially important, however, is the fact that the Colonel has complete faith in the truthfulness of this source.
"Winchell would crucify me with this if he found out what we were doing." This is Harry Truman speaking now instead of Stalin, but still described as if Corso were the fly on the wall. "Don't ask me how I know," Corso says coyly about such exact wording, but then goes on to answer his own forbidden question: it is, once again, his "old friend from the KGB."
This faith in the truthfulness of Russian spies lands Corso in a strange predicament. On the second page of his book, he makes the amazing proclamation that the Russians had so infiltrated our government that "key aspects of American foreign policy were being dictated from inside the Kremlin." Thus the Russians were so efficient, and our side so weak and bumbling, that our Cold War enemies were literally running parts of our government. But since Corso implies an absolute belief in the truthfulness of the spies with whom he claims to have had such a chummy relationship, without realizing it he may have implicated himself as one of the branches of American policy-making that the Kremlin subtly controlled. Ironically, the behavior of this self-described cold warrior is consistently that of a credulous patsy who believed everything the Russian spies told him.
In this sticky situation, the reader has a choice of two alternatives either one of which, for me, damages his credibility beyond repair. Either Corso, like the author of an historical novel, freely invented these scenes to produce a melodramatic work of fiction and thus to glamorize his own life, or the Russian spies did say these things to him and he swallowed them whole. Neither is an appetizing prospect.
Those who support Corso's credibility, however, cite the large number of names and places familiar to UFO researchers that he mentions in his account, one example being the list of those involved in MJ-12, the cover-up organization allegedly set up in 1947 to handle the Roswell material. But it is my contention that Corso could have learned almost all of these places and names by making a careful study of the Roswell literature: books and articles by Stanton Friedman, Don Berliner, Don Schmitt, Kevin Randle and many others. For me, the question is whether Philip Corso reverse-engineered the Roswell debris or the Roswell UFO literature. In support of the latter idea, I find it suspicious that on page 32 Corso describes the alien he claims to have seen as having four-fingered, thumbless hands, and yet on page 78 it now has six-fingered hands. Could it be that the four-fingered description appeared in an earlier draft of his book, but a later viewing of the Santilli film's six-fingered "alien" caused him to go back over the manuscript and make changes, one of which he missed?
Throughout his book Corso makes so many other incon sistent statements and errors of historical fact, and describes so much behavior that violates simple common sense, that I cannot begin to enumerate them. All of these problems are dwarfed, however, by the magnitude of his dubious claims. Put simply, he says that the reverse-engineering which he put into effect led to the invention of SDI - Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative - which, despite voluminous scientific testimony to the contrary, not only worked like a charm but won the Cold War. And most important for the planet earth, SDI also effectively neutralized the extraterrestrial threat. With his typical Rambo bravado Corso says that we now have "more powerful weapons for killing UFOs than were employed in the movie Independence Day. We can knock those guys down tomorrow." He implies that, as a result of the new weapons developed from his work on the Roswell debris, the threat of cattle mutilations and human abductions by the UFO occupants was effectively ended sometime in the 1980's. His declaration of victory will come as a surprise to thousands of recent abductees around the world.
Apart from all of these concerns, however, the reader can accurately judge the credibility of Corso's account by examining just one implication of its central premise. If an alien spacecraft was recovered in Roswell fourteen years before Corso says he was handed his file folders and box of extraterrestrial debris, one can be sure that the scientists who had previously studied this material would have generated an unimaginably vast amount of paper: metallurgical reports, electron microscope studies, lab analyses of every kind, as well as reams of photographs, drawings, measurements, theoretical studies and so forth. Wild animals could not have dragged the scientists away from such a cache until its every last secret had been obtained, analyzed and recorded, even if the process had taken years. Presumably no one would have been allowed to handle an artifact until he or she had read and mastered the related literature and photographs describing its location, function, lab analysis, and so on. Whole forests might have been flattened to supply paper for this one extraordinary investi gation.
And yet Corso describes the most significant technological and scientific material on earth as "...just a yellowing sheaf of papers and a few cracked glossy prints in a brown folder sitting among scores of odds and ends, bits of debris, and strange devices in my nut file." Nut file, indeed! Further, he tells us that the Roswell files and artifacts had been virtually forgotten, "lying close to dormancy for over a decade," and adds that they were "very light on scientific data." I find it preposterous to believe that that is the way science, the government and the military would have dealt with such an extraordinary discovery.
Again there seem to me to be only two possible interpretations of Corso's statements. If he's telling the truth, all those he says were privy to the Roswell crash - Presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, Defense Secretary James Forrestal, preeminent American scientist Vannevar Bush, the rocket engineer Werner von Braun, the heads of the Army Air Force and the CIA, among many others - simply ignored or "forgot" about the most significant cache of material on earth. That is the slender reed upon which Corso hangs the credibility of his tale. The other alternative is that he invented this account as part of a self-glorifying saga of how he and his deceased boss, General Trudeau, together saved the world. In deciding which version seems more likely, it is worth quoting the extraordinary penultimate sentence in Corso's book, a self-appraisal of his bravery, intelligence and place in history: "Sometimes, once in a very long while, you get the chance to save your country, your planet, and even your species at the same time."
If Corso is telling the truth, Truman and Eisenhower, Vannevar Bush and many of America's leading scientists are guilty of an inconceivable degree of stupidity and incompetence. Apart from Trudeau, who gets the credit for unleashing him, only one man finally deserves the undying gratitude of the entire planet: Colonel Philip J. Corso. He saved mankind while all those who made up the political, scientific and military structure between 1947 and 1961 and who knew about Roswell nearly lost it. And yet Corso presents not a single word of testimony from another living person to support such a megalomaniacal claim.
Even worse, Senator Strom Thurmond, who wrote the laudatory introduction to Corso's book, later demanded that it be retracted on the grounds that Corso had misled him as to what kind of a book it would be. The Senator's lawyers forced the publisher to drop his introduction from future editions, and, stating that he knew nothing about Corso's Roswell claims, Thurmond has refused to endorse their truthfulness. Not a comforting indication of the Colonel's innate reliability.
Should Corso's book be seen, then, as history's most damning indictment of the intelligence and common sense of those who led us through the difficult postwar years? Or is it merely a modern version of "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," James Thurber's story of the outrageously egoistic dreams of a timid, very ordinary man? Is The Day After Roswell revelatory fact, the complete, stunning, inside story of the Roswell saga? Or is it an act of hubris, a consistently unbelievable, self-glorifying fiction aimed squarely at the credulous? Read the book and decide for yourself
Budd Hopkins, August 1997
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