To give a more detailed view of Corso’s book and its inherent problems, I reprint below my 1997 review of “The Day After Roswell,” by Colonel Philip J. Corso with co-author William J. Birnes.

Click here for "The Day After Roswell" book review

This, then, is what I wrote nine years ago, in IF Bulletin Number 5. A short time later I met Col. Corso in San Marino, Italy, and was able to interview him. Our conversation, which was videotaped, left me frustrated and more than a little angry at what I took to be his stonewalling. Though he claimed to be aware that his book contained not a single name of anyone who could help to verify his claim of single-handedly saving the planet, he refused to provide the identity of any corroborating witness. “I never give out a name unless I have that person’s permission,” he said, as if he were maintaining a high moral position. I pointed out that thirty-six years had elapsed since the climactic events he’d written about; that the Cold War had been over for nearly a decade; and that many of those he claimed to have dealt with, like General Trudeau, might have died since then. I added that, in any case, being named as having helped to save planet Earth and the very existence of one’s species might be welcomed by some of these individuals. Nevertheless, he was adamant. He would offer no names.

One of our discussions focused on the issue of Corso’s apparently total acceptance of everything the Russian espionage agents told him about various American state and military secrets. One such example, which I cited in my review, was the ostensibly verbatim account of a highly secret conversation Harry Truman held with high officials in the White House immediately after the Roswell incident. When I pointed out that his acceptance of the Russian spy’s detailed account made him seem gullible, he claimed that he had been able to “check” the veracity of the Russian claims with “other sources.” But this late-in-the-game defense of what appeared to be remarkable credulousness left him open to yet another uncomfortable – and more serious - charge. If he truly believed the Russians’ detailed accounts of White House secret conversations, his acceptance meant one of two things: either there was a Russian mole within the White House at the highest level, or the place was bugged. Either way, he would have known that no American secrets were safe, and therefore his duty would be to immediately report such an extraordinary breach of security. It is my guess that had he neglected to sound the alarm, he might well have faced court martial or criminal charges. Unfortunately, there is no evidence that he ever warned anyone about the Russians’ ominous capabilities, even when, later on, he claimed to be a member of the National Security Council (NSC) and as such was frequently present in the Oval Office. In retrospect, logic demands that if we are to acquit the Colonel of indirectly abetting enemy espionage, we must accept the more obvious explanation: that he simply invented the secret Harry Truman conversations, the Russian spies and the whole elaborate story, in order to add a bit more Rambo-like hot-sauce to his tale.

I should add that I begged Col. Corso to name, or at least to describe, some of these voluble Russian spies, now that the KGB files had been opened by the Russian government. Again he declined. He said that he remembered no names and that these spies “looked just like Americans.” He could remember no distinguishing features, nor could he recall where he used to meet with them to hear their latest Oval Office revelations.

My friend and colleague, Stanton Friedman, is an expert at ferreting out government documents and validating – or discrediting – the credentials claimed by people in the UFO field. In answer to my queries about Colonel Corso, he made the following points:

 

• After writing to the Eisenhower Library, I received a letter stating that Corso had never been a member of the National Security Council, a position he had sworn to before attorney Peter Gersten.
• As to his claim that he had been head of the army’s Foreign Technology Division during the 1960s, I obtained a roster of the people working under General Trudeau in the mid-60s. It consisted of four legal-sized, two column pages. There was indeed an Army Foreign Technology Division, and the roster stated that there were two people in it, Corso being the junior officer [and not its chief as he had claimed -BH]. The U.S. Air Force Foreign Technology Division at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base had dozens of people in it, many of whom were engineers and scientists. I made a number of visits to the group in the early 60s. Being familiar with its members I cannot believe they had wreckage in 1947 and did nothing with it.
• Corso was not a scientist or an engineer so I can’t understand how he could have injected all that advanced technology into industry. He certainly wouldn’t have understood it himself. He took credit for microcircuits, for example, though Jack Kilby won a Nobel Prize in physics for microcircuits for his 1959 work, two years before Corso claimed to have begun the process of covert reverse-engineering.

At this point it is fair to say that Corso’s tale lies in shambles, and that Paul. Hellyer’s use of it to persuade journalists and the general public of UFO reality is a doomed, self-destructive enterprise. My own position with regard to the central issues Corso raised is this: To me, the evidence is clear that at least one UFO crashed in July, 1947, near Roswell, New Mexico, and that wreckage and bodies were recovered. I assume that the process of analysis and reverse-engineering of that unique material would have begun virtually instantly, and is likely to be continuing to this day. It seems highly possible that at least some recent technological innovations are due to the careful, methodical reverse-engineering begun over fifty years ago - work which Philip J. Corso had nothing to do with. I most emphatically reject his claim that he, virtually single-handed, was able to “save our country, our planet and our species.” On the other hand, there can be no doubt that Corso possessed both a colossal ego and a vivid imagination, though I tend to attribute many of the gung-ho, pot-boiler passages in his book to his co-author, William Birnes, a writer who is apparently more familiar with that kind of gaudy prose.

Before I leave the discouraging subject of Philip J. Corso, there is one more personal anecdote I would like to record. During my trip to the conference in San Marino, where I met and interviewed the Colonel, I became acquainted with an Italian UFO researcher named Maurizio Baiata. I found Maurizio to be a charming and intelligent man - and an unshakeable Corso fan. He and I, of course, disagreed completely about the Colonel’s trustworthiness, but one day Maurizio informed me that there was yet another reason why he held him in such esteem: “He is a great man because of his contributions toward the end of World War II. Colonel Corso served in Italy,” Maurizio went on, “and he told me that his actions saved Italy.”

I assumed my Italian friend had misunderstood what Corso had said. “You mean,” I explained, “he said that we, meaning the Allied armies, saved Italy.” “No,” Maurizio replied. “He said that he saved Italy. He, himself. His actions.”

I was, for a moment, astonished, but after a bit of reflection realized that Corso’s statement was just another of his extraordinary little-man-as great-hero fantasies. “But Maurizio,” I protested, “Even Eisenhower never said ‘I saved Western Europe,’ though he certainly deserves some of the credit. And Churchill never said ‘I saved England,’ and he deserves a lot of the credit. How can Corso say such a thing? ‘I saved Italy!’” Maurizio then repeated a convoluted story Corso had told him which, as I recall, involved underhanded Communists and hidden Nazis and mule-headed American generals. But at heart, his tale was the same old thing: no one did a thing to help Italy until the intrepid Major Corso (his rank at the time) came along and saved the entire country and all its people, and the only one who recognized that fact is Philip J. Corso, himself.

So what object lessons are we to infer from this dispiriting series of events? First, whenever someone presents a “breakthrough” account that is “bound to dissolve the official cover-up of UFO reality,” don’t get your hopes up. When I first heard about a forthcoming book – “The Day After Rosewell” – written by a genuine insider and an apparent whistleblower, I was thrilled. But then I read Corso’s book and cold reality returned. Years later, when I heard the first incomplete reports about a former Canadian Minister of Defense – another genuine insider in a high government position, I was excited all over again. Then I read some of Hellyer’s media interviews and understood that his primary source about the UFO phenomenon was Philip Corso, and my hopes were dashed once more. The moral? If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is too good to be true.

Another thing to be learned from these near-fiascos is that highly intelligent people can be as easily taken in as anyone else. In actuality, their endorsement means nothing. Recently, at a UFO conference in southern Italy, I met a fellow speaker, an academic gentleman with a Ph.D. in Government, who had apparently been totally captivated by Col. Corso, as well as by a handful of other fraudulent or dubious Billy-Meier-like personalities whose deceptions and/or imaginary credentials had been exposed time and time again. All of us who labor in this prickly vineyard must be extremely careful in whom we place our trust, and remain attentive to the modesty (or immodesty) of someone’s claims. People who claim to chat frequently with Zeta Reticulans, or who hand out channeled prognostications which never seem to come true, are to be avoided like the Avian Flu. The good soldiers in this field – and there are many – reveal themselves by their personal integrity and calm rationality. They do not claim to have saved their entire species, nor do they stridently warn their fellow humans to become more spiritual in order that the “Galactic Federation’s” dread quarantine may be lifted. (There are, of course, far better and more rational reasons for us to mend our ways.)

One final lesson to be drawn from the Corso/Hellyer situation is an optimistic one. From the earliest years of the modern UFO phenomenon, public opinion has moved slowly and inexorably toward the acceptance of UFO reality, belief in the existence of an official government cover-up, and even, in recent years, acceptance of the reality of UFO abductions, despite the absence of dramatic, highly publicized events. This movement is like a slow moving current that, year by year, acquires more adherents, more who reject the knee-jerk scoffing of conventional science and more who refuse the cosmic limitations imposed upon us by earlier paradigms.

Those researchers who have, year after year, coolly and rationally presented the evidence for UFO reality have obviously been doing something right. Despite the unfortunate dips and turns along the road - like the recent Corso/Hellyer detour - the thrust of history is on our side, and there is every reason in the world to feel hopeful.

- Budd Hopkins, January, 2006