The Day After Roswell (20 page)

At the same time, we knew we were gaining on the aliens. With
each successful start of a new project, some based on the Roswell
technology, others initiated specifically to counter the alien
capabilities we had discovered at Roswell, we believed we were
advancing our game piece to the next square. We believed that no matter
how hostile the aliens’ intentions were, they
didn’t have the raw power to launch a global war against us.
They would study us, infiltrate us, wear us down until we might not be
able to resist them, but they had neither the intention nor the
capability, we believed, of destroying the planet so as to take it for
themselves. In that, we held the upperhand.

But what we needed was a real outpost in a location that would enable us to establish a strategic advantage, a base to strike
at them far enough away so that we wouldn’t create a panic on
Earth. We needed a base on the moon. It was something the army had
dreamed about from the very first months after our encounters with the
aliens outside of Roswell and something we had tried to fund without
the public’s knowledge. It was an ambitious project that had
bounced around from skeptic to skeptic inside the military for over a
year before it landed in front of me. And when I took over the Foreign
Technology desk, it was a project we almost had.

Project Moon Base

“I ENVISION EXPEDITIOUS DEVELOPMENT OF THE PROPOSAL
TO establish a lunar outpost to be of critical importance to the U.S.
Army of the future. This evaluation is apparently shared by the Chief
of Staff in view of his expeditious approval and enthusiastic
endorsement of initiation of the study, ” General Trudeau
wrote to the chief of ordnance in March 1959, in support of the
army’s “Project HORIZON, ” a strategic
plan for deploying a military outpost on the surface of the moon.. It
was the army’s most ambitious response to the threat from
extraterrestrials and, by the time I arrived at the Pentagon, it was
one of the projects that General Trudeau had handed off to me to get
moving.

“The boys at NASA are taking over the whole rocket
launching business, Phil, ” he said. “And the
army’s not even getting the scraps left on the table.
”

I had just left the White House when the National Aeronautics
and Space Act was passed in 1958, and I knew what that had portended.
It transferred the responsibility of space from the military services
to a civilian run agency that was supposed to fulfill the U.S. promises
to other countries for the demilitarization of space. It was a laudable
goal, anyone would argue : demilitarize space so that countries could
explore and experiment without the risk of losing their space vehicles
or satellites to hostile activities. For the United States and the
Russians the agreement meant that our respective astronauts and
cosmonauts wouldn’t make war on each other. Good idea. But
someone forgot to tell it to the extraterrestrials, who had been
systematically violating our planet’s airspace for decades,
if not centuries, and had already set up a base of operations on the
moon.

For General Trudeau and much of the U.S. military command, the
Soviets’ ability to put high payload vehicles and cosmonauts
into orbit with relative ease was a frightening prospect. Unless the
United States challenged Soviet technology with our own ongoing launch
program and expanded our satellite surveillance, the army believed it
would cede an all important strategic advantage to the Soviet Union. By
1960, we were reaching a critical juncture. Because of the development
window and the time it took to get projects through development,
programs started too late in the 1960s would be hopelessly obsolete by
1970, when the Soviets were expected to have established a presence in
space.

As in the U2 program, we had another agenda that concerned us
more than just the Soviets’ ability to threaten us with a
nuclear missile capability from space. We were also very much aware of
the ability of a dominant military power on Earth to establish its own
version of a treaty with extraterrestrials. We had already seen how
Stalin negotiated a separate non-aggression pact with Hitler, allowing
the Germans to stabilize its Eastern front and invade Western Europe.
We didn’t want to see Khrushchev gain so much unchallenged
power in space that the extraterrestrials would readily agree to some
kind of accommodation with him guaranteeing both of them a degree of
freedom to dominate the political affairs of our planet. This may seem
paranoid now, in the 1990s, but in the late 1950s this was exactly the
thinking of the military intelligence community.

General Trudeau’s concerns were the concerns of
anybody who knew the truth about an alien presence around our planet
and their abilities to drop on top of us from out of nowhere just like
they had done in Roswell, in Washington, D.C., in 1952, and in
countless other places around the world. And we didn’t know
if any one of these sightings could turn into a full-fledged landing in
force or if an invasion hadn’t already begun. If they could
turn the Soviet government into a client state with a proxy army, there
might be no checking their ability to exercise their will to colonize
our planet, appropriate our natural resources, or, if the cattle
mutilations and stories of abductions were true, conduct with complete
impunity an organized experimentation or testing program on the life
forms of this planet. In the absence of any information to disprove our
fears, it was the military’s obligation to project the worst
possible scenario. That’s why the army pushed for Project
HORIZON. We had to have a plan.

The Horizon documents were straight forward in expressing
their concerns : We needed to put a fully armed military outpost on the
moon first because if the Soviets achieved this objective before we
did, we would be in the position of having to storm a hill or secure a
military position. We would rather be the defenders of a strongly
fortified enclave than the attackers. Our outpost had to be strong
enough to withstand an assault and have enough personnel to conduct
scientific experiments and continual surveillance of the earth and its
airspace.

Initially, General Trudeau argued, the outpost must be of
sufficient size and contain sufficient equipment to permit the survival
and moderate constructive activity of from ten to twenty personnel at a
minimum. It must allow for expansion of the permanent facilities,
resupply, and rotation of personnel to guarantee the maximum amount of
time for a sustained occupancy. The general not only wanted the outpost
to establish a beach head on the moon, he wanted it to be permanent and
able to sustain itself for long periods without support from the earth.
Therefore, location and design were critical and required, in the
army’s view, a triangulation station of moon to Earth
baseline space surveillance system that facilitated:

(1) communication with and optimum observation of the earth,

(2) routine travel between the moon and the earth,

(3) the best possible exploration capability not only of the
immediate area of the lunar surface but long range exploration
expeditions and, most importantly from the army’s perspective,

(4) the military defense of the moon base. The
army’s primary objective was to establish the first permanent
manned installation on the moon and nothing less. The military
potential of the moon was paramount, but the mission allowed for an
ongoing investigation of the commercial and scientific potentials of
the outpost as well.

The army wanted to make Horizon conform to existing national
policy on space exploration, even insofar as the demilitarization of
space was concerned. But it was tough because all of us in the military
services who had come in contact with the Roswell file believed that we
were already under some form of attack. Demilitarizing space only meant
playing into the hands of a culture that had displayed a hostile intent
toward us. But we also realized that overtly establishing a military
presence in space would encourage the Soviets to match us step for step and result in an arms race in outer space that would
exacerbate Cold War tensions. Armaments in space might be more
difficult to control, and the chance of an accidental military exchange
could have easily precipitated a crisis on Earth. Thus, the whole
problem of what to do about establishing a military presence in space
was a conundrum. Horizon was the army’s attempt to accomplish
its military objectives within the context of the
government’s demilitarization policy.

The army faced another obstacle in its plans from the members
of the Roswell working group who were still establishing and enforcing
policy at levels above top secret. The working group correctly saw that
any independent military expedition into space, especially for the
purpose of establishing an outpost on the moon, had a high probability
of encountering extraterrestrials. In this encounter, there was no
guarantee that a military exchange would not ensue or, at the very
least, a military report would be filed. Even if these reports were
kept top secret, given the military bureaucracy and the presence of
legislative oversight it was highly unlikely that the press would not
learn about military encounters with aliens. Thus, the basic premise of
the working group and its entire mission, the camouflage of our
discovery of alien life forms visiting and probably threatening Earth,
would be undermined and years of successful operations might easily be
brought to an unsatisfactory end. No, the working group would rather
have the exploration of space in the hands of a civilian agency whose
bureaucracy could be more easily controlled and whose personnel would
be handpicked, at least at the outset, by the members of the working
group.

Thus, the stage was set for a Byzantine bureaucratic struggle
among members of the same organizations but with different levels of
security clearance, policy objectives, and even knowledge of what had
taken place in years gone by. And underlying it all was the basic
assumption that the world’s civilian population was not ready
to learn the real truth about the existence of extraterrestrial
cultures and the likely threat these cultures posed to life on Earth.
General Trudeau was as undaunted as I had ever seen him. In Korea, he
charged back up Pork Chop Hill into the face of an enemy attack so
fierce that the soldiers who had volunteered to go up with him believed
they were going to breathe their last. But they couldn’t let
him go up there alone, which is exactly what he was set to do when he
threw away his helmet and clasped one on from a wounded sergeant. He
chambered the first round into his automatic and said,
“I’m going. Who’s with me?” I
imagined he had the same look on his face now, as he handed me the
report for Project Horizon, as he did then. “We’re
going, Phil, ” he said, and that was all I needed to hear.

When the civilian space agency supporters told the army that
all of the issues the military raised about the need to establish a
presence first would be accomplished with civilian missions, General
Trudeau argued that the civilian plans did not explicitly call for a
base on the moon, only for the possibility of an outpost in earth orbit
that may or may not be capable of serving as a way station for flights
to the moon or to other planets. And the time frame for the
construction of an orbiting space station made it seem obsolete even
before it reached the drawing boards. Besides, General Trudeau told the
scientists on Eisenhower’s aeronautics and space advisory
committee toward the end of the President’s administration,
you can’t trust a civilian run agency to complete a military
mission. It hadn’t happened in the past and it
wouldn’t happen in the future. If you wanted a military
operation completed, only the military could do it. President
Eisenhower understood that kind of logic.

In the late 1950s, the White House had forwarded queries to
General Trudeau about the army’s research and development
policy regarding Project Horizon and why, specifically, the military
needed to be on the moon and why a civilian mission couldn’t
accomplish most of the scientific objectives. This was at the time when
the White House was supporting the National Aeronautics and Space Act
and was supporting the creation of the civilian National Aeronautics
and Space Administration.

General Trudeau responded that he couldn’t
immediately lay out the full extent of the military potential.
“But, ” he wrote in the report, “it is
probable that observation of the Earth and space vehicles from the moon
will prove to be highly advantageous. ”

Later he wrote that by using a moon to Earth baseline, space
surveillance by triangulation - in other words, using a point of
reference on Earth and a point of reference on the moon to pin point
the positions of enemy missiles, satellites, or spacecraft - promised
greater range and accuracy of observation. Instead of having only one
point of observation, we would have an additional angle because we
would have a base on the moon as another point of observation. This was
especially the case for the types of lunar and Mars missions NASA was
planning as early as 1960. He said that the types of earth based
tracking and control networks currently in the planning stages were
already inadequate for the deep space operations that were also in the
planning stages in the civilian agencies. So, it made no sense to spend
money developing communications and control networks that would be
obsolete for the very purposes for which they were being designed.
Military communications would be improved immeasurably by the use of a
moon based relay station that would cover a broader range and probably
be more resistant to attack during a conventional or nuclear war that
took place on Earth. But General Trudeau had the real bombshell waiting
to be dropped.

“The employment of moon based weapons systems
against Earth or space targets may prove to be feasible and desirable,
” he wrote the army chief of ordnance, revealing for the
first time that he believed, along with Douglas MacArthur, that the
army might be called upon to fight a war in space as well as on Earth.
General Trudeau foresaw the possibility that a moon based
communications network would have an advantage in tracking guided
missiles launched from Earth, but he also realized that weapons could
be fired from space, and not just by Earth governments but by
extraterrestrial craft. It was the moon base project, he believed, that
would be able to protect civilian populations and military forces on
Earth from attacks launched either from earth orbit or from space. But
a moon based defense initiative had an added feature.

“Moon based military power will be a strong
deterrent to war because of the extreme difficulty, from the enemy
point of view, of eliminating our ability to retaliate, ” he
hypothesized. “Any military operations on the moon will be
difficult to counter by the enemy because of the difficulty of his
reaching the moon, if our forces are already present and have means of
countering a landing or of neutralizing any hostile forces that have
landed. ”And, the general told me, this would apply whether
those hostile forces were the Soviets, the Chinese, or the EBEs. The
situation would be reversed, however, “if hostile forces are
permitted to arrive first. They can militarily counter our landings and
attempt to deny us politically the use of their property. ”