Article/Document:
Colonel Philip Corso's Book Confirms Roswell
Michael Lindemann
original source | fair use notice
Summary: The long-awaited book by Colonel Philip Corso, titled "The Day After Roswell," will soon be in bookstores nationwide. CNI News has gotten an advance look at parts of the text, and if Corso can be believed, his story blows the lid on Roswell, government UFO secrecy, and the ongoing reality of extraterrestrial visitors.
He Saw Alien and Handled Wreckage, Book Declares
by Michael Lindemann
The long-awaited book by Colonel Philip Corso, titled "The Day After Roswell," will soon be in bookstores nationwide. CNI News has gotten an advance look at parts of the text, and if Corso can be believed, his story blows the lid on Roswell, government UFO secrecy, and the ongoing reality of extraterrestrial visitors.
What will frustrate all but the most ardent believers is the fact that much of what Corso says cannot be confirmed. The reader is forced to accept or reject a litany of extravagant claims on the basis of Corso's credibility alone.
But Corso does have inherent credibility, and that is a big part of the story. By all accounts, he served with distinction during World War II and the Korean War, was a member of the White House National Security Council under President Eisenhower, and then headed the Foreign Technology Desk at the U.S. Army's Research and Development Department, reporting to General Arthur Trudeau. When this man says he knows about Roswell, it makes sense to pay attention.
Corso says he was not at Roswell during the period in early July, 1947 when the famous UFO incident took place. He recounts the probable chain of events as he learned them from records and stories, just as other Roswell researchers have done. But he backs up the stories with the claim that he did personally see what came from Roswell -- the bodies and the wreckage.
It was Lt. General Trudeau, Corso says, who assigned him the task of dealing with the wreckage when he joined Trudeau's staff at the Pentagon in 1961. But that was not his first exposure to Roswell.
Corso says he happened to be in a position, more or less accidentally, to see an alien body as it was being shipped from the New Mexico crash site to its destination at Wright Field in July 1947.
This chance event happened at Ft. Riley, Kansas, where then-Major Corso had just enrolled in Military Intelligence School after returning to the U.S. from a post-war assignment in Italy. One day -- July 6, 1947 to be exact -- he and the other men on base watched a convoy of trucks pull into Ft. Riley laden with large crates. Freight records said the crates contained an assortment of aircraft parts coming from Fort Bliss, Texas and bound for Wright Field, Ohio. Routine, Corso thought -- except that aircraft parts tended to flow FROM, rather than to, Wright Field. But that was a minor point. The only other odd thing was that the veterinary clinic was suddenly put off limits to all personnel.
Corso was Post Duty Officer that night. As he made his rounds, he came to the veterinary clinic, where a Sergeant he knew well was posted as sentry. The Sergeant was not at his post.
A voice in the dark urged Corso to come into the clinic. Corso saw the Sergeant waving him inside. He went in. There he saw several of the crates that had arrived on the convoy. Corso sternly questioned the Sergeant about what was going on. "You don't understand, Major," the Sergeant said. "You have to see this." After much discussion, Corso was persuaded to have a look. He did have the clearance to be in the temporarily top-secret location, he says, though the Sergeant did not. He ordered the Sergeant to leave, and then opened a crate.
Inside, he says, he saw an extraordinary body floating in some kind of gel-like fluid, obviously for preservation.
"It was a four-foot human-shaped figure with arms, bizarre-looking four-fingered hands -- I didn't see a thumb -- thin legs and feet, and an oversized incandescent lightbulb-shaped head that looked like it was floating over a balloon gondola for a chin," Corso writes. "I had the urge to pull off the top of the liquid container and touch the pale gray skin. But I couldn't tell whether it was skin because it also looked like a very thin one-piece head-to-toe fabric covering the creature's flesh."
Corso goes on to describe a creature that will sound familiar to anyone who understands the term "Gray." At a later point in the book, he also describes autopsy reports on this or a similar body, detailing internal organs and skeletal structure. He surmises that these bodies may have been genetically engineered for space travel.
Corso says he found routing papers on the crate which indicated the body had been taken from a craft that had crash-landed near Roswell earlier that week. This crate was routed to Air Materiel Command at Wright Field, and then on to Walter Reed Army Hospital's morgue pathology section.
Corso says that at that moment, in July 1947, he was utterly shocked by what he saw and knew he could never discuss it with anyone. He says he hoped he would never have occasion to deal with any such thing again.
But that would not be the case. In 1961, as a Lt. Colonel and a highly trusted military intelligence officer just returned from four years duty in Germany, Corso joined the staff of Lt. General Arthur Trudeau at the Pentagon. Trudeau, head of the Army's Research and Development Department, put Corso in charge of the Foreign Technology desk and immediately gave him an unexpectedly bizarre assignment.
Trudeau pointed to a filing cabinet in his office and said to Corso, "This has some special files, war materiel you've never seen before." The General said the filing cabinet would be transferred to Corso's office, and Corso was to decide how to deal with the contents. Before starting, though, the General told Corso to "do a little research on the Roswell file." Corso says the General evidently assumed that Roswell would be a complete mystery to his new assistant.
Thus Corso came to be in charge of devising a way to exploit the obvious strategic value of wreckage recovered from the Roswell craft. He says that wreckage had languished in the Army's possession from 1947 to 1961, mainly for one reason: the few people who knew about it were convinced that the government was full of Soviet spies and informers, plus many other people who were simply naive and thus security liabilities. In particular, Corso says, he and Trudeau were convinced that the CIA was virtually a direct pipeline to the Kremlin. This put the Army in a bind: the UFO wreckage was so sensitive, no one could be trusted to deal with it.
Corso's task from 1961 to 1963 was to break that logjam by secretly distributing various pieces of potentially valuable wreckage to scientists and industrial entities who were known to be trustworthy. There, the wreckage would be back-engineered into startling new human technologies. The human patent process would effectively mask the alien source of the ideas. There would simply be the appearance of a tremendous burst of American technological progress.
Corso claims that the wreckage samples he found in Trudeau's mystery filing cabinet led directly to fiber optics, computer microchips and integrated circuits, night-vision goggles and the laser, among other things.
In the course of describing his handling of the wreckage, Corso makes numerous interesting side comments. For example, he says he soon realized that a small hand-held laser he found in the filing cabinet must be a surgical cutting instrument, which was probably used in cattle mutilations. He also says he learned that the Roswell UFO was "a delta-shaped object," a claim that fits recent speculations by Roswell researchers Randle and Schmitt and forensic investigator William McDonald.
Corso also confirms the existence of the super-secret oversight group usually called "MJ-12," though he says the group has gone mostly by other names. His list of original members in that group is identical to the list in the famous "Eisenhower Briefing Document." He also describes how an overall UFO cover-up strategy was set in motion by General Nathan Twining and others immediately after the Roswell incident -- just as researchers such as Stanton Friedman have long surmised -- and says the official cover-up was a highly orchestrated process with two parallel objectives: first, to keep the most sensitive facts about alien technology and visitation away from America's enemies, which necessarily meant keeping them from the general population; and second, to gradually desensitize the public, with a mix of real and nonsensical UFO information, toward some future time when the reality of alien visitation would become public knowledge.
Corso speaks of these things as if he knows them to be true, yet he refers only to the kind of documentary evidence that has long been available to UFO researchers.
In sum, Corso portrays himself as a classic and unrepentant Cold Warrior who was engaged, along with a handful of others such as General Trudeau, in a two-front war. The obvious war was with the Soviet Union, seen as an evil and brilliantly devious foe that had infiltrated every level of the U.S. government, so that almost no one could be trusted, least of all the CIA. But the other war, even weirder and more horrifying, was with an extraterrestrial foe that did not show its intentions but had, whether accidentally or not, shown its capabilities. That foe was everywhere apparent to the trained observer, Corso says. Not only were alien craft frequently sighted in the air, but the Navy was seeing them constantly underwater as well.
Corso says he played a key role in making sure U.S. technology took full advantage of what could be learned from Roswell. He seems to believe that human technology has now reached a point of being able to meet potential alien hostility on more or less even terms.
What to make of Colonel Philip Corso and his book? If he were not a highly decorated, highly credible military officer, he would likely be passed off by most people as a blatant hoaxer. But why would this particular man tell such very tall tales at the end of his life, if the tales are simply untrue? That question will likely vex more than a few readers of "The Day After Roswell," a book that will probably push the Roswell controversy to new heights in this Roswell-happy year of 1997.
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The Roswell Incident
