by US Army Col Philip J Corso (Ret)
Did Philip Corso Save the Planet?
Publisher: Simon & Schuster, NY (1997)
341 pages
What do mutilated cattle, the Cold War, technological breakthroughs like fibre optics, integrated circuits and night vision and aliens – have in common?
According to Colonel Philip J. Corso (Ret) these seemingly disparate entities can be linked by one of the most controversial events of the mid twentieth century – the crash of a UFO near Roswell New Mexico in July 1947.
For many skeptics, an anti-gravity flying disk is still too much to contemplate, much less one that crashes, much less one that crashes and the US Army carts it away and then back-engineers some of the technology it retrieves – as this book asserts.
But since this book was published nearly a decade ago, the skeptics have gone quiet. Corso’s credentials checked out. He was who he says he was. And he did what he said he did.
So who was he?
Simply, Col Corso was arguably one of the best qualified people on the planet to make such an assertion, having actually seen the preserved body of the aliens, he maintains, when he was working at Fort Riley.
And he was the one who actually disseminated the alien technology to American industry.
Corso had been trained by British MI19 and served in US Army Intelligence in WW2. But he found himself given the assignment of his life in 1961 when his boss in the pentagon General Trudeau handed him a file of artifacts and documents related to the famous Roswell crash. Corso’s job was to determine which US companies would be the best to “reverse engineer” the various technologies taken from the crashed disks.
Initially the technologies like lasers had military applications. Some others included image intensifiers (later developed into night vision products) fibre optics, super tenacity fibres (developed into Kevlar and related products used in bullet proof vests), and integrated circuits. Many of these, of course, were quickly adapted to consumer markets.
Col. Corso also analysed the information from the Roswell crash to determine what other technologies were needed in order for the US to develop its space exploration programme. One of the needs he identified was for non-perishable ready-to-eat meals. Corso was delighted to find that research into food irradiation apparently solved this problem.
Corso also claims to have suggested that the density of depleted uranium made it an ideal material for antitank ammunition. He writes of its successful use in the 1991 War in the Gulf.
One of the most interesting aspects of The Day After Roswell is the author’s insider perspective of the Cold War. He describes the CIA and KGB as working so closely together that “for all intents and purposes, and because each agency had so thoroughly penetrated the other they behaved like the same organisation.” Corso also gives his opinion about why the agencies acted in this way, that they believed that “by sharing information they kept us out of a nuclear war”.
Corso claims that he himself was part of the cover-up of the crash during his work at the Pentagon. He describes how, in 1947:
“We [the USA] had not yet fully made the transition from a nation at war to a nation at peace. And there was Harry Truman, still reeling from his sudden ascendancy to the presidency, toughened into steel by his decision to drop the atomic bombs on Japan, and now faced with the monumental impact of a crash landing (of a UFO) on American soil. Was it Soviet? Did it belong to a foreign power? We simply didn’t know and weren’t about to say anything until we knew what it was.
“Was it a flying saucer? The last time a public announcement of a landing by extraterrestrial took place, even though it was entertainment, [the radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds in 1942] panic ensued. In the aftermath of the war and the fears surrounding the Cold War, we didn’t want to risk another panic. So the military recommended and the White House agreed to clam up.”
Perhaps more to the point, the cover up of the Roswell crash ensured that its technological secrets could be exploited by the US military, giving them the advantage.
As time went on and more data was gathered about the activities of UFOs and their alien crews, the military became increasingly concerned that the planet’s defences were being probed by a hostile force. UFOs buzzed US military installations and teased out fighter jets as if testing their capabilities. Human abductions by aliens – although rubbished in the media as the invention of crackpots or publicity seekers – were also worrying the military. Mysterious cattle deaths in which the cattle carcasses were found to have had vital organs removed with surgical techniques so skillful that there was no damage to surrounding tissues also raised alarm bells when it became clear that an alien explanation appeared to be the most likely.
In respect to these events, the military benefited from the on-going cover up of the UFO story. For, as Corso writes:
“If there was no public enemy, there would be no pressure from the public to do anything about it.”
Behind the cover stories and denial, however, the military continued its programme of assessing the alien activity and developing weapons technology to counter the threat.
International politics on earth assisted this process, according to Corso:
“This is where the Cold War turned out to be a tremendous opportunity for us, because it allowed us to upgrade our military preparedness in public to fight the Communists while secretly creating an arsenal and strategy to defend ourselves against the extraterrestrials. In short, the Cold War, while real enough, and dangerous enough, was also a cover for us to develop a planetary tracking and defense system that looked into space as well as into the Soviet’s backyard. And the Soviets were doing the same thing that we were, looking up at the same time that they were looking down.”
Col. Corso is proud of the work that he did to help make earth a safer planet, concluding that while “at the time, because I was so much in the routine of a military intelligence officer, I didn’t really stop to think about the implications of UFOs and EBEs (Extra Biological Entities). I understood that we were fighting a Cold War with the Soviets and a skirmish war with extraterrestrials. I believed that their intentions were and still are hostile, and I believe that we took the steps necessary to develop the weapons that can blunt that threat. In fact the U.S military has better, more accurate and more powerful weapons for killing UFOs than were deployed in the movie Independence Day.”
Col Corso clearly thinks he saved the world.
“Sometimes things just work the way they’re supposed to. 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.”
