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suggested to General Trudeau, might they have seen the Trojan stowing that huge wooden horse the Greeks left for them right through the open gates of their city? For his part, General Trudeau, in the months before he retired, made a number of appearances before Congress. He argued consistently that the army did have a real place in space and we had a capability in missile defense that he had proven at Los Alamos and at the guided-missile and Redstone command at Huntsville, Alabama. Moreover, the army had been able to use German scientists in the months immediately after the fighting in Europe had ended. It wasn't just a matter of who could get the biggest budget, General Trudeau testified. In fact, he offered in a briefing before the Congressional Committee on Science and Astronautics, if the space effort was to be completely taken away from the army, then it should be given lock, stock, and barrel to the air force. At least, he said, the air force was a military service and had officers and enlisted personnel who knew how to fight. But, at least in the early years, Congress and the President decided that NASA should control the space program. By the end of the 1960s, however, they had reversed that decision and realized that there was a serious military aspect to space exploration. General Trudeau also had his allies among the major defense contractors we worked with. Not only scientists but members of the boards of directors suspected that the army had an urgency in developing weapons for use in space. Some of them even realized that we must have had a hidden agenda because each of the projects we proposed, like Horizon and the energy weapons, seemed de-signed for a war with enemies far more powerful and elusive than the Soviets. When he would address industrial groups on matters of technical intelligence and applied engineering, General Trudeau received what | could only call a "knowing" response. He himself once wrote in his unpublished memoirs that when he was invited to give an address to one of the companies we worked with, the people who showed up were the decision makers. He said: | think on every occasion that | went out, the chairman of the board was there, the chief executive officer who was usually the president, and an impressive cross section of their senior corporate officers or directors. | might say even when | went to Sperry-Rand, no less a person than General MacArthur honored me by his presence at dinner, and he didn't turn out for many. General Trudeau was the father of the ballistic missile and the person who, from the 1950s through the 1960s, made sure that our armed forces adapted the ballistic missile for our own use. His presence at Sperry-Rand with MacArthur, his boss in Korea, was all the more important because General MacArthur knew the truth about UFOs and commented that the army was girding itself to fight in space. And he didn't mean fighting the Russians in space, he meant the extraterrestrials. But we were fighting so deeply immersed in the darkness of our own official denial that the fantastic nature of the truth, the ongoing effects of the truth, and the capitulation of the civilian intelligence services to some crazed blueprint they had for world order based upon an international government sometimes made us doubt our own senses. However, when you looked at what | called the secret history of the United States since 1947, you knew that the invisible elephant was walking through the room. A better analogy is the concept of the black hole. Black holes, the ultra dense remains of stars that have collapsed upon themselves, swallow up light and gravity and, compressing them in like a galactic compactor into something that only subatomic particle physicists can describe and that can't actually be "seen. " Only their effects can be determined from the way light and gravity seem to behave around them. So you guess that a black hole might be present in a specific region of space when light and gravity around it bend almost like the way water circulates around the drain at the bottom of your sink. That's what the truth looked like in the region around our Cold War strategy and the development of any ultra- high-tech or exotic weapons. It might have made sense in 1947, but by 1962, the refusal of the government to admit the war it was fighting was getting in the way of actually fighting the war. Since 1947 and the formation of the working group, each new layer of bureaucracy operating within the black hole of UFO strategy and intelligence gathering found itself more enmeshed in the confusion of what was true and what was false than the previous {layer. Like legions of blind soldiers, they bumped into one another in the night, upset one another's plans, and thought that friends were foes and vice versa. In the absence of a clear policy that could be maintained from generation to generation, the strategy for dealing with the EBEs became tangled up in its own web. After December 1947 when Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg, the air force chief of staff, directed the air force to evaluate and track UFO sightings - this in response to the working group - Project "Sign" began at the Air Technical Intelligence Center. Sign was so critical that even J. Edgar Hoover in 1947 issued Bureau Bulletin 59ordering that all future reports of UFOs should not be investigated by FBI agents but sent, instead, to the air force. Although officially not looking for UFOs, the air force Project Sign examined 243 sightings and submitted its report in February *1949. But at the same time Sign was doing its evaluation, the Air Technical Intelligence Center issued its own document called an "Estimate of the Situation." Basically, but naively, the document came to the 111