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Saint and Blue Gemini were important first steps in our war against the UFOs. The technology that came out of Army R&D in the 1960s, retrieved from the aliens themselves, led directly to our ability to put up such a defense against the aliens even though in the hours after the crash at Roswell our situation looked completely hopeless. Like many of the products that came out of R&D and were used for military purposes, they had consumer uses. And today, if you look on the small dish digital direct broadcast television satellite antennas that are being marketed all across the country, you'll see Hughes's own brand. It's an example of how technology originally earmarked for the military winds up as the most basic and everyday consumer product. On December 17, 1969, the secretary of the air force announced the termination of Project Blue Book. He said that Blue Book's review of more than thirteen thousand cases had yielded no information that there was a threat to national security in any way and that, in effect, since every sighting processed by Blue Book had been identified as something earthly and not extraterrestrial, there were, by definition, no such things as unidentified flying objects. Blue Book had done its job and now could report that our skies were safe. But Blue Book had been pure public relations from the start, and the military's evaluation of UFOs continued uninterrupted. In 1975 and early 1976, air force nuclear weapons repositories at Loring AFB in Maine, the all-important and sensitive Strategic Air Command facility at Minot, North Dakota, and other facilities in Montana, Michigan, and even the Royal Canadian Air Force Base at Falcon bridge in Ontario had been seriously encroached upon by UFOs. These weren't just random sightings. UFOs actually con- ducted surveillance and scanning operations at the bases that resulted in security alerts and classified reports to Washington about the intrusions. Then NASA finally got a project up and running to scan for radio transmissions from any advanced civilizations whose signals we could pick up. Called the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence and endorsed by the late Carl Sagan, SETI, which has since been discontinued, was not only a set of receivers around the world but a set of international protocols governing what would happen if contact was made with an extraterrestrial civilization. For over fifty years, now, the war against UFOs has continued as we tried to defend ourselves against their intrusions. The Hughes hunter-killer satellites of the 1970s were our first steps in deploying a planetary defense system that held any real threat against the EBEs. When, late in the 1970s, we realized that a directed-energy weapon and high-energy laser were even more effective than exploding satellites, our defensive ability was enhanced even further. We recognized that by applying both the technology we found at Roswell and Tesla's vision of a particle beam to our own antisatellite missiles and laser targeting equipment, we could achieve the rapid aim/rapid fire capability that these type of defenses demanded. But we were still playing cover-up games even though the Russians were now finally acknowledging that maybe cooperation between the superpowers was Called for to meet a common threat. In the 1980s, both President Reagan and Chairman Gorbachev recognized the need for cooperation against a common enemy. While neither officially owned up to the threat of EBEs and alien hostilities, both acknowledged that if the United States and the Soviet Union could lay aside their differences and participate in a shared policy to defend the space around the earth, then both superpowers would benefit. For his part, President Reagan pushed hard for the rapid development and deployment of a space-based defense technology to defend the planet. Called the Strategic Defense Initiative, and derisively dubbed "Star Wars" by the press, the SDI was described in 1985 in President Reagan's own words as "a defensive shield that won't hurt people but will knock down nuclear weapons before they can hurt people. " Briefly, the Strategic Defense Initiative was described by the White House and the military as a space-based defense system to protect the United States from an all-out nuclear attack by the Soviet Union. It would include satellites that could detect a massive nuclear launch within seconds, orbiting lasers to destroy the first wave of missiles, laser-equipped submarines that could defend against the next round of attacks, anda ground-based missile system providing the last line of defense. In addition, the SDI also included what | thought was the best of its weapons, a missile-launched kinetic energy beam weapon that locked onto incoming warheads or low-orbiting space vehicles and knocked out their electronics with a particle beam. The elegant aspect to the kinetic energy beam weapon was that you couldn't really defend against it. Lasers, even high- energy lasers, had their shortcomings in that once a laser beam bounced off a surface, the surrounding energy envelope protected the surface from subsequent pulses. You either knocked out your target right away or shielded it against subsequent hits. But with a particle-beam weapon, you penetrated the surface, just like micro waving a piece of meat, destroyed its electronics to render it useless, and then broke it apart or melted it from within. Amidst the warnings that the SDI wouldn't work, was a giant unscientific gamble and a corporate giveaway, couldn't provide the massive shield against nuclear missiles, would violate the ABM treaty President Johnson had negotiated with the Russians, and was a giant waste of the taxpayers' money, guess what? It worked! 114