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We didn't have to shoot down thousands of Soviet incoming warheads, and the Soviets never really cared about the ABM treaty in the first place because they knew they weren't going to launch a first strike and neither would we. We both knew who the real targets of the SDI were, and it wasn't a bunch of ICBM warheads. It was the UFOs, alien spacecraft thinking themselves invulnerable and invisible as they soared around the edges of our atmosphere, swooping down at will to destroy our communications with EMP bursts, buzz our spacecraft, colonize our lunar surface, mutilate cattle in their own horrendous biological experiments, and even abduct human beings for their medical tests and hybridization of the species. And what was worse, we had to let them do it because we had no weapon to defend ourselves. These creatures weren't benevolent alien beings who had come to enlighten human beings. They were genetically altered humanoid automatons, cloned biological entities, actually, who were harvesting biological specimens on Earth for their own experimentation. As long as we were incapable of defending ourselves, we had to allow them to intrude as they wished. And that was part of what the working group had to deal with. We had negotiated a kind of surrender with them as long as we couldn't fight them. They dictated the terms because they knew what we most feared was disclosure. Hide the truth and the truth becomes your enemy. Disclose the truth and it becomes your weapon. We hid the truth and the EBEs used it against us until 1974 when we had our first real shootdown of an alien craft over Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany. They had tried to disrupt our space program for years - Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and even the Space Shuttle. They buzzed our capsules traveling through space, interfered with our transmissions, and pulsed us with EMP bursts just like we used to do to the Soviet surface ships when we would hit them with a radar burst so massive it would send their earphone-wearing radar and sonar techs howling in pain down to the ship's dispensary. But when the EBEs did it to us, we had no response. That was before the SDI. Once launched and tested, our space-based high-energy lasers, or HELs, acted like the lightning bolts on the nights of July 3 and 4,1947, that so thoroughly disrupted the electromagnetic wave propagators in the spacecraft flying over Roswell that the pilots couldn't retain control of their own vehicle. We eventually realized that what happened then was that a natural version of an advanced particle-beam burst actually brought a UFO down even as it tried to escape. When we deployed our advanced particle-beam weapon and tested it in orbit for all to see, the EBEs knew and we knew they knew that we had our defense of the planet in place. Gorbachev, believe it or not, was also pleased because President Reagan guaranteed that the United States would throw its defensive shield around the Soviet Union, too. Sure, the two leaders shook hands and embraced one another in public. What they had achieved together, cooperating when they were supposed to be fighting, was nothing short of miraculous. Whatever we were fighting over became minimally important in the face of a threat from creatures who were so superior to us in technology that we were their farm animals to be harvested as they pleased. But when the United States and USSR agreed, in the early 1980s, not to fight each other over this territory or that territory, to cooperate so as to defeat the common foe, we were unbeatable. Now, as the Space Shuttle docks with the Mir and the astronauts and cosmonauts share a toast of vodka from their plastic squeeze tubes and look out into the darkest reaches of space, they know that there is an electronic shield around them. Now that the war is just about over and we defend our beachhead, the truth will ultimately be revealed. The real truth behind a fifty-year history of a war that looked like the ultimate defeat for human kind amidst a Cold War that threatened us with nuclear annihilation can now finally be told because we prevailed. It was because in the dark hours just before dawn in July of 1947 the army, only dimly recognizing that we were on the edge of a potential cataclysmic event, pulled the crashed space vehicle out of the desert and harvested its parts just like the inhabitants of that vehicle wanted to harvest us. In those moments, even though we might have fallen over ourselves in the darkness of the next fifty years, we set in motion the processes that brought us to an initial resolution with a military power greater than us. It helped us in our confrontation with the Russians and, if we don't lose our way, will help us manage the threats to come. When that truth of alien intervention in our planet's affairs and our ongoing contact with an alien culture is finally revealed, it won't be frightening even though it will be a shock. The night closes in around you in the desert, exposing your deepest terrors of childhood bogeymen to the desolation of the landscape and the blackness of the sky. So, even inside your car you keep on chattering to keep the night away. "And that's what | think about all of it, UFOs, the Cold War, all of it, "| told my companion in the car sitting next to me as we drove south through the New Mexican desert toward the town of Roswell. "| may be over eighty now, but that's what | think. " The night was swallowing us up as our Car twisted around the curves on the crowned road surface, still warm and wet on a summer night from passing thunderstorms, heading toward lights we knew were over the horizon but still could not see. 115