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"The Cold War, the missile crisis of 1962, the worldwide alert in1973, all history now, don't you think?" | asked. "Maybe it was a good thing that the aliens forced us to defend the planet. At least it kept us in a Cold War even though we were using real bullets. " "And what makes you think the Cold War is over, tovarisch?" my friend asked as he carefully took out a cigarette, lit it, and blew the smoke out the window. "American cigarettes, " he said. "Am | not the most bourgeois decadent person you've ever met? But what would the Amerikanskis have done without me?" And | laughed to myself and counted the million stars across the desert sky as far as | could see. Cattle sleeping near the scrub and sand fences along the side of the lonely state route, a coyote now and then running through the beams of our headlights, and the sound of my friend's breath as he blew the column of smoke into the desert air. It was a night just like this, lightning crackling off in the distance and a thunderclap rolling across the desert floor, a night just like this. And what looked like a bright shooting star blazed very bright in an arc from south to north and disappeared over a rise as we Continued toward Roswell into the darkness of the New Mexico night. AFTERWORD called | Led Three Lives about the exploits of Herbert A. Philbrick, who described the "fantastic but true" story of his life as a member of a Communist Party cell and an undercover operative for the FBI. Years later, when | got to Army R&D, | remember thinking about how my own story was also "fantastic but true" and how what General Trudeau and | did helped to change the course of history. Very few people knew that what was coming out of Foreign Technology during the early 1960s had some basis in a crash of a UFO that "officially" never took place. Lives were distorted, careers destroyed, children frightened into submission by Army Counterintelligence bogeymen, businessmen in Roswell threatened with financial ruination and even worse if anybody told the story of what happened. But they were all loyal Americans, and even though some might have had their doubts about hiding the truth, they went along with what the army wanted. Many people have criticized the army and the government for maintaining the Roswell cover-up not only at the time but also through the years. For that, | need to say a word in defense of what the army did. It's easy to criticize if you weren't an adult back then or someone who didn't understand the politics that governed our thinking at that point in American history. We 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 strange craft on American soil. Was it Soviet? Did it belong to a foreign power? Was it hostile? 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 extraterrestrials took place, even though it was entertainment, 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. Just like the secrecy surrounding the Manhattan Project, no word gets out. And for the next fifty years that policy, once put into place, governed the behavior of the U.S. government and the military about the existence of UFOs and the crash at Roswell. 116 BACK IN THE 19508, | REMEMBER WATCHING A TELEVISION SERIES