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"They're guessing, | suppose, " he said. "And figuring it out by the process of elimination. Look, everybody suspects what the air force has." the Pentagon made deposits and withdrawals, the air force was sitting on the Holy Grail - a spaceship itself and maybe even a live extraterrestrial. Nobody knew for sure. We knew that after it became a separate branch of the military in 1948, the air force kept some of the Roswell artifacts at Wright Field outside of Dayton, Ohio, because that's where "the cargo" was shipped, stopping off in Fort Riley along the way. But the air force was primarily interested in how things fly, so whatever R&D they worked on was focused on how their planes could evade radar and out fly the Soviets no matter where we got the technology from. "And, " he continued, "I'm sure the agency fellows would love to get into the Naval Intelligence files on Roswell if they've not done so already. " With its advanced submarine technology and missile launching nuclear subs, the navy was struggling with its own problem in figuring out what to do about UUOs or USOs - Unidentified Submerged Objects, as they came to be called. It was a worry in naval circles, particularly as war planners advanced strategies for protracted submarine warfare in the event of a first strike. Whatever was flying circles around our jets since the 1950s, evading radar at our top secret missile bases like Red Canyon, which | saw with my own eyes, could plunge right into the ocean, navigate down there just as easy as you please, and surface halfway around the world without so much as leaving an underwater signature we could pick up. Were these USOs building bases at the bottom of oceanic basins beyond the dive capacity of our best submarines, even the Los Angeles-class jobbies that were only on the drawing boards? That's what the chief of Naval Operations had to find out, so the navy was occupied with fighting its own war with extraterrestrial craft in the air and under the sea. That left the army. "But they don't know for sure what we have, Phil, " Trudeau continued. He'd been talking the whole time. "And they're busting a gut to find out." "So we have to keep on doing what we do without letting them know what we have, General, "| said. "And that's what I'm working on. " And | was. Even though | wasn't sure how we'd do it, | knew the business of R&D couldn't change just because we had Roswell crash artifacts in our possession. Roswell technology, it had to be within the existing way we did business so no one would recognize any difference. We operated on a normal defense development projects budget of well into the billions in 1960, most of it allocated to the analysis of new weapons systems. Just within our own bureau we had contracts with the nation's biggest defense companies with whom we maintained almost daily communication. A lot of the research we conducted was in the improvement of existing weapons based on the intelligence we received about what our enemies were pointing at us: faster tanks, heavier artillery, improved helicopters, better tasting MREs. At the Foreign Technologies desk, we kept an eye on what other countries were doing, ally or adversary, and how we could adapt it to our use. The French, the Italians, the West Germans, all of them had their own weapons systems and streams of development that seemed exotic by our standards yet had certain advantages. The Russians had gotten ahead of us in liquid rocket propulsion systems and were using simpler, more efficient designs. My job was to evaluate the potential of the foreign technology and implement whatever we could. I'd get photos, designs, and specs of foreign weapons systems, like the French helicopter technology, for example, and bring it to American defense companies like Bell, Sikorski, or Hughes to see whether we could develop aspects of it for our own use. And it was the perfect cover for protecting the Roswell technology, but we still had to figure out what we wanted to do with it. It couldn't simply stay in file cabinets or on shelves forever. What we had retrieved from the Roswell crash and had managed to hold on to was probably the most closely guarded secret the army had. Yet it was nothing more than an orphan. Up until 1961, the army had come up with no plan to use the technology without revealing its nature or its source and in so doing blow the cover on the single biggest secret the government was keeping. There was no one bureau within the army charged with managing Roswell and other aspects of UFO encounters, as there was in the air force, and therefore nobody was keeping any public records of how the army got its hands on its Roswell technology in the first place and, consequently, no oversight mechanism. Everything up until 1961 was catch-as-catch-can, but now it had to change. General Trudeau was looking for the grand end game development scheme. It began with researching the history of how the whole file - the field reports, autopsy information, descriptions of the items found in the wreckage, and the bits and pieces of Roswell technology themselves - came into the possession of Army R&D. 24 Trudeau was right. In the rumor bank from which everybody in However we were going to camouflage our development of the