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field office of the AMC itself, where rocket scientists Wernher von Braun and others were primarily based. Close by was the White Sands guided missile base, where some of our military's most advanced tracking and embryonic targeting radars were deployed. These were sensitive installations, especially during the UFO activity that week, and it made perfect sense that immediately after the recovery of the UFO the army general whose responsibility it would have been to manage the retrieval was almost directly on-site conferring with his top scientists. Although | never saw the actual memos from President Truman to General Twining regarding his trip to New Mexico, | had heard stories about secret orders that Truman had issued to General Twining directing him to New Mexico to investigate the reports of the crash and to report directly to the White House on what he'd found. | believe that it was General Twining's initial report to the President that confirmed that the army had retrieved something from the desert and might have suggested the need for the formation of an advisory group to develop policy about whatever was discovered. And, remember, in those first forty-eight hours, nobody really knew what this was. By the time the Roswell debris had been shipped out of Fort Bliss and had arrived at Wright Field, General Twining had flown back from New Mexico to Wright to oversee the analysis and evaluation of the Roswell treasure trove. Twining moved quickly once back at his office. The alien bodies had to be autopsied in utmost secrecy and the spacecraft and its contents analyzed, cataloged, and prepared for dissemination to various facilities within the military. In as much as everything about the crash was given the highest security classification, stories had to be prepared for those with lower security classifications but whose contributions could be important to the creation of a credible cover story. The official camouflage was almost as important to the military in1947 as it was in 1961 when | took over. It was important because as far as the army was concerned, 1947 was still wartime, a Cold War, perhaps, but war nevertheless, and stories about military hardware as valuable as the material retrieved from Roswell could not be disclosed for fear that the Soviets would exploit it. Thus, from day 1, the army treated its retrieval of the debris as if it were an operation conducted in a wartime theater under battle conditions. Roswell became military intelligence. General Twining had seen the material for himself, and even before he returned to Wright Field, he'd conferred with the rocket scientists who were part of his brain trust at Alamogordo. Now, during the remainder of the summer months, he quietly compiled a report that he would deliver to President Truman and an ad hoc group of military, government, and civilian officials, who would ultimately become the chief policy makers for what would become an ongoing contact with extraterrestrials over the ensuing fifty years. And as stories of the Roswell crash and other UFO sightings around U.S. military bases began to filter in through the command chain of the armed services, General Twining also needed to establish a lower security channel along which he could exchange information with other commands that were not cleared all the way to the top. General Twining still reported to higher ups who, though they may not have had the security clearance he had with regard to extraterrestrial contact, nevertheless were his commanding officers and routinely sought information from the AMC. Accordingly, General Twining needed to maintain a quasi cover-up even within the military. The first of these reports was transmitted from General Twining to the commanding general of Army Air Forces in Washington, dated September 23, 1947. Written to the attention of Brig. Gen. George Schulgen, Twining's memo addressed, in the most general of terms, the official Air Materiel Command's intelligence regarding "flying discs. "He drew a remarkable number of conclusions, most of which, | had to surmise when | was on Eisenhower's National Security Council and then again when | got to the Pentagon, were based on Twining's own first hand experience with the sighting reports from Roswell and other sighting reports as well as the materials themselves, which were in the military's possession. Flying saucers or UFOs are not illusions, Twining says, referring to the sighting of strange objects in the sky as "something real and not visionary or fictitious. "Even though he cites the possibility that some of the sightings are only meteors or other natural occurrences, he says that the reports are based upon real sightings of actual objects" approximating the shape of a disc, of such appreciable size as to be as large as man made aircraft. " Considering that this report was never intended for public scrutiny, especially in 1947, Twining marveled at the aircrafts’ operating characteristics and went on record, drawing major conclusions about the material he had and the reports he'd heard or read. But, when he wrote that the extreme maneuverability of the aircraft and their "evasive" actions when sighted "or contacted" by friendly aircraft and radar led him to believe that they were either "manually, automatically, or remotely" flown, he not only suggested a guided flight but imparted a hostile intent to their evasive maneuvers to avoid contact. His characterization of the aircrafts' behavior revealed, even weeks after the physical encounter, that those officers in the military who were now running the yet-to-be-code- named extraterrestrial contact project already considered these objects and those entities who controlled them a military threat. 26