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He described the aircraft as it had been reported in the sightings: a "light reflective or metallic surface, "absence of a trail except in those few instances when the object was operating under high performance conditions, " "circular or elliptical in shape, flat on bottom and domed on top, " flights in formation consisting of from "three to nine objects, " and no sound except for those instances when "a substantial rumbling roar was noted. " The objects moved quickly for aircraft at that time, he noted to General Schulgen, at level flight speeds above three hundred knots. Were the United States to build such an aircraft, especially one with a range of over seven thousand miles, the cost, commitment, administrative and development overhead, and drain on existing high technology projects required that the entire project should be independent or outside of the normal weapons development bureaucracy. In other words, as | interpreted the memo, Twining was suggesting to the commander of the Army Air Force that were the airforce, which would become a separate branch of the military by the following year, to attempt to exploit the technology that had quite literally dropped into its lap, it had to do so separately and independently from any normal weapons development program. The descriptions of the super secret projects at Nellis Air Force Base or Area 51 in the Nevada desert seem to fit the profile of the kind of recommendation that General Twining was making, especially the employment of the "skunk works" group at Lockheed in the development of the Stealth fighter and B2 bomber. Not revealing to the Army Air Forces command that Twining himself had been ordered to visit bases in New Mexico in the hours after the crash, the general advised his bosses that the military should consider whether the flying disks were of domestic origin, "the product of some high security project" already developed by the United States outside of normal channels, or developed by a foreign power that "has a form of propulsion possibly nuclear, which is outside of our domestic knowledge. " At the same time, weaving a cover story that takes him out of the loop of reporting any of these flying disks as a first hand observer, Twining writes that there is a "lack of physical evidence in the shape of crash recovered exhibits which would undeniably prove the existence of these objects. " But, even though General Twining has just written that there is no evidence, he nevertheless recommends to his superiors that: Headquarters, Army Air Forces issue a directive assigning a priority, security classification and Code Name for a detailed study of this matter to include the preparation of complete sets of all available and pertinent data which will then be made available to the Army, Navy, Atomic Energy Commission, JRDB, the Air Force Scientific Advisory Group, NACA, and the RAND and NEPA projects for comments and recommendations, with a preliminary report to be forwarded within 15 days of receipt of the data and a detailed report thereafter every 30 days as the investigation develops. A complete interchange of data should be effected. This was an important part of the memo, at least for me and my research into how the army got the Roswell tile, because it accounted for the army's dissemination of the Roswell materials and accompanying reports within only a couple of months after the material's arrival at Wright Field. When General Twining suggested to his commanding officers at AAF that all the military branches as well as existing government and civilian commissions needed to share this information, the dispersal of the materials was already under way. This is how the technology came into the possession of Army R&D. Finally, the general promised the Army Air Forces command that the Air Materiel Command would continue to investigate the phenomenon within its own resources in order to define its nature further and it would route any more information it developed through channels. Three days after the memo, on September 26,1947, General Twining gave his report on the Roswell crash and its implications for the United States to President Truman and a short list of officials he convened to begin the management of this top-secret combination of inquiry, police development, and "ops. " This working group, which included Adm. Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, Dr. Vannevar Bush, Secretary James Forrestal, Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg, Dr. Detlev Bronk, Dr. Jerome Hunsaker, Sidney W. Souers, Gordon Gray, Dr. Donald Menzel, Gen. Robert M. Montague, Dr. Lloyd V. Berkner, and Gen. Nathan Twining himself, became the nucleus for an ongoing fifty-year operation that some people have called "Majestic-12. " At the Eisenhower White House, it was simply referred to as "the group, " and in the days after Roswell it went into operation just as smoothly as slipping your new 1949 Buick with its "Dynaflow" automatic transmission into drive and pulling away from the curb. In this way General Twining had carefully orchestrated a complete cover-up of what had happened at Roswell as well as a full scale, top-secret military R&D operation to identify the nature of the phenomenon and assess its military threat to the United States. It was as elegant as it was effective. But the plan didn't stop with the creation of the working group - in fact, the operation very quickly developed into something far more sophisticated because General Twining's "flying discs" simply wouldn't go away. As more information on sightings and encounters came rolling in through every imaginable channel, from police officers taking reports from frightened civilians to airline pilots 27