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INTRODUCTION My name is Philip J. Corso, and for two incredible years back in the 1960s while | was a lieutenant colonel in the army heading up the Foreign Technology desk in Army Research and Development at the Pentagon, | led a double life. In my routine everyday job as a researcher and evaluator of weapons systems for the army, | investigated things like the helicopter armament the French military had developed, the tactical deployment complexities of a theater antimissile missile, or new technologies to preserve and prepare meals for our troops in the field. | read technology reports and met with engineers at army proving grounds about different kinds of ordnance and how ongoing budgeted development projects were moving forward. | submitted their reports to my boss, Lt. Gen. Arthur Trudeau, the director of Army R&D and the manager of a three thousand plus man operation with lots of projects at different stages. On the surface, especially to congressmen exercising oversight as to how the taxpayers’ money was being spent, all of it was routine stuff. Part of my job responsibility in Army R&D, however, was as an intelligence officer and adviser to General Trudeau who, himself, had headed up Army Intelligence before coming to R&D. This was a job | was trained for and held during World War Il and Korea. At the Pentagon | was working in some of the most secret areas of military intelligence, reviewing heavily classified information on behalf of General Trudeau. | had been on General Mac Arthur's staff in Korea and knew that as late as 1961 - even as late, maybe, as today - as Americans back then were sitting down to watch Dr. Kildare or Gunsmoke, captured American soldiers from World War Il and Korea were still living in gulag conditions in prison camps in the Soviet Union and Korea. Some of them were undergoing what amounted to sheer psychological torture. They were the men who never returned. As an intelligence officer | also knew the terrible secret that some of our government's most revered institutions had been penetrated by the KGB and that key aspects of American foreign policy were being dictated from inside the Kremlin. | testified to this first at a Senate subcommittee hearing chaired by Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois in April 1962, and a month later delivered the same information to Attorney General Robert Kennedy. He promised me that he would deliver it to his brother, the President, and | have every reason to believe he did. It was ironic that in 1964, after | retired from the army and had served on Senator Strom Thurmond's staff, | worked for Warren Commission member Senator Richard Russell as an investigator. But hidden beneath everything | did, at the center of a double life | led that no one knew about, and buried deep inside my job at the Pentagon was a single file cabinet that | had inherited because of my intelligence background. That file held the army's deepest and most closely guarded secret: the Roswell files, the cache of debris and information an army retrieval team from the 509th Army Air Field pulled out of the wreckage of a flying disk that had crashed outside the town of Roswell in the New Mexico desert in the early morning darkness during the first week of July 1947. The Roswell file was the legacy of what happened in the hours and days after the crash when the official government cover-up was put into place. As the military tried to figure out what it was that had crashed, where it had come from, and what its inhabitants’ intentions were, a covert group was assembled under the leadership of the director of intelligence, Adm. Roscoe Hillenkoetter, to investigate the nature of the flying disks and collect all information about encounters with these phenomena while, at the same time, publicly and officially discounting the existence of all flying saucers. This operation has been going on, in one form or another, for fifty years amidst complete secrecy. | wasn't in Roswell in 1947, nor had | heard any details about the crash at that time because it was kept so tightly under wraps, even within the military. You can easily understand why, though, if you remember, as | do, the Mercury Theater "War of the Worlds" radio broadcast in 1938 when the entire country panicked at the story of how invaders from Mars landed in Grovers Mill, New Jersey, and began attacking the local populace. The fictionalized eyewitness reports of violence and the inability of our military forces to stop the creatures were graphic. They killed everyone who crossed their path, narrator Orson Welles said into his microphone, as these creatures in their war machines started their march toward New York. The level of terror that Halloween night of the broadcast was so intense and the military so incapable of protecting the local residents that the police were overwhelmed by the phone calls. It was as if the whole country had gone crazy and authority itself had started to unravel. Now, in Roswell in 1947, the landing of a flying saucer was no fantasy. It was real, the military wasn't able to prevent it, and this time the authorities didn't want a repeat of "War of the Worlds. "So you can see the mentality at work behind the desperate need to keep the story quiet. And this is not to mention the military fears at first that the craft might have been an experimental Soviet weapon because it bore a resemblance to some of the German designed aircraft that had made their appearances near the end of the war, especially the crescent shaped Horton flying wing. What if the Soviets had developed their own version of this craft? The stories about the Roswell crash vary from one another in the details. Because | wasn't there, I've had to rely on reports of others, even within the military itself. Through the years, I've heard versions of the Roswell story in which campers, an archeological team, or rancher Mac Brazel found the wreckage. I've read military reports about different crashes in different locations in some proximity to the army air field at Roswell like San Agustin and