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This, Truman could understand. He had trusted Twining to manage this potential crisis from the moment Forrestal had alerted him that the crash had taken place. And Twining had done a brilliant job. He kept the lid on the story and brought back everything that he could under one roof. He understood as Twining described to him the strangeness of the spacecraft that seemed to have no engines, no fuel, nor any apparent methods of propulsion, yet out flew our fastest fighters; the odd childlike creatures who were inside and how one of them was killed by a gunshot; the way you could see daylight through the inside of the craft even though the sun had not yet risen; the swatches of metallic fabric that they couldn't burn or melt; thin beams of light that you couldn't see until they hit an object and then burned right through it, and on and on; more questions than answers. It would take years to find these answers, Twining had said, and it was beyond the immediate capacity of our military to do anything about it. This will take a lot of man power, the general said, and most of the work will have to be done in secret. General Twining showed photographs of these alien beings and autopsy reports that suggested they were too human; they had to be related to our species in some way. They were obviously intelligent and able to communicate, witnesses at the scene had reported, by some sort of thought projection unlike any mental telepathy you'd see at a carnival show. We didn't know whether they came from a planet like Mars in our own solar system or from some galaxy we could barely see with our strongest telescopes. But they possessed a military technology whose edges we could understand and exploit, even if only for self defense against the Soviets. But by studying what these extraterrestrials had we might be able to build a defense system against them as well. At the very least, Twining had suggested, the crescent shaped craft looked so uncomfortably like the German Horten wings our flyers had seen at the end of the war that he had to suspect the Germans had bumped into something we didn't know about. And his conversations with Wernher von Braun and Willy Ley at Alamogordo in the days after the crash confirmed this. They didn't want to be thought of as but intimated that there was a deeper story about what the Germans had engineered. No, the similarity between the Horten wing and the craft they had pulled out of the arroyo was no accident. We always wondered how the Germans were able to incorporate such advanced technology into their weapons development in so short a time and during the Great Depression. Did they have help? Maybe we were now as lucky as the Germans and broke off a piece of this technology for ourselves. With an acceleration capability and maneuverability we'd never seen before, this craft would keep American aircraft engineers busy for years just incorporating what they could see into immediate designs. The issue of security was paramount, but so were questions of disclosure, the President reminded him. This thing was too big to hide and getting bigger all the time while reporters were just like dogs on a scent. So just putting a higher security classification on it and threatening anybody who came too close wasn't enough to hide a secret this big. You couldn't prevent leaks, and eventually it would all have to come out anyway. General Twining should think about that before the group made any final decisions, the President advised. By the middle of September it was obvious to every member of President Truman's working group, which included the following: Central Intelligence Director Adm. Roscoe Hillenkoetter Secretary of Defense James Forrestal Lt. Gen. Nathan Twining of the AAF and then USAF Air Materiel Command Professor Donald Menzel, Harvard astronomer and Naval Intelligence cryptography expert Vannevar Bush, Joint Research and Development Board Chairman Detlev Bronk, Chairman of the National Research Council and biologist who would ultimately be named to the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics Gen. Robert Montague, who was General Twining's classmate at West Point, Commandant of Fort Bliss with operational control over the command at White Sands Gordon Gray, President Truman's Secretary of the Army and chairman of the CIA's Psychological Strategy Board Sidney Souers, Director of the National Security Council Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg, Central Intelligence Group Director prior to Roscoe Hillenkoetter and then USAF Chief of Staffin 1948 Jerome Hunsaker, aircraft engineer and Director of the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics Lloyd Berkner, member of the Joint Research and Development Board Unless this group established a long term plan for protecting and developing the Roswell project, the secrets would soon leak out. | understand that it was General Twining who pointed out to the group that, in fact, the story had already leaked out. It was leaked, he said, hours after the crash and then retracted. In fact, people were still talking about it in New Mexico, but after the army's weather balloon story, the national newspapers were treating the flying disk reports as the delusions of people who had seen too many Buck Rogers movies. The national press was already doing the committee's work. What was really needed, Twining suggested, was a method for gathering the information about continuing UFO activity - especially crashes, high probability sightings by pilots or the military, or actual physical encounters with individuals - and surreptitiously filtering that information to the group while coming up with practical explanations that would turn unidentified flying disks into completely identifiable and explainable phenomena. Under the cover of explaining away all the flying disk activity, the appropriate agencies represented by members 32