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closely held secrets. For all the years after Roswell we weren't just one step ahead of people wanting to know what really happened, we were a hundred steps ahead, a thousand, or even more. In fact, we never hid the truth from anybody, we just camouflaged it. It was always there, people just didn't know what to look for or recognize it for what it was when they found it. And they found it over and over again. Project "Blue Book" was created to make the general public happy that they had a mechanism for reporting what they saw. Projects "Grudge" and "Sign" were of a higher security to allow the military to process sightings and encounter reports that couldn't easily be explained away as balloons, geese, or the planet Venus. Blue Fly and Twinkle had other purposes, as did scores of other camouflage projects like Horizon, HARP, Rainbow, and even the Space Defense Initiative, all of which had something to do with alien technology. But no one ever knew it. And when reporters were actually given truthful descriptions of alien encounters, they either fell on the floor laughing or sold the story to the tabloids, who'd print a drawing of a large headed, almond eyed, six fingered alien. Again, everybody laughed. But that's what these things really look like because | saw the one they trucked up to Wright Field. Meanwhile, as each new project was created and administered, another bread crumb for anyone pursuing the secrets to find, we were gradually releasing bits and pieces of information to those we knew would make something out of it. Flying saucers did truly buzzover. Washington, D.C., in 1952, and there are plenty of photographs and radar reports to substantiate it. But we denied it while encouraging science fiction writers to make movies like The Man from Planet X to blow off some of the pressure concerning the truth about flying disks. This was called camouflage through limited disclosure, and it worked. If people could enjoy it as entertainment, get duly frightened, and follow trails to nowhere that the working group had planted, then they'd be less likely to stumble over what we were really doing. And what were we really doing? As General Twining had suggested in his report to the Army Air Forces, "foreign technology" was the category to which research on the alien artifacts from Roswell was to be delegated. Foreign technology was one of the great catch all terms, encompassing everything from researching French air force engineering advances on helicopter blades to captured Russian MiGs flown in from Cuba by savvy pilots who could negotiate our southern radar perimeter better than our own pilots. So what if a few pieces of technological debris from a strange crescent shaped hovering wing turned up in an old file somewhere in the army's foreign technology files? If nobody asked about it - and nobody did because foreign technology was just too damned dull for most reporters to hang around - we didn't have to say anything about it. Besides, most foreign technology stuff was classified anyway because it dealt with weapons development we were hiding from the Soviets and most reporters knew it. Foreign technology was the absolute perfect cover. All | had to do was figure out what to do with the stuff | had. And General Trudeau wasn't in the mood to wait any longer. “Come on, Phil, let's go. " The general's voice suddenly filled the room over the blown speaker hum of my desk intercom. | put down my coffee and headed up the stairway to the back door of his inner office. This was a routine that repeated itself three, sometimes four times a day. The general always liked to get briefed in person because even in the most secure areas of the Pentagon, the walls tended to listen and remember our conversations. Our sessions were always private, and from the way our conversation bounced back and forth among different topics, if it weren't for his three stars and my pair of leaves, you wouldn't even think you were listening to a pair of army officers. It was cordial and friendly, but my boss was my boss and, even after we both retired like two old war horses put out to pasture, our meetings were never informal. after | sat down. | had figured it out by going through all of the files | could get my hands on and tracing the path of the Roswell information from the 509th to Fort Bliss and from there to Wright Field, the dissemination point. General Trudeau motioned for me to sit down and | settled into a chair. It was already ten thirty in the morning so | knew there'd be at least two other sit down briefings that day. Actually, knowing how the material got into the Foreign Technology files was critically important because it meant that it was dispatched there originally. Even if it had been neglected over the years, it was clear that the Foreign Technology desk of the R&D system was its intended destination, part of the original plan. And | even had the documents from General Twining's own files to substantiate this. Not that | would have ever revealed them at that time. General Twining, more than anyone else during those years after the war, understood the sensitive and protected nature of the R&D budget. And now that | understood how the camouflage was to take place, | also saw how brilliant the general's plan was. R&D, although important and turning over records like topsoil from the Nazi weapons development files captured after the war, was kind of a backwater railroad junction. 34 "So now you figured out how the package arrived?" he asked me "| know it didn't come by the parcel service, "| said. "| don't think they have a truck that big." "Does that help you figure out what we should do?" he asked.