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Unnoticed by most officers on their way to the top and not called upon in the late 1940s to do much more than record keeping, it turned out to be the perfect hideaway when the CIA hirelings came sniffing through the Pentagon in the early 1950s looking for anything they could find on the Roswell technology. Unless they were part of the working group from the start, not even members of the Eisenhower White House National Security staff knew that R&D was the repository of Roswell artifacts. | was there. | can vouch for that. In fact, it wasn't until | saw the files for myself and reverse traced their path to my doorstep that | realized what General Twining and the working group had accomplished. By the time | had arrived at the White House, though, it was all ancient history. People were more worried about the sighting information deluging Project Blue Book every day than they were about the all but forgotten story of Roswell. wanted to know what my research had uncovered and what | had learned about Roswell during my years at the White House, what I'd seen, how far the concentric circles of the group and the people who worked for them nt went. | didn't respond substantively, and he didn't expect me to, because to do so would have meant breaching security confidentiality that I'd sworn to maintain when | was assigned to the NSC staff at the White House. "You don't have to say anything officially, "he continued. "And | don't expect you to. But can you give me your impressions of how people working for the group talked about the package?" "| wasn't working for the group, General, "| said. "And whatever | saw or heard was only because it happened to pass by, not because | was supposed to do anything about it." But he pushed me to remember whether the NSC staff had any direct dealings with the group and how much the Central Intelligence staffers at the White House pressed to get any information they could about what the group was doing. Of course | remembered the questions going back and forth about what might have happened at Roswell, about what was really behind Blue Book, and about all those lights buzzing the Washington Monument back in 1952. | didn't have anything substantive to tell my boss about my involvement, but his questions helped me put together a bigger picture than | thought | knew. From my perspective in 1961, especially after reviewing everything | could about what happened in the days after the Roswell crash, | could see very clearly the things that | didn't understand back in 1955. | didn't know why the CIA was so aggressively agitated about the repeated stories of flying saucer sightings or why they kept searching for any information about the technology from Roswell. | certainly didn't volunteer any information, mainly because nobody asked me, about having seen parts of "the cargo" as it passed through Fort Riley. | just played position, representing the army as the military member of the National Security Staff, but | listened to everything | heard like a fly on the wall. General Trudeau's questions forced me to ask myself what the big picture was that he saw. He was obviously looking for something in my descriptions of the architecture of the group, as | had learned it from my review of the history, and of the starters on the lower security classification periphery as | understood it from my experience at the White House. He really wanted to know how the bureaucracy worked, how much activity the group itself generated, what kinds of policy questions came up in my presence, and whether | was asked to comment informally on anything having to do with the issues of the group. Did Admiral Hillenkoetter host many briefings for President Eisenhower where Generals Twining, Smith, Montague, and Vandenburg were present? Gen. W. B. Smith had replaced Secretary Forrestal after he committed suicide during the second year of the Truman administration. Were Professor Menzel and Drs. Bush and Berkner visitors to the White House on regular occasions? Did they meet at the White House with Admiral Hillenkoetter or the generals? What was the level of presence of the CIA staffers at the White House through all of this? And did | recognize anyone from the Joint Research and Development Board or the Atomic Energy Commission at any briefings chaired by Admiral Hillenkoetter? Through General Trudeau's questions | could see not only that the general knew his history almost as well as | did about how the original group was formed and how it must have operated, but he also had a sense of what kind of problem was facing the military R&D and how much leeway he had to solve it. Like most ad hoc creations of government, the group must have at some point become as self-serving as every other joint committee eventually became the longer it functioned and the more its job increased. As the camouflage about flying disks grew, so did the role of the group. Only the group didn't have the one thing most government committees had : the ability to draw upon other areas of the government for more resources. This group was above top secret and, Officially, had no right to exist. Therefore, as its functions grew over the next ten years to encompass the investigations of more flying saucer sightings and the research into more encounters with alien aircraft or with the extraterrestrials themselves, its resources became stretched so thin that it had to create reasons for drawing upon other areas of the government. 35 But my mind was drifting and the general was still speaking. He "Phil, we both know that the package you have is no surprise, " he said very flatly.