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Even stranger to me than the medical examiner's report was my reaction: What could we exploit from this entity? | wrote the general that "whether we found an ‘extraterrestrial biological entity’ is not as important in the R&D arena as are the ways we can develop what we learn from it so that man can travel in space. " This quickly became the overriding concern with all of the Roswell artifacts and the general format for all of my reports. Once | swallowed back the "oh wow" aspect to all of this life altering information - and sometimes it took a very big swallow - | was still left with the job of sorting out what looked promising for R&D to develop from what seemed beyond our realistic grasp for the present. | began with the EBE. The medical report and supporting photographs in front of me suggested that the creature was remarkably well adapted for long distance space travel. For example, biological time, the Walter Reed medical examiners hypothesized, must have passed very slowly for the entity because it possessed a very slow metabolism, evidenced, they said, by the enormous capacities of the huge heart and lungs. The physiology of this thing indicated that this was not a creature whose body had to work hard to sustain it. A larger heart, my ME's report read, meant that it took fewer beats than an average human heart to drive the thin, milky, almost lymphatic like fluid through a limited, more primitive looking, and apparently reduced capacity circulatory system. As a result, the biological clock beat more slowly than a human's and probably allowed the creature to travel great distances in a shorter biological time than humans. The heart was very decomposed by the time the Walter Reed pathologists got their hands on it. It seemed to them that our atmosphere was quite toxic to the creature's organs. Given the time that passed between the crash of the vehicle and the creature's arrival at Walter Reed, it decomposed all of the organs far more rapidly than it would have decomposed human organs. This fact particularly impressed me because | had seen one of these things, if not the very one described in the report, suspended in a gel-like substance at Fort Riley. So whatever exposure it must have had was very minimal by human standards because the medical personnel at the 509th's Walker Field got it into a liquid preservation state very quickly. Nevertheless, the Walter Reed pathologists were unable to determine with any certainty the structure of the creature's heart except to guess that because it functioned as a passive blood storage facility as well as a pumping muscle that it didn't work the same way as did a four chambered human heart. They said the alien heart seemed to have had internal diaphragm like muscles that worked less hard than human heart muscle did because the creatures were meant to survive within a reduced gravity as we understand gravity. As camels store water, so did this creature store whatever atmosphere it breathed in the large capacity of its lungs. The lungs functioned in ways similar to a camel's humps or to our scuba tanks and released atmosphere very slowly into the creature's system. Because of the large heart and the storage function we believed it had, we also surmised that it took far less breathable atmosphere to sustain the creature, thereby reducing the need for carrying large volumes of atmosphere along on the voyage. Perhaps the aircraft had a means of recirculating its atmosphere, recycling spent or waste air back into the craft. Moreover, because the creatures were only four or to feet tall, the large lungs occupied a far greater percentage of the chest cavity than human lungs did, further impressing the pathologists who examined the creatures’ remains. This also indicated to us that perhaps we were dealing with an entity specifically engineered for long distance travel. If we believed the heart and lungs seemed bioengineered for long distance travel so, too, was the creature's skeletal tissue. Although it was in a state of advanced decomposition, the creature's bones looked to the army medical examiners to be fibrous, actually thinner than comparable human bones such as the ribs, sternum, clavicle, and pelvis. Pathologists speculated that the bones were more flexible than human bones and had a resiliency that might be related to the function of shock absorbers. More brittle human bones might more easily shatter under the stresses these alien entities must have been routinely subjected to. However, with a flexible skeletal frame, these entities appeared well suited for potential shocks and physical traumas of extreme forces and could withstand the fractures that would cripple human space travelers in a similar environment. The military recovery team at the Roswell site had reported that the two creatures still alive after the crash had difficulty breathing our atmosphere. Whether that was because they were suddenly tossed out of their craft, unprotected, into our gravity envelope or whether our atmosphere itself was toxic to them, we don't know. We also don't know whether the one creature who died very shortly after the crash was struggling to breathe because he was fatally wounded by gunshots or because of other reasons. Military witnesses recounted different stories about the creature that survived and tried to run. Some said it was struggling to breathe from the moment the military had secured the area; others said that it was gasping only after it had been shot by one of the sentries. My guess was that it was the alien's sudden exposure to the earth's strong gravity that caused the creature to panic at first. That could have been one reason his breathing seemed labored. Then, after he fled and was shot, he was struggling to breathe because of his wounds. The medical examiner's report mentioned nothing about toxic gases or the kind of atmosphere he believed the creatures naturally breathed. If the Roswell craft were a scout or surveillance ship, as the military analysts back at Wright believed, then it was also more than likely that the creatures never intended to exit the craft. This was a craft equipped with a device that was capable of penetrating our nighttime or utilizing the temperature differentials of different objects 40