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they processed chemicals released from their skin and maybe even recirculated waste chemicals would have explained the lack of any food preparation or waste processing facilities on the craft. | soeculated, however, that they didn't require food or facilities for waste disposal because they weren't actual life forms, only a kind of robot or android. Another explanation, of course, suggested by the engineers at Wright Field, is that there would have been no need for food preparation facilities had this craft been only a small scout ship that didn't venture far from a larger craft. The creatures’ low metabolism meant that they could survive extended periods away from the main craft by subsisting on some form of military prepackaged foods until they returned to base. Neither the Wright Field engineers nor the Walter Reed medical examiners had an explanation for the lack of waste disposal on board the craft, nor could they explain how the creatures' waste was processed. Maybe | was speculating too far about robots or androids when | was writing my report for General Trudeau, but | kept thinking, also, that the skin analysis that | was reading sounded more akin to the skin of a houseplant than the skin of a human being. That, too, could have been another explanation for the lack of food or waste facilities. Much of the attention during the preliminary and later autopsies of the creatures focused on the size, nature, and anatomy of their brains. Much credence also was given to the first hand descriptions of on scene witnesses who said they received impressions from the dying creature that it was suffering and in great pain. No one heard the creature make any sounds, so any impressions, Army Intelligence personnel assumed, would have to have been created through some type of empathic projection or outright mental telepathy. But witnesses said they heard no "words" in their mind, only the resonance of a shared or projected impression much simpler than a sentence but far more complex because they were able to share with the creature a sense not only of suffering but of profound sadness, as if it were in mourning for the others who perished on board the craft. These witness reports intrigued me more than any other information we took from the crash site. The medical examiners believed that the alien brain, way oversized in comparison with the human brain and in proportion to the creature's tiny stature, had four distinct sections. The creatures were dead and the brains had begun to decompose by the time they were removed from the soft spongy skulls that felt to the doctors more like palatal cartilage than the hard bone of a human cranium. Even had the creatures been alive when they were examined, 1947 medical technology didn't have ultrasound scanning or the high resonance tomography of today's radiology labs. Accordingly, there was no way for the doctors to evaluate the nature of the cranial lobes, or "spheres, " as they called them in the report. Thus, despite the rampant speculation about the nature of the creatures' brains - thought projection, psychokinetic powers, and the like - no hard evidence existed of anything, and the reports were very light on real scientific data. alien brains did exist was in what | referred to in my reports as the"headbands". Among the artifacts we retrieved were devices that looked something like headbands but had neither adornment nor decoration of any kind. Embedded by some very advanced kind of vulcanizing process into a form of flexible plastic were what we now know to have been electrical conductors or sensors, similar to the conductors on an electroencephalograph or polygraph. This band was fitted around the part of the alien cranium just above the ears where the skull began to expand to accommodate the large brain. At the time, the field reports from the crash and the subsequent analysis at Wright Field indicated that the engineers at the Air Materiel Command thought these might be communication devices, like the throat mikes our pilots wore during World War Il. But, as | would find out when | evaluated the device and sent it into the market for reverse-engineering, this was a throat mike only in a way that a primitive stylus can be considered the forerunner of the color laser-imaging printer. Suffice it to say that in the few hours the material was at Walker Field in Roswell, more than one officer at the 509th gingerly slipped this thing over his head and tried to figure out what it did. At first it did nothing. There were no buttons, no switches, no wires, nothing that could even be considered to have been a control panel. So no one knew how to turn it on or off. Moreover, the band was not really adjustable, though it had enough elasticity to have been one size fits all for the creatures whose skulls were large enough to accommodate them. However, the reports | read stated, the few officers whose heads were just large enough to have made contact with the full array of conductors got the shocks of their lives. In their descriptions of the headband, these officers reported everything from a low tingling sensation inside their heads to a searing headache and a brief array of either dancing or exploding colors on the insides of their eyelids as they rotated the device around their head and brought the sensors into contact with different parts of their skull. These eyewitness reports suggested to me that the sensors stimulated different parts of the brain while at the same time exchanged information with the brain. Again, using the analogy of an EEC, these devices were a very sophisticated mechanism for translating the electrical impulses inside the creatures’ brains into specific commands. Perhaps these headband devices comprised the pilot interface of the ship's navigational and propulsion system combined with a long range communications device. At first | didn't know, but it was only when we began development of the long brain wave research project toward the end of my tenure at the Pentagon that | realized just what we had 42 Where the possibility of some evidence about the workings of the