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looking up from the paper clipped sheaf of typewritten sheets I'd handed him first thing that morning. I'd been waiting at my desk since before six when | got back to the Pentagon, taking looks outside the building every once in a while as the bright orange reflection of the rising sun that exploded in a distant window and looked as if it had caught fire. "What'd you do, stay up all night writing it?" "| put in some work after hours, "| said. "| don't want to spend too much time in the nut file when people are supposed to be working. " The general laughed as he fingered through the paperwork, but you could see he was impressed. As much as | wanted to denigrate the Roswell file in front of him as a bunch of drawers full of stuff that people would put me away for, we both knew that it contained much of the future of our R&D. Military research and development agencies were under growing pressure from the Congress to put some success points on the scoreboard or get out of the rocket launching business for good. Early failures to lift off the navy's WAC Corporal and the army Redstone had made laughing stocks out of the American rocket program while the Soviets were showing off their success like basketball players on fancy lay-ups right across the court. The army's Project Horizon moon base project was sitting in its own file cabinet gathering dust. And there was also a growing concern among the military that we'd be pushed into taking over the failed French mission in Indochina to keep the Vietcong, Pathet Lao, and Khmer Rouge from making the whole area Communist. It was a war we could not win but that would drain our resources from the real battle front in Eastern Europe. So, even more than scoring some field goals, General Trudeau needed projects going into development to keep the civilian agencies from cutting us back and diverting our resources. Now my boss held my first report in his hands and knew that our strategic plan had some rational grounding. He pushed for a tactical plan. | explained that | wanted to compile a list of all our technical human resources, like the rocket scientists from Germany then still working at Alamogordo and White Sands. I'd met more than my share of our rocket fuel and guidance specialists in the guided missile program during my years at Red Canyon in command of the Nike battalion. But we were working with theoretical scientists as well, men with experience who could combine the cold precision of an engineer with the speculative vision of a free thinker. These were the people | wanted to assemble into a brain trust, people | could talk to about strange artifacts and devices that had no basis in earthly reality. They were the scientists who could tell me what the potential was in items like wafer shaped plywood thin pieces of silicon with mysterious silver etchings on them. "Match them up with technologies, "| said. | admitted that we were flying blind on much of the material that we had. We couldn't go out to the general scientific and academic communities to ask them what we had because we would very quickly lose control of our own secrets. Besides, a lot of it had to do with weaponry, and there were very strict rules on what we could and could not disclose without the appropriate clearances. But our brain trust would be invaluable. And, with the proper orientation and security checks, they would keep our secrets, too, just as they had since the end of World War Il. "Which of the scientists do you have in mind?" Trudeau asked, taking out the little black leather covered notepad he kept in his inside pocket. "| was thinking of Robert Sarbacher, "| said. "Wernher vonBraun, of course. Hans Kohler. Hermann Oberth. John von Neumann." "How much do they know about Roswell?" Trudeau wanted to know. If they'd been consulted on the Roswell material back in1947, as | knew Wernher von Braun had been by General Twining, then we weren't revealing any secrets. If they had never been informed about the crash, then we were going out on a limb by sharing information that was still classified above top secret. General Trudeau needed to know how dangerous it was to bring these scientists into the loop. But | assured him that all of them knew something about Roswell because of their connection with the Research and Development Board. During the Eisenhower administration information about the classified research and data collection projects into extraterrestrials was routinely filtered to the Office 45 The Project Gets Under Way "THIS IS A HELLUVA REPORT, PHIL, "GENERAL TRUDEAU SAID, "We know what we want to do, " he said. "Now, how do we do it?" "I've been thinking about that, too, General, "| said. "And here's how I'd like to start. " "And once you have this brain trust, "General Trudeau asked, "then what?"