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Fort Belvoir was one of those military posts where the mundane activity of training and weapons testing was an effective cover for what came to be known as the secret life of Fort Belvoir. It sat comfortably within thirty minutes of the Pentagon, and it was where some of the army's most top secret research into UFO technology was also taking place. Belvoir housed the Army Engineering School and, for former artillery and missile officers like myself, maintained a vital information database about ballistics testing and the development of new weapons. But on the secret side of the ledger, Fort Belvoir was home to the Signal School where officers for the National Security Council who had top secret crypto clearance were trained. Even years after | retired from active duty, stories lingered about the records of UFOs that were stored at Fort Belvoir, including photos and even motion pictures of military retrievals of downed extraterrestrial craft. What very few people knew was that an elite secret air force unit operated out of Fort Belvoir - ostensibly an army base - that was responsible for retrievals of downed UFOs. That was how Fort Belvoir became a repository of classified UFO footage. Those secrets remained at Fort Belvoir over the years and were closely guarded while the installation remained shrouded in mystery. For those who suspect what information was kept at the base, Fort Belvoir remains a central part of the legends surrounding the official military cover up of UFOs. Me, | was on my way there to talk about the night vision project to see what German World War II files they were keeping on the infrared viewfinders the Nazis were trying to deploy for their night fighting troops. These were cumbersome, unwieldy devices that left infantry hampered and weighed down. They were never effective in the war but held out the enormous promise of opening up the night as a battlefield where an army could maneuver around its blind and helpless enemy. That was the promise that tantalized both the Soviets and American forces as we closed in on Germany's most secret weapons facilities during the final months of the war. Our forces secured all of the German records on mountable weapons night viewers and headpieces, but it wasn't until we looked inside the crashed Roswell vehicle and saw a hazy daylight through the view ports that we realized just what the potential of night viewing could be. We understood in those few moments after the vehicle was brought back to Wright Field and General Twining made his initial report that we were the blind and helpless enemy through the eyes of the EBEs. These creatures controlled our night skies, observing us with an ease that we didn't enjoy until we had deployed our own night-viewing goggles years later and leveled the playing field against them and the Soviet client forces arrayed against us. My very proper looking deep blue Oldsmobile might not have been a secret weapon in America's arsenal, but it was carrying a description of one of the tiny components of what would be one of our most effective Cold War weapons. Guerrilla armies used the night itself on their familiar home territory as a tactical weapon that allowed them to move right past enemy positions without being spotted. They could secure a battlefield advantage as if they were invisible. But equip a patrol with night viewers, mount night viewers on tanks and observation vehicles, hover over a battlefield at night in helicopter gunships equipped for night vision, and suddenly the night becomes day and the invisible enemy appears in your gunsights like prey for the hunter. To the EBEs, we were that prey, and we knew they were monitoring our defenses, surveilling the aircraft we scrambled to chase them, and hovering above the experimental satellites we launched. We could see them with our radar, | had seen them on our scopes with my own eyes, and we knew their presence wasn't benign. But they had an advantage over us that we couldn't overcome unless we acquired the technological ability to put up enough of a defense to make their cost too high to engage in any large scale warfare. Not only was it an advantage that forced us to scrape whatever technology we could off the edge of our encounters with them; it was one of the many factors that forced us into a silence about the alien presence. If there was no public enemy, there would be no pressure from the public to do anything about it. So we simply denied all extraterrestrial activity because no aliens meant no military responsibility to counter their threat. But all the while we were still planning, measuring their hostile intentions, and pushing through weapons development that might reduce their advantage. It would have been next to impossible to stage a military build up that would help us fight extraterrestrial enemies had we not had a lot of help from our old adversaries, the Soviets and the Chinese. The Soviets made no bones about their intentions to dominate the world through Communist revolutionary coups and set about immediately to challenge us even before World War Il ended. By 1948, the Iron Curtain had dropped over Eastern Europe and the Soviets were trying to back us into a position of appeasement. In 1949, Mao Tse-tung drove Chiang Kai-shek out of mainland China to the island of Taiwan, and the United States had another major Communist adversary trying to impose its will upon its Asian neighbors. We first tasted their blood in Korea and would soon almost choke on it in Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, and Cambodia. Those were hard times, made even harder because the U.S. military also knew that not just the free world but the whole world was under a military threat from a power far greater than the combined forces of the Soviet Union and the Republic of China. We didn't know what the EBEs wanted at first, but we knew that between the cattle mutilations, surveillance of our secret weapons installations, reports of strange abductions of human beings, and their consistent buzzing of our unmanned and manned space launches, the EBEs weren't just friendly visitors looking for a polite way to say "Hello, we mean you no harm." They meant us harm, and we knew it. The problem 52