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Everybody wants the best and fastest plane, of course, so that we can out fly and out shoot the enemy we know about. But we were also defending our skies against an enemy we didn't admit to having. The second agenda was always there and the Cold War provided the budgetary impetus the military needed : We were building aircraft to protect against flying saucers. And in a very real measure, we succeeded. Both the United States and USSR were sensitive to another area where the extraterrestrials were aggressing upon our military personnel : our respective space exploration programs. From the very beginning of our endeavors to put satellites in orbit, the extraterrestrials have been surveilling and then actively interfering with our launch vehicles and in some cases the manned and unmanned payloads themselves by buzzing them, jamming radio transmissions, causing electrical problems with the spacecrafts' systems, or causing mechanical malfunctions. American astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts have separately reported sightings of UFOs so routinely that it's become commonplace. The audio/video transmission downlink between space capsules and NASA, however, is a secure scrambled signal so that commentary about UFOs shadowing the spacecraft can't be picked up by private listeners. Even then, the astronauts are specifically instructed not to report UFO sightings until they are debriefed once they've landed. Astronaut Gordon Cooper, for example, reported that when he was a fighter pilot over Germany in the 1950s, he scrambled with other Sabre Jet fighter pilots to intercept a formation of UFOs flying over his base, but when his fighter group got too close, the formation of UFOs flew away. Cooper also described film that he saw at Edwards Air Force base in California in 1957 of a UFO landing. He said that he sent the film to Washington and followed up on it with the officers at Project Blue Book, but they never responded to his queries. Similarly, X-15 pilot Joe Walker revealed that his 1961 mission in setting a new world air speed record was also to hunt for UFOs during his high altitude flights. He also said that he filmed UFOs during an X-15 flight a year later in 1962. Other reports persisted about Mercury 7 astronauts being shadowed by UFOs and about Neil Armstrong's having seen an alien base on the moon during the Apollo 11 flyover and landing. NASA has, of course, not admitted to any of this, and, very correctly, it's been treated as a matter of high national security. An extraterrestrial presence on the moon, whether it was true or not in the 1950s, was an issue of such military importance that it was about to become a subject for National Security Council debate before Admiral Hillenkoetter and Generals Twining and Vandenberg pulled it back under their working group's security classification. The issue never formally reached the National Security Council, although Army R&D under the new command of General Trudeau in 1958 quickly developed preliminary plans for Horizon, a moon base construction project designed to provide the United States with a military observation presence on the lunar surface. Started in the late 1950s and set for completion between 1965 and1967, Horizon was supposed to establish defensive fortifications on the moon against a Soviet attempt to use it as a military base, an early warning surveillance system against a Soviet missile attack, and, most importantly, a surveillance and defense against UFOs. It was, to be blunt, a plan to establish a skirmish line in space to protect the earth against a surprise attack. But Horizon was side tracked when the National Space and Aeronautics Act gave control over space exploration to the civilian NASA, effectively eliminating the military branches from pursuing their own projects until much later in the1970s. Fears of an attack to probe our planet's ability to defend itself were running rampant at National Security and through the military chiefs of staff during the middle 1950s. After he retired from the army, even Gen. Douglas MacArthur got into the fray, urging the military to prepare itself for what he felt would be the next major war. He told the New York Times in 1955 that "The nations of the world will have to unite for the next war will be an interplanetary war. The nations of the Earth must someday make a common front against attack by people from other planets. " The public took little notice of that comment, but it was, in fact, a disclosure of the strategic thinking of the military back in the 1950s and explains part of the paranoia the government was displaying about all information relating to the flying saucers and unidentified aircraft. Part of the military response to what they perceived as threats from extraterrestrials was, first, to analyze the specific ways that alien spacecraft "passively" disrupt our defenses and world wide communications through electrical and magnetic field interference and develop circuitry hardened against it. Second, General Trudeau and his counterparts in the other branches of the military at the Pentagon charged with strategic planning looked at the aggressive behaviors of the EBEs. They didn't just shadow or surveil our spacecraft in orbit; they buzzed us and tried to create such havoc with our communications systems that NASA more than once had to rethink astronaut safety in the Mercury and Gemini programs. Years later, there was even some speculation among Army Intelligence analysts who had been out of the NASA strategy loop that the Apollo moon landing program was ultimately abandoned because there was no way to protect the astronauts from possible alien threats. The alien spacecraft were also aggressively buzzing our frontline defenses in Eastern Europe, either looking for blind spots or weaknesses, or - which is what | believed because | was there and saw it with my own eyes - probing our radar to see how quickly we responded. We'd see blips shoot across our screens that we couldn't identify and suddenly they'd disappear. Then they'd reappear, only this time even closer to our airfields or missile launchers. Once we determined that we weren't being probed by Soviet or East German aircraft, we sometimes decided not to respond to the threats. Many times they'd just go away. But other times they would play cat and 54