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mouse, edging ever closer until we had to respond. That's what they were looking for, how quickly we could respond and pick them upon our targeting radars or catch up to them with our interceptors. Whenever we'd get just about there for an aerial sighting, they'd take off out of the atmosphere at speeds over 7,500 miles an hour. If we tried to follow, they'd play us along until our fliers had to return. Our only successes in defending against them, back in the late1950s and early 1960s, occurred when we were able to get a firm tracking radar lock. Then when we locked our targeting radars on, the signals that missiles were supposed to follow to the target, it somehow interfered with their navigational ability and the vehicle's flight became erratic. If we were especially fortunate and able to boost the signal before they broke away, we could actually bring them down. Sometimes we actually got lucky enough to score a hit with a missile before the UFO could take any evasive action, which an army air defense battalion did with an antiaircraft missile near Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany in May 1974. The spacecraft managed to crash land in a valley. The craft was retrieved and flown back to Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada. The Roswell crash was different. There was much speculation that it was a combination of the desert lightning storm and our persistent tracking radars at Alamogordo and the 509th that helped bring down the alien vehicle over the New Mexico desert in 1947. Then there were the suspected cattle mutilations and reported abductions, perhaps the most direct form of intervention in our culture short of a direct attack upon our installations. While debates broke out among the debunkers - who said these were a combination of hoaxes, attacks by every day predators on cattle, psychological flashback memories of episodes of childhood abuse in the cases of reported abductees, and out and out fabrications of the media - field investigators found they could not explain away some of the cattle mutilations, especially where laser surgery seemed to be used, and psychologists found alarming similarities in the descriptions of abductees who had no knowledge of one another's stories. The military intelligence community regarded these stories of mutilations and abductions very seriously. They worked up descriptions of at least three separate scenarios in which (1) the EBEs were simply conducting scientific experiments on earthly life forms and collecting whatever specimens they could without causing too much disruption and alerting us; (2) the EBEs were actively collecting specimens and conducting experiments so as to determine whether this was a hospitable environment for them to inhabit, and any disruption they caused was of no concern to them; and (3) all of the experimentation and specimen collection were the prelude to some kind of infiltration or invasion of our planet. We did not know their motives, but could only assume the worst and, therefore, needed to defend ourselves however we could. While never disclosing it publicly, military intelligence analysts supported the view that Earth was already under some form of probing attack by one or more alien cultures who were testing both our ability and resolve to defend ourselves. Without ever directly addressing whether contacts between the aliens and Earth governments had already taken place - because the notes and minutes of the Hillenkoetter working group were never released to the Chiefs of Staff or to their intelligence officers - the heads of the armed services decided collectively that it was better to plan for war rather than be surprised. At the same time, the civilian leaders of the nation's space program at NASA decided that military intelligence was overreacting to the shadowing and buzzing of our spacecraft. NASA, which had been holding as highly confidential any reports of extraterrestrial activity surrounding our space vehicles, nevertheless decided to adopt an internal official "wait and watch" attitude because they believed that it would have been impossible to launch an explicitly military defensive space program and still achieve the civilian scientific aims at the same time. So NASA agreed to go covert. As a cover, NASA, in1961, agreed to cooperate with military planners to work a second tier" space program within and covered up by the civilian scientific missions. They agreed to open up a confidential "back channel" communications link to military intelligence regarding any hostile activities conducted by the EBEs against our spacecraft even if these included only shadowing or surveillance. | was aware of this through my contacts in the military intelligence community. What NASA didn't tell military intelligence, of course, was that they already had an even more classified back channel to the Hillenkoetter working group and were keeping them updated on every single alien spacecraft appearance the astronauts reported, especially during the early series of Apollo flights when the EBE craft began buzzing the lunar modules on successive missions after they thrusted out of earth orbit. Even though military intelligence was kept out of the operational loop between NASA and the working group, | and a few others still had contacts in the civilian intelligence community that kept us informed. And the army and air force managed to find at least 122 photos taken by astronauts on the moon that showed some evidence of an alien presence. It was a startling find and was one of many reasons that the Reagan administration pushed so hard for the Space Defense Initiative in 1981. In 1960, upon the confidential approval of the working group and at the request of the National Security Agency, which was concerned about the vulnerability of its U2 flights, NASA agreed to allow some of its missions to become covers for military surveillance satellites. These satellites, although approved for surveillance of Soviet ICBM activity, were also supposed to spot alien activity in remote portions of the earth. Maybe, in the 1960s, we 55