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At the same time, we knew we were gaining on the aliens. With each successful start of a new project, some based on the Roswell technology, others initiated specifically to counter the alien capabilities we had discovered at Roswell, we believed we were advancing our game piece to the next square. We believed that no matter how hostile the aliens’ intentions were, they didn't have the raw power to launch a global war against us. They would study us, infiltrate us, wear us down until we might not be able to resist them, but they had neither the intention nor the capability, we believed, of destroying the planet so as to take it for themselves. In that, we held the upperhand. enable us to establish a strategic advantage, a base to strike at them far enough away so that we wouldn't create a panic on Earth. We needed a base on the moon. It was something the army had dreamed about from the very first months after our encounters with the aliens outside of Roswell and something we had tried to fund without the public's knowledge. It was an ambitious project that had bounced around from skeptic to skeptic inside the military for over a year before it landed in front of me. And when | took over the Foreign Technology desk, it was a project we almost had. "| ENVISION EXPEDITIOUS DEVELOPMENT OF THE PROPOSAL TO establish a lunar outpost to be of critical importance to the U.S. Army of the future. This evaluation is apparently shared by the Chief of Staff in view of his expeditious approval and enthusiastic endorsement of initiation of the study, "General Trudeau wrote to the chief of ordnance in March 1959, in support of the army's "Project HORIZON, " a strategic plan for deploying a military outpost on the surface of the moon.. It was the army's most ambitious response to the threat from extraterrestrials and, by the time | arrived at the Pentagon, it was one of the projects that General Trudeau had handed off to me to get moving. "The boys at NASA are taking over the whole rocket launching business, Phil, " he said. "And the army's not even getting the scraps left on the table. " | had just left the White House when the National Aeronautics and Space Act was passed in 1958, and | knew what that had portended. It transferred the responsibility of space from the military services to a civilian run agency that was supposed to fulfill the U.S. promises to other countries for the demilitarization of space. It was a laudable goal, anyone would argue : demilitarize space so that countries could explore and experiment without the risk of losing their space vehicles or satellites to hostile activities. For the United States and the Russians the agreement meant that our respective astronauts and cosmonauts wouldn't make war on each other. Good idea. But someone forgot to tell it to the extraterrestrials, who had been systematically violating our planet's airspace for decades, if not centuries, and had already set up a base of operations on the moon. For General Trudeau and much of the U.S. military command, the Soviets’ ability to put high payload vehicles and cosmonauts into orbit with relative ease was a frightening prospect. Unless the United States challenged Soviet technology with our own ongoing launch program and expanded our satellite surveillance, the army believed it would cede an all important strategic advantage to the Soviet Union. By 1960, we were reaching a critical juncture. Because of the development window and the time it took to get projects through development, programs started too late in the 1960s would be hopelessly obsolete by 1970, when the Soviets were expected to have established a presence in space. As in the U2 program, we had another agenda that concerned us more than just the Soviets’ ability to threaten us with a nuclear missile capability from space. We were also very much aware of the ability of a dominant military power on Earth to establish its own version of a treaty with extraterrestrials. We had already seen how Stalin negotiated a separate non-aggression pact with Hitler, allowing the Germans to stabilize its Eastern front and invade Western Europe. We didn't want to see Khrushchev gain so much unchallenged power in space that the extraterrestrials would readily agree to some kind of accommodation with him guaranteeing 62 But what we needed was a real outpost in a location that would CHAPTER 11 Project Moon Base