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persevered. Ultimately, we reached the moon and sent enough manned expeditions to explore the lunar surface that they effectively challenged the EBEs for control over our own skies and sphere of space, the very sphere General Trudeau was talking about in the Project Horizon memoranda ten years earlier. And although the Horizon proposal projected a lunar landing by1967, it presupposed that the army would begin creating the bureaucracy to manage the effort and build the hardware as early as1959. Because of NASA and civilian management of space exploration, the United States took longer to reach the moon than we had originally assumed and, of course, never did build the permanent base we had planned for in the original Horizon proposal. | knew, even though | was no longer in the army in 1969, that our success at lunar exploration had demonstrated that we were exercising control and that the EBEs would not have free rein over our skies. It also demonstrated that if there were any deals to be made, any proxy relationships to establish, the Soviets were not the ones to deal with. By the beginning of the 1970s, as the Apollo lunar landings continued, it was clear that the tide had turned and we had gained some of the advantage in dealing with the EBEs that we were seeking way back in the 1950s. But for me, back in 1961, staring at the mammoth Project Horizon report on my desk and realizing that the entire civilian science establishment was mobilizing against this endeavor, | knew that small victories would have to suffice until the big ones could be won. And | took out the printed silicon wafers we'd pulled from the Roswell spacecraft wreckage and told myself that these would comprise the next project | would get into development. | barely knew what they were, but, if the scientists at White Sands Proving Grounds were right about what they portended, this was a victory we would relish long after the political battles over Project Horizon were over. CHAPTER 12 WITH THE NIGHT-VISION IMAGE INTENSIFIER PROJECT UNDER way at Fort Belvoir and the Project Horizon team trying to swim upstream against the tide of civilian management of the U.S. space program, | turned my attention to the next of the Roswell crash fragments that looked especially intriguing: the charred semiconductor wafers that had broken off some larger device. | hadn't made these my priorities at first, not knowing what they really were, until General Trudeau asked me to take a closer look. "Talk to some of the rocket scientists down at Alamogordo about these things, Phil, " he said. "| think they'll know what we should do with them." | knew that in the days immediately following the crash, General Twining had met with the Alamogordo group of the Air Materiel Command and had described some of the debris to them. But | didn't know how detailed his descriptions were or whether they even knew about the wafers we had in our file. "| want to talk to some of the scientists up here, too, "| said. "Especially, | want to see some of the engineers from the defense contractors. Maybe they can figure out what the engineering process is for these things. " "Go over to Bell Labs, Phil, "General Trudeau also suggested. " The transistor came out of their shop and these things look a lot like transistorized circuits. " I'd heard that General Twining had worked very closely with both Bell Labs and Motorola on communications research during the war, afterwards at the Alamogordo test site for V2 missile launches, and after the Roswell crash. Whether he had brought them any material from the crash or showed them the tiny silicon chips was a matter of pure speculation. | only know that the entire field of circuit miniaturization took a giant leap in 1947 with the invention of the transistor and the first solid state components. By the late 1950s, transistors had replaced the vacuum tube in radios and had turned the wall-sized wooden box of the 1940s into the portable plastic radio you could hear blaring away at the shore on a hot July Sunday. The electronics industry had taken a major technological jump in less than ten years, and | had to wonder privately whether any Roswell material had gotten out that | didn't know about prior to my taking over Foreign Technology in 1961. 68 The Integrated Circuit Chip: From the Roswell Crash Site to Silicon Valley