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The maser, however, was only a forerunner of the product that was to come, the laser, which would revolutionize every aspect of technology it touched. It would also prove to be a weapon that would help us deploy a realistic threat to the EBEs who seemed poised to trigger a nuclear war between the superpowers. Where the maser was an amplification of generated microwaves, the laser was an amplification of light, and theories about how this might be accomplished were circulating widely throughout the weapons development community even before Bell Labs produced the first maser. | had seen the descriptions of the EBE laser in reports about the Roswell crash, a beam of light so thin that you couldn't even see it until it landed on a target. What was the purpose of this light generator? the Alamogordo group had asked. It looked like a targeting or communications device, seemed to have an almost limitless range, and, if the right power source could be found to amplify the light beam to where it could penetrate metal, the device could be used as a drill, a welder, or even a devastating weapon. Even while | was at the White House, all three branches of the military were working with researchers in university laboratories to develop a working laser. In theory, exciting the atoms of an element to produce light energy in the same way that atoms of a gas were excited to produce microwaves, lasers offered the tantalizing promise of a directed energy beam that had such a wide variety of applications it could become an almost universal utility for all divisions of the military, even controlling warehouse inventory for the Quarter master Corps. Finally, in 1958, the year after | left the White House, there was a surge in research activity, especially at Columbia University where, two years later, physicist Theodore Maiman constructed the first working laser. The first practical demonstration of the laser took place in 1960,and by the time | got to the Pentagon, General Trudeau had put it on our list of priorities to develop for military purposes. Also, because stimulated energy radiation devices were among the cache of technological debris we recovered from Roswell, the U.S. development or the laser encompassed the special urgent requirements of my Roswell mission. | had to write a report to General Trudeau suggesting ways the EBEs might have used laser technology in their missions on this planet and how we could develop similar uses for it under the guise of a conventional development program. In other words, once we guessed how the aliens were using it, it was to become our developmental model for similar applications. We believed that the EBEs used lasers for navigation, by bouncing beams off distant objects in space and homing in on them to triangulate a course; for communication, by using the laser beam as a carrier signal or asa signal in and of itself; for surveillance, by painting potential targets with a beam; and for power transmission, illumination, and even data storage. The strength and integrity of the laser beam should have served as the EBEs' primary method of communication over vast distances or even as a way of storing communications in packages for later delivery. However, it was the EBEs' use of directed energy as a medical tool and ultimately as a potential weapon that sent shivers up and down our spines because to our minds it was evidence of the aliens’ hostile intentions. Whether they saw us as true enemies to be destroyed or regarded all life on our planet as laboratory specimens to be experimented with, the results from the animal carcasses picked up in the field by our military nuclear, biological, and chemical recovery teams and the civilian intelligence investigators could have been very much the same. In the Pentagon from 1961 to 1963,1 reviewed field reports from local and state police agencies about the discoveries of dead cattle whose carcasses looked as though they had been systematically mutilated and reports from people who claimed to have been abducted by aliens and experimented on. One of the common threads in these stories were reports by the self described abductees of being subjected to some sort of probing or even a form of surgery with controlled, intense, pencil thin beams of light. Local police reported that when veterinarians were called to the scene to examine the dead cattle left in fields, they often found evidence not just that the animal's blood had been drained but that entire organs were removed with such surgical skill that it couldn't have been the work of predators or vandals removing the organs for some depraved ritual. Where there was evidence of crime of someone staging a bizarre hoax, it was usually obvious from the clumsiness of the attempt and the deliberate staging of the carcass. And in the overwhelming majority of instances where the animal was killed by a predator who consumed its blood and carried away internal organs, the evidence of teeth marks or of a brief life and death struggle was also a clear indicator of what had happened. But in those cases where investigators claimed to have been baffled by what they found, the removal of the organs and the draining of the animal's blood - where blood had been completely drained - were so sophisticated that there was almost no peripheral damage to the surrounding tissue. There was even some speculation, in the early 1960s, that whatever device the EBEs had employed, it didn't even cut through the surrounding tissue. We had no medical instruments that even remotely approached what the aliens could do. It was as though some device had simply excised the organs with techniques that even went beyond our own surgical precision. While | was on the White House National Security staff and later when | was at the Pentagon, | was intrigued by these reports. | also remember that both civilian and military intelligence personnel attached to the staffs of individuals who worked for the Hillenkoetter and Twining working group on UFOs in the 1950s were actively engaging in research into the kinds of surgical methods that would produce "crime scene evidence" like this. Could have been the Russians, they thought at first. Given the tense climate of the Cold War, a fear that the Soviets were experimenting with American livestock to develop some form of toxin or biological weapon that would devastate our cattle population was not unduly paranoid. It's sufficient to say, without going into any 77