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detail, that we were thinking about the same kinds of weapons, so it was not far fetched to say that we were projecting our own doomsday strategies onto what the Russians might have done. But it wasn't the Soviets who were going after our cattle. In fact the Soviet strategy for destabilizing the United States was so sophisticated that it was only a strategy of playing nuclear chicken with the Soviets that forced them to back down in the end. It was the EBEs who were experimenting with organ harvesting, possibly for transplant into other species or for processing into some sort of nutrient package or even to create some sort of hybrid biological entity. This is what people attached to the working group thought in the 1950s and 1960s, and even though we had no solid intelligence at the time that we were right, we operated on the assumption that no one takes an organ just for the sheer pleasure of removing it. Although the first public reports of cattle mutilations surfaced around 1967 in Colorado, at the White House we were reading about the mutilation stories that had been kept out of press as far back as the middle 1950s, especially in the area around Colorado. There was speculation, also, that maybe pharmaceutical companies were responsible because they could utilize the organs and soft tissues in biological experimentation, but we dismissed that because the companies had their own farms and could grow anything they wanted. Our intelligence organizations and especially the working group believed that the cattle mutilations that could not be obviously explained away as pranks, predators, or ritual slaughter were the results of interventions by extraterrestrials who were harvesting specific organs for experimentation. So if our cattle were important enough to the EBEs to get them to expose what they were doing, it was an important thing for us to understand why. The EBEs were nothing if not coldly and clinically efficient - their methodology reminded us of the Nazis - and they didn't waste time sitting around on the ground where they were most vulnerable to attack or capture unless they had a darn good reason for doing so. We didn't know their reasons back in the 1950s and 1960s and can only make educated guesses about them now, but back then we were driven by a terror that unless we found ways to defend ourselves against the EBEs we would be corralled by them and used for replacement tissue or as a source of nutrition. In 1997 this may sound like a nightmare out of a flying saucer horror movie, but in1957 this was our thinking both in the White House and in the military. We didn't know, but we had irrefutable evidence that EBEs were landing on farms, harvesting vital organs from livestock, and then just leaving the carcasses on the ground because they knew we couldn't do anything about it. The mutilations that interested the National Security personnel seemed to have the same kind of modus operandi. Whoever went after the animals seemed most interested in the mammary, digestive, and reproductive organs, especially the uteruses from cows. In many cases the eyes or throats were removed in a type of surgery in which the demarcation line was almost microscopically thin and the surrounding tissue showed that the incision had super heated and then blackened as it cooled. But the crime scene and forensic specialists noted that in any type of cut by a predatory animal or a human - even a skilled surgeon - one would find evidence of some trauma in the surrounding tissue such as swelling, contusions, or other forms of abrasion. In these reports of mutilations, forensic examination showed no evidence of collateral trauma or even inflammation. Therefore, they believed, the cuts to extract the tissue were made so quickly and wounds were sealed so fast that the surrounding tissue never was destroyed. This meant that whoever was operating on these animals did so ina matter of minutes. It was rare, therefore, that police would ever catch them in the act. So if we couldn't protect our livestock or react intelligently to the stories of human abductions, except to debunk them and make the abductees themselves think they were delusional, we had to find weapons that would put us on a more equal footing with the EBEs. One of those weapons, which had a wide application potential, was the laser - light amplification through stimulated energy radiation - the device the army found in the Roswell spacecraft and would later develop as a weapon in cooperation with Hughes Aircraft. Shortly after the first successful demonstration of a ruby red laser at Columbia University, the three military branches realized they had a winner. The following year, the results of the tests at Columbia, the industry interest in developing laser based products, and the Roswell report on stimulated energy all merged on my desk. Now it was my turn to get involved and assemble the information to support laser product development with military funds before the whole operation was turned over to one of the R&D specialists who would take the product through its next stages. That was the way our backfield worked: | fed the play, made sure the snap got off, and then faded in behind the blockers. By the time the ball carrier had made his way into the secondary, | was already off the field. | never got the Heisman Trophy, but | sure as hell moved the ball. | began by listing the needs of the army for what the laser might be able to accomplish. Based on what the army analysts reported they saw in the Roswell ship, it seemed to me obvious that if the Roswell laser was a cutting or surgical tool, the beam could also be utilized as an advanced rapid firing weapon. With a beam so precise and directed, the laser would also make an excellent range finder and target manager for artillery. If the beam was capable of instantaneous read ajustment and fed into a computer, it would also be the perfect targeting system for a tank, especially a tank on the move. Typically, a tank must stop before it can fire because the gunner needs to have a fixed firing platform from which he calculates range direction, and other compensating factors. The laser can do all that while the vehicle is moving and should therefore enable a tank to stay on the move while firing. And if a laser can paint a target from a tank and find the range, | speculated, it can do the same for a helicopter from air to air and air to ground. 78