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| suggested to General Trudeau that all the research we were conducting into helicopter tactics, especially into the role of helicopters as infantry support gun and rocket platforms, dove tailed perfectly with the possibilities of the laser as a range finding mechanism. We could paint friendly troops to locate them, identify our foes, and illuminate potential targets with light invisible to all but our own gunners. At the same time, our own bombs or missiles can home in on the laser image we project onto a target, like a heat seeking missile. Once painted, the target could evade the laser guided rocket or shell only with great difficulty. For a stationary target such asa fortification or artillery redoubt, a laser guided shell would be particularly devastating because we could take it out with one or two rounds instead of having to go back again and again to make sure we'd found the target. As a signal, a laser is so intense, refined, and perfectly stable that it is almost impervious to any kind of disturbance. For this reason, | wrote General Trudeau, the EBEs must have used an advanced form of a laser for their communication, and we can, too. The intensity of the beam and its highly refined focus mean that it can be aimed with minute precision. Amplifying the power to boost the signal should not distort the beam's aim, which makes it perfect for straight line long distance communication. Lasers also have high capacities for carrying multiple signals. Therefore, | wrote the general, we can pack a greater number of transmission bands into a laser signal than we can with our conventional signal carriers. This meant that we could literally flood a battlefield with different kinds of communication channels, each carrying different kinds of communication, some not even invented yet, and have them securely carried by laser signals. For command and control on the increasingly sophisticated electronic battlefield the army was predicting for the 1970s, lasers would become the Signal Corps workhorses. General Trudeau said that he was also interested in an item from one of the specification reports that other military observers wrote that said that lasers could also serve as projection devices for large screen displays. Lasers were so bright that displays could be shown in rooms that didn't have to be darkened. The general saw the possibility of fully lit situation rooms with large screen displays from satellite radar transmissions. The room would allow computer operators to see what they were doing at their keyboards while seeing the displays and listening to the briefing. | suggested that the army cartography division would be particularly interested in the accuracy of the laser derived measurements for maps. That same measurement ability would also be able to generate digital data for ground hugging infantry support helicopters or low flying planes. Aircraft that could stay close to the ground could avoid enemy radar and stay concealed until the last minute. But unless there was a method for accurately charting the topography, aircraft could find themselves scraping tree tops or crashing into the side of a hill. Ifa laser could accurately transmit topographic features to altitude control and navigational computers on board attack aircraft, it would keep the aircraft safely above any ground obstacles but close enough to the ground to remain concealed. This ground hugging capability that | suggested to General Trudeau had been suggested to me from the analysis reports of UFOs that also had this capability. It was what enabled them to hover close to the ground and to move rapidly at speeds over a thousand miles an hour at treetop level without hitting anything. The laser type devices aboard the UFO instantly fed the craft with the topographic features of the landscape and the craft automatically adjusted to the terrain. In late 1961, General Trudeau asked me to visit Fort Belvoir again, this time to meet a Dr. Mark Johnston, one of aeronautical research scientists from Hughes Aircraft. Fort Belvoir was one of the safe houses for the Office of R&D to conduct meetings in because it was a secure military facility. My Comings and goings there on Army R&D business were completely routine, even to the CIA surveillance teams that would occasionally pick up my car coming out of the Pentagon, and could be covered in our daily logs with references to the ongoing projects that served as covers. My meeting with Johnston, for example, was to talk about the Hughes helicopter development program, not to give him my reports on the laser measuring devices we believed were in the Roswell spacecraft. | briefed Johnston on what the scientific team from Alamogordo believed was on the spacecraft, asked him not to talk about it, and suggested that the Hughes team developing the navigational radars for the helicopter project consider using the newly developed lasers as terrain measuring apparatus and for target acquisition. "Yes, of course, "| assured him. "The Office of R&D would have a development budget for the laser project if the R&D team at Hughes thought our idea was feasible and they could develop it." And that's exactly what happened. Using the positive results from the Columbia University test and the army weapons specifications we drew up in R&D for the requirements of a range finder, targeting, and tracking weapon, and with research grants from the Pentagon, Hughes signed on as one of the contractors for the military laser. Today, the laser has become the HEL, or High Energy Laser, deployed by the army's Space Defense Command as, among other things, an antisatellite/antiwarhead weapon. My meeting at Hughes was quick and direct. Like so many of the research scientists | met with from Hughes, Dow, IBM, and Bell, Johnston disappeared behind the work benches, computer screens, or test tubes of the company's back room and out of my sight forever. When General Trudeau would ask me to follow up on the project months later, a different company representative would meet with me and the project would look just like any other Army R&D initiated research contract. Any traces of Roswell or the nut file would be gone, and the 79