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project would have been slipped into the normal R&D functioning. Of course this device didn't come out of the Roswell incident. The incident was only a myth; it never took place. This came out of the Foreign Technology desk, something the Italians or French were working on and we picked up through our intelligence sources. Our work with laser products was becoming so successful by the end of 1961 that General Trudeau was urging me to spread the wealth around as many army bases as | could. | spoke to weapons experts at Fort Riley, Kansas, for example, about the use of lasers by troops in the field. Maybe as range finders, we suggested, or even as ways to lock onto a target the way the air force was experimenting with something they were calling "smart bombs. " By 1964, after seeing the research into the feasibility of lasers that we had commissioned, hand held range finders were being tested at army bases around the country, and today, police forces use laser sights on their weapons. Lasers became one of the army's great successes. In one of our final pushes for the development of laser based weapons systems, we argued successfully for a budget to develop laser tracking systems for incoming missiles. This was a project we fought hard for, over political opposition as well as opposition from the other military branches, which were looking at our proposal as a conventional method of tracking missiles. The laser was too new, they argued. Atmospheric interference or heavy clouds would distort the laser over long distances, they said. Or, they said, it would simply take too much power and would have no portability. General Trudeau and | had another agenda for this project that we couldn't readily share with anybody. We believed that lasers could be used not just to track incoming missiles - that was obvious. We saw the lasers too as our best weapon for not only tracking UFOs from the ground, from aircraft, or from satellites but, if we could boost the power to the necessary levels, for shooting them down. Shoot down a few of them, we speculated, and they wouldn't violate our airspaces with such impunity. Equip our fighter planes or interceptors with laser firing mechanisms and we could pose a credible threat to them. Equip our satellites with laser firing mechanisms and we could triangulate a firing pattern on the UFOs that might even keep them away from our orbiting spacecraft. But all of this was speculation in late 1961. Only a very few people in the other branches of R&D even had a hint about what we were proposing. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration had its own plans for developing laser tracking systems and didn't want to share any development budget with the military, so there was very little help forth coming from NASA. The air force and navy were guarding their own development budgets for laser weapons, and we couldn't trust the civilian intelligence agencies at all. So General Trudeau and | began advocating a plan as a cover to develop laser tracking and other sophisticated types of surveillance projects. It was outrageous on the surface, but it quickly found its adherents, and its real agenda could be completely masked. We could never call it an anti-UFO device so we named it the antimissile missile. It was one of the most successful projects ever to come out of Army R&D. It owed most of its theory to our discovery of the laser in the Roswell wreckage. CHAPTER 14 there were times during my tenure at the Pentagon when something in the Roswell file had such resonance in my life that it made me question whether there was some larger plan for my work. I've read about the concept of synchronicity or confluence in the years since | retired from the military and how things or events tend to cluster around a common thread. Such a common thread was the development of the antimissile missile that encompassed my work in R&D at the Pentagon, my brief stint as a staff adviser to Senator Strom Thurmond, and my years in Rome during the war and occupation as the assistant chief of staff, Intelligence (G-2), Rome Area Allied Command. In early 1963, just after | left the Pentagon, Senator Strom Thurmond asked me to join his staff as a consultant and adviser on military and national security issues. Congress had just appropriated $300 million to turn a fledgling plan to investigate the feasibility of an antimissile missile program into a full development project. But it ran right into a concrete barrier just as soon as it left the Senate. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara flatly refused to spend the money because, he said, not only would it intensify the U.S.-Soviet arms race, it would actually offend the Kremlin because it would put them on notice that we were trying to deploy a first strike Capability while neutralizing their ICBMs. Worse, he said to the Congress, the United States military simply didn't need the weapon in the first place. 80 The Antimissile Missile Project