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| began to answer, but Harold Brown got up to leave. We shook hands and he walked toward the door. The army colonel remained in front of my desk. "Maybe just you and | can have a word, Colonel Corso, " he said. My own associate on Senator Thurmond's committee left the office also. "In the Pentagon, we understand that your early research into the technology of the antiballistic missile is the real reason for your support, Colonel Corso, " the project manager said. "It's in good hands. " But | can tell you he didn't know the real reason, the EBEs. Only General Trudeau understood the secret agenda that lay beneath the research into the project. "In just a couple of years we'll have lunar spacecraft orbiting the moon, " he said. "We'll have orbiting satellites mapping every inch of the Soviet Union. We'll see what they can throw against us. Then we'll have exactly the kind of antimissile missile you proposed because then even the Congress will see the reason for it. ""But until then .. "| began. "Until then, " the colonel said, "all we can do is wait. "It would take another twenty years for the beginnings of an antimissile to be deployed. And it would also take a president who was willing to recognize the threat from the extraterrestrials to force an antimissile weapon through a hostile Congress. CHAPTER 15 | BARELY PICKED MY HEAD UP FROM THE PILES OF TECHNICAL proposals on my desk during the winter months of 1961. The work didn't even stop for the Christmas holiday, when most of Washington likes to take a break and head for the West Virginia mountains or the Maryland countryside. | was traveling a lot during the final months of 1961, seeing weapons undergo testing at proving grounds around the country, meeting with university researchers on such diverse items as the preservation of food or the conversion of spent atomic pile material into weapons, and developing intelligence reports for General Trudeau on the kinds of technologies that might shape weapons development into the next decade. With my other eye, | was keeping a look out for any reports going to the Air Intelligence Command about UFO sightings that | thought Army Intelligence should be thinking about. The AIC was the next step in classification from the Project Blue Book people. Its job, besides the obvious task of moving any urgent UFO reports up the ladder of secrecy to the next levels where they would disappear behind the veil of camouflage, was to classify the type of event or incident the sighting seemed to indicate. Usually that meant separating real aircraft sightings that needed to be investigated for pure military intelligence purposes from either true UFO sightings that needed to be processed by whatever elements of the original working group were on watch or false sightings that needed to be sent back down to Blue Book to be debunked. The AIC loved it when it had actual false sightings it could send back: an obvious meteorite that they could confirm, some visual anomaly having to do with an alignment of planets, or, best of all, a couple of clowns somewhere that decided to pull a Halloween prank and scare the locals. There were guys running around wheat fields with snowshoes or submitting photos of flying frozen pie tins to the local papers. Then the folks at Blue Book could release the story to the press, and everybody patted themselves on the back for the job they were all doing. Life could be fun in the early 1960s, especially if you didn't know the truth. Moving into 1962, Army Intelligence was lit up with rumors about potential threats coming in from all over the place. The anti-Castro Cubans were mad about the President's refusal to support the Bay of Pigs invasion and were looking for revenge; Castro was mad about the Bay of Pigs invasion and was looking to get back at us; Khrushchev was still furious about the U2 and the Bay of Pigs and thinking Kennedy was a pushover, would soon jump on an opportunity to force us into some humiliating compromise. The Russians were on the verge of sending manned spacecraft into extended orbital flights and robot probes out to explore Venus. We were way behind in the space race and none of the services had the budget or the ability to get us back into the fight. NASA was telling the President they would have to dig in, develop the technology base, and, by the middle of the decade, 87 "But when do you think development will start?" | asked. My Last Year in R&D: The Hoover Files, Fiber Optics, Supertenacity, and Other Artifacts