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he gave them. All they had to do was provide him with a human sacrifice every now and then, someone completely unimportant or actually innocent of any wrong doing, and McCarthy pilloried them on television. But when he turned against the US. Army, he crossed into my territory and we had to shut him down. The Communists used McCarthy to give them good press and open up an area where they could work while the anti-Communists were made to look like fools. | told this to Robert Kennedy, who as a young lawyer had been a member of Roy Cohn's investigative staff working for the McCarthy subcommittee and who had learned firsthand what it was like to be completely misled into self destructive behavior. It was a mistake, he confided to me, that he would never make again. Unfortunately, his brother's enemies were his own, and he was misled into thinking that being president would allow him to settle the score. But in January of 1962 all that was on my mind was reestablishing a relationship with J. Edgar Hoover so that | could pursue my agenda while keeping a lookout for who might be dangerous out there in the academic community. Now | had something to bargain with for the information | wanted. Not only did | have the bits and pieces of the Roswell story that | knew Hoover wanted, | also had information about the domestic activities of the CIA. Hoover was more than interested in sharing information, and we continued to talk right through 1962 until | left the army and went over to Senator Thurmond's staff. Our relationship continued right through1963. And in 1964, when | was an investigator for Senator Russell on the Warren Commission and Hoover was pursuing his own independent investigation into the President's assassination, he and | could only stare at one another again on either side of the abyss of that crime. Stacked up against the enormity of what had happened, Hoover and | both understood that there are some battles you cannot win. So you leave them alone so you can fight another day. I'm not sure whether J. Edgar Hoover ever really believed that the Roswell story was true, an absolute conspiracy to cover up something else, or just a delusion that became mass hysteria out there in the desert. There were so many details buried in army memos and maintained under layers of cover stories fabricated by military intelligence experts that he couldn't possibly know the truth. But like the good cop that he was, he took information wherever he could find it and kept on searching for something that made sense. If the army saw a threat to our society, then Hoover thought there was a threat. And whenever he could follow up a report of a sighting with a very discreet appearance by a pair of FBI agents to interview the witnesses and get away with it, he did. He was more than willing to share that information with me, and that was how | found out about some of the unpublicized cattle mutilation stories in the early 1960s. My J. Edgar Hoover connection was important to me as | began my work in the early weeks of 1962 because the level of research into the types of projects we were developing became very intense. The rumors of General Trudeau's appointment to the Southeast Asia command and my selection as intelligence director for the Green Berets in Southeast Asia, as vague and unconfirmed as they were, set a deadline for the general and me to push our projects forward because we knew we had only a year or so left on our tenure at R&D. So when the FBI director and | would talk, | had questions ready to ask. No information we ever shared was in writing, and any notes that | took from the conversations we had | later destroyed after committing them to memory or taking action on the things he said. Even to this day, although FBI agents have contacted me about records supposedly still left in the old files, | don't know what notes the FBI director took about our conversations and what specific actions he ever took. Because we trusted each other and remained in contact once every six months or so even after | left government service, | never followed up on anything | said and never asked for any verification of information in the files. | think Hoover appreciated that. By February of 1962 | had lined my nut file projects up for an end run that would take me to the end of the year and either South Vietnam or retirement. The first folder on the desktop was the "glass filaments. " Fiber Optics Members of the retrieval team who foraged around inside the spacecraft on the morning of the discovery told Colonel Blanchard back at the 509th that they were amazed they couldn't find any conventional wiring. Where were the electrical connections? they asked, because obviously the vehicle had electronics. They didn't understand the function of the printed circuit wafers they found, but, even more important, they were completely mystified by the single glass filaments that ran through the panels of the ship. At first, some of the scientists thought that they comprised the missing wiring that also had the engineers so confused as they packed the craft for shipping. Maybe they were part of the wiring harness that was broken in the crash. But these filaments had a strange property to them. The wire harness seemed to have broken loose from a control panel and was separated into twelve frayed filaments that looked something like quartz. When, back at the 509th's hangar, officers from the retrieval team applied light to one end of the filament, the other end emitted a specific color. Different filaments emitted different colors. The fibers - in reality glass crystal tubes - led to a type of junction box where the fibers separated 89