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them up completely, it would look like there was a complete break in a technological path. How do you explain that? But if there's research already going on, no matter how basic, then just showing someone at the company one of these pieces of technology could give them all they need to reverse engineer it so that it became our technology. But we'd have to support it as part of an arms development research contract if the company didn't already have a budget. This is what | wanted to do with this glass filament technology. "Bell Labs, " he answered. "It'll take another thirty years to develop it, but one day most of the telephone traffic will be carried on fiberoptic cable. " Army R&D had contacts at Bell just like other contractors we worked with, so | wrote a short memo and proposal to General Trudeau on the potential of optical fibers for a range of products that Professor Kohler and | discussed. | described the properties of what had been previously called a wiring harness, explained how it carried laser signals, and, most importantly, how these fibers actually bent a stream of light around a corner and conducted it the same way a wire conducts an electrical current. Imagine conducting a beam of high intensity single frequency light the same way you'd run a water line to a new bathroom, | wrote. Imagine the power and flexibility it provided the EBEs, especially when they used the light signal as a carrier for other coded information. This would enable the military to recreate its entire Communications infrastructure and allow our new surveillance satellites to feed find store potential targeting information right into frontline command and control installations. The navy would be able to see the deployment of an entire enemy fleet, the air force could look down on approaching enemy squadrons and target them from above even if our planes were still on the ground, and for the army it would give us an undreamed of strategic advantage. We could survey an entire battlefield, track the movements of troops from small patrols to entire divisions, and plot the deployments of tanks, artillery, and helicopters at the same time. The value of fiberoptic communication to the military would be immeasurable. And, | added, | was almost certain that a development push from the army to facilitate research on the complete reengineering of our country's already antiquated telephone system would not be seen by any company as an unwarranted intrusion. | didn't have to wait long for the general's response. "Do it, " he ordered. "And get this under way fast. I'll get you all the development allocation you need. Tell them that." And before the end of that week, | had an appointment with a systems researcher at the Western Electric research facility outside of Princeton, New Jersey, right down the road from the Institute for Advanced Study. | told him it came out of foreign technology, something that the intelligence people picked up from new weapons the East Germans were developing but thought we could use. "If what you think you have, " he said over the phone, "is that interesting and shows us where our research is going, we'd be silly not to lend you an ear for an afternoon. " "I'll need less than an afternoon to show you what | got, "| said. Then | packed my Roswell field reports into my briefcase, got myself an airline ticket for a flight to Newark Airport, and | was on my way. Even before the 1960s, when | was, still on the National Security staff, the army had begun to look for fibers for flak jackets, shrapnel proof body armor, even parachutes, and a protective skin for other military items. Silk had always been the material of choice for parachutes because it was light, yet had an incredible tensile strength that allowed it to stretch, keep shape, and yet withstand tremendous forces. Whether the army's search for what they called a "tenacity fiber" was prompted purely by its need to find better protection for its ttoops or because of what the retrieval team found at Roswell, | do not know. | suspect, however, that it was the discovery at the crash site that began the army's search. Among the items in my Roswell file that we retained from the retrieval were strands of a fiber that even razors couldn't cut through. When | looked at it under a magnifying glass, its dull grayness and almost matte finish belied the almost supernatural properties of this fiber. You could stretch it, twist it around objects, and subject it to a level of torque that would rend any other fiber, but this held up. Then, when you released the tension, it snapped back to its original length without any loss of tension in its original form. It reminded me of the filaments in a spiderweb. We became very interested in this material and began to study a variety of technologies, including spider silks because they, alone in nature, exhibit natural super tenacity properties. The spiders' spinning of its silk begins in its abdominal glands as a protein that the spider extrudes through a narrow tube that forces all the molecules to align in the same direction, turning the protein into a rod like, very long, single thread with a structure not unlike a crystal. The extrusion process not only aligns the protein molecules, the molecules are very compressed, occupying much less space than conventionally sized molecules. This combination of lengthwise aligned and super compressed molecules gives this thread an incredible tenacity and the ability to stretch under enormous pressure while retaining its tensile strength and integrity. A single strand of this 91 "Where is the best research on optical fibers being done?" | asked him. Supertenacity Fibers