Page Content (OCR)
spider's silk thread would have to be stretched nearly fifty miles before breaking and if stretched around the entire globe, it would weigh only fifteen ounces. Clearly, when the scientists at Roswell saw how this fiber - not cloth, not silk, but something like a ceramic - had encased the ship and formed the outer skin layer of the EBEs, they realized it was a very promising avenue for research. When | examined the material and recognized its similarity to spider thread, | realized that a key to producing this commercially would be to synthesize the protein and find a way to simulate the extrusion process. General Trudeau encouraged me to start contacting plastics and ceramics manufacturers, especially Monsanto and Dow, to find out who was doing research on supertenacity materials, especially at university laboratories. My quick poll paid off. | not only discovered that Monsanto was looking for a way to develop a mass production process for a simulated spider silk, | also learned that they were already working with the army. Army researchers from the Medical Corps were trying to replicate the chemistry of the spider gene to produce the silk manufacturing protein. Years later, after I'd left the army, researchers at the University of Wyoming and Dow Corning also began experiments on cloning the silk manufacturing gene and developing a process to extrude the silk fibers into a usable substance that could be fabricated into a cloth. Our research and development liaison in the Medical Corps told me that the replication of a supertenacity fiber was still years away back in 1962, but that any help from Foreign Technology that we could give the Medical Corps would find its way to the companies they were working with and probably wouldn't require a separate R&D budget. The development funding through U.S. government medical and biological research grants was more than adequate, the Medical Corps officer told me, to finance the research unless we needed to develop an emergency crash program. But | still remained fascinated by the prospect that something similar to a web spinner had spun the strands of supertenacity fabric around the spaceship. | knew that whatever that secret was, amalgamating a skin out of some sort of fabric or ceramic around our aircraft would give them the protection that the Roswell craft had and still be relatively lightweight. Again, | didn't find out about it until much later, but research into that very type of fabrication was already under way by a scientist who would, years later, win a Nobel Prize. At a meeting of the American Physical Society three years before, Dr. Richard Feynman gave a theoretical speculative assessment of the possibilities of creating substances whose molecular structure was so condensed that the resulting material might have radically different properties from the noncompressed version of the same material. For example, Feynman suggested, if scientists could create material in which the molecular structures were not only compressed but arranged differently from conventional molecular structures, the scientists might be able to alter the physical properties of the substance to suit specific applications. This seemed like brand new stuff to the American Physical Society. In reality, though, compressed molecular structures were one of the discoveries that had been made by some of the original scientific analytical groups both at Alamogordo right after the Roswell crash and at the Air Materiel Command at Wright Field, which took delivery of the material. As a young atomic physicist, Richard Feynman was a colleague of many of the postwar atomic specialists who were in the army's and then the air force's guided missile program as well as the nuclear weapons program in the 1950s. Although | never saw any memos to this effect, Feynman was reported to have been in contact with members of the Alamogordo group of the Air Materiel Command and knew about some of the finds at the Roswell crash site. Whether these discoveries suggested theories to him about the potential properties of compressed molecular structures or whether his ideas were also extensions of his theories about the quantum mechanics behavior of electrons, for which he won the Nobel Prize, | don't know. But Dr. Feynman's theories about compressed molecular structures dove tailed with the army efforts to replicate the supertenacity fiber composition and extrusion processes. By the middle of the 1960s work was under way not only at large industrial ceramics and chemical companies in the United States but in university research laboratories here, and in Europe, Asia, and India. With my questions about who was conducting research into supertenacity fibers answered and learning where that research was taking place, | could turn my attention to other applications of the technology to see whether the army could help move the development along faster or whether any collateral development was possible to create products in advance of the supertenacity fibers. Our scientists told us that one way to simulate the effect of supertenacity was in the cross alignment of composite layers of fabric. This idea was the premise for the army's search for a type of body armor that would protect against the skin piercing injuries of explosive shrapnel and rounds fired from guns. "Now this won't protect you against contusions, "General Trudeau told me after a meeting with Army Medical Corps researchers at Walter Reed. "And the concussive shock from an impact will still be strong enough to kill anybody, but at least it's supposed to keep the round from tearing through your body. " 92