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Portable Atomics A challenge posed to us directly by the army's retrieval of the Roswell craft and our further discovery that the craft was not propelled by a conventional engine - either propeller, jet, or rocket - pressed upon us the critical realization that if we were to engage these extraterrestrial creatures in space we would need a propulsion system that gave us a capability for long distance travel similar to theirs. But we had no such system. The closest form of energy we had that did not rely on a constant supply of fuel was atomic power in a controlled, sustained reaction, and even that was far away from development. However, at the close of the war the army had operational control over atomic weapons because, under Gen. Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project, the army had established the bureaucracy that developed and deployed the atomic bomb. So for army engineers, struggling to find out how the Roswell spacecraft was powered, atomic power was the easiest form of propulsion to seize upon, in part because it was the most immediate. However, by 1947, a struggle was already breaking out within the Truman administration over who would control nuclear power, a civilian commission or the military. As the nation was making the transition from wartime to peace time, the specter of a General Groves secretly dictating how and in what manifestation atomic power would be used frightened Truman's advisers. So in the end, President Truman made the decision to turn control of the nation's nuclear program over to a Civilian commission. Thus, by 1947, the army was getting out of running the nuclear power business, but that didn't mean that research into the military applications of nuclear power plants stopped. We needed to develop nuclear reactors, not only to manufacture nuclear power propulsion systems for naval vessels and for on site installation of power generating stations, but to experiment with ways nuclear power could be made portable in space by assembling systems in orbit from component parts. This would enable us to maintain long term outposts in space and even to power interplanetary vessels that could serve as a defensive force against any extraterrestrial hostile forces. If this sounds like science fiction, remember, it was 1947, and the nation had barely gotten out of World War Il before the Cold War had begun. War, not peace, was on the mind of the military officers who were in charge of the Roswell retrieval and analysis of the wreckage. The army, | discovered from the "Army Atomic Reactors" reports at Fort Belvoir, not only had a very sophisticated portable reactor program under way, but had already built one in cooperation with the air force for installation at the Sundance Radar Station six miles out of Sundance, Wyoming, early in 1962. This was a highly sophisticated piece of power generating apparatus that provided steam heat to the radar station, electrical power for the base, and a very precisely controlled separate power supply for the delicately calibrated radar equipment. But this wasn't the first portable power plant, as most people thought it was. The first portable nuclear reactor plant anywhere was for a research facility in Greenland, under the Arctic ice cap, designed for Camp Century, an Army Corps of Engineers project nine hundred miles from the North Pole. Ostensibly operated by the Army Polar Research and Development Center conducting experiments in the Arctic winter, Camp Century was also a vital observation post in an early warning system monitoring any Soviet activity at or near the North Pole and any activity related to UFO sightings or landings. During the years when | was at the White House, the UFO working group had consistently pushed President Eisenhower to establish a string of formal listening posts - electronic pickets staffed by army and air force observers at the most remote parts of the planet - to report on any UFO activity. General Twining's group had argued that if the EBEs had any plans to establish semipermanent Earth bases, it wouldn't be in a populated area or an area where our military forces could monitor. It would be at the poles, in the middle of the most desolate surroundings they could find, or even underneath the ocean. The polar caps seemed like the most obvious choices because during the 1950s we had no surveillance satellites that could spot alien activity from orbit, nor did we have a permanent presence at the two poles. It was thought that we wouldn't be able to put any sophisticated devices at the poles, either, because doing so would require more power than we could transport. However, the army's Nuclear Power Program, developed in the1950s at Fort Belvoir, provided us with the ability to install a nuclear powered base anywhere on the planet. In 1958, work was started on the Camp Century power plant, which was to be constructed beneath the ice in Greenland. Initially this was supposed to be top secret because we didn't want the Soviets to know what we were up to. Ultimately, however, the high security classification proved too unwieldy for the army because too many outside contractors were involved and the logistics, transportation to Thule, Greenland, then installation on skids beneath the ice pack created a cover story nightmare. So Army Intelligence decided to drop the security classification entirely and treat the entire plan as a scientific information gathering expedition by its polar research group. Just like the whole camouflage operation that had protected the existence of the working group, Camp Century provided the perfect cover for testing out a procedure for constructing a prefabricated, prepackaged nuclear reactor under arduous conditions and flying it to its site for final assembly. It also provided the army witha 98