Roswell and the EBE

 Therefore, perhaps we should consider the EBEs as described in the medical autopsy reports humanoid robots rather then life forms, specifically engineered for long distance travel through space or time.

A hot Washington summer morning had already settled over the Potomac like a wet towel on the day I finished the first of my reports for General Trudeau. And what a report it was. It set the tone for all of the other reports and recommendations I was to make for the general over the next two years. It began with the biggest find we had: the alien extraterrestrial itself.
 
Had I not read the medical examiner’s report of the alien from Walter Reed with my own eyes and reviewed the 1947 army photographs and sketches, I would have called any description of this creature pure science fiction; that is, had I not seen either this or its twin suspended in a transparent crypt at Fort Riley. But here it was again, just a yellowing sheaf of papers and a few cracked glossy prints in a brown folder sitting among scores of odds and ends, bits of debris, and strange devices in my nut file.

Even stranger to me than the medical examiner’s report was my reaction: What could we exploit from this entity? I wrote the general that “whether we found an ‘extraterrestrial biological entity’ is not as important in the R&D arena as are the ways we can develop what we learn from it so that man can travel in space. “ This quickly became the overriding concern with all of the Roswell artifacts and the general format for all of my reports. Once I swallowed back the “oh wow” aspect to all of this life altering information - and sometimes it took a very big swallow - I was still left with the job of sorting out what looked promising for R&D to develop from what seemed beyond our realistic grasp for the present. I began with the EBE.

The medical report and supporting photographs in front of me suggested that the creature was remarkably well adapted for long distance space travel. For example, biological time, the Walter Reed medical examiners hypothesized, must have passed very slowly for the entity because it possessed a very slow metabolism, evidenced, they said, by the enormous capacities of the huge heart and lungs.
 
The physiology of this thing indicated that this was not a creature whose body had to work hard to sustain it. A larger heart, my ME’s report read, meant that it took fewer beats than an average human heart to drive the thin, milky, almost lymphatic like fluid through a limited, more primitive looking, and apparently reduced capacity circulatory system. As a result, the biological clock beat more slowly than a human’s and probably allowed the creature to travel great distances in a shorter biological time than humans.

The heart was very decomposed by the time the Walter Reed pathologists got their hands on it. It seemed to them that our atmosphere was quite toxic to the creature’s organs. Given the time that passed between the crash of the vehicle and the creature’s arrival at Walter Reed, it decomposed all of the organs far more rapidly than it would have decomposed human organs. This fact particularly impressed me because I had seen one of these things, if not the very one described in the report, suspended in a gel-like substance at Fort Riley.
 
So whatever exposure it must have had was very minimal by human standards because the medical personnel at the 509th’s Walker Field got it into a liquid preservation state very quickly. Nevertheless, the Walter Reed pathologists were unable to determine with any certainty the structure of the creature’s heart except to guess that because it functioned as a passive blood storage facility as well as a pumping muscle that it didn’t work the same way as did a four chambered human heart. They said the alien heart seemed to have had internal diaphragm like muscles that worked less hard than human heart muscle did because the creatures were meant to survive within a reduced gravity as we understand gravity.

As camels store water, so did this creature store whatever atmosphere it breathed in the large capacity of its lungs. The lungs functioned in ways similar to a camel’s humps or to our scuba tanks and released atmosphere very slowly into the creature’s system. Because of the large heart and the storage function we believed it had, we also surmised that it took far less breathable atmosphere to sustain the creature, thereby reducing the need for carrying large volumes of atmosphere along on the voyage.
 
Perhaps the aircraft had a means of recirculating its atmosphere, recycling spent or waste air back into the craft. Moreover, because the creatures were only four or to feet tall, the large lungs occupied a far greater percentage of the chest cavity than human lungs did, further impressing the pathologists who examined the creatures’ remains. This also indicated to us that perhaps we were dealing with an entity specifically engineered for long distance travel.

If we believed the heart and lungs seemed bioengineered for long distance travel so, too, was the creature’s skeletal tissue. Although it was in a state of advanced decomposition, the creature’s bones looked to the army medical examiners to be fibrous, actually thinner than comparable human bones such as the ribs, sternum, clavicle, and pelvis. Pathologists speculated that the bones were more flexible than human bones and had a resiliency that might be related to the function of shock absorbers. More brittle human bones might more easily shatter under the stresses these alien entities must have been routinely subjected to. However, with a flexible skeletal frame, these entities appeared well suited for potential shocks and physical traumas of extreme forces and could withstand the fractures that would cripple human space travelers in a similar environment.

The military recovery team at the Roswell site had reported that the two creatures still alive after the crash had difficulty breathing our atmosphere. Whether that was because they were suddenly tossed out of their craft, unprotected, into our gravity envelope or whether our atmosphere itself was toxic to them, we don’t know. We also don’t know whether the one creature who died very shortly after the crash was struggling to breathe because he was fatally wounded by gunshots or because of other reasons.
 
Military witnesses recounted different stories about the creature that survived and tried to run. Some said it was struggling to breathe from the moment the military had secured the area; others said that it was gasping only after it had been shot by one of the sentries. My guess was that it was the alien’s sudden exposure to the earth’s strong gravity that caused the creature to panic at first. That could have been one reason his breathing seemed labored. Then, after he fled and was shot, he was struggling to breathe because of his wounds. The medical examiner’s report mentioned nothing about toxic gases or the kind of atmosphere he believed the creatures naturally breathed.

If the Roswell craft were a scout or surveillance ship, as the military analysts back at Wright believed, then it was also more than likely that the creatures never intended to exit the craft. This was a craft equipped with a device that was capable of penetrating our nighttime or utilizing the temperature differentials of different objects to create a visual image, enabling the occupants to navigate and observe in darkness. And because it could elude our interceptors and appear and disappear on our radar screens at will, we believed that the occupants simply stayed inside and observed rather than roamed about. Perhaps other types of craft deployed from this same culture were equipped to land and carry out missions and therefore had breathing and antigravity apparatus on board for its crew that permitted them to exit the craft without suffering any consequences. The medical examiner didn’t speculate on this.

What did intrigue those who inspected the aircraft once it was shipped to Wright Field was the complete absence of any food preparation facilities. Nor were there any stored foodstuffs on board. At a time when space travel was a science fiction writer’s fantasy, military analysts were already at work formulating ideas for how just such a technology could be practically implemented. It was not for travel to other planets, but for navigation around the earth because that’s the technology that military planners believed the Germans were developing as an extension of their V2 rocket program.
 
If you’re going to put airmen into earth orbit, how do you process their waste products, provide adequate oxygen, and sustain them during prolonged periods? Clearly, after you’ve developed a launch vehicle with enough thrust to put a craft into earth orbit, keeping it there long enough for it to accomplish a mission is the next problem to tackle. The Roswell craft seemed to have tackled it because somehow it got here from somewhere else. But there was no indication of how such household problems as food preparation and the disposal of waste were solved.

There was much speculation from the different medical analysts about what these beings were composed of and what could have sustained them. First of all, doctors were more tantalized by the similarities the creatures shared with us than they were concerned about the differences. Rather than hideous-looking insects or the reptilian man-eaters that attacked Earth in War of the Worlds, these beings looked like little versions of us, only different. It was eerie.

While doctors couldn’t figure out how the entities’ essential body chemistry worked, they determined that they contained no new basic elements. However, the reports that I had suggested new combinations of organic compounds that required much more evaluation before doctors could form any opinions. Of specific interest was the fluid that served as blood but also seemed to regulate bodily functions in much the same way glandular secretions do for the human body. In these biological entities, the blood system and lymphatic systems seem to have been combined. And if an exchange of nutrients and waste occurred within their systems, that exchange could have only taken place through the creature’s skin or the outer protective covering they wore because there were no digestive or waste systems.

The medical report revealed that the creatures were enclosed within a one piece protective covering like a jumpsuit or outer skin in which the atoms were aligned so as to provide a great tensile strength and flexibility. One examiner wrote that it reminded him of a spider’s web, which appears very fragile but is, in fact, very strong. The unique qualities of a spiderweb result from the alignment of fibers that provide great tenacity because they’re able to stretch under great pressure, yet display a resiliency that allows them to snap back into shape even after the shock of an impact. Similarly, the creature’s spacesuit or outer skin appeared to be stretched around it as if it were literally spun over the creature and seized up around it, providing a perfect skin-tight protective fit. The doctors had never seen anything like it before.

I think I finally understood it years later, after I had left the Pentagon and I was buying a Christmas tree. As I stood there in the frosty air, I watched as the young man who prepared the tree for transport inserted it, top first, into a stubby barrel like device that automatically spun a twine mesh covering around the branches to keep them in place for the trip home. After I got home I had to cut through the mesh with a knife to remove the tree and separate the branches. This tree set up reminded me specifically of the medical report on the creature from the Roswell crash, and I imagined that maybe the spinning process of the creature’s outer garment resembled something like this.

The lengthwise alignment of the fibers in the suit also prompted the medical analysts to suggest that the suit might have been capable of protecting the wearer against the low energy cosmic rays that would routinely bombard any craft during a space journey. The interior organs of the creature seemed so fragile and oversized that the Walter Reed medical analysts imagined that without the suit the entity would have been vulnerable to the cumulative physical trauma from a constant energy particle bombardment. Space travel without protection from subatomic particle bombardment might subject the traveler to the same kind of effects he’d experience if he were cooked in a microwave oven. The particle bombardment inside the craft, if heavy enough to constitute a shower, would so excite and accelerate the creature’s atomic structure that the resulting heat energy would literally cook the entity up.

The Walter Reed doctors were also fascinated by the nature of the creature’s inner skin. It resembled, although their preliminary reports didn’t go into any chemical analysis, a thin layer of fatty tissue unlike any they’d ever seen before. And it was completely permeable, as if it were constantly exchanging chemicals back and forth with the combination blood/lymphatic system. Was this the way the creatures nourished themselves during their journeys and was this how waste was processed? The very small mouths and the lack of a human digestive system troubled the doctors at first because they didn’t know how these things were sustained. But their hypothesis that they processed chemicals released from their skin and maybe even recirculated waste chemicals would have explained the lack of any food preparation or waste processing facilities on the craft. I speculated, however, that they didn’t require food or facilities for waste disposal because they weren’t actual life forms, only a kind of robot or android.

Another explanation, of course, suggested by the engineers at Wright Field, is that there would have been no need for food preparation facilities had this craft been only a small scout ship that didn’t venture far from a larger craft. The creatures’ low metabolism meant that they could survive extended periods away from the main craft by subsisting on some form of military prepackaged foods until they returned to base. Neither the Wright Field engineers nor the Walter Reed medical examiners had an explanation for the lack of waste disposal on board the craft, nor could they explain how the creatures’ waste was processed. Maybe I was speculating too far about robots or androids when I was writing my report for General Trudeau, but I kept thinking, also, that the skin analysis that I was reading sounded more akin to the skin of a houseplant than the skin of a human being. That, too, could have been another explanation for the lack of food or waste facilities.

Much of the attention during the preliminary and later autopsies of the creatures focused on the size, nature, and anatomy of their brains. Much credence also was given to the first hand descriptions of on scene witnesses who said they received impressions from the dying creature that it was suffering and in great pain. No one heard the creature make any sounds, so any impressions, Army Intelligence personnel assumed, would have to have been created through some type of empathic projection or outright mental telepathy.
 
But witnesses said they heard no “words” in their mind, only the resonance of a shared or projected impression much simpler than a sentence but far more complex because they were able to share with the creature a sense not only of suffering but of profound sadness, as if it were in mourning for the others who perished on board the craft. These witness reports intrigued me more than any other information we took from the crash site.

The medical examiners believed that the alien brain, way oversized in comparison with the human brain and in proportion to the creature’s tiny stature, had four distinct sections. The creatures were dead and the brains had begun to decompose by the time they were removed from the soft spongy skulls that felt to the doctors more like palatal cartilage than the hard bone of a human cranium. Even had the creatures been alive when they were examined, 1947 medical technology didn’t have ultrasound scanning or the high resonance tomography of today’s radiology labs.
 
Accordingly, there was no way for the doctors to evaluate the nature of the cranial lobes, or “spheres, “ as they called them in the report. Thus, despite the rampant speculation about the nature of the creatures’ brains - thought projection, psychokinetic powers, and the like - no hard evidence existed of anything, and the reports were very light on real scientific data.

Where the possibility of some evidence about the workings of the alien brains did exist was in what I referred to in my reports as the ”headbands”. Among the artifacts we retrieved were devices that looked something like headbands but had neither adornment nor decoration of any kind. Embedded by some very advanced kind of vulcanizing process into a form of flexible plastic were what we now know to have been electrical conductors or sensors, similar to the conductors on an electroencephalograph or polygraph.
 
This band was fitted around the part of the alien cranium just above the ears where the skull began to expand to accommodate the large brain. At the time, the field reports from the crash and the subsequent analysis at Wright Field indicated that the engineers at the Air Materiel Command thought these might be communication devices, like the throat mikes our pilots wore during World War II. But, as I would find out when I evaluated the device and sent it into the market for reverse-engineering, this was a throat mike only in a way that a primitive stylus can be considered the forerunner of the color laser-imaging printer.

Suffice it to say that in the few hours the material was at Walker Field in Roswell, more than one officer at the 509th gingerly slipped this thing over his head and tried to figure out what it did. At first it did nothing. There were no buttons, no switches, no wires, nothing that could even be considered to have been a control panel. So no one knew how to turn it on or off. Moreover, the band was not really adjustable, though it had enough elasticity to have been one size fits all for the creatures whose skulls were large enough to accommodate them. However, the reports I read stated, the few officers whose heads were just large enough to have made contact with the full array of conductors got the shocks of their lives.
 
In their descriptions of the headband, these officers reported everything from a low tingling sensation inside their heads to a searing headache and a brief array of either dancing or exploding colors on the insides of their eyelids as they rotated the device around their head and brought the sensors into contact with different parts of their skull.

These eyewitness reports suggested to me that the sensors stimulated different parts of the brain while at the same time exchanged information with the brain. Again, using the analogy of an EEC, these devices were a very sophisticated mechanism for translating the electrical impulses inside the creatures’ brains into specific commands. Perhaps these headband devices comprised the pilot interface of the ship’s navigational and propulsion system combined with a long range communications device.
 
At first I didn’t know, but it was only when we began development of the long brain wave research project toward the end of my tenure at the Pentagon that I realized just what we had and how it might be developed. It took a long time to harvest this technology, but fifty years after Roswell, versions of these devices eventually became a component of the navigational control system for some of the army’s most sophisticated helicopters and will soon be on the American consumer electronics market as user input devices for personal computer games.

The first Army Air Force analysts and engineers both at the 509th and at Wright Field were also bedeviled by the lack of any traditional controls and propulsion system in the crashed vehicle. Looking at their reports and the artifacts from the perspective of 1961, however, I imagined that the keys to understanding what made the craft go and directed its flight lay not only within the craft itself but in the relationship between the pilots and the craft. If we hypothesized a brainwave guidance system that was as specific to the pilots’ electronic signature as it was to the spacecraft’s, then we were looking at an entirely revolutionary concept of guided flight in which the pilot was the system.
 
Imagine transportation devices in which the key to the ignition is a digitized code derived from your electroencephalographic signature and is read automatically upon your donning some sort of sensorized headband. That’s the way I believed the spacecraft was navigated, by direct interaction between the electronic waves generated within the minds of the pilots and the craft’s directional controls. The electronic brain signals were interpreted and transmitted by the headband devices, which served as interfaces.

I never managed to obtain a copy of the Bethesda autopsy of the alien body the navy received from General Twining. I only had the army report. The remaining bodies were kept in storage at Wright Field initially. Then they were split up among the services. When the air force became a separate branch of the service, the remaining bodies, stored at Wright, along with the spacecraft, were sent to Norton Air Force Base in California, where the air force began experiments to replicate the technology of the vehicle. This made sense. The air force cared about the flight capabilities of the craft and how to build defenses against it.

Experiments were carried out at Norton and ultimately at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, at the famous Groom Lake site where the Stealth technology was developed. The army cared only for the weapons systems aboard the craft and how they could be re-engineered for our own use. The original Roswell spacecraft remained at Norton, however, where the air force and CIA maintained a kind of alien technology museum, the final resting place of the Roswell spacecraft. But experiments in replicated alien craft continued to be carried on through the years as engineers tried to adapt the propulsion and navigation systems to our level of technology. This continues to this very day almost in plain sight for people with security clearance who are taken to where the vehicles are kept.
 
Over the years, the replicated vehicles have become an ongoing, inner circle saga among top ranking military officers and members of the government, especially the favored senators and members of the House who vote along military lines. Those who are shown the secrets are immediately bound by national secrecy legislation and cannot reveal what they saw. Thus, the official camouflage is maintained despite the large number of people who really know the truth. I admit I’ve never seen the craft at Norton with my own eyes, but enough reports passed across my desk during my years at Foreign Technology so that I knew what the secret was and how it was maintained.

There were no conventional technological explanations for the way the Roswell craft’s propulsion system operated. There were no atomic engines, no rockets, no jets, nor any propeller driven form of thrust. Those of us in R&D from all three branches of the service tried for years to adapt the craft’s drive system to our own technology, but, through the 1960s and 1970s, fell short of getting it operational. The craft was able to displace gravity through the propagation of magnetic wave, controlled by shifting the magnetic poles around the craft so as to control, or vector, not a propulsion system but the repulsion force of like charges.
 
Once they realized this, engineers at our country’s primary defense contractors raced among themselves to figure out how the craft could retain its electric capacity and how the pilots who navigated it could live within the energy field of a wave. At issue was not only a great discovery, but the nuts-and-bolts chance to land multibillion dollar development contracts for a whole generation of military air and undersea craft.

The initial revelations into the nature of the spacecraft and its pilot interface came very quickly during the first few years of testing at Norton. The air force discovered that the entire vehicle functioned just like a giant capacitor. In other words, the craft itself stored the energy necessary to propagate the magnetic wave that elevated it, allowed it to achieve escape velocity from the earth’s gravity, and enabled it to achieve speeds of over seven thousand miles per hour. The pilots weren’t affected by the tremendous g-forces that build up in the acceleration of conventional aircraft because to aliens inside, it was as if gravity was being folded around the outside of the wave that enveloped the craft. Maybe it was like traveling inside the eye of a hurricane. But how did the pilots interface with the wave form they were generating?

I reported to General Trudeau that the secret to this system could be found in the single-piece skin-tight coveralls spun around the creatures. The lengthwise atomic alignment of the strange fabric was a clue to me that somehow the pilots became part of the electrical storage and generation of the craft itself. They didn’t just pilot or navigate the vehicle; they became part of the electrical circuitry of the vehicle, vectoring it in a way similar to the way you order a voluntary muscle to move. The vehicle was simply an extension of their own bodies because it was tied into their neurological systems in ways that even today we are just beginning to utilize.

So the creatures were able to survive extended periods living inside a high energy wave by becoming the primary circuit in the control of the wave. They were protected by their suits, which enclosed them head to feet, but their suits enabled them to become one with the vehicle, literally part of the wave. In 1947 this was a technology so new to us that it was as frightening as it was frustrating. If we could only develop the power source necessary to generate a consistently well defined magnetic wave around a vehicle, we could harness a technology which would have surpassed all forms of rocket and jet propulsion. It’s a process we’re still trying to master today, fifty years after the craft fell into our possession.

I pushed myself through the night to complete the report for the general. At least I wanted him to see that our strategy held out the probability that even in a basic evaluation of the material were covered, the seeds were there for specific products we could develop. I wanted to start the entire process by writing him a background report about the nature of the beings we’d autopsied and what we could understand of the technology from an analysis of their spacecraft.

By the time I finished, it was already just before sun up, and I looked like hell. This was the day I was going to drop my report on the general’s desk, first thing. I’d snap right to attention in front of him and say, “Here’s that report you were waiting for, General, “ confident it contained more than he ever thought it would because the subject was that new and complicated. But I wanted to be clean shaven and in a clean, crisp shirt. That’s what I wanted. I didn’t even need any sleep because my optimism and confidence at that moment were more powerful than anything a few hours of sleep could give me. I knew I was onto something here, something that could change the world.
 
Here in the basement of the Pentagon, lying close to dormancy for over a decade, were secrets my predecessors had just begun to discover before they were stopped. Maybe it had been the Korean War, maybe the CIA or other intelligence agencies had cast a pall over R&D’s operation, but those days were over now. I was at the Foreign Technology desk and the responsibility for this material was mine, just like General Twining had said it should be fourteen years ago.

In those drawers I had found the puzzle pieces for a whole new age of technology. Things that were only twinkles in the minds of engineers and scientists were right here in front of me as hard, cold artifacts of an advanced culture. Craft that navigated by brain waves and floated on a wave of electromagnetic energy, creatures who look through devices that helped them turn night into day, and beams of light so narrow and focused you couldn’t see them until they bounced off an object far away.

For years scientists had thought about what it would have been like to travel in space, especially since the Russians first put up their Sputnik. Plans for a military operated moon base had been developed by the army in the 1950s under the leadership of Gen. Arthur Trudeau at R&D but were ultimately shelved because of the formation of NASA. Those plans had tried to confront the issues of space travel for prolonged periods of time and adjusting to a low gravity state on the moon. But here, right in front of us, was the evidence of how an alien culture had adapted itself to long range space travel, different gravities, and the exposure to energy particles and waves crashing into a spacecraft by the billions. All we had to do was marshal the vast array of resources in the military and industry at R&D’s disposal and harvest that technology. It was all laid out for us, if we knew how to use it. This was the beginning and I was right there on the cusp of it.

So in the first few minutes of glimmering light just on the edge of the horizon, a promise of the day to come, I took off for home, for a shower, a shave, a pot of coffee, and the crispest new uniform I could find. I was driving east into the dawn of a brand new age, my report right alongside me in my briefcase on the front seat. There would be other reports and the details of long term complicated projects to confront me in the future, I knew, but this was the first, the foundation, the beam of light into a hidden past and an uncertain future. But it was a light, and that’s what was important.
 
No time for sleep now. There was too much to do.