Roswell and the laser

 

AS I WORKED MY WAY THROUGH THE LIST OF ITEMS IN MY NUT file, writing advisory reports and recommendations to General Trudeau about the potential of each item, I lost all concept of time. I could see, as I drove up and down the Potomac shore to Fort Belvoir to check on the progress of night vision at Martin Marietta, that the summer was coming to an end and the leaves had started to change color. I could also see that now it was already dark when I left the Pentagon. And it was dark now when I set out for the Pentagon every morning. I’d gotten into the habit of taking different routes to work just to make sure that if the CIA had put a tail on me, I’d make him work harder to stay up with me.

General Trudeau and I had settled down into a long daily routine ourselves at R&D. We had our early morning meetings about the Roswell file - he also called it the “junk pile” because it was filled with so much debris and pieces of items that had broken away from larger components - but we had buried the Roswell material development projects themselves so deep inside the regular functions of the R&D division that not even the other officers who worked with us every day knew what was going on. We’d categorized the work we did so carefully that when it came time to discuss anything about Roswell, even if it had a bearing on some other item we were working on at the time, we made sure that either no one was at the office, or we were at a place where we wouldn’t have to stop talking just because someone came into the room.

My responsibility at Foreign Technology was to feed R&D’s ongoing project development with information and intelligence from sources outside the regular army channels. These ran in interconnected rings through the Pentagon to defense industry contractors to testing operations at army bases and to researchers at universities or independent laboratories who were under contract with us. If we were developing methods of preserving food, always trying to come up with a better way to prepare field rations, and the Italians and Germans had a process that seemed to work, it was my job to learn about it and slip the information into the development process.

 

Even when there was no official development process underway for a specific item, if something I learned was appropriate to anyone of the army’s major commands, whether it was the Medical Corps, the Signal Corps, the motor pool, ordnance, or even the Quartermaster Corps, it was also my job to find a way to make that information appropriate and drop it in without so much as a splash. This made the perfect cover for what I was doing with the Roswell file as long as I could find ways to slip the Roswell technology into the development process so invisibly no one would ever able to find the Roswell on ramp to the information highway.

For all the world to see, General Trudeau and I regularly met to review the ongoing projects in Army R&D, those we had inherited from the previous command and those we wanted to initiate on our watch. Officers who’d been assigned to R&D before we arrived had their own projects already in development, too, and the general had assigned me the task of feeding those projects with information and intelligence, no matter where it came from, without disturbing either what the officers were doing or interfering with their staffs. It was tricky because I had to work in the dark, undercover even from my own colleagues whose reputations would have been destroyed if word leaked out that they were dealing in “flying saucer stuff. “

 

Yet at the same time, most high ranking officers at the Pentagon and key members of their staffs knew that Roswell technology was floating through most of the new projects under development. They were also vaguely, if not specifically, aware of what had happened at Roswell itself and of the current version of the Hillenkoetter/Bush/Twining working group, which had personnel stationed at the Pentagon to keep tabs on what the military was doing.

Uniting what I called my official “day job” at R&D on regular projects and my undercover job in the Roswell file, was my official, but many times informal, role as General Trudeau’s deputy at the division. In that job, I would carry out the general’s orders as they related to the division and not specifically to any one project or another. If General Trudeau needed information to help him redefine his budgetary priorities or assemble information to help compile supplementary development budgets, he’d often ask me to help or at least give him advice.

 

And I functioned as the general’s intelligence officer as well, supporting him at meetings with information, helping him present position papers, assisting him whenever he had to hold briefings or meet with congressional committees, and defending him and the division against the almost weekly attacks on our turf from officers in the other military branches or from the civilian development and intelligence agencies. Everybody wanted to know what we knew, what we were spending, and what we were spending it on. And we had no quarrel with telling anybody who wanted to know exactly what kinds of goods the American people were getting for their money except when it came to one category - Roswell.

 

That’s when the mantle of darkness would fall and our memories about where certain things came from became very dim, as it did with the dramatic improvement in night vision technology shortly after the summer of 1961. Even our own people became very frustrated with us when General Trudeau would turn to me at a meeting and say,

“You know that night vision information you sent over to Fort Belvoir a while back? Where did you find that file, Phil?” And if I couldn’t play dumb and say, “I don’t think I ever came across this before, must be someone else in charge, “ then I’d simply shrug and say, “I don’t know, General, must have been in the files somewhere. I’ll have to go back and look. “

It was an act, and many of the officers who suspected we had a stash of information somewhere knew we were covering up something. But if they were career, they also knew how to play the Pentagon version of steal the bacon. We had it and we were hiding it. No one would find out anything unless we let them. So the general would typically hand off anything having to do with military intelligence information to me and I would usually find a way not only to lose the answer but to lose the question as well. We became so practiced at this that entirely new inventions could find their way into development at many different places at the same time without anyone’s ever becoming aware of the source of the technology, especially the officer who was assigned the task of project manager within our very own division.

The CIA got so frustrated at not getting any information out of us that they began keeping closer tabs on the Russian attaches floating around Washington and working under their KGB controllers at the embassies and consulates. Because the CIA knew how thoroughly our universities had been penetrated they figured they’d get information on the rebound by photographing what was inside the photocopiers at the Russian embassy in Washington. And sure enough, from the rumor mill circulating around the exchange of scientists between industry and academia, the CIA knew that we were on to something at Army R&D and kept the circle as tight around us as they possibly could. So I had to keep close tabs on the general, not letting him go into meetings, any meetings, unprotected and always making sure that the CIA knew that they would have to climb over me to get to General Trudeau and anything he knew. And the CIA knew that I knew what they were doing and where their loyalties lay and also knew that it would have to come to a showdown someday.

General Trudeau and I had quickly established our routine in early1961, and our categorization of how we did our jobs seemed to be working. Night vision was under development at Fort Belvoir, and researchers who worked with us had made sure that the silicon wafer chips had gotten to their colleagues at Bell Labs and assured us that a new generation of transistorized circuitry was already finding its way into development. The silicon chips were a covert reintroduction to the people at Bell Labs because the initial introduction of the integrated circuit chips from the Roswell crash had reached defense contractors as early as 1947 in the weeks after the material reached Wright Field.

A similar history of introduction and reintroduction had occurred with stimulated energy radiation, a weapon the early analysts believed they were looking at in the wreckage of the Roswell craft. Since directed energy radiation was a technology we’d already deployed in World War II, seeing what they thought was a super advanced version of that technology, so advanced as to be in a completely different realm, so excited the analysts at Wright Field that they wanted to get it out to research scientists as quickly as possible, which they did. And by the early 1950s, a version of stimulated energy radiation had found its way into the scientific community, which was developing new products around the process of microwave generation.

Most Americans who were alive in the 1950s remember the introduction of the microwave oven that helped us “live better electrically” in our new modern kitchens. One of the miracle appliances that burst onto the scene in the 1950s promised to cook food in less than half the time of conventional ovens, even when the food had been completely frozen. Marketed under a variety of brand names including the now historic “Radar Range, “ the microwave oven cooked whatever was inside not by the application of pure heat, the way conventional ovens did, but by bombarding the food with showers of tiny waves of electromagnetic radiation, usually only a centimeter or so long.

 

The waves would pass through the food, exciting the water molecules deep inside and causing them to align and realign, back and forth, with greater velocity. The molecular activity generated heat from within and the food cooked from the inside out. Once you enclosed it in the right kind of container to keep all the moisture from evaporating, you had a quick cooked meal.

The theory behind the microwave oven that started us down the long and profitable path of stimulated energy research was formulated in 1945 with the first commercial microwave ovens rolling off the line at Raytheon in Massachusetts in 1947 before any dissemination of either intelligence or material from the crash of the Roswell spacecraft. But in the wreckage of that craft, the scientists from the test firing range at Alamogordo reported that the inhabitants of the craft seemed to use very advanced wave stimulation instrumentation that, according to their analysis, bore a relationship to the physics of a basic microwave generator.

 

The retrieval team that pulled the wreckage out of the desert also found a short, stubby, internally powered flashlight device that threw a pencil thin, intense beam of light for a short distance that could actually cut through metal. This, the engineers at Wright Field believed, was also based on wave stimulation. The questions then were, how did the EBEs use wave stimulation and how could we adapt it to military uses or slip it into the product development already under way?

By 1954, when I was at the White House, the National Security Council was already receiving reports of a theory, developed by Charles H. Townes, that described how the atoms of a gas could be excited to extraordinarily high energy levels by the application of bursts of energy. The gas would release its excess energy as microwaves of a very precise frequency that could be controlled. In theory, we thought, the energy beam could be a signal to carry communications or an amplifier for the signal. When the first maser was assembled at Bell Laboratories in 1956, it was used as a timer because of the very exact calibration of the wave frequency.

The maser, however, was only a forerunner of the product that was to come, the laser, which would revolutionize every aspect of technology it touched. It would also prove to be a weapon that would help us deploy a realistic threat to the EBEs who seemed poised to trigger a nuclear war between the superpowers. Where the maser was an amplification of generated microwaves, the laser was an amplification of light, and theories about how this might be accomplished were circulating widely throughout the weapons development community even before Bell Labs produced the first maser. I had seen the descriptions of the EBE laser in reports about the Roswell crash, a beam of light so thin that you couldn’t even see it until it landed on a target.

 

What was the purpose of this light generator? the Alamogordo group had asked. It looked like a targeting or communications device, seemed to have an almost limitless range, and, if the right power source could be found to amplify the light beam to where it could penetrate metal, the device could be used as a drill, a welder, or even a devastating weapon.

Even while I was at the White House, all three branches of the military were working with researchers in university laboratories to develop a working laser. In theory, exciting the atoms of an element to produce light energy in the same way that atoms of a gas were excited to produce microwaves, lasers offered the tantalizing promise of a directed energy beam that had such a wide variety of applications it could become an almost universal utility for all divisions of the military, even controlling warehouse inventory for the Quarter master Corps. Finally, in 1958, the year after I left the White House, there was a surge in research activity, especially at Columbia University where, two years later, physicist Theodore Maiman constructed the first working laser.

The first practical demonstration of the laser took place in 1960,and by the time I got to the Pentagon, General Trudeau had put it on our list of priorities to develop for military purposes. Also, because stimulated energy radiation devices were among the cache of technological debris we recovered from Roswell, the U.S. development or the laser encompassed the special urgent requirements of my Roswell mission. I had to write a report to General Trudeau suggesting ways the EBEs might have used laser technology in their missions on this planet and how we could develop similar uses for it under the guise of a conventional development program. In other words, once we guessed how the aliens were using it, it was to become our developmental model for similar applications.

We believed that the EBEs used lasers for navigation, by bouncing beams off distant objects in space and homing in on them to triangulate a course; for communication, by using the laser beam as a carrier signal or as a signal in and of itself; for surveillance, by painting potential targets with a beam; and for power transmission, illumination, and even data storage. The strength and integrity of the laser beam should have served as the EBEs’ primary method of communication over vast distances or even as a way of storing communications in packages for later delivery.

 

However, it was the EBEs’ use of directed energy as a medical tool and ultimately as a potential weapon that sent shivers up and down our spines because to our minds it was evidence of the aliens’ hostile intentions. Whether they saw us as true enemies to be destroyed or regarded all life on our planet as laboratory specimens to be experimented with, the results from the animal carcasses picked up in the field by our military nuclear, biological, and chemical recovery teams and the civilian intelligence investigators could have been very much the same.

In the Pentagon from 1961 to 1963,1 reviewed field reports from local and state police agencies about the discoveries of dead cattle whose carcasses looked as though they had been systematically mutilated and reports from people who claimed to have been abducted by aliens and experimented on. One of the common threads in these stories were reports by the self described abductees of being subjected to some sort of probing or even a form of surgery with controlled, intense, pencil thin beams of light.

 

Local police reported that when veterinarians were called to the scene to examine the dead cattle left in fields, they often found evidence not just that the animal’s blood had been drained but that entire organs were removed with such surgical skill that it couldn’t have been the work of predators or vandals removing the organs for some depraved ritual. Where there was evidence of crime of someone staging a bizarre hoax, it was usually obvious from the clumsiness of the attempt and the deliberate staging of the carcass. And in the overwhelming majority of instances where the animal was killed by a predator who consumed its blood and carried away internal organs, the evidence of teeth marks or of a brief life and death struggle was also a clear indicator of what had happened.

 

But in those cases where investigators claimed to have been baffled by what they found, the removal of the organs and the draining of the animal’s blood - where blood had been completely drained - were so sophisticated that there was almost no peripheral damage to the surrounding tissue. There was even some speculation, in the early 1960s, that whatever device the EBEs had employed, it didn’t even cut through the surrounding tissue. We had no medical instruments that even remotely approached what the aliens could do. It was as though some device had simply excised the organs with techniques that even went beyond our own surgical precision.

While I was on the White House National Security staff and later when I was at the Pentagon, I was intrigued by these reports. I also remember that both civilian and military intelligence personnel attached to the staffs of individuals who worked for the Hillenkoetter and Twining working group on UFOs in the 1950s were actively engaging in research into the kinds of surgical methods that would produce “crime scene evidence” like this.

Could have been the Russians, they thought at first. Given the tense climate of the Cold War, a fear that the Soviets were experimenting with American livestock to develop some form of toxin or biological weapon that would devastate our cattle population was not unduly paranoid. It’s sufficient to say, without going into any detail, that we were thinking about the same kinds of weapons, so it was not far fetched to say that we were projecting our own doomsday strategies onto what the Russians might have done.

But it wasn’t the Soviets who were going after our cattle. In fact the Soviet strategy for destabilizing the United States was so sophisticated that it was only a strategy of playing nuclear chicken with the Soviets that forced them to back down in the end. It was the EBEs who were experimenting with organ harvesting, possibly for transplant into other species or for processing into some sort of nutrient package or even to create some sort of hybrid biological entity.

 

This is what people attached to the working group thought in the 1950s and 1960s, and even though we had no solid intelligence at the time that we were right, we operated on the assumption that no one takes an organ just for the sheer pleasure of removing it. Although the first public reports of cattle mutilations surfaced around 1967 in Colorado, at the White House we were reading about the mutilation stories that had been kept out of press as far back as the middle 1950s, especially in the area around Colorado.

 

There was speculation, also, that maybe pharmaceutical companies were responsible because they could utilize the organs and soft tissues in biological experimentation, but we dismissed that because the companies had their own farms and could grow anything they wanted. Our intelligence organizations and especially the working group believed that the cattle mutilations that could not be obviously explained away as pranks, predators, or ritual slaughter were the results of interventions by extraterrestrials who were harvesting specific organs for experimentation.

 

So if our cattle were important enough to the EBEs to get them to expose what they were doing, it was an important thing for us to understand why. The EBEs were nothing if not coldly and clinically efficient - their methodology reminded us of the Nazis - and they didn’t waste time sitting around on the ground where they were most vulnerable to attack or capture unless they had a darn good reason for doing so.

We didn’t know their reasons back in the 1950s and 1960s and can only make educated guesses about them now, but back then we were driven by a terror that unless we found ways to defend ourselves against the EBEs we would be corralled by them and used for replacement tissue or as a source of nutrition. In 1997 this may sound like a nightmare out of a flying saucer horror movie, but in1957 this was our thinking both in the White House and in the military. We didn’t know, but we had irrefutable evidence that EBEs were landing on farms, harvesting vital organs from livestock, and then just leaving the carcasses on the ground because they knew we couldn’t do anything about it.

The mutilations that interested the National Security personnel seemed to have the same kind of modus operandi. Whoever went after the animals seemed most interested in the mammary, digestive, and reproductive organs, especially the uteruses from cows. In many cases the eyes or throats were removed in a type of surgery in which the demarcation line was almost microscopically thin and the surrounding tissue showed that the incision had super heated and then blackened as it cooled.

 

But the crime scene and forensic specialists noted that in any type of cut by a predatory animal or a human - even a skilled surgeon - one would find evidence of some trauma in the surrounding tissue such as swelling, contusions, or other forms of abrasion. In these reports of mutilations, forensic examination showed no evidence of collateral trauma or even inflammation.

 

Therefore, they believed, the cuts to extract the tissue were made so quickly and wounds were sealed so fast that the surrounding tissue never was destroyed. This meant that whoever was operating on these animals did so in a matter of minutes. It was rare, therefore, that police would ever catch them in the act. So if we couldn’t protect our livestock or react intelligently to the stories of human abductions, except to debunk them and make the abductees themselves think they were delusional, we had to find weapons that would put us on a more equal footing with the EBEs. One of those weapons, which had a wide application potential, was the laser - light amplification through stimulated energy radiation - the device the army found in the Roswell spacecraft and would later develop as a weapon in cooperation with Hughes Aircraft.

Shortly after the first successful demonstration of a ruby red laser at Columbia University, the three military branches realized they had a winner. The following year, the results of the tests at Columbia, the industry interest in developing laser based products, and the Roswell report on stimulated energy all merged on my desk. Now it was my turn to get involved and assemble the information to support laser product development with military funds before the whole operation was turned over to one of the R&D specialists who would take the product through its next stages. That was the way our backfield worked: I fed the play, made sure the snap got off, and then faded in behind the blockers. By the time the ball carrier had made his way into the secondary, I was already off the field. I never got the Heisman Trophy, but I sure as hell moved the ball.

I began by listing the needs of the army for what the laser might be able to accomplish. Based on what the army analysts reported they saw in the Roswell ship, it seemed to me obvious that if the Roswell laser was a cutting or surgical tool, the beam could also be utilized as an advanced rapid firing weapon. With a beam so precise and directed, the laser would also make an excellent range finder and target manager for artillery. If the beam was capable of instantaneous read adjustment and fed into a computer, it would also be the perfect targeting system for a tank, especially a tank on the move.

 

Typically, a tank must stop before it can fire because the gunner needs to have a fixed firing platform from which he calculates range direction, and other compensating factors. The laser can do all that while the vehicle is moving and should therefore enable a tank to stay on the move while firing. And if a laser can paint a target from a tank and find the range, I speculated, it can do the same for a helicopter from air to air and air to ground.

I suggested to General Trudeau that all the research we were conducting into helicopter tactics, especially into the role of helicopters as infantry support gun and rocket platforms, dove tailed perfectly with the possibilities of the laser as a range finding mechanism. We could paint friendly troops to locate them, identify our foes, and illuminate potential targets with light invisible to all but our own gunners. At the same time, our own bombs or missiles can home in on the laser image we project onto a target, like a heat seeking missile. Once painted, the target could evade the laser guided rocket or shell only with great difficulty. For a stationary target such as a fortification or artillery redoubt, a laser guided shell would be particularly devastating because we could take it out with one or two rounds instead of having to go back again and again to make sure we’d found the target.

As a signal, a laser is so intense, refined, and perfectly stable that it is almost impervious to any kind of disturbance. For this reason, I wrote General Trudeau, the EBEs must have used an advanced form of a laser for their communication, and we can, too. The intensity of the beam and its highly refined focus mean that it can be aimed with minute precision. Amplifying the power to boost the signal should not distort the beam’s aim, which makes it perfect for straight line long distance communication.

Lasers also have high capacities for carrying multiple signals. Therefore, I wrote the general, we can pack a greater number of transmission bands into a laser signal than we can with our conventional signal carriers. This meant that we could literally flood a battlefield with different kinds of communication channels, each carrying different kinds of communication, some not even invented yet, and have them securely carried by laser signals. For command and control on the increasingly sophisticated electronic battlefield the army was predicting for the 1970s, lasers would become the Signal Corps workhorses.

General Trudeau said that he was also interested in an item from one of the specification reports that other military observers wrote that said that lasers could also serve as projection devices for large screen displays. Lasers were so bright that displays could be shown in rooms that didn’t have to be darkened. The general saw the possibility of fully lit situation rooms with large screen displays from satellite radar transmissions. The room would allow computer operators to see what they were doing at their keyboards while seeing the displays and listening to the briefing.

I suggested that the army cartography division would be particularly interested in the accuracy of the laser derived measurements for maps. That same measurement ability would also be able to generate digital data for ground hugging infantry support helicopters or low flying planes. Aircraft that could stay close to the ground could avoid enemy radar and stay concealed until the last minute. But unless there was a method for accurately charting the topography, aircraft could find themselves scraping tree tops or crashing into the side of a hill. If a laser could accurately transmit topographic features to altitude control and navigational computers on board attack aircraft, it would keep the aircraft safely above any ground obstacles but close enough to the ground to remain concealed.

 

This ground hugging capability that I suggested to General Trudeau had been suggested to me from the analysis reports of UFOs that also had this capability. It was what enabled them to hover close to the ground and to move rapidly at speeds over a thousand miles an hour at treetop level without hitting anything. The laser type devices aboard the UFO instantly fed the craft with the topographic features of the landscape and the craft automatically adjusted to the terrain.

In late 1961, General Trudeau asked me to visit Fort Belvoir again, this time to meet a Dr. Mark Johnston, one of aeronautical research scientists from Hughes Aircraft. Fort Belvoir was one of the safe houses for the Office of R&D to conduct meetings in because it was a secure military facility. My comings and goings there on Army R&D business were completely routine, even to the CIA surveillance teams that would occasionally pick up my car coming out of the Pentagon, and could be covered in our daily logs with references to the ongoing projects that served as covers. My meeting with Johnston, for example, was to talk about the Hughes helicopter development program, not to give him my reports on the laser measuring devices we believed were in the Roswell spacecraft.

 

I briefed Johnston on what the scientific team from Alamogordo believed was on the spacecraft, asked him not to talk about it, and suggested that the Hughes team developing the navigational radars for the helicopter project consider using the newly developed lasers as terrain measuring apparatus and for target acquisition.

“Yes, of course, “ I assured him. “The Office of R&D would have a development budget for the laser project if the R&D team at Hughes thought our idea was feasible and they could develop it. “

And that’s exactly what happened. Using the positive results from the Columbia University test and the army weapons specifications we drew up in R&D for the requirements of a range finder, targeting, and tracking weapon, and with research grants from the Pentagon, Hughes signed on as one of the contractors for the military laser. Today, the laser has become the HEL, or High Energy Laser, deployed by the army’s Space Defense Command as, among other things, an antisatellite/antiwarhead weapon.

My meeting at Hughes was quick and direct. Like so many of the research scientists I met with from Hughes, Dow, IBM, and Bell, Johnston disappeared behind the work benches, computer screens, or test tubes of the company’s back room and out of my sight forever. When General Trudeau would ask me to follow up on the project months later, a different company representative would meet with me and the project would look just like any other Army R&D initiated research contract. Any traces of Roswell or the nut file would be gone, and the project would have been slipped into the normal R&D functioning. Of course this device didn’t come out of the Roswell incident. The incident was only a myth; it never took place. This came out of the Foreign Technology desk, something the Italians or French were working on and we picked up through our intelligence sources.

Our work with laser products was becoming so successful by the end of 1961 that General Trudeau was urging me to spread the wealth around as many army bases as I could. I spoke to weapons experts at Fort Riley, Kansas, for example, about the use of lasers by troops in the field. Maybe as range finders, we suggested, or even as ways to lock onto a target the way the air force was experimenting with something they were calling “smart bombs. “ By 1964, after seeing the research into the feasibility of lasers that we had commissioned, hand held range finders were being tested at army bases around the country, and today, police forces use laser sights on their weapons. Lasers became one of the army’s great successes.

In one of our final pushes for the development of laser based weapons systems, we argued successfully for a budget to develop laser tracking systems for incoming missiles. This was a project we fought hard for, over political opposition as well as opposition from the other military branches, which were looking at our proposal as a conventional method of tracking missiles.

 

The laser was too new, they argued. Atmospheric interference or heavy clouds would distort the laser over long distances, they said. Or, they said, it would simply take too much power and would have no portability. General Trudeau and I had another agenda for this project that we couldn’t readily share with anybody. We believed that lasers could be used not just to track incoming missiles - that was obvious. We saw the lasers too as our best weapon for not only tracking UFOs from the ground, from aircraft, or from satellites but, if we could boost the power to the necessary levels, for shooting them down. Shoot down a few of them, we speculated, and they wouldn’t violate our airspaces with such impunity.

 

Equip our fighter planes or interceptors with laser firing mechanisms and we could pose a credible threat to them. Equip our satellites with laser firing mechanisms and we could triangulate a firing pattern on the UFOs that might even keep them away from our orbiting spacecraft. But all of this was speculation in late 1961.

Only a very few people in the other branches of R&D even had a hint about what we were proposing. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration had its own plans for developing laser tracking systems and didn’t want to share any development budget with the military, so there was very little help forth coming from NASA. The air force and navy were guarding their own development budgets for laser weapons, and we couldn’t trust the civilian intelligence agencies at all.

 

So General Trudeau and I began advocating a plan as a cover to develop laser tracking and other sophisticated types of surveillance projects. It was outrageous on the surface, but it quickly found its adherents, and its real agenda could be completely masked. We could never call it an anti-UFO device so we named it the antimissile missile. It was one of the most successful projects ever to come out of Army R&D. It owed most of its theory to our discovery of the laser in the Roswell wreckage.