The Day After Roswell (29 page)

craft for shipping. Maybe they were part of the wiring harness
that was broken in the crash. But these filaments had a strange
property to them.

The wire harness seemed to have broken loose from a control
panel and was separated into twelve frayed filaments that looked
something like quartz. When, back at the 509th’s hangar,
officers from the retrieval team applied light to one end of the
filament, the other end emitted a specific color. Different filaments
emitted different colors. The fibers - in reality glass crystal tubes -
led to a type of junction box where the fibers separated and went to
different parts of the control panel that seemed to acknowledge
electrically the different color pulsing through the tube. Since the
engineers evaluating the material at Roswell knew that each color of
light had its own specific wavelength, they guessed that the frequency
of the light wave activated a specific component of the
spacecraft’s control panel. But beyond that, the engineers
and scientists were baffled. They couldn’t even determine the
spacecraft’s power source, let alone what generated the power
for the light tubes. And, the most amazing thing of all was that the
filaments not only were flexible but still emitted light even when they
were bent back and forth like a paper clip. How could light be made to
bend? the engineers wondered. This was one of the physical mysteries of
the Roswell craft that stayed hidden through the 1950s until one of the
Signal Corps liaisons, who routinely briefed General Trudeau on the
kinds of developments the Signal Corps was looking for, told us about
experiments in optical fibers going on at Bell Labs.

The technology was still very new, Hans Kohler told me during
a private briefing in early 1962, but the promise of using light as a
carrier of all kinds of signals through single filament glass strands
was holding great promise. He explained that the premise of optical
fibers was to have a filament of glass so fine and free of any
impurities that nothing would impede the light beam moving along the
center of the shaft. You also had to have a powerful light source at
one end, he explained, to generate the signal, and I thought of the
successful ruby laser that had been tested at Columbia University. I
knew the EBEs had integrated the two technologies for their glass cable
transmission inside the spacecraft.

“But what makes the light bend?” I asked
Professor Kohler, still  incredulous that the aliens seem to
have been able to defy one of our own laws of physics. “Is it
some kind of an illusion?”

“It’s not a trick at all, ” the
scientist explained. “It only looks like an illusion because
the fibers are so fine, you can’t see the different layers
without a microscope. ”

He showed me, when I gave him the broken pieces of filament
that I still had in my nut file, that each strand, which looked like
one solid piece of material enclosing the circumference of a tiny tube,
was actually double layered. When you looked down the center of the
shaft you could see that around the outside of the filament was another
layer of glass. Dr. Kohler explained that the individual light rays are
reflected back toward the center by the layer of glass around the
outside of the fiber so that the light can’t escape. By
running the glass fibers around corners and, in the case of the Roswell
spacecraft, through the interior walls of the ship, the aliens were
able to bend light and focus it just like you can direct the flow of
water through a supply pipe. I’d never seen anything like
that before in my life.

Kohler explained that, just like lasers, the light can be made
to carry any sort of signal : light, sound, and even digital
information.

“There’s no resistance to the signal,
” he explained. “And you can fit more information
on to the light beam. ”

I asked him how the EBEs might have used this type of
technology. He suggested that all ship’s communication,
visual images, telemetry, and any amplified signals that the vehicles
sent or received from other craft or from bases on the moon or on earth
would use these glass fiber cables.

“They seem to have an enormous capacity for carrying
any kind of load, ” he suggested. “And if a laser
can amplify the signal, in their most refined form, these cables can
carry a multiplicity of signals at the same time. ”

I was more than impressed. Even before asking him about the
specific types of applications these might have for the army, I could
see how they could make battlefield communications more secure because
the signals would be stronger and less vulnerable to interference. Then
Professor Kohler began suggesting the uses of these fibers to carry
visual images photographed in tiny cameras from the weapons themselves
to controlling devices at the launcher.

“Imagine, ” he said, “being able
to fire a missile and actually see through the missile’s eye
where it’s going. Imagine being able to lock onto a target
visually and even as it tries to evade the missile, you can see it and
make final adjustments. ” And Kohler went on to describe the
potential of how fiberoptics based sensors could someday keep track of
enemy movements on the ground, carry data heavy visual signals from
surveillance satellites, and pack very complicated multichannel
communications systems into small spaces. “The whole space
program is dependent upon carrying data, voice, and image,
”he said. “But now, it takes too much space to
store all the relays and switches and there’s too much
impedance to the signal. It limits what we can do on a mission. But
imagine if we could adapt this technology to our own uses. ”

Then he looked me very squarely in the eye and said the very
thing that I was thinking. “You know this is their
technology. It’s part of what enables them to have
exploration missions. If it became our technology, too, we’d
be able to, maybe we could keep up with them a little better.
”

Then he asked me for the army’s commitment. He
explained that some of our research laboratories were already looking
into the properties of glass as a signal conductor and this would not
have to be research that was started from complete scratch. Those kinds
of start ups gave us concern at R&D because unless we covered
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 I wanted to do with this glass filament
technology.

“Where is the best research on optical fibers being
done?” I asked him.

“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 I wrote a short memo and proposal to
General Trudeau on the potential of optical fibers for a range of
products that Professor Kohler and I discussed. I 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, I 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, I added, I 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. I 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, I 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. I 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 I got, ” I said. Then I packed my Roswell field
reports into my briefcase, got myself an airline ticket for a flight to
Newark Airport, and I was on my way.

Supertenacity Fibers

Even before the 1960s, when I 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 troops or because of what the retrieval
team found at Roswell, I do not know. I 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 I 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 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 I examined the material and
recognized its similarity to spider thread, I 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.

I not only discovered that Monsanto was looking for a way to
develop a mass production process for a simulated spider silk, I 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 I still remained fascinated
by the prospect that something similar to a web spinner had spun the
strands of supertenacity fabric around the spaceship. I 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.