Corso Foreign Technology Desk seeding

From 1961 to 1963, United States Army Lieutenant Colonel Philip Corso allegedly ran a covert technology-seeding program from the Army Research and Development (R&D) Foreign Technology Desk at the Pentagon, in which recovered material from the 1947 Roswell incident was reportedly channeled to American defense contractors under the guise of conventional foreign-technology development projects. The program was run under the authority of Lieutenant General Arthur Trudeau, Commanding General of Army R&D, who directed Corso to exploit the artifacts while keeping their origin concealed — framing each handoff as a piece of captured Soviet or East German technology to prevent any contractor from becoming aware of the material's true provenance. Technologies seeded through the program included image intensifiers (night vision), integrated circuits, fiber optics, lasers, and Kevlar — all of which, Corso claimed, derived from artifacts he held in a locked file cabinet in his Pentagon office. The seeding is placed downstream of the Roswell craft retrieval operation of 1947, which put the material into military hands, and is described as the second of at least two channels by which the same artifacts reached industry — the first being their distribution to defense contractors in the weeks after the wreckage reached Wright Field.

Position and chain of command

Corso was assigned to the Army R&D Foreign Technology Division on June 20, 1961, under General Trudeau, who had commanded Army R&D since 1958. Corso placed the appointment at the end of a tour in Germany, where he had commanded a missile battalion with atomic warheads and served as Inspector General of the 7th Army: "General Trudeau had reorganized research and development of the Army. And he sent for me, and I joined him as a special assistant and Chief of the Foreign Technology Division." The position was nominally tasked with compiling intelligence on allied and adversary weapons research; in practice, Trudeau used it as a channel for artifacts that had circulated through Army intelligence since the 1947 crash.

Shortly after Corso took up his post, Trudeau had a four-drawer filing cabinet moved to Corso's second-floor office in the Pentagon's outer ring. The cabinet contained what Corso called "the nut file" — the classified Roswell dossier, including field reports, autopsy summaries, and the physical artifacts themselves. Trudeau gave Corso a single operational directive: develop a plan to harvest the material into the defense contracting stream without alerting the CIA, which Trudeau considered a Soviet intelligence penetration risk, or any other branch of the military. During the same tour Corso reportedly briefed the Attorney General, Robert Kennedy, on the recovered technologies, because the CIA "weren't telling the president" — an account given by the journalist Paola Harris, who worked directly with Corso and later translated his original manuscript The Dawn of a New Age into Italian.

Army personnel records show Corso formally held the position of chief of the Foreign Technology Division for only ninety days — from April 18 to July 18, 1962 — before being reassigned to the Plans Division of Army R&D until his retirement on March 1, 1963. Critics of Corso's memoir, including researchers at Project 1947 who obtained his DA Form 66 through a Freedom of Information Act request, noted that his narrative describes the role as a two-year command, while the records indicate a thirteen-month total assignment. The researcher Kevin Randle pressed the same discrepancy as the central weakness of the account, arguing that Corso's own Army records undermine the chronology in the book. Stanton Friedman and others noted that Corso's verifiable career points — his National Security Council assignment, his Fort Riley posting in 1947, and his Foreign Technology Division assignment — were all confirmed by the same records, leaving the substance of his claims difficult to evaluate solely from personnel documentation.[citation needed]

The artifacts

The file cabinet Trudeau transferred to Corso contained a range of physical items recovered from the Roswell site and stored at Fort Riley, Kansas before being divided among military services in the years after 1947.

Semiconductor wafers

Among the items Corso personally handled were small gray wafer-like discs approximately two inches across and as thin as a sheet of plywood, with fine wire etchings on the surface: "thin two-inch-around matte gray oyster cracker shaped wafers of a material that looked like plastic but had tiny road maps of wires barely raised/etched along the surface... the etchings on the surface reminded me of squashed insects with their hundred legs spread out at right angles from a flat body." Corso recognized these as related to the transistorized circuitry then in early development at Bell Labs and described them as "wafer shaped plywood thin pieces of silicon with mysterious silver etchings on them."

Headband and neurological interface

A crescent-shaped device, described in the Roswell field reports as worn around the head by the craft's occupants, with sensors that appeared to translate brainwave signals into navigational commands. Officers who had tried on the device at Walker Field after the 1947 recovery 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." Corso interpreted the device as a pilot–spacecraft interface, translating brain signals into speed, direction, and elevation commands, and viewed it as the conceptual forerunner of what eventually became military brain-wave-control helmets.

Glass fiber filaments

Twelve single glass filaments recovered from a broken wire harness inside the craft's control panels. When light was applied to one end of a filament, the other end emitted a specific color; different filaments emitted different colors, apparently activating different components of the control panel. The filaments remained flexible and continued to emit light even when bent back and forth.

Super-tenacity fiber

Strands of a dull gray metallic fiber from the skin of the craft and the suits of the occupants, which could not be cut with scissors or razors: "a dull, grayish-silvery foil-like swatch of cloth... that you could not fold, bend, tear, or wad up but that bounded right back into its original shape without any creases... If you tried to stretch it, it bounced back, but I noticed that all the threads seemed to be going in one direction." The documentary filmmaker James Fox, who interviewed Corso on camera in Roswell in 1997 at the fiftieth anniversary of the crash, recounted his description of a fabric that "you could crumple it up, it was light as a feather, and then it would regain its original form." Describing Corso's examination of the file cabinet's contents on air in 1997, Art Bell characterized the same swatch as "a dull grayish silvery foil like a swatch of cloth that he was unable to fold, bend over, tear, or wad up but that bounded right back into its original shape without any crease."

Directed-energy device

A short, stubby, internally powered flashlight-type device that produced a pencil-thin intense beam of light that could cut through metal. The Alamogordo analysis team described it as a very advanced form of the wave-stimulation technology whose theory had circulated in physics communities since the 1940s. Fox recalled Corso describing on camera "these little pen-like things that... turned out to be lasers," alongside an account of the recovery team's surprise at the craft's lack of provisions and at occupants who had no reproductive organs, slits for mouths and no vocal cords.

Night-vision device

A device worn over the eyes, an image intensifier in effect, recovered from one of the EBE occupants, which the field reports described as allowing the wearer to see in darkness. Corso's file included sketches of the device drawn by officers who observed it at the 509th Bombardment Group hangar in Roswell.

Seedings by technology

Corso and Trudeau developed a standardized methodology for each seeding: Corso would write an R&D advisory report on the artifact or device as though evaluating captured foreign technology; Trudeau would then identify an existing Army defense contract in the relevant area; Corso, dressed in civilian clothes and traveling without a staff car to avoid CIA surveillance, would visit the contractor's facility and present the material as East German or Soviet technology obtained by intelligence sources; and after the handoff, Army R&D would assign an official project officer to the contractor to see the development through, with Corso severed from all further association. "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," Corso wrote. The transactions with contractors were reportedly settled in cash precisely so that the program would generate no documentary trace — "he said it was done on a cash basis. So there was no paper trail," according to Paola Harris, to whom Corso described the arrangement — and the total budget Corso is said to have managed for the program was approximately $200 million.

Night vision — Fort Belvoir / Martin Marietta

The first seeding Corso completed after arriving at the Foreign Technology Desk involved the night-vision image intensifier. An existing night-vision research program had been running at Fort Belvoir since the end of World War II, drawing on German infrared viewfinder research. Trudeau directed Corso to Fort Belvoir in civilian clothes to hand off the Roswell night-vision sketches and device descriptions to Dr. Paul Fredericks, the technology development consultant for the night-vision section. Fredericks told Corso that the Roswell material would be absorbed into the existing development stream without leaving any trace of its origin: "From the moment your boys hand the material over, it goes into the developmental soup at Fort Belvoir and comes out the other end as a weapon in the field. No one will ever even guess." Corso made more than one trip to Fort Belvoir, on at least one occasion taking the German Paperclip scientist Hans Kohler with him to evaluate the night-vision and laser artifacts, with Trudeau authorizing a discretionary cash budget for each visit and leaving the handoff itself to Corso's judgement: "the General called me and he told me, 'Look, it's your decision whether to give it to them or not.'" By 1963, night vision development had moved to Martin Marietta Electronics (later part of Lockheed Martin) and was on track for initial deployment in Europe and Vietnam.

Semiconductor wafers / integrated circuits — Bell Labs, IBM, Motorola

By early 1961, Trudeau had arranged meetings for Corso at Sperry-Rand, Hughes Aircraft, and Bell Labs, framed as reviews of how those companies were applying miniaturized circuitry to weapons systems guidance. The real purpose was to present the silicon wafer artifacts. Corso noted that Bell Labs had in fact already seen such material once before — in 1947, when the initial wave of Roswell artifacts had reached defense contractors in the weeks after the wreckage arrived at Wright Field. The 1961 visits were accordingly a "reintroduction" — showing Bell Labs scientists the same class of device and reinserting it into ongoing transistor miniaturization work then funded through military guidance-system contracts.

Corso connected the 1948 invention of the transistor by William Shockley at Bell Labs directly to this seeding: "within months after the Roswell crash and the first exposure of the silicon wafer technology to companies already involved in the research and development of computers, the limitations on the size and power of the computer suddenly dropped like the removal of a roadblock on a highway." Motorola entered the integrated circuit market in the early 1970s with its own microprocessor — the 6502-powered Apple II reached the market in 1977 — and Corso credited the entire arc of semiconductor development from transistor to microprocessor as the downstream consequence of the Roswell wafer introduction.

Laser — Hughes Aircraft

The directed-energy device from the Roswell wreckage matched technologies already in early theoretical development in academic laboratories. Corso wrote a report for Trudeau proposing military applications of the device — range-finding, target acquisition, terrain mapping for helicopter navigation, and eventually satellite-based anti-missile and anti-spacecraft tracking systems — and used it to obtain a development budget. In late 1961, Trudeau arranged a meeting at Fort Belvoir between Corso and Dr. Mark Johnston of Hughes Aircraft, nominally about helicopter navigation radar development. Corso briefed Johnston on the spacecraft's laser-type devices and suggested the Hughes team developing helicopter navigational radars consider newly developed lasers as terrain-measuring apparatus and for target acquisition. Trudeau then pushed successfully for Army R&D budget to develop laser tracking systems for incoming missiles — a project that faced opposition from other military branches and from NASA — framing it publicly as a conventional anti-missile tracking system: "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."

Fiber optics — Bell Labs / Western Electric

In early 1962, Corso turned to the glass filaments in his "nut file." His scientific consultant, Dr. Hans Kohler — a member of Trudeau's informal brain trust — explained that each single filament was double-layered: an inner core surrounded by an outer glass layer that reflected light back toward the center, preventing it from escaping and allowing it to bend around corners. Kohler confirmed the technology was under early investigation at Bell Labs and that light signals conducted through such fibers could carry voice, visual images, and digital data without resistance or signal loss. After Trudeau's authorization, Corso flew to Newark and visited the Western Electric research facility outside Princeton, New Jersey, presenting the filaments as East German technology. He described the mission: "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." Kohler predicted Bell Labs would require roughly thirty more years to develop the technology to commercial scale — a timeline that proved accurate, with widespread fiber-optic telephone infrastructure arriving in the 1990s.[citation needed] The astrophysicist and investigator Jacques Vallée, who spent two days with Corso at Bigelow Aerospace in Las Vegas after Robert Bigelow brought him in to address the company's science board, and who, asked afterwards whether he found Corso credible, answered simply "Yes," took the fiber attribution as the weakest link in the account, observing that "glass fibers were known before World War Two. People use them in lab work and so on," and reporting that Corso answered him, "look, I'm not a scientist, I'm a military guy."

Kevlar — Du Pont / Monsanto

The super-tenacity fiber from the craft's hull and the occupants' flight skins was handed to researchers at Du Pont and Monsanto. Corso personally carried field descriptions of the Roswell fabric to meetings at these companies and showed the actual material to scientists who visited him in Washington. The fiber's molecular structure was lengthwise-aligned and super-compressed, giving it an extraordinary tensile strength that resisted cutting, tearing, or permanent deformation. Corso recognized the structural principle as analogous to spider silk. Trudeau encouraged him to contact plastics and ceramics manufacturers to find anyone already working on super-tenacity materials at university laboratories. Du Pont announced the creation of Kevlar fabric in 1965; it was brought to market as the Kevlar bulletproof vest in 1973.

Strategic Defense Initiative as end product

Corso described the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, or "Star Wars"), announced by President Reagan in 1983, as the culmination of the seeding program — the point at which the technologies distributed through the Foreign Technology Desk in 1961–63 had matured into a deployable planetary defense system. Alongside laser tracking systems and particle-beam weapons whose origins lay in Roswell wreckage, SDI incorporated Stealth aircraft derived from the super-tenacity composite skin of the craft. Corso wrote: "It was alien technology that we used: lasers, accelerated particle-beam weapons, and aircraft equipped with 'Stealth' features." Corso further held that SDI was designed not only as a nuclear deterrent against the Soviet Union but as a credible weapons capability against extraterrestrial spacecraft: "The full story behind the SDI and the way it changed the Cold War and forced the extraterrestrials to change the strategies for this planet is a story that's never been told."

Disclosure

The seeding program remained unknown to the public until 1997, when Corso co-authored The Day After Roswell with journalist William J. Birnes, published by Pocket Books (a division of Simon & Schuster). Senator Strom Thurmond, for whom Corso had worked as a legislative aide, contributed a foreword to the book — which he later distanced himself from, stating he had been told the book was about Corso's general Cold War career, not about extraterrestrials. On July 23, 1997, Corso appeared on Coast to Coast AM with host Art Bell, giving a live account of the seedings; the interview was rebroadcast on July 3, 2010.

Around the book's release the journalist Paola Harris interviewed Corso at the Sallyport Inn in Roswell on July 3, 1997, and in further meetings before his death, obtaining details of the seeding program that do not appear in The Day After Roswell. Harris recounted that Corso pressed her to keep publishing: "Colonel Corso kept telling me, 'The world can handle it; they can handle it; the young people can handle it.' So he kind of gave me the mandate to keep doing it." James Fox filmed an interview with him in Roswell the same summer, at the crash's fiftieth anniversary.

Corso died on July 16, 1998, approximately one year after the book's publication, of a heart attack in Jupiter, Florida. He was interred at Florida National Cemetery.

In 2010, the Italian journalist Maurizio Baiata published an account of the contents of Corso's original pre-publication manuscript, titled Dawn of a New Age, which contained material not included in the published book — among it a claimed face-to-face telepathic encounter with an extraterrestrial biological entity at White Sands Missile Range in 1957, and a reference to nine security clearances held above Top Secret. Harris held that the factual errors seized on in the published book — such as Corso being placed at Roswell rather than Fort Riley — were mistakes introduced by his co-writer William J. Birnes rather than Corso's own testimony, and that the original manuscript carried Corso's exact words without them. Vallée gave the same reading of the published text, holding that the English edition had been cut by the publisher and that much of what Corso knew survived only in the foreign-language editions: "His English book was censored by the publisher and he died... a lot of what he knew wasn't in the book that was published in the US. It's in books that were published in other languages, you know, thanks to Paola Harris who preserved all that."

Open questions

See also

• Pieces of the Roswell craft
• Corso lost tapes
• Alien reproduction vehicles

References

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