The Day After Roswell

Ikwipedia

The Day After Roswell

The Day After Roswell is a 1997 memoir co-authored by retired United States Army Lieutenant Colonel Philip J. Corso and William J. Birnes, published by Pocket Books (a Simon & Schuster imprint), in which Corso, as head of the Army's Foreign Technology Division in 1961, covertly distributed recovered extraterrestrial material from the 1947 Roswell crash to American defense contractors, seeding technologies including transistors, fiber optics, lasers, night vision, integrated circuits, Kevlar, and advances in particle accelerators. The book peaked at number 12 on the New York Times Best Sellers list in July 1997 and was timed to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the Roswell incident.

Publication

Cover of The Day After Roswell (1997) by Lt. Col. Philip J. Corso with William J. Birnes.

The book was published in July 1997 by Pocket Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, with the full title The Day After Roswell: A Former Pentagon Official Reveals the U.S. Government's Shocking UFO Cover-Up. It was co-written with William J. Birnes, publisher of UFO Magazine. The first printing carried a foreword by Senator Strom Thurmond (R-SC), who had employed Corso on his Senate staff from March 1963 to December 1964, and again from February 1973 to July 1974.

Thurmond foreword controversy

The Thurmond foreword became a major controversy immediately upon the book's announcement. Thurmond's office stated that the senator had agreed to write a foreword based on an outline describing the book as Corso's personal military memoirs, with no mention of UFOs, Roswell, or extraterrestrials. When Thurmond learned the book's actual content, he disavowed it. In a statement released in June 1997, Thurmond said: "When I agreed to provide a foreword for Col. Philip Corso's forthcoming book, I was of the understanding that the book was autobiographical in nature. I know of no such 'cover-up' and do not believe one existed."

Thurmond's Deputy General Counsel Eric Raymond demanded that Simon & Schuster recall all copies of the first printing, remove all dust jackets bearing the senator's name, cease using references to the foreword in promotional materials, and issue a public statement establishing that Thurmond "had no intention or desire to write the foreword to The Day After Roswell." Simon & Schuster issued an apology and removed the foreword from all subsequent printings.

Karl Pflock, a former deputy assistant defense secretary under President Reagan and UFO researcher, who had met Corso in January 1993 and knew Thurmond's press secretary, confirmed that the foreword "was drafted by one of the senator's staff... at the senator's direction on the understanding he had from Corso that it was to be for Corso's memoirs, for which he and his staff were supplied an outline, a document which made no mention of UFOs." Pflock characterized the incident as "the cheap trick that Corso pulled on him."

OpenMinds.tv commentator Maurizio Baiata, who worked directly with Corso, later confirmed in a comment on the publication of Corso's unpublished manuscript that the foreword had originally been prepared for an earlier, different book project that Corso had been working on before The Day After Roswell was developed.

Claims

Corso's central claim is that in 1961, as Chief of the Foreign Technology Division of Army Research and Development under Lieutenant General Arthur Trudeau, he inherited a cabinet of recovered debris and biological materials from the 1947 Roswell crash, assembled by the Roswell craft retrieval operation — known as "the Roswell File" — and systematically parcelled items and technical data to twenty-five US defense contractors, including IBM, Hughes Aircraft, Bell Labs, and Dow Chemical. The program was designed so that no single contractor received complete knowledge of the origin of the materials; each company was told only that the items came from an unspecified foreign source.

The book claims the following technologies were seeded from the recovered Roswell material:

Corso first encountered Roswell material on July 6, 1947, at Fort Riley, Kansas, where — while serving as post duty officer — he discovered a crate containing one of the Roswell EBE survivors in the post veterinary clinic. In his own words, he described a figure with skinny arms and legs, under five feet tall, with a large head, slanted eyes, and no nose, mouth, or ears, floating in a gray liquid.

Majestic 12 was assembled under the leadership of CIA Director Admiral Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter to collect and suppress all information on off-planet technology while the US administration publicly denied the existence of flying saucers. The Strategic Defense Initiative ("Star Wars") was designed not only to defeat Soviet ballistic missiles but to achieve the capability to disable extraterrestrial spacecraft, per Corso.

Unpublished manuscript

In 2010, Italian journalist Maurizio Baiata — who had worked with Corso personally and published Italian translations of his work — released excerpts from Corso's original pre-publication manuscript titled Dawn of a New Age, with the full manuscript made available via OpenMinds.tv. The manuscript contained additional material not present in the published book, including Corso's face-to-face telepathic encounter with an Extraterrestrial Biological Entity at White Sands Missile Range in 1957, in which the being asked him for ten minutes of radar-free time in exchange for "a new world if you can take it." The manuscript also describes Corso's claim to have held nine security clearances above Top Secret, and that on two occasions he received instructions to destroy radar tape recordings of objects traveling above 3,000 mph — though he stated he did not destroy the 1957 tape.

Public discussion

The Day After Roswell debuted prominently in summer 1997. Corso gave an exclusive interview to NBC's Dateline and appeared at Roswell for a press conference, lecture, and book signing timed to the incident's fiftieth anniversary. The book appeared on the New York Times Best Sellers list for three weeks in August 1997, peaking at number 12. Corso was, at the time of publication, the highest-ranking military officer to go on record with claims about Roswell. Michael Salla described Corso as "probably the most highly credentialed individual to come forward to say that yes, we have extraterrestrial craft that have been retrieved and that they're being studied in various corporations and they're being reverse engineered."

Phillip Corso Jr. confirmed at the Ft. Walton Beach UFO Conference in October 2000 that his father told the truth, acknowledging "marketing discrepancies" in the published edition compared to his father's original notes, and announced his intention to publish the complete original documentation at the website corsofiles.com. Paola Harris, who knew Corso personally and was the journalist closest to him during the book's release, confirmed that Italian journalist Maurizio Baiata had sent her to cover the Roswell fiftieth anniversary conference and that Corso's co-writer introduced editorial errors — including incorrectly placing Corso at Roswell itself — which detractors then used to dismiss the entire testimony: "Mistakes were made by his co-writer. And so when you get one mistake, everybody cancels everything."

Donald Schmitt, who met and interviewed Corso on multiple occasions, found him "very believable, very sincere" and confirmed the logic of distributing recovered Roswell material to private-sector contractors after the Foreign Technology Division at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base failed to achieve breakthroughs internally, stating: "It made perfect sense to us that in the failed efforts with Foreign Technology Division at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base that they would have then assimilated it into the private sector." Schmitt pointed to fiber optics and night vision as technologies that "may indeed suggest that there were some breakthroughs, that we were able indeed to have some of these quantum leaps."

In his own interview with Steven Greer, Corso stated that without extraterrestrial assistance, developing the transistor and integrated circuit alone "would have taken us 250 years," and expressed his desire that the message of the book reach the younger generation: "Let the young people know that that's the future that they're going to be seen and live with."

A voice stress analysis of Corso's July 23, 1997 Coast to Coast AM interview with Art Bell, conducted independently by analyst William Michael Kemp, found no indicators of deception: Corso's vocal stress averaged 9.5 Hz throughout, characterized as "dead normal, unstressed, and truthful," with no sustained elevation when discussing Roswell claims.

Mainstream reception and criticism

Reviews of The Day After Roswell in the general press were sharply mixed. The Baltimore Sun described the book as "disturbing," while the Financial Post titled its review "Book Reads Like Unidentified Lying Object." James Cummings of the Dayton Daily News summarized the book's likely fate: "believers will believe him, the skeptics will dismiss him, and the publishers will come out with a new series." In 2001, The Guardian included The Day After Roswell on a list of the "Top 10 literary hoaxes," grouping it with other widely-circulated works whose claims editors regarded as unsupported.

UFO researchers themselves were divided. Karl Pflock, who had met Corso in 1993, characterized him in private correspondence as "a blowhard loony tune" and considered the book "far out of left field" relative to mainstream Roswell research. Pflock further documented that the CORONA reconnaissance program — which the book credits Corso with helping initiate — had been launched two years before Corso's Pentagon posting, making his claimed central role chronologically impossible. Philip J. Klass, in detailed reviews for Skeptics UFO Newsletter, identified specific factual errors including the misidentification of 8th Air Force headquarters location, an incorrect date for Walter Haut's 1947 press release, and the description of the MIM-23 Hawk missile as "heat-seeking" rather than radar-guided as it actually was. Kevin D. Randle, a Roswell researcher who corresponded with Corso, found no documentary evidence that Corso ever served on the National Security Council as the book claims, and identified a 1961 confrontation Corso describes at CIA headquarters in Langley as impossible because the Langley facility had not yet opened and the official Corso names was posted elsewhere at the time. Researcher Brad Sparks documented that Corso positions himself in the book as a central figure in the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Kennedy assassination, and several major KGB spy cases — events for which no historical record corroborates his presence.

Author background also drew scrutiny. Corso had served as a staff assistant to Strom Thurmond and Representative Michael A. Feighan after leaving the Army; an earlier attempt to secure a different congressional staff position had been blocked following allegations of "misconduct" and "unreliability" published by the syndicated columnists Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson, and Corso's subsequent libel suit against the columnists was dismissed. A 1997 internal memorandum from the UK National Archives dismissed the book's claims, citing Corso's "previous track record of unreliable testimony."

The book also generated litigation. Producer Neil Russell sued Corso and his son in Los Angeles County Superior Court, alleging that they had attempted to extract a more lucrative film-rights deal through threats after Russell had paid for the original option. Separately, Citizens Against UFO Secrecy, represented by attorney Peter Gersten, sued the U.S. Government in 1998 seeking the release of the alleged UFO documentation referenced in the book; Judge Roslyn O. Silver of the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona dismissed the case in April 1999.

See also

References

External links