Free Secret Journey to Planet Serpo by Len Kasten

entirely accidental. The feeling is constantly growing on me that I had been the first to hear the greeting of one planet to another.
    N IKOLA T ESLA , “T ALKING
WITH THE P LANETS,”
C OLLIERS W EEKLY
(M ARCH 1901)
    The selection of the Los Alamos National Laboratory near Santa Fe, New Mexico, as the site to house the alien found alive at the Corona crash site, seemed at first glance to be rather strange and inappropriate. At the time of the Roswell crash, in July 1947, less than two years after the two atomic bombs had been dropped on Japan, and only four years after it was founded, the Los Alamos Laboratory was still somewhat primitive. Originally the Los Alamos Ranch School, a private school for boys who wanted to live an outdoor life, it was selected by J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Manhattan Project, and approved by General Leslie Groves, and then was commandeered by the Army in November 1942 for the express purpose of designing and developing the atomic bomb. That is to say, it was officially condemned by the government so that the property could be acquired pursuant to a military purpose. In order to allow the boys to finish the fall semester, Secretary of War Henry Stimson agreed to wait until February 8, 1943, to take possession.
    During the war, it was staffed primarily by high-level theoretical physicists from several different countries. Immediately after the war, in the fall of 1945, the scientific ranks were severely reduced as the major nuclear scientists returned to academia and corporate consulting, and the lower-level workers left to pursue advanced degrees. Oppenheimer resigned a few weeks after the war ended to become director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and Norris Bradbury succeeded him as the director in October 1945. By spring 1946, only twelve hundred staff members remained, as Bradbury sought to define the new civilian role of the laboratory in the postwar world, now working closely with the nascent Atomic Energy Commission. But the exclusive focus of the laboratory in the new era continued to be the development of atomic weaponry. According to the Los Alamos website:
    By the late 1940s, funding was secured to rebuild the main technical area and improve housing, as the Laboratory refined and tested fission weapons and gradually expanded the hydrogen bomb research program. Two test series, Operations CROSSROADS and SANDSTONE, were conducted in 1946 and 1948, respectively. Six nuclear weapons tests were conducted in the 1940s, allowing the nation’s stockpile to grow from two bombs, in late 1945, to 170 in 1949.
    Interestingly, Major Jesse Marcel, the base security officer at Roswell, had been the Army security officer for Operation CROSSROADS conducted at the Bikini Atoll. There is no evidence that any other type of R&D was conducted at the laboratory in that period. Given the limited resources available to him during the late 1940s, it seems highly improbable that Bradbury was financially able to pursue any other type of research.

    Los Alamos National Laboratories, present day
    PARANOIA RULES
    It seems that the most important rationale for sending the sole alien survivor of the Roswell crash to Los Alamos in 1947 must have been based on trying to learn whatever they could about the advanced technology incorporated into the alien craft, and whatever other scientific information he could give them. Certainly, the theoretical physicists at the Laboratory would have been most capable of comprehending that information and possibly converting it to useful human technology. In a more perfect world, an unexpected visitor from another planet might have been sent to a top university where Earth academicians would have attempted to learn about his home world. But, only two years after a brutal, devastating war, and with the military expecting another one, advanced technology adaptable to weaponry was the main preoccupation of the U.S. government. Paranoia