Free The Day After Roswell by Philip J. Corso Page A

in a heartbeat, as if we’d never had
the conversation.
    I didn’t take the file apart that night, even after
another nondescript wooden crate that looked like something you ship
vegetables in was carted to my office by an equally nondescript army
corporal. I didn’t go through the material the next night,
either. But over the following week, whenever I could be sure that no
one was around who could pop in without warning, I moved the material
from the box into the file and allowed myself time to look at it. It
was just like falling through the looking glass into a different world,
a puzzle of separate pieces that only vaguely captured what had been in
the memos I’d read over at the White House. No wonder no one
had really wanted anything to do with this junk, which held out the
promise of a whole world we knew nothing about but that as far back as
1947, the government had decided to keep an absolute secret.
    Career after career of anyone in government who even hinted at
the big dark secret of Roswell was pulverized by whoever was behind
this operation. And, although I knew far more than I had even admitted
to myself, I would never be the one to shoot off my mouth. But now this
file, what I would eventually call the “nut file”
to General Trudeau, had come into my possession, and as the ensuing
weeks turned into a month, I gradually figured out where some of the
puzzle pieces fit.
    First there were the tiny, clear, single filament, flexible
glass like wires twisted together through a kind of gray harness as if
they were cables going into a junction. They were narrow filaments,
thinner than copper wire. As I held the harness of strands up to the
light from my desk, I could see an eerie glow coming through them as if
they were conducting the faint light and  breaking it up into
different colors. When the personnel at the retrieval site in the
desert outside of Roswell pulled this piece out of the wreckage of the
delta shaped object, they thought it was some sort of wiring device -a
harness is what they said - or maybe some of them thought it was a
junction box or electrical relay. But whatever they thought it was,
they believed there was nothing like it on this planet. As I turned the
object over in my hand, I figured, from the way the individual
filaments flexed back and forth but didn’t break and the way
they were able to conduct a light beam along their length, they were a
wire of some sort. But for what purpose I didn’t have a clue.
    Then there were the 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. They
were the size of a twenty-five-cent piece, but the etchings on the
surface reminded me of squashed insects with their hundred legs spread
out at right angles from a flat body. Some were more rounded or
elliptical. It was a circuit - anyone could figure that out by 1961,
especially when you put it under a magnifying glass - but from the way
these wafers were stacked on each other, this was a circuitry unlike
any other I’d ever seen. I couldn’t figure out how
to plug it in and what kind of current it carried, but it was clearly a
wire circuitry of a sort that came from a larger board of wafers on
board the flying craft. My hand shook ever so slightly as I held these
pieces, not because they themselves were scary but because I was awed,
just for a few seconds, about the momentous nature of this find. It was
like an architectural treasure trove, the discoveries of some long
departed culture, a Rosetta stone, even though whoever crashed onto the
desert floor was still very active and roaming around our most secret
army and air force bases.
    I was most interested in the file descriptions accompanying a
two piece set of dark elliptical eye pieces as thin as skin. The Walter
Reed pathologists said they adhered to the lenses of the
extraterrestrial creatures’ eyes and seemed to