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

reflect
existing light, even in what looked like complete darkness, so as to
illuminate and intensify images in the darkness to allow their wearer
to pick out shapes. The reports had said that the pathologists at
Walter Reed hospital who autopsied one of these creatures tried to peer
through them in the darkness to watch the one or two army sentries and
medical orderlies walking down a corridor adjacent to the pathology
lab. These figures were illuminated in a greenish orange, depending
upon how they moved, but the pathologists could see only their outer
shape. And when they got close to each other, their shapes blended into
a single form. But they could also see the outlines of furniture and
the wall and objects on desktops. Maybe, I thought as I read this
report, soldiers could wear a visor that intensified images through the
reflection and amplification of available light and navigate in the
darkness of a battlefield with as much confidence as if they were
walking their sentry posts in broad daylight. But these eyepieces
didn’t turn night into day, they only highlighted the
exterior shapes of things.
    There was a dull, grayish-silvery foil-like swatch of cloth
among these artifacts that you could not fold, bend, tear, or wad up
but that bounded right back into its original shape without any
creases. It was a metallic fiber with physical characteristics that
would later be called “supertenacity, ” but when I
tried to cut it with scissors, the arms just. slid right off without
making even a nick in the fibers. If you tried to stretch it, it
bounced back, but I noticed that all the threads seemed to be going in
one direction. When I tried to stretch it width wise instead of length
wise, it looked like the fibers had reoriented themselves to the
direction I was pulling in. This couldn’t be cloth, but it
obviously wasn’t metal. It was a combination, to my
unscientific eye, of a cloth woven with metal strands that had the
drape and malleability of a fabric and the strength and resistance of a
metal. I was on top of some of the most secret weapons projects at the
Pentagon, and we had nothing like this, even under the wish-list
category.
    There was a written description and a sketch of another
device, too, like a short, stubby flashlight almost with a
self-contained power source that was nothing at all like a battery. The
scientists at Wright Field who  examined it said they
couldn’t see the beam of light shoot out of it, but when they
pointed the pencil-like flashlight at a wall, they could see a tiny
circle of red light, but there was no actual beam from the end of what
seemed like a lens to the wall as there would have been if you were
playing a flashlight off on a distant object. When they passed an
object in front of the source of the light, it interrupted it, but the
beam was so intense the object began smoking. They played with this
device a lot before they realized that it was an alien cutting device
like a blowtorch. One time they floated some smoke across the light and
suddenly the whole beam took shape. What had been invisible suddenly
had a round, micro thin, tunnel-like shape to it. Why did the
inhabitants of this craft have a cutting device like this aboard their
ship? It wasn’t until later, when I read military reports of
cattle mutilations in which entire organs were removed without any
visible trauma to the surrounding cell  tissue, that I
realized that the light beam cutting torch I thought was in the Roswell
file was actually a surgical implement, just like a scalpel, that was
being used by the aliens in medical experiments on our livestock.
    Then there was the strangest device of all, a headband,
almost, with electrical signal pickup devices on either side. I could
figure out no use for this thing whatsoever unless whoever used it did
so as a fancy hair band. It seemed to be a one size fits all headpiece
that did nothing, at least not for humans. Maybe it picked up brain
waves like an