Following is a brief review of "THE DAY AFTER ROSWELL", a new book that BLOWS the lid off Roswell if true. You'll also find the following interviews with the authors very enlightening.However, once again many of the claims can't be verified, at least for now. It's a very interesting book and I urge you to get it.
CNI News once again is right on top of the latest breaking news. CNI is the best single source of unbiased reporting and information on all related UFO subjects you'll find anywhere. I highly recommend you subscribe. For info go to their Web site at www.cninews.com
Dave
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COLONEL PHILIP CORSO'S BOOK CONFIRMS ROSWELL He Saw Alien and Handled Wreckage, Book Declares
by Michael Lindemann
The long-awaited book by Colonel Philip Corso, titled "The Day After Roswell," will soon be in bookstores nationwide. CNI News has gotten an advance look at parts of the text, and if Corso can be believed, his story blows the lid on Roswell, government UFO secrecy, and the ongoing reality of extraterrestrial visitors.
What will frustrate all but the most ardent believers is the fact that much of what Corso says cannot be confirmed. The reader is forced to accept or reject a litany of extravagant claims on the basis of Corso's credibility alone.
But Corso does have inherent credibility, and that is a big part of the story. By all accounts, he served with distinction during World War II and the Korean War, was a member of the White House National Security Council under President Eisenhower, and then headed the Foreign Technology Desk at the U.S. Army's Research and Development Department, reporting to General Arthur Trudeau. When this man says he knows about Roswell, it makes sense to pay attention.
Corso says he was not at Roswell during the period in early July, 1947 when the famous UFO incident took place. He recounts the probable chain of events as he learned them from records and stories, just as other Roswell researchers have done. But he backs up the stories with the claim that he did personally see what came from Roswell -- the bodies and the wreckage.
It was Lt. General Trudeau, Corso says, who assigned him the task of dealing with the wreckage when he joined Trudeau's staff at the Pentagon in 1961. But that was not his first exposure to Roswell.
Corso says he happened to be in a position, more or less accidentally, to see an alien body as it was being shipped from the New Mexico crash site to its destination at Wright Field in July 1947.
This chance event happened at Ft. Riley, Kansas, where then-Major Corso had just enrolled in Military Intelligence School after returning to the U.S. from a post-war assignment in Italy. One day -- July 6, 1947 to be exact -- he and the other men on base watched a convoy of trucks pull into Ft. Riley laden with large crates. Freight records said the crates contained an assortment of aircraft parts coming from Fort Bliss, Texas and bound for Wright Field, Ohio. Routine, Corso thought -- except that aircraft parts tended to flow FROM, rather than to, Wright Field. But that was a minor point. The only other odd thing was that the veterinary clinic was suddenly put off limits to all personnel.
Corso was Post Duty Officer that night. As he made his rounds, he came to the veterinary clinic, where a Sergeant he knew well was posted as sentry. The Sergeant was not at his post.
A voice in the dark urged Corso to come into the clinic. Corso saw the Sergeant waving him inside. He went in. There he saw several of the crates that had arrived on the convoy. Corso sternly questioned the Sergeant about what was going on. "You don't understand, Major," the Sergeant said. "You have to see this." After much discussion, Corso was persuaded to have a look. He did have the clearance to be in the temporarily top-secret location, he says, though the Sergeant did not. He ordered the Sergeant to leave, and then opened a crate.
Inside, he says, he saw an extraordinary body floating in some kind of gel-like fluid, obviously for preservation.
"It was a four-foot human-shaped figure with arms, bizarre-looking four-fingered hands -- I didn't see a thumb -- thin legs and feet, and an oversized incandescent lightbulb-shaped head that looked like it was floating over a balloon gondola for a chin," Corso writes. "I had the urge to pull off the top of the liquid container and touch the pale gray skin. But I couldn't tell whether it was skin because it also looked like a very thin one-piece head-to-toe fabric covering the creature's flesh."
Corso goes on to describe a creature that will sound familiar to anyone who understands the term "Gray." At a later point in the book, he also describes autopsy reports on this or a similar body, detailing internal organs and skeletal structure. He surmises that these bodies may have been genetically engineered for space travel.
Corso says he found routing papers on the crate which indicated the body had been taken from a craft that had crash-landed near Roswell earlier that week. This crate was routed to Air Materiel Command at Wright Field, and then on to Walter Reed Army Hospital's morgue pathology section.
Corso says that at that moment, in July 1947, he was utterly shocked by what he saw and knew he could never discuss it with anyone. He says he hoped he would never have occasion to deal with any such thing again.
But that would not be the case. In 1961, as a Lt. Colonel and a highly trusted military intelligence officer just returned from four years duty in Germany, Corso joined the staff of Lt. General Arthur Trudeau at the Pentagon. Trudeau, head of the Army's Research and Development Department, put Corso in charge of the Foreign Technology desk and immediately gave him an unexpectedly bizarre assignment.
Trudeau pointed to a filing cabinet in his office and said to Corso, "This has some special files, war materiel you've never seen before." The General said the filing cabinet would be transferred to Corso's office, and Corso was to decide how to deal with the contents. Before starting, though, the General told Corso to "do a little research on the Roswell file." Corso says the General evidently assumed that Roswell would be a complete mystery to his new assistant.
Thus Corso came to be in charge of devising a way to exploit the obvious strategic value of wreckage recovered from the Roswell craft. He says that wreckage had languished in the Army's possession from 1947 to 1961, mainly for one reason: the few people who knew about it were convinced that the government was full of Soviet spies and informers, plus many other people who were simply naive and thus security liabilities. In particular, Corso says, he and Trudeau were convinced that the CIA was virtually a direct pipeline to the Kremlin. This put the Army in a bind: the UFO wreckage was so sensitive, no one could be trusted to deal with it.
Corso's task from 1961 to 1963 was to break that logjam by secretly distributing various pieces of potentially valuable wreckage to scientists and industrial entities who were known to be trustworthy. There, the wreckage would be back-engineered into startling new human technologies. The human forward-engineering and patent process would effectively mask the alien source of the ideas. There would simply be the appearance of a tremendous burst of American technological progress.
Corso claims that the wreckage samples he found in Trudeau's mystery filing cabinet led directly to fiber optics, computer microchips and integrated circuits, night-vision goggles and the laser, among other things.
In the course of describing his handling of the wreckage, Corso makes numerous interesting side comments. For example, he says he soon realized that a small hand-held laser he found in the filing cabinet must be a surgical cutting instrument, which was probably used in cattle mutilations. He also says he learned that the Roswell UFO was "a delta-shaped object," a claim that fits recent speculations by Roswell researchers Randle and Schmitt and forensic investigator William McDonald.
Corso also confirms the existence of the super-secret oversight group usually called "MJ-12," though he says the group has gone mostly by other names. His list of original members in that group is identical to the list in the famous "Eisenhower Briefing Document." He also describes how an overall UFO cover-up strategy was set in motion by General Nathan Twining and others immediately after the Roswell incident -- just as researchers such as Stanton Friedman have long surmised -- and says the official cover-up was a highly orchestrated process with two parallel objectives: first, to keep the most sensitive facts about alien technology and visitation away from America's enemies, which necessarily meant keeping them from the general population; and second, to gradually desensitize the public, with a mix of real and nonsensical UFO information, toward some future time when the reality of alien visitation would become public knowledge.
Corso speaks of these things as if he knows them to be true, yet he refers only to the kind of documentary evidence that has long been available to UFO researchers.
In sum, Corso portrays himself as a classic and unrepentant Cold Warrior who was engaged, along with a handful of others such as General Trudeau, in a two-front war. The obvious war was with the Soviet Union, seen as an evil and brilliantly devious foe that had infiltrated every level of the U.S. government, so that almost no one could be trusted, least of all the CIA. But the other war, even weirder and more horrifying, was with an extraterrestrial foe that did not show its intentions but had, whether accidentally or not, shown its capabilities. That foe was everywhere apparent to the trained observer, Corso says. Not only were alien craft frequently sighted in the air, but the Navy was seeing them constantly underwater as well.
Corso says he played a key role in making sure U.S. technology took full advantage of what could be learned from Roswell. He seems to believe that human technology has now reached a point of being able to meet potential alien hostility on more or less even terms.
What to make of Colonel Philip Corso and his book? If he were not a highly decorated, highly credible military officer, he would likely be passed off by most people as a blatant hoaxer. But why would this particular man tell such very tall tales at the end of his life, if the tales are simply untrue? That question will likely vex more than a few readers of "The Day After Roswell," a book that will probably push the Roswell controversy to new heights in this Roswell-happy year of 1997.
["The Day After Roswell," by Col. Philip J. Corso (Ret.) with William J. Birnes, Pocket Books Hardcovers, ISBN 0-671-00461-1]
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CO-AUTHOR OF BOMBSHELL ROSWELL BOOK SPEAKS OUT
William Birnes on Himself, UFOs, Impressions of Col. Corso[CNI News thanks William J. Birnes, co-author (with Col. Philip Corso) of the new bombshell book "The Day After Roswell," for this exclusive interview in which he discusses his involvement with the book and his candid impressions of the man behind the story, Col. Philip Corso.]
CNI News: Please tell us a little about your background: schooling, profession, military involvement, other publications -- anything you'd like our readers to know about you.
William Birnes: I'm a 52-year-old writer, editor, book publisher, and literary rights agent in New York and Los Angeles. I write mostly true crime, but have done some celebrity books and sports biographies. By training, I'm an academic with a Ph.D. in Medieval Literature and Linguistics from N.Y.U. I taught English and Linguistics on both undergraduate and graduate levels for many years at what is now called the College of New Jersey. When I taught there it was called Trenton State College. I have been an NEH fellow and an NEH grants judge. I've never served in the military.
CNI: How would you describe your orientation to the UFO subject? Prior to working with Corso, were you familiar with UFO research and lore? Did you have a personal opinion on the "reality" of UFOs as unusual aircraft of possibly non-human origin?
WB: I was a UFO literary and movie"fan" with a cursory background into the research. I'd read Kevin Randle and Stan Friedman, saw all the relevant documentaries, knew the lore of Roswell and spoken with people in Roswell who had claimed to have knowledge of the 1947 incident. I had heard "stories" about a group called MJ-12 and, of course, read about it in books, but had no direct knowledge of it. I'd spoken to some pilots who's claimed to have had encounters and had heard stories about UFOs in Mexico and Brazil. But I had no direct knowledge of any UFO encounters except through second-hand or third-hand sources.
CNI: How did you come to collaborate with Col. Corso on this project? When did your collaboration begin and how did it develop?
WB: I was brought to Col. Corso by a Los Angeles motion picture company that was working with him on his World War II and Korean War Army Intelligence experiences. I was particularly interested in writing a book with him on his tour of duty in Rome when he managed to arrange for the escape of a Jewish displaced war refugee camp from Rome to Palestine right under the noses of the British and the Soviet NKVD units operating in Rome. But after developing a book outline for this, I learned about Col. Corso's experiences as a member of the U.S. Senate Internal Security subcommittee in 1963 and his investigation of the Warren Commission (all of it documented) and I really got intrigued.
It was only after we'd talked about what kinds of books we wanted to do that [Col. Corso] confided in me that he'd had another job when he was at the Pentagon from 1961-1963 which concerned the development of U.S. weapons technology from "foreign" or "alien" sources. Ultimately, he told me that he had information from the Roswell crash that had been kept in the Army files since 1947 and gradually put into development. When it became his time to take over the files, he was in charge of the anti-missile missile, military applications for the already-in-development laser, a night vision lens, and the high-energy kinetic electron beam. The inspiration for all of these devices, he said, came from files the Army kept on the technology of the devices retrieved from Roswell. The cover for this "alien" technology development was the routine Army weapons development program. He showed me the development histories of these weapons and from what I could see, the cover worked perfectly. Things just seemed to "appear" in development without any previous history. Of course, nobody wrote down anything about Roswell.
CNI: What else can you say about Corso's background and overall credibility?
WB: Phil Corso was an Army Intelligence officer trained by the British. His records were covered up by his bosses at the Pentagon because he had made intelligence discoveries (not related to Roswell) that put his life in danger. I have seen some of the classified information he developed and it amounts to nothing less than a "secret history of the United States." I'm almost afraid to talk [about] some of this stuff. But the man is as credible as they come. He was responsible for POW exchanges, had sources deep inside the KGB, fought a real battle for over fifteen years with the CIA, and saved the life of House Speaker McCormick in the hours after JFK was assassinated in Texas. I've even managed to confirm through columnist Paul Scott (now in his 90's, I think) that it was Corso who leaked information about the Soviet IRBMs [intermediate range missiles] in Cuba in 1962 because the president wasn't going to do anything about them. Corso's as real as they come.
CNI: While you worked with Corso, was there any point at which your own sense of reality was challenged by his claims? If so, what caused that to happen for you?
WB: I was frankly amazed at the matter-of-fact way in which Corso recounted the day-to-day operations of slipping alien technology into the R&D units of large corporations. His facile way of dealing with large companies through the offices of General Trudeau showed me just how narrow the line is between the military and corporate America. Maybe it's different today, but back in the 1960s, while JFK was talking about idealism and altruism, the military was fighting its own war both within government, with the Soviets and their satellite nations, and with some alien presence that the military believed was hostile. It was as if there was an entire universe during the early 1960s that was completely invisible unless you knew it was there. More than ever, Phil Corso's revelations pointed me in the direction of a "secret American history" that is still unfolding today.
CNI: Turning now to the specifics in the book, does Corso state as fact that alien (i.e. off-world, non-human) artifacts have been acquired by the U.S. government?
WB: Yes. Said artifacts were part of the Roswell debris delivered to the Pentagon from Wright Field and were stored in R&D files for over ten years before anyone tried to harvest them. Corso handled some of these artifacts, especially the cracker-sized IC wafers, a fiber-optic harness, and some kind of metallic headband, and tried to determine what use they had.
CNI: And does Corso state as fact that alien bodies have been acquired by the U.S. government?
WB: Corso saw one of the alien bodies floating in some kind of gel in a casket at Fort Riley in 1947 and reviewed the Army autopsy of an alien body while he was at the Pentagon. He describes what the Army pathologists speculated upon in his book.
CNI: In your understanding, why is Corso writing this book now?
WB: Corso says that now that everybody is dead, especially his boss, Arthur Trudeau, he feels comfortable talking about the Foreign Technology section of Army R&D. Five years ago, he wouldn't have compiled this manuscript or dared to describe what he did. But, now, he says, there really is no reason to keep these facts hidden. Besides, he believes he's part of the disclosure.
CNI: Do you think Corso has put himself (his reputation, his military pension, his life) at risk by publishing this book?
WB: Although his pension is not at issue, nor is his life, there are people -- friends of his from his military days -- who've suggested that the public really shouldn't be entrusted with this information and it's better left unspoken. Also, very few people currently in the government want to be identified with the Roswell story because of the ongoing controversy. Clearly, Phil Corso has opened up some of this controversy to public scrutiny, and it's bound to cause some waves.
CNI: Senator Strom Thurmond, who wrote the foreword to the book, told the Associated Press on June 5 that he was not properly informed on the content of the book and now wants to distance himself from it. According to the press statement, Thurmond was told that the book was to be a memoir titled "I Walked with Giants: My Career in Military Intelligence," and that there was "'absolutely no mention, suggestion or indication' that the book dealt with UFOs and a government conspiracy to hide the existence of such space vehicles." On learning the actual content of the book, Thurmond stated that "I did not, and would not, pen the foreword to a book about, or containing, a suggestion that the success of the United States in the Cold War is attributable to the technology found on a crashed UFO." Mr. Birnes, how do you respond to these statements?
WB: I want to set the record straight on this. I've read a number of articles in which Thurmond's staff has cited a book entitled "I Walked with Giants" as the book for which the senator claims to have written the foreword. This is patently incorrect. The truth is that the foreword the senator wrote for Phil Corso's first manuscript "I Walked with Giants" was returned to him by Col. Corso, who requested that he write a NEW foreword for his book "The Day After Roswell." Col. Corso spoke to Senator Thurmond in person in DC and told him what he was writing in "The Day After Roswell," and that he was even including an anecdote about [the senator] in the book. Senator Thurmond agreed to write the new foreword -- which he did -- and sent it to Corso. I have copies of both forewords as well as Thurmond's signed release to use his new foreword in "The Day After Roswell."
It's quite possible that, for whatever reason, Senator Thurmond's staff never realized that the senator had agreed to write a foreword for a book about UFOs and the military's harvest of alien technology. But the senator did agree, and we have his signed release.
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CNI NEWS INTERVIEWS COLONEL PHILIP CORSO[From the moment he arrived in Roswell, New Mexico last week, Colonel Philip Corso was in constant demand for press interviews. Despite his advanced age, Corso was energetic, lucid and very generous with his time. CNI News editor Michael Lindemann was fortunate to be invited to privately interview the Colonel in his hotel room on Saturday morning, July 5. Also present were the Colonel's son, Philip Jr., and William Birnes, co-author with Colonel Corso of the bombshell book, "The Day After Roswell."
In the book, Corso says that a genuine alien spacecraft, with bodies, was recovered near Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. He says he personally viewed one of the dead alien bodies. More importantly, he says that during the early 1960s, he was stationed at the Pentagon under the command of General Arthur Trudeau, and was assigned the super-secret task of parceling pieces of alien spacecraft wreckage out to various defense-related companies who could back engineer the alien material into useful human technology. From this program, Corso says, sprang such strategically important developments as the integrated circuit for computers, fiber optics, advanced night vision technology and lasers.
Lindemann arrived at Corso's room as a previous interview was concluding. The Colonel and Mr. Birnes were explaining how Corso had arranged for the safe passage of 10,000 Jewish refugees out of Rome to Palestine just after the end of World War II. Lindemann picked up on this theme to start the CNI News interview.]
Michael Lindemann: Not only are you a highly decorated military officer, but it seems you've always been willing to be a bit of a maverick when it comes to "doing the right thing," even if it might make some other people uncomfortable -- to the point where this latest disclosure about Roswell seems essentially in character for you. But this is a bigger disclosure, a bigger departure from the norm than your previous actions, don't you think?
Philip Corso: Well, some other things have been pretty important. Like when I moved those 10,000 Jews, I thought nothing of it, but people said what a big thing it was. Putting Rome back on its feet was important. I don't think this is bigger than some of those things. Even the looks on the families' faces in front of Congress [when he testified about American POWs left in North Korea], that was pretty important to those people. And this one here, I think, fits in with all those others. Yes, it's important, because like they say, it might have changed the course of the world. Well, I have to give a lot of credit to General Trudeau, who made it possible, and to the other people who were with me. Maybe we changed the course of the world. The thing that I've done now is going to affect the future. That's why I bring the children in on it, the young ones. We're old now, we're going to be moving on. But they're going to be here. Let them know what happened. I think it's of great importance that those children are going to read this and know what happened and what it came from, and that it was true. It did happen. They have to know what's involved, and what it's leading to. They're the ones who will be involved in what it leads to. From that point of view, it's the most important thing I ever did.
ML: Where do you think it does lead to? You allude in your book to the possibility that maybe there's a hostile potential here.
PC: When you're in the military, you always have to figure on that hostile part. You can't disregard that. Our motto was, "Just in case, we're going to be ready." What's it going to be in the future? We called it at R&D [the Army's Research and Development Department at the Pentagon] the dawn of a new age, maybe a new world. The world's not going to stop. Maybe this was a seed that was sown to start a new world. Look what they did with the [computer] chip -- in just a few years, how it blossomed out into the supercomputer. I said to General Trudeau, "What are we unleashing on the world, General? If this can integrate with the brain, there's great danger." He said, "Yes, Phil, but the people coming after us, we hope, will possibly understand and take this into consideration. But maybe not in our lifetime." He didn't see it in his lifetime. He died three years ago.
ML: Do we know how to build the kind of craft that they found at Roswell?
PC: I think that we will know. Where we were missing out on a lot of this was in the propulsion and guidance systems. We came to the conclusion years ago, and now it's starting to take hold even among scientists, that the reason we missed out on this was that the extraterrestrial himself was the guidance system. He was part of the system. We never figured on that.
One day I was walking in the hall with General Trudeau, and I turned to him and said, "General, I think that son of mine is a little bit crazy. He says engines talk to him." The General turned to me and said, "Phil, don't ever say that again. People have certain relationships with engines, with solid matter, that we don't understand. But it's there." See, this is all starting to come forward now.
And it was uncanny that this book had to break when this thing is happening here at Roswell. I never expected what I saw last night, what I've seen here. [From the time he arrived in Roswell, Colonel Corso was surrounded by press and people seeking interviews.] Someone like me has always lived in the shadows. To all at once see this happening around me, and I'm a focal point -- I feel like I should be home sitting in my easy chair, not here. And yet, last night [at the Friday evening banquet] I was almost mobbed.
ML: Did you know that the American public was this hungry for this information, and this ready to believe you?
PC: Sure I knew. My nephew is a research director at [inaudible] university, and I have letters the young man wrote to me. He said, "Uncle Phil, please tell them to tell us the truth. We won't pull our hair out or panic. We want to hear this." In all of my interviews lately, I've been saying I'm going to prove this to you people. My own experience: I commanded a battalion of 1500 men. Average age, nineteen and a half years old. Those boys didn't panic and run. I told my exec[utive officer], my god, we're leading babies into combat. They didn't panic. They stood and fought some of the greatest armies the world has ever seen, and defeated them. A lot of them died. But they didn't run, they fought. So I say, this is the younger-age people -- they're not going to panic. Let them know. They want to know. That Orson Welles show [War of the Worlds, 1938] has thrown a lot of people off. It's not going to be like that.
ML: Do you feel we are ready to know the truth on this?
PC: We've been ready. A long time ago.
ML: Did you have to willfully break any personal oaths or promises to the military or the country in order to do what you've done?
PC: No. The oath that I held was with the General. I held that oath until he died, because he was an honorable man, an honest man. I liked him. He was a great man. As far as being an Army officer, I kept my oath for thirty-five years. I did not violate any security, and I had all the clearances. I was the one who used to stop people from violating security. I did not reveal anything that's harmful or should be kept quiet.
ML: There have been rumors and speculations that Roswell, and what came from Roswell -- the way we exploited Roswell technology -- might not have been the very first time such a thing happened. There have even been indications or speculations that the Nazis had done such a thing, that some of their extraordinary technological developments may have come from a similar source. What do you think about that?
PC: Yes. True. I had German scientists on my team. I discussed this with them. I discussed this with Oberth, von Braun. I was part of Project Paperclip with General Trudeau. There's an example in the book. In the middle of the book there's a photograph of Edward O'Connor, one of Truman's poker-playing buddies at the White House -- he was a Soviet expert -- and General Trudeau, myself and Victor Fediay of the Library of Congress, who spoke fluent Russian. Fediay was going to Russia. I gave him a series of questions. I said, "Ask a KGB general these questions [pertaining to UFOs]." So Victor comes back and says, "Phil, I asked him the questions. You know what he said? He said, 'I know what you want. But do you want me killed?'" Now, that's Russia. Germany? Yes. Canadians and British also, and something in Italy. There were crashes elsewhere, and they gathered material too. The Germans were working on it. They didn't solve the propulsion system. They did a lot of experiments on flying saucers. They had one that went up 12,000 feet. But where all, we and they, missed out was on the guidance system. In R&D we began to realize that this being was part of the guidance system, part of the apparatus himself -- or itself, because it had no sexual organs. This is where most people missed out.
ML: Do you think, then, that if we are going to develop a way of interstellar travel, we will have to develop a similar relationship to our spacecraft?
PC: Man can't travel in space today. Those clones were created to travel in space, specifically. They can travel in space. Our muscles, our bones, our brain, can't take space travel, even today. We can't do it.
ML: We can do it to some extent.
PC: Well, when they go to Mir, they stay up there two or three months, and when they come off, they have to be carried off. Their bones won't hold up. If they stayed a little longer, they'll never be able to walk. But the big thing that is not talked about is [that] the brain is affected up there.
ML: How is that?
PC: Gravity, radiation -- it comes right through that ship. Look at Senator [John] Glenn, he saw "fireflies" coming through his capsule. They weren't fireflies, they were some kind of electromagnetic thing that came through there. Those [alien] beings are created specifically to travel in space.
ML: Speaking of Senator Glenn, my understanding is that he's sort of ambivalent on the subject of UFOs. How would you characterize it?
PC: He told me exactly what he was. I met with Senator Glenn. I was supposed to meet him for half an hour, and he kept me for an hour and a half. During the course of the conversation, we talked about UFOs, and he said, "Colonel, I'm an agnostic." I said, "But you didn't say you don't believe," and he laughed. That's his exact word to me -- he's agnostic.
Then we got into Project Horizon. I had the whole project [document], 310 pages, and he wanted it. I had to give it to him. He was amazed when he saw that [in] 1959, long before he went up in the capsule, we had all the plans made up to put a military colony on the moon. Defense killed it on us. They didn't like the Army, so they took it away from us and killed it, and made NASA.
ML: Is it possible for any civilian to get their hands on the Project Horizon report today? How do we find out about this?
PC: It's unclassified. I was the declassifying officer. There's 50 pages of it in [my] book. I wrote to the Army Corps of Engineers historical division, and I told them where it was and what it was, and they found it and sent me copies of it immediately. The original was in color. Beautiful. I'd like to get my hands on it. [Corso pages through Appendix One of his book as he speaks.] Look, there's a lunar lander. This was 1959. The best brains in the world worked on this, all the Germans, all von Braun's team, they worked on this. I talked to a German in Huntsville, Alabama, a few months ago, and he said, "I remember that. I worked on it." This was an amazing document. And here's General Trudeau's instructions that started it. Lately, my scientist friend at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Texas [probably a reference to Dr. Hal Puthoff] had a meeting with the top [scientists] at NASA, and he threw Project Horizon on the table, and he says they were shocked. They couldn't believe it. They never knew about it. Defense killed it on us; and the CIA had a hand in killing it.
ML: Just the other day, the Air Force issued their latest official explanation of what happened at Roswell. I'm sure you must have had a few chuckles over it. How are you responding to this? And how is the press treating you, now that you've made your position so clear and now that the Air Force has said, again, that it's all a bunch of baloney?
PC: They're treating me better than I ever expected. I expected criticism. As far as the Air Force, I fought alongside them in Korea. I have a lot of friends in the Air Force, and I will not criticize a sister service. But I will criticize their superiors, the Secretary of the Air Force and so forth. It amazes me and I cannot comprehend why they do this. They don't have to do this. Why do they want themselves to look like fools? Even the young kids are telling me, "Dummies? Dummies?" and then they laugh. I can't comprehend why they put that out. What is in their mind? If I'd have written something like that, General Trudeau would have thrown me out of the top window of the Pentagon.
ML: What about the problem with Senator Strom Thurmond's foreword to your book? Simon and Schuster has issued a bland apology, saying they're going to pull Thurmond's foreword out of future printings of the book. What was your understanding with the Senator?
PC: I've known Strom Thurmond for almost a lifetime. He's a very honest, sincere and courageous individual. We've alway been close. I found out recently that his staff did it. I don't think the old man knew it, and I think the old man will eventually call me. We were too close for too many years. I sent the original foreword for the other book [Thurmond had written a foreword for a book titled "I Walked With Giants"] back to the Senator, and I told him, "If you want to send me another statement for this new book, that's fine. If you don't want to, that's fine too." I discussed UFOs with him. I gave him a copy of Project Horizon. About a week later, not only did I get the two pages that are in the book, but I also got a note from him authorizing Simon and Schuster to print it. Bill Birnes has all that. He has the original foreword -- the one I sent back -- and he has the new one.
ML: Bill Birnes told me when I arrived here today that he was under the impression that Thurmond or perhaps his staff had been pressured from higher up to back out of this. Can you say anything about this?
[Colonel Corso's son, present during the whole interview, made very visible hand signals to the Colonel at this point indicating that the Colonel should not answer this question.]
PC: I can't verify that one way or another.
ML: Forgive me, Colonel, if I ask Mr. Birnes to say something about this. [Birnes was in the room embroiled in a side conversation at this time.] Bill, the Colonel has just declined to address the question whether or not Senator Thurmond or his staff may have been pressured from higher up. You indicated that he might have been. Can you explain?
Bill Birnes: This is just my understanding of it from stories I heard. The staff really wasn't aware of the agreement that Colonel Corso and the Senator had. It was an agreement between two friends, more than two business associates. The staff went ballistic when they found out. In other words, "How dare you do something and not consult your staff about what you're writing?" So the staff's immediate preliminary reaction was, "Oh no, this was the foreword for the book 'I Walked With Giants.'" What the staff didn't know was that Colonel Corso had sent that first foreword back to the Senator and got a new foreword in return. I have copies of both. So, obviously, they weren't in the loop. When they were told that this is a new foreword the Senator wrote, the story immediately changed. "Well, we weren't told, and we can't do this." Finally, one of the staff members said, "Don't you understand that the Senator cannot be on a book cover, writing a foreword, for a book that says the United States government utilized alien technology to win the Cold War? Don't you realize this man is fourth in line to succeed the president? Don't you know this man is chairman of the Armed Services Committee? NO, it can't be." So they went to Simon and Schuster and said, "You have to pull the cover. Take it off the shelves, get the foreword out, write a new cover." Simon and Schuster said absolutely not. Then they made it very clear to Simon and Schuster, saying, "You're part of a large conglomerate. Your large conglomerate has to deal with government regulatory bodies. [According to Birnes, Simon and Schuster is owned by Paramount, which in turn is owned by Viacom.] Do you really want to be in this position? Viacom goes before the FCC. You have a constituency of stockholders that you have to respond to.
ML: You're suggesting political blackmail.
BB: It's absolutely political blackmail.
ML: Can you verify that this is what was going on?
BB: I have to say that this is my understanding of what was going on because of confidential discussions I had with legal [personnel] at Simon and Schuster, and from statements that the staff members made to the Corso family with respect to the pressure that was being put on them to get this foreword out of the book. What I do know for a fact is that they demanded that Simon and Schuster pull the book off the shelves. Simon and Schuster flatly refused and said they had a signed release. Then [the Senator's staff] came back and said, "As a matter of courtesy, if we say that the Senator really wasn't clear on the nature of the book..." and Simon and Schuster said, "Well, if it's a matter of courtesy, then we can certainly understand that in the heat of material passing back and forth, misunderstandings can happen." So, that was the basic agreement.
ML: So, once they got the niceties of language straightened out, the agreement was that the foreword would be pulled from future printings of the book?
BB: Yes, exactly. But it will remain as it is, with this cover, for this printing.
ML: Cutting to other news, there was a story that broke here yesterday morning [Friday, July 4] about an object that had been tested by several scientists. Its content was almost entirely pure silicon, with small traces of metals such as germanium and zinc. This sounds suspiciously like some kind of solid state artifact, and it showed such highly anomalous isotopic ratios that a scientist was willing to say on the record that it had the appearance of extraterrestrial manufacture. Can this be compared with anything you saw at the Pentagon, Colonel?
PC: I don't know anything about it. It doesn't even sound similar to me.
ML: According to your book, you spent most of your time dealing with the artifacts and debris of the Roswell incident, but what about the aliens involved, and more especially, what about the alien situation today? What do you think is the nature of the alien presence, if any, on earth today?
PC: From my knowledge, at the moment, I don't know of any alien presence on earth. There are still reports of flying saucers, of course, but I don't know of any report of a body, or anyone who has seen [an alien] lately.
ML: What do you say about people such as abductees who claim to be actually seeing these creatures?
PC: My reports were thirty-five years ago. If there's anything now, I'm not aware of it. I know just what I saw in those days, and the truth like I lived it. If there's any aliens now, I'd like to see them. I don't know where they are. I'd like to see if they compare with the ones that I saw.
[Due to the Colonel's other commitments, the interview ended here.]
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