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From: campbell@ufomind.com (Glenn Campbell, Las Vegas) Date: Wed, 18 Jun 1997 16:00:31 -0800 Subject: Greg Sandow's Report on Corso Book [UFO Updates] |
From: Greg Sandow <gsandow@prodigy.net> To: "UFO Updates (E-mail)" <updates@globalserve.net> Subject: Corso's book Date: Tue, 17 Jun 1997 17:34:25 -0400 Damn. I never meant to buy it. I just thought I'd sit and read it in the bookstore, to see what it was like. But it turned out to be more substantial, more dubious, and more just plain quirky than I expected, so I had to have a copy. Here's what's in it. The central UFO theme is a lot more detailed and newer than anyone has yet suggested here. But there's a smorgasbord of UFO references -- Roswell, abductions, the autopsy film, cattle mutilations, MJ-12 -- so random and incoherent you can easily suspect they were tossed in by someone who didn't really know the UFO literature, to give a manufactured story credibility. And that's not all. Corso makes claims about non-UFO history -- the U-2 incident and the Cuban Missile Crisis -- that are, shall we say, at variance with the usuaul accounts. It turns out, in fact, that even in non-UFO terms Corso is a key figure in postwar events, and, if we factor in his alleged UFO role, he becomes one of the most important people in the 20th century. Though to give him credit, he's modest about his stature and in fact says that the importance of his work hadn't even occured to him until he sat down to write what apparently (he's not entirely clear about this) was originally going to be quite a different memoir. If I've read him correctly on this last point, of course, then Thurmond's staff might be right when they say they originally had an outline with nothing in it about UFOs. However, Corso says in the book that Thurmond knew the UFO secret, so Thurmond was going to be involved with the book whether he wrote the foreword or not. To discuss some of these points in greater detail: The key to Corso's UFO information is the title of the book -- "The Day After Roswell." This refers to something initially quite limited, and fascinating -- what happened to the crash debris. Corso says that it initially got scattered scientific study, some of which led to the development of the transitor. But then it languished, until the early '60s when Corso went to work for a foreign technology unit of the army. His superior asked him to look at the stuff, and suggest what might be done with it. Corso's report (I'm leaving out all the "supposedly"s here, to save wear and tear on my typing fingers) led to an ingenious project, in which suggestive bits of alien stuff were funneled into private-industry research projects that were already used to getting terrestrial foreign technology, and not asking questions about it. That is, one week they'd get parts from a crashed Soviet jet. The next week they'd get something alien. They wouldn't be told what either thing was. The point here was to keep the work secret by NOT starting a massive new project -- and, by the way, to cover the tracks of any alien-based technological developments. This sounds plausible to me, though I'd be quick to stress I don't have the military or intellgence background for my assesssment to mean much. One key to the plan was that security was just as important as information. That's why a full-bore study wasn't unleashed from the start. Corso's full story of the aliens includes more than this -- they're hostile, for instance, and they're genetically-engineered creatures, optimized for space travel. And it has a grand and glorious conclusion. After alien technology helped create night vision equipment and lasers, among much else, it finally helped us build particle-beam weaponry that -- when deployed as part of Reagan's Star Wars program -- not only brought the cold war to an end, but brought about a stalemate with the aliens, whose UFOs could now be shot down! Corso somewhat fudges the extent of his involvement with this, since he left the army shortly after setting the initial project in motion (though his fudging may just be a reflection of a general carelessness that afflicts much of the narrative). Still, if this is where his work led, he's a hero -- clearly, as the man who set us on the path of miltiary equality with an alien invading force, one of the great heroes of our time. One passing thought: We've read here that somebody traced the development of the transistor through patents and articles in scientific journals, and found every step accounted for, thus proving, supposedly, that alien technology wasn't involved. Corso suggests that the project was set up to create precisely this impression. Besides -- and here I'm speaking for myself -- patents and journal articles don't record where engineers and scientists get their ideas. If somebody's thinking is stimulated by a fragment of an alien TV set, they still have to theorize and experiment to imitate the thing -- and it's those theories and experiments that show up in published data, not the inspiration for them. So what about Corso's non-UFO heroism? This, friends and fellow ufologists, is a doozy. Corso takes personal credit for U.S. resistance to Soviet missiles in Cuba. I'm not exaggerating. Corso says he had photographs clearly showing the missles, and says that he knew President Kennedy wasn't going to do anything about it. So he leaked the information to Senator Kenneth Keating of New York, and, most crucially, to a reporter -- and says that it was the reporter's articles that forced Kennedy to act! Needless to say, you can't find this in standard histories. Keating, it's true, sounded an early alarm; that I could document. But -- while Corso is in synch with standard histories when he says the CIA didn't believe that Soviet ICBMs were in Cuba -- the usual story depicts a steady buildup of data within the Kennedy administration that quickly persuaded Kennedy to act. Corso also appears out to lunch when he reproduces quotes from phone conversations between Eisenhower and Soviet premier Khrushchev about the U-2 flights that eventually would wreck a US-Soviet summit meeting. Corso seems to say (again, the sloppy tracking of details throughout the book makes this hard to be sure about) that his source is a buddy in the KGB, and he's correct, according to standard histories, to say that Eisenhower was dubious about the flights, and that the USSR knew all about them, even before they shot one down. But that Khruschchev and Eisenhower ever talked about it before the shooting, and even that they ever talked on the phone, is, um, new. You won't find any reference to it in the standard Stephen Ambrose biography of Eisenhower, or in Khrushchev's memoirs. For what it's worth, the hot line between the White House and the Kremlin wasn't even installed till the '60s. There's also a hint somewhere about the CIA plotting Kennedy's assassination. Nothing more on the subject. And everything in the book is buried in a subtext right out of a spy novel. The CIA (which follows Corso around Washington to see what he's up to) is shipping secrets to the Russians. Nevertheless, an unstated bond between the CIA and the KGB adds a touch of stability to US-Soviet relations, and Corso quite happily makes deals with the Soviet military, which hates the KGB. On one memorable page he even gets photocopies smuggled out of the Soviet embasssy -- the point being to find out exactly what secrets the CIA has revealed! Thurmond? The reference to his secret knowledge is brief, and just a bit coy. I can't find it, for the moment, and the book has no index. But in essence it's this. Corso finds his superior, General Arthur Trudeau, talking to Thurmond. Thurmond says something about "them," and Corso understands that "they" are the aliens. If that's all he has to go on, you might wonder why he's so sure. but he does state outright that Thurmond knew. UFO data? What a mishmash. The book begins, in fact, with an account of the Roswell crash, complete with reconstructed dialogue. It reads like fiction -- or, to give a proper UFO antecedent, like one of Keyhoe's books, though the facts Keyhoe alleged always checked out. Maybe to give himself an out, Corso says he's heard many versions of the crash story, and that this is just one of them. As we've read here, Major Jesse Marcel is on hand at the crash site, overseeing the recovery of the body of the craft, and the aliens. That's at variance with standard Roswell accounts, which, as Dennis Stacy has pointed out, leave us wondering why Marcel wasn't there, or, if he was, why he never talked about it afterwards. But there's more. A sentry shoots an alien that starts to move, and there are named witnesses heretofore unknown (or at least not listed in the indexes of the standard Roswell books). Who's Steve Arnold? Corso says he rode shotgun on one of the staff cars heading for the recovery site, and was the first to disembark. Who's Roy Danzer, a plumbing subcontractor who was fitting pipe at the base, and saw the recovery convoy arriving with the alien bodies, one of which Danzer saw? Corso mentions the members of MJ-12, without naming the organization. He says the aliens have six fingers; that's from the autopsy film. He's confusing on abductions. I've said that much in this book isn't clear, and the abduction references go to the front (or rear) of the pack. It's hard to tell, but Corso does seem to state that abductions were known in the '50s and known to be widespread in the '60s, something the UFO literature won't support. (But then Corso might have been referring to secret military data. Who knows?) These UFO references are a mess, basically. Corso at least should have noted where they fit. As in: "Yes, UFO researchers have found these names, and say they were part of a group called MJ-12. I never heard that name, but the group did exist, and these were the guys who ran it." As things stand, every one of these references seems phony, as if Corso (or his ghostwriter) had plucked factoids from various UFO sources, to make the story seem credible. What WOULD make the tale believable? More facts. Backup. Corrobora tion. The book, taken as a whole, is simply weird. Suppose it's fake. Why on earth would Corso, after what appears to have been a distinguished career, smash his reputation for....what, money? Fame? Attention? Why would he say Thurmond knew the secret, when that means Thurmond would certainly be asked, and presumably would deny the whole thing? But then suppose the story is real. Is this how a distinguished military man spills the greatest secret in human history? By hiring a ghostwriter to write an incoherent popular potboiler? Wouldn't a better plan be, first, to make sure the book makes sense, and addresses obvious problems right where they occur, and second to call a press conference, in which supporting evidence and maybe even a supporting witness or two would see the light of day? There's precious little in the book for anyone to work with. Here and there you find a name -- "Dr. Mark Johnson," for instance, identified as an "aeronautical reserach scientst" from Hughes Aircraft, whom Corso says he met at Fort Belvoir, and who knew the alien secret. Does this man exist? And how did Corso emerge from this long history without a single document? All he seems to have are some shadowy photos of UFOs, and even these he says he can't vouch for as genuine. But wait -- there ARE documents! He mentions them in the text, and even quotes from them. For instance, he has a private copy of General Trudeau's apparently unpublished memoirs. He even quotes a paragraph, in which UFOs aren't mentioned. Is that the best he could do? What do the rest of the memoirs say? Would I be right to suspect that UFOs aren't mentioned anywhere in them? And then there are Corso's sharply written reports to Trudeau, which he quotes from liberally. Could we, perhaps, see a page or two? Can we verify that they really were written in the '60s, or that at least they could have been? What security markings do they bear, if any? The book doesn't tell us. Corso also mentions his journals. Can we see them? Can we verify their age? This is getting frustrating -- unless, of course, we simply conclude that the whole thing is bogus, and that we're not seeing these documents because they don't exist. Finally, there's something else. Apparently this secret wasn't very tightly kept. The Soviets knew all about it. Even the Nazis did -- Corso thinks they'd recovered their own alien UFO, and were on the way to learning the aliens' secrets. The ET threat was discussed at National Security Council meetings, he also says, was known about at high levels in all the armed services, and was widely known (or at least rumored) in science and private industry. So where's the evidence for that? Stalin, Corso says, pitched a fit when he heard about Roswell. Are there Kremlin files that say so? And what about the hundreds or thousands of politicians, generals, admirals, Washington insiders, scientists and industrial magnates who knew about the aliens? Surely -- if Corso's book is true, and he's still alive after writing it -- somebody, somewhere, is going to step forward to say that they were there, too. (Delightful fact! Corso's view of the aliens does not support other alleged insiders' reports -- not Bob Lazar's, with its spacecraft fueled by element 115, or William Uhouse's (he being Glenn Campbell's "Jarod II"), with its deal between the ETs and our government: their technology in exchange for a steady supply of boron. Who should we believe?) Greg Sandow ----------------------- Ufomind Index: Philip Corso Ufomind Index: The Day After Roswell Ufomind Index: Greg Sandow
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