La Guerra Secreta ...

This is the title of a new edition, in Spanish and published by Planeta (2007) in Mexico of the workbench reports written by Lt. Col. Philip J. Corso from which our manuscript, The Day After Roswell (Atria/Pocket 1997) ultimately came. Corso called his workbench notes The Dawn of a New Age and was going to publish them in English after he and I completed the next book he was going to write for Pocket called The Day After Dallas. The Day After Dallas was about Corso's years as the chief investigator for Internal Government Security for the Senate, particularly for Senator Richard Russell of the Warren Commission. You can guess what the title The Day After Dallas refers to.

But The Dawn of a New Age is different, coming as it did before we actually put together Corso's different manuscripts for The Day After Roswell. As Phil had explained it to me when we first went over his notes, The Dawn of a New Age was a very optimistic view of how alien technology promised to solve many problems here on earth. But it also documents some of the difficulties that the Army had in developing some of the technologies that he said the Army retrieved from the craft that crashed at one of the Roswell crash sites.

Part of Corso's intention in assembling his notes for this manuscript was a defense of Army R&D during the tenure of Lt. General Arthur Trudeau, an important figure in Army history. Phil Corso argued that what he called the "golden age of technology" from the middle to the late 1960s, in part, resulted from the Army's harvesting the technology from the crash sites north of Roswell and developing them into everything from today's airborne high-energy laser to high tensile strength fabrics like Kevlar®.

As the 1990s drew to a close, what impressed me most about The Dawn of a New Age wasn't the description of all the technologies per se -- we'd covered that in The Day After Roswell -- but Corso's belief in the promise of what technology could accomplish and the Army's role in bringing it to the public. These were notes ostensibly written before the Vietnam War and the Kennedy assassination, before Watergate, and before the partisan politics that has made government just about unworkable.

Corso was a soldier of the Cold War, and there was no confusion in his mind about who the enemy was. He was criticized for his beliefs, but he claimed he had seen the enemy within, face to face and was unrepentant about how to deal with it. Corso's descriptions of what the Soviets and Chinese did to high-value American POWs in the Korean War were graphic and chilling and were, years later, partially borne out by the release of the KGB files from the Cold War years.

The Dawn of A New Age describes incredible devices and fantastic weapons. It supports Michael Sala to some extent about the hostile intentions of extraterrestrials, at least from a military perspective. But it also raises the question that the ETs might not have had any hostile intehntions at all. In fact, Corso says at one point, the "ETs had no intentions because they were simply surveyors exploring the territory of a different species." If they left behind some advanced technology, so much the better for us. It wasn't a gift as much as it was a fortuitous accident of which we were the beneficiaries. The manuscript is a very interesting reflection by someone who, in his own words, stared at ETs face to face and handled the debris they left behind.

I can't tell you when I will get the chance to publish this in English. But at some point, I will, and everyone will get a chance to read Corso's own words at a time when he was still at Army R&D in 1962.