By this time, the tallest alien and the bioastronautic engineer had established a rudimentary form of communication. The four aliens entered the craft and after a few minutes the hum was silenced. Upon emerging, the tall alien asked the bioastronautic engineer to accompany him back inside. This was permitted. The memo says, âAfter sometime [
sic
] passed, both made their exit. The engineer looked well and smiling.â After that event, the Ebensâ preferences were honored. They were allowed to be housed at the test site near their craft, and their requests for additional material, equipment, and literature were granted. Thus began a new phase of human-alien cooperation that allowed the reverse-engineering program to begin in earnest. That would have been sometime around November 1953.
In attempting to reconstruct the sequence of events that occurred after the alien craft landed near Kingman, it becomes clear by putting the two versions together that the scene that was staged for the benefit of the investigators must have taken place after the four live aliens had been packed off to Los Alamos. The dead Eben seen by Stancil could easily have been one of the ten that had been preserved cryogenically at Los Alamos, and was brought to the site on dry ice just to participate in the tableau to be observed by the fifteen investigatorsâa nifty piece of stagecraft presented by an ad hoc U.S. Air Force theater group!
See appendix 10 for a personal statement by Bill Uhouse, an American engineer who worked on duplicating the alien disc recovered at the Kingman site and building a disc simulator for training our pilots.
6
KENNEDY
Many years ago, the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it. He said, âBecause it is there.â Well, space is there, and weâre going to climb it, and the moon and the planets are there, and new hopes for knowledge and peace are there. And, therefore, as we set sail we ask Godâs blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.
J OHN F. K ENNEDY , S PEECH
AT R ICE U NIVERSITY , S EPTEMBER 12, 1962
President Kennedy was catapulted into the middle of world-shaking events in his very first year in office. Perhaps most important was Vostok 1, the successful orbital flight of Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin on April 12, 1961 (see plate 7 ). Even though Gagarin was in space for a short 108 minutes, and made only a single orbit, this was a shot across the bow for the United States because we werenât even close to matching that accomplishment, even though we had Wernher von Braun on our NASA team. Kennedy was galvanized by that event. Eight days later, he shot off a memo to Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, whom he had appointed as chairman of the Space Council, that asked the question, âDo we have a chance of beating the Soviets by putting a laboratory in space, or by a trip around the moon, or by a rocket to land on the moon, or by a rocket to go to the moon and back with a man? Is there any other space program which promises dramatic results in which we could win?â Kennedy was deeply committed to his New Frontier initiative, and space was the new frontier. Space travel was tops on his agenda, and he wasnât going to settle for second best to the Soviets. It clearly demonstrates the importance of this subject to Kennedy when it is realized that this memo to Johnson was sent only three days after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. One would think that explosive subject would have been uppermost in his mind. Just the previous day, several members of the invasion force had been executed by the Castro regime.
We now know from several sources, including Jacqueline Kennedy, how severely shaken Kennedy was over the Bay of Pigs debacle. And yet, only one month later, on May 25, 1961, he delivered his famous man-on-the-moon speech to a Joint
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