The UFO Mystery Grows

Area 51 and reverse engineering

While the government officially denies the existence of the base known as Area 51, UFO investigators are convinced that the military base near Groom Lake in Nevada is the site where the UFO that crashed near Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947 was reversed engineered to create such aerial craft as the Stealth Bomber.

Area 51, also known as Dreamland, has not really been secret since the March 1993 issue of Popular Science brought the reconnaissance aircraft Aurora out of the dark and revealed that the Mach 6 spy plane was developed at the closely guarded U.S. Air Force facility at Groom Lake, Nevada.

In his book, The Day After Roswell (1997), Colonel Philip J. Corso (U.S. Army, retired) claims that he was given "personal steward-ship" of various extraterrestrial artifacts recovered from the crash of a spacecraft outside of Roswell, New Mexico, in July 1947. Corso goes on to state that he distributed the objects of alien technology to select government contractors and that while the U.S. government has officially denied doing so, it has had large numbers of scientists secretly and ambitiously achieving reverse engineering from advanced alien technology. Among the results of such back engineering have been fiber optics, light amplification devices, Kevlar (lightweight, heavily resistant material for use in body armor), and a large number of advances in laser weaponry.

Corso served his country for many years. He was on General Douglas MacArthur's intelligence staff following the Korean War in the 1950s, and he was later assigned to President Dwight Eisenhower's Security Council, then to the Army Research and Development's Foreign Technology Desk at the Pentagon. According to Corso, when he moved into the Foreign Technology Division, he was given a file cabinet of artifacts from the Roswell crash and instructed to begin working on a plan of action and recommendations for their use. His superiors were enthusiastic about the artifacts' use in building spaceships that would not be able to be penetrated by radiation, cosmic activity, or gunfire.

One of Corso's first file cabinet discoveries was a piece of metal about the size of a postcard that was paper thin. Somehow the atoms were aligned in the metal in such a way that government scientists all failed to back engineer it. Next, according to Corso, the scientists moved on to an integrated circuit, the size of a chip, that gave rise to the transistor.

In a government program called "Applied Engineering," Corso and his staff would find people in industry who were working in a particular area of scientific research and supplement their work with the alien technology through their Research and Development projects. In some instances, the government agency would even fund it.

Although the claims made by Colonel Corso in The Day After Roswell remain extremely controversial and unverified, they continue to keep alive the accusations that the government has kept the truth about the alleged alien crash at Roswell from the public.

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