ScienceDirect - Technol Rep Tohoku Univ ... - Garryck Osborne

NICK COOK 151
months after the supposed crash of a UFO at Roswell, New Mexico, in
July 1947: the period that most people tout as the real start of the modern
UFO sightings era.
What was it that Twining had written? That it was possible, "within
the present U.S. knowledge—provided extensive detailed development
is undertaken—to construct a piloted aircraft which has the general
description of the object above which would be capable of an approximate
range of 7,000 miles at subsonic speeds."
In mid-August 1945, I recalled, too, that 300 railroad freight cars of
V-2 components captured in the European theater of operations had
trundled westward across the wilderness from the Gulf of Mexico to the
Organ Mountains, deep inside the dry, desert hinterland. Every railroad
siding from El Paso, Texas, to Belen, New Mexico, a distance of 210
miles, had been seen to be full of cars all headed for the White Sands
Proving Ground, 125 miles to the west of Roswell. Following on behind
them were approximately 40 captured German scientists recruited under
the covert selection program known as "Operation Paperclip." They
were led by Wernher von Braun.
Maybe Roswell had happened, maybe it hadn't. But if something had
come down in that summer of 1947, something extraterrestrial, there was
no definitive proof, more than half a century later, to say that what had
crashed there was alien; and dozens, if not hundreds of researchers had
sought to discover the truth about it.
But if Roswell's extraterrestrial dimension was simply a piece of
fiction, then why not turn the thing around, look a little to the left or the
right, and see what swam into focus.
When I looked at Roswell this way, I saw the White Sands Proving
Ground. And then I saw something else.
The V-2 rocket program had started under the aegis of the German
Army, the Wehrmacht, but had been transferred in the final stages of the
war on Hitler's orders to a higher authority: Reichsführer-SS, Heinrich
Himmler. The same had been true of the Me 262 jet fighter and just
about every other German high-tech weapons program. Most of them
had started under Luftwaffe control and then migrated in the same
direction. In short, anything that had shown any real promise as a weapon
system—in particular, anything that appeared to represent a quantum
leap over the then state of the art—had ended up under the oversight of
the SS.
Eight thousand feet above sea level, I felt a constriction in my throat. I
was so keyed up, my breath was coming in short, sharp gasps. But the
thoughts kept on tumbling.