From: Moderator, UFO UpDates - Toronto
Date: Tue, 11 Aug 1998 07:33:18 -0400
Fwd Date: Tue, 11 Aug 1998 07:33:18 -0400
Subject: Korff & Sparks - Roswell Book 'Exposed'



Source: Jeff Rense's Sightings Homepage

http://www.sightings.com/ufo/corsoexpose.htm

Korff and Brad Sparks Claim Corso-Birnes Roswell Book Exposed
From Kal Korff
c/o TotlResrch@aol.com


Note - Replies and responses are welcomed and encouraged.


EXCLUSIVE EXPOSE! Colonel Philip Corso and William Birnes'
Bestselling Book Exposed as a Hoax! By Brad C. Sparks

Philip Corso's Roswellmania

The only thing "extraterrestrial" in Philip Corso's book "The
Day After Roswell" (Pocket Books/Simon & Schuster, 1997), is the
height of his tall tales, certainly the tallest Roswell tales to
date. His thesis of course (for those of you blessed with not
hearing this rubbish before) is that many of our high-tech
advances such as microcircuits (and the transistor before IC's),
lasers, fiber optics, microwave ovens, Star Wars SDI weapons,
etc., all actually came from "reverse engineering" the alien
technology found in the crashed UFO near Roswell, New Mexico, in
July 1947 -- a feat largely made possible by Corso himself when
he purportedly divvied up the alien goodies while working at
Army R&D in the early 60's. But in his haste to cash in on
Roswellmania he has made some fantastic blunders of history that
completely expose him as a fraud in the most embarrassing way.

Corso just can't resist putting himself at the center stage of
great events of history, courted by the big names such as Robert
Kennedy and his "old friend" J. Edgar Hoover (Corso's "other
book" is called "I Walked With Giants"), and he is ever the
powerful hero. (pp. 2, 37, 84, 156, 191, 206-209, 255) But he
trips on his way up the ladder to the stage. Corso has
apparently made a cynical calculation that he'll be able to make
his bundle and retreat before anyone can develop a sufficient
publicity base to expose him, so there was no need to research
his lies to get them perfect.

The only thing he has carefully avoided is getting trapped into
endorsing a particular Roswell crash site or timeline from the
multitude now being promoted. He can't clarify the confusion for
us because he pretends he doesn t remember too clearly these
elementary details of the date and location of what he claims is
the single most important event in human history (pp. 5, passim)
-- to say nothing of his military career -- even though he
claims he had two years to pore over the TOP SECRET Roswell
files while at Army R&D headquarters. Instead, all he really
knows is what happened the "DAY AFTER" Roswell, starting from
when the alien material was transported -- hence the title of
the book (p. 55). How convenient? (Page references are to the
edition of Corso's book minus the now withdrawn preface by Sen.
Strom Thurmond.)

Corso tells how he personally intimidated the CIA director of
covert operations to get him to stop his CIA agents from
following Corso around.

This is part of Corso's story of how he got the job of
exploiting alien technology as head of the Foreign Technology
desk of Army R&D in "early 1961" (pp. 50, 63-64, 177). The alien
microchips and other technology had been recovered from Roswell
decades earlier but gathered dust in one filing cabinet,
together with extensive files and documents on the case, until
genius Corso came along and figured out what to do with it. A
"couple of days" before he was officially expected to begin at
the Pentagon (p. 37), he was led through back door means to meet
his new boss and old friend, Lt. Gen. Arthur Trudeau, head of
Army R&D. (His military records indicate he arrived at Army R&D
Hq in the Pentagon from Baltimore on May 5, 1961.) This was
supposedly done so that no one would know officially that Corso
was inside the Pentagon yet and so he wouldn't be followed.
Corso asked why he couldn't go through the "front door." Trudeau
allegedly replied "Because they're already watching you, Phil."
Thus Corso learned he was being tailed by CIA personnel (pp. 37,
44, 87, 107, 174, 185), but he was determined to not play along.

Corso claims he marched right past a startled secretary and into
the office of the CIA director of covert operations, Frank
"Wiesner" (sic), at CIA headquarters in "Langley, Virginia," and
told him off (p. 87). As indicated above, this must have been "a
couple of days" after the initial meeting with Gen. Trudeau, in
early May 1961. Keep this date in mind as you read on, as it
explodes Corso's story as a tissue of lies. Corso claims he
warned "Wiesner" that he would start carrying a gun and if he
ever found a CIA man following him again, the agent's body would
later be found with bullet holes in his head. Later in 1961,
"Wiesner" himself was found dead by hanging in a London hotel
room, the victim of suicide, Corso claims (p. 87). Better not
tangle with that Corso, no telling what might happen!

Problem is that Frank G. Wisner (not "Wiesner") had been
hospitalized and replaced as top CIA covert operator nearly
three years earlier in August 1958, first by an acting covert
operations director Richard M. Helms and then by Wisner's
permanent replacement, Richard M. Bissell, on January 1, 1959.
Thus Bissell was the actual CIA Chief of the Clandestine Service
(or Deputy Director for Plans) serving in 1961 at the time
alleged in Corso's tale.

Bissell is famous in history as the leader of the U-2 and the
Corona spy satellite projects at CIA as well as the architect of
the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion that had dominated the
headlines for the past few weeks before

Corso arrived at the Pentagon in 1961, so it is surprising that
the supposed intelligence expert Corso has such a poor grasp of
intelligence history as to not know these well-known facts.
Bissell's name was repeatedly cited as the chief planner of the
Bays of Pigs operation in front-page news stories at the time.
(For example, see New York Times, April 21, 1961, p. 1 col. 7;

May 3, 1961, p. 1 col. 6; July 17, 1961, p. 13 col. 4. The May 3
front-page story reported that CIA "deputy director" Bissell and
CIA Director Allen Dulles had testified the day before at a
closed-door hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
concerning the Cuba disaster.)

I interviewed Bissell almost twenty years ago about his UFO
involvement and Project Corona and naturally he never mentioned
Corso or Roswell. Corso should have known who Bissell was for
another reason, namely that he claims (falsely of course) that
the Project Corona spy satellite program was handed over to him
in 1961 (pp. 131, 136) -- and that was Bissell's project. More
about this below.

Worse still, Wisner s office was not even in the U.S. in 1961
but was in London. Wisner had been sent overseas to take the
less demanding post of CIA Chief of Station in London on August
6, 1959, but was recalled from London in the spring of 1962 and
resigned from the CIA entirely in August 1962. So Corso could
not have simply driven to Wisner's office in 1961 and barged in
-- as if we're to believe that Corso could get through CIA
Security so easily to reach the top spook in the Agency and
threaten him.

And it was public knowledge that the new CIA headquarters in
Langley, Va., was not yet open for business in May 1961 when
Corso's imagined confrontation with the top CIA spook supposedly
took place there. The new building did not receive its first CIA
employees until September 1961.

(The New York Times reported on May 3 (p. 5 col. 5) that the CIA
s "headquarters staff is scattered throughout Washington in
thirty or more buildings but it will EVENTUALLY MOVE into a new
building almost as large as the Pentagon on the Virginia side of
the Potomac [at Langley]." The New York Times Magazine published
a photo of the CIA HQ building "NEARING COMPLETION in Langley,
Va.," on May 21, 1961 (pp. 78-79). Only about 4 months later did
CIA employees start moving into the Langley building (New York
Times, Sept. 28, 1961, p. 20 col. 8; Oct. 8, p. E 7) and by
early November 1961 about 1/3 of the CIA HQ employees had moved
in, with the rest expected early in 1962 (NYT Nov. 6, 1961, p.
39).)

Did Corso push his way past construction workers into an
unoccupied office-to-be?!? Maybe he just camped out there and
waited for all the walls and furnishings to be filled in and
"Wiesner" to pick the right office. Maybe there was a time
machine in the Roswell spacecraft. There are lots of ways to
explain this discrepancy, all of them psycho.

Worst of all, Frank Wisner did not "hang himself" in a "London
hotel" in 1961. He killed himself with a shotgun on his family
farm in Galena, Maryland, on October 29, 1965 -- years after
Corso claims it was, and on the wrong side of the Atlantic for
Corso's fevered and rather sick imagination. There's no need to
add to the Wisner family tragedy with preposterous stories
linking him to extraterrestrial investigations, distorting the
sad details of his demise and even falsely accusing him of being
"one of the best friends" the Soviets ever had (p. 87). Wisner
had been depressed since the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 which
he had helped inspire as the top CIA clandestine official only
to see it brutally suppressed. Eisenhower refused to overtly
intervene or covertly assist the brave freedom fighters who were
crushed by Soviet tanks, and Wisner never recovered from his
personal anguish over the betrayal.

If anyone was a real hero it was Wisner not Philip Quixote, the
fake. Wisner could have chosen the life of a rich playboy but
instead threw himself into service to his country. Whereas
others gave mere lipservice to the "rollback of the Iron
Curtain," Wisner personally did more to roll it back than
practically anyone in his era. And when plans failed and
courageous freedom fighters were bloodied or tortured, Wisner
saw and felt their anguish and it took a terrible toll on him
personally, till it killed him.

These are not minor errors of abstract historical facts. These
are stories of Corso's own alleged personal experiences
involving supposed major episodes in his career and in world
history. For comparison, here is an example of an error that IS
minor: Corso believes the Air Force became a separate service
from the Army in 1948 (pp. 54, 61). In fact it separated on
September 18, 1947. Corso was in the Army at the time and stayed
there, so it is understandable that decades later he might make
a one-year error in remembering the date inasmuch as he was
probably not personally involved with the creation of the Air
Force (though given his claim that it was "critically important"
for him to trace the exact movements of Roswell material in 1947
in order to assess which military service or agency got control
of how much [pp. 53-55, 62, 79-80, 99] and that the Air Force
got its share of alien materiel when Wright Field changed over
from Army to AF [pp. 54, 61-62] one would think Corso would have
done better research on the date of the transition).

Corso again fraudulently inserts himself into history by
alleging that as the Army Foreign Technology czar in charge of
Roswell he helped President Kennedy decide to send a man to the
moon. Corso alleges that he worked on a moon base plan called
Project Horizon to help keep the ET's at bay, which plan he
urged on Attorney General Robert Kennedy in a personal meeting
in May 1962 (compare pp. 2, 37, 156, 191, 206, 255). Lo and
behold says Corso, it was a short time later that the AG's
brother, the President, announced the Apollo program objective
of landing a man on the moon by the end of the decade. Corso
takes pride in his supposed contribution to Kennedy's decision
on the moon race (p. 156).

Only problem is that JFK made the famous moon-project
announcement on May 25th of 1961 -- A YEAR BEFORE the alleged
Corso promotion of Project Horizon to Bobby Kennedy in May 1962.
Corso can't seriously claim he simply made a typo or error of
one year and meant to say it was in May 1961 because that would
mean he had secured a personal meeting with the brother of the
President only days after he arrived at the Pentagon and before
he had even finished his first alleged Roswell exploitation plan
which included the Horizon moon-base (pp. 102, 105, 115, 157)!
Corso indicates it took more than a month to complete his first
report and plan for General Trudeau and it was already "summer"
then so it had to be at least June or July 1961 (cp. pp. 49, 51,
53, 91).

He also states explicitly it was "After his first year in
office" (after Jan. 1962) that "President Kennedy saw the value
in Project Horizon" (p. 155) through Corso's pitch to brother
Bobby in the May 1962 meeting and it had been "six months" from
that meeting to the Cuban Missile Crisis of the Fall of 1962 (p.
255) so that doubly fixes the alleged meeting in the Spring of
1962, not 1961. He is tightly locked into his 1962 date for his
fictitious involvement in inspiring JFK's 1961 Apollo lunar
landing plan and there is no way out -- except to admit it's all
a fantasy. Corso's delusion is one year too late.

Why doesn't Corso present written records proving the subject
matter, date and existence of the Kennedy meeting? This would be
far more important evidence to support his claims than padding
his book with several dozen pages of irrelevant Project Horizon
technical documentation, none of which mentions ET s or UFO s or
Roswell (pp. 275-332).

Corso claims that in his first Roswell exploitation plan to
General Trudeau, which as we ve seen must have been submitted in
June or July 1961, he claims he stressed how the Roswell aliens
were so well protected and equipped for long-term space flight,
unlike the experiences of both American and Soviet astronauts
who had had difficulties with weightlessness and the space
environment (p. 112). But as of the date when Corso purportedly
made his report only ONE person had been in orbit, Soviet
cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin who was up for an hour and a half on
April 12, 1961. The Soviets released nothing at the time
indicating any difficulties with human adaptation to space
flight.

Not only is time warped in Corso's crazy fantasies as with his
"Wiesner" fable and the Kennedy moon-shot fabrication, which are
years off in date in physically impossible ways, but so is
space: He has a possible Roswell UFO crash site on the plains of
San Agustin "in some proximity" to the Roswell Army Air Field
(p. 3). But in fact it is at least 160 miles away, west of
Socorro! Look at a map.

Logic goes out the window, too, as when Corso mystifyingly
states in one place that only "five to six of us" in all three
military services were privy to the Roswell secrets (p. 85). Yet
he tells how the Roswell "package" spread out further and
further among the services over the years with little or no
coordination (pp. 51-62, 71, 73, 78, 82-84). Plus there were the
several military members of the "Majestic 12" committee in
control of the coverup of Roswell (pp. 62, 69, 71, 74, 82,
passim) who additionally "had personnel stationed at the
Pentagon to keep tabs on what the military was doing" on Roswell
R&D (p. 175). There were military pathologists at Walter Reed,
Bethesda and Roswell Army Air Base, who allegedly performed
autopsies on the alien bodies (pp. 91-92, 96-99, 190). There
were "military intelligence personnel" developing cattle
mutilation surgical methods (p. 181). And there must have been
many military technicians involved in the test flights of the
Roswell craft at Norton, Edwards and Nellis AFB's (pp. 99-100,
107, 218) and quite a few military administrators of the
purported "alien technology museum, the final resting place of
the Roswell spacecraft" maintained by the Air Force and CIA (p.
100). In fact, Corso admits there were a "LARGE NUMBER of people
who really know the truth" about Roswell such as "top-ranking
MILITARY officers" (p. 100, emphasis added). Yet we are meant to
believe the Roswell secret had spread out to ONLY 5-6 MILITARY
MEN after 15 years?? That s a "LARGE NUMBER"?!? If they had that
few after that many years, how many did they START with in
charge of the Roswell spacecraft, ZERO? Maybe that s the real
truth slipping out by inference -- it started with zero because
it never happened.

Typical of Corso s absurd anachronisms that prove he doesn't
know what he is talking about on military and intelligence
history is his listing of the members of the MJ-12 "working
group" as of the "middle of September" 1947 (p. 74). He has
obviously lifted this list carelessly from published pro-MJ-12
sources without bothering to verify the facts. He is careful to
note the exact transitional positions in 1947, e.g., that
General Twining was in the "AAF and then USAF" (the Army Air
Forces became the U.S. Air Force in 1947), General Vandenberg
was Central Intelligence Group Director then "USAF Chief of
Staff in 1948," etc. But Gordon Gray is described in
mid-September 1947 by Corso as "President Truman's Secretary of
the Army" (I think he's wrong, it was Under Secretary in 1947)
"and chairman of the CIA's Psychological Strategy Board." The
PSB was a division of the National Security Council (NSC), not
the CIA, and it didn't exist in 1947. The PSB was created on
April 4, 1951. Corso should have known this from his tour of
duty at the NSC in the early 50's.

Another bogus Corso achievement I ve already mentioned is his
purported takeover of Project Corona, the pioneer U.S. spy
satellite. Corso attempts to steal all the credit for Corona but
if you read his timeline carefully most of the major R&D and
cover-story actions took place in 1960, long before he ever
arrived on the scene (pp. 129, 138, 141-142, 145). Corso has
done a poor job of reading up on space history from comic books
or whatever (since he couldn t have actually worked on the real
classified Corona program and gotten things so ridiculously
wrong). He claims the most clever innovation was when the Air
Force managed to sneak the Corona camera payload on-board an
already existing "NASA" civilian satellite project called
"Discoverer," which was difficult because it had to be small
enough to "fit into" the interior easily and be self-contained
(pp. 137-138, 140-142). He imagines that this whole ludicrous
endeavor of one agency hiding payloads aboard another agency's
satellites was necessitated by NASA assuming control of "ALL
satellite launchings" including the military s launches when
NASA was created in 1958, a control that purportedly lasted
until the 1970 s (pp. 126, 128-129, 138, 144-147, 155-157;
emphasis added).

The truth is that Corona was entirely a secret CIA -- not Air
Force -- program begun several months BEFORE NASA was even
formed. Corona was ordered by President Eisenhower on February
7, 1958, and NASA s first day of operation was on October 1. The
cover for the satellites was the AIR FORCE s Discoverer label,
which never had anything to do with NASA. It was always publicly
associated with the AIR FORCE. NASA never had control of the
military's satellite launchings. The existence of a Air Force
satellite launch pad completely separate from NASA's Cape
Canaveral should settle it. Doesn't Corso read the newspapers?
Who does he think has launched satellites from Vandenberg AIR
FORCE Base in California from 1959 to the present day? Santa
Claus and his elves?

In another proof of Corso's complete ignorance of the Corona
project, he invents the following remark by General Trudeau in
early 1963, purportedly declaring, "In just a couple of years
... We ll have orbiting satellites mapping every inch of the
Soviet Union" (pp. 202-203). Corona satellites had already
mapped the USSR by 1963 and proved the nonexistence of the
"missile gap," showing there was no huge Soviet ICBM force
hidden in Siberia or some other place. You can now even read the
official history of CIA s Corona satellite on the Internet and
millions of frames of its space reconnaissance photos are now
declassified and available to the public. Obviously Corso has a
very poor grasp of the Corona satellites function and
operational history.

Corso is also the hero of the Cuban Missile Crisis (pp. 253-258,
269), Reagan's SDI or Strategic Defense Initiative (pp. 4-5, 78,
115, 243, 249-250, 268, 273), the Korean War POW revelations
(pp. 2, 37-38, 87), the exposure of KGB moles inside the CIA and
elsewhere (pp. 2, 37, 139, 141, 189), and the JFK assassination
-- as an investigator for the Warren Commission -- which he
intimates was due to JFK finding out the truth about the CIA
(pp. 2, 87, 206, 208).

And of course last but not least Corso is the hero of the Planet
Earth's desperate but successful "war" against the ET s (or
EBE's, Extraterrestrial Biological Entities, the term he cribbed
from the fraudulent MJ-12 documents) (pp. 5, 142, 249-250, 260,
269). This supposed war against UFO s led to Reagan and
Gorbachev meeting and ending the Cold War (pp. 262-263, 266,
268). We had negotiated a "surrender" treaty with the aliens
(were there alien negotiators in the State Dept. too?) until we
were able to reverse engineer enough Roswell weapons to fight
back (pp. 268, passim).

As Corso modestly boasts, "Sometimes, once in a very long while,
you get the chance to save your country, your planet, and even
your species at the same time." (p. 273) Corso gives whole new
meaning to the term "delusions of grandeur."

Corso's notion that many of our high-tech innovations were
really back-engineered from extraterrestrials is a new twist on
the Ancient Astronauts theory. Instead of saying man was too
stupid to invent pyramids or the wheel on his own and had to get
the ideas from space visitors, Corso has updated the concept and
says we got the microwave oven (p. 178) and laptop computers
(pp. 170-173) from aliens. I guess all those millions of
scientists and engineers we've cranked out over the years have
largely been a waste -- they were dummies who had to get clued
in by ET's.

Now that we've established that Corso fabricates entire
screenplays and dialogues involving himself inside CIA
headquarters and elsewhere that never happened and never could
have happened, there really is no need to go into the rest of
his confabulations about his heroic role in getting U.S.
industry to "reverse engineer" microchips, fiber optics, lasers,
Kevlar, etc., from his make-believe Roswell spacecraft. That
would be chasing phantoms, trying to prove a negative -- that
something doesn't exist -- which is inherently very difficult if
not actually impossible. The dramatic stories that we can easily
check prove Corso to be a rank literary hoaxer.







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