This is the account of the late Philip Corso, colonel in the United States Army and as he tells it, overseer of alien technology. As the title implies, this story has its true beginning with the UFO crash in Roswell, New Mexico of July 1947. Corso tells of the various forms of alien technology and entities that were recovered from the crash site. With the experience of being the head of the Army's Foreign Technology Desk in Research and Development, Corso led the effort to reverse engineer this technology and turn it into night vision goggles, stealth aircraft, fiber optics, integrated circuits, and numerous other technologies that we now take for granted.I'm sure that Col. Philip Corso was a nice guy. And as with anyone who has worn a uniform and served to protect, he deserves the gratitude and respect of every American.That said, the account this book puts forth has all the earmarks of a Walter Mitty story. In the famous short story The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, the titular character daydreams of fantastic lives that he will never lead, all of them far more grandiose than his grim reality. While Corso's account is not to this magnitude, there does seem to be a larger than necessary amount of chest puffing. We are regaled with paragraphs explaining how "I was in charge of this" and "I was one of only a few people who knew that" and "I met the Pope" (not making that one up) and so forth. He was military brass. We get the picture. So why do we need the photo of him getting a medal pinned to his chest? What does that have to do with Roswell?Then there is the matter of the "reverse engineering." We get the impression from Corso's account that damn near any advancement in technology in the past 60 years or so has its roots in alien hardware found at the Roswell crash. That just does not sit right with me. For one, this notion gives the same short shrift to human ingenuity that the "ancient aliens" crowd does. Secondly, a few of the technologies Corso mentions were actually around before Roswell happened, at least in conceptual forms. For example, Tesla and other scientists had thought of lasers and the Germans were experimenting with early forms of stealth and night vision. The stealth aspect leads to further questioning. If these UFOs are so stealthy, why did they register on radar during several sightings, most notably the Washington D.C. mass sighting of 1952?That point is just one of the apparent inconsistencies in the book. Corso claims that we shot a UFO down over Rammstein Air Force Base in the late 1970s. How could we manage that with our comparatively less sophisticated missile systems? Corso asserts that he saw an alien body encased in a "goo" inside a crate at an army base in Kansas. The crates were supposedly on trucks from Roswell. Why would the military fly the wreckage of the craft out of Roswell but not the bodies? After all, the bodies are going decompose. The UFO material logically should not. It just makes me wonder. There are other, similar allegations that made me sit up and ask "how could he possibly know that?" Much of this may come from co-author Bill Birnes. Birnes is the chief editor of UFO Magazine and the former host of UFO Hunters. I like Bill a lot. However, he has a flare for the dramatic. I have to question how much of this might have been amplified for dramatic effect. Most of all, the book offers precious little in the way of evidence to back up the claims. There are appendices with a few intra-governmental memos and detailed plans for a hypothetical military base on the Moon, but nothing that really supports Corso's accounts. While I don't expect classified documents to be published along with the story, in the absence of evidence I am still forced to call it just that: one man's story. Though grievously flawed, this book does have its merits. Corso neatly explains just how a cover-up can be implemented by the government. It's all about compartmentalization and "seeding" the military-industrial complex with the alien technology in isolated sectors. For example, highly trained engineers may be given fiber optics and asked to work them into military applications. The engineers might say, "Wow! Where did you get this?" and the reply can be, "Dunno, it's something the boys in R&D came up with." Additionally, Corso confirms the existence of Majestic-12 and even goes into the theory that the "aliens" are actually biomechanical constructs or even time travelers.In short, The Day After Roswell can only be one of two things: 1) One of the most important books ever published or 2) One man's musings based upon a small kernel of fact.Unfortunately, I must place my money on the latter.
I love books like this. This nonfiction work is written by Col. Philip J. Corso, former Army intelligence officer, and it comes with a forward by Senator Strom Thurmond claiming that Corso is in no way a nut, and is a reliable hero that people should trust. Of course, when the forward was written, Thurmond was old enough to have been completely senile, so maybe Corso's credibility is still in question. Thurmond's as well, but that's a different book review and an unfair digression. Regardless, Corso claims that he was tasked by no less than President Truman with salvaging alien technology from the wreck at Roswell, then reverse engineer that technology and seed it into American industry for the benefit of our economy and our military. As a result, the book claims, everything from microwave ovens to night vision goggles, from tiny computer processors to aircraft design, from advanced metals to various household appliances were all a result of salvaged alien technology. The list of companies Corso claims benefited from this project include Hughes Aircraft (the biggest military contractor at the time), IBM, Bell Labs, Dow and dozens of others. There's limited documentation to support many of Corso's claims, though advocates would point out that the limit on supportive information is the result of a government cover-up not Corso's manipulation, and that Corso does, in fact, present some interesting documentation in the book. Though the footnotes are limited, there are some photocopies of supposed military documentation of these events at the end of the book. Corso has a mixed reputation and is known as somewhat of an extremist conspiracy theorist, with ties to numerous conspiracy theories ranging from Roswell to J.F.K.'s assassination. The thing is, if you take this book for what it is, or isn't, and don't take it too seriously, it really is a fun read and an interesting speculation on the "maybes" and "what if?"s of the famous Roswell incident. More interesting - assuming Corso is making all this up, what the heck is he really up to, and how did Strom Thurmond's notoriously astute handlers think a character reference from him would be a good idea for anyone involved in this book?NC
Do You like book The Day After Roswell (1998)?
Wow, does Corso have the politics in Washington DC pegged down. It's worth reading just to understand how the United States is not really a united country, but just a bunch of autonomous organizations vying for power with each other. Forget the UFOs. The book is worth reading just to get this perspective. In the book, Corso states the various US spook organizations spend more time spying on each other, than all the other countries put together. And after working in Washington DC, particularly within the Department of Homeland Security, I believe him!
—Jerry Travis
I have never read such gibberish in my life!! I find it hard to believe this was written by a Colonel who wrote official military reports. It is badly written, badly researched, over written, and waffles. I also find it hard to believe that many technologies we now take for granted such as integrated circuitry, lasers and even stealth technology were spoon fed to large companies and reverse engineered from alien materials while tricking the companies into thinking they had invented the materials themselves. I suppose I am a little sceptical.I particularly enjoyed this paragraph:"By the time President Nixon returned from China, having agreed to turn over Vietnam to the Communists, he had effectively turned the Soviets' flank in the Cold War. For the next decade, the Soviets felt caught between the Chinese, with whom they'd fought border wars in the past, and the United States.When President Ronald Reagan demonstrated to Mikhail Gorbachev that the United States was capable of deploying an effective antimissile missile defense and sought Soviet cooperation in turning it against the extraterrestrials, all pretext of the Cold War ended and the great Soviet monolith in Eastern Europe began to crumble."Of course!! The whole idea of Vietnam was to eventually hand it to the Communists in order to eventually win the Cold War...and attack aliens, if only those poor people who died knew what they were fighting for, sheesh.This book is full of crazed ideas such as this. If I was a conspiracy nut I would probably enjoy it, but reading it just made me mad.
—Kat Davis
I first became interested in this book when I saw the author on a tv talk show many, many years ago and finally had the chance to buy his book. The book makes a very interesting read. Basically Philip J. Corso was in the military, back in the day when a dedicated and enthusiastic enlisted individual could make a great difference and eventually find himself climbing the ranks of the military brass of very high and privileged levels. Because of such authority and rank Philip J. Corso he found himself confronted with information he never was looking for - or even wanted to know anything about. Yet he was giving the responsibility to act on this information and bring forth many of technological advancements which had been collected, hidden for years, and than physically placed in front of him so the military could use such technology in warfare and defense.The book is kind of broken in 2 parts. The first part of the book explains about the author's background, getting involved with the military over his many years, his accomplishments and how he moved in rank and lead him to the position which would eventually get him involved with the Roswell incident many years earlier. The second part of the book goes into great detail about how he was responsible in bringing technology that was found from the Roswell crash to the public.Overall the book was a very good read and is peppered full of interesting bits of information about how aspects of the government acts and responds behind closed doors which most of the general public would never catch on too through Philip J. Corso journey relating to the Roswell event. The second part of the book got a bit boring as the author attempts to fill you with all this information which he was involved with trying to get this technology out. The information just felt over-loaded and at times, almost ridiculous from his rambling which began to hurt the credibility the author established during the first part of the book. In the end I felt the first part of the book and other ares in the second part of the book was enough for me to enjoy everything the author set out to do with this book for the reader.
—Mr. H.
