Day After Roswell or Eight Lives Down

Day After Roswell

Author: Philip J Corso

A landmark expose firmly grounded in fact, The Day After Roswell ends the decades-old controversy surrounding the mysterious crash of an unidentified aircraft at Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. Backed by documents newly declassified through the Freedom of Information Act, Colonel Philip J. Corso (Ret.), a member of President Eisenhower's National Security Council and former head of the Foreign Technology Desk at the U.S. Army's Research & Development department, has come forward to reveal his personal stewardship of alien artifacts from the Roswell crash. He tells us how he spearheaded the Army's reverse-engineering project that led to today's:

• Integrated circuit chips

• Fiber optics

• Lasers

• Super-tenacity fibers

and "seeded" the Roswell alien technology to giants of American industry.

Laying bare the U.S. government's shocking role in the Roswell incident -- what was found, the cover-up, and how they used alien artifacts to change the course of twentieth-century history -- The Day After Roswell is an extraordinary memoir that not only forces us to reconsider the past, but also our role in the universe.

Publishers Weekly

Never mind a crashed saucer with dead aliens strewn around it. Corso has bigger news to impart: that alien technology harvested from the infamous saucer crash in Roswell, N.Mex., in July 1947 led directly to the development of the integrated circuit chip, and laser and fiber optic technologies, among other marvelsand that he knows this because he was in charge of distributing the harvest. Senator Strom Thurmond offers a foreword that will reassure readers that Corso is in fact a real person, and a patriot. Curiously, Corso first learned of the Roswell incident when, on July 6, 1947, he saw one of the alien bodies, which was en route to Air Materiel Command in Ohio. Fourteen years later, as the newly appointed head of the Foreign Technology Desk in Army R&D at the Pentagon, he "inherited" a file cabinet filled with Roswell debris. He details the "program" by which the debris and/or its technologies were released to defense contractors (and ascribes the invention of the transistor to discussions among Wernher von Braun, Bell Lab technicians and others regarding "silicon wafers from the Roswell crash"); he also explores the government's cover-up of the UFO phenomenon. Despite flashes of paranoia (e.g., of a KGB-manipulated "secret government within the [U.S.] government"), in general Corso comes off as calm, sober and rational. His claims are so outlandish, though, that the many readers he's going to attract likely will have difficulty discerning whether they are reading a hoax, ravings or the biggest story of the century. (July)

Library Journal

As the 50th anniversary approaches of the crash of a so-called extraterrestrial craft near Roswell, New Mexico, the UFO conspiracy theory is getting more attention. These latest books approach Roswell from different perspectives but identical agendas. Hesemann and Mantle are young UFO researchers who have visited Roswell and spent several years collecting documents and eyewitness testimony from people reputedly involved in either the crash recovery or its cover-up. (Most of the eyewitnesses turn out not to be.) The authors trade off chapters, with Hesemann using his anthropologist's training not only to tie the Roswell crash to Native American legends but to claim that Egyptian hieroglyphics and the Greek alphabet are directly related to the characters said to have adorned the crashed spacecraft's exterior. Corso, a career military intelligence officer, claims to have managed myriad research projects throughout the 1950s connected to recovery of the Roswell craft. Like Hesemann and Mantle, he asserts that the Cold War was a cover to develop "alien technology" that superpowers USA and USSR could not only use against the other but against the threat of extraterrestrial invasion. The most memorable passage in either book, however, is Hesemann and Mantle's suggestion that President Clinton induced the warring parties to make peace in the Bosnian war only by showing them proof of that alien menace. For public libraries convinced that pro-UFO books are needed for balance, the Hesemann and Mantle may be appropriate. The Corso is only for the few special libraries that have made documenting the unconventional a collecting priority.Scott H. Silverman, Bryn Mawr Coll. Lib., Pa.

Book review: The Gambling Addiction Patient Workbook or Pain

Eight Lives Down: The Story of the World's Most Dangerous Job in the World's Most Dangerous Place

Author: Chris Hunter

Visceral and compelling, Eight Lives Down is the most exciting and nerve-jangling work of military non-fiction since Bravo Two Zero.

If fate is against me and I’m killed, so be it, but make it quick and painless. If I’m wounded, don’t let me be crippled. But above all, don’t let me fuck up the task.

So goes the bomb technician’s prayer before every bomb he defuses. For Chris Hunter, it is a prayer he says many times during his four-month tour of Iraq. His is the most dangerous job in the world — to make safe the British sector in Iraq against some of the most hardened and technically advanced terrorists in the world. It is a 24/7 job — in the first two months alone, his team defuses over 45 bombs. And the people they’re up against don’t play by the Geneva Convention. For them, there are no rules, only results — death by any means necessary.

The job of a Bomb Disposal officer is a lonely one. You are alone with the sound of your own breathing and the drumming of your heart in a protective suit in forty-plus degrees of heat. The drawbridge has been pulled up behind you as you advance on your goal. It’s just you and the bomb.

But for Chris Hunter, just when life couldn’t get any more dangerous, the stakes are raised again.

Kirkus Reviews

A British Royal Logistic Corps captain shares his experiences of front-line service in Iraq. Trained in IRA and Colombian FARC tactics of bomb construction, 31-year-old Hunter shipped out to Iraq in 2004 for a 101-day tour disposing of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and rooting out bomber teams. Despite his disgruntled wife (she wanted him back home in Oxfordshire) and two small daughters, Hunter admits that after 13 years on the job he still found its dangers and risks exhilarating. That may not be the adjective that comes to readers' minds as they peruse his narrative, written as a present-tense diary of his tour of duty. IEDs created havoc for the troops in some 2,000 attacks a month, and sniffing out insurgents and their homemade bombs in a country where Westerners were angrily resented was perilous and extremely dicey work. Soldiers were both witting and unwitting provokers of disaster. Hunter saw a husband give his pregnant wife a severe beating after her burqa slipped and the British gazed at her face. He did nothing, he later explained to his men, because he'd heard about what happened when some fellow soldiers retaliated against a man who had beaten his 11-year-old daughter-the father cut her throat "to save his honor." Neutralizing banks of explosives was a punishing, thankless task, and Hunter was frequently plagued by guilt and sadness about the violence he and the Americans inflicted. Eventually, he had to say goodbye to the other blokes (lots of jocular Briticisms here); he was promoted to major and got a desk job as a staff officer, leaving the situation in Iraq much the same as when he arrived. Ponderous platitudes from Gandhi to Gilda Radner form epigraphs to eachchapter but don't add much gravitas. Hunter's prose is wooden, his experiences rather formulaic, but he offers singular glimpses of the Iraqis' harsh, hardscrabble lives. Agent: Mark Lucas/Lucas Alexander Whitley