he Day After Roswell is Colonel Philip J. Corso's accounting of the controversial events that took place on a desert night in 1947. Roswell is the small, New Mexican town of reknown where, purportedly, a UFO crashed into terra firma, scattering debris and extra-terrestrial bodies over the desert floor like so much weird candy from a shattered pinata. If the notorious Area 51 can be likened to the ufologists' Holy Grail, then Roswell is akin to its Bethlehem, the place where it all started (in the dramatic, if not the actual, sense). According to Corso, he's been there from almost the beginning.
Corso was not at Roswell. Corso's universe got bigger one July night at Fort Riley, an Army base in Kansas. There, he slipped into an off-limits warehouse and furtively opened a Pandora's box of secrets. The alien cadavers he says he found were en route from Roswell, a name which meant little to Corso at the time. Realizing the profundity of what he saw, he tried to forget it.
Years later it all wound up back in his lap when he was recruited to analyze and report on mysterious, ultra-classified material. Corso's curriculum vitae was in military intelligence, and this resume would qualify him to pull double duty. Ostensibly he would work in surveillance, but his flip-side job would be to reverse-engineer all of the extra-terrestrial technology into military and mainstream research. Corso says his legacy, unknown until now, includes Kevlar vests, the Strategic Space Initiative, night-vision goggles, lasers, fiber optics and computer microchips.
Loose lips sink spaceships
The match between Corso and co-author Birnes is a good one. Corso's tale is told in a fairly coherent fashion, and the tone is decidedly personal, a factor that enhances readability. It's that readability factor that makes the whole thing even remotely plausible, which is a must: Military reports, even top-secret ones, are about as dry as saltines in the Sahara.
Despite this author-bought credibility and more than 340 pages (including appendices) full of diagrams and official-type argot, Corso closes the book without finishing it. There is no passage or portion in this tome that decently explains why an ex-military spook would suddenly talk. This is especially curious, because Corso does much to relate the quality of military life in his era, the spicy, conspiritorial tang it held for anti-communists fighting the hidden war. These are guys who shut up with pleasure when told to, so wherefore Corso?
Overall, The Day After Roswell is a real hootenanny. All true-believers have been waiting for someone with some brass to publically shoot down the weather balloon story that the Army told after Roswell. True or not, believable or no, this accounting is at least a wonderful fantasy. To MUFON-ers and their kin, Corso is not the Grail -- he may be bald and weird-looking, but he's no E.T. But he is, if he's to be believed, one of the blessed who has seen the holy of holies, and he's willing to say so. That will do nicely.
