The events of the mid-20th century had many far-reaching consequences. The Second World War finally divided the world into two political camps, whose goals, in fact, consisted in the complete destruction of the ideology of the opponents. And who knows, if nuclear weapons had not appeared, it might have happened that way. However, the realization that the hypothetical Third World War will be the last in the history of mankind forced the parties to move away from direct confrontation and engage in "petty dirty tricks" in relation to each other in the form of economic, ideological and informational confrontation, avoiding open clashes. Subsequently, this confrontation will be called the Cold War.
In conflicts of this kind, the main actors, of course, were the scouts. If the representatives of the other army specialties most of the time of their service were waiting for that very “hour of H” (which, by the way, never came), then the intelligence work continued, as Churchill once said, “25 hours a day”. One such scout was Philip James Corso, an ordinary American officer who did his job in good faith.
In 1942, the young lieutenant Philippe Corso, after graduating from the intelligence school, went to Europe, where he worked for 3 years in his specialty. Moreover, it works very successfully. Thanks to his actions, more than ten thousand Jews were saved, safely transporting them to neutral countries. During the Korean War, Corso's reconnaissance group is looking for American soldiers captured by the DPRK army. It is here that Corso has a very serious conflict with the leadership and even with the government.
The fact is that Corso finds a huge number of prisoners of war in about ten places of their detention, however, he later learns that about half of the people he found were not released from captivity, that is, the government actually abandoned them. Corso raises a big buzz that leads to a Senate hearing. During the hearings, John McCain (the pope of modern Senator McCain) publicly accuses Corso of lying and is making every effort to effectively end the investigation into the disappearance of several thousand prisoners of war. The performances of Corso and McCain are shown on television, but the video sequence is selected in such a way that the viewer does not have a shadow of doubt in McCain's words, because "America does not abandon its own."
In order to somehow hush up the matter, Corso is delicately hinted that he should shut up, assign the next rank and send him to serve first in the President's Security Council, and then in the CIA as deputy chief of the foreign technology department. He retires as a colonel. Like everything? A successful career - rest on your retirement. But Corso was not that kind of person. At the end of the term of the nondisclosure agreements, he publishes The Day After Roswell. In it, Corso talks about the fact that all the achievements of the United States over the past 50 years are the product of copying alien technologies, and in general, all the progress in electronics and nuclear physics is owed by the States to secret agreements of the government of representatives of extraterrestrial civilizations.
The book remained in the top 10 bestsellers for several weeks. Despite the fact that the book belonged to the light genre of semi-fantastic pseudo-documentary works, of which there were and will be many more before and after it, it was Corso's book that excited the representatives of the US establishment. Rockefeller's Voice - The New York Times has burst into articles on several occasions in which government circles have expressed their opinion of the book with violent indignation. Senator John McCain also could not resist and called not only Corso's book a lie, but also recalled how the author "lied" to his dad, the Senator. And there will be many more similar statements. Despite the apparent success of the book, none of the "significant figures" spoke positively about it.
The reaction from the foreign press also looked very interesting. For example, the traditionally left-centrist British Guardian ranked Corso's book among the top ten literary fictions. However, this coincided with the dominance of pro-American authors and editors in the editorial board of the magazine in the late 90s and early 2000s, who unquestioningly supported the White House course. The trend continued in other pro-American publications in Europe.
Why did the former intelligence officer so annoy the country's leadership with his "book about aliens"? The topic of government conspiracies and their contacts with aliens was by no means new at the end of the 20th century. This question was partially answered by co-author of The Day After Roswell, William Burns. In an interview, he said that in the book one should not take literally not only some ideas and ideas, but also words with expressions. In particular, the English words foreign (external) and alien (alien) have almost the same meaning, however, are traditionally used for different designations. The first is used as an analogue of the word "foreign"; and the second, as an "alien".
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That is, if we recall the last place of work of Corso (deputy head of the department of foreign technologies at the CIA), then the allegory of "relations with aliens" takes on a completely different form. The CIA, taking advantage of its complete impunity (and, possibly, the extremely low level of counterintelligence in the post-war world), was engaged in industrial espionage, and, apparently, has achieved considerable success. A huge number of German, French, Japanese and Soviet technological ideas came to the United States through intelligence channels. The United States, as the only country that retained its economy after World War II, could afford to finance any projects that its intelligence service got. And who, if not Corso, due to the duty of his work, could know this …
You don't have to go far for examples. The first solid-state transistors were invented in Germany in 1944, but the American Shockley (1947) is considered their inventor. The first silicon monocrystal and semiconductor device from it was made by the French in 1947, but for some reason the first microcircuit was patented by the American Kilby (1958). And so on - there are many inventions that have been nurtured for years in Europe, but for several months their "last leap" they took place in the United States.
Corso's book opened a very unpleasant page in American history. This is precisely what prompted such a reaction from the leading circles of the States. Is the same spy work being done now? - Of course yes! Otherwise, America would no longer be the leading world power.