Philip Corso (1915–1998)

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 show more 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. show less

Most reviewers wonder if Corso is telling the truth. Where one stands on that, probably depends upon one's preconceived notions about the subject. Corso really has nothing to gain by lying, therefore it must be. His book is written based on a 2 year assignment in the Pentagon during the early 1960s. That alone would indicate that there were others who held this position before and since...wondering why they have not come forward? That said, this is likely the most credible book on the show more subject or the Roswell "crash." A fascinating Cold War memoir. The reader must dig through tons of self aggrandizement. show less

There have been a lot of books written about Roswell, enough to fill a bookcase if not more. When history ends up sorting them all out in terms of their value, Corso's book will be there up at the top. He has the credibility of a high military rank, provable connections to five-star brass. If he said he saw an alien body in a hangar at Wright-Patterson AFB shortly after Roswell, there's no reason to disbelieve him other than the unshakable "show me" attitude of Missouri. Not everyone gets to show more be an insider, and not every insider has the courage to disclose what they know. So we now know where the super-technological leaps in the post-war era came from: Corso and his Foreign Technology Desk at the Pentagon seeding recovered artifacts to defense industries. This is a good book to reread every few years. show less

I thought this would be a good alien story, turns out the author re-writes some of the most important events from the second half of the 20th century! Invention of the integrated circuit, laser, kevlar vests, fiber optics are all alien "seeded" inventions. Also the author played a key role leading up to the Cuban Missile Crisis. Wow!