"The Day After Roswell" · 1915–1998
Philip James Corso was born on 22 May 1915 in Pennsylvania. He had a distinguished military career spanning World War II (serving in Italy), Korea (chief of the counterintelligence branch), and peacetime staff positions including a posting to President Eisenhower's National Security Council staff. He retired as a Lieutenant Colonel (promoted to Colonel in retirement) and later worked for Senator Strom Thurmond, becoming chief of staff of the U.S. Senate Republican Policy Committee. He was by any measure a credentialled, establishment figure with access to classified information at the highest levels.
In 1997, at age 82, Corso published The Day After Roswell (co-written with journalist William Birnes), which became a bestseller and one of the most controversial books in UFO history. He died of a heart attack on 16 July 1998, less than two months after testifying before Senator Thurmond at a book signing.
Corso's central claim was that during his 1961–1962 posting to the Army Research and Development office under General Arthur Trudeau, he was tasked with managing a file cabinet containing artefacts recovered from the Roswell crash of 1947. These artefacts included integrated circuit fragments, fibre optic strands, night vision technologies, and materials of unknown composition. Corso claimed he was directed to covertly seed these technologies into American industry by providing samples to defence contractors who were then allowed to "reverse-engineer" and develop them without being told their origin. He argued that transistors, integrated circuits, fibre optics, night vision, and Kevlar all derived at least partly from extraterrestrial technology retrieved at Roswell.
The book caused a sensation but also attracted intense criticism. Historians and military researchers identified factual errors in Corso's account of his own biography — dates that didn't match, positions that didn't exist as described, and descriptions of technologies that predate the timeline he implies. Senator Thurmond, who wrote a foreword to the book, later issued a statement saying he had been misled about its contents and did not endorse its claims.
Corso remains one of the most disputed figures in UAP history. His supporters argue that his credentials were genuine, that his account was corroborated in general (if not always specific) terms by other insiders, and that the technologies he described — particularly integrated circuits emerging in unusual ways from obscure contractors in the early 1960s — merit serious investigation. His critics argue that the book is primarily a work of Cold War mythology dressed as memoir, that its specific claims are verifiably false in several instances, and that the convenience of publishing near death (and dying shortly after) is too perfect.
What is not disputed: Corso had real access to classified information at the highest levels of the Cold War national security state. Whether that access included anything related to non-human technology remains, as with so much in this field, unresolved.
"The Cold War was the cover story. The real war — the one that mattered — was the war to understand what landed in the New Mexico desert."