Philip Corso's Roswell claims

Philip Corso's Roswell claims

Person	Philip James Corso (22 May 1915 – 16 July 1998)
Service	U.S. Army, 23 Feb 1942 – 1 Mar 1963; lieutenant colonel
Book	The Day After Roswell (Pocket Books, 1997), ghostwritten by William J. Birnes
Claims	Saw an alien body at Fort Riley in 1947; in 1961–63 managed Roswell artifacts and seeded the technology to U.S. industry
FTD record	Staff officer from June 1961; chief for 90 days (April–July 1962)
Reception	Three weeks on the NYT bestseller list (peak no. 12); named one of The Guardian's "Top 10 literary hoaxes" (2001)
Testimony	Shellenberger testimony, p. 64
Date	1961
Topics	Crashes & retrievals (topic), Beings & bodies (topic), Secrecy & cover-up (topic)
People	Philip J. Corso, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Arthur Trudeau, Stanton Friedman, Brad Sparks
Year	1961 in UFO history
Timeline	1961 on the UAP Timeline
Sources	13

Philip J. Corso was a U.S. Army intelligence officer. In his 1997 book The Day After Roswell he claimed that in the early 1960s, while working in Army research and development, he secretly handled alien artifacts and autopsy reports from the 1947 Roswell crash and passed the technology on to American industry. He also claimed to have seen an alien body in a crate at Fort Riley, Kansas, in 1947.^[2][4] His military service was real, and his own records confirm several of his postings. His Roswell claims, however, have never been verified, and analysts on both sides of the Roswell debate have found the book full of errors and chronological impossibilities.^[1][8]

Military career

• Corso was born in California, Pennsylvania. He was conscripted into the Army and commissioned in 1942. He served from 23 February 1942 to 1 March 1963 and reached lieutenant colonel.^[1][8]
• His service record. His Officer Qualification Record (DA Form 66), obtained under FOIA and analysed by Jan Aldrich of Project 1947, shows a reserve artillery officer with many intelligence and air-defence specialties. His overseas tours included Europe and the Mediterranean in 1943–47, the Far East in 1950–53 (where he won the Legion of Merit), and command of an air-defence battalion in Germany.^[8] He was posted to Fort Riley, Kansas, from 21 April 1947 to 12 May 1950, matching the period he describes in the book.^[8]
• The Foreign Technology Division. Corso joined the Army's Foreign Technology Division, part of the Office of the Chief of Research and Development (OCRD), as a staff officer on 20 June 1961. He was its chief only from 18 April to 18 July 1962, and was absent for 15 of those 90 days. He then moved to OCRD's plans division and retired on 1 March 1963.^[8] Aldrich concluded that Corso headed the division for 90 days, "not two years" as the book implies. Birnes disputed this point.^[8] Other accounts describe him as having briefly been its deputy chief.^[1]
• In the book Corso described himself as special assistant to Lieutenant General Arthur Trudeau, head of Army Research and Development.^[11] The anonymous UAP timeline in Michael Shellenberger's 2024 congressional testimony refers to the "USAF Foreign Technology Division".^[10] Corso's post was in the Army's division, not the Air Force's.^[8]
• The NSC claim. The earlier version of this article noted that he said he served on Eisenhower's National Security Council staff. Kevin Randle, citing an archivist at the Eisenhower Presidential Library, found no documentary evidence of that.^[1]
• After the Army. In 1963, after ten years as a lieutenant colonel without promotion and with a heavily mortgaged home, he left to become a staff assistant to Senator Strom Thurmond (March 1963 – December 1964, and again February 1973 – July 1974).^[1][4] A committee job was blocked after columnists Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson published allegations against him, and his libel suit was dismissed.^[1]

The claims

• The Day After Roswell was ghostwritten by William J. Birnes, later editor of UFO Magazine. Birnes said it began as a military memoir, but Corso's UFO material seemed "compelling enough for its own book".^[1]
• Corso wrote that as a Pentagon official in the early 1960s he inherited a filing cabinet of Roswell material and quietly passed items to defence contractors.^[4] He said reverse engineering led indirectly to particle-beam devices, fibre optics, lasers, integrated circuits, night vision and Kevlar. Companies named included Hughes Aircraft, Bell Labs and IBM.^[8][11]
• He also said a covert group was formed under the first Director of Central Intelligence, Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, to collect information on off-planet technology. He said the Strategic Defense Initiative was partly meant to disable spacecraft, including extraterrestrial ones, and that "mental phenomena" could help remotely pilot spacecraft.^[8][11]
• Fort Riley. In an interview later printed by the Disclosure Project, Corso said that one night in 1947, as duty officer at Fort Riley, a sergeant let him look into one of five or six crates in the veterinary section. He saw a small grey body "floating in fluid", with thin arms and an unusual head. The sergeant said the trucks had come from New Mexico and were heading for Wright-Patterson along Route 40.^[9] He also said that later, at White Sands and in Germany, his pencil-beam radars tracked objects moving at 3,000–4,000 mph.^[9]
• He promoted the book in interviews, including on Dateline NBC on 24 June 1997, the same day the Air Force released The Roswell Report: Case Closed, and on Coast to Coast AM on 23 July 1997.^[1][8] He died on 16 July 1998.^[8]
• According to Vallée's journals, Corso told Vallée in January 1997 that he might have been fed disinformation, because autopsy analyses he had received showing occupants with scaly skin "didn't seem right".^[12] Earlier, in 1994, the producer Robert Emenegger had told Vallée that Corso once tried to give him a fake autopsy photograph.^[13]

Thurmond's foreword

• The book first appeared with a foreword by Thurmond praising Corso's "full and adventurous life" and his expertise in intelligence and national security. It did not mention UFOs. A Thurmond aide said the proposal they had seen described only a memoir.^[4]
• Thurmond then said he regretted that the foreword appeared in a book claiming to reveal a "shocking UFO cover-up": "I know of no such 'cover-up' and do not believe one existed." The foreword was withdrawn from later printings.^[4][5]

Criticism

• Klass asked why Corso, without a science or engineering degree, would be put in charge of alien wreckage when the Army had many cleared scientists. He also listed errors, such as placing the Eighth Air Force headquarters at Fort Bliss instead of Fort Worth, misdating Walter Haut's press release, and calling the radar-guided Hawk missile "heat-seeking".^[1] Corso's own record shows two years of college.^[8]
• Randle noted that a 1961 confrontation the book places at CIA headquarters in Langley was impossible, since the building had not yet opened and Frank Wisner, misspelled "Wiesner", was then in London.^[1]
• Pflock pointed out that the book credits Corso and Trudeau with the CORONA satellite programme, although CORONA's first launch came two years before Corso's Pentagon posting. Pflock, who had met Corso in 1993, called him a "blowhard loony tune". He said many people who believed in UFOs thought the book was "from far out of left field", and described it as "a unified field theory of Roswell, UFOs, alien abductions and cattle mutilations".^[1][4]
• Sparks, reviewing the book in the Skeptical Inquirer, called its mistakes not "mere errors or inaccuracies", as Birnes claimed, but "impossibilities". He noted that Corso placed himself at the centre of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Kennedy assassination and the unmasking of KGB moles, with no record of his involvement beyond the book.^[5][1]
• The earlier version of this article also listed Stanton Friedman among the critics, and said historians of technology had shown that the inventions Corso named had well-documented human origins.^[6] Neither point is covered in the sources read here.
• UK files. When the UK National Archives released UFO files in 2011, they included a 1997 internal memo dismissing the book because of Corso's "previous track record of unreliable testimony". The earlier version of this article described it as a 2011 memo; it was written in 1997 and released in 2011.^[1]
• In 2001 The Guardian named the book one of its "Top 10 literary hoaxes".^[1]
• Lawsuits. The film producer Neil Russell, who had bought the film rights, sued Corso and his son, alleging threats. A 1998 lawsuit by Citizens Against UFO Secrecy, based on the book, was dismissed in April 1999.^[1]

People and topics

• Philip J. Corso — Army officer who claimed in The Day After Roswell that he seeded alien technology into industry.
• Dwight D. Eisenhower — 34th U.S. president, named in the MJ-12 briefing document.
• Foreign Technology Division — The Air Force unit at Wright-Patterson that analysed foreign technology.
• Arthur Trudeau — Head of Army Research and Development in the early 1960s and Philip Corso's boss.
• Roswell incident — The July 1947 recovery of debris near Roswell, New Mexico, announced as a "flying disc" and then explained as a weather balloon.
• The Day After Roswell — The Day After Roswell
• Stanton Friedman — Nuclear physicist and leading Roswell researcher.
• Brad Sparks — UFO analyst known for his catalogue of Blue Book unknowns and work on the CIA lawsuit.

On the Timeline

• Graduate Research Center of the Southwest (1961) — Texas Instruments sets up a research center that hires gravitational physicists.
• John McCormack's doubts about the Air Force (1961) (16 February 1961) — House leader John McCormack says the Air Force isn't sharing all it knows about UFOs.

See every 1961 event on the UAP Timeline →

Further reading

References

Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia articles “Philip J. Corso”, “The Day After Roswell”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.