The Day After Roswell
From the UAP Encyclopedia, the open encyclopedia of UFO and UAP history · 🗓️ Event
Contents 9
| Date | June 1997 |
|---|---|
| Topics | Crashes & retrievals (topic), Nuclear & missile sites (topic), Military encounters (topic) |
| People | Philip J. Corso, Arthur Trudeau, Stanton Friedman, Brad Sparks |
| Testimony | Shellenberger testimony, p. 128 |
| Year | 1997 in UFO history |
| Timeline | 1997 on the UAP Timeline |
| Sources | 8 |
The Day After Roswell is a 1997 book by retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Philip J. Corso, ghostwritten with William J. Birnes, in which Corso claimed that he had helped pass technology recovered from the 1947 Roswell crash to American industry. It was a bestseller but is widely regarded as unreliable.[1][2]
Claims
Corso said that in 1961–1963, while working for Lieutenant General Arthur Trudeau in Army Research and Development at the Pentagon, he was given a filing cabinet of material from the Roswell crash and quietly passed items to defence companies, seeding technologies such as fibre optics, lasers, integrated circuits, night vision and Kevlar. He also said that in 1947 he had seen an alien body in a shipping crate at Fort Riley, Kansas.[1][2]
Publication
The book was published by Pocket Books in 1997. Corso promoted it on Dateline NBC on 24 June 1997, the day the Air Force released The Roswell Report: Case Closed, and it spent three weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, peaking at number 12.[1]
The Thurmond foreword
Senator Strom Thurmond had written a foreword praising Corso's military career, which did not mention UFOs. After learning of the book's contents he withdrew it, saying it had been written for a different book and that he knew of no such cover-up.[1][3]
Criticism
Historians of technology have shown that the inventions Corso credited to alien sources have well-documented human origins. Philip Klass listed factual errors, such as placing Eighth Air Force headquarters at Fort Bliss instead of Fort Worth; Kevin Randle found no record of Corso's claimed National Security Council role; and Brad Sparks argued that the book placed Corso at the centre of too many historic events. The Guardian later listed it among the top ten literary hoaxes. Corso's Army career was real, but his Roswell claims are unverified.[1][4]
Aftermath
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A film producer who had bought the rights sued Corso and his son over the movie deal, and in 1998 Citizens Against UFO Secrecy sued the government for crash-retrieval records, a case dismissed in April 1999. Corso died in 1998.[1]
People and topics
- Philip J. Corso — Army officer who claimed in The Day After Roswell that he seeded alien technology into industry.
- Unidentified anomalous phenomena — The U.S. government's current term for unidentified objects in the air, in space and underwater.
- 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.
- Roswell — The New Mexico town at the center of the 1947 crash story.
- 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
- Boyd Bushman magnetic beam patent (17 April 1997) — Lockheed scientist Boyd Bushman patents a magnetic device.
- The Roswell Report: Case Closed (24 June 1997) — The Air Force's 'Case Closed' report says Roswell 'bodies' were crash-test dummies.
See every 1997 event on the UAP Timeline →
References
- The Day After Roswell — Wikipedia · en.wikipedia.org · archived copy
- "The Day After Roswell", Publishers Weekly · publishersweekly.com · archived copy
- "The senator and the UFOs", Government Executive (Jun 1997) · govexec.com · archived copy
- Brad Sparks, review of The Day After Roswell, Skeptical Inquirer (1998) · cdn.centerforinquiry.org · archived copy
- The Day After Roswell — Wikipedia · en.wikipedia.com · archived copy
- Stanton Friedman's review of The Day After Roswell · medium.com · archived copy
- Philip J. Corso case file — The Black Vault · theblackvault.com · archived copy
- archive.org · archive.org · archived copy
Further reading
- Roswell incident — Wikipedia · en.wikipedia.org · archived copy
- UFOs and the Air Force: records — National Archives · archives.gov · archived copy
- Philip J. Corso — Wikipedia · en.wikipedia.org · archived copy
This page was last edited on 29 October 2026. Articles are written in our own words from the sources listed under References; disputed claims are attributed to the people who made them.
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