About Time is a light, little movie I watched a week ago! It is a heart-warming romantic comedy which affirms a lot of what is good about life.

But there’s a twist to the story. The male character can travel in time! His father informs him about age 21 that all males in their family have this ability. He shows his son how it works, what can be done with it, and what its limitations are. The son experiments a bit, and gradually accepts that he has this ability.

He uses it quite a bit at first, especially when it comes to establishing a romantic relationship. But as he gets older, develops a career, has a family, he begins to realize that this gift is not always a blessing. In one telling episode, where he tries to prevent his sister from having a disastrous accident, he realizes (as he talks this over with his father), that sometimes it is better not to interfere with the bumps and trials of life. Sometimes the pain we experience is for our own good.

With his father’s advice he begins to use his gift only to re-live each day so as to recognize the good things happening in it. After awhile, he says, he even ceases this use, and allows each day to unfold as it will, always aware of the giftedness in his life, from the most casual encounters with strangers to the deeper gifts of his family and friends.

It is such a good lesson, one all of us can learn from. Too often we go through our day with blinders on, unaware of all the goodness going on around us.

I just finished reading an astonishing and remarkable book, The Day After Roswell. Written by Col. Philip J. Corso, a retired US Army officer about his own experiences with the Roswell incident and its aftermath, this book is a readable “inside” account. On July 1, 1947, an alien spacecraft crashed into the New Mexico desert outside Roswell, New Mexico. US Army personnel from nearby 509th airfield retrieved the debris as well as the bodies of small alien creatures.

Within hours the military hierarchy began coverup stories of what had happened and what had actually been retrieved in the desert. That cover up has been accepted and believed to this day. A few people who knew the story have begun to relate their memories as they grow older, before they die. Such is the case with this book. Corso wrote these memoirs in 1996, and died within a year of its publication.

I don’t think anybody today actually believes the cover stories initially provided by the military, but there is still tons of speculation of what actually was found in 1947. And of course, the implications of that find are still being debated. So much disinformation has arisen that it is very difficult to sort out fact from speculation.

With his book Corso provided a huge aid to this dilemma. While he was not in New Mexico in 1947, he encountered bits and pieces of the story over his years in military intelligence. His biggest contribution to the facts of the story come from a couple years in the early 1960’s when he was stationed in the Pentagon in the R & D department under the authority of Lt. General Arthur Trudeau. Trudeau gave Corso a file cabinet which had been neglected for years. Inside this were files about the Roswell incident, and a few pieces of debris which had been recovered from the site.

What Corso was instructed to do was to research this information and to develop as much as could be gleaned for purposes of the US Army. What Corso did in most cases was to feed information into streams of R & D already occurring in order to speed up development of weapons and defense mechanisms. What resulted from this work, largely done behind the scenes, were huge leaps in the development of transistors, integrated circuits, night-vision goggles, bullet-proof material (like Kevlar), laser beams, particle-beam weapons, etc.

Along the way reading about all of this, we get a glimpse into some behind-the-scenes workings of the cold war environment in the US military. There were constant tug-of-war struggles occurring between Russia and the US. The CIA and KGB spy agencies had infiltrated each other to the extent that military higher ups would not trust their own intelligence agents. This resulted in much secrecy within various agencies within their own governments. Even the four branches of the US military would not trust one another, and kept many secrets from each other, while trying to ferret out secrets from the other branches.

Today this sounds like pure insanity. But while Corso is telling his story, it becomes clearer what the atmosphere was like through the 1950’s and 60’s. Much of the insanity of the cold war rhetoric becomes easier to understand when seen in context.

One thing which became clearer to me, something I had not been very aware of at all, was that throughout the cold war, an underlying agenda behind the arms race, the space race, the intelligence race, between Russia and the US, was their common need for defenses from alien attacks from outer space. Neither country knew exactly how much the other knew about the EBE’s (the term Corso uses for the alien creatures) and their advanced technology. Each country was afraid that the other would gain a technological advantage, and that the alien societies would see the other one as the superior power and would therefore negotiate with them rather than their own country when it came to contact and use of the Earth as a planet of interest.

Therefore, when developing weapons using the Roswell technology, always in the background was how this particular device could help in defense against EBE’s. Of course none of this could be stated publicly. When appealing for budgets from the civilian government, they had to be very circumspect when stating their arguments. Presidents Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy knew fully about alien encounters and some of the technology being gleaned. But publicly, of course, they had to be careful what they said or implied.

Corso’s opinion, after retiring from the military, is that the US development of the Strategic Defense Initiative (“Star Wars” in popular perspective) under President Reagan allowed both the US and the Soviet Union to end the cold war. The SDI had implemented sufficiently advanced technology to counter the perceived threat from EBE’s. Therefore both countries could relax a bit in the race between them in areas of arms and space exploration.

I highly recommend this book! It is written with enough tech information to satisfy curiosity, but not so much as to be unreadable. I found it a very readable account of an aspect of society still largely in the shadows. The fact that it parallels my own life span makes it even more compelling. I was born within a year of the Roswell incident! All of the stuff Corso writes about has occurred within my lifetime. Having grown up in the US it helps explain a whole lot of stuff I never knew about. It broadens the perspective of my own experience.

Wow! I hardly know where to begin! The book, Millennial Hospitality, is an astounding story! Written by former US Airforce weather observer Charles James Hall, it details his few years spent at the USAF Desert Center Air Base in Nevada.

During his time there in the 1960’s he encountered extraterrestrial beings who were using the Nevada desert as a base, coming and going on a regular basis. But he was not told initially that he would encounter these beings. He found out only by hearsay that former weather observers stationed there had had terrifying encounters with something out on the ranges where they had to go to make their weather observations.

A long time after his years out there in the desert, the author began to record his experiences. He mainly was doing this to provide an account for his own children. When his wife discovered that he was writing these stories down, and began reading them, she insisted that he get them published. The couple decided to self-publish these stories. So far they have five books printed.

These stories are well-told; they are gripping accounts of the initial terror he experienced when encountering the unknown. They are written in very simple language. Reading them is like reading perhaps junior-high level writing. But they are entirely gripping stories, well-worth reading. The only criticism I have is that they are a bit hard to access. My local library had no copies. I had to order this first book online; I will order subsequent books as I finish them.

I heard about these books from an interview the author had on the Coast to Coast AM radio program. George Noory, the host of this overnight program, had also enlisted a person who specialized in debunking alien encounter stories. After the interview with Charles Hall, she said he was entirely authentic. There was nothing in his story which caused her to doubt him.

This first book is published as fiction. After hearing the interview with him, and the subsequent discussion, this surprised me a bit. But I suppose he might have to pose these stories as fiction in order to evade security concerns, I don’t know. He stated that he had received no restrictions on writing down what he experienced at Desert Center. Nothing he learned was classified in any way. I guess publishing them as fiction also allows readers to just enjoy the stories for what they are, and not have to try and get their heads around what incredible accounts these are.

This first book details his growing exposure to these alien creatures. At first he refused to believe what he was experiencing. He was somewhat terrified by these encounters as had been his predecessors. He kept putting them off as mental apparitions. “I’m just seeing things out in the desert in the middle of the night.” But the longer he was there, the more he began to realize that there was something very real about these beings.

Because he treated these visions as not real, and didn’t freak out about them, he had more of them, over a longer time period, than had his predecessors. And the fact that he did not overreact, or try to attack the aliens, they began to respect him and their encounters with him. He began to get orders from the Pentagon in Washington to allow these encounters. Apparently these beings had reasons for wanting human encounters. And they had agreements with high-level military regarding these.

Because this first book deals only with the very initial encounters, I am very anxious to read more. I know from his interview that he discovered a whole lot of interesting things about how these aliens live, how their societies are structured, family dynamics, and so on.

This is certainly the most detailed account I have encountered about alien beings. I have absolutely no trouble believing they are among us. I am fascinated in discovering details about them, and want to know more!!

I highly recommend these books to anyone with similar curiosity.