The Day After Roswell

• Integrated circuit chips

• Fiber optics

• Lasers

• Super-tenacity fibers

and "seeded" the Roswell alien technology to giants of American industry.

Laying bare the U.S. government's shocking role in the Roswell incident -- what was found, the cover-up, and how they used alien artifacts to change the course of twentieth-century history -- The Day After Roswell is an extraordinary memoir that not only forces us to reconsider the past, but also our role in the universe.

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A landmark expose firmly grounded in fact, The Day After Roswell puts a fifty-year-old controversy to rest. Since 1947, the mysterious crash of an unidentified aircraft at Roswell, New Mexico, has fueled a firestorm of speculation and controversy with no conclusive evidence of its extraterrestrial origin - until now. Colonel Philip J. Corso (Ret.), a member of President Eisenhower's National Security Council and former head of the Foreign Technology Desk at the U.S. Army's Research & Development department, has come forward to tell the whole explosive story. Backed by documents newly declassified through the Freedom of Information Act, Colonel Corso reveals for the first time his personal stewardship of alien artifacts from the crash, and discloses the U.S. government's astonishing role in the Roswell incident: what was found, the cover-up, and how these alien artifacts changed the course of twentieth-century history.

I for one do not doubt that this whole book might be based on truth. Basically the author recounts how he got a filing cabinet full of information that he had to 'farm out' to companies. The information? technology that was retrieved from a downed space craft (UFO) that crashed in Roswell. The author recounts how he helped share this information with others so that they could use it to increase our technology.

Fascinating.


How gullible can people be?   December 30, 1999
33 out of 54 found this review helpful

This is without a doubt the stupidest book I've read in the past two years. Pseudoscience can be fun in modest doses, but this doesn't even qualify as entertainment. The basic claim is that the major technological developments of the past 50 years, particularly in microchips, lasers, and fiber optics, are a consequence of reverse engineering an alien spaceship that crashed at Roswell.

This claim is insulting to the real engineers and scientists who actually did the work, and didn't need any cheat sheets from bug eyed grays, thank you. The first transistor was developed at Bell Labs at just about the time of the Roswell incident, well before there could have been any time for "alien technology transfer". And it was based upon physical principles that had been discovered in the first few decades of this century. The subsequent development of complete semiconductor circuits on a chip was an inevitable and natural consequence of this early crude invention -- it can be explained fully by the combination of competitive capitalism and some initial seed money from the space program. Likewise lasers and fiber optics have a technological evolutionary history that follows naturally from discoveries in physics early in this century, no miraculous intervention by the space brothers is needed.

Note that the one truly unfathomable property of the alleged UFOs is the one that *hasn't* been reversed engineered and inserted into our technological infrastructure -- a silent propulsion system that uses no jets, propellers, or rockets. If tomorrow the Air Force were to announce a new airplane that works by anti-gravity, I might be willing to give some credence to Corso's book. But when the best he can do is point to technology based on principles fully understandable by a 1930s physicist, Occam's razor requires that we toss his claims into the wastebasket.


My Close Encounter with Philip Corso   February 6, 2007
InsightStraight (New Mexico)
29 out of 29 found this review helpful

When "The Day After Roswell" came out in 1997, I was working in a bookstore in Albuquerque. We got the book's author, Philip Corso, for a signing.

Our store had a good reputation for events around "High Strange" subjects, partly due to my efforts. Publishers knew we were worth putting on the schedule. Besides, UFO books in general make for good trade - host a novelist or a 'serious' book and you might get less than a dozen people, feature a UFO author and you could count on at least 100.

And it was well over 100 who turned out for Philip Corso that night. It was a great draw, even besides the local interest of Roswell: an ex-military man who had been "deep in", telling all...

Mr. Corso made an impressive speaker. His grasp of names and dates was so immediate that it actually made me envious; he never seemed to falter in his recall. He was able to reel off locations, offices, names, ranks...

He covered the basic elements from the book: that he had been called upon to assist in reverse-engineering and disseminating technologies garnered from alien craft, and that he had seen what seemed to be a small humanoid body packed in blue gel. He was careful to state that such was his only exposure to "the Roswell question", and that he had not himself seen any alien spacecraft

Then he took questions from the audience, and here it was that things started to get fuzzy around the edges. Just as does the book, he started to vary from the things he said he had personally witnessed, and included material from other sources.

At one point he mentioned that someone elsewhere in the government had told him that they had received some sort of strong signals from space, from a direction which Mr. Corso recalled and could provide. And he said, "Someone at one of these things [meaning a previous signing event] told me that in that direction is Zeta Reticuli."

(I groaned inwardly when I heard him say this. Zeta Reticuli was a particular favorite for the UFO enthusiasts at the time, as a home for certain alien visitors. And I just knew that, were I to interview the crowd the next day, a goodly number of them would remember that Mr. Corso had told them that the signal came from Zeta Reticuli. Thus do folktales grow.)

He answered a variety of questions, then we moved on to the signing of the books. As the host for the signing, it was my job to make sure things kept moving smoothly, and I was at Mr. Corso's elbow as I opened books so he could sign them. Thus I was privy to all of his conversations with people.

Most of the discussions were the usual things -- "usual" for a UFO book signing being a mix of sincere inquiry and intense conspiratorial viewpoint. But it was right at the end that things got really interesting.

A young boy came up with his mother; they had been waiting patiently and the boy had a drawing he wanted to show Mr. Corso. The boy was interested in engineering, as was Mr. Corso's son (or was it grandson? - I cannot recall for sure) and the author warmed to the boy and spent more time with him than he had with anyone else.

Mr. Corso praised the boy's drawing and told him to continue in his studies and become an engineer and maybe someday he would go into space. Then they talked about spacecraft and what they might be made of, and Mr. Corso suddenly said, "And even in the hot sun, they are cool to the touch, you know."

The boy asked what, and Mr. Corso said, "Alien spacecraft." My ears pricked up at this, since I had not long before heard him say very clearly to a large group of people that he had never himself seen an alien spacecraft, and now he was telling this young boy that he had touched one.

Mr. Corso proceeded to make a drawing for the boy, a representation of a classic flying saucer stuck into the ground at a 40-degree angle. He said that he had gone up to it and put his hand on it and "even in the hot desert sun it was cool to the touch".

The boy thanked him and took the drawing and left; the event was over. And I was left to mull over what I had heard.

Mr. Corso seemed to be what so many people in UFOlogy had been awaiting: an inside source, finally telling his tale. (Though even in the book he is very vague why he finally decided to break his security oath.) His presentation made him seem sharp and sure of his recall of names, titles, and places. But his willingness to be agreeable to suppositions put to him by the audience made me uneasy. And hearing him contradict a major part of his testimony in less than an hour made me place all of his testimony in question.

I had to conclude that Mr. Corso was a very nice old gentleman with some great stories. His grandkids growing tired of his stories, he went looking for a new audience and found a willing and eager one in the UFO community. And he himself was willing to support suppositions which were presented to him, as a way to please his new audience.

Mr. Corso's death soon after the release of the book brought, if not joy, great satisfaction to the conspiratorialists who could now claim that he was "silenced because he told the truth". But the truth I personally heard him present changed markedly in only a short time, and I carry away the conviction that Mr. Corso's stories are just that - stories - and do not constitute evidence.


Absolutely The Best   March 12, 2000
M. Bose (Iowa, USA)
28 out of 42 found this review helpful

I've read literally hundreds of books and articles on UFO's - which I find to be a very serious subject. Unfortunately there are too many "questionable" sources contributing to the subject and many times it makes a mockery of serious contributers. In "The Day After Roswell" Colonel Philip J. Corso provides what I feel is the most detailed, reliable and completely objective account of history's most debated UFO incedent. Colonel Corso is one of a kind - in the right position at the right time to have first hand knowledge of many interesting details, a man of unquestionable integrity dedicated to serving the American people and exposing this incident for what it really is, and a true master of seperating fact from speculation. The truth is completely exposed in this book, more completely than I've ever seen. Everything from what actually happened in the deserts of New Mexico to the political and military scramble to not only cover it up but also to prepare a defense against it. Colonel Corso, I salute you - it takes a man of exceptional courage to jeapordize such an outstanding military career to do what's right.


Deeply disappointing.   May 24, 2005
Zato Ici (Starbucks, USA)
25 out of 34 found this review helpful

Bits and pieces of fascinating, tantalizing testimony scattered here and there in a long, often repetitive, discourse. The first and last chapters have some literacy to them. No doubt they were contributed by William J. Birnes, who gets a "with" credit on the title page. The wide ranging middle is of a distinctly different style: rambling, self-centered, and cavalier.

Col. Corso is frustratingly coy with his facts. On page 179 of the hardcover edition, for example, in the middle of a chronology of the development of the laser, he drops in the following zinger. "[The laser] would also prove to be a weapon that would help us deploy a realistic threat to the [aliens] who seemed poised to trigger a nuclear war between the superpowers." The aliens wanted us to fight each other??? Wow! What was the evidence? Why wait until page 179 to tell us about it? Why present it as an aside in the middle of a history of the laser, and then wander around for another hundred pages without ever mentioning the subject again?

Maybe an alien craft DID crash at Roswell. Maybe Corso, years later, had custody of some of the debris. Maybe he really did secretly show these treasures to key scientists, thus speeding along our technological development. May be. Or maybe not.

Strom Thrumond, in his foreword to this book, never says it is so. He only says Corso is a fine man. "I am certain he has many interesting stories to share." Hardly a ringing confirmation that aliens were once probably poised to trigger a nuclear war.

This book is tantalizing, teasing, and worth reading, but in the end, deeply disappointing.