Philip J. Corso

A US Army lieutenant colonel (1942–1963) who in 1997, at 82, published The Day After Roswell with writer William J. Birnes, the book that spread the claim that the Roswell material was used for reverse engineering. His service record (DA Form 66) confirms a real intelligence career: prisoner-of-war interrogator at the European theater headquarters G-2 from April 1943 and then Italian interpreter and intelligence officer in the Mediterranean theater in World War II; from April 1947, already a major, a posting at the Ground General School at Fort Riley (Kansas), where he sets his Roswell story; intelligence officer at Far East Command headquarters during the Korean War and, from 1954 to 1956, intelligence staff officer at the Operations Coordinating Board, the body that carried out the policies of Eisenhower's National Security Council. On May 5, 1961 he joined the Army's Office of the Chief of Research and Development; on July 20 he moved to the Foreign Technology Division, headed it from April 18 to July 18, 1962, then returned to the Plans Division and retired on March 1, 1963. The DA Form 66 summarizes a career from rating reports, and Jan Aldrich, who circulated it, warns that it can contain errors. He later served as an aide to Senator Strom Thurmond (1963–1964 and 1973–1974). He died in 1998.

In the book he says that in July 1947, as a major at Fort Riley (Kansas), he saw the body of one of the Roswell beings in a truck convoy, and that in 1961, in charge of Foreign Technology, he inherited a filing cabinet of crash debris and fed it to defense contractors through Army programs. The list of developments he attributes to that material includes image intensifiers for night vision, fiber optics, super-tenacity fibers, the laser and integrated circuits. He produced no documents to support any of those transfers.

The case against it is on record. Thurmond, who wrote the foreword, stated on June 3, 1997 that he had written it believing the book was an autobiography (an aide explained that the proposal they received described only a memoir, with no mention of UFOs) and that he regretted seeing it in a book that promised to reveal a cover-up: 'I know of no such "cover-up" and do not believe one existed.' The foreword was withdrawn from the book. Brad Sparks, in Skeptical Inquirer (March-April 1998), pointed to episodes the dates make impossible: Corso says that in 1961 he threatened the CIA's covert operations chief, Frank Wisner, at Langley headquarters, when Wisner had left that post in 1958, was stationed in London, and Langley did not receive its first employees until September 1961; he writes that Wisner hanged himself in a London hotel in 1961, when Wisner killed himself at his Maryland farm in 1965; and he claims to have spurred in 1962 the Moon goal Kennedy announced on May 25, 1961. The service record also shows that, although he had been on the Foreign Technology Division's staff since July 1961, he headed it for only three months, in 1962.

The technologies on his list have documented invention histories that predate or are unrelated to his Pentagon tour: Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce demonstrated the integrated circuit in 1959, Theodore Maiman published the first laser in August 1960, Charles Kao proposed in the 1960s, from a British laboratory, the pure-glass fiber that made optical communication workable, and the book itself has General Trudeau say that Fort Belvoir had run a night-vision project for ten years. AARO's historical report (Volume I, dated February 2024 and released in March) found no empirical evidence that the government or private companies have reverse-engineered extraterrestrial technology; it does not name Corso. The book is still cited as the basis for that belief: in July 2026 Sean Stone told NewsNation that Roswell was a real crash, that 'we started to basically reverse engineer the craft', and named Corso as his support.