This all started when I was searching YouTube for national-security related vids when a search result caught my eye, entitled, UFO Alien Disclosure by Canadian Minister of Defense May 2013. (Apparently this video is not embeddable.)
The former Canadian defense minister in question is Paul Hellyer, who served in that role (equivalent to the US secretary of defense) in the 1960s. In this and other videos, he states unambiguously that UFOs are non-terrestrial craft, directed by extra-terrestrial, highly intelligent beings. That makes Mr. Hellyer the most senior person I have ever heard of who claimed this.
(I personally lean toward the side of the scientists who say that the odds of human beings having come into existence are so incredibly remote that concluding homo sapiens is alone in the universe is quite reasonable.)
Without offering here any opinion of whether Hellyer's claims have merit, in a different interview he gave he made reference to a book written by someone named Corso, an American colonel. Hellyer said that an American Air Force general told him that every word of the book was true. Hellyer said he had no way to assess the veracity of the book's claims personally, except that being a defense insider the language of the book rang true and that the contexts of the book were convincing.
It was easy to find the book on Amazon, especially since it is the only book that the late Lt. Col. Phillip Corso wrote. It's called The Day After Roswell. Since it was only $6 on Kindle, I downloaded it.
Again, I am not here affirming or debunking Corso's claims (he died in 1998 at age 83). But I kept Hellyer's observations in mind about how the book read like it was written from an "inside baseball" perspective. And Hellyer is right.
Corso served as a White House member of the National Security Council in the 1950s and as deputy of the US Army's Foreign Technology Office in the Pentagon from 1960-1963. He claims in the book that his personal office in the Pentagon held the cabinet in which was stored the Army's files of what really happened at Roswell and some actual artifacts from the UFO that crashed there. Exploiting alien technology for mass production for military and later civilian use was his main job there.
At any rate, Corso says that all the services distrusted the CIA (Corso says that as an intelligence officer he knew the CIA was well penetrated by the Soviet KGB). But the part that stuck me as absolutely authentic and from someone who had truly "been there" was this passage:
This is so cogent, so authentic that it is what makes me think that whether Corso's UFO claims are objectively true, Corso was relating what he believed to be true. Accounts I have read by former Soviet spies confirm what Corso says about the deep suspicion the KGB and the Communist Party had of each other. (In fact, the Party, the Soviet army and the KGB were all highly suspicious and extremely competitive of each other.) Corso spends a lot of time explaining the politics of the multiple duchies inside the Pentagon and the strategies they all employed to "steal the bacon" from one another - much like their Soviet counterparts except without the Soviet's level of hostility. It was no different in Corso's years at the Pentagon than it was during mine there, 30 years later.
Final point. Here is what Corso says are the main exploitations the United States gained from the Roswell crash.
Project Horizon was the Army's plan for a permanent moon base that never got farther than the drawing board. HARP, despite its tinfoil-hat status today, was nothing more than a concept to send base materials to the moon cheaply. It did move from drawing board to testing, but no farther.
Not all these technologies were derived directly from alien technology. Depleted uranium was no alien invention, it was (and is) produced by nuclear-power plants as spent fuel. Army R&D realized that because of its extremely high density, solid projectiles made of DU, traveling at hypervelocity, would be devastatingly powerful at impact. This was ultimately affirmed during the Gulf War of 1991 and again in Iraq and Afghanistan by US tanks firing such rounds at a mile per second. But the reason DU was developed as a weapon, Corso says, was to shoot down UFOs.
Same with particle-beam weapons that work by focusing beams of electrons against a target. It was not a technology found on the Roswell craft. Hypothesizing that the craft was likely brought down by a lightning strike, which is a high-energy electron beam, research was oriented toward, basically, generating our own lightning. The whole point of President Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, in fact was to develop anti-UFO weapons for which defense against Soviet ICBMs was a happy bonus.
Whether you consider Corso credible or not, it is fascinating reading, especially if you already have some familiarity with the military or political subcultures of Washington, D.C.