Lecture
given by Jack Shulman, President of the American Computer Company,
at the Global Sciences Congress.
Hi,
I'm Jack Shulman. I'm the head of the American Computer Company.
American Computer Company is part of the Technology International
Group and Bell North America group of companies. I'm also one
of the owners of the group of companies. I've been in the computer
industry for about 28 or 29 years. I've worked for IBM as a
professional services management consultant. I worked on the
development of the personal computer in 1978 for FIT (Fashion
Institute of Technology) and Simplicity Patterns, later adopted
by IBM. I developed something called the "pattern creator".
That's where we got the term "PC". Prior to that, I'd developed
what you might call the first windowing operating system in
1975 for Citibank, and before that there were earlier versions
I did for a company called Vydec. I'm a serious computer person
- very, very serious - and also someone who's not generally
inclined to leap to great predispositions about any unusual
subject.
Well, as it turns out, a few years ago I got my dose of reality.
It was in the form of a visit from a friend of mine. When I
was very young I'd got involved in technology, partly by virtue
of the influence of a friend's father. I grew up in central
New Jersey, which is around where AT&T and Bell Labs originated,
and my friend's father was the head of Bell Labs. I ended up
at a private school and ended up living at the household of
the head of Bell Labs, going to that private school and going
to college with his son as a roommate, and I kind of grew up
around the various projects at Bell Laboratories in the late
1960s and early 1970s.
I'd always held out that AT&T was this rather magnificent institution.
Anybody here worked for AT&T in the past? So, you know when
I say Bell Labs research, I'm speaking Holy Grail; and in certain
parts of the defence community and in government I'm also speaking
Holy Grail. Anyone here realise that AT&T and Bell Laboratories
ran our nuclear arsenal for 45 years? Anybody who knows that,
raise your hand. Not a one of you. I didn't really even know
until a little bit later in my career, but I knew something
strange was going on because it always seemed to me that AT&T
always had what it needed to make innovations in technology,
and subsequently such technology would migrate to an IBM or
a Sarnoff Research or to an RCA.
And I could never really figure out, in the course of my young
life, who were these magnificent, incredible scientists, other
than that I frequently met them...like a fellow by the name
of William Shockley. He was quite a frequent friend to Jack
Morton's household, and I knew him, and I knew some of the other
folks that he knew, like a fellow by the name of - well, I guess
not too many people would know him - Bob Noyce, and Jack Kilby
who was an acquaintance of theirs, and so forth. These names,
if you've ever worked for AT&T or in the electronics industry,
are also Holy Grail names. These are Mount Rushmores of the
technology industry. Jack Kilby is credited with the invention
of the integrated circuit.
I was rather shocked when, about late 1995, a dear friend came
to me. He was at one time one of the very well known generals
in the Pentagon, a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and
is now a consultant. I'd known him a very long time through
the Morton family and Bell and when working for IBM. He asked
me to analyse some documents that he had in his possession.
He showed me some pictures. I kind of turned up my nose. I said,
"I don't believe this." He suggested they were pictures of an
alien craft. I said to him, "Well, why do you come to me and
ask me this?" "Because there are some documents that fell into
my possession that I would also like you to see, that go beyond
these drawings, these pictures, these photographs, that describe
some technology; and I would like you to analyse this technology
and make a determination for me of the veracity of these documents,
help me to authenticate them." I said, "Fine. I don't believe
this is real. I'm sceptical. I don't believe in aliens, I don't
believe in UFOs, I don't believe in any of that." And he said,
"Okay, well, I'd still want you to take a look at them, Jack."
And I agreed.
I met with him at his home. I met a woman by the name of Mrs
Jeffrey Proscauer. That's not her real name, but it's the name
she goes by; she does not want her true identity revealed. And
I got a chance to piece and look through some 28 boxes of materials
that had come from Western Electric Laboratories in the late
1940s, 1947, early 1948 and beyond, and some subsequent documents.
Now again, if you've ever worked for AT&T, you know that the
laboratories at Bell Laboratories are often quite distinct,
and the documentation from a laboratory is kept in an ongoing,
growing tome called a "Lab Shopkeeper's Notebook". It turns
out that even in the super-secret laboratories, the ones in
the part of Western Electric or Bell Laboratories that manage
the nuclear arsenal, these notebooks are kept, and they grow
and they're ongoing and they become almost like a living representation
of what that laboratory did for a living.
Well, such as it is, I was rather shocked at what I had to see
there in these boxes of materials, and I convinced them to let
me look at them over the course of about three-and-a-half weeks.
They were kept at the consultant's house during that time period,
and he actually kept a security guard with them at all times
because he was afraid that someone might come and steal them.
Now of course, I wasn't sure why he was afraid, because at the
time I didn't realise the full magnitude of what I was looking
at.
In any event, after about two or three weeks of looking at them,
I came back to him and we sat down over what turned out to be
a Christmas Eve dinner, and I said to him: "I've got to tell
you something. I'm having a real problem with this because what
you're showing me looks like technology that we have not yet
developed, that humanity has not yet developed, yet the documents
you're showing me appear to be forty-eight, forty-nine years
old. This would put them in 1947, 1948, 1949."
I suggested to him that before I could proceed I would have
to have someone verify the age, carbon-date or come up with
some other means to verify the age of the documents, and he
agreed. So, with the help of a mutual acquaintance - a private
investigator formerly with the Justice Department - we were
able to take fragments of the documents without damaging them.
We sent them to an expert who formerly consulted for Scotland
Yard; he's a fairly well known forensic expert at...I believe
it's the University of Edinburgh in Scotland today; he was at
a different university at the time. He analysed these fragments
of these documents for me, and came back and told me that the
ink, the paper, even the presentations were valid; that this
was in fact a book or series of books from the 1947, '48, '49,
1950 time period. That took him about four and a half weeks
of analysis, and I was for four and a half weeks, as you can
imagine, holding my breath.
The things that I saw described in this Lab Shopkeeper's Notebook
consisted of things that today would be more powerful than the
Intel Pentium processor, for instance, or the Cray supercomputer.
There were communications devices that were described; there
were ways to sandwich-in very, very thin, micrometre-thin layers;
special metals to produce moving parts for things like...from
the descriptions that I read, the nearest thing I could describe...an
anti-gravity propulsion unit for a spacecraft. They included
dynamic electronic and power-control technology that even to
this day we have not yet developed. They included communications
technology that was described only as having been taken from
an object of unknown or unearthly origin. The documents were
very carefully worded not to reveal what was, in reality, in
these boxes of materials.
I was sort of at a loss at that juncture, because even though
we had forensic information at the time from this particular
forensic expert that would date these boxes back to the late
'40s, and even though they said "Western Electric, Bell Laboratories",
part of them said something called "Z-Division" on them. We
knew of the Z-Division: it was a segment of the United States
Army, formed in 1947 and 1948. The implications were that this
project was operating on the fringes of the nuclear bomb development
project - then known as the Manhattan Project Group.
It turns out that in 1947 - between '47 and actually late '48
- Harry Truman decided he was going to grant a contract to AT&T
to go through the overseeing and management of our nuclear arsenal
and the commercialisation of derived product technologies from
the nuclear bomb, from the bomb project: the physics, the electronics,
the control systems, even the ballistics, the radar that was
used, the ICBM technology that was under development in the
late '40s after we got a hold of the V-series rockets from the
Nazis, and so forth. The contract was inked by Truman in early
1949, if I recall correctly, but during the prior two-year period
there was an informal relationship, during which AT&T played
a greater and greater role in the organisation of super-secret
military weapons-grade projects for the federal government and
eventually got pretty much control of what was then known as
the Z-Division.
Z-Division, believe it or not, originated in Roswell, New Mexico.
I guess the reason is, that is where the original nuclear bomb
armada was formed - the first bomber wing that carried the nuclear
bomb - and it migrated over to Kirtland Air Force Base during
the time period when Orlando Lawrence, the Lawrence Berkeley
Laboratories fellow, was called in. He was called in by Teller,
Oppenheimer...all those folks responsible for the nuclear bomb...Leo
Szwilard. Lawrence was called in at the time because he could
make accelerators, or "cyclotrons" as they were known at the
time. Those cyclotrons were capable of refining uranium, refining
plutonium...well, actually, back then, they weren't working
with plutonium but with uranium.
I guess you could imagine what it must have been like in the
time period. They were in the middle of a war when they were
building the nuclear bombs and they had to do everything secretly,
so this Z-Division was created with super-secrecy as its fundamental
core.
Ultimately Lawrence was called in because they had to build
enough of an accelerator to refine enough uranium to make the
bomb possible, and, in spite of all the greatest minds of nuclear
physics assigned to the Z-Division in the Manhattan Project,
none of them could figure out how to refine enough uranium to
make the nuclear bomb a possibility. This was before the first
bomb was exploded. So Lawrence was brought in because he knew
how to make a cyclotron; but his cyclotron, the biggest one
he'd ever created, was about the size of this white board over
here, and it could produce about a thimbleful of refined uranium
- which would have been about enough to make a nuclear bomb
capable of blowing off your left foot.
In any event, Lawrence one day is called in and he's asked:
"How do we build a cyclotron big enough?" He makes a few calculations
and hands a requisition order to Harold Ackerman - today a federal
judge, and who was the chief supply clerk for the Manhattan
Project - to requisition enough silver to build a big silver
racetrack; something like 12 million tons of silver. In fact,
he took it to the United States Treasury, handed it to the then
Secretary of the Treasury - I guess it was Morganthal - and
Morganthal was asked to fill a 12-million-ton order, which also
necessitated the relocation of Z-Division to some place where
they could put all this silver and build this racetrack.
We decided one day at American Computer Company that we were
going to be brave. I talked with my board and I talked with
some of the people at the company and they agreed. "Yeah, we
can try this; let's see what happens."
We decided that we were going to take the story that had been
conveyed to me about this unusual Shopkeeper's Notebook with
these unusual technological artifacts in them, and naively and
blithely put a panel on the Internet, describing in black and
white and colour what we had found, and raise the question.
However, the picture that we put up was a picture of Testor's
model of the so-called Roswell Lander. It's a picture of what
looks like a spacecraft with wings and a jet propulsion system,
with a pod in the front to hold alien occupants who were piloting
it. We superimposed the picture over an image from the Thunder
Range - of course, we picked the wrong place; the Plains of
San Agustin was the right place, actually - and we put a little
bit of rhetoric on this panel and just placed it right in the
middle of our American Computer Company website.
Now that probably was the stupidest thing we ever did. Here's
this picture of a Roswell alien lander sitting on a panel in
the middle of a computer company website, and on it it said
something like: "Did AT&T receive stolen alien technologies
from the US Government in 1947 and thereby invent the transistor,
the laser, the integrated circuit, and...on and on and on...different
technologies?" Well, we figured the reaction we would get from
the public would be one of, "Oh gee, isn't that cute? That's
funny, X-Files, you know..." The reaction we got was not one
we had anticipated.
Three days after we placed the image onto our website, we received
a very strange series of military faxes to our tech support
fax machine, referring to a piece of hardware known as "Sky
Station". Anybody ever hear of anything called Sky Station?
Never heard of it, have you? Well, it's up there. It's an orbital
platform of some kind. We were receiving live messages from
Sky Station for a day or two and we decided this wasn't right;
we were going to call the Pentagon and tell them about it.
So I picked up the phone and first I called Fort Monmouth; then
I called down to Langley Air Force Base. They wanted to know,
"Why are you calling Langley Air Force Base?" Well, where else
would I call about a satellite that's sending messages to our
fax machine...talk about sounding strange...that say this satellite
is about to crash, it's coming down, its communications systems
are breaking down. Well, finally we got to somebody who was
of authority. It was Colonel James that we got to, and he gets
on the phone with me...I'm in my car, on my car phone...and
he says: "Mr Shulman, please secure these faxes. Do not let
anyone see them. We'll take care of it. We'll let you know what
to do with the faxes." It's like...the military goes silent.
That next day our offices were broken into. Our front door was
smashed, our glass was smashed to smithereens all over the place,
and everything was taken out of the file cabinets in our offices.
My office was a wreck when I got in there. It was awful. We
came in the next day to work and it was like: what happened,
what happened?
I had these faxes in my briefcase. I'd taken them with me, home.
So apparently, by not leaving them there, I probably worsened
the situation. It might have been better if I'd left them there,
to be frank; if they'd found them and had just come and arrested
us, taken us away. They were top level, five-level clearance.
We're not supposed to even see or even know such a thing, but
inadvertently, as a result, we became aware of the fact that
there's an orbital DSP [Defense Space Platform], called Sky
Station, which is nuclear-hardened and equipped to carry nuclear
weapons, because it was described in these faxes.
It is not a very pleasant place to be, to discover that now,
here we are at the end of the Cold War with an agreement that
there will be no nuclear weapons in space in orbit, and there
is apparently a platform up there that the United States secretly
put up back in the '60s or '70s or '80s, that's equipped; it's
nuclear-hardened, it's one of the Star Wars SDI series, based
on Spacelab, equipped to handle and carry nuclear weapons.
So now, not only did we have a picture of an alleged alien craft
on our website, talking about alien technologies being transferred
to AT&T, but we also were in possession of very high level,
Level Five, Top Secret security clearance military faxes describing
something called Sky Station.
That week we had visits from the Air Force Office of Special
Investigations. They came up and they interviewed us. They put
me through a day-long third degree. We didn't want it happening
in the middle of our customers coming in and seeing us or selling
personal computers and servers, so I took them to an out-of-the-way
part of the office, down the hall, down the elevator to a little
office downstairs, and I got a query about everything just short
of...well, it included my shoe size, when I was born, names
of parents, names of grandparents, when they entered the country,
driver's licence number. They went through a Q&A with me and
with my staff, that just came short of asking me the wrong question
- if you know what I mean.
We were very startled, naturally. We weren't certain what in
fact was going on, but we're not ones to back down at American
Computer so we decided that instead of running for cover and
taking the picture down off of our website...because we kind
of connected that the two things might have something to do
with each other...instead of backing down and turning it all
off, we would go the other direction. So we moved the picture
to a separate section of our website and created an entire website
within our website, called American Computer Company Special
Investigation. This is what happens when you grow up in New
Jersey! Of course, we couldn't have rubbed salt into a deeper
wound: "Some have claimed that alien technology was found on
board a UFO crashed in Roswell, 1947. Very dramatic. Is it true?
Did the US military discover something strange in the desert
near Albuquerque, New Mexico? Did they alter human history?
Was the transistor one of those alien marvels? Click here for
the original story."
We tried to be a little cute. We put up a picture, and if you
go to our website it's still there. If you go to our main website,
accpc.com..., at the bottom of the page is a nav bar with
a pointer in the middle of the corporate info products, catalogue,
features, tech support, Roswell 1947, help. You can go to that
link and click on it and it'll take you to this special page
which, of course, has now grown tremendously. It has something
like, we estimate, about 9,000 messages and articles now stored
within it. We started off on one Internet server and moved it
to five Internet servers, and now we are on one of our super-servers
which consists of four groups of four Pentium XEONs and three
different service-provider carriers and a whole lot of communications
just to handle the load.
