Technology has changed our lives in ways many of us could hardly have imagined just 20 years ago, whether we like it or not.
Shouldn't we be asking where it really came from?
While controversy over Corso and his book raged, another insider came forward with an equally-strange story. This insider, however, went into layers of historic and technical detail Corso barely scratched at. Along with the claims of reverse-engineering there would be dark allegations of murder and harassment and then ...silence.
In 1999, Jack Shulman of the American Computer Company gave a lecture at the Global Sciences Conference that would rock the UFO world again by offering what he claimed was an inside account of the process Corso detailed in The Day After Roswell.
Shulman claimed that he was well-acquainted with the team credited with the development of the transistor, the tiny device that has revolutionized the entire world and changed the way the entire world does its business.
The reason Shulman had been invited to speak was that ACC had posted something of a manifesto about the reverse engineering of recovered technology from Roswell in either 1996 or 1997 (the exact dates are fuzzy).
Here's what it said:
Shulman also claimed that Transistor Group leader Dr. John Morton was going to go public about the fraud and was first defamedº and then set up to be assassinated by corporate goons.
Serious accusations. Is there any truth to them?
Well, Morton was burned alive in his car in December of 1971 after being assaulted when leaving a bar one night. This happened in sleepy Neshanic Station, NJ, not exactly a hotbed of crime. His killers claimed they were trying to roll him, but he fought back so they decided to kill him instead. They were caught and sentenced to life.
They only served 18 years of their sentence. For a brutal, horrific, premeditated murder.
Stories would later emerge that Morton was increasingly disenchanted at Bell and that he was having marital problems, but Morton's primary sin seemed to be his resistance of the Panopticon system that was growing within the high-tech community.
Was Shulman right? Was Morton going to blow the whistle? I don't know, but he seemed like the type to. And his horrific murder (so reminiscent of that of Apollo whistleblower Gus Grissom) certainly would have silenced anyone else planning to do so.
Shulman spoke of a "Shopkeeper's Notebook," a leaked document that contained many of Bell's secrets pertaining to reverse-engineered technology. He would claim Morton was the source of the leak. The Notebook allegedly contained:
SILICON ON SAPPHIRE
But what about the silicon problem? Shulman wrote:
Even Bell's transistor - the germanium version at least - was something of a pink elephant:
THE ENDLESS COSMIC NUDGE
Now, as to the work already done with semiconductors, I would argue that that doesn't mitigate against these Roswell claims at all, even if I highly doubt it all went down exactly like Corso or Shulman alleged.
Why?
Because scientists would have to know what the hell they were looking at before they could reverse-engineer it. As I said before, you don't hand the keys to your Lamborghini to a toddler.
And if you look carefully at this whole school of thought of Contact Technology, it always seems to deal with breakthroughs to long-standing (and more importantly, stubbornly long-standing) problems, sudden applications to what seemed only theoretical science, and radical revisions to existing technology.†
We're talking all the way back to the pyramids and further back still. The idea of aliens zapping everything with their tractor beams while everyone sits around with their thumbs up their asses is not only unsupported by the physical evidence, it's actually contradicted by the ancient accounts. We're talking something altogether more complex than all that. Yet no less extraordinary.
Of course, this is where I start to question the Roswell thesis, but for entirely different reasons than most skeptics...
But before we go there, the rest of Shulman and ACC's story needs to be told. Because it all took a very strange turn.
TO BE CONTINUED
We looked at graphs charting the rate of human technology: you see a steady line for millennia, then all of them spike skyward shortly after World War II. Why? Human intelligence didn't increase so radically, that's for certain.
Then how do we explain technologies coming to market that were little more than theoretical science at the war's end? How do we explain technologies that our best and brightest claimed were impossible?
What if our technology is "indistinguishable from magic" for a simple yet compelling reason?
In a previous post we looked at Lt. Col. Philip Corso's book The Day After Roswell and its claims of reverse-engineering of high technology from the alleged crash of a UFO in New Mexico.
That book - and the drama around it - seemed to have an odor about it, as if it were part of a very complex intelligence operation, one that included the Air Force's widely-ridiculed "Roswell reports," which seemed deliberately engineered to fan the flames.
But, as we saw, Roswell itself seems drenched to the bone in symbolism, specifically the symbolism of the most ancient of Mystery cults, specifically those linking us back to the Phoenicians, those mysterious yet ever-present wraiths of history.
As I said in the previous post, "The Roswell events themselves are so laden with symbolism that one seriously has to wonder if what we saw was in fact some kind of ritual and not any kind of accident at all."
As if all that were not enough, the crash site at the Plains of San Agustin aligns (to the minute) with Ba'albek, the Phoenician megalithic site that ancient astronaut theorists love so dearly.
Ba'al made the news more recently following the controversial plan to install the Ba'al Gates in London and New York (only the triumphal arch, also sacred to Ba'al Hadad, whom the Greeks and Romans identified with Jupiter-Ammon, was installed in London)
Whatever you believe, one thing is certain: high technology absolutely exploded after Roswell and changed everything; science, culture, warfare--all human endeavors were revolutionized by transistors, integrated circuits, motherboards, lasers.
Then how do we explain technologies coming to market that were little more than theoretical science at the war's end? How do we explain technologies that our best and brightest claimed were impossible?
What if our technology is "indistinguishable from magic" for a simple yet compelling reason?
That book - and the drama around it - seemed to have an odor about it, as if it were part of a very complex intelligence operation, one that included the Air Force's widely-ridiculed "Roswell reports," which seemed deliberately engineered to fan the flames.
But, as we saw, Roswell itself seems drenched to the bone in symbolism, specifically the symbolism of the most ancient of Mystery cults, specifically those linking us back to the Phoenicians, those mysterious yet ever-present wraiths of history.
As I said in the previous post, "The Roswell events themselves are so laden with symbolism that one seriously has to wonder if what we saw was in fact some kind of ritual and not any kind of accident at all."
As if all that were not enough, the crash site at the Plains of San Agustin aligns (to the minute) with Ba'albek, the Phoenician megalithic site that ancient astronaut theorists love so dearly.
Ba'al made the news more recently following the controversial plan to install the Ba'al Gates in London and New York (only the triumphal arch, also sacred to Ba'al Hadad, whom the Greeks and Romans identified with Jupiter-Ammon, was installed in London)
Whatever you believe, one thing is certain: high technology absolutely exploded after Roswell and changed everything; science, culture, warfare--all human endeavors were revolutionized by transistors, integrated circuits, motherboards, lasers.
In 1999, Jack Shulman of the American Computer Company gave a lecture at the Global Sciences Conference that would rock the UFO world again by offering what he claimed was an inside account of the process Corso detailed in The Day After Roswell.
Shulman claimed that he was well-acquainted with the team credited with the development of the transistor, the tiny device that has revolutionized the entire world and changed the way the entire world does its business.
Shulman said:
Or was it?
A "Bob Wolf" followed up on the story at the time. He spoke to an ACC consultant who was presented as "an expert on National Electronic Space Command matters for the Department of the Air Force."
I grew up in the household of the head of Bell Labs, so I knew that there was something strange about the transistor because I knew Bill Shockley, and Bill Shockley was something of a witless buffoon.
There’s no way he could have invented the transistor.The symbol for the transistor is made up of three pieces: positive, positive and negative; or negative, negative and positive... silicon dioxide doped with arsenic and boron, in 1947.
Now, in 1947, doping things with boron was not easy. It required the sort of equipment that even Bell Labs in 1946 did not possess. They had this type of equipment at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories - but it would have taken thousands and thousands and thousands of man-hours to invent the transistor.
Well, Shulman apparently got his facts wrong. The first transistor was apparently composed of germanium. The silicon Transistor was developed at Bell Labs in the early 50s.
Or was it?
A "Bob Wolf" followed up on the story at the time. He spoke to an ACC consultant who was presented as "an expert on National Electronic Space Command matters for the Department of the Air Force."
That individual said:
(T)here is NO INFORMATION ABOUT TRANSISTOR RESEARCH actually available nor that is bonafide nor provided by Bell Labs PRIOR TO July - August - Sepetember of 1947.
It didn't exist, because the materials concepts used by Bell and the associated research resulting in the fabrication of the Transistor came from the Roswell, New Mexico crash site of the "extraterrestrial craft" discovered jointly by the Air Force and Army there in mid 1947.
Indeed, there was great doubt over whether semiconductors themselves would ever work. Here is the opinion of a legendary physicist:
But an explanation of semiconductor behavior eluded scientists for decades. As late as 1931, physicist Wolfgang Pauli opined that “one shouldn’t work on semiconductors, that is a filthy mess; who knows whether any semiconductors exist.”
Who was this Jack Shulman anyway? He provided this bio:
Shulman is the inventor of ODIN, the first "overlapping windowed" display manager for desktop computing, in 1974. In the late 1970s, Shulman designed CAD/CAM and desktop computer systems for manufacturing and the office, including one of the forerunners of the IBM PC-AT. Shulman is also the inventor of the massively parallel systolic hypersystem (MPSH) -- a connection machine called PROTEUS
Odin and Proteus, eh? The gods are all over this story, aren't they?
Here's what it said:
Nuclear Powered Engines and Advanced Communications and Computing device…were taken from the Alien wreck and purportedly made their way to The Bell System's "Bell Laboratories", then located in Murray Hill, New Jersey…
One piece was supposedly found to have unique potential, an Alien switching device composed of Silicon and Arsenic, arranged in a microscopic array much more complicated than even now have been assembled by Humankind...
The Alien device purportedly became the priority focus object of Bell Labs' and The US Department of Defense's analysis and scientific research. It was discovered by the researchers, that the unusual electronic Alien device could act as both a high speed electronic switch and as an Amplifier.
Shulman also claimed that Transistor Group leader Dr. John Morton was going to go public about the fraud and was first defamedº and then set up to be assassinated by corporate goons.
Serious accusations. Is there any truth to them?
Well, Morton was burned alive in his car in December of 1971 after being assaulted when leaving a bar one night. This happened in sleepy Neshanic Station, NJ, not exactly a hotbed of crime. His killers claimed they were trying to roll him, but he fought back so they decided to kill him instead. They were caught and sentenced to life.
They only served 18 years of their sentence. For a brutal, horrific, premeditated murder.
Stories would later emerge that Morton was increasingly disenchanted at Bell and that he was having marital problems, but Morton's primary sin seemed to be his resistance of the Panopticon system that was growing within the high-tech community.
Was Shulman right? Was Morton going to blow the whistle? I don't know, but he seemed like the type to. And his horrific murder (so reminiscent of that of Apollo whistleblower Gus Grissom) certainly would have silenced anyone else planning to do so.
Shulman spoke of a "Shopkeeper's Notebook," a leaked document that contained many of Bell's secrets pertaining to reverse-engineered technology. He would claim Morton was the source of the leak. The Notebook allegedly contained:
• There were communications devices that were describedShulman would make some startling suggestions over Morton's death :
• There were ways to sandwich-in very, very thin, micrometer-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
Apparently, AT&T had too much to risk over the Transistor, to have press and public looking into the Transistor's unusual origins.Could internal rivalries or professional jealousies have led to a plot to assassinate Dr. Morton?Or were there other problems, had he, being noted for occasionally having too open a nature, in fact, started to discuss the True Origins of the Transistor with the wrong parties, thereby becoming a liability to AT&T?
SILICON ON SAPPHIRE
But what about the silicon problem? Shulman wrote:
Bell Labs first announced it was composed of 'Germanium', like the old rectifier diode, so as to protect the Silicon formula from industrial espionage, until it could get its 1948 patents filed.
Once filed and granted as "unique", "originally authored" and approved, the patents became the basis for Bell controlling the Transistor for about the first 15 years of its existence. Those who used it, had to pay some form of royalty to Bell.
To challenge this, one competitor alleged Bell had IN FACT only demonstrated the Transistor Effect in 'Germanium' and that the secret formula involving Silicon, should not be considered 'property of the Bell System'.
Bell argued back that the secrecy was necessary**, in a patent dispute within an Anti-Trust suit brought to bear on the Bell System during the 50's.
.
Interesting. I wondered about this claim, but read this in an online history of Raytheon:In 1948 Bell had filed patents on the point-contact and junction transistor and had invented the name “transistor” but its licensing programme did not begin until 1952.
Early on some companies exercised caution on the use of what could have been a trade-name and called their devices “Crystal Triodes.” Raytheon’s provisional data sheet uses this description although the above example is emblazoned “Transistor.”
An update to the ACC manifesto stated that:
"(P)rior to 1947 there were no Transistors in use, only raw germanium and selenium diodes composed of naturally occurring elements -- mined from Bauxite and other mines."
The ACC manifesto also cites the enormous difficulty of the actual application of this science, as opposed to the theory:
This produced the "Transistor" effects that had not been discovered by researchers working with rectifiers in over a hundred years. Some claim that these transistors were made of Germanium, as well, however, the effect that caused the transistor to work hadn't been observed by any researcher, prior to September of 1947.
Was that true? From the Wiki on Semiconductors:
Detector and power rectifiers could not amplify a signal. Many efforts were made to develop a solid-state amplifier, but these were unsuccessful because of limited theoretical understanding of semiconductor materials.
In 1922 Oleg Losev developed two-terminal, negative resistance amplifiers for radio; however, he perished in the Siege of Leningrad. (Lilienfeld) patented a device resembling a modern field-effect transistor, but it was not practical.
R. Hilsch and R. W. Pohl in 1938 demonstrated a solid-state amplifier using a structure resembling the control grid of a vacuum tube; although the device displayed power gain, it had a cut-off frequency of one cycle per second, too low for any practical applications.
Here's where we return to the issue of the "Lilienfeld device", which was in fact not called a transistor, though some misleading histories would have you believe that it was:
Because the production of high-quality semiconductor materials was still decades away, Lilienfeld's solid-state amplifier ideas would not have found practical use in the 1920s and 1930s, even if such a device had been built.
"Decades away."
To my ears that sounds like more than twenty years. Why is this important?
Because just as Shulman claimed, the germanium transistor seemed to be extremely problematic, despite what some of Bell Labs' boosters have said. From an online history of Raytheon:
Because just as Shulman claimed, the germanium transistor seemed to be extremely problematic, despite what some of Bell Labs' boosters have said. From an online history of Raytheon:
But in common with all early point-contact transistors this was not a robust device and Krim, retrospectively discussing the issues in 2003, noted it had to be “handmade with watchmaker precision, which precluded cost-effective mass production. "
And they were none too robust. The slightest shock could ruin them, which made them useless for hearing aids and just about everything else.”
Bardeen and Brattain’s point-contact transistor was a crude, fragile device consisting of two closely spaced metal points jabbed into a germanium sliver.That it worked at all was a minor miracle.
Continuing:
Already a pilot production line at the Labs was turning out hundreds of prototypes every week for further experimentation, measurement, and testing. But the transistors were extremely noisy, variable, and unreliable.
“In the very early days, the performance of a transistor was apt to change if someone slammed a door,” Morton was quoted as saying in a 1953 article in Fortune.
Or at least the transistors created for public consumption were.*
Less is known about any silicon version being developed in secret. Remember now that Bell waited almost seven months before telling the world the transistor existed at all.
In fact it would take several years for licensees like GE and Raytheon to get any kind of power out of germanium transistors (as late as 1953 Raytheon's germanium yields "stayed stubbornly low").
The more you know about the details of the germanium and silicon transistors, the more Jack Shulman's seemingly wild claims seem to resonate.
In fact it would take several years for licensees like GE and Raytheon to get any kind of power out of germanium transistors (as late as 1953 Raytheon's germanium yields "stayed stubbornly low").
.
By the time any of their competitors managed to get the germanium transistors to work...Bell Labs trumped them all with the silicon transistor, which Shulman argued was in fact the first transistor.The more you know about the details of the germanium and silicon transistors, the more Jack Shulman's seemingly wild claims seem to resonate.
For instance, germanium transistors made for...
...lousy switches: tiny leakage currents continue to flow even when the devices are nominally off. Silicon doesn’t have these problems, but it’s a lot more difficult to work with.
Which resonates with Shulman's original claims that germanium never displayed any transistor effects in the decades scientists were working with it, and that only huge national labs had the capacity to work with silicon.
THE ENDLESS COSMIC NUDGE
Now, as to the work already done with semiconductors, I would argue that that doesn't mitigate against these Roswell claims at all, even if I highly doubt it all went down exactly like Corso or Shulman alleged.
Why?
Because scientists would have to know what the hell they were looking at before they could reverse-engineer it. As I said before, you don't hand the keys to your Lamborghini to a toddler.
And if you look carefully at this whole school of thought of Contact Technology, it always seems to deal with breakthroughs to long-standing (and more importantly, stubbornly long-standing) problems, sudden applications to what seemed only theoretical science, and radical revisions to existing technology.†
We're talking all the way back to the pyramids and further back still. The idea of aliens zapping everything with their tractor beams while everyone sits around with their thumbs up their asses is not only unsupported by the physical evidence, it's actually contradicted by the ancient accounts. We're talking something altogether more complex than all that. Yet no less extraordinary.
Of course, this is where I start to question the Roswell thesis, but for entirely different reasons than most skeptics...
But before we go there, the rest of Shulman and ACC's story needs to be told. Because it all took a very strange turn.
TO BE CONTINUED
Part One/ Part Two/ Part Three/ Part Four/
Part Five/ Part Six/ Part Seven/ Part Eight/
Part Nine/ Part Ten/ Part Eleven/ Part Twelve/
Need more Knowledge? Come enroll at the Secret Sun Institute of Advanced Synchromysticism.
Don't forget: the legendary Secret Sun Facebook group is back in action, after a three year hiatus.
º Shulman may be referring to stories citing a number of bad decisions Morton allegedly made (and hints at his "dark side"). Which certainly doesn't account for why Morton was given numerous accolades- and awards- from his peers at the same time and was even sought out by Japanese firms as a consultant.
* Following Shulman's model, once the working transistor had been achieved with silicon, the Bell team would have fully understood the mechanics, something no other researcher had done to that point. From there they could have jury-rigged a germanium imposter, which from the sounds of it was nowhere ready to go to market. And remained so for several years. So Shulman's claim that the germanium imposter was put out to secure patents while the silicon transistor was being readied makes sense in light of the history with Raytheon, etc.
† And we're not just talking about technology, we're also talking about the arts as well (see Kirby, Jack and Dick, Philip K).
