Exclusive Interview with American Computer President Jack Shulman

In late 1947, the world witnessed a technological miracle: the invention of the transistor at Bell Laboratories. While official history credits William Shockley and his team, a provocative theory suggests the blueprint for the modern computer didn’t originate in a lab, but in the wreckage of a downed extraterrestrial craft. In this exclusive 1997 interview, Jack Shulman, President of the American Computer Company (ACC), breaks his silence on the allegations that a secret technology transfer occurred between the U.S. military and AT&T. This “Roswell-to-Silicon” pipeline, Shulman argues, explains why Bell Labs was surrounded by Nike-Ajax missile batteries during an era when major American cities were left undefended.

The controversy was sparked by a mysterious consultant with high-level ties to the defense industry, who provided Shulman with evidence of a coordinated disinformation campaign designed to mask the transistor’s true origins. From the “lab-keeper’s notebooks” to the strange silence of corporate giants like Lucent and AT&T, the Shulman interview explores the staggering possibility that our entire digital age is built on a foundation of recovered alien debris. Whether a bold truth or an elaborate psychological operation, the ACC/Roswell connection remains a cornerstone of the argument that the “Landlords” have been providing us with a technological “Co-Evolution” for decades.

Exclusive Interview with American Computer President Jack Shulman
On the Roswell/Bell Labs Controversy

By: Michael Lindemann

Word from Jeroen Wierda:

This (news)article is about the ACC (American Computer Company) news that we continue to hear about. This article is an interview with ACC prez. Jack Shulman.
Permission to place this article was granted by Michael Lindemann from CNI News (www.cninews.com).

[Since mid-August, a controversy has raged on the internet concerning highly provocative information posted on the web site of American Computer Company (see CNI News of September 16, 1997; and visit ACC’s web site: http://www.american-computer.com ). In brief, ACC has suggested that the historic invention of the transistor at Bell Laboratories in December, 1947 might have been aided by covert transfer of technology from an alien spacecraft recovered near Roswell, New Mexico. This suggestion directly parallels similar claims made by Lt. Col. Philip Corso in his recent book, “The Day After Roswell.” However, ACC personnel state they had no knowledge of Corso or his book, but relied instead on information provided by a “consultant” who remains nameless.

American Computer’s president and chief technical officer is Jack Shulman. In recent weeks, Shulman himself has come under scrutiny by UFO researchers, as have several other people who have presumed to speak in a seemingly authoritative way on behalf of American Computer. Chief among these “others” are one Ed Wang and one Bob Wolf. Pronouncements attributed to these two persons have raised suspicions that Shulman himself may have been writing under one or several pseudonyms.

CNI News, working in cooperation with radio host Jeff Rense of the popular syndicated program “Sightings on the Radio,” [see Jeff’s web site at http://www.sightings.com], is seeking to verify or dispel the various rumors swirling around ACC and the person of Jack Shulman, so that public attention can be refocused to the significant issues raised on the American Computer web site. This special supplement to the October 1 edition of CNI News is directed to that goal.

The following is an edited transcript of a telephone interview between Jeff Rense and Jack Shulman which took place on September 29. Jeff Rense and CNI News editor Michael Lindemann consulted together on the questions to be asked prior to the call.

CNI News recognizes that the statements made by Shulman in this interview by no means satisfy all the questions we would like to have answered. However, we hope that this information represents a contribution to the ongoing investigation of this unusual case.

Thanks to Jeff Rense for sharing the complete contents of this interview with CNI News.]

JEFF RENSE: It’s September 29, and we’re talking with American Computer Company president Jack Shulman. To begin with, are you, Jack Shulman, writing under the pseudonym “Ed Wang”?

JACK SHULMAN: No

RENSE: Have you ever met Ed Wang?

SHULMAN: No.

RENSE: Have you ever talked to anyone calling himself Ed Wang?

SHULMAN:: Yes, he’s called here a couple of times. At one time he had asked us if he could use an account at one of the computer science associations nearby to access the internet for the purpose of investigative reporting. That predated this whole controversy. We did in fact give him an account to use, back about eleven months ago. I don’t remember what he was investigating at that time. Then somebody raised his name, in about the early part of August, asking us if we could verify something that he had paraphrased from one of the stories on our web site. Since he had paraphrased, and it was all quoted and everything, it would have been just as easy for that party to just look at our web page. So we said, “If you’ll look at our web page, you’ll see that whatever he’s paraphrased here does appear to resemble exactly the words that are on the web page.” To my knowledge, the only other contact we’ve had with Ed Wang is an occasional call from him, much as you’ve called me today, and others such as Stig Agermose, who have contacted us to ask questions.

RENSE: Who is Bob Wolf? Does he mean anything to American Computer?

SHULMAN: Again, he’s one of the people, like Jared Anderson, Ed Wang, Linda Moulton Howe, yourself and others, who’ve written us. There have been dozens of people who have either written us or called us for information. I have spoken to Bob Wolf at length by phone. I have not personally met the guy. He does appear to be a very nice fellow. He’s given me some very interesting information. I don’t know if I’d take all of it without the proverbial grain of salt, because he has told me some things that led me to believe there are parts of his background that he doesn’t want to disclose to me. Apparently he worked for the U.S. Navy as a Seal, but I can’t verify that. I can’t call the Seals organization and ask if this guy was a Seal. They won’t respond to that.

RENSE: What is your purpose in exposing the Roswell/Bell Labs allegations on the ACC web site, thereby attaching your credibility, for better or worse, not only to Roswell, but to claims concerning Bell Labs’ access to alien technology — claims which either must be substantiated, or which could make you look like a nut, or a disinformer?

SHULMAN: I don’t think there was any purpose — either to look like nut, a disinformer, a credible source or anything — taken into consideration at first. We had a consultant come to me and tell me this story. At first, I was quite skeptical about it. I knew a lot of the facts, because they are pretty much matters of record, but had always thought that the reason there was a cloud of — shall we say — controversy about the exact origins of William Shockley’s transistor was that it stemmed perhaps from a prehistory that AT&T didn’t care to disclose. I didn’t have any idea, up until the time that the consultant came to me and raised these issues, that it might in fact be related to the Roswell incident. I originally thought [the origin] was something like German rocket scientists….

RENSE: How did this consultant come to you?

SHULMAN: I had known the consultant years ago. We had met each other in the hinterlands of AT&T. I’ve worked on and off in AT&T contracts over the course of a couple of decades. And about a year ago, in my capacity as the chairperson of the American Computer Science Foundation, I was asked to review materials that pertained to an ongoing investigation of telephone company practices that were pertinent to the success of the computer industry, during the course of which I happened to come across some fairly strong allegations that were made by the consultant in the dominion of that specific investigation. I was not at that time informed of the possibility of an alien technology transfer. It was not until he came to me personally and suggested it that I said to him, “Well, you’re going to have to show me some bonafide evidence before I even consider this.” About six months later he came back to me with what appeared to me to be… some evidence that might suggest in fact that the transistor came from some kind of a project involving investigation into an alien technology of some kind.

RENSE: Can you elaborate on that evidence at all?

SHULMAN: I can tell you that I have seen what appears to be some notes from someone. However, I cannot verify their authenticity, so I’d really not like to describe them in any detail. Frankly, Jeff, I grow concerned about leading people in the wrong direction. They did give me the appearance of a lab notebook, of a lab-keeper’s notebook. In fact, they did appear to describe or have an actual memorandum referring to a disinformation campaign in late 1947 at AT&T. But again, they could have been a complete forgery. They could have been anything. They might have been legitimate too. At that particular juncture, I said to him, “OK, this now looks like it’s fairly conceivable it might have happened, if in fact this is bonafide.” So he suggested to me, Why don’t we at the American Computer Science Foundation post some kind of white paper on the subject? I said we really can’t do that. He asked me why, and I said to him that it was because American Computer Science Foundation carries the weight of its membership companies, etc., all of which might lend a greater weight, in essence underwriting the credibility of this story in a way that I would not intend it to. I would prefer that the information somehow stand on its own. Well, he pestered me for a couple of months. We were talking over coffee, reviewing the whole thing, and he suggested, “Why don’t you put it on your American Computer Company web site?” I said I can’t do that, because it might [reflect badly on ACC]. So he said — and I’ll be blunt with you here — “Why don’t you make it look humorous? That way, you have a plausibly deniable excuse.” I said, “It IS humorous, in a way, because if you look at it, you have a company — if in fact they did obtain technology from a technology transfer source — that’s been running around for fifty years trying to hide that fact.” That’s funny. Why would anybody do that? It struck me at that particular moment that AT&T would have been better off admitting it. So I said, “OK, why don’t we make it appear in its proper light — as outrageous and/or funny — and put it on the ACC web site and see if we get any reaction at all from anybody who reads it. Perhaps if it strikes a chord, somebody will contact us and tell us whether this is ridiculous or not.” Initially, we did not expect anyone from your investigative arena to even notice the story. At least I didn’t. The consultant may have, but I did not. I initially thought that people would see it in passing and would say, hmm, how interesting, how humorous, or whatever.

RENSE: You had no idea of the potential scope of this?

SHULMAN: Well, interestingly, exactly what I thought might happen did happen — that is, it struck a chord with somebody and they wrote us. Sure enough, the first week someone wrote us and said, “Yes, my father worked for AT&T/Bell Labs in 1947, and in the early ’60s took me to see a UFO.” I was flabbergasted, absolutely floored. You could have knocked me over with a feather at that moment. Not because I was skeptical, but in the context of how ridiculous it makes AT&T look, I found it to be humorous. What, are they crazy? Why didn’t they come out with it in 1947? The world would have been in their debt. AT&T would have been the greatest company that ever lived. Why would they hide it?

It was then that the full import of the suggestion of profiteering began to occur to me. If in fact this were true, the profiteering aspect was something that none of us considered. If people were ready to make billions and billions of dollars for 200 years on this kind of technology, and it came from an “alien source,” they would keep it a secret — because if it came from outside of AT&T, it wouldn’t belong to AT&T. It hadn’t even dawned on us, because we were looking at it from the perspective of how amazing the story is, how earthshaking, and how silly it would be to keep it a secret — until we began to realize who was in the business of profiting from this kind of technology.

RENSE: Do you have any relationship with Bell Labs now, Jack?

SHULMAN: Not really. They call us every once in a while to look at buying equipment, but I am no longer personally doing any consulting for Bell Labs.

RENSE: Does the consultant?

SHULMAN: Occasionally. He or she does communications-related consulting in the defense industries, and very specifically his or her identity is being withheld for security reasons.

RENSE: Has the consultant expressed to you any surprise at the amount of internet interest in this story?

SHULMAN: He and several of our public relations consultant clients said that, frankly, it will do quite well as a story on the internet because it will serve to brighten up the interest of some very frustrated people. This information will give people in your investigative field some leverage in dealing with the whole subject. Even if the entire story might not be 100 percent accurate for whatever reason, the facts described in our story are materially largely true. For instance — and it’s been interesting to see how many people have reacted adversely to this suggestion — if you take a look at the part about the Nike-Ajax missile bases, and the anti-aircraft guns that preceded them, in and around AT&T down in Red Bank, outside of Crawford’s Corners, up in Murray Hill and over in Holmdel, it’s almost shocking to discover that, while New York City and New Jersey sat undefended, AT&T had both anti-aircraft and then anti-missile batteries constructed around them in the 1940s and 1950s. This is painfully humorous. It actually hurts to consider that AT&T and Bell Labs are more important than the citizens of our country. So I’m thinking, wow, there must be more than just the labs there. Because I know something about the research community, and I don’t know that there is anything at AT&T from 1947 to 1997 that was irreplaceable. Whereas, when I think of places like the Applied Physics Laboratory, Cold Springs Harbor, Lawrence Livermore — there are projects going on there that are not reproducible, and I’m not sure they all have Nike-Ajax missile bases around them.

RENSE: Concerning the allegations about Bell Labs, then, would you say that you are a conduit for someone else’s information?

SHULMAN: Yes, we are providing a forum. To date, only Motorola from the AT&T arena has tried to dispute it. AT&T appears to be remaining mute on the subject. And Lucent has remained mute, although I must tell you that our relationship with Lucent on the technical support side — because we support some of Lucent’s products on the AT&T phone systems — has been less than warm since August 15. We’ve actually been hung up on a few times.

RENSE: But have you had anyone call up and tell you, Jack, you’ve really stepped across the boundary here?

SHULMAN: No, not thus far. We’ve gotten a couple of nasty letters from people who didn’t provide a return email address. But we’re just trying to provide a forum for people to hear these facts and either disprove them or prove them. There’s nothing worse, in my view, than something like this that’s left open to conjecture indefinitely, because it does nothing but hurt the people who try to consider it, and I think it hurts the country to some degree. I think it weakens our country. The fact that people will continuously arrive at the conclusion, for instance, that either the DoD, or the president, or someone like that is not disclosing facts to them that they ought to disclose, leads to the kind of thinking that undermines our democratic system. It tends to erode our confidence in government, and I think our confidence in government really needs to be reinforced.

RENSE: Is American Computer consciously part of a larger coordinated campaign of public disclosure or education aimed at revealing things about the alleged alien presence on earth?

SHULMAN: No. Not unless you call ACC’s own campaign that broader one. Nobody came to us other than this consultant.

RENSE: So would you say that Jack Shulman, as a matter of conscience and patriotism, independently decided to put this on his web site?

SHULMAN: Conscience, yes, simply because I thought that the facts deserved disclosure and consideration. The public should know. Even if they’re not true, the fact is they appear to have some degree of plausibility, so they should be considered on their own weight.

By the way, I was caught completely off guard by Colonel Corso’s book. I did not know the book existed until Jared Anderson called here and spoke to John Schwartz, one of my VPs, who got me on the phone immediately and said, “Did you know there’s a book that describes transfers of technology from either Roswell or some other crash to AT&T?” That was the first I heard of it.

As for what you call patriotism: We are our government, Jeff. The government is us. We have this perception of a dyspeptic, detached entity with X-Files guys running around in it, Men-in-Black running around in it, abusive IRS guys running around in it — all those reasons are used by people who are insurrectional in their thinking. I don’t happen to share those views. I happen to love this country and the people who live here, and I think that if they have a gripe or a beef, it deserves to be aired. And this is one of those that appears to deserve to be aired…. I raised that very issue in a letter to, dare I say, Secretary of Defense William Cohen. I stated my concern that — what do they say, “Sooth the savage beast”? — I’m concerned that a “savage beast” will emerge eventually from the disinformation, lack of information, strangely conflicting or compelling stories, and the lack of a basic kind of town-hall sit-down to discuss these matters. I mean, how expensive is it for the government to respond to a million FOIA requests a year, compared with one concerted effort to gather all the information, keep it pure, break down a few barriers that might be left over from some nameless classified project….?

RENSE: It sounds like you don’t subscribe to the idea of a fifty-year, coordinated cover-up of the UFO subject.

SHULMAN: I think I would have to see actual evidence of a coordinated cover-up. It’s not that I don’t subscribe to it. It’s that I don’t as yet see evidence of anything other than bureaucracy, technical deficiencies in requests [for information], a disinclination on the part of the government to discuss the matter. I think, if anything, I’d call it a fifty-year disinclination, rather than cover-up.

RENSE: But the reasons for that “disinclination” are the key…

SHULMAN: That’s correct. That’s one of the things we raised in the Shadowlake Invitation page on our web site [an open letter to the Secretary of Defense, Joint Chiefs of Staff and other top officials to participate in an open forum on the subject of UFOs.]

RENSE: That letter has caused a lot of reaction. Who wrote that?

SHULMAN: It was written by American Computer Company. You have people working here, including myself, who are less than inclined to seek the public spotlight on this issue. We are not what you’d call publicity hounds.

RENSE: I understand. What is your personal opinion about the ET issue, vis a vis our military and our government?

SHULMAN: My personal opinion is a very troubled one. I have a degree of personal integrity that forbids my [drawing conclusions] until I’ve seen the absolute facts. I have not concluded one way or the other. But I am inclined to believe that it is more likely that there is some shred of truth to visitation than that there is no shred of truth.

RENSE: Do you expect any more information from your consultant to come through ACC’s web site?

SHULMAN: I can’t say at this moment. We have a plan in place, that we’re considering, to raise the ante a little bit to try to generate some kind of reaction out of the Department of Defense that might lean toward the town-hall, public-forum type of meeting. But I really don’t want to reveal any more about this now.

RENSE: Is the consultant’s agenda, in your opinion, personal, or is he or she being directed by any agency?

SHULMAN: The consultant does not work, to my knowledge, on this particular story for any agency, because that would probably violate the consultant’s security oath. The consultant has been advised, and has advised us, that the information that he or she has given us is “allowed” to be given to us by whatever agency he or she consults to, because the information was obtained other than through their employment by the U.S. government. Meaning, the guy worked at AT&T, came across this information, and was not working for the federal government at the time, so the federal government cannot prevent him or her from releasing it to us. But to be very distinct here… the federal government is not particularly happy that the information is being given out.

RENSE: How do you know that?

SHULMAN: That’s a comment from the consultant. He said, “I don’t think they’re happy that I’m talking. I don’t think they’re upset, but I don’t think they’re happy.”

RENSE: To summarize: Would you say that you think the information given by the consultant is credible and believable? This seems to go without saying, or you wouldn’t have put it on your web site.

SHULMAN: “The information” is rather broad. There are a lot of different parts to this, and some feel more accurate to me than others.

RENSE: On balance, would you say that ACC’s web postings on this subject are important?

SHULMAN: That’s been said to me. Again, we did not do it to attract this kind of publicity. We did it because we thought we would attract some interest from someone, somewhere, who might know whether it’s true or not — meaning other than from sources that the consultant has, such as past contacts with John Morton [formerly of Bell Labs], William Shockley, others at AT&T and Defense who were involved with him at the time. The problem is, too many people are trying to read into it, Jeff. If it’s true, it’s true — if it’s not, it’s not. I was not there in 1947. I cannot swear if it is or isn’t. A complete charade could be presented to me, and I could be fooled if it were presented properly. It could be suggested that the consultant is a bold-faced liar, or that he has had information given to him that is untrue but looks very plausible and believable at the level of detail that we presently know.

RENSE: Thanks very much for your time.

[Jeff Rense has invited Jack Shulman to be a live guest on “Sightings on the Radio,” where many of the foregoing issues might be explored in greater depth. No date for that interview has yet been announced. Meanwhile, CNI News will continue to pursue the ACC/Bell Labs/Roswell story.]

Thanks to Jeroen for permission to use this info
WWW design and text editing Copyrighted © 1996-1997 by Jeroen Wierda
Picard UFO Research International

This post features an edited transcript of a high-stakes telephone interview between Jack Shulman and radio host Jeff Rense, originally published by Michael Lindemann of CNI News. Shulman addresses the swirling rumors regarding his company’s website postings, which alleged that Bell Labs’ 1947 breakthrough was aided by alien artifacts. He clarifies his role as a “conduit” for a consultant who claimed to have seen internal AT&T memoranda referencing a technology transfer from the Roswell incident. Shulman details the suspicious security measures taken at Bell Labs—including specialized anti-aircraft defenses—suggesting that the facility was protecting something far more irreplaceable than standard telecommunications research.

The summary also touches on the “profiteering” aspect of the cover-up, positing that if the technology were known to be extraterrestrial, the patents held by AT&T and Motorola would be legally void. Shulman discusses his surprise at the parallels between his information and Colonel Philip Corso’s book, The Day After Roswell, despite having no prior knowledge of Corso’s claims. By examining the military’s “disinclination” to disclose UFO data and the potential for a “town-hall” style public forum, the interview presents a compelling case for government and corporate transparency regarding the origins of the semiconductors that power our modern world.

About the Author

Administrator