Shulman, chairman of the American Computer Company, claims his firm is back-engineering alien technology recovered from the 1947 Roswell crash. Shulman describes a device called the transcapacitor, which stores information not as binary ones and zeros like a transistor but as multiple voltage gradients, functioning similarly to the rods and cones of the human eye. He says a wallet-sized version could hold several terabytes of data and operate at billions of bits per second.
Shulman recounts receiving a mysterious classified fax from a military space platform called Sky Station, followed by a break-in at his offices where nothing of obvious value was taken but files were searched. Linda Moulton Howe joins to compare the transcapacitor's physical description with the alien wafers described by Colonel Philip Corso in his book about Roswell technology transfer.
Key Moments
What the trans-capacitor is: Shulman explains that among the recovered drawings was a transistor-sized component that gathers and modulates charge across roughly 10^23 gradient states, working analogously to the rods and cones of the human eye storing color rather than a transistor's binary on/off.
Two to four terabytes the size of a wallet: Shulman quantifies the storage claim: a device the size of a man's wallet holding two to four terabytes, an entire World Wide Web fitting on a small desk, and a single component running at 6.6 billion bits per second, roughly twenty times the speed of a Pentium II 333.
Sky Station fax and the office break-in: After receiving a misrouted military fax describing an emergency on a classified orbital weapons platform code-named Sky Station and calling the CIA duty office and Langley Air Force Base, Shulman returns to the ACC office Monday to find the heavy glass doors blown out, the lock wrenched apart, and offices ransacked.
AFOSI agents Ledestri and partner: Shulman describes two Air Force Office of Special Investigations agents arriving the next morning, one of them, Agent Ledestri, looking like a cross between Schwarzenegger and Popeye, with muscles on muscles and warts on warts, who proceed to put him through an exhaustive interrogation.