After the Manhattan Project was finished my Dad, Warren P. Waters, spent several summers as a graduate student at Los Alamos, New Mexico working with the rocket scientists who built the A Bomb. However, he decided not to go into nuclear physics. He became a solid state physics engineer, who developed patented technologies that went into telecommunication satellites, computers, video games and calculators. He was really a man of peace, but also very patriotic. I asked him why he did not become a nuclear physicist? He said that solid state technology was the new frontier, and that this was much more exciting to him. The A Bomb had already been invented and deployed. He wanted to contribute to science in a new and better way, through the Information Age.
My Dad told me a few stories about the scientists who were there at the Los Alamos facility. The rocket testing that they were doing after the bomb was built, was very experimental. He said that they were Jerry rigging a lot of those rockets. In other words, it had never been done before, so they were trying a lot of different materials. Hence, there were parts of rockets all over the desert. I asked him about the alien crash. He said that one of the cones of an abandoned rocket could have looked like a space craft in the New Mexico desert. But he also told me that there were NO Crash Dummies! When I asked him again later about the aliens, he said “Don’t worry about that.” My Dad was sworn to secrecy about a lot of government scientific projects, so in his language this meant, I can’t tell you about that.
My Dad made friends with the famous nuclear scientist Edward Teller while he was doing graduate work at Los Alamos, NM in 1947. They soon discovered that each had lost their leg, Teller in a street car accident, my Dad from a Nazi shell. The two friends spent a day down in Mexico, and my Dad decided to buy some whiskey. When they came back across the border, the customs agent asked them if they had anything to declare. My Dad said “Only the bottle of Jack Daniels hidden in my wooden leg”. The border agent smiled and passed them through. Later my Dad pulled the bottle out of his wooden leg and the two scientists laughed and laughed! My Dad was a very quiet and reserved man most of the time, but he had an amazing sense of humor, and was very quick witted when he wanted to be.