Strom Thurmond

Strom Thurmond (1902–2003), US senator from South Carolina, appears in this graph for a narrow but load-bearing reason: he wrote the foreword to The Day After Roswell and then publicly repudiated it within days of publication. His disavowal is the strongest outside evidence for how the book was assembled.

The statement

Reported contemporaneously by Time, the Chicago Tribune (5 June 1997) and Government Executive (4 June 1997), the last carrying the fullest text [S1][S2]:

"When I agreed to provide a foreword... I was of the understanding that the book was autobiographical in nature... I know of no such 'cover-up' and do not believe one existed."

The detail that matters more than the disavowal

Thurmond's office described what it had actually been shown: a proposed memoir titled I Walked With Giants, accompanied by a 21-page outline containing no aliens [S1].

That outline is the pivot point. A senator's staff reviewed a written proposal for Philip J. Corso's book and found a conventional war memoir. William J. Birnes separately describes the project turning to UFOs mid-production. Two independent lines therefore converge on the same conclusion: the Roswell material was grafted onto a manuscript conceived as something else.

Simon & Schuster apologised and removed the foreword from subsequent editions, and by early 1998 reviewers were citing "the edition of Corso's book minus the now withdrawn foreword" as a matter of course [S3][S4]. Thurmond had no connection to UAP matters otherwise; his significance here is entirely as an inadvertent witness to the book's construction.

Sources

[S1] Louis Jacobson, "The Senator and the UFOs", Government Executive, 4 June 1997 — https://www.govexec.com — Accessed 2026-08-29 — Fullest text of the statement; the 21-page outline. [S2] "UFO Book Gives Thurmond Conspiracy-Sized Headache", Chicago Tribune, 5 June 1997 — https://www.chicagotribune.com — Accessed 2026-08-29 — Contemporaneous coverage. [S3] Brad Sparks, "Philip Corso's Roswellmania", Skeptical Inquirer, Mar/Apr 1998 — https://centerforinquiry.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/29/1998/03/22164921/p52.pdf — Accessed 2026-08-29 — Refers to the withdrawn foreword. [S4] Kevin Randle, "Philip Corso and The Day After Roswell, Again", A Different Perspective — https://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2014/01/philip-corso-and-day-after-roswell.html — Accessed 2026-08-29 — Publisher apology and removal.

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