roswell

COL TRAKOWSKI - 6/29/94 7
were out of channel, so to speak. It was on such an occasion that Ed Istvan acted to line up contractors
for these targets. He got into a considerable amount of, shall we say, controversy with the Signal Corps
because he was out of line.
Q: Do you recall any of the contractors he may have worked with?
A: No, I don't remember them by name. They were not within my purview at the time. As
I have told others, including Mr. Pflock, we had an outstanding expeditor on our staff, on Colonel Duffy's
staff, by the name of John E. Peterson. Jack Peterson was a major at the time. He was a prewar graduate
of Harvard Business School, and he knew business operations inside and out. Again, he was an extremely
energetic fellow. He was very, very valuable and successful at breaking loose stuck contracts and stuck
production and things that weren't moving as fast as they should. During the war that was very important.
Jack monitored the procurement of these radar targets, and I believe Ed Istvan either worked for
or alongside Jack Peterson, and I remember when they finally ... Now this was all not under my purview,
but I worked in the same building with them, and I knew Jack very well, he was a very good friend and
we talked and joked with each other a lot. I remember so clearly when the contractor for these targets was
selected, and Jack thought it was the biggest joke in the world that they had to go to a toy manufacturer
to make these radar targets. Then it was even a bigger joke when it turned out that because of wartime
scarcities of materials, the tape that they used to assemble these targets, the reflecting material on the balsa
frames, was some kind of a pinkish purple tape with a heart and flower design on it. This was, again, a
big flap.
Q: Did you ever see any of those?
A: Yeah, I saw some of them. Not in connection with my work, but they were around the
office. The prototypes were around the office, and the first production runs were there.
Q: So you would say it's a limited number of a few runs maybe.
A: I have no idea how many hundreds were made, or even thousands. But like everything
else that goes into production, the contractors have a limited production to begin with until they work out
the bugs, and then they go full blower in the high production.
Q: Do you remember a rough span of times when you saw these: when you saw the first one,
and when you saw the last?
A: It was probably 1944 or 1945. It was probably late in 1944 when the first ones were
produced.
Q: Where did you see those? What part of the country?
A: Right there at Signal Corps. We were all working at that time, and John Peterson had his
offices at the Toms River Signal Laboratory, which was actually located on the jurisdictional lines between
Sea Girt and Springlake, New Jersey. It was an old night club that the Signal Corps had rented for the
purposes of doing remote experimentation.