He was preoccupied with the topic.

According to UFO authors Brad Steiger and Joan Whritenour, von Braun told West German newspapers that a 1958 malfunction of a US Juno II rocket had been "deflected" off-course by an unnamed and presumably extraterrestrial source. The following year he elaborated to Neues Europa that "we find ourselves faced by powers which are far stronger than we had hitherto assumed, and whose base of operations is at present unknown to us. More I cannot say at present. We are now engaged in entering into closer contact with these powers and in six or nine months' time it may be possible to speak with more precision on this matter." [10]

The von Braun Astronomical Society, founded in 1954 by high schooler Sam Pruitt under Von Braun's direction, still maintains a 13.5 acre tract of land atop Monte Sano Mountain, near where the Torbitt identifies a DISC field office in Huntsville, Alabama.

von Braun's interest in space ran parallel with that of Albert Thomas in his later career. Elected in 1936 to the U.S. House of Representatives from the Eighth Texas District (comprised of Harris County, where the city of Houston is located), Thomas since 1941 had served on the powerful House Appropriations Committee. Over the years he had voted to prevent workers from striking during the war and to increase Navy pay, but for the most part he was a loyal, liberal New Dealer whose electoral support came from organized labor and minorities. By JFK's day his Appropriations Committee position exerted an enormous influence on how the federal budget was spent. Despite the fact than he voted in support of the Kennedy Administration in nearly 90% of the roll call votes from 1961 to 1963, he helped direct the committee on a course to trim the budget and stop Treasury bureaucratic measures to fund social welfare programs. He had a strong interest in funding the fledgling space program, however. [11]

Thomas chaired the Independent Offices Subcommittee of the Appropriations Committee, which controlled funds for the Atomic Energy Commission as well as NASA.

His efforts funded the space agency and led to its September 1961 decision to build its Manned Spacecraft Center near Houston, so far from the Cape Canaveral launch site in Florida. As the man with NASA's purse strings, he became a favorite of JFK's. The president's third-to-last speech was a testimonial to Thomas. Those final speeches and intended speeches have Kennedy the public hawk trumpeting the successes of the US's military build-up, citing the hike in the Polaris submarine count, hyping the Tactical Fighter Experimenatal (TFX) planes, but focusing repeatedly and particularly on his ambitions for America in space. After making a dig at Thomas over the NASA payroll money being directed at Houston, Kennedy said of Thomas, "In 1990 the age of space will be entering its second phase, and our hopes in it to preserve the peace, to make sure that in this great new sea, as on earth, the United States is second to none. And that is why I salute Albert Thomas and those Texans whom you sent to Washington in his time and since then, who recognize the needs and the trends today in the sixties so that when some meet here in 1990 they will look back on what we did and say that we made the right and wise decisions." [12]

In Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye, a book published at the time the Torbitt Document began to circulate, Dave Powers and co-authors Kenneth O'Donnell and Joe McCarthy, summarized their perspective of Kennedy's behind-the-scenes relationship with Thomas at the time of the assassination:

"President Kennedy also timed the trip to Texas so that he could appear on Thursday night at a testimonial dinner for Representative Albert Thomas in Houston, the Congressman's hometown. The elderly Thomas was one of the President's favorite congressmen and had done important fiscal favors for Kennedy in his capacity as chairman of the subcommittee that approved supplementary appropriations. Thomas had raised the money for the launching of the space program. The President initiated the costly drive to put astronauts on the moon not only for national prestige, but equally because he thought that large government spending on the space project was urgently needed to stimulate the national economy. He felt deeply indebted to Thomas for his support of the program and raised no objection when NASA located its Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, instead of somewhere in the Midwest or near Boston, where the President would have liked to have seen its huge payroll spent.

"The President knew, of course, that NASA picked Houston for only one reason -- Albert Thomas. It was always entertaining to watch the President listening impatiently to a visitor who was beating a long-winded path around the bush and then interrupting with one quick question which immediately brought the heart of the matter into suddenly clear focus.

When James E. Webb, the director of NASA, came to the President to explain the choice of the Manned Spacecraft Center's site, he began with a lengthy technical discussion about national geography. The President's eyes strayed to a written proposal that Webb had placed on his desk, and when he saw halfway down the page the first mention of Houston, he looked up at Webb and said, 'How is Albert Thomas feeling these days?'

"Appearing at the Albert Thomas dinner was especially important to the President because Thomas was thinking of retiring due to poor health and the President had been urging him to stay on in Congress for at least another term. We paid no attention to it at the time, but later we remembered that the President said in his speech about Thomas, "I asked him to stay as long as I stayed -- I didn't know how long that would be." [13]

(In the same book, incidentally, readers discover that JFK shared a favorite movie with psychologist/space scientist Wilhelm Reich, Bad Day At Black Rock, the 1955 movie starring Spencer Tracy.)