Arthur Gilbert Trudeau was a U.S. Army lieutenant general whose four-decade career ran from combat engineering and Korean War command to the Army's top research post. Born in Middlebury, Vermont, in 1902, he graduated from West Point in 1924 and served as an engineer officer between the wars. In 1942 he became chief of staff of the new Engineer Amphibian Command, and as a brigadier general in 1945 he commanded a base in the Philippines preparing for the planned invasion of Japan. In 1946 he sat as one of the judges at the military tribunal of Japanese General Masaharu Homma.

After postwar service in Germany and as deputy commander of the Army War College, Trudeau commanded the 1st Cavalry Division and then the 7th Infantry Division in Korea, earning a Silver Star for personally leading a reconnaissance of Pork Chop Hill under fire in 1953. That October he became chief of Army intelligence, but he was relieved about 20 months later, after Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles sent the Pentagon a memorandum of complaints. He went on to command I Corps in Korea, was promoted to lieutenant general in 1956, and in 1958 returned to Washington as the Army's chief of research and development, the post in which he finished his career in 1962.

In retirement he headed Gulf Oil's research laboratories in Pittsburgh until 1968 and then advised the aerospace firm Rockwell International until 1972. An advocate of racial integration in the armed forces, he was named to the Military Intelligence Hall of Fame. He passed away in 1991 and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

Trudeau's place in UFO lore comes from Philip Corso, an Army intelligence officer who served on his research and development staff in the early 1960s. In The Day After Roswell, a 1997 memoir ghostwritten by William Birnes, Corso wrote that when he took over the Foreign Technology desk in Trudeau's office in 1961, he inherited a file of material from the 1947 Roswell crash, and that Trudeau asked him to filter the technology into industry through Army defense contracts. Corso credited the effort with seeding lasers, integrated circuits, fiber optics and Kevlar. The book appeared six years after Trudeau's passing, so he never addressed its claims.

Critics found the book's chronology unreliable. Karl Pflock noted that it credits Corso and Trudeau with the CORONA reconnaissance satellite program, although CORONA's first launch came two years before Corso's Pentagon posting, and Kevin Randle found no record supporting Corso's claimed National Security Council role. Senator Strom Thurmond, who had written a foreword in the belief that the book was a conventional memoir, said he knew of no such cover-up. In March 2026 online clips titled "Corso Revisited" paired Corso's account with physicist Eric Davis telling Jesse Michels he was "100%" convinced of a Roswell crash, keeping a decorated research chief at the center of a story his own service record does not describe.