Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 11 (17 page)

“You didn’t think anything of it? Another day, another captured flying saucer?”

“Hey, it was lunchtime, so I ate lunch. I didn’t give it a second thought; when a superior officer said, ‘This is what it is,’ that was what it was. I went back to the base, to my office, and nothing much happened the rest of the afternoon, except the phone was ringing pretty heavily for a couple hours, there.”

“The press?”

“Oh, yeah, from all over the world!” Haut laughed, shaking his head, struck by a funny memory. “First call I got was from London, this very proper English accent asking me how the ‘chap’ who found the saucer had known how to fly the ‘craft’ back to the base! I had to explain it was just wreckage that was found.”

“Walt, you and I both know how cautious, and secretive, the military usually is. Here’s the first instance of the Air Force capturing a flying saucer … obviously, an event with national security implications, and international repercussions. Do you think Colonel Blanchard could have issued that press release on his own authority?”

Haut rocked in the chair, thought about that. “Well, the Old Man could put out just about anything he wanted, short of information about the atomic weapons on the base. Things of a secret nature, that’d have to be cleared with the Eighth Air Force, and probably further up the chain of command….”

“Don’t you think a flying saucer would fall into that category?”

The insurance agent sighed, nodded, mulling some more. “Come to think of it … I honestly don’t think Colonel Blanchard did authorize that release. My feeling is it went to General Ramey and probably on to higher headquarters.”

“Why would they sanction something this sensitive?”

An eyebrow lifted. “I can hazard an informed guess, if you like.”

“Guess away, Walt.”

Haut sat way forward, eyes narrowing. “That same afternoon, remember, word from General Ramey came down that the wreckage wasn’t from a flying saucer at all. And all of a sudden, we’re sending out pictures of Jesse Marcel holding up fragments of your everyday garden-variety weather balloon, looking like Public Idiot Number One.”

I was shaking my head, confused. “Why would the brass do that? Issue a statement about a flying saucer, then a couple hours later contradict themselves?”

Haut’s smile turned sly. “I believe they knew the cat was out of the bag … the rumors about a recovered saucer were flyin’, around here. So the best cover-up is to announce a saucer’s been found, attributing it to Major Screwup, then have the much smarter, more knowledgeable general say, ‘Oh no, you children got it wrong—it’s just a weather balloon.’ And the incident gets laughed off and forgotten. It was a real sleight-of-hand trick, typical disinformation.”

“Disinformation?”

“That’s an intelligence term, Nate—same as ‘black’ propaganda, purposeful misinformation issued by the government to confuse its citizens. And as a guy who put his ass on the line for his country, that ticks me off. I mean, America’s supposed to be in the truth business.”

“You believe a saucer
was
found.”

The boyish features tightened. “I believe Jesse Marcel knows a weather balloon when he sees it. And did you hear about that weird tinfoil shit?”

“Yes. Did you see any of it?”

“No. I saw nothing—no wreckage, no outer space creatures, none of it. A public relations officer is kept away from things that the public isn’t supposed to know; that’s a practice I was accustomed to.”

“But you believe Jesse Marcel.”

“We were friends. My wife and I would go play bridge with the Marcels; we rode to work together. He was rock-steady, and hell, they kept him on as intelligence officer for something like a year after that. Then he was transferred to a job of even higher responsibility!”

“You mentioned ‘outer space creatures’…”

Haut raised a hand. “You need to talk to Glenn Dennis about that.”

“I have.”

“Well, Glenn’s a friend, too, and I can tell you, he’s not a nut; if he tells you something, you can give it credence. Now, I don’t know much about this military clampdown that supposedly went on, and nobody threatened me or anything—but you might want to talk to Frank Joyce, over at the radio station.”

Which was my next stop, an adobe storefront operation with a small neon reading radio station, in small letters, over KGFL in large ones, above a sun-faded canvas awning. In a small control booth, I talked with Joyce, a sturdily stocky brown-haired kid in his mid-twenties, who ran a one-man operation on his afternoon show, reading the news, spinning records, doing live commercials and serving as his own engineer. I sat at the little table used for on-air interviews and we chatted sporadically, while discs spun—not flying ones, the kind with Crosby and Perry Como on them.

Joyce had Mickey Rooney-ish features clustered in the midst of his round face, making his rather large head seem even larger; he might have been young, but he had the no-nonsense attitude and manner of a seasoned reporter.

Doing twelve things at once on his control panel, he said, in his announcer’s mellifluous voice, “Late morning, Monday after the Fourth, I was making my usual calls, before the noon news, looking for any late-breaking items…. When I checked with Sheriff Wilcox, he put this rancher, Mac Brazel, on. Never met the man, and wasn’t sure I wanted to.”

“Why?”

“Well, this bizarre wreckage he described made me pretty skeptical; flying saucer talk, I mean, really! Little green men, that sort of thing. I asked him to put the sheriff back on, and recommended they call the RAAF, since they were the experts on everything that flies.”

“Did you put the story on the radio?”

“No. This was Monday; that story didn’t break till Tuesday.”

“I see.”

“Anyway, having been in the military, I knew they’d frown on something like this getting out—assuming there was anything to it. We’re just a little station, and we were just starting out, then—we didn’t need to alienate the local air base. Funny thing is, my pal Walt Haut was the p.r. officer out there, and I’d been giving him a hard time about putting me last on his list, whenever a story broke. Guess what story he brings to me, first, to make it up to me?”

“And that’s when you put it on the radio.”

“Yeah, but the funny thing is, I was still reluctant. I mean, I find myself readin’ this press release about the Air Force saying it has a flying saucer, and I say to Walter, ‘Wait a minute! I know this story—
I
sent this guy Brazel to you!’ And Walt says, ‘Oh, well, thanks,’ and I say, ‘I don’t think you oughta release this story.’ Like I said, I know how the military works, and I could see the top brass havin’ a shit fit. But Walt says, ‘It’s okay, Frank, the Old Man has cleared it, and it’s okay for you to put the story on the air.’”

Since it was close to airtime, Joyce had flown out the door to reach the Western Union office, two blocks away, to wire the release to the United Press in Santa Fe, knowing he had hold of a “once-in-a-life-time” story.

“You’re the one that spread the news, then,” I said.

Joyce nodded, getting the next disc ready on his second turn-table, cuing it up in earphones that left one side uncovered, so we could converse. “By the time I got back here, the phones were going crazy, AP, UP, every big and little paper in the Southwest, hot for confirmation and more details.” His mouth tightened under the mustache. “Then I got the first of the threatening calls.”

“Who from?”

“A Colonel Johnson, in Washington. He cursed me out, told me I was going to get in a lot of trouble, and I told him I was a civilian and a member of the press, and he couldn’t treat me that way, couldn’t tell me what stories I could put on the air. And he says, ‘I’ll show you what I can do,’ and hung up.”

This made a kind of skewed sense. If Walter Haut was right, the point of the exercise had been to release the flying saucer story locally—where rumors were rife—and then quell it a few hours later with an official retraction and the new “weather balloon” explanation. Having the story spread over the wire, nationwide and worldwide, focusing instant and intense attention on Roswell and its purported flying saucer, may have been more than the brass bargained for.

“A day or so later,” Joyce said, a new platter spinning, a Peggy Lee, “two soldiers escorted that rancher Mac Brazel into this very station. They sat him down in that chair you’re sitting in and he offered to do an interview. I said, ‘Fine, but you boys’ll have to wait outside,’ and the soldiers, they waited out on the street, by the jeep they brought him in.”

“And you interviewed him.”

“Yes, but I didn’t bother putting it on the air. How could I? The story he told this time was completely at odds with what he first said.”

“He backed up the military’s weather balloon tale.”

“In spades.
Now
Brazel said that what he found on his ranch was rubber strips, tinfoil, paper, Scotch tape and sticks. Like a big kite had crashed. No writing on it, either. All the debris could be tied up in a little bundle weighing less than five pounds, he said. And he told the same story at a press conference for the AP, among others.”

“Did you get a sense of why he lied? You figure he was threatened, too, and caved in?”

“Well, there are two schools of thought on that. One is based on the fact that ol’ Mac somehow came into a considerable amount of money—a fella so poor he couldn’t rub two nickels together suddenly shows up in town in a brand-new pickup. Then he buys his family a new house, at Tularosa, and a cold store at Las Cruces….”

“That sounds like the Chicago school of thought,” I said. “What’s the other one?”

“Money may have been part of it, but this is one of your old Wild West, dirt-in-the-pores cowboys, and I could see his quiet anger, how coldly p.o.’ed he was. He’d been bullied, pushed around and threatened.”

“Is this something you surmised, or …?”

“I had a moment with Brazel here in my ugly little announcer’s cabin, and I said to him, ‘You know that this story doesn’t have a damn thing to do with what you told me on the phone, the other day.’ And he says, ‘Look, son—best keep that to yourself. They told me to come here and tell you this story, or else.’ ‘Or else what?’ I ask. ‘I open my mouth, I’m in the federal calaboose. Or breathin’ sand.’”

That was not the end of it, not of the threats anyway. Joyce told me that his boss, the owner of the station, had received a call from “someone in Washington, D.C.,” who made it clear that if KGFL aired an uncensored story about Brazel’s two differing accounts “the station’s license would be in jeopardy.”

“So you never aired the story,” I said.

“No. And whenever I run into Mac Brazel, here in town, we don’t speak.”

The Roswell Fire Department was a new buff-brick building with room for three trucks in as many stalls, but only two were taken up. I checked in at the front office with the receptionist, who fetched fireman Dan Dwyer for me.

Dwyer, a big brown-haired man in his thirties, asked me what I wanted and I suggested we talk outside; he didn’t object, and when I brought Major Marcel’s name up, he responded warmly.

“Jesse’s a nice fella,” the husky fireman said, hands in the pockets of his jumpsuit. “How’s he like Washington?”

“I think he’s happy. But I’m pretty sure he feels his reputation at SAC is tainted, because of the ridicule heaped on him, in that ‘saucer’ incident.”

The fireman’s friendliness evaporated. He studied me through slitted eyes. “Is that what this is about? Who are you?”

I told him, was showing him my i.d., when he held up a hand in a stop fashion.

“I have nothing to say about that situation.”

“Jesse seems to think you witnessed something, Mr. Dwyer. Didn’t you respond to a call in early July of ’47? Was there wreckage of some kind of flying craft, possibly bodies of—”

“Stop. I told you, already. I’m not talking.”

“We can keep it discreet. Your name won’t be used. We’re just trying to determine what happened, and whether the military got out of line in the way they—”

“I’ll tell you about the military getting out of line. How about threatening to stick my wife and kid and me in Orchard Park?”

“What’s Orchard Park?”

He threw his hands up. “That’s all I got to say, mister. And anybody asks me, I didn’t say
that.”

Then turned and all but ran into the station.

The Clover Cafe made no attempt to serve the native cuisine; its Blue Plate Special was meat loaf, peas and gravy, and worth every bit of fifty cents. At two o’clock, the lunch crowd was gone; you could have fired a cannon off in the place and not hit anybody. I sat in a back booth, finished off the wholesome fare, and waited to see if Deputy Reynolds would show. He did, about two-fifteen. We spoke over Cokes and a radio’s country-western music.

“Sorry I’m late,” the slender deputy said. “We were bookin’ a guy.”

“What happened to your low crime rate?”

“This drifter tried to rob the Conoco station in broad daylight. Wanted everything in the cash drawer.” He laughed. “Manager’s an ex-Marine who gave him a wrench alongside the head, instead.”

“Stopped his drifting, anyway. Say, Deputy—what’s Orchard Park?”

“Former POW camp, for the Japs, out in the desert—why?”

“Nothing important.”

“Look, Mr. Heller, we need to make this quick. This joint is pretty dead after lunch hour, so it’s safe enough. But I don’t want to take any chances.”

“Why are you?”

“What, taking a chance? Because it pisses me off how the strongarm’s been put on a lot of good citizens by their own goddamn government. In particular, pisses me off, what the sheriff’s been subjected to.”

“Like what?”

“You wouldn’t know it, from talkin’ to him today, but Sheriff Wilcox is an easygoing, even gregarious fella. Progressive, too—he was the first one in the state to separate juvenile offenders from adults.”

“He wasn’t oozing warmth and compassion this morning.”

“Not after what he’s been put through. Do you know he’s talking about not running again? Best sheriff we ever had, best boss I ever had. He hardly says anything about what happened, though I have heard him say he’s furious with himself for bringing the military in. Once they showed up, and claimed jurisdiction, we got completely cut off. I heard him say, if he had it to do over again, he’d call in the press, first. Give ’em carte blanche.”