Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 11 (30 page)

James Forrestal’s legacy was probably more lasting than Pearson’s. The headquarters of the Defense Department bears his name; 1954 marked the christening of the
USS Forrestal,
the nation’s largest cant-deck aircraft carrier; and in 1975, Princeton University designated its corporate research park the Princeton Forrestal Center. More significant was the role of this paranoid schizophrenic as an architect of the Cold War—based largely on false, inflated data from an East-Bloc-countries-based Nazi spy network with whom our government was now collaborating—and in inspiring Senator Joe McCarthy to seek out the largely nonexistent Communists supposedly riddling our government. McCarthy himself, in 1952, credited Forrestal as the one who had alerted him to the “existence of traitors in high government positions.”

I liked Jim Forrestal, and as was the case with Pearson, the guy was a dedicated servant of the public who did a lot of good, particularly toward the winning of the Second World War; but there would have perhaps been better things to bequeath the nation he loved and served than Nazi collaboration, the Cold War and McCarthyism.

Caught up in the pressures of McCarthyism, his popularity eroded, Harry Truman left office largely unheralded, though with his position in history secure as the first (and at this writing only) U.S. president to use the atomic bomb in war; historians rate him a good to great president, a perception that had long since become evident by his death in 1972.

Teddy Kollek—who had fled to Canada from U.S. prosecution in April of 1949—was elected Mayor of Jerusalem in 1965, a position he held for twenty-eight years; much of the face of modern Jerusalem, it has been said, is his doing. His efforts toward tolerance for minority groups in his city, including Arabs, alienated some of his constituents, and his last two mayoral campaigns failed, despite efforts by such Hollywood supporters as his old friend Frank Sinatra. In 1991 he established the Jerusalem Foundation to help further aesthetic and cultural development of his beloved city.

Jo Forrestal was in and out of clinics for the rest of her life, for alcoholism and mental problems. In the first years after her husband’s passing, she traveled constantly, and lived for a time in France, Ireland and Jamaica, finally landing in Newport, Rhode Island, selling Morris House in 1951. She also maintained an apartment on Park Avenue in New York, and backed several theatrical productions in Newport as well as writing a play of her own,
Democracy,
never produced. Sporadic reports of her bizarre behavior continued until her death in January of 1976.

The Forrestals’ son Michael distinguished himself with service in the Kennedy White House, returning to law practice after the assassination; his life was devoted to improving understanding between the United States and the Soviet Union. Unmarried, he died of an aneurysm in January 1989, at sixty-one; he was chairing a committee of the governing board of Lincoln Center, at the time. Brother Peter worked for his father’s old firm, Dillon, Read, then for Ferdinand Eberstadt’s company (Eberstadt died in 1969, leaving a personal estate of fifty million). Peter shared his mother’s love of and skill with horses, but also shared her love for, and lack of skill with, alcohol. He died at fifty-two of an abdominal hemorrhage due to heavy drinking, leaving behind a bride of a year, pregnant with a daughter he never knew.

Many of those I met on the Forrestal/Roswell job are gone—including two class acts of law enforcement, Frank J. Wilson and Hughie Baughman—and others I never saw again and couldn’t tell you what became of them, like the two medical corpsmen, Prise and Harrison, and the doctor who tore his sleeve, Deen.

But Roswell … that was another story.

For many years, the incident at Roswell—despite the historical significance of the Air Force issuing a press release announcing the recovery of a flying saucer—rarely received even a mention in the voluminous UFO literature of the late forties and on through the seventies.

But in 1978, Stanton Friedman—a nuclear physicist with an interest in UFOs—followed up a lead that led him to Lieutenant Colonel Jesse Marcel, retired, who had spent his post-military years running a television repair shop in Houma, Louisiana. Marcel told Friedman the same story he’d told me back in 1949—a story he had apparently told no one since—and a Roswell floodgate opened.

A cottage industry of books by Friedman and others blossomed, with scads of television documentaries, in which Marcel and other witnesses—like Glenn Dennis, Walter Haut, Frank Joyce and Frank Kaufmann—came forward, becoming celebrities in UFO circles, even television stars, with the many appearances they made. Marcel’s son, a physician and pilot, with memories of the samples of strange “saucer” debris his father had brought home in ’47, joined in with his own recollections, taking over as family TV spokesman after his father’s death in 1986. These were solid citizens, clearly not kooks, and their reminiscences carried weight.

Some potential Roswell witnesses, however, received their fifteen minutes of fame posthumously.

Mac Brazel died in 1963, though relatives and neighbors told his story to researchers and on camera. His son Bill Brazel reported his father had been held by the Air Force for eight days in the base “guesthouse.”

Colonel William “Butch” Blanchard remained tight-lipped on the subject of Roswell, in public at least, though friends reported he’d said, when asked about the supposed saucer, “I’ll tell you this, what I saw I’d never seen before.” Shortly after the incident, he was promoted to general and, at the time of his death in 1966, was Deputy Chief of Staff of the Air Force.

Sheriff George Wilcox did not run for reelection and his family considered the saucer incident to have gravely affected his health and outlook. Wilcox passed away before the renewed interest in the saucer crash; but family members, including his wife, Inez, came forward with tales of death threats from the military.

The daughter of fireman Dan Dwyer, Frankie Rowe, told of the strange debris, scraps of which she had handled, and claimed that her father (part of a fire department crew called to the crash site) had described “aliens” being loaded into body bags. She also tearfully recounted death threats to her father and herself by sinister figures from the government.

The resurgence of Roswell interest caused the Air Force to do something remarkable: they contradicted their previous explanation of the debris found on the Foster ranch with a thick official report in 1994, admitting the weather balloon story had been a cover-up for Project Mogul—which in 1947 had been classified Top Secret A-1. This—the third official explanation (first a flying disk, then a weather balloon, now Project Mogul)—was the intelligence-gathering balloon train described to me by Frank Wilson in 1949. An experimental attempt to acoustically detect suspected Soviet atomic explosions and missile launchings, Mogul utilized acoustical sensors, radar reflecting targets and other gizmos, all of which were attached to a train of weather balloons over six hundred feet long.

The flaw in this explanation—which I’ve never heard anybody point out, including the “UFOlogists”—is that Project Mogul would be the very device gathering information for Major Jesse Marcel at SAC in 1948 and ’49. Unless Marcel was part of a decades-spanning disinformation campaign—which seems very unlikely, considering his burst of UFO TV fame in his elderly years—this indicates Marcel, in the new job he’d been transferred to from Roswell, would have likely discovered that the strange debris he’d found in ’47 was from one of the devices gathering information for him in ’48. And he would not have spoken to me in 1949, nor a horde of Roswell researchers in the late seventies and early eighties, from the point of view of a man still bewildered by what he’d found on the Foster ranch.

The Project Mogul explanation, of course, didn’t speak to the many witnesses—Frank Kaufmann, Glenn Dennis and a number of others who came out of the woodwork in the eighties and thereafter—who spoke of the second crash site, the wedge-like aircraft and the alien crew.

So the Air Force rolled up its sleeves for a fourth official explanation. In 1997, in perhaps the most tortuous piece of logic to arise out of Roswell yet, the Air Force explained that the alien bodies that had been seen by witnesses in 1947 were crash-test dummies dropped by the USAF starting around 1952. Seems the residents of Roswell were simply confused about the time frame.

The Air Force insisted that “Maria Selff,” the nurse Glenn Dennis claimed to have known (and of whom others had memories), never existed; memories of aliens were probably confused recollections of Captain Dan Fulgham’s injury in a 1959 balloon gondola accident, from which the captain’s face became swollen; and furthermore the mortician’s claim that he’d been bullied by a black MP was impossible, because no black sergeants were stationed at the air base during that time period.

Majestic Twelve reared its head in 1984 when documents similar to the ones Pearson had received (I never actually saw them) were delivered anonymously to a UFO researcher, Jamie Shandera. On a roll of 35mm black-and-white film were copies of the letter from Truman to Forrestal, and a “briefing document” supposedly prepared for President-elect Eisenhower. Tops and bottoms of pages were stamped
TOP SECRET/MAJIC EYES ONLY
. The list of Majic-12 members included Forrestal, with mention that, after his death, he had been replaced (he was MJ-3) by General Walter Bedell Smith.

Majestic Twelve (or Majic-12), according to these documents, was “a
TOP SECRET
Research and Development/Intelligence operation responsible directly and only to the President of the United States,” and the briefing papers described the crash of a saucer-like craft near Roswell and the recovery of “four small human-like beings.”

To true believers, the Majic-12 papers were the Holy Grail found; for professional UFO debunkers, the material was an obvious hoax. Both sides mounted impressive arguments, but those in the know recognized the extensive inside knowledge and expertise in military documents that would have had to go into such an elaborate fabrication. A few small voices cried, “Disinformation,” largely unheeded. The Majestic Twelve files remain a hotly debated topic among believers and debunkers alike.

Perhaps because my inquiry into Roswell had taken place almost two years after the various events that composed the “incident,” none of the researchers or documentary film-makers sought me out, at least not until the pending fiftieth anniversary of the crash in 1997 raised interest to a fever pitch. A freelance journalist from Davenport, Iowa—Matthew Clemens—had run across a mention of me in a Roswell-related FBI memo unearthed by the Freedom of Information Act, and tracked me down (by phone) at my Coral Springs condo.

“You talked to the eyewitnesses,” Clemens said over the phone, sounding young and eager, “in a contemporary time frame—everyone else who interviewed them did so thirty years after the fact, or more.”

“Yeah,” I said, sounding like the cranky old man that I was. “So?”

“So, did you uncover anything, back then, when memories were fresh, that the latter-day researchers haven’t?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t read any of the ‘latter-day researchers.’”

“Mr. Heller, I’m going down my own path, here, and I need to talk to somebody knowledgeable, somebody who was there, but who doesn’t have an agenda.”

“What do you mean, an agenda?”

“Well, guys like Walter Haut and Glenn Dennis, they’re caught up in it, now. Haut’s a longtime Roswell Chamber of Commerce guy, and both of ’em are involved with running a UFO museum there! I mean, it’s become the town industry.”

“So what road are you going down, Mr. Clemens?”

“I’ve been digging for information on the Nazi presence at White Sands, which was nearby. You know about Operation Paperclip, don’t you?”

“Putting Nazi scientists on the U.S. payroll. Got us to the moon.”

“Yeah, it did. We had … let me check my notes … seven hundred and sixty-five of ’em working for us, scientists, doctors, technicians; at least half, maybe as many as eighty percent of ’em, were Nazi party members and/or SS men. Of course those guys claim they only joined the party and SS because they couldn’t get research grants, otherwise.”

“And you think this has something to do with Roswell, Mr. Clemens?”

“Yeah, at first I thought the ‘saucer’ was one of these refurbished V-2s … you know, maybe the ‘aliens’ were monkeys; von Braun was obsessed with manned flight, you know. But I’m onto something better, something bigger. You ever hear of the Fugo incendiary bomb?”

“Yeah.”

“Really?”

“The Japs launched unmanned high-altitude balloons, with bombs on ’em, hoping to explode them in our Pacific Northwest.”

“I’m impressed, Mr. Heller. The hope was to ignite forest fires, and deny lumber to the war effort. And of course, the effort was a bust. But new evidence indicates the Japanese may have been working on a second-generation Fugo, with kamikaze pilots to target them. That never got off the drawing board.”

“So you think the Roswell crash was a Fugo balloon?”

“No. I think it was a VTOL.”

“And what would that be, Mr. Clemens?”

“A vertical-takeoff-and-landing aircraft. These German brothers, Walter and Reimar Horten, designed them—first for the Nazis, then for us, after the war. See, the German runways were shot to hell, and something that could lift off without a runway might have won the thing for them, and Hitler and his crowd would be carved on Mount Rushmore, right now. Also, the VTOL was the Reich’s only shot at trying out their new jet-engine propulsion system.”

“So was the Roswell crash a balloon or a, what? Vertical-takeoff whatever?”

“I think it was a combination of both, a hybrid craft utilizing Fugo lifting technology and a Horten-designed lifting body.”

He had just explained the balloon debris found on the Brazel ranch, and the aircraft discovered north of Roswell.

“Well, Mr. Heller? What do you think of my theory?”

“Son,” I said, “it’ll never fly.”

And that ended my one and only interview on Roswell.