Independence Day: Silent Zone (13 page)

"Grant,
someone's coming! Over there."

He
looked in
the direction Betty was pointing. Two black sedans followed by a dozen
military
trucks were cutting cross-country toward the site. He started to come
back down
the slope, but curiosity got the better of him. He knew how the
military was.
They'd shoo him away, and he'd never get to see what was inside. So he
climbed
high enough onto the slope so that he could step onto the edge of the
disk-shaped craft, then carefully walked across the surface and peered
in the
windows. A pair of blunt, bony faces was staring back at him through
the
window. They looked like large death masks fashioned out of living
tissue,
gristle, and tendon. Horrified and repulsed, Weston fell backwards off
the
ship, then ran down the slope. Before he had rejoined the group, the
first
black sedan pulled up. The man who stepped out introduced himself as
Special
Agent Ian Leigh.

He talked with the
archaeologists for a moment. He asked Professor Weston to sit in the
sedan and
directed the others to wait in a group off to the side. He then jogged
hack to
the head of the military convoy and called a huddle with the commanding
officers. One of them asked if he should take the civilians into
custody.

"They seem like
a cooperative group. We'll worry about them later. Right now our
problem is
these soldiers; they've already seen too much." The group turned and
noticed six troop transport vehicles, each one loaded to the brim with
gawking
enlisted men. Like everyone else, they were transfixed by the sight of
the
wreckage. Leigh thought for a minute before coming up with a plan.
"Here's
what we'll do. We'll use these men to establish a cordon. Nobody comes
in or
out without my approval. Tell the men to walk back out of this ravine
the same
way we drove in. Put four or five guys up on the cliff above the ship
and fan
the rest of them out in a circle. Make sure they're far enough away to
where
they can't see what's going on."

"Why don't we
just have them turn their backs?"

"Good
idea. As soon as they're in position, you guys drive the trucks down
close to
the wreck, and we'll use them to create a screen. OK, get busy." Leigh
moved around the crash site with impressive efficiency. It was as if
he'd done
all of this before. "Steiger, let's go; this is your big moment, kid.
You're elected to be our welcoming committee," he called across the
gravel
to one of the men he'd brought in from DC. "Put on that protective
gear.
You're going in first." Steiger, a rail-thin man who stood well over
six
feet, popped open the trunk of the first sedan. A minute later, covered
head to
toe in a rubbery, lead-lined suit, he was moving toward the fallen
spacecraft.
He carried a Geiger counter. He moved around the outside of the ship
for
several minutes, sampling radiation levels, and found nothing abnormal.
Very
carefully, he approached the breach in the wall and reached in with the
Geiger
counter. Finding all levels normal again, he poked his head through the
gap and
cautiously climbed inside.

A
few hours
later, the work was finished. Every square inch of the impact area had
been
carefully photographed. The three large bodies found inside had been
sealed in
lead-lined body bags, lowered through the opening, and piled into the
back of
an ambulance, which took them to the base hospital. After a loading
crane had
hoisted the ship onto the back of a flatbed truck, it was buried under
a
collection of tarps and poles meant to disguise the vehicle's shape.
Before turning the
archaeologists loose, Leigh had sworn them to secrecy. He reminded them
that
they were the only ones outside the military who knew about the ship,
and he
had cataloged a short list of accidents that might befall anyone who
broke the
silence. The next morning he would return to the site with a hundred
soldiers,
MPs with reputations for being able to keep their mouths shut gathered
from six
different bases across three states. After cleaning the area once by
hand, they
used industrial vacuum cleaners to remove every last shred of evidence.
At that
point, Leigh was convinced he had succeeded in making the whole
situation
disappear.

But that same
morning, a man walked into the Chaves County Sheriffs Headquarters
carrying a
crate full of a strange, lightweight material he'd found scattered over
a large
area of his ranch. His name was Mac Brazel. He was one of those
leather-skinned, scuffed-up cowboys who eked out a living by keeping
cattle and
sheep herds up in the hard-scrabble mountains.

On the night of July
4, he'd heard a loud crashing sound, one that didn't sound like
thunder. He'd
forgotten about it completely until he found the field of shiny
material.
Initially he seemed angry. His sheep wouldn't go near the stuff and he
wanted
to know who was going to come out there and clean it up. But then he
asked if
his discovery might lead to him collecting some of the reward money
that
magazines had been offering to anyone who could prove the existence of
flying
saucers. Until he arrived at the sheriffs office, he'd heard none of
the rumors
concerning the craft that had gone down north of town.

The
sheriff,
George Wilcox, came out of his office and examined the material. It was
unlike
anything he'd seen before. It seemed to be some kind of metal. Although
it was
as light as balsa wood, none of the men in the office could bend it.
They tried
hammering on it with a stapler and burning it with their lighters, all
to no
avail.

Wilcox was angry with
the way the Army had pushed him out of the investigation of the crashed
ship,
refusing him access to the site. Nevertheless, he called Roswell Field
to
report Brazel's find. He spoke with Major Jesse Marcel, who said he'd
come into
town right away. Thinking the Army would shunt him aside once more,
Wilcox
dispatched two of his deputies to the Brazel ranch to look for the
debris
field. As soon as they left, the phone rang. It was Walt Wasserman, the
owner
of local radio station KGFL, calling to see if there had been any new
developments in the investigation of the crash. Wilcox put Brazel on
the phone
and, after the two men talked for several minutes, Wasserman was given
directions to the rancher's home.

Major Marcel arrived
with a plainclothes counterintelligence officer, Sheridan Cavitt. After
they
had inspected the debris that Mac Brazel had brought to town, they
instructed
Sheriff Wilcox to lock it in a secure office, then made plans to follow
Brazel
out to his ranch. Moments after they left, the two deputies returned
from the
ranch. Instead of finding the field of debris, they'd come across a
large
circular burn mark in the grass. It was their opinion that something
hot had
landed in the spot, scorching the grass and baking the earth to a hard
clay
beneath it. They had come back to get a camera before it got dark.

Brazel
led
the two military officers, each of them driving separate vehicles,
across his
rocky property to a wide-open field of sand and knee-high dead grass.
They were
about twelve miles from the site of the downed saucer. Scattered over
an area
three-quarters of a mile long and two hundred feet wide, were thousands
of
pieces of the mysterious lightweight material. Most of them were very
small,
the size of a fingernail and just as thin; others were almost three
feet long.
After a short examination of the site, the officers agreed with Brazel
that "something
had exploded in the air while flying south by southeast." Brazel left
when
the sun began to set, telling the men that he had agreed to give an
interview
to KGFL. Cavitt and Marcel loaded their cars with as much of the debris
as they
could pack up before darkness fell. Cavitt drove straight back to the
base, but
Marcel was so impressed with the strange material, he stopped at his
house to
show it to his wife and son.

That night,
station-owner Wasserman drove out to the Brazel property, picked him
up, and
drove him into town, where they made a recording of the rancher's
story. By the
time they were finished, the station was ready to sign off for the
night. So
they scheduled it for the next afternoon.

But the recording
would never be aired. Much to Wasserman's surprise, he got an
early-morning
phone call from the Federal Communications Commission. He was ordered
not to
broadcast the interview. "If you do," the man warned, "you'd
better start looking for another line of work because you'll be out of
the radio
business permanently within twenty-four hours."

Wasserman
tried to get in touch with Brazel but learned a squad of soldiers had
come to
his house in the middle of the night and taken him somewhere.

Marcel spent about an
hour at home. He brought in one of the boxes he'd filled that afternoon
and
spread the contents out on the kitchen floor. The family tried to fit
the
pieces together, but had no luck. They experimented with pliers,
attempting to
bend the paper-thin substance out of shape. They realized that there
was more
than one kind of material. While most of it was amazingly rigid, other
pieces
could be folded easily between their fingers. Whichever way this second
material was folded or bent, it retained the shape.

"Look at this
one, it has signs on it," Jesse, Jr., said.

His mother said the
writing looked like hieroglyphics. The piece in question looked like a
very
small I-beam. It was about four inches long and appeared undamaged. The
writing
was a dull purple color etched onto the gray surface of the beam.
Eleven-year-old
Jesse, Jr., had seen hieroglyphs in schoolbooks, and knew these were
different.
They were geometric shapes, including circles and one pattern that
looked like
a leaf. The family couldn't tell if the images were meant to be read;
they were
evenly spaced up and down the flat surfaces of the beam.

The son asked the
father if he could keep some of the pieces as souvenirs. Marcel said he
would
ask his commanding officer about it, but that night he made sure all
the pieces
were put back in the box, which he then delivered to the base.

The
next
morning, First Lieutenant Walter Haut, the information officer for the
509th
Bomb Group, held a series of discussions with people who had
information
concerning the strange goings-on. He learned from Marcel about the
debris
scattered around Brazel's ranch and spoke with a few of the soldiers
who had
been out to the site of the crashed ship. Haut had received hundreds of
telegrams and phone calls from all over the country asking him to
confirm or
deny the rumors coming out of the area. After gathering what he felt
was a
sufficient amount of information, he sat down at his typewriter and
composed a
brief, not very accurate press release. He then drove into town to
deliver it.
His first stop was KGFL. Not wanting to be hounded with a lot of
questions he
didn't have answers for, he handed a copy of the statement to the
receptionist
and slipped out the door while she was reading through it. He did the
same
thing at KSWS, the town's other radio station. Next, he drove to the
newspaper
offices of the
Roswell Daily Record
, stopping to
chat with one of the
reporters for a few minutes. By the time he came to his final stop, the
Roswell Morning Dispatch,
their phones had already started
ringing off the
hooks. As soon as the story had gone out on the wire, news editors from
all
forty-eight states had picked up their phones to confirm the story.
While Haul
was standing in the office, a call came in from Hong Kong. He didn't
even know
where Hong Kong was. There was certainly more interest in the story
than he had
anticipated. It was about noon, so he walked down the street to a
hamburger
stand and had lunch by himself, an extra copy of the press release
sitting on
the counter soaking up water and grease:

J.
Bond
Johnson was a reporter and photographer for the
Fort Worth
Star-Telegram.
At four o'clock, he was on the phone researching a local political
story when
his editor walked in, took the receiver away from him, and calmly put
it in the
cradle. He'd been on the phone himself and had arranged for Johnson to
get in
on something more interesting. "If it pans out," the editor said,
"it'll be the story of the century." He told Johnson about the press
release from Roswell, which had been dominating the wire services all
afternoon. He'd been trying to get through to Roswell, but all the
lines were
jammed. Then, out of the blue, he'd gotten a call from General Ramey's
office.
They were bringing the saucer from New Mexico to the Fort Worth Army
Air Field.
He told Johnson to grab his camera and get over there before Ramey
called
anyone else.