Majestic (17 page)

"We're saying it's a mistake. A rawinsonde. That's a type of radar target." Will was uneasy about Major Gray.

He told me that he would have "taken care" of the major in short order. In Will Stone hate and envy are essentially the same emotion. "In the end Don told the truth," he says. "It took him thirty-two years, but he did it." His tone is curt because of his envy for the man's moral clarity. Not that the statement helped. Don Gray's words collided with the brick wall of Will Stone's cover-up and quite simply died.

Now Joe went to work on the colonel. "We want air transport," he said. "Mr. Stone wants to be on site within the hour. And we want full support. CIG intends to stay physically with the disk and the bodies until they are delivered to Los Alamos."

"I understood they were following the other debris to Wright Field."

Legally, the AAF had jurisdiction at Wright. Los Alamos had just shifted to Atomic Energy Commission control and was thus no longer within the reach of the Joint Chiefs, specifically Van. That was the main reason that Hillenkoetter had decided to park the disk there. Smoothly, Joe made his case. "The best scientists in the world are located at Los Alamos, and it's only a few hundred miles away."

"Washington already set it all up," Sally added.

Colonel Blanchard raised his eyebrows. "I don't know if we have the whirlybirds available to take you to the site."

"You have them," Joe said. "I counted six on the apron as we landed."

"I meant unassigned."

Once again Will played his high card. "Reassign them. Surely you can do that for the President."

Blanchard gave Hesseltine a curt nod, and the young officer went, off to arrange matters. The CIG group finished breakfast and went over to the colonel's office to wait. On the way Will picked up a copy of the Roswell Daily Record. The headline made him furious.

RAAF CAPTURES FLYING SAUCER IN ROSWELL REGION

Will was so enraged that he was afraid to speak lest he jeopardize their tenuous rapport with the colonel.

Once in his office they looked at more photographs of the disk. These were copies of the aerials they had seen at the White House. "What is the status of these pictures," Sally asked.

"Restricted."

"I'm officially changing them to Top Secret. Take them off the walls and place them under covers, please, Colonel." She had no legal right to change the classification level of anything, but her action was typical of the way these people regarded themselves.

Blanchard and Hesseltine fell all over each other to get the pictures off the walls. They stacked them backside up on the colonel's steel desk, and covered them with pink sheets of paper stamped top secret in block letters.

Joe, as liaison with Air Force Intelligence, made a call to S-2 at White Sands to confirm that all wire-service output from the area was still being intercepted. Given the headline that had just appeared, it was probable that reporters by the hundreds would be on their way to this place within a matter of hours.

Will was leaving for the helicopter port when he received word that Hilly was on the line from Washington.

He took the call in an empty office he later found out belonged to the base press officer who had issued the offending press release. Hillenkoetter was abrupt. "What's it look like?"

"Well, Admiral, I'm not sure. We only arrived here an hour ago. They didn't have any transport prepared. Then they wanted to send me in convoy. Now I'm in a whirlybird. It's a struggle dealing with them. And they've hijacked the debris they've already collected. It's on its way up to Wright via Eighth Air Force in Fort Worth.

Ramey's going to hold a press conference claiming the debris is a crashed radar target."

"Don't get your back up. The President approved that last night. By the way, Blanchard doesn't know it yet, but he's going on leave this afternoon. His second's gonna take the heat. Van wants to make sure nobody throws up on his favorite boy's pretty blue uniform."

"I want support from Van. So far it looks like I'm getting anything but."

"I'll have to go through Forrestal."

"Van will totally ignore you."

"Forrestal is too weak a weapon, Truman too strong."

"Meaning that I'm on my own."

"Get out there and get that disk. And the bodies. Especially the bodies."

Bodies. Disks. Debris. Huge newspaper headlines. Will experienced a moment of despair. How were they ever going to hide this thing? "I've got to tell you that I don't think the radar-target story will work. The press'll never buy it."

"They will, old son."

"But it's absolute, obvious crap. Admiral - "

"You add together all the reporters west of the Mississippi and you still haven't got enough smarts to tune a radio. They'll buy it. Anyway, I read reporters as frustrated egos. They don't want to hear anything about superior aliens when they're already suffering from the sneaking suspicion that they're nothing but pieces of shit themselves."

"You're being briefed by the headshrinkers again, Hilly. And you're believing it." "No - "

"Remember what happened last time? When we tried to psychoanalyze Stalin and we predicted - "

"Never mind that. Truman forgave me."

"Good luck with your radar targets, Admiral. You and Van and Ramey are going to need it."

Will said nothing of this disturbing turn of events to Sally and Joe as he hurried through the beating sun to where the helicopters were firing up. His two associates would remain at the base to begin setting up a field office.

Will had never flown in a helicopter before. As a matter of fact, none of them had. In those days they were quite a new technology. Will was strapped into a miserable plastic seat and given a helmet that was not sized for him. It stank of the sweat of many heads.

The machine rose into its own cloud of dust. A moment later Roswell AAF was swinging away below. The pilot soon set a course to the north and west.

On the way the machines seemed to make dozens of banks, all of them very steep. Will held tightly to the edge of his seat and the lip of the windshield. He vividly remembers the feeling that he was going to fall out at any moment.

"Want to listen to the radio? We can pick up KGFL in Roswell."

Radio. What more could a man want? "Yeah, fine." Will tried to sound enthusiastic. Unfortunately the station did not offer dance music, at least not at nine-fifteen A.M. Instead, he was forced to listen to something called Trading Post. A rancher called in wanting to trade a "black shoat" for a set of golf clubs. A beauty salon owner would trade a Toni Professional Permanent for three nights of baby-sitting with her two sons.

And Will was on his way to view the bodies of beings who had been born in another world.

The sun was already high, pouring through the cockpit, burning against everything that it touched. Hot, exhaust-filled wind swirled in the sides. The stink of gasoline mixed with the stink of two sweaty men.

Roswell sank away behind them. They were alone now between the sky and the land. It was so big, so empty.

When Will saw the disk he almost choked with excitement. They swept around it in a long circle, and it gleamed in the sun. It gleamed and glimmered, and beside it he saw two khaki tarps.

They landed in an area that had been roughly marked with some cloth tape. Here the brush had been hacked away, but not enough to make much difference.

A hundred feet away lay the most extraordinary object on the surface of the earth. Will had appropriately large thoughts: the pyramids, the Acropolis, the Colosseum at Rome, the Eiffel Tower, the Empire State Building, all the works of man. Among them there was no such work as this.

Our history, too: clambering up from the muck, making the first fire and the first pot, building our cities and our empires, the dreams of sultans and kings, the hoarse chorus of the modern democracies - in all of those thousands of days, there was no such day as this.

And Wilfred Stone was here.

CARSWELL ARMY AIR FORCE BASE PRESS OFFICE PRESS CONFERENCE REPORT

8Jly47

LOCATION:
HQ 8AF Ft. Worth Tx.

PARTICIPANTS:
Brig. Gen. Roger M. Ramey, CinC 8th AF; Major Donald Gray, S-2, RAAF; Warrant 0. Vinton Yancey, Base Weather Officer, Carswell AAF.

Various newspaper reporters identified herein as "QUESTIONERS."

General Ramey and officer specialists met with members of the press on the evening of July 8 to discuss the misidentification of a rawinsonde (type ML-306) as a so-called "alien flying disk."

GENERAL RAMEY:
Thank you, gentlemen, for coming to this conference. I trust that we can rectify some pretty exciting reports that have been circulating about the pile of debris I have here. [Points to debris on desk and floor of office.] With me I have Major Donald Gray who is the expert intelligence officer who originally recovered the material, and Warrant Officer Vinton Yancey of our weather office, who can make a positive identification of the material. Now I'd like to open it up to questions.

QUESTIONER:
So this is all it is? A pile of tinfoil?

GENERAL RAMEY:
That is correct. Perhaps Warrant Officer Yancey can explain.

W. O. YANCEY:
This debris is from a so-called radiosonde. A rawinsonde-type device. It is very familiar to me. We release these sondes as target devices for airborne and land-based radar. It is one of the primary things we do here at Carswell.

GENERAL RAMEY:
Radar practice is one of the fundamental training functions of the AAF. They also do it at Roswell, don't they, Major Gray?

MAJ. GRAY:
Yes, sir.

QUESTIONER:
Major Gray, aren't you an intelligence officer?

MAJ. GRAY:
Yes, sir. That is correct.

QUESTIONER:
And yet you thought this was a flying saucer? This is just tinfoil.

MAJ. GRAY:
The misidentification was a result of a series of miscommunications.

QUESTIONER:
Didn't you personally gather this debris in a field near Roswell?

And personally identify it as a crashed disk?

GENERAL RAMEY:
There are misidentifications of one object for another all the time. This was a case of mistaken identity. This is a complicated business, identification of one object or another.

QUESTIONER:
This rawinsonde is a weather balloon? Can we say that?

W.O. YANCEY:
No, sir, this is -

GENERAL RAMEY:
Say that. That's fine. It's close. You can tell the way the wind is blowing looking at these things. A mistaken identification of a weather balloon. As far as I can see, there is nothing to get excited about.

Would you concur. Major Gray?

MAJ. GRAY:
Absolutely nothing here to get excited about. What we have here is a common device in use in the Air Force.

GENERAL RAMEY:
Thank you very much, gentlemen.

Chapter Thirteen

Describing his first moments on site, Will leaned back and coughed a long, productive cough and closed his eyes. "It was like being in heaven," he said. "It was the highest of high adventure."

Will was a romantic, and as such a dangerous man. Romanticism rejects the ordinary, seeks the impossible and demands death for failure. The ultimate romantic was the Waffen-SS officer standing in the turret of his Tiger tank, battling the cold plains and blood of Russia.

I am not a romantic.

As the helicopters wheezed into silence Will strode up to the disk. So far nobody had entered it, nobody had even come this close.

A breeze brought an unusual smell, a sort of sulfurousness mixed with decay. It was coming from beneath the two tarps that covered the bodies of the pilots. Flies buzzed around them. Death was death, the flies knew.

To Will's absolute astonishment a civilian came strolling out from behind the disk. "Hiya," he said congenially, "I'm Barney Barnett."

"Who?"

"Barnett. I'm with the survey."

Will was thunderstruck. Surely nobody had been so remarkably stupid as to assign a civilian survey team to this site. "You're surveying this crash?"

He laughed. "Nah, not this. The mapping survey."

The man had blundered into the most secret place in the country. His unexpected appearance reminded Will that things were in a profound state of disorder. It went deeper than a simple lack of security, and it arose from a number of factors.

At this moment in history the government was undergoing intense change. The Air Force was being split off from the Army; the Department of Defense was being formed out of the Old War Department; the CIG was becoming the CIA; the American war machine was being dismantled and the Cold War was just starting.

The U.S. had no agency in place to meet the aliens, no properly positioned personnel, and no organization at all. Will felt as if he was being rolled in a wave.

"Mr. Barnett, go sit over there," he said, pointing to where the copters had landed.

"Is this a flying saucer?"

"We're just examining it."

"Because I had a look at those bodies before you guys got here, and they surely aren't human beings. No, sir."

"All right."

One of the enlisted men escorted the surveyor away. Will returned to the business at hand.

The device was about thirty feet in diameter, dented and collapsed in the front. You could see where it had skidded across the ground, making a track about sixty feet long. He walked around it, looking for an entrance.

Given the circumstances, his approach was admirably straightforward. One would have thought that considerably more caution was in order.

There was an opening on the bottom. When he bent down he could see a small chamber inside, but the hatchway was too tight for him. At that point he considered looking for a more lightly built volunteer, but the thought of not being the first to enter the craft was unacceptable to him.

Then he found the place where the blast had occurred. It was a tear about eight feet long toward the rear of the craft. Inside he could see shreds of what looked like wax paper and bits of tinfoil. This was a much more promising point of entry.