Star Trek The Original Series From History's Shadow (7 page)

The rest of her message, on the other hand, had hit him like a hammer.

And it’s your own damned fault
, he reminded himself.

“If you don’t mind my saying so, sir,” Marshall offered, “I don’t think you’re being very fair to yourself.”

Wainwright slid the envelope into his top desk drawer. “Military life’s hard on families, Marshall, and that’s before the military adds on a lot of extra baggage to carry around.” His wife, both before and after Michael’s birth, had endured her share of service-induced separations, beginning with the war. She had married him in a quiet, rushed ceremony just two nights before he shipped out for England in early 1944, and he had communicated with her only via letters for nearly a year afterward. Deborah had weathered his time away in superb fashion, occupying her days working in a factory near her family’s home in Sacramento. They enjoyed a delayed, extended honeymoon after his return before he settled into his postwar duties. In the fall of 1946, Michael entered their lives, and Wainwright now brought along his family to new assignments. Life continued in routine, even boring fashion as he worked at the base in Roswell, but everything changed on that fateful day in 1947.

“Oh, I can imagine, sir,” Marshall said, averting her gaze as she returned to moving various papers and files around
her desk. “I can only seem to keep a boyfriend as long as I stay here, but the minute I’m sent somewhere? Kiss him good-bye.”

Despite his mood, Wainwright smiled at her comment. At twenty-six, Allison Marshall was smart and unafraid to speak her mind, a trait he admired. Though military discipline prevented her from straying too far from traditional courtesies and demeanor, she had no problem voicing her opinions to him if she felt she needed to be heard. Their working relationship was such that he long ago had encouraged her to dispense with protocol when they were alone.

“Well, it’s their loss, then,” Wainwright said. Clearing his throat, he tried—with only marginal success—to put the letter out of his mind. Though he knew saying as much reinforced everything Deborah had been trying to tell him, there really were more pressing matters demanding his attention just now. “Do you have the report on the Kansas City sighting? Captain Ruppelt’s been asking about it.”

Marshall held up a file folder. “Finishing it up now, sir. I’m waiting on the photos we took to come back from the lab.”

“Good.” The photographs he and Marshall had collected were nothing spectacular; just supporting documentation of the people who had reported seeing an “unidentified flying object” or “UFO,” as the Air Force now called such unknown craft, as well as the area where the alleged sighting had taken place. As one of the senior members of the project here at Wright-Patterson, Wainwright was sent to Kansas City, Missouri, to investigate the report as filed by their liaison officer at Whiteman Air Force Base, the closest installation to the city. Marshall had gone with him. “Thanks for turning that around so quickly. I know we just
got back last night, and it was a Sunday night to boot, but you know how Ruppelt can be.”

“Not a problem, sir,” Marshall replied, ever the consummate professional so far as their actual work was concerned. She paused, and Wainwright watched her eyes take in the stacks of paperwork cluttering her desk. “I’m not saying a vacation to San Diego or Miami wouldn’t go unappreciated, though.”

For the first time that morning, Wainwright chuckled. “I’ll see what I can do, but I wouldn’t count on anything more than a weekend pass anytime soon. If anything, I think we’re going to be getting busier.”

From its humble beginnings here five years earlier, the original Majestic 12 project had evolved far beyond the investigation of the original spacecraft landing at Roswell along with any possible aftereffects of that incident. Within months of the project’s inception, the Air Force launched another initiative, Project Sign, with a primary mission of investigating the increasing number of UFO sightings.

As this mandate was separate from MJ-12 operations, Professor Carlson—still a central figure in the original group’s leadership committee—had requested of the new project’s commander, Captain Robert Sneider, that Wainwright be designated as a liaison officer between the two groups. For nearly a year, Wainwright and other Air Force officers investigated reports submitted by military personnel as well as civilians. Though no hard evidence had been collected during this time, details as relayed from individuals claiming to have seen strange aircraft bore enough similarities that senior government and military officials were becoming convinced that some form of extraterrestrial activity was taking place in the skies above America and, indeed, the entire world.

Skeptics also put forth theories that some of these sightings might well be top-secret aircraft from the Soviet Union. Such notions had been bandied about even before the launch of Project Sign, and Wainwright had heard rumors that investigations such as those currently being conducted were taking place as much as a year before the Roswell Incident. Wainwright and other project officers had been able to debunk such theories, though their investigations did not always lead to evidence of alien activity. Doubts in the higher echelons of government and the military soon began to take their toll. Despite credible witnesses, compelling photographic evidence, and other collected findings, a lack of tangible, actionable proof had begun to chip away at the support Project Sign had enjoyed at its inception. A report submitted by Captain Sneider to the Air Force chief of staff, General Hoyt Vandenberg, containing a comprehensive assessment that many of the reported sightings could be attributed to extraterrestrial activity, was rejected. When the project became public, this invited more skepticism and even ridicule, resulting in Sign’s deactivation and subsequent replacement by a new initiative, Project Grudge.

Straightening a stack of papers before putting them inside a brown file folder stamped “TOP SECRET,” Marshall placed the completed file in a cardboard box containing several more folders of identical design.

“While I’m waiting on the photos from the Kansas City trip, I thought I might catch up on some filing, sir. We’ve got several older case logs here that need to go into storage next door.”

“Probably a good idea,” Wainwright said, eyeing the other file boxes and folders littering the office. Captain Ruppelt had been keeping him and Marshall busy during these past few
months, leaving little time for the mundane yet necessary paperwork that accompanied each investigation. “Double check with the master list, and make sure we keep anything from an active file here, even if it’s just for something small. Until we get used to the new system, I don’t want anything to get lost.”

Marshall nodded as she picked up the file box and headed for the door. “Yes, sir. It’s nice to have people actually being interested in what we’re doing, for a change.”

“You can say that again.”

Following the debacle that Project Grudge turned into, a new attitude now gripped Wainwright, his fellow officers, and everyone connected to the secret work with which they had been charged.

Prior to this new shift, Project Grudge’s former primary directive—at least so far as the Air Force and the Pentagon were concerned—had been to find plausible explanations for any “UFO sightings” that did not point to extraterrestrial causes. It was a definite shift in mindset when compared to the attitudes that had driven Project Sign. The prior effort, which worked outward from the truth of what really had happened at Roswell, was motivated by a need to understand the larger ramifications of the aliens’ presence on Earth, and what it might mean for humanity in the years to come.

Now Project Grudge’s aim was to ignore or debunk any claims of extraterrestrial activity, engaging in a more organized public relations effort with the aim of presenting the results of its investigations to the citizenry, rather than pursuing the truth. Wainwright had come close to resigning his commission on two separate occasions, but Professor Carlson had talked him out of it, convinced that soon, something would happen to change the minds of skeptical leaders.

It did happen, on September 10, 1951, when both civilian
and military pilots reported sightings and near collisions with varying numbers of unidentified disk-like craft in the skies over New Jersey. The mass sighting and sheer number of corroborating reports demanded an investigation, during which Project Grudge was called to answer for its seemingly apathetic approach to UFO sightings. In the aftermath of that investigation, Grudge was deactivated and a new project put into motion; one that would treat sightings and reports seriously, but with no bias for or against any extraterrestrial explanation. Indeed, the project’s primary mandate for all personnel was to vigorously pursue whatever evidence or other information presented itself, regardless of where it might lead. In short, the directive was simple: Keep an open mind.

And so it was in early 1952 that James Wainwright, with great enthusiasm and renewed hope, found himself once again transferred from Majestic 12 and assigned as an investigating officer for the newly christened Project Blue Book. Liaison officers for the project were assigned to every Air Force installation, acting as a starting point for reports submitted from those regions, with all such accounts sent up the chain of command to the project’s commander, Captain Edward Ruppelt, and the main task group at Wright-Patterson.

Wainwright, by virtue of seniority and his tenure with the previous projects, was a principal case officer, dispatched by Ruppelt himself to investigate any reports or sightings with a high probability of obtaining incontrovertible proof of extraterrestrial activity. The new initiative, grounded as it was by Ruppelt’s directive to carry out every investigation with all due rigor and attention to every detail, demanded even more from the officers in his charge. More research, more time spent traveling, and more long nights spent in this office, filing reports detailing the results of those efforts.

I know your work is important to you, and you’re driven by your duty. It’s one of the many things I’ve always loved and admired about you, but I’m tired of being the second most important thing in your life.

Deborah’s words, as though she stood before him speaking them aloud, rang in Wainwright’s ears. Balancing his work against his home life had been difficult during the eras of Sign and Grudge, but Blue Book had only increased that strain. While the new project was still in its earliest days, he had tried to prepare her for the increased requirements it would place upon him. Of course, many of her questions touched on those aspects of his assignment that he was not allowed to share.

You don’t talk to me, about anything. Is it because you can’t, or you just don’t want to?

Wainwright hoped one day to be able to tell Deborah everything, to show her what had so consumed him these past five years, and what it meant for the very safety of the human race. Since his arrival here and from the beginnings of the Air Force’s investigation, hundreds of UFO sightings had been reported. While the majority of these had proven either to be false or else explained by conventional causes, and many of these were reported as part of Project Grudge’s public relations endeavors, there were still dozens of reports requiring increased scrutiny. Some of these cases remained open because alien activity had not yet been ruled out. Then there was the even smaller number of files that pointed without doubt to vessels of extraterrestrial origin. According to the initial top-secret assessment provided to the Pentagon by Captain Ruppelt, there could be no denying that Earth was under almost constant surveillance.

It was a claim questioned by the highest tiers of government
and military leadership, despite being supported by thousands of pages of information and photographs as collected by the Air Force during the past five years. Though Wainwright had not seen anything conclusive pointing to the existence of aliens on Earth since that day at Roswell in 1947, he had heard rumors of other case officers stumbling across spacecraft or advanced technology. There even were reports of bodies being recovered from crash sites, with all of the evidence spirited away to high-security storehouses around the country. There was an area of Wright-Patterson with several buildings operating under a tight security cordon, with access by visitors restricted to those authorized by the base commanding general. Even with the security clearance Wainwright held, he had never been granted access to that section.

Maybe one day,
he thought, but he would not be holding his breath.

A knock from outside the office interrupted his thoughts, and Wainwright looked up to see a shadowy figure standing just beyond the door’s glazed, translucent window. “Come in.”

The door opened to reveal Lieutenant Darren Benjamin, one of Captain Ruppelt’s aides. Like Wainwright, he was dressed in the standard blue officer’s service dress uniform, with blue trousers and jacket over a light blue shirt with a dark blue tie. A lock of his dark brown hair dropped down across his forehead, and Wainwright suspected the younger man used some sort of hair tonic to achieve that look.

“Good morning, sir,” Benjamin said, closing the door behind him and moving to stand before Wainwright’s desk. He was carrying a green file folder; on the cover Wainwright could see the stamped words “TOP SECRET.” Stopping in front of the desk, Benjamin held out the folder. “Captain Ruppelt asked me to deliver this to you pronto.”

“Another sighting?” Wainwright asked, taking the folder and laying it on his desk. As he opened the file and began perusing its contents, his eyes locked on one particular piece of information on the report’s top sheet. “Yuma?”

“Yes, sir,” Benjamin replied. “Last Thursday, the seventeenth. At least a half dozen witnesses reported seeing a flat, white disk traveling in a straight line across the sky over the mountains of the testing ranges. Two more people reported seeing it again the next day. All of the observers were military personnel. We got the call that day, with the follow-up report arriving Saturday afternoon. Given the nature of the incident, and the witnesses involved, Captain Ruppelt wants you to head out there and have a look.”