The Day After Roswell (12 page)

“So how do you recommend we operate?” he
asked. I think he already figured out what I was saying but wanted me
to spell it out so we could start moving my nut file out of the
Pentagon and out of the encroaching shadow of the CIA.

“We start the same way this desk has always started
: with reports, ”I said. “I’ll write up
reports on the alien technology just like it’s an intelligence report on any piece of foreign technology. What I
see, what I think the potential may be, where we might be able to
develop, what company we should take it to, and what kind of contract
we should draw up. “

“Where will you start?” the general asked.

“I’ll line up everything in the nut file,
” I began. “Everything from what’s
obvious to what I can’t make heads or tails out of. And
I’ll go to scientists with clearance who we can trust, Oberth
and von Braun, for advice. ”

“I see what you mean, ” Trudeau
acknowledged. “Sure. We’ll lineup our defense
contractors, too. See which ones have ongoing development contracts
that allow us to feed your development projects right into them.
”

“Exactly. That way the existing defense contract
becomes the cover for what we’re developing, ” I
said. “Nothing is ever out of the ordinary because
we’re never starting up anything that hasn’t
already been started up in a previous contract. ”

“It’s just like a big mix and match,
” Trudeau described it.

“Only what we’re doing, General, is mixing
technology we’re developing in with technology not of this
earth, ” I said. “And we’ll let the
companies we’re contracting with apply for the patents
themselves. ”

“Of course, ” Trudeau realized.
“If they own the patent we will have completely
reverse-engineered the technology. ”

“Yes, sir, that’s right. Nobody will ever
know. We won’t even tell the companies we’re
working with where this technology comes from. As far as the world will
know the history of the patent is the history of the invention.
”

“It’s the perfect cover, Phil, ”
the general said. “Where will you start?”

“I’ll write up my first analysis and
recommendation tonight, ” I promised.
“There’s not a moment to lose. ”

“The photographs in my file, ” I began my
report that night over the autopsy reports, which I attached,

show a being of about 4 feet tall. The body seemed decomposed
and the photos themselves aren’t of much use except to the
curious. It’s the medical reports that are of interest. The
organs, bones, and skin composition are different from ours. The
being’s heart and lungs are bigger than a human’s.
The bones are thinner but seem stronger as if the atoms are aligned
differently for a greater tensile strength. The skin also shows a
different atomic alignment in a way that appears the skin is supposed
to protect the vital organs from cosmic ray or wave action or
gravitational forces that we don’t yet understand. The
overall medical report suggests that the medical examiners are more
surprised at the similarities between the being found in the spacecraft
(note: NSC reports refer to this creature as an Extraterrestrial
Biological Entity [EBE]) and human beings than they are at the
differences, especially the brain which is bigger in the EBE but not at
all unlike ours.

I wrote on into the first of many nights that year, drafting
rough notes that I would later type into formal reports that no one
would ever see except General Trudeau, reaching conclusions that seemed
more science fiction than real. I was most happy not because I was
finally working on these files but, oddly enough, because when I sat
down to write, I believed these reports would never see the light of
day. In the harsh reality of the everyday world, they sound, even now
as I remember them, fantastic. Even more fantastic, I remember, were
the startling conclusions I allowed myself to come to. Was this really
I writing, or was it somebody else? Where did these ideas come from?

If we consider similar biological factors that affect human
beings, like long distance runners whose hearts and lungs are larger
than average, hill and mountain dwellers whose lung capacity is greater
than those who live closer to sea level, and even natural athletes
whose long striated muscle alignment is different from those who are
not athletes, can we not assume that the EBEs who have fallen into our
possession represent the end process of genetic engineering designed to
adapt them to long space voyages within an electromagnetic wave
environment at speeds which create the physical conditions described by
Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity? (Note for the
record: Dr. Hermann Oberth suggests we consider the Roswell craft from
the New Mexico desert not a spacecraft but a time machine. His
technical report on propulsion will follow.)

The EBE

Therefore, perhaps we should consider the EBEs as described in
the medical autopsy reports humanoid robots rather then life forms,
specifically engineered for long distance travel through space or time.

A hot Washington summer morning had already settled over the
Potomac like a wet towel on the day I finished the first of my reports
for General Trudeau. And what a report it was. It set the tone for all
of the other reports and recommendations I was to make for the general
over the next two years. It began with the biggest find we had: the
alien extraterrestrial itself.

Had I not read the medical examiner’s report of the
alien from Walter Reed with my own eyes and reviewed the 1947 army
photographs and sketches, I would have called any description of this
creature pure science fiction; that is, had I not seen either this or
its twin suspended in a transparent crypt at Fort Riley. But here it
was again, just a yellowing sheaf of papers and a few cracked glossy
prints in a brown folder sitting among scores of odds and ends, bits of
debris, and strange devices in my nut file.

Even stranger to me than the medical examiner’s
report was my reaction: What could we exploit from this entity? I wrote
the general that “whether we found an
‘extraterrestrial biological entity’ is not as
important in the R&D arena as are the ways we can develop what
we learn from it so that man can travel in space. ” This
quickly became the overriding concern with all of the Roswell artifacts
and the general format for all of my reports. Once I swallowed back the
“oh wow” aspect to all of this life altering
information - and sometimes it took a very big swallow - I was still
left with the job of sorting out what looked promising for R&D
to develop from what seemed beyond our realistic grasp for the present.
I began with the EBE.

The medical report and supporting photographs in front of me
suggested that the creature was remarkably well adapted for long
distance space travel. For example, biological time, the Walter Reed
medical examiners hypothesized, must have passed very slowly for the
entity because it possessed a very slow metabolism, evidenced, they
said, by the enormous capacities of the huge heart and lungs. The
physiology of this thing indicated that this was not a creature whose
body had to work hard to sustain it. A larger heart, my ME’s
report read, meant that it took fewer beats than an average human heart
to drive the thin, milky, almost lymphatic like fluid through a
limited, more primitive looking, and apparently reduced capacity
circulatory system. As a result, the biological clock beat more slowly
than a human’s and probably allowed the creature to travel
great distances in a shorter biological time than humans.

The heart was very decomposed by the time the Walter Reed
pathologists got their hands on it. It seemed to them that our
atmosphere was quite toxic to the creature’s organs. Given
the time that passed between the crash of the vehicle and the
creature’s arrival at Walter Reed, it decomposed all of the
organs far more rapidly than it would have decomposed human organs.
This fact particularly impressed me because I had seen one of these
things, if not the very one described in the report, suspended in a
gel-like substance at Fort Riley. So whatever exposure it must have had
was very minimal by human standards because the medical personnel at
the 509th’s Walker Field got it into a liquid preservation
state very quickly. Nevertheless, the Walter Reed pathologists were
unable to determine with any certainty the structure of the
creature’s heart except to guess that because it functioned
as a passive blood storage facility as well as a pumping muscle that it
didn’t work the same way as did a four chambered human heart.
They said the alien heart seemed to have had internal diaphragm like
muscles that worked less hard than human heart muscle did because the creatures were meant to
survive within a reduced gravity as we understand gravity.

As camels store water, so did this creature store whatever
atmosphere it breathed in the large capacity of its lungs. The lungs
functioned in ways similar to a camel’s humps or to our scuba
tanks and released atmosphere very slowly into the creature’s
system. Because of the large heart and the storage function we believed
it had, we also surmised that it took far less breathable atmosphere to
sustain the creature, thereby reducing the need for carrying large
volumes of atmosphere along on the voyage. Perhaps the aircraft had a
means of recirculating its atmosphere, recycling spent or waste air
back into the craft. Moreover, because the creatures were only four or
to feet tall, the large lungs occupied a far greater percentage of the
chest cavity than human lungs did, further impressing the pathologists
who examined the creatures’ remains. This also indicated to
us that perhaps we were dealing with an entity specifically engineered
for long distance travel.

If we believed the heart and lungs seemed bioengineered for
long distance travel so, too, was the creature’s skeletal
tissue. Although it was in a state of advanced decomposition, the
creature’s bones looked to the army medical examiners to be
fibrous, actually thinner than comparable human bones such as the ribs,
sternum, clavicle, and pelvis. Pathologists speculated that the bones
were more flexible than human bones and had a resiliency that might be
related to the function of shock absorbers. More brittle human bones
might more easily shatter under the stresses these alien entities must
have been routinely subjected to. However, with a flexible skeletal
frame, these entities appeared well suited for potential shocks and
physical traumas of extreme forces and could withstand the fractures
that would cripple human space travelers in a similar environment.

The military recovery team at the Roswell site had reported
that the two creatures still alive after the crash had difficulty
breathing our atmosphere. Whether that was because they were suddenly
tossed out of their craft, unprotected, into our gravity envelope or
whether our atmosphere itself was toxic to them, we don’t
know. We also don’t know whether the one creature who died
very shortly after the crash was struggling to breathe because he was
fatally wounded by gunshots or because of other reasons. Military
witnesses recounted different stories about the creature that survived
and tried to run. Some said it was struggling to breathe from the
moment the military had secured the area; others said that it was
gasping only after it had been shot by one of the sentries. My guess
was that it was the alien’s sudden exposure to the
earth’s strong gravity that caused the creature to panic at
first. That could have been one reason his breathing seemed labored.
Then, after he fled and was shot, he was struggling to breathe because
of his wounds. The medical examiner’s report mentioned
nothing about toxic gases or the kind of atmosphere he believed the
creatures naturally breathed.

If the Roswell craft were a scout or surveillance ship, as the
military analysts back at Wright believed, then it was also more than
likely that the creatures never intended to exit the craft. This was a
craft equipped with a device that was capable of penetrating our
nighttime or utilizing the temperature differentials of different
objects to create a visual image, enabling the occupants to navigate
and observe in darkness. And because it could elude our interceptors
and appear and disappear on our radar screens at will, we believed that
the occupants simply stayed inside and observed rather than roamed
about. Perhaps other types of craft deployed from this same culture
were equipped to land and carry out missions and therefore had
breathing and antigravity apparatus on board for its crew that
permitted them to exit the craft without suffering any consequences.
The medical examiner didn’t speculate on this.

What did intrigue those who inspected the aircraft once it was
shipped to Wright Field was the complete absence of any food
preparation facilities. Nor were there any stored foodstuffs on board.
At a time when space travel was a science fiction writer’s
fantasy, military analysts were already at work formulating ideas for
how just such a technology could be practically implemented. It was not
for travel to other planets, but for navigation around the earth
because that’s the technology that military planners believed
the Germans were developing as an extension of their V2 rocket program.
If you’re going to put airmen into earth orbit, how do you
process their waste products, provide adequate oxygen, and sustain them
during prolonged periods? Clearly, after you’ve developed a
launch vehicle with enough thrust to put a craft into earth orbit,
keeping it there long enough for it to accomplish a mission is the next
problem to tackle. The Roswell craft seemed to have tackled it because
somehow it got here from somewhere else. But there was no indication of
how such household problems as food preparation and the disposal of
waste were solved.

There was much speculation from the different medical analysts
about what these beings were composed of and what could have sustained
them. First of all, doctors were more tantalized by the similarities
the creatures shared with us than they were concerned about the
differences. Rather than hideous-looking insects or the reptilian
man-eaters that attacked Earth in War of the Worlds, these beings
looked like little versions of us, only different. It was eerie.

While doctors couldn’t figure out how the
entities’ essential body chemistry worked, they determined
that they contained no new basic elements. However, the reports that I
had suggested new combinations of organic compounds that required much
more evaluation before doctors could form any opinions. Of specific
interest was the fluid that served as blood but also seemed to regulate
bodily functions in much the same way glandular secretions do for the
human body. In these biological entities, the blood system and
lymphatic systems seem to have been combined. And if an exchange of
nutrients and waste occurred within their systems, that exchange could
have only taken place through the creature’s skin or the
outer protective covering they wore because there were no digestive or
waste systems.

The medical report revealed that the creatures were enclosed
within a one piece protective covering like a jumpsuit or outer skin in
which the atoms were aligned so as to provide a great tensile strength
and flexibility. One examiner wrote that it reminded him of a
spider’s web, which appears very fragile but is, in fact,
very strong. The unique qualities of a spiderweb result from the
alignment of fibers that provide great tenacity because
they’re able to stretch under great pressure, yet display a
resiliency that allows them to snap back into shape even after the
shock of an impact. Similarly, the creature’s spacesuit or
outer skin appeared to be stretched around it as if it were literally
spun over the creature and seized up around it, providing a perfect
skin-tight protective fit. The doctors had never seen anything like it
before.

I think I finally understood it years later, after I had left
the Pentagon and I was buying a Christmas tree. As I stood there in the
frosty air, I watched as the young man who prepared the tree for
transport inserted it, top first, into a stubby barrel like device that
automatically spun a twine mesh covering around the branches to keep
them in place for the trip home. After I got home I had to cut through
the mesh with a knife to remove the tree and separate the branches.
This tree set up reminded me specifically of the medical report on the
creature from the Roswell crash, and I imagined that maybe the spinning
process of the creature’s outer garment resembled something
like this.

The lengthwise alignment of the fibers in the suit also
prompted the medical analysts to suggest that the suit might have been
capable of protecting the wearer against the low energy cosmic rays
that would routinely bombard any craft during a space journey. The
interior organs of the creature seemed so fragile and oversized that
the Walter Reed medical analysts imagined that without the suit the
entity would have been vulnerable to the cumulative physical trauma
from a constant energy particle bombardment. Space travel without
protection from subatomic particle bombardment might subject the
traveler to the same kind of effects he’d experience if he
were cooked in a microwave oven. The particle bombardment inside the
craft, if heavy enough to constitute a shower, would so excite and
accelerate the creature’s atomic structure that the resulting
heat energy would literally cook the entity up.

The Walter Reed doctors were also fascinated by the nature of
the creature’s inner skin. It resembled, although their
preliminary reports didn’t go into any chemical analysis, a
thin layer of fatty tissue unlike any they’d ever seen
before. And it was completely permeable, as if it were constantly
exchanging chemicals back and forth with the combination
blood/lymphatic system. Was this the way the creatures nourished
themselves during their journeys and was this how waste was processed?
The very small mouths and the lack of a human digestive system troubled
the doctors at first because they didn’t know how these
things were sustained. But their hypothesis that they processed
chemicals released from their skin and maybe even recirculated waste
chemicals would have explained the lack of any food preparation or
waste processing facilities on the craft. I speculated, however, that
they didn’t require food or facilities for waste disposal
because they weren’t actual life forms, only a kind of robot
or android.

Another explanation, of course, suggested by the engineers at
Wright Field, is that there would have been no need for food
preparation facilities had this craft been only a small scout ship that
didn’t venture far from a larger craft. The
creatures’ low metabolism meant that they could survive
extended periods away from the main craft by subsisting on some form of
military prepackaged foods until they returned to base. Neither the
Wright Field engineers nor the Walter Reed medical examiners had an
explanation for the lack of waste disposal on board the craft, nor
could they explain how the creatures’ waste was processed.
Maybe I was speculating too far about robots or androids when I was
writing my report for General Trudeau, but I kept thinking, also, that
the skin analysis that I was reading sounded more akin to the skin of a
houseplant than the skin of a human being. That, too, could have been
another explanation for the lack of food or waste facilities.