The Day After Roswell (3 page)

In the stark light of the military searchlights, Arnold saw
the entire landscape of the crash. He thought it looked more like a
crash landing because the craft was intact except for a split seam
running lengthwise along the side and the steep forty-five-plus-degree
angle of the craft’s incline. He assumed it was a craft, even
though it was like no airplane he’d ever seen. It was small,
but it looked more like the flying wing shape of an old Curtis than an
ellipse or a saucer. And it had two tail fins on the top sides of the
delta’s feet that pointed up and out. He angled himself as
close to the split seam of the craft as he could get without stepping
in front of the workers in hazardous material suits who were checking
the site for radiation, and that was when he saw them in the shadow.
Little dark gray figures - maybe four, four and a half feet in length -
sprawled across the ground.

“Are those people?”  Arnold heard
someone say as medics rushed up with stretchers to the knife like
laceration along the side of the craft through which the bodies had
either crawled or tumbled.

Arnold looked around the perimeter of light and saw another
figure, motionless but menacing nevertheless, and another leaning
against a small rise in the desert sand. There was a fifth figure near
the opening of the craft. As radiation technicians gave the all clear
and medics ran to the bodies with stretchers, Arnold sneaked a look
through the rip in the aircraft and stared out through the top.
Jehosaphat! It looked like the sun was already up. Just to make sure,
Steve Arnold looked around the outside again and, sure enough, it was
still too dark to call it daylight. But through the top of the craft,
as if he were looking through a lens, Arnold could see an eerie stream
of light, not daylight or lamplight, but light nevertheless.
He’d never seen anything like that before and thought that
maybe this was a weapon the Russians or somebody else had developed.

The scene at the crash site was a microcosm of chaos.
Technicians with specific tasks, such as medics, hazardous material
sweepers, signalmen and radio operators, and sentries were carrying out
their jobs as methodically and unthinkingly as if they were the Emperor
Ming’s brainwashed furnace stoking zombies from the Flash
Gordon serials. But everyone else, including the officers, were simply
awestruck. They’d never seen anything like this before, and
they stood there, overpowered, it seemed, by simply a general sense of
amazement that would not let them out of its grip.

“Hey, this one’s alive, ” Arnold
heard, and turned around to see one of the little figures struggling on
the ground. With the rest of the medics, he ran over to it and watched
as it shuddered and made a crying sound that echoed not in the air but
in his brain. He heard nothing through his ears, but felt an
overwhelming sense of sadness as the little figure convulsed on the
ground, its oversized egg shaped skull flipping from side to side as if
it was trying to gasp for something to breathe. That’s when
he heard the sentry shout, “Hey, you!” and turned
back to the shallow rise opposite the arroyo.

“Halt!” the sentry screamed at the small
figure that had gotten up and was trying desperately to climb over the
hill.

“Halt!” the sentry yelled again and
brought his Ml to bear. Other soldiers ran toward the hill as the
figure slipped in the sand, started to slide down, caught his footing,
and climbed again. The sound of soldiers locking and loading rounds in
their chambers carried loud across the desert through the predawn
darkness.

“No!” one of the officers shouted. Arnold
couldn’t see which one, but it was too late.

There was a rolling volley of shots from the nervous soldiers,
and as the small figure tried to stand, he was flung over like a rag
doll and then down the hill by the rounds that tore into him. He lay
motionless on the sand as the first three soldiers to reach him stood
over the body, chambered new rounds, and pointed their weapons at his
chest.

“Fuck, ” the officer spit again.
“Arnold. ” Steve Arnold snapped to attention.
“You and your men get out there and stop those civilians from
crossing this perimeter. ” He motioned to the small convoy of
emergency vehicles approaching them from the east. He knew they had to
be police or county sheriff. Then he called out, “Medics.
”

Arnold jumped to at once, and by the time the medics were
loading the little creature on a stretcher, he was already setting up a
perimeter of CIC personnel and sentries to block the site from the
flashing lights and churning sand far in the distance to the south of
them. He heard the officer order the medics to load the bodies on
stretchers, pack them in the back of whatever two-and-a-half-ton CMC he
could pull off the line, and drive them back to the base immediately.

“Sergeant, ” the officer called out again.
“I want your men to load up everything that can be loaded on these deuce-and-a-halfs
and sway that damn… whatever it is“ - he was
pointing to the delta shaped object - ”on this low-boy and
get it out of here. The rest of you, “ he called out.
”I want this place spotless. Nothing ever happened here, you
understand? Just a nothing piece of scrub brush like the rest of this
desert. “

As the soldiers formed an arm in arm “search and
rescue” grid, some on their hands and knees, to clean the
area of any pieces of debris, devices, or chunks of wreckage, the huge
retrieval crane that had been deployed from the air base hoisted the
surprisingly light flying object out of its impact crater in the arroyo
and swayed it above the long flatbed Ford that accompanied the convoy
of army trucks. A small squad of MPs were deployed to face the civilian
convoy of emergency vehicles quickly approaching the site. They fixed
bayonets and lowered their Ml barrels at the whirlwind of sand directly
in front of them.

On the other side of the skirmish line, Roswell firefighter
Dan Dwyer, the radioman riding shotgun on the red Ward LaFrance pumper
the company rolled that night along with the tanker, could see very
little at first except for an oasis of white light in the center of
darkness. His small convoy had been running lights but no sirens as
they pulled out of the firehouse in the center of Roswell, rendezvoused
with the police car north of town, and headed out to the site to
rescue what he had been told was a downed aircraft. As he approached
the brightly lit area of floodlights off in the distance - it looked
more like a small traveling amusement park than a crash site - he could
already see the soldiers in a rough circle around an object that was
swinging from the arm of a crane. As the LaFrance got closer, Dwyer
could just make the strange deltoid shape of the thing as it hung, very
precariously, from the arm, almost dropping once or twice under the
very inexperienced control of the equipment operator. Even at this
distance, the sound of shouting and cursing was carrying across the
sand as the crane was raised, then lowered, then raised as the object
finally sat over the Ford flatbed trailer.

The police unit ahead of the fire truck suddenly shot out
toward the brightly lit area as soon as the driver saw the activity,
and immediately the area was obscured from Dwyer’s vision by
clouds of sand that diffused the light. All he could see through the
thicket of sand were the reflections of his own flashing lights. When
the sand cleared, they were almost on top of the site, swinging off to
one side to avoid the army trucks that had already started hack down
the road toward them. Dwyer looked over his shoulder to see if any more
military vehicles were headed his way, but all he saw were the first
pink lines of sunlight over the horizon. It was almost morning.

By the time Dwyer’s field truck pulled around to the
area the soldiers had pointed out, whatever it was that had crashed was
sitting on the flatbed, still clamped to the hovering crane. Three or
four soldiers were working on the coupling and securing the object to
the truck with chains and cable. But for something that had dropped out
of the sky in a fireball, which was how the police described it, Dwyer
noted that the object looked almost unscathed. He couldn’t
see any cracks in the object’s skin and there were no pieces
that had broken off. Then the soldiers dropped an olive tarp over the
flatbed and the object was completely camouflaged. An army captain
walked over to one of the police units parked directly in front of the
fire truck. And behind the officer stood a line of bayonet wielding
soldiers sporting MP armbands.

“You guys can head on back, ” Dwyer heard
the captain tell one of the Roswell police officers on the scene.
“We’ve got the area secured. ”

“What about injuries?” the police officer
asked, maybe thinking more about the incident report he had to fill out
than about what to do with any casualties.

“No injuries. We have everything under control,
” the captain said.

But even as the military was waving off the civilian convoy,
Dwyer could see small bodies being lifted on stretchers from the ground
into army transport trucks. A couple of them were already in body bags,
but one, not bagged, was strapped directly onto the stretcher. The
police officer saw it, too. This one, Dwyer could tell, was moving
around and seemed to be alive. He had to get closer.

“What about them?” he asked.

“Hey, get those things loaded, ” the
captain shouted at the enlisted men loading the stretchers into the
truck. “You didn’t see anything here tonight,
Officer, ” he told the driver of the police unit.
“Nothing at all. ”

“But, I gotta… ”

The captain cut him off. “Later today, I’m
sure, there’ll be someone from the base out to talk to the
shift; meanwhile, let this one alone. Strictly military business.
”

By this time Dwyer thought he recognized people he knew from the army airfield. He thought he could see the base
intelligence officer, Jesse Marcel, who lived off“ the base
in Roswell, and other personnel who came into town on a regular basis.
He saw debris from whatever had crashed still lying all over the ground
as the flatbed truck pulled out, passed the fire apparatus, and rumbled
off through the sand back on the road toward the base.

Dwyer took off his fire helmet, climbed down from the truck,
and worked his way through the shadows around the flank of the line of
MPs. There was so much confusion at the site Dwyer knew no one would
notice if he looked around. He walked around in back of the truck,
across the perimeter, and from the other side of the military transport
truck walked up to the stretcher. He looked directly down into the eyes
of the creature strapped onto the stretcher and just stared.

It was no bigger than a child, he thought. But it
wasn’t a child. No child had such an oversized balloon shaped
head. It didn’t even look human, although it had human like
features. It’s eyes were large and dark, set apart from each
other on a downward slope. It’s nose and mouth were
especially tiny, almost like slits. And its ears were not much more
than indentations along the sides of its huge head. In the glare of the
floodlight, Dwyer could see that the creature was a grayish brown and
completely hairless, but it looked directly at him as if it were a
helpless animal in a trap. It didn’t make a sound, but
somehow Dwyer understood that the creature understood it was dying. He
could gape in astonishment at the thing, but it was quickly loaded onto
the truck by a couple of soldiers in helmets who asked him what he was
doing. Dwyer knew this was bigger than anything he ever wanted to see
and got out of there right away, losing himself amidst a group of
personnel working around a pile of debris.

The whole site was scattered with articles that Dwyer assumed
had fallen out of the craft when it hit. He could see the indentation
in the arroyo where it looked like the object embedded itself and
followed with his eyes the pattern of debris stretching out from the
small crater into the darkness beyond the floodlights. The soldiers
were crawling all over on their hands and knees with scraping devices
and carrying sacks or walking in straight lines waving metal detectors
in front of them. They were sweeping the area clean, it seemed to him,
so that any curiosity seekers who floated out here during the day would
find nothing to reveal the identity of what had been here. Dwyer
reached down to pick up a patch of a dull gray metallic cloth like
material that seemed to shine up at him from the sand. He slipped it
into his fist and rolled it into a hall. Then he released it and the
metallic fabric snapped hack into shape without any creases or folds.
He thought no one was looking at him, so he stuffed it into the pocket
of his fire jacket to bring back to the firehouse.

He would later show it to his young daughter, who forty-five
years later and long after the piece of metallic fabric itself had
disappeared into history, would describe it on television documentaries
to millions of people. But that night in July 1947, if Dwyer thought he
was invisible, he was wrong.

“Hey you, ” a sergeant wearing an MP
armband bawled. “What the hell are you doing out
here?”

“I responded with the fire company, ”
Dwyer said as innocently as possible.

“Well, you get your civilian ass back on that truck
and get it the hell out of here, ” he ordered. “You
take anything with you?”

“Not me, Sergeant, ” Dwyer said.

Then the MP grabbed him as if he were under arrest and hustled
him off to a major, who was shouting orders near the generator that was
powering the string of floodlights. He recognized him as Roswell
resident Jesse Marcel.

“Caught this fireman wandering around in the debris,
sir, ” the sergeant reported.

Marcel obviously recognized Dwyer, although the two
weren’t friends, and gave him what the fireman only
remembered as an agonized look. “You got to get out of here,
” he said. “And never tell anyone where you were or
what you saw. ”