The Day After Roswell (5 page)

“Brownie, you know you’re not supposed to
be in there, ” I said. “Get out here and tell me
what’s going on. ”

He stepped out from inside the door, and even through the
shadow I could see that his face was a dead pale, just as if
he’d seen a ghost. “You won’t believe
this, ” he said. “I don’t believe it and
I just saw it. ”

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“The guys who off-loaded those deuce-and-a-halfs,
” he said. “They told us they brought these boxes
up from Fort Bliss from some accident out in New Mexico?”

“Yeah, so what?” I was getting impatient
with this.

“Well, they told us it was all top secret but they
looked inside anyway. Everybody down there did when they were loading
the trucks. MPs were walking around with sidearms and even the officers
were standing guard, ” Brown said. “But the guys
who loaded the trucks said they looked inside the boxes and
didn’t believe what they saw. You got security clearance,
Major. You can come in here. ”

In fact, I was the post duty officer and could go anywhere I
wanted during the watch. So I walked inside the old veterinary
building, the medical dispensary for the cavalry horses before the
First World War, and saw where the cargo from the convoy had been
stacked up. There was no one in the building except for Bill Brown and
myself.

“What is all this stuff?” I asked.

“That’s just it, Major, nobody knows,
” he said. “The drivers told us it came from a
plane crash out in the desert somewhere around the 509th. But when they
looked inside, it was nothing like anything they’d seen
before. Nothing from this planet. ”

It was the silliest thing I’d ever heard, enlisted
men’s tall stories that floated from base to base getting
more inflated every lap around the track. Maybe I wasn’t the
world’s smartest guy, but I had enough engineering and
intelligence schooling to pick my way around pieces of wreckage and
come up with two plus two. We walked over to the tarpaulin shrouded
boxes, and I threw back the edge of the canvas.

“You’re not supposed to be in here,
” I told Brownie. “You better go. ”

“I’ll watch outside for you, Major.
”

I almost wanted to tell him that that’s what he was
supposed to be doing all along instead of snooping into classified
material, but I did what I used to do best and kept my mouth shut. I
waited while he took up his position at the door to the building before
I dug any further into the boxes.

There were about thirty-odd wooden  crates nailed
shut and stacked together against the far wall the building. The light
switches were the push type and I didn’t know which switch
tripped which circuit, so I used my flashlight and stumbled around
until my eyes got used to the darkness and shadows. I didn’t
want to start pulling apart the nails, so I set the flashlight off to
one side where it could throw light on the stack and then searched for
a box that could open easily. Then I found an oblong box off to one
side with a wide seam under the top that looked like it had been
already opened. It looked like either the strangest weapons crate
you’d ever see or the smallest shipping crate for a coffin.
Maybe this was the box that Brownie had seen. I brought the flashlight
over and set it up high on the wall so it would throw as broad a beam
as possible. Then I set to work on the crate.

The top was already loose. I was right - this one had just
been opened. I jimmied the top back and forth, continuing to loosen the
nails that had been pried up with a nail claw, until I felt them come
out of the wood. Then I worked along the sides of the five-or-so-foot
box until the top was loose all the way around. Not knowing which end
of the box was the front, I picked up the top and slid it off to the
edge. Then I lowered the flashlight, looked inside, and my stomach
rolled right up into my throat and I almost became sick right then and
there.

Whatever they’d crated this way, it was a coffin,
but not like any coffin I’d seen before. The contents,
enclosed in a thick glass container, were submerged in a thick light
blue liquid, almost as heavy as a gelling solution of diesel fuel. But
the object was floating, actually suspended, and not sitting on the
bottom with a fluid over top, and it was soft and shiny as the
underbelly of a fish. At first I thought it was a dead child they were
shipping somewhere. But this was no child. It was a four-foot human
shaped figure with arms, bizarre-looking four-fingered hands - I
didn’t see a thumb - thin legs and feet, and an oversized
incandescent lightbulb shaped head that looked like it was floating
over a balloon gondola for a chin. I know I must have cringed at first,
but then I had the urge to pull off the top of the liquid container and
touch the pale gray skin. But I couldn’t tell whether it was
skin because it also looked like a very thin one-piece head-to-toe
fabric covering the creature’s flesh.

Its eyeballs must have been rolled way back in its head
because I couldn’t see any pupils or iris or anything that
resembled a human eye. But the eye sockets themselves were oversized
and almond-shaped and pointed down to its tiny nose, which
didn’t really protrude from the skull. It was more like the
tiny nose of a baby that never grew as the child grew, and it was
mostly nostril.

The creature’s skull was over grown to the point
where all of its facial features - such as they were - were arranged
absolutely frontally, occupying only a small circle on the lower part
of the head. The protruding ears of a human were nonexistent, its
cheeks had no definition, and there were no eyebrows or any indications
of facial hair. The creature had only a tiny flat slit for a mouth and
it was completely closed, resembling more of a crease or indentation
between the nose and the bottom of the chinless skull than a fully
functioning orifice. I would find out years later how it communicated,
but at that moment in Kansas, I could only stand there in shock over
the clearly non-human face suspended in front of me in a semi-liquid
preservative.

I could see no damage to the creature’s body and no
indication that it had been involved in any accident. There was no
blood, its limbs seemed intact, and I could find no lacerations on the
skin or through the gray fabric. I looked through the crate encasing
the container of liquid for any paperwork or shipping invoice or
anything that would describe the nature or origin of this thing. What I
found was an intriguing Army Intelligence document describing the
creature as an inhabitant of a craft that had crash landed in Roswell,
New Mexico, earlier that week and a routing manifest for this creature
to the login officer at the Air Material Command at Wright Field and
from him to the Walter Reed Army Hospital morgue’s pathology
section where, I supposed, the creature would be autopsied and stored.
It was not a document I was meant to see, for sure, so I tucked it back
in the envelope against the inside wall of the crate.

I allowed myself more time to look at the creature than I
should have, I suppose, because that night I missed the time checks on
the rest of my rounds and believed I’d have to come up with a
pretty good explanation for the lateness of my other stops to verify
the sentry assignments. But what I was looking at was worth any trouble
I’d get into the next day. This thing was truly fascinating
and at the same time utterly horrible. It challenged every conception I
had, and I hoped against hope that I was looking at some form of atomic
human mutation. I knew I couldn’t ask anybody about it, and
because I hoped I would never see its like again, I came up with
explanation after explanation for its existence, despite what
I’d read on the enclosed document: It was shipped here from
Hiroshima, it was the result of a Nazi genetic experiment, it was a
dead circus freak, it was anything but what I knew it said it was -
what it had to be: an extraterrestrial.

I slid the top of the crate back over the creature, knocked
the nails loosely into their original holes with the butt end of my
flashlight, and put the tarp back in position. Then I left the building
and hoped I could close the door forever on what I’d seen.
Just forget it, I told myself. You weren’t supposed to see it
and maybe you can live your whole life without ever having to think
about it. Maybe.

Once outside the building I rejoined Brownie at his post.

“You know you never saw this, ” I said.
“And you tell no one. ”

“Saw what, Major?” Brownie said, and I
walked back to the base general headquarters, the image of the creature
suspended in that liquid fading away with each and every step I took.
By the time I slid back behind the desk, it was all a dream. No, not a
dream, a nightmare - but it was over and, I hoped, it would never come
back.

The Roswell Artifacts

THE NIGHTMARE OF THE CREATURE I SAW AT FORT RlLEY NEVER faded
from my memory, although I was able to bury it during my years as a
guided missile commander in Europe. And I never saw its body again the
rest of my life except for the autopsy photos and the medical examiner
sketches that would catch up to me, along with the rest of what
happened at Roswell, when I returned to Washington from Germany for
assignment at the Pentagon in 1961. I can remember my first day back
when I was waiting outside my boss’s door for entry into the
inner sanctum. And, boy, was I ever nervous. The last time I remembered
being that nervous in Washington, I was standing in the little anteroom
outside the Oval Office in the White House waiting for President
Eisenhower to get off the phone. I had a big request to make and I
wanted to do it face-to-face, not go through any aides or assistants or
wait for special assistant C. D. Jackson to show up to make everything
OK. I was almost a regular in the Oval Office those days, back in the
1950s, dropping off National Security Council staff papers for the
President, making reports, and sometimes waiting while he read them
just in case he wanted me to relay a message. But this time was
different. I needed to speak to him myself, alone. But Ike was taking a
longer time than he usually took on this phone call, and I shifted
around and sneaked a glance at the switchboard lights on Mrs.
Lehrer’s desk off to the side. Still on the phone, and you could see at the bottom of the switch panel
where the calls were backing up.

I was asking President Eisenhower for a personal favor: to let
me out of my fifth year on the White House National Security staff so I
could pick up the command of my own anti-aircraft guided-missile
battalion being formed up in Red Canyon, New Mexico. Ike had once
promised me a command of my own when I returned from Korea and was
posted to the White House. And in 1957 the opportunity came up, a juicy
assignment at a high-security base with the coveted green tabs and all
the trappings: train and command an anti-aircraft battalion to use the
army’s most secret new surface-to-air missile and then take
it to Germany for some front-line target practice right where the
Russians could see us. In case of World War III, the order of battle
read, Soviet Backfire bombers will drop an inferno of high explosives
on our positions first and the East German tanks will roll straight
into our barracks. We stand and fight, torching off every missile we
have so as to take out as many attacking aircraft as we have missiles,
and get the hell out of there. I could almost taste the thrill in my
mouth as I waited for Ike to get off the phone that day back in 1957.

Those were my memories this afternoon as I stood outside the
back door of General Trudeau’s office on the third floor of
the outer ring of the Pentagon. It was 1961, four years after I left
the White House and put on my uniform again to stand guard across the
electronic no-man’s-land of radar sweeps and photo sensors
just a few kilometers west of the Iron Curtain. Ike had retired to his
farm in Pennsylvania, and my new boss was General Arthur Trudeau, one
of the last fighting generals from the Korean War. Trudeau became an
instant hero in my book when I heard about how his men were pinned down
on the cratered slopes of Pork Chop Hill, dug into shallow foxholes
with enemy mortars dropping round them like rain. You
couldn’t order anyone up that hell of an incline to walk
those boys back down; just too damn many explosions. So Trudeau pulled
off his stars, clapped a sergeant’s helmet over his head, and
fought back up the hill himself, leading a company of volunteers, and
then fought his way back down. That was how he did things, with his own
hands, and now I’d be working directly for him in the Army
R&D Division.

I was a lieutenant colonel when I came to the Pentagon in
1961, and all I brought with me were my bowling trophy from Fort Riley
and a nameplate for my desk cut out of the fin of a Nike missile from
Germany. My men made it for me and said it would bring me luck. After I
got to the Pentagon - it was still a couple of days before my
assignment actually began - I found out right away I’d need a
lot of it. In fact, as I opened the door and let myself directly into
the general’s inner office, I found out how much luck
I’d need that very day.

“So what’s the big secret,
General?” I asked my new boss. It was strange talking to a
general this way, but we’d become friends while I was on
Eisenhower’s staff. “Why not the front
door?”

“Because they’re already watching you,
Phil, ” he said, knowing exactly what kind of cold chill that
would send through me. “And I’d just as soon have
this conversation in private before you show up officially. ”

He walked me over to a set of file cabinets. “Things
haven’t changed that much around here since you went to
Germany, ” he said. “We still know who our friends
are and who we can trust. ”

I knew his code. The Cold War was at its height and there were
enemies all around us: in government, within the intelligence services,
and within the White House itself. Those of us in military intelligence
who knew the truth about how much danger the country was in were very
circumspect about what we said, even to each other, and where we said
it. Looking back on it now from the safe distance of forty years,
it’s hard to believe that even as big eight-cylinder American
cars rolled off the assembly lines and into suburban driveways and
television antennas sprung up on roofs of brand-new houses in thousands
of subdivisions around the country, we were in the midst of a
treacherous war of nerves.

Deep inside our intelligence services and even within the
President’s own cabinet were cadres of career government
officers working - some knowingly, some not - for the Soviet Union by
carrying out policies devised inside the KGB. Some of the position
papers that came out of these offices made no sense otherwise. We also
knew the CIA had been penetrated by KGB moles, just as we knew that
some of our own policy makers were advocating ideas that would only
weaken the United States and lead us down the paths that served the
best interests of our enemies.

A handful of us knew the awful truth about Korea. We lost it
not because we were beaten on the battlefield but because we were
compromised from within. The Russian advisers fighting alongside the
North Koreans were given our plans even before they reached those of us
on Mac Arthur’s staff. And when we threw our host technology
into the field and into the air, the Soviets had already formulated
plans to capture it and take it back to Russia. When the time came to
talk peace at Panmunjom and negotiate a POW exchange, I knew where
those Americans were, ten miles north of the border, who
wouldn’t be coming home. And there were people right inside
our own government who let them stay there, in prison camps, where some
of them might be alive to this very day.

So General Trudeau gave me his very grim smile and said, as he
walked me toward the locked dark olive military file cabinet on the
wall of his private office, “I need you to cover my back,
Colonel. I need you to watch because what I’m going to do, I
can’t cover it myself. ”

Whatever Trudeau was planning, I knew he’d tell me
in his own time. And he’d tell me only what he thought I
needed to know when I needed it. For the immediate present, I was to be
his special assistant in R&D, one of the most sensitive
divisions in the whole Pentagon bureaucracy because that was where the
most classified plans of the scientists and weapons designers were
translated into the reality of defense contracts. R&D was the
interface between the gleam in someone’s eye and a piece of
hardware prototype rolling out of a factory to show its potential for
the army brass. Only it was my job to keep it a secret while it was
developed.

“But there’s something else I want you to
do for me, Phil, ” General Trudeau continued as he put his
hand on top of the cabinet. “I’m going to have this
cabinet moved downstairs to your office. ”

The general had put me in an office on the second floor of the
outer ring directly under him. That way, as I would soon find out,
whenever he needed me in a hurry I could get upstairs and through the
back door before anybody even knew where I was.

“This has some special files, war material
you’ve never seen before, that I want to put under your
Foreign Technology responsibilities, ” he continued. My
specific assignment was to the Research & Development
Division’s Foreign Technology desk, what I thought would be a
pretty dry post because it mainly required me to keep up on the kinds
of weapons and research our allies were doing. Read the intelligence
reports, review films of weapons tests, debrief scientists and the
research people at universities on what their colleagues overseas were doing, and write up proposals for weapons the
army might need. It was important and it had its share of cloak and
dagger, but after what I’d been through in Rome chasing down
the Gestapo and SS officers the Nazis left behind and the Soviet NKVD
units masquerading themselves as Italian Communist partisans, it seemed
like a great opportunity to help General Trudeau keep some of the
army’s ideas out of the hands of the other military services.
But then I didn’t know what was inside that file cabinet.

The army generally categorized the types of weapons research
it was doing into two basic groups, domestic and foreign. There was the
research that sprang out of work going on in the United States and
research by people overseas. I knew I’d be keeping track of
what the French were doing with advanced helicopter design and whether
the British would be able to build a practical vertical takeoff and
landing fighter, something we’d given up on after World War
II. Then there was the German big gun, the V3, granddaughter of Big
Bertha that the Germans threatened Paris with during the First World
War. We’d found the barrel assemblies of the German artillery
pieces near Calais after we invaded Normandy and knew that the Nazis
were working on something that, like their jet engine fighter and new
Panzer tank, could have changed the outcome of the war if
they’d held us off any longer at the Battle of the Bulge.

I was responsible for developing this technology, ideas we
hadn’t come up with ourselves, and work up recommendations
for how we could incorporate this into our weapons planning. But I
didn’t know why the general kept on patting the top drawer of
that file cabinet.

“I’ll get to those files right away if you
like, General, ” I said. “And write up some
preliminary reports on what I think about it. ”

“It’s going to take you a little longer
than that, Phil, ” Trudeau said. Now he was almost laughing,
something he didn’t do very much in those days. In fact, the
only time I remember him laughing that way was after he heard that his
name had been put up to command the U.S. forces in Vietnam. He also
heard that they wanted me to head up the intelligence section for the
Army Special Forces command in Vietnam. We both knew that the army
mission in Vietnam was headed for disaster because it was a think-tank
war. And the people in the think tank were more worried about
restraining the army than in wiping out the Vietcong. So Trudeau had a
plan: “We’ll either win the war or get
court-martialed, ” he said. “But they’ll
know we were there. ” And he laughed when he said that the
same way he was laughing as he told me to take my time with the
contents of the file cabinet. “You’ll want to think
about this before you start writing any reports, ” he said.

I couldn’t help but pick up the nervousness in his
voice, forcing itself through his laughter, the same sound over the
phone that got me nervous when I heard it the first time. There really
was something here he wasn’t telling me.

“Is there something else about this I should know,
General?” I asked, trying not to show any hesitation in my
voice. Business as usual, nothing out of the ordinary, nothing anybody
can throw my way that I can’t handle.

“Actually, Phil, the material in this cabinet is a
little different from the run-of-the-mill foreign stuff we’ve
seen up to now, ” he said. “I don’t know
if you’ve ever seen the intelligence on what we’ve
got here when you were over at the White House, but before you write up
any summaries maybe you should do a little research on the Roswell
file. ”

Now I’d heard more about Roswell than I was ready to
admit right on the spot my first day at the Pentagon. And there were
more wild stories floating around about Roswell and what we were still
doing there than anyone could have imagined. But I hadn’t
made the connection between the Roswell files and what was in the
cabinet General Trudeau was talking about. Basically I had hoped after
Fort Riley that it would all go away and I could simply stick my head
in the sand and worry about things I could get my brain around like
bureaucratic in fighting inside Washington instead of little aliens
inside sealed coffins.

The general didn’t wait for me to answer him. He
left me standing there in his office and walked out to the reception
room, where I heard him giving orders into a speaker phone. He had
barely clicked off the speaker and walked back to where I was standing
when four enlisted men pulling a hand truck showed up, saluted, and
stood there at attention while Trudeau kept looking at me. He
didn’t say anything. He turned to the enlisted men instead.
“Load up this cabinet on that dolly and follow the colonel to
his office on the second floor. Don’t stop for anybody.
Don’t talk to anybody. If anyone stops you, you tell them to
see me. That’s an order. ”

Then he turned back to me. “Why don’t you
take some time with this, Phil. ” He paused. “But
not too much time. Sergeant” - he turned his attention back
to the enlisted man with the shortest haircut  - 
“please see the colonel back to his own office below.
”