Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 11

by Majic Man (v5. 0)

  The Forrestals’ son Michael distinguished himself with service in the Kennedy White House, returning to law practice after the assassination; his life was devoted to improving understanding between the United States and the Soviet Union. Unmarried, he died of an aneurysm in January 1989, at sixty-one; he was chairing a committee of the governing board of Lincoln Center, at the time. Brother Peter worked for his father’s old firm, Dillon, Read, then for Ferdinand Eberstadt’s company (Eberstadt died in 1969, leaving a personal estate of fifty million). Peter shared his mother’s love of and skill with horses, but also shared her love for, and lack of skill with, alcohol. He died at fifty-two of an abdominal hemorrhage due to heavy drinking, leaving behind a bride of a year, pregnant with a daughter he never knew.

  Many of those I met on the Forrestal/Roswell job are gone—including two class acts of law enforcement, Frank J. Wilson and Hughie Baughman—and others I never saw again and couldn’t tell you what became of them, like the two medical corpsmen, Prise and Harrison, and the doctor who tore his sleeve, Deen.

  But Roswell … that was another story.

  For many years, the incident at Roswell—despite the historical significance of the Air Force issuing a press release announcing the recovery of a flying saucer—rarely received even a mention in the voluminous UFO literature of the late forties and on through the seventies.

  But in 1978, Stanton Friedman—a nuclear physicist with an interest in UFOs—followed up a lead that led him to Lieutenant Colonel Jesse Marcel, retired, who had spent his post-military years running a television repair shop in Houma, Louisiana. Marcel told Friedman the same story he’d told me back in 1949—a story he had apparently told no one since—and a Roswell floodgate opened.

  A cottage industry of books by Friedman and others blossomed, with scads of television documentaries, in which Marcel and other witnesses—like Glenn Dennis, Walter Haut, Frank Joyce and Frank Kaufmann—came forward, becoming celebrities in UFO circles, even television stars, with the many appearances they made. Marcel’s son, a physician and pilot, with memories of the samples of strange “saucer” debris his father had brought home in ’47, joined in with his own recollections, taking over as family TV spokesman after his father’s death in 1986. These were solid citizens, clearly not kooks, and their reminiscences carried weight.

  Some potential Roswell witnesses, however, received their fifteen minutes of fame posthumously.

  Mac Brazel died in 1963, though relatives and neighbors told his story to researchers and on camera. His son Bill Brazel reported his father had been held by the Air Force for eight days in the base “guesthouse.”

  Colonel William “Butch” Blanchard remained tight-lipped on the subject of Roswell, in public at least, though friends reported he’d said, when asked about the supposed saucer, “I’ll tell you this, what I saw I’d never seen before.” Shortly after the incident, he was promoted to general and, at the time of his death in 1966, was Deputy Chief of Staff of the Air Force.

  Sheriff George Wilcox did not run for reelection and his family considered the saucer incident to have gravely affected his health and outlook. Wilcox passed away before the renewed interest in the saucer crash; but family members, including his wife, Inez, came forward with tales of death threats from the military.

  The daughter of fireman Dan Dwyer, Frankie Rowe, told of the strange debris, scraps of which she had handled, and claimed that her father (part of a fire department crew called to the crash site) had described “aliens” being loaded into body bags. She also tearfully recounted death threats to her father and herself by sinister figures from the government.

  The resurgence of Roswell interest caused the Air Force to do something remarkable: they contradicted their previous explanation of the debris found on the Foster ranch with a thick official report in 1994, admitting the weather balloon story had been a cover-up for Project Mogul—which in 1947 had been classified Top Secret A-1. This—the third official explanation (first a flying disk, then a weather balloon, now Project Mogul)—was the intelligence-gathering balloon train described to me by Frank Wilson in 1949. An experimental attempt to acoustically detect suspected Soviet atomic explosions and missile launchings, Mogul utilized acoustical sensors, radar reflecting targets and other gizmos, all of which were attached to a train of weather balloons over six hundred feet long.

  The flaw in this explanation—which I’ve never heard anybody point out, including the “UFOlogists”—is that Project Mogul would be the very device gathering information for Major Jesse Marcel at SAC in 1948 and ’49. Unless Marcel was part of a decades-spanning disinformation campaign—which seems very unlikely, considering his burst of UFO TV fame in his elderly years—this indicates Marcel, in the new job he’d been transferred to from Roswell, would have likely discovered that the strange debris he’d found in ’47 was from one of the devices gathering information for him in ’48. And he would not have spoken to me in 1949, nor a horde of Roswell researchers in the late seventies and early eighties, from the point of view of a man still bewildered by what he’d found on the Foster ranch.

  The Project Mogul explanation, of course, didn’t speak to the many witnesses—Frank Kaufmann, Glenn Dennis and a number of others who came out of the woodwork in the eighties and thereafter—who spoke of the second crash site, the wedge-like aircraft and the alien crew.

  So the Air Force rolled up its sleeves for a fourth official explanation. In 1997, in perhaps the most tortuous piece of logic to arise out of Roswell yet, the Air Force explained that the alien bodies that had been seen by witnesses in 1947 were crash-test dummies dropped by the USAF starting around 1952. Seems the residents of Roswell were simply confused about the time frame.

  The Air Force insisted that “Maria Selff,” the nurse Glenn Dennis claimed to have known (and of whom others had memories), never existed; memories of aliens were probably confused recollections of Captain Dan Fulgham’s injury in a 1959 balloon gondola accident, from which the captain’s face became swollen; and furthermore the mortician’s claim that he’d been bullied by a black MP was impossible, because no black sergeants were stationed at the air base during that time period.

  Majestic Twelve reared its head in 1984 when documents similar to the ones Pearson had received (I never actually saw them) were delivered anonymously to a UFO researcher, Jamie Shandera. On a roll of 35mm black-and-white film were copies of the letter from Truman to Forrestal, and a “briefing document” supposedly prepared for President-elect Eisenhower. Tops and bottoms of pages were stamped TOP SECRET/MAJIC EYES ONLY. The list of Majic-12 members included Forrestal, with mention that, after his death, he had been replaced (he was MJ-3) by General Walter Bedell Smith.

  Majestic Twelve (or Majic-12), according to these documents, was “a TOP SECRET Research and Development/Intelligence operation responsible directly and only to the President of the United States,” and the briefing papers described the crash of a saucer-like craft near Roswell and the recovery of “four small human-like beings.”

  To true believers, the Majic-12 papers were the Holy Grail found; for professional UFO debunkers, the material was an obvious hoax. Both sides mounted impressive arguments, but those in the know recognized the extensive inside knowledge and expertise in military documents that would have had to go into such an elaborate fabrication. A few small voices cried, “Disinformation,” largely unheeded. The Majestic Twelve files remain a hotly debated topic among believers and debunkers alike.

  Perhaps because my inquiry into Roswell had taken place almost two years after the various events that composed the “incident,” none of the researchers or documentary film-makers sought me out, at least not until the pending fiftieth anniversary of the crash in 1997 raised interest to a fever pitch. A freelance journalist from Davenport, Iowa—Matthew Clemens—had run across a mention of me in a Roswell-related FBI memo unearthed by the Freedom of Information Act, and tracked me down (by phone) at my Coral Springs condo.

  “You talked to th
e eyewitnesses,” Clemens said over the phone, sounding young and eager, “in a contemporary time frame—everyone else who interviewed them did so thirty years after the fact, or more.”

  “Yeah,” I said, sounding like the cranky old man that I was. “So?”

  “So, did you uncover anything, back then, when memories were fresh, that the latter-day researchers haven’t?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t read any of the ‘latter-day researchers.’”

  “Mr. Heller, I’m going down my own path, here, and I need to talk to somebody knowledgeable, somebody who was there, but who doesn’t have an agenda.”

  “What do you mean, an agenda?”

  “Well, guys like Walter Haut and Glenn Dennis, they’re caught up in it, now. Haut’s a longtime Roswell Chamber of Commerce guy, and both of ’em are involved with running a UFO museum there! I mean, it’s become the town industry.”

  “So what road are you going down, Mr. Clemens?”

  “I’ve been digging for information on the Nazi presence at White Sands, which was nearby. You know about Operation Paperclip, don’t you?”

  “Putting Nazi scientists on the U.S. payroll. Got us to the moon.”

  “Yeah, it did. We had … let me check my notes … seven hundred and sixty-five of ’em working for us, scientists, doctors, technicians; at least half, maybe as many as eighty percent of ’em, were Nazi party members and/or SS men. Of course those guys claim they only joined the party and SS because they couldn’t get research grants, otherwise.”

  “And you think this has something to do with Roswell, Mr. Clemens?”

  “Yeah, at first I thought the ‘saucer’ was one of these refurbished V-2s … you know, maybe the ‘aliens’ were monkeys; von Braun was obsessed with manned flight, you know. But I’m onto something better, something bigger. You ever hear of the Fugo incendiary bomb?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Really?”

  “The Japs launched unmanned high-altitude balloons, with bombs on ’em, hoping to explode them in our Pacific Northwest.”

  “I’m impressed, Mr. Heller. The hope was to ignite forest fires, and deny lumber to the war effort. And of course, the effort was a bust. But new evidence indicates the Japanese may have been working on a second-generation Fugo, with kamikaze pilots to target them. That never got off the drawing board.”

  “So you think the Roswell crash was a Fugo balloon?”

  “No. I think it was a VTOL.”

  “And what would that be, Mr. Clemens?”

  “A vertical-takeoff-and-landing aircraft. These German brothers, Walter and Reimar Horten, designed them—first for the Nazis, then for us, after the war. See, the German runways were shot to hell, and something that could lift off without a runway might have won the thing for them, and Hitler and his crowd would be carved on Mount Rushmore, right now. Also, the VTOL was the Reich’s only shot at trying out their new jet-engine propulsion system.”

  “So was the Roswell crash a balloon or a, what? Vertical-takeoff whatever?”

  “I think it was a combination of both, a hybrid craft utilizing Fugo lifting technology and a Horten-designed lifting body.”

  He had just explained the balloon debris found on the Brazel ranch, and the aircraft discovered north of Roswell.

  “Well, Mr. Heller? What do you think of my theory?”

  “Son,” I said, “it’ll never fly.”

  And that ended my one and only interview on Roswell.

  I have finally broken my silence, including admitting a murder, confident that the United States government will not come to Florida looking for the old man making these absurd statements. The true believers will discount my tale—part of me hopes they’ll label it “disinformation”—and the debunkers will reject it, too, because they didn’t think of it.

  As I write this, a new millennium approaches, and Roswell, New Mexico, has three UFO museums (retired mortician Glenn Dennis is the president of the International UFO Museum & Research Center). The town of fifty thousand also has bus tours to various impact sites, and numerous shops selling T-shirts, dolls, puppets, spaceship earrings, bumper stickers and UFO hats. More than five million earth dollars a year, of late, have been pumped into Roswell, where its annual summer UFO celebration—with rock concert, “Best Alien” costume contest, laser light show and film festival—has attracted as many as 150,000 tourists. The town’s new motto: “Crash in Roswell.” No one seems to care about the space program anymore, that trip to the moon the Nazi scientists helped us make; we’re more interested in watching science-fiction movies on our Japanese-designed video equipment. But, of course, everybody’s interested in Roswell, and why not? Something strange happened there.

  I OWE THEM ONE

  Despite its extensive basis in history, this is a work of fiction, and liberties have been taken with the facts, though as few as possible—and any blame for historical (and/or geographical) inaccuracies is my own, reflecting, I hope, the limitations of conflicting source material.

  Of all the subjects I’ve chosen to explore to date in the Heller “memoirs,” the Roswell incident is perhaps the most written about, outdistancing even Amelia Earhart (Flying Blind, 1998), Huey Long’s assassination (Blood and Thunder, 1995) and the Lindbergh baby kidnapping (Stolen Away, 1991). Whether this fact is remarkable or absurd, I leave to the reader’s judgment.

  But—as with the disappearance of Amelia Earhart—books on this subject tend to display the bias of the authors/researchers. Many of the debunkers will accept no evidence tending toward extraterrestrial phenomena; many of the believers will accept any evidence. Both approaches are, as is obvious even to a B-biology student like me, bad science.

  This does not deprive the best Roswell books of their entertainment value or make them less than worthwhile; it does demand that readers approach these works with a combination of skepticism and open-mindedness. I am prepared to be attacked by both sides, incidentally, because the theory expressed in this book is unlikely to be accepted by either the debunkers or the believers. And while I do not put this theory forth as anything more than a reasoned, reasonably informed alternative solution, it is a result of a trip down a research road fraught with the potholes of contradictory and frustrating evidence.

  The best-known of the believers is probably my fellow Iowan Kevin Randle, and he alone of the pro-UFO crowd seems to make an attempt to hold the evidence to somewhat rigorous standards. He regularly revises his opinions, based on new facts, and has debunked some of his own star witnesses—a rarity in UFO circles. At this writing, Randle’s most recent thoughts on Roswell can be found in The Randle Report (1997); his earlier book-length works on the subject are UFO Crash at Roswell (1991, with Donald R. Schmitt) and The Truth About the UFO Crash at Roswell (1994, also with Schmitt). All three of Randle’s well-crafted books were useful in the writing of this novel.

  Another pioneer (mentioned in the narrative), and the key defender of the Majestic Twelve documents, is nuclear physicist Stanton Friedman, who contributed research to the first book-length work on the subject, The Roswell Incident (1980) by Charles Berlitz and William L. Moore. Friedman’s books Crash at Corona (1992, 1997, written with Don Berliner) and Top Secret/Majic (1996) were extremely helpful to this project. Anyone interested in Roswell needs to read both Randle and Friedman.

  Two excellent books that attempt, with some success, to debunk the incident are The Real Roswell Crashed-Saucer Incident (1997) by Philip J. Klass, and The Roswell UFO Crash (1997) by Kal K. Korff. These were vital sources in the writing of this novel, particularly useful in trying to sort through the muddled chronology of events (and supposed events), although the extent to which Klass and Korff disbelieve at times rivals the absurdity of the believers at their most naive. Incidentally, inconsistencies in the various Roswell authors’ chronology have been resolved in this book in favor of whatever the hell the narrative needed.

  The Roswell File (1997) by Tim Shawcross is the closest attempt I found to examine the
incident in an objective fashion; while Shawcross appears to be in the believer camp, he presents negative evidence, which he discusses with an open mind, as opposed to the professional skepticism of Klass and Korff. A similar approach—but with a wider-ranging view of the UFO phenomenon—is taken by Jim Marrs in Alien Agenda (1997); and yet another objective look is provided by a former teacher of mine (at the University of Iowa in the early seventies), C.D.B. Bryan, in Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind: Alien Abduction, UFOs, and the Conference at MIT (1995).

  I relied heavily upon a wide-eyed believer’s account of the incident, the lavishly illustrated Beyond Roswell (1997) by Michael Hesemann and Philip Mantle, which thoroughly explores Majestic Twelve and may be the most fun of any of these books, assembling a coherent narrative out of the various, sometimes incredibly dubious, evidence. The Roswell Report: Case Closed (1997) by Captain James McAndrew is the United States Air Force’s second published report on the incident, and was extremely useful, and less tainted by bias than the Klass and Korff books, but at the same time less credible, particularly considering that this is the government’s fourth official explanation of the incident.

  Roswell articles I consulted include “Roswell or Bust” by Bruce Handy, Time (June 23, 1997); “50 Years After Roswell” by Dawn Stover, Popular Science (June 1997); and “Roswell—50 Years Later” by Jim Wilson, Popular Mechanics (July 1997)—the latter in particular helping me fine-tune my “solution.” The Complete Roswell Encyclopedia, a one-shot magazine published by Steve Harris, was another valuable resource. Various Internet articles, including Troy Taylor’s “The Lodge—Cloudcroft, New Mexico” (which details the legend of the hotel’s ghost), were helpful, as well.