GENERAL RAMEY: Radar practice is one of the fundamental training functions of the AAF. They also do it at Roswell, don't they, Major Gray?
MAJ. GRAY: Yes, sir.
QUESTIONER: Major Gray, aren't you an intelligence officer?
MAJ. GRAY: Yes, sir. That is correct.
QUESTIONER: And yet you thought this was a flying saucer? This is just tinfoil.
MAJ. GRAY: The misidentification was a result of a series of miscommunications.
QUESTIONER: Didn't you personally gather this debris in a field near Roswell?
And personally identify it as a crashed disk?
GENERAL RAMEY: There are misidentifications of one object for another all the time. This was a case of mistaken identity. This is a complicated business, identification of one object or another.
QUESTIONER: This rawinsonde is a weather balloon? Can we say that?
W.O. YANCEY: No, sir, this is -
GENERAL RAMEY: Say that. That's fine. It's close. You can tell the way the wind is blowing looking at these things. A mistaken identification of a weather balloon. As far as I can see, there is nothing to get excited about.
Would you concur. Major Gray?
MAJ. GRAY: Absolutely nothing here to get excited about. What we have here is a common device in use in the Air Force.
GENERAL RAMEY: Thank you very much, gentlemen.
Chapter Thirteen
Describing his first moments on site, Will leaned back and coughed a long, productive cough and closed his eyes. "It was like being in heaven," he said. "It was the highest of high adventure."
Will was a romantic, and as such a dangerous man. Romanticism rejects the ordinary, seeks the impossible and demands death for failure. The ultimate romantic was the Waffen-SS officer standing in the turret of his Tiger tank, battling the cold plains and blood of Russia.
I am not a romantic.
As the helicopters wheezed into silence Will strode up to the disk. So far nobody had entered it, nobody had even come this close.
A breeze brought an unusual smell, a sort of sulfurousness mixed with decay. It was coming from beneath the two tarps that covered the bodies of the pilots. Flies buzzed around them. Death was death, the flies knew.
To Will's absolute astonishment a civilian came strolling out from behind the disk. "Hiya," he said congenially, "I'm Barney Barnett."
"Who?"
"Barnett. I'm with the survey."
Will was thunderstruck. Surely nobody had been so remarkably stupid as to assign a civilian survey team to this site. "You're surveying this crash?"
He laughed. "Nah, not this. The mapping survey."
The man had blundered into the most secret place in the country. His unexpected appearance reminded Will that things were in a profound state of disorder. It went deeper than a simple lack of security, and it arose from a number of factors.
At this moment in history the government was undergoing intense change. The Air Force was being split off from the Army; the Department of Defense was being formed out of the Old War Department; the CIG was becoming the CIA; the American war machine was being dismantled and the Cold War was just starting.
The U.S. had no agency in place to meet the aliens, no properly positioned personnel, and no organization at all. Will felt as if he was being rolled in a wave.
"Mr. Barnett, go sit over there," he said, pointing to where the copters had landed.
"Is this a flying saucer?"
"We're just examining it."
"Because I had a look at those bodies before you guys got here, and they surely aren't human beings. No, sir."
"All right."
One of the enlisted men escorted the surveyor away. Will returned to the business at hand.
The device was about thirty feet in diameter, dented and collapsed in the front. You could see where it had skidded across the ground, making a track about sixty feet long. He walked around it, looking for an entrance.
Given the circumstances, his approach was admirably straightforward. One would have thought that considerably more caution was in order.
There was an opening on the bottom. When he bent down he could see a small chamber inside, but the hatchway was too tight for him. At that point he considered looking for a more lightly built volunteer, but the thought of not being the first to enter the craft was unacceptable to him.
Then he found the place where the blast had occurred. It was a tear about eight feet long toward the rear of the craft. Inside he could see shreds of what looked like wax paper and bits of tinfoil. This was a much more promising point of entry.
He called to Lieutenant Hesseltine, who—still green from the flight—came reeling up with a flashlight and -
absurdly—a pair of pliers.
"I'm going in, Lieutenant."
"Is that wise?"
"There's nothing left alive around here."
"I mean—what you might encounter. Booby traps."
"I doubt if they had time to set traps."
"I gotta tell you, I'll back you up but I don't like this." As they talked Will examined the wound in the disk. The debris found on the Ungar ranch had obviously come from this area. He looked inside, shining the flashlight around. Then he leaned into the opening.
His head was in a small room that had been badly damaged by the explosion. The gray floor had collapsed into the base of the craft. The walls had been made of sheets of wax paper with yellow flowers pressed between them. He recalls the cheerful shambles as seeming very sad.
He wanted to get into the room. The trouble was finding a handhold. Everything was torn, bent or broken and it all looked extremely fragile. Experimentally he pulled at a shred of the paper. It proved to be as tough as the soldiers had claimed it was, and as it turned out he had no difficulty using it to pull himself up into the craft.
Beyond the damaged room the machine seemed to be largely intact. It was gloomy and he had to use the flashlight. He went deeper into the ship.
He told me about this in such matter-of-fact tones that I must surmise that it never occurred to him to be afraid. It would have occurred to me, I can tell you.
In 1947, of course, they barely considered issues like the danger of alien bacteria and viruses. Were such a craft to appear for the first time now we would immediately take steps to isolate it from the environment, and would approach it only with the most carefully prepared personnel and the greatest caution.
In those days, though, a vaguely briefed young man seemed completely adequate to the task at hand.
He must have been mad. That was the most dangerous place on earth, the interior of the disk, and it was being penetrated by an ignorant kid in shirtsleeves. His only equipment was a flashlight that kept going out.
He called back to Hesseltine, "Looks okay."
"See any controls? Equipment?" Children in the cookie jar.
"Not yet," he reported. He had expected to find a flight deck complete with rows and rows of dials, sticks for the pilots and perhaps a couple of jumpseats for deadheading buddies.
To move forward he almost had to crawl.
Then he arrived in a round central room, and there had his first taste of what he had come here to find, the deep unknown.
The floor below him was black and shiny and curved. It looked and felt as if he was standing on the top of an enormous bowling ball. To his left and right were two more of the wax-paper doors. They were really just wooden frames with the paper glued to them. It all looked delicate and oriental. Had it been a few years earlier, they would have been suspicious that this was a Japanese secret weapon.
The black curved surface he was standing on was extremely slippery, and he fell forward when he shifted his weight. He hit the wall, which was made of a gray substance as thin as the wax paper that formed the doors behind him. It wrinkled but snapped back into place as he regained his balance.
He thought he heard something on the other side of the wall.
He shone his light but it seemed dim, and the
outside world was far away. Not only was the interior of the ship extremely dark, it was incredibly quiet.
Behind him he could see Hesseltine's head and shoulders as he squinted into the craft. There was a strange effect, as if the man was underwater.
Nobody then understood the significance of the black object Will had walked across. He has told me that they eventually decided it was a gravity motor, and still operating at very low power. It was distorting space and time. Without knowing or understanding, Will was feeling the effects.
He called Hesseltine, but the man simply stared. He hadn't heard a thing.
"Hesseltine?" The lieutenant was no more than eight feet away. "Hesseltine!"
He frowned. "Are you there, Mr. Stone?"
"I'm here."
"Where?"
"Right in front of you!" Will stepped across the black object into the destroyed room.
"I couldn't see you."
"I'm going to go through into the front. Time me. Fifteen minutes. If I don't call or come out, come in and get me."
I asked Will if at that point he was afraid. He stared at me for a moment, then continued his narrative.
Again he crossed the slippery black object. This time he shone his flashlight into the darkness beyond the door. The room was empty. He proceeded.
Where was he now? Surely he should be up against the front of the craft. But there appeared to be more rooms beyond this one. This seemed completely impossible. He shone the light around, finally hitting on another hatch like the one he had just come through. He wriggled through it also, and finally found himself at the front. Here the ceiling was dented, corresponding to the damage that could be seen on the outside of the ship.
There were three tiny seats before a small, disappointingly simple control panel. It consisted only of a thick black rod with a round knob on top, protruding from the center of a console in front of one of the chairs.
That was all there was in the way of controls. Beyond the console were two half-moon-shaped windows in the lower part of the nose. They were embedded in the dirt, which he could see when he shone his light on them.
The shape of the windows, like two slitted, glowering eyes, made Will distinctly uneasy. They seemed familiar—or perhaps simply right—and that unsettled him. It was as if he was being affected by a powerful unknown beauty or horror, he could not tell which.
At this point things began to happen to him that the scientists he has worked with all these years still cannot explain. It was things like this that first made Will aware of the fact that the others had something to do with the life of the soul. As with so many people, merely being close to these high artifacts drew him toward his soul's denied truth.
Suddenly a scene swam up before his eyes, a terrible scene from early in the war. In 1940 he was working in France, before his transfer to Algeria, which had taken place after the United States entered the war.
He was in Marseilles developing contacts with the infant French Resistance, building an investment against future hardship, as it were.
He had just met Sophie Tuttle.
Never in all the time I spent with Will did he so much as allude to having a sexual relationship with a woman.
Sometimes he would mention Sophie, though, and stare long into space or take a hit from his bottle.
Now her face seemed to come looming up out of the dimness of the room. He describes himself as profoundly shocked. It seemed to him that time had been erased, that Sophie was back, real and alive.
He even smelled her perfume, L'Heure Bleu. She'd had a bottle of it. She'd worn it when they met for the last time, in Marseilles. He heard her sigh, heard the rustle of her dress. A snatch of song from the war,
"Radio-Paris ment," to the tune of "La Cucaracha." Radio Paris lies. Children would sing it, "Radio Paris lies, Radio Paris lies, Radio Paris is German." Sophie would also sing it.
He lost her the same way he lost the others, because the Gestapo was an excellent organization and he was a confused, underfinanced, frightened man alone in an enemy land.
His feelings were extremely intense. He was crying, and amazed at his own tears. It was as if she was just as wonderful and alive as she had been when their sun shone.
Then he snapped back, aware that he was not sitting in a cafe listening to old Jacques Reynard relate the manner of her death. Werner Roetter's triumph.
He told me that he had been friendly with the Gestapo chief—in a distant way. They had strolled together along the waterfront while Will knew that Roetter's underlings were boring holes in his lover's teeth. The strategy was to break her by disfiguring her.
After the war Werner Roetter joined West German intelligence and had a fine career. A sudden heart attack took him in 1977, and Will had sent a note to his wife, Hildegard. From time to time over the years they'd exchanged Christmas cards. "Why not? You get tired of hate, and Sophie is dead." My God, I'm glad I've never fought in a war. The sun in wartime, the songs of the birds, the rattle of children shoes on the cobblestones, sudden rain, it all came back to him.
I don't think that he ever truly forgot Sophie, and I feel sure that she was his only real love.
He remembered that first time in the ship as a confrontation with deep personal truths. "I recalled the way a forty-five feels in your hand, kind of ugly and kind of beautiful at the same time. Then you fire it and the top of a man's head flies off. Against the red blood the brains look white, and his skullcap and hair make a slap when they hit the wall. His arms fly akimbo and he drops. The face of a man suddenly dead captures all the sweetness life offers—if the bastard didn't suffer."
His friend Reynard told him that Sophie tucked in her chin before they hauled up the rope. Even at the end she was trying to live, hoping against hope that the noose would slip and give her a few more minutes.
It was like Will to have kept up with Sophie's murderer but to have lost track of the man who tried to save her.
Will claimed that he'd lost track of Jacques, but I discovered that he had been a Resistance hero and had not died until 1983. He was well known in Marseilles.
To see Jacques again Will would of course have had to face the pain of his love.
He told me, "I had the feeling I was being examined, as if my soul was being evaluated."
The room was tiny and hot and it stank, something he had not noticed at first. He described the smell as being a mixture of sulfur and Sophie's perfume.
He began to touch things. It was almost compulsive, as if some part of him was trying to hold reality that way. He ran his fingers along the little seats, the console, the black control stick, the ugly, squinting windows.
And then he saw the boy.
He screamed—finally. I would have done it a long time before. In his surprise he dropped his light, which rolled across the floor, making wild shadows on the walls and ceiling.
But for its dismal glow, now coming from beneath one of the chairs, the room was dark. He tried to fumble for it but he had entered a state of fear so deep that he could not coordinate his actions. He jerked and twisted, then sank to his knees.
He was helpless, sinking down, crouching, his head touching the cool, soft floor. And the being was there before him, a figure no larger than a child, grown in his mind to the proportions of a giant.
From the San Francisco Chronicle, July H, 1947:
DISK SOLUTION COLLAPSES
"Flying Saucer" Find Turns Out to Be a
Weather Balloon
A platter-puzzled nation thought it was about to get the answer to the mystery of the "flying disks" yesterday.
A press relations officer at the Roswell Army Air Force Base in New Mexico announced without qualification that the 509th Bomber Group had picked up a flying disk on a nearby ranch last week.
There was immediately much telephoning from the Pentagon in Washington, and then Brigadier General Roger M. Ramey, commanding the Eighth Air Force at Fort Worth, said the object had been identified as the wreckage of a high-altitude
weather observation device.
Originally, he said, it consisted of a box-kite and a balloon.
"The wreckage is in my office right now and as far as I can see there is nothing to get excited about," he said.
General Ramey later made a radio broadcast further to deflate the excitement caused by the first announcement.
The device, a star-shaped tinfoil target designed to reflect radar, is incapable of speeds higher than the wind.
The mysterious flying disks, which have been "seen" all over the nation (except Kansas, which is dry), have been described as traveling at speeds up to 1,200 miles an hour.
Chapter Fourteen
The Chronicle of Wilfred Stone
The small figure started to move forward. I could see its shadow coming quickly down toward me. I reared up and, shrieking like an animal, slapped at the thing.
It fell lightly against me and all of a sudden I was holding a dead child in my arms.
He felt almost like nothing. He was only a shadow in my arms, but he was so dead. It seemed to me that I was in the presence of an overwhelming tragedy or sacrifice. This was no "alien" disk, it was a thing of God's and I was holding a dead angel.
I cradled him in my arms. He was amazingly light; I doubt if he weighed more than ten pounds. I turned toward the entrance and started to carry him out. But it was too dark. I had to put him down on the floor and get the flashlight. Going down into the more intimate darkness of the floor I scrabbled around as if I was in my own kitchen hunting for a dropped matchbook in the night. I could feel dust there and the slight indentations made by many steps and sharp heels, and the base of one of the seats stuck down with glue.
There was such a feeling of something being alive in that room that I was almost unable to remain there when I finally grasped my flashlight. I shook it and got some dim light out of the stubborn battery.
I shone it into the dead face. There was an absolutely immediate and stunning sense of recognition.
He was—I remembered him.
Majestic Page 14
