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 infighting 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 speakerphone. 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.”
They loaded the file cabinet onto the dolly as if there were nothing inside, pulled it toward the back door, and stared at me until I followed them out. “Not too much time, Colonel,” General Trudeau called after me as we went out the door and down the hall.
I remember I spent quite a while just looking at that cabinet after it was loaded off the dolly and set up in my inner office. There was an almost ominous quality to it that belied its quiet, official army presence. So I must confess that, given the reverse hype of the general’s introduction, part of me wanted to tear it open right away as if it were a present on Christmas morning. But the part of me that won just let it sit there, protected, until I thought about what General Trudeau had said about Roswell and the amount of paperwork that had circulated through the White House when I was on the National Security staff there. No, I wasn’t going to review the Roswell files. Not just yet. Not until I took a long hard look at what was inside this file cabinet. But even that was going to wait until the rest of my office was set up. Whatever I was supposed to do, I wanted to do it right.
I spent a little time pacing around my new office while I thought some more about what the general said, why this file was waiting for me in his private office, and why he had wanted to talk to me specifically about it. It also wasn’t lost on me that I had not seen one scrap of paper from the general covering his delivery of the material to me nor my receipt of it. It could have just as easily been that this file cabinet didn’t even exist. As far as I knew, only his eyes and soon my eyes would review it. So whatever it was, it was serious and, only if by omission, very secret.
I remembered a hot July night fourteen years before at Fort Riley when I was the young intelligence officer after having just been shipped back from Rome. I remembered being hustled into a storage hangar by one of the sentries, a fellow member of the Fort Riley bowling team. What he pointed to under the thick olive tarp that night was also very, very secret, and I held my breath, hoping that what was inside this cabinet wasn’t anything like what I saw that night in Kansas, July 6, 1947.
I opened the cabinet, and almost immediately my heart sank. I knew, from looking at the shoebox of tangled wires and the strange cloth, from the visorlike headpiece and the little wafers that looked like Ritz crackers only with broken edges and colored a dark gray, and from an assortment of other items that I couldn’t even relate to the shapes and sizes of things I was familiar with, that my life was headed for a big change. Back in Kansas that night in July, I told myself that I was seeing an illusion, something that if I wished real hard, didn’t have to exist for me. Then, after I went to the White House and saw all the National Security Council memos describing the “incident” and talking about the “package” and the “goods,” I knew that the strange figure I’d seen floating in liquid in a casket within a casket at Fort Riley wasn’t just a bad dream I could forget about. Nor could I forget about the radar anomalies at the Red Canyon missile range or the strange alerts over Ramstein air base in West Germany. I only hoped all of it would never catch up with me again and I could go through the rest of my army career in some kind of peace. But it was not to be. There, mangled like somebody else’s junk, were the trinkets I knew would involve me in something deeper than I had ever wanted. Whatever else I had to do in this life, here was a job that would change it all.
You know how in the movies when Bud Abbott would open a closet, see the dead body hanging there, close the closet door, open it up again, and find the body gone? That’s what I actually did with the file cabinet. Nobody was there to see me, or so I believed, so I opened it, closed it, opened it again. But this was no movie and the stuff was still there.
So here it was, some of the material they’d recovered from Roswell. And now, just like a bad penny, it turned up again. I heard footsteps outside my door and caught my breath. There were always sounds in the Pentagon at night because the building was never empty. Somewhere, in some office, in parts of the building most people don’t even know about, some group is planning for a war we hope we will never fight. Therefore, more than any other building except for the White House, the Pentagon is a place where someone is always walking around after something.
General Trudeau peeked his head around the door.
“Look inside?” he asked.
“What’d you do to me, General?” I said. “I thought we were friends.”
“That’s why I gave you this, Phil,” he said, but he wasn’t laughing, wasn’t even smiling. “You know how valuable this property is? You know what any of the other agencies would do to get this into their hands?”
“They’d probably kill me,” I said.
“They probably want to kill you anyway, but this makes them even more rabid. The air force wants it because they think it belongs to them. The navy wants it because they want anything the air force wants. The CIA wants it so they can give it to the Russians.”
“What do you want me to do, General?” I asked. I couldn’t figure out what he was thinking unless he thought I should just bury the stuff and leave it at that.
“I need a plan from you,” he said. “Not simply what this property is, but what we can do with it. Something that keeps it out of play until we know what we have and what use we can make of it.”
This had all the makings of a plot, pure and simple.
“Look, who’s our biggest problem?” I asked, but it was a pro forma question because I already knew the answer.
“The same people who lost Korea for us and who you had to fight over at the White House,” he said. “You know exactly who I mean. We got to keep whatever’s valuable here from falling into the wrong hands because as sure as we’re standing in this Pentagon, it’ll find its way right to the Kremlin.”
There were people floating around Wash
ington right at that very moment who, even out of the most well-meaning intentions they could muster, would have shipped this Roswell file over to Russia while patting President Kennedy on the back and congratulating him for contributing to world peace. Just as there were people who would have cut Trudeau’s and my throat and left us right on the rug to bleed to death while they packed that file away. Either way, Trudeau didn’t have to quote me chapter and verse to explain that he was handing me one of the most important assignments I would ever receive from him. He was giving me the keys to a whole new kingdom, but neither he nor I knew what in the world we could do with this stuff, short of keeping it out of the hands of the Russians. At the very least, that was a start.
“We have to know what we have first,” I said.
“Then that’s your job right away. What do we have? Anything usable here? Put together people you can trust from the specialists we have and go over the contacts at our defense contractor lists. And this is only part of the property we have. There’s some more of it downstairs in the file basement that the other intelligence agencies don’t know anything about. Came here from New Mexico instead of going out to Ohio. Don’t ask me why. It’s coming up to you right now in boxes. Just put everything together, take some time, and evaluate this for me.”
“Anybody know I have this?” I asked.
“Everybody knows that if you’re poking around something it’s got to be important,” he said. “So don’t act like the cat that ate the canary. They’re watching you as much as they’re watching me.” Then he walked to the doorway, looked down both ends of the hall, and turned back to me. “But move this thing along, because we could be out of this office in under a year and I don’t want to have to worry about running out of time on this.”
And he was gone in a heartbeat, as if we’d never had the conversation.
I didn’t take the file apart that night, even after another nondescript wooden crate that looked like something you ship vegetables in was carted to my office by an equally nondescript army corporal. I didn’t go through the material the next night, either. But over the following week, whenever I could be sure that no one was around who could pop in without warning, I moved the material from the box into the file and allowed myself time to look at it. It was just like falling through the looking glass into a different world, a puzzle of separate pieces that only vaguely captured what had been in the memos I’d read over at the White House. No wonder no one had really wanted anything to do with this junk, which held out the promise of a whole world we knew nothing about but that as far back as 1947, the government had decided to keep an absolute secret.
Career after career of anyone in government who even hinted at the big dark secret of Roswell was pulverized by whoever was behind this operation. And, although I knew far more than I had even admitted to myself, I would never be the one to shoot off my mouth. But now this file, what I would eventually call the “nut file” to General Trudeau, had come into my possession, and as the ensuing weeks turned into a month, I gradually figured out where some of the puzzle pieces fit.
First there were the tiny, clear, single-filament, flexible glasslike wires twisted together through a kind of gray harness as if they were cables going into a junction. They were narrow filaments, thinner than copper wire. As I held the harness of strands up to the light from my desk, I could see an eerie glow coming through them as if they were conducting the faint light and breaking it up into different colors. When the personnel at the retrieval site in the desert outside of Roswell pulled this piece out of the wreckage of the delta-shaped object, they thought it was some sort of wiring device—a harness is what they said—or maybe some of them thought it was a junction box or electrical relay. But whatever they thought it was, they believed there was nothing like it on this planet. As I turned the object over in my hand, I figured, from the way the individual filaments flexed back and forth but didn’t break and the way they were able to conduct a light beam along their length, they were a wire of some sort. But for what purpose I didn’t have a clue.
Then there were the thin two-inch-around matte gray oyster cracker–shaped wafers of a material that looked like plastic but had tiny road maps of wires barely raised/etched along the surface. They were the size of a twenty-five-cent piece, but the etchings on the surface reminded me of squashed insects with their hundred legs spread out at right angles from a flat body. Some were more rounded or elliptical. It was a circuit—anyone could figure that out by 1961, especially when you put it under a magnifying glass—but from the way these wafers were stacked on each other, this was a circuitry unlike any other I’d ever seen. I couldn’t figure out how to plug it in and what kind of current it carried, but it was clearly a wire circuitry of a sort that came from a larger board of wafers on board the flying craft. My hand shook ever so slightly as I held these pieces, not because they themselves were scary but because I was awed, just for a few seconds, about the momentous nature of this find. It was like an architectural treasure trove, the discoveries of some long-departed culture, a Rosetta stone, even though whoever crashed onto the desert floor was still very active and roaming around our most secret army and air force bases.
I was most interested in the file descriptions accompanying a two-piece set of dark elliptical eyepieces as thin as skin. The Walter Reed pathologists said they adhered to the lenses of the extraterrestrial creatures’ eyes and seemed to reflect existing light, even in what looked like complete darkness, so as to illuminate and intensify images in the darkness to allow their wearer to pick out shapes. The reports had said that the pathologists at Walter Reed hospital who autopsied one of these creatures tried to peer through them in the darkness to watch the one or two army sentries and medical orderlies walking down a corridor adjacent to the pathology lab. These figures were illuminated in a greenish orange, depending upon how they moved, but the pathologists could see only their outer shape. And when they got close to each other, their shapes blended into a single form. But they could also see the outlines of furniture and the wall and objects on desktops. Maybe, I thought as I read this report, soldiers could wear a visor that intensified images through the reflection and amplification of available light and navigate in the darkness of a battlefield with as much confidence as if they were walking their sentry posts in broad daylight. But these eyepieces didn’t turn night into day, they only highlighted the exterior shapes of things.
There was a dull, grayish-silvery foil-like swatch of cloth among these artifacts that you could not fold, bend, tear, or wad up but that bounded right back into its original shape without any creases. It was a metallic fiber with physical characteristics that would later be called “supertenacity,” but when I tried to cut it with scissors, the arms just slid right off without making even a nick in the fibers. If you tried to stretch it, it bounced back, but I noticed that all the threads seemed to be going in one direction. When I tried to stretch it widthwise instead of lengthwise, it looked like the fibers had reoriented themselves to the direction I was pulling in. This couldn’t be cloth, but it obviously wasn’t metal. It was a combination, to my unscientific eye, of a cloth woven with metal strands that had the drape and malleability of a fabric and the strength and resistance of a metal. I was on top of some of the most secret weapons projects at the Pentagon, and we had nothing like this, even under the wish-list category.
There was a written description and a sketch of another device, too, like a short, stubby flashlight almost with a self-contained power source that was nothing at all like a battery. The scientists at Wright Field who examined it said they couldn’t see the beam of light shoot out of it, but when they pointed the pencil-like flashlight at a wall, they could see a tiny circle of red light, but there was no actual beam from the end of what seemed like a lens to the wall as there would have been if you were playing a flashlight off on a distant object. When they passed an object in front of the source of the light, it interrupted it, but the beam was so intense the object began smoking. They
played with this device a lot before they realized that it was an alien cutting device like a blowtorch. One time they floated some smoke across the light and suddenly the whole beam took shape. What had been invisible suddenly had a round, microthin, tunnel-like shape to it. Why did the inhabitants of this craft have a cutting device like this aboard their ship? It wasn’t until later, when I read military reports of cattle mutilations in which entire organs were removed without any visible trauma to the surrounding cell tissue, that I realized that the light-beam cutting torch I thought was in the Roswell file was actually a surgical implement, just like a scalpel, that was being used by the aliens in medical experiments on our livestock.
Then there was the strangest device of all, a headband, almost, with electrical-signal pickup devices on either side. I could figure out no use for this thing whatsoever unless whoever used it did so as a fancy hair band. It seemed to be a one-size-fits-all headpiece that did nothing, at least not for humans. Maybe it picked up brain waves like an electroencephalogram and projected a chart. But no private experiment conducted on it seemed to do anything at all. The scientists didn’t even determine how to plug it in or what its source of power was because it came with no batteries or diagrams.
The Day After Roswell Page 6
