The Roswell Swatch

by Scott Powers

  “Your granddad was picked for a unit that made the move. A top-secret mission. They never knew what it was all about,”Ziv told Eve. "They was just told they had a job to do. Move a bunch of junk from point A to point B. So they did."

  Ziv drew a scrapbook from the box.

  “Then those men he was with started dying,” Ziv said.

  Ziv handed Eve the scrapbook open to pages of yellowed newspaper clippings. She flipped through some. Obituaries. A drowning. A car crash. A fire. A natural gas explosion. All dated 1955. Her reverence surprised her as much as the revelations she was experiencing. After the fire, the Dayton paper noted the incident was the sixth recent death involving an airman at the base. An Air Force spokesman promised an inquiry. But there were no clippings following up.

  The next page held a black-and-white photograph of eight airmen.

  “Joe’s on the far left,”Ziv said.

  The man was thin. That was the first oddity. He was tall, uniformed in fatigues, and clean-cut, with a winning smile. It was Joe, as Eve had never seen or imagined him. But as she concentrated on it, she knew it was him. Same pentagon-shaped face, coming to a point at the chin. Same big ears. Same well-defined cheekbones. He was so young. She’d never seen a picture of him as a young man. She never even imagined him as a young man. She’d never cared to.

  Hey, Joe, she thought, at last wanting to believe it.

  There was one more old newspaper clipping, a page past the picture. It was of the crash that had killed Grandma Fay and injured Grandpa Joe. The caption referenced Joe and Fay Fynn.

  “He received a medical discharge because of his leg,” Nan said. “His commanding officer told him to get away and hide.”

  “The Air Force did this?”Eve asked.

  “No!”Zivsnapped.“Joe said the Air Force had nothin’to do with it. It was someone else. Something else.”

  Eve reviewed the photo and clips.

  “These articles only mention seven men,”she said.“There’s eight in the picture.”

  “That’s right,”Ziv said.

  Her grandfather had written names on the picture, but the ink was smeared and faded, and the penmanship tough to decipher. She could make out only three or four names for sure: Weitz, Blair, Keller, and what looked like Gleibicz.

  “Did he say who he thought did it?”

  “I don’t think he knew, dear,”Nan said.“He did mention an organization, the IBTT. Have you heard of it?”

  Eve shook her head. "IBTT? What's it standfor?”

  "I'm sure we don't know," Nan said. "And your granddad never said if he knew."

  “I’m not saying I do or don’t, but why do you believe him?”Eve asked. "This story is crazy. And it doesn't sound like the man I knew. No way."

  "But it is him, isn’t it, dear?" Nan said, folding the page back to the group photo.

  Eve had been sucked back into looking at the picture.

  “For one,”Zivsaid,“he kept a souvenir from that little mission.”

  She looked up.

  Zivtook a piece of foil from the box, a thin tissue, shiny grey like nickel, narrow like a swatch of sample fabric, and about ten inches long. She couldn’t tell if it was metal or plastic. It seemed both as she stared at it. He spread it on the coffee table. It went flat without the tiniest creases or imperfections.

  Next, Ziv fished a hunting knife out of a drawer in the coffee table.

  “No!”shrieked Nan.

  Ziv slammed the knife into the swatch, stabbing the material an inch deep into the wooden tabletop. The knife tip must have gone clean through the wood and it pushed the swatch down with it, as if were poking it down, not slicing neatly through.

  “Each man snuck some of this. Joe said there was boxes of it,”he said. "They didn't know what it was, but they knew it was somethin' damn strange. They figured no one would miss a piece here or there."

  With some effort, Ziv wriggled the knife free.

  Wriggle. Wriggle. Ziv’s effort popped the knife loose, and the tissue floated up with the blade. Then it settled back to the wooden tabletop.

  The swatch had no hole, not even an indentation where Zivhad stabbed it with the knife. Eve touched it there—slick and unscathed.

  “You can’t cut it, tear it, or burn it, Eve,”Zivsaid.“Whatever it is, this is what got them folks killed."

  "This," Nan said, lifting the swatch and holding it out to Eve as if she were offering her a tissue, "is what ruined your granddad’s life. This is what he wanted you to have.”

  “He said,”Zivadded,“‘Eve’llknow what to do with it.’That’s what he said.”

  CHAPTER 2

  ELI’S COMIN’

  Max Studebaker danced the curb in a Green Lantern costume, holding a black sign that spelled out MaxiComix in sparkly, gold letters. A gold arrow beneath pointed to the shopping center parking lot behind him.

  The trick to being a successful spinner along a busy Houston street was lost on most spinners. It was the dance, not the costume: wild enough to get a driver’s attention, yet smooth enough for Max to hold the sign still and straight so drivers could read it: MaxiComix.

  Tall, lanky, with long arms, and still wearing the long stringy, black hair from his rock and roll career, Max could draw attention without the costume and dance. Some drivers honked or waved. Assholes yelled witless insults. He loved it all. He loved the costume. He loved being the show.

  The comic store business couldn’t have been better. A decade of comic book blockbuster movies had fueled a boom. Japanese anime and manga created new markets and new products all the time. So did the Internet. The popular Big Bang TV show renewed the comic book allure many guys had forsaken as youthful entertainment. The days of the business being a kids- and geeks-only retreat were gone, and Max focused much of his business model on making comics and related products cool. Way cool.

  These costumed dances drew attention better than billboards. Anyone driving this street regularly knew MaxiComix was in the strip center behind him.

  Max and his partner were doing well financially, but Max really didn’tneed money, just a vocation. He’d built his life around his passions, and at thirty-six, Max Studebaker lived a charmed life. He had known pain, but he’d never known failure. Everything he tried worked. First, it was music. Then comics. Finally, the network.

  The network: Max wasn’t sure if there was a full name for it. In fact, he knew little about it, except that it had appeared when he needed it in his life. The network was an international group of like-minded individuals, smart believers like him, focused on a cause they had embraced—collecting and preserving evidence of UFOs. The group clearly had remarkable intelligence-gathering skills, impressive resources, and natural talent, even if all of it was deliciously mysterious. The missions entrusted to him always seemed right. Though they never quite satisfied Max’s thirst for proof, his work with the group always fulfilled him.

  Mail, calls, texts, or emails would arrive, and a network volunteer field agent like Max would ride out to investigate reported incidents, collect and validate potential evidence, and sometimes even save lives. Or so the network boasted. If nothing else, missions were humanitarian trips, offering anchorage to people who had just experienced an event so profound, so unbelievable, they felt cast adrift from all they had once believed.

  Max’s introduction had come after his own terrible experience in Detroit a few years back. The death of the woman he loved. Public ridicule as an unindicted murder suspect. No one ever believed him, because his story had been that she had been taken away in a flying saucer. He’d been powerless to do anything about it.

  Try to find fellowship on that. Try to find someone who genuinely, sympathetically, understandingly, would say,“It’s okay, Max. I believe you. That must have been terrible.”Well, it had been.

  Max’s first assignment from the network was a rookie’s task. A woman in Nacogdoches, Texas, had followed her barking spaniel into the woods. Through the trees, she had seen some sort of air
craft rise from a clearing. It wasn’t a helicopter. It had no wings. It went straight up, slowly at first, and then with ferocious speed and little noise. As it rose, she and her dog collapsed hard, as if pulled to the ground by an intense surge in gravity. Just like Max.

  She had described her encounter on social media. Within hours, someone in the network had flagged her post. Soon after, the new recruit named Max Studebaker drove into the pine forests of east Texas.

  Her house was outside town, just past a Texaco station. He didn’t call; he just showed up that Saturday morning. He didn’t know what to expect. She was equally clueless when she answered the door and found this awkward, former rock star on her stoop. They had coffee and shared stories. Lily Duetchesleggarwas a heavy woman in her forties, a divorcee with no kids, and a loan officer at the Texas Commercial Bank in town. Until a few days earlier, she had been a full-fledged member of the God-fearing society in which she’d lived her whole life. But she told Max she no longer knew how she fit in. She felt shed. Lily quickly warmed to Max. He was someone, at last, who professed to understand what she had gone through and what she was going through now.

  Max felt the same.

  With her dog DoubleTrouble—she called him Dub—Lily led Max into the woods. The brush thickened until he realized the sheriff’s office might have been prudent when it refused her demand to send a deputy to check the scene.

  “This is nothing,”she told Max.“There’s places back there the briars get so thick rabbits can’t get through.”

  The meadow was perhaps fifty yards at its widest. Max entered as if it were a crime scene, measuring and photographing everything. At times, he inspected on his hands and knees. Some of the grasses and wildflowers in the center appeared bent and broken. Here and there, the dirt, too, looked as if it had recently been crushed.

  But so what?

  “Was it on legs or skids?”he asked.

  “No idea. Dub and I were stuck over there.”She pointed.“I didn’t get the best view. My girlfriend Judy called it‘fear paralysis.’ She’s always into that psycho-mumbo-jumbo. But it was more than that. I didn’t fall. There wasn’t a wind from it. Not much, anyway. I was pulled down.”

  Max left with a SIM card full of pictures and a video interview of a haunted woman’s story. He knew no one outside the network would think any of it seemed real. For anyone who would bother to consider the story and the evidence, Lily would be just another crazy, small-town, attention-craving hoaxster. The last one saw Big Foot, didn’t she?

  The network would gratefully compile the information. One day, someone else might find the relevance that escaped Max. One day, Lily might be contacted again. Months, maybe years, after her experience, a recruiter from the network might check on her, assess if she had come to terms with her experience, and ask for her help.

  Max had been on a few missions since. He’d copied witnesses’pictures and videos of dots and lights in the sky. He’d recorded testimonials. Once he’d even had a second-hand encounter with agents of the legendary counter network, the IBTT. He was certain of it. He knew the signs from his own experience. That group, Max believed now, was dedicated to destroying or stealing evidence, to clouding memories with more plausible explanations, and, if necessary, to discrediting witnesses with lies, fabrications, threats, and force. The network called them“silencers.”They had silenced an Arkansas woman before Max could reach her. Whatever she saw, whatever she had, she was going to share it with no one. She dismissed Max with nothing but pleading eyes and a breaking voice.

  Max knew.

  Max had once given in to the IBTT, and he had never forgiven himself. Detroit. That’s why he had become the network’s loyal foot soldier. This was a quest for proof, but for Max, it also was a mission of revenge. Max lived for the field missions. It wasn’t that he disliked his real life, not anymore. Now he was a darling of the greater Houston comic culture.

  He loved working the street: Green Lantern as rock star. Legs spread, back arched, long, black hair plunging, spinning, the black-and-gold sign as his ax. Someone honked. He slashed a power chord. His iPhone earbuds provided his private music track, driving his beat.

  His cell phone rang—the cheap, disposable one, the one for which only three or four people in the world had the number. As always, the ring sucked away his breath. Adrenaline blew through his vascular system and jolted his brain. It was the only thing that could make him stop moving. Max was stunned. For a moment, that short moment between rings, he stood limp. It rang again.

  Max removed his earbuds, fished out the cell, checked the number, and said,“Hold on.”

  Even when higher duty called, the Green Lantern couldn't be seen standing on a sidewalk talking on a cell phone. He crossed the parking lot to his store.

  MaxiComix’s interior blasted a riot of sensory overload. Neon lights and black lights, fluorescent paints, posters, mirrors, racks of memorabilia, and glassed displays all celebrated the art and pastime of heroic fantasy. A flat screen in each corner played superhero movies. Stadium speakers cranked rock music, at the moment, The White Stripes. Max used his old stadium speakers more for the visual effect than for the audio. Max pushed the senses every way he could. Fog machines blew cold, dry ice smoke across customers. Scented sprays, powerful and sweet, perfumed the air. Customers came in for the experience and bought even if they weren’t comic fans. Perhaps they bought out of gratitude. Then, they’d tell their friends,“This place is cool.”

  His business partner, Tommy, was busy cashing out customers.

  Max strode quickly to the back office. He secured a heavy door and finally returned to his cell phone.

  “Check out UFOtalk,”said the man on the other end. The voice was slow, low, and East Coast. Max knew the voice, though he had never met the caller.“Some chick in your area—San Antonio—claims to have Roswell fabric. Looks like they're already on her and ready to make her a deal. I’ll text you what we’ve got.”

  Max's heart raced. Roswell fabric: the infamous, rubbery foil that reportedly had been found among crash-scene debris scattered about a hill near Roswell, New Mexico, in mid-June 1947. A local ranch hand, William Brazel, had discovered the debris. He had told everyone that it had odd properties. Air Force Captain Jesse Marcel, who oversaw the Air Force’s recovery and clean-up operations, had told the local newspaper the foil had supernatural strength. The Air Force had later dismissed it all as rubber and tin foil from a crashed weather balloon. Yet over the decades, the oddly divergent reports had helped fuel the Roswell UFO legend.

  The Roswell story included accounts of extraterrestrials found on that hillside, with witnesses’s statements that at least one of them was alive when discovered. For many in the UFOlogy community, that prospect was intoxicating. But for dedicated UFOlogists, the best bet for proof of a crashed UFO lay in the rubbery foil, the Roswell fabric. There always was hope some of it had escaped the Air Force’s collection. After all, debris had been spread over more than 100 yards of rugged terrain. Once or twice a decade, someone claimed to have some. But no one from the network had ever gotten to it before the material disappeared.

  Max figured the chances of this report from San Antonio being genuine were a million to one. He knew he must muster skepticism, but he couldn't help himself. This could be, just might be, just may be, huge. One way or another, it already appeared to have drawn the silencers' attention, as did all mildly credible reports of actual UFO debris.

  Max’s caller hung up without another word. The text arrived. He jotted down the information, including an access code, which he double-checked by reading the letters and numbers aloud again. He slid out a heavy, wooden tray that had been leaning against the side of the desk and laid it on the carpet. He set the burner phone on the tray. He stood and lifted an iron mace from a mount on the wall and raised it to shoulder level. With a growl, he brought it down and smashed the device. With shorter swings, taps really, he smashed the pieces over and over. The memory card, every circuit board, every chip, e
very little piece of plastic, silicon, and metal shattered.

  He loved doing that. The NSA or worse, some super-secret agency spying UFO trackers, might have listened in on that call. There would be no physical evidence left to help them determine who had just called, and there would be no second call on that particular number. The caller, Max knew, had just done something similar to the phone on his end.

  On his computer, Max went through an encryption algorithm, using software provided by the network. He called up UFOtalk.com, a popular but clearly compromised rumor-mill site with private chat rooms. With the code, he accessed the appropriate discussion and scrolled through the chats.

  An evestrong had inquired about a mysterious fabric she possessed: light, waterproof, heat resistant, impenetrable, and rumored to be from a UFO. An IBelieve51 assured her she most likely had Uylon, a Dow invention that turned out to be prohibitively costly, developed in the’90s for the Department of Defense, which rejected it as impractically expensive. Other than patent files and second-hand reports, little was known about it. If evestronghad a sample, it might be worth something, and he might be willing to buy it. But UFO debris?“No. Sorry, girlfriend. Uylonmaybe, but that's your best hope.”

  They had settled on meeting the next day, outside a hotel in downtown San Antonio.

  Max had heard of Uylon. The silencers had used that ruse before. It was documented. New Jersey, seven years ago. A man named Sylvain, who sold what might or might not have been Roswell fabric for a few hundred dollars. Max figured if evestrong had Roswell fabric, then she, too, was about to be taken.

  He unlocked a desk drawer and flipped through a deck of stolen credit and ID cards. He loved Houston; he could buy anything. He settled on a matching driver’s license and Visa card and raised them. Let’s see. This is a job for Father Elijah Longfellow, he decided.