Major Jesse Marcel would have been unimpressive if I hadn’t read the material in the file folder Pearson had given me, a combination of newspaper clippings and background check, which I’d perused when I parked the rental Ford over by Honest Abe’s memorial.
Marcel had entered the U.S. Army Air Force in 1942; he had both studied and taught at the Air Intelligence School at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where his civilian experience with Shell Oil, making maps from aerial photographs, soon developed into a much-valued expertise in mapping, and photographic reconnaissance and interpretation. His duties in the South Pacific had included serving as squadron intelligence officer as well as flying several combat missions in B-24s, winning two Air Medals.
Promoted to group intelligence officer and transferred stateside, Marcel was involved with radar navigation study at Langley Field when his unit, the 509th, dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. Shortly thereafter he was named intelligence officer for the bomb group; his first assignment: observer at the atomic tests at Bikini.
Right now Major Marcel was assigned to Strategic Air Command headquarters here in Washington: the officer in charge of the War Room, Intelligence Branch Operations Division, AFOAT-1. Apparently this mousy little guy was head of something called the Long Range Detection Program, intended to alert the U.S. to any atomic explosions elsewhere in the world, in particular the Soviet Union.
This latter information was probably classified, at least, and possibly top-secret; and I had to wonder if Pearson had gotten it from Marcel himself—and why a guy so tied to intelligence work would share it with a muckraker like Pearson.
Also, my neck was getting prickly with apprehension at atomic bomb stuff turning up again, even in this sidebar to the Forrestal investigation: first Frank Wilson of the Atomic Energy Commission, and now SAC’s atom bomb watchdog, Major Marcel.
Who said, in a husky tenor, “Jesse Marcel, Mr. Heller. You are Mr. Heller?”
His tan sportshirt was a print design of cartoony representations of vacation spots: Miami, Cuba, Rio, palm trees, volcanoes, hotels.
“Nathan Heller, yes,” I said, shaking the hand he offered.
His smile was friendly but nervous. “Mind if I see some identification?”
“Not at all.” I got out my wallet, showed him my Illinois private operator’s ticket.
“No offense,” he said, and sucked on the stub of his cigarette. “Can’t be too careful. Swell day, huh? Nice breeze—my wife and son are over at the park, so we should have plenty of time to talk.”
“Major,” I said, slipping my wallet back in my hip pocket, “I read the newspaper accounts about the incident at Roswell, but considering the inconsistencies … I’d really like to hear your version of it.”
“Call me Jesse,” he said, dropping the spent cigarette to the granite, heeling it out. “We seem to be pretty much by ourselves here, but let’s keep it un-military, all right? You prefer Nathan or Nate?”
“Nate’ll do. Jesse, if you’re planning to reveal anything of a classified nature, I’ll have Pearson send somebody else over to talk to you.”
He shook his head, as he plucked a Camel out of a half-used pack. “Smoke?”
“No thanks.”
“None of this is classified, Nate, or top-secret or anything. But it’s military matters just the same, and I’m in intelligence, and I might get a tit in the wringer if it was known I was a damn source for ‘Washington Merry-Go-Round.’”
“Understood. I just have no desire to see the inside of Fort Leavenworth.”
“You’re comin’ in loud and clear on that one.” He fired up his Camel with a silver Zippo, which he snapped shut. “No, they clamped the lid on this thing, but oddly, I never got any kind of serious debriefing or orders to clam up or anything. But, understand, this deal blew over real quick.”
And it had. One day the headlines were trumpeting AIR FORCE CAPTURES FLYING SAUCER ON RANCH IN ROSWELL, the next ARMY DEBUNKS ROSWELL FLYING DISK AS WORLD SIMMERS WITH EXCITEMENT and GENERAL RAMEY EMPTIES ROSWELL SAUCER. These had been the headlines of Roswell’s own Daily Record and Dispatch, but the story had been carried via the Associated Press and United Press, and spread worldwide—the Pearson file had clips from Rome, London, Paris, Hamburg, Hong Kong, Tokyo—creating a momentary sensation, only to be laughed off as a fluke of the flying saucer “craze.”
“So what really happened at Roswell, Jesse?” I was getting out my small spiral notebook.
“No notes, Nate. We’re just two pals chatting, okay?”
“Sure.” I put the spiral pad away.
He plucked tobacco flakes off his tongue. “I can only tell you my part of it; I’ve heard of some fantastic things that other people witnessed, but I’m not gonna pass that along to you. If you’re interested, you can go talk to ’em in Roswell; I’ll even give you, or Mr. Pearson, a list of names. Make some calls for you—pave the way. But I’m in the intelligence game myself, Nate—and I’m not going to insult your intelligence with hearsay.”
“Fair enough. What’s your story, Jesse?”
Laughter echoed across the water, as pleasure boaters glided by; the afternoon sun was turning the surface of the Potomac a glimmering gold.
Marcel drew on the cigarette, held the smoke in, blew it out through his nostrils, dragon-style. “It was the first Monday after Independence Day weekend, what—two years ago. I was just sittin’ down to lunch, at the officers’ club, when I got called to the phone. It was Sheriff Wilcox, saying he had a man in his office tellin’ him something real strange.”
“This is the sheriff in Roswell.”
“That’s right—Chaves County sheriff, to be exact. Anyway, Wilcox says this rancher from over by Corona has come trampin’ into his office, yammering about a flying saucer crashing on his property. Well, as you can imagine, the sheriff took this with a big ol’ grain of salt, but this rancher—Mac Brazel, your typical dusty ol’ cowboy, not the owner of this ranch, just a guy running it for an absentee owner—had come three and a half hours over rotten roads and he wasn’t about to stand for the bum’s rush. Seems he had a few pieces of debris of this supposed saucer out in his pickup truck, which he shows the sheriff.”
“And this prompts the sheriff to call you.”
“Well, Sheriff Wilcox called the Army airfield and got put through to me, as Intelligence Corps officer. So the sheriff fills me in a little, and then he puts the rancher, Brazel, on the line, who says he’s found something on his ranch that crashed down either yesterday or the day before; didn’t know what it was—just that there was rubble all over a pasture of his, ‘bigger than a football field,’ he said, and that the grass looked like it had got burnt underneath.”
Despite the cool breeze, the sun was warm enough for me to slip out of my sportcoat, and drape it over the granite step beside me. “So you headed over there.”
“After I finished my lunch, I did. I wasn’t in any rush. You know the papers were full of this flying saucer baloney around then, and somebody or other, I don’t know, some radio station I think, was offering a reward to anybody who found one. I figured this might be a weather balloon—we had a lot of those come down—or some experimental thing from over at White Sands, which is nearby.”
“Or did you think it was a hoax, maybe? With a reward at stake?”
He shook his head, sucked some more on his cigarette. “That’s not the kind of thing that would occur to a guy like Mac Brazel; he was just your typical New Mexico salt-of-the-earth shitkicker.”
“So you went to the sheriff’s office.”
“I did, and I saw the stuff in Brazel’s truck, and it was pretty weird—there was this parchmentlike substance, extremely strong, so brown it was almost black, only more like a rough plastic than paper but it didn’t seem to be either one; and some scraps of this shiny, flexible metal, like tinfoil, only it wasn’t tinfoil, it was as thin as that, but much stronger. Here’s what was really peculiar—you could bend that stuff, and if you put some muscle in it, even kind of wad
it up … but it would then assume its original shape—without a bend, without a crinkle.”
“Is that possible?”
“I would say no, if I hadn’t seen it, held it.” Marcel took his Zippo lighter from his shirt pocket. “I tried to burn the stuff with this very lighter—held the flame under a piece, and it wouldn’t burn. You couldn’t pierce it with a sharp knife, either!”
This subject clearly made him nervous, and he was drawing on the cigarette constantly, and on this beautiful sunny fresh afternoon, I was sitting in a swirl of smoke.
“So you saw these … samples of debris, in the rancher’s truck. What then, Jesse?”
He shrugged. “I thought the matter was certainly worth reporting, so I called Colonel Blanchard at the base, commanding officer, and he asked me to bring some of the debris back for him to take a look at. I told Brazel and the sheriff I’d come back in, in an hour so, asked ’em to wait for me, and I met with Colonel Blanchard at the base. I showed him a piece of that shiny shit and asked him what he’d advise me to do. He looked it over carefully, and got the gist of how curious this stuff was, and he asked me how much debris was at the ranch, and I said, according to this Brazel character, plenty. I told the colonel, ‘I believe we have some kind of downed aircraft of an unusual sort.’ Then he said, ‘Well then, I’d advise that you drive out to that site, and take one of our three counterintelligence agents along with you for support.’”
“And did you?”
Marcel nodded, sucking on the cigarette; he was almost ready for another. “I took the highest-ranking man we had, a CIC captain named Cavitt, who drove a jeep carry-all from the base. We took two cars—I was in a staff car, a prewar Buick—and we met up with Brazel at the sheriff’s office, and followed him out to the ranch.”
“The sheriff didn’t come with you.”
“No. He’d tossed the ball to the military and that was fine with us. Anyway, it was a long, hot, bumpy ride, and it was five p.m. before we got out there. Brazel had some of the debris stored in a shed, more of the same plus some rods, maybe two and a half inches in girth, in various lengths, none of them very long.”
“What, metal rods?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know what the hell they were made of. They didn’t look or feel like metal, more like wood, and light as balsa wood.”
“Plastic, maybe?”
“If so, the toughest damn plastic I ever saw—kinda like that stuff, whaddyacallit, Bakelite? Anyway, you couldn’t bend it or break it.”
“These were just little pieces?”
“Well, later we saw bigger ones, but right then, in the shed, no—although there were large pieces of the shiny stuff, and of the parchmentlike material, as big as ten feet in diameter.”
“Jesus.”
“Colonel Cavitt—I don’t remember his first name, we just called him ‘Cav’—he says, ‘This could be radioactive,’ and I says, ‘Well, we’ll find out right now.’ I’d thrown a Geiger counter in the Buick trunk, so I got it and held the sensor near the pieces and got no radiation reading. ‘Whatever this is,’ I told the fellas, ‘it’s not dangerous.’ By this time it was gettin’ dark, no point going out to the pasture till morning. So we dined on canned beans and crackers and slept in sleeping bags in an empty shack, a hired hands’ bunkhouse.”
“Sounds quaint.”
“We turned in early—this was a sheep ranch, understand, no radio, no phone—but we did sit and talk awhile. Brazel said he’d heard an odd explosion, during an electrical storm, night of the fourth, but that he hadn’t paid it any heed, figuring it was a clap of thunder, or somethin’ getting hit by lightning. Next morning he found the wreckage.”
The gleeful screams of children playing echoed across the water.
“So Brazel didn’t report finding the debris immediately?”
“No. That first day he went into Corona—smaller town even than Roswell, closer to the ranch. Place was buzzing with talk about flying saucers; in late June and early July of that year, people all over New Mexico were spotting all sorts of strange lights and objects in the sky. Almost hate to admit it, but I had what they call a ‘sighting’ myself.”
“Sighting of what?”
He smirked, sighed, letting more smoke out. “A few days before the July Fourth holiday … must’ve been around eleven-thirty at night … Major Easley, the provost marshal, called me all excited and said, get out to the base—I lived in town—and he wouldn’t even say why. On my way there, in my car, on a straightaway, I spotted a group of lights moving north to south, bright lights flying a perfect V formation, movin’ like a bat out of hell. I mean, it was visible for maybe three or four seconds from overhead to the horizon. We didn’t have any planes in the air that night, not that any of ’em could’ve traveled at that speed; maybe they did at White Sands or Alamogordo.”
“The provost marshal saw what you saw?”
“Yeah. So did several other GIs and MPs…. Anyway, when Brazel went into Corona and heard all this saucer talk, it got him thinking, and somebody probably told him about that reward for finding a flying saucer, which I think was pretty good money, like three thousand or somethin’, so he decided to report it.”
“Why did he go to Roswell to make his report? Because that’s where the county sheriff was?”
“Exactly.” Marcel stopped to light up another cigarette, saying, “Sure you don’t want a coffin nail? Mr. Pearson said you were in the service …”
“Marines.”
“Guadalcanal, right?”
“That’s right.”
He grinned as he slipped his Zippo back in his breast pocket. “I thought everybody came back from overseas with a two- or three- or four-pack-a-day habit.”
“I did smoke, on the island,” I admitted. “But I managed to leave the habit there. So, uh—the next morning?”
He nodded, drew in smoke, exhaled it, saying, “Next morning, right after breakfast, right around seven o’clock, our rancher host starts saddling up horses. Now Cav was originally from Texas, so that was no problem for him; but I’d never sat a horse before and told ’em I’d follow ’em in the jeep. Besides, we could start loading up the debris that way, save some time.”
“So the debris wasn’t near the ranch house?”
“No, it was maybe three or four miles north of the house. Funny, bouncing along in that jeep, middle of nowhere, all that emptiness stretching to the horizon, and then, wham—all of a sudden, as far the eye could see, that weird wreckage.”
“There was that much of it?”
His buggy eyes bugged further. “Hell yes, spread over a wide area, three quarters of a mile long, two hundred, hell, three hundred feet wide. From the way the stuff was scattered, I had the feeling no aircraft had hit the ground, you know, bounced on the ground or anything.”
“More like a midair explosion?”
“Yes, like something must have exploded in the sky just over the pasture and strew this shit all over … although there was this deep scorched gouge, maybe five hundred feet long, and that could’ve been where something touched down and skipped along.”
“And then, what, bounced up in the sky and exploded?”
He sighed out more smoke. “Who knows? Maybe some kind of craft had an explosion and kept going a ways before finally crashing. I learned later that north of Roswell, they found something else.”
“What?”
“That I can’t say. I only know what I saw, and what I saw was enough.”
“The debris, was it just more of the same as in the shed?”
“Pretty much, just a lot more of the same, bigger pieces in some cases. A ton of that blackish-brown parchment material, from scraps to sheets. And we found a piece of that foil-like metal about two feet long and maybe a foot wide, so thin, so light it weighed practically nothing. But back at the base, we couldn’t tear it or cut it, we even tried to make a dent in it with a sixteen-pound sledgehammer. Nothing.”
“Not a dent?”
“W
ell, it made a dent, but then the damn stuff went back the way it was. It was right out of Ripley—you could bend it but you couldn’t crease it. But you know, those rods were just as weird as the magic tinfoil.”
“Rods?”
“Yeah, that stuff I told you about, that was light as balsa but didn’t seem to be wood? They ranged in length from a few inches to a yard. Flexible stuff, but hard! We couldn’t break that shit or burn it; didn’t even smoke!”
The same couldn’t be said for Marcel; my eyes were burning from his Camels.
“But the truly bizarre thing,” he said, and I was certainly glad we were getting around to something bizarre, “was the markings on them, the writing.”
“Writing?” I had to smile. “Outer space writing, Jesse?”
“I don’t know what it was, symbols, maybe numbers … but not our numbers. It reminded me of hieroglyphics only without any animal-like characters: purple and pink embossed writing on the inner surface of the rods, which were kind of like I-beams.”
“Maybe it was Chinese or Japanese or Russian …”
“No, I have some familiarity with those. That’s not what it was.”
“You saw nothing you recognized as man-made?”
Marcel shook his head, smirking humorlessly. “You know, I’m interested in electronics and kept looking for something that would resemble instruments or electronic equipment, ’cause then we’d know what the hell we were dealing with. But I came up empty on that front, though Cav found a black, metallic box, several inches square. There was no apparent way to open it, so we threw it in with the rest of the stuff. I don’t know what became of it, but it went along with the rest of the material back to the base.”
“Did you gather up all the debris?”
The buggy eyes bugged again, eyebrows climbing his high forehead. “Hell, no! We worked all morning and most of the afternoon, loading up the jeep carryall and transferring it to the Buick staff car’s trunk and backseat, then filled the carry-all again.”
“So how much were you able to haul?”
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