Majic Man nh-10

by Max Allan Collins

  “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 thinkin
g, 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?”

  “Well, 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?”

  He shrugged. “A fraction. But after we got back to the base, Colonel Blanchard took a look at the wreckage, then the next morning sent Cav and Major Easley back, to cordon off the field. Thirty men cleared it.”

  “How did the press get ahold of the story?”

  He grinned, which made his weak chin seem weaker. “It was a press release straight off the air base! Walt Haut, the lieutenant who was public information officer, was kind of an eager beaver, and it would’ve been like him to jump the gun.”

  “You can hardly blame the guy. It’s not every day the Air Force finds a flying saucer.”

  “Yeah, but when I asked Walt about it, he claimed Colonel Blanchard personally dictated the press release to him, that same morning, and instructed him to hand-deliver the release to the two newspapers and the radio stations, there in Roswell.”

  “Why would your commanding officer have done that?”

  “I understand word about the saucer was getting around town, and Blanchard prided himself on good relations with the community, and keeping ’em informed. Or maybe he wanted some glory. They say he always resented he didn’t fly the Enola Gay.”

  “But within twenty-four hours, it was all retracted.”

  Marcel’s eyes flared. “Hell, that same day the colonel ordered me to fly to Fort Worth and make a personal report to General Ramey. A B-29 was loaded up with all of the wreckage, most of it boxed up, the bigger pieces wrapped up in brown paper; damn plane was stuffed like a Thanksgiving turkey with that debris. When we got to Fort Worth, the wreckage was transferred to a B-25, which I heard later was flown to Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio. Me, I was taken to General Ramey’s office, with a box or two of debris, which I showed him, making my report. He listened, politely, nodding, and I left the samples of debris behind when we went to the map room, ’cause the general said he wanted me to show him on a map where we found the wreckage. After we had dinner at the officers’ mess, there was a press conference, and I was instructed to keep my mouth shut, let the general answer all the questions, while I bent down and smiled for the camera with the debris … only it wasn’t the debris.”

  I’d seen the newspaper wire photos in Pearson’s clip file: Marcel had posed with the crumpled remains of a weather balloon and its trailing radar target-aluminum foil, balsa wood, burnt rubber. Only a total chump would have mistaken this stuff for something from outer space.

  “I was the fall guy,” Marcel said, grinning like a skull, “the Army Air Force major who ‘goofed,’ who mistook a weather balloon for a flying saucer. Big joke.”

  Now I knew why he was talking to Pearson, intelligence officer or not; like most soldiers, Marcel would have been willing to die for his country, but it’s much harder to play the fool for it. To play the sap.

  “What do you think that really was out in that pasture, Jesse?”

  The eyes tightened and weren’t buggy, anymore. “It wasn’t a goddamn weather balloon, I’ll tell you that much. I was familiar wit
h every kind of gadget we used in the Army for meteorological observations, and was in fact fairly familiar with everything in the air, at that time. Not just our own military aircraft, mind you, but other countries’, too.”

  He pitched the still-burning butt of his latest Camel down the granite steps and it trailed sparks like a dying comet.

  Then he said, flatly, “That was not a terrestrial object. It came to earth, but not from this earth.”

  Laughter echoed gently across the Potomac.

  I put a hand on his shoulder. “What was found north of Roswell, Jesse? What were you hinting at, earlier, when you said I should talk to other people?”

  He was lighting up yet another Camel. “No hearsay, Nate. I told you that.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Jesse, we’ve come this far. At least point me in the right direction.”

  Marcel exhaled a mushroom cloud of smoke. “Well, that would be northwest, wouldn’t it? Where they say the craft itself came to rest. Where they found the four little bodies.”

  And suddenly, as we sat there on the steps of the Water Gate, I was fresh out of questions.

  8

  On Monday morning at the Pentagon, as a matter of good form, James V. Forrestal attended the swearing-in ceremony of his successor, lawyer Louis Johnson-chief fund-raiser for the Truman campaign-as the new Secretary of Defense. Custom had it that the outgoing cabinet officer would then proceed to the White House for a final exchange of respects with the president, a task Forrestal-being a creature of protocol-dutifully performed.

  At the White House, however, the former Defense Secretary was surprised by President Truman with an assemblage of government dignitaries, including the entire cabinet and the military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff. Reading from a presidential citation, Truman honored Forrestal for “meritorious and distinguished service,” pinning the Distinguished Service Medal on Forrestal’s lapel.