“Fuck,” the officer spit again. “Arnold.” Steve Arnold snapped to attention. “You and your men get out there and stop those civilians from crossing this perimeter.” He motioned to the small convoy of emergency vehicles approaching them from the east. He knew they had to be police or county sheriff. Then he called out, “Medics.”
Arnold jumped to at once, and by the time the medics were loading the little creature on a stretcher, he was already setting up a perimeter of CIC personnel and sentries to block the site from the flashing lights and churning sand far in the distance to the south of them. He heard the officer order the medics to load the bodies on stretchers, pack them in the back of whatever two-and-a-half-ton GMC he could pull off the line, and drive them back to the base immediately.
“Sergeant,” the officer called out again. “I want your men to load up everything that can be loaded on these deuce-and-a-halfs and sway that damn . . . whatever it is”—he was pointing to the delta-shaped object—“on this low-boy and get it out of here. The rest of you,” he called out. “I want this place spotless. Nothing ever happened here, you understand? Just a nothing piece of scrub brush like the rest of this desert.”
As the soldiers formed an arm-in-arm “search-and-rescue” grid, some on their hands and knees, to clean the area of any pieces of debris, devices, or chunks of wreckage, the huge retrieval crane that had been deployed from the air base hoisted the surprisingly light flying object out of its impact crater in the arroyo and swayed it above the long flatbed Ford that accompanied the convoy of army trucks. A small squad of MPs were deployed to face the civilian convoy of emergency vehicles quickly approaching the site. They fixed bayonets and lowered their M1 barrels at the whirlwind of sand directly in front of them.
On the other side of the skirmish line, Roswell firefighter Dan Dwyer, the radioman riding shotgun on the red Ward LaFrance pumper the company rolled that night along with the tanker, could see very little at first except for an oasis of white light in the center of darkness. His small convoy had been running lights but no sirens as they pulled out of the firehouse in the center of Roswell, rendezvoused with the police car north of town, and headed out to the site to rescue what he had been told was a downed aircraft. As he approached the brightly lit area of floodlights off in the distance—it looked more like a small traveling amusement park than a crash site—he could already see the soldiers in a rough circle around an object that was swinging from the arm of a crane. As the LaFrance got closer, Dwyer could just make the strange deltoid shape of the thing as it hung, very precariously, from the arm, almost dropping once or twice under the very inexperienced control of the equipment operator. Even at this distance, the sound of shouting and cursing was carrying across the sand as the crane was raised, then lowered, then raised as the object finally sat over the Ford flatbed trailer.
The police unit ahead of the fire truck suddenly shot out toward the brightly lit area as soon as the driver saw the activity, and immediately the area was obscured from Dwyer’s vision by clouds of sand that diffused the light. All he could see through the thicket of sand were the reflections of his own flashing lights. When the sand cleared, they were almost on top of the site, swinging off to one side to avoid the army trucks that had already started back down the road toward them. Dwyer looked over his shoulder to see if any more military vehicles were headed his way, but all he saw were the first pink lines of sunlight over the horizon. It was almost morning.
By the time Dwyer’s field truck pulled around to the area the soldiers had pointed out, whatever it was that had crashed was sitting on the flatbed, still clamped to the hovering crane. Three or four soldiers were working on the coupling and securing the object to the truck with chains and cable. But for something that had dropped out of the sky in a fireball, which was how the police described it, Dwyer noted that the object looked almost unscathed. He couldn’t see any cracks in the object’s skin and there were no pieces that had broken off. Then the soldiers dropped an olive tarp over the flatbed and the object was completely camouflaged. An army captain walked over to one of the police units parked directly in front of the fire truck. And behind the officer stood a line of bayonet-wielding soldiers sporting MP armbands.
“You guys can head on back,” Dwyer heard the captain tell one of the Roswell police officers on the scene. “We’ve got the area secured.”
“What about injuries?” the police officer asked, maybe thinking more about the incident report he had to fill out than about what to do with any casualties.
“No injuries. We have everything under control,” the captain said.
But even as the military was waving off the civilian convoy, Dwyer could see small bodies being lifted on stretchers from the ground into army transport trucks. A couple of them were already in body bags, but one, not bagged, was strapped directly onto the stretcher. The police officer saw it, too. This one, Dwyer could tell, was moving around and seemed to be alive. He had to get closer.
“What about them?” he asked.
“Hey, get those things loaded,” the captain shouted at the enlisted men loading the stretchers into the truck. “You didn’t see anything here tonight, Officer,” he told the driver of the police unit. “Nothing at all.”
“But, I gotta . . .”
The captain cut him off. “Later today, I’m sure, there’ll be someone from the base out to talk to the shift; meanwhile, let this one alone. Strictly military business.”
By this time Dwyer thought he recognized people he knew from the army airfield. He thought he could see the base intelligence officer, Jesse Marcel, who lived off the base in Roswell, and other personnel who came into town on a regular basis. He saw debris from whatever had crashed still lying all over the ground as the flatbed truck pulled out, passed the fire apparatus, and rumbled off through the sand back on the road toward the base.
Dwyer took off his fire helmet, climbed down from the truck, and worked his way through the shadows around the flank of the line of MPs. There was so much confusion at the site Dwyer knew no one would notice if he looked around. He walked around in back of the truck, across the perimeter, and from the other side of the military transport truck walked up to the stretcher. He looked directly down into the eyes of the creature strapped onto the stretcher and just stared.
It was no bigger than a child, he thought. But it wasn’t a child. No child had such an oversized balloon-shaped head. It didn’t even look human, although it had humanlike features. It’s eyes were large and dark, set apart from each other on a downward slope. It’s nose and mouth were especially tiny, almost like slits. And its ears were not much more than indentations along the sides of its huge head. In the glare of the floodlight, Dwyer could see that the creature was a grayish brown and completely hairless, but it looked directly at him as if it were a helpless animal in a trap. It didn’t make a sound, but somehow Dwyer understood that the creature understood it was dying. He could gape in astonishment at the thing, but it was quickly loaded onto the truck by a couple of soldiers in helmets who asked him what he was doing. Dwyer knew this was bigger than anything he ever wanted to see and got out of there right away, losing himself amidst a group of personnel working around a pile of debris.
The whole site was scattered with articles that Dwyer assumed had fallen out of the craft when it hit. He could see the indentation in the arroyo where it looked like the object embedded itself and followed with his eyes the pattern of debris stretching out from the small crater into the darkness beyond the floodlights. The soldiers were crawling all over on their hands and knees with scraping devices and carrying sacks or walking in straight lines waving metal detectors in front of them. They were sweeping the area clean, it seemed to him, so that any curiosity seekers who floated out here during the day would find nothing to reveal the identity of what had been here. Dwyer reached down to pick up a patch of a dull gray metallic clothlike material that seemed to shine up at him from the sand. He stuffed it into his fist and rolled it into a
ball. Then he released it and the metallic fabric snapped back into shape without any creases or folds. He thought no one was looking at him, so he stuffed it into the pocket of his fire jacket to bring back to the firehouse.
He would later show it to his young daughter, who forty-five years later and long after the piece of metallic fabric itself had disappeared into history, would describe it on television documentaries to millions of people. But that night in July 1947, if Dwyer thought he was invisible, he was wrong.
“Hey you,” a sergeant wearing an MP armband bawled. “What the hell are you doing out here?”
“I responded with the fire company,” Dwyer said as innocently as possible.
“Well, you get your civilian ass back on that truck and get it the hell out of here,” he ordered. “You take anything with you?”
“Not me, Sergeant,” Dwyer said.
Then the MP grabbed him as if he were under arrest and hustled him off to a major, who was shouting orders near the generator that was powering the string of floodlights. He recognized him as Roswell resident Jesse Marcel.
“Caught this fireman wandering around in the debris, sir,” the sergeant reported.
Marcel obviously recognized Dwyer, although the two weren’t friends, and gave him what the fireman only remembered as an agonized look. “You got to get out of here,” he said. “And never tell anyone where you were or what you saw.”
Dwyer nodded.
“I mean it, this is top security here, the kind of thing that could get you put away,” Marcel continued. “Whatever this is, don’t talk about it, don’t say anything until somebody tells you what to say. Now get your truck out of here before someone else sees you and tries to lock the whole bunch of you up. Move!” He faced the helmeted MP. “Sergeant, get him back on that fire truck and move it out.”
Dwyer didn’t need any more invitations. He let the sergeant hustle him along, put him back on the truck, and told his driver to bring it back to the station. The MP sergeant came up to the driver’s-side window and looked up at the fireman behind the wheel.
“You’ve been ordered to evacuate this site,” the MP told the driver. “At once!”
The Roswell police unit had already made a U-turn on the sand and was motioning for the truck to back up. The driver dropped the truck into reverse, gently fed it gas as its wheels dug into the sand, made his U-turn, and headed back for the firehouse in Roswell. The Ford flatbed had already passed through the sleeping town in the moments between darkness and light, the sound of its engines causing no alarm or stir, the sight of a large tarpaulin-covered object on the back of an army vehicle rolling along the main street of Roswell against the purple-gray sky raising nobody’s eyebrows because it was nothing out of the ordinary. But later, by the time Dwyer backed his field truck into the station house, the sun was already up and the first of the GMC transport trucks was just reaching the main gate at the 509th.
Plumbing subcontractor Roy Danzer, who had worked through the night at the base fitting pipe, knew something was up from the way the trucks tore out of the compound through the darkness. He had just walked out of the base hospital to grab a cigarette before going back to work. That’s when he heard the commotion over at the main gate. Danzer had cut his hand a few days earlier cutting pipe, and the infirmary nurse wanted to keep checking the stitches to make sure no infection was setting in. So Danzer took the opportunity to get away from the job for a few minutes while the nurse looked over her work and changed his bandage. Then, on his way back to the job, he would grab a cup of coffee and take an unscheduled cigarette break. But this morning, things would be very different.
The commotion he heard by the main gate had now turned into a swirling throng of soldiers and base workers shoved aside by what looked like a squad of MPs using their bodies as a wedge to force a pathway through the crowd. There didn’t even seem to be an officer giving orders, just a crowd of soldiers. Strange. Then the throng headed right for the base hospital, right for the main entrance, right for the very spot where Roy was standing.
Nobody moved him out of the way or told him to vacate the area. In fact, no one even spoke to him. Roy just looked down as the line of soldiers passed him, and there it was, strapped tightly to a stretcher that two bearers were carrying into the base hospital right through the main door. Roy looked at it; it looked at Roy, and as their eyes met Roy knew in an instant that he was not looking down at a human being. It was a creature from somewhere else. The pleading look on its face, occupying only a small frontal portion of its huge watermelon-sized skull, and the emotion of pain and suffering that played itself behind Roy Danzer’s eyes and across his brain while he stared down at the figure told Roy it was in its final moments of life. It didn’t speak. It could barely move. But Roy actually saw, or believed he saw, an expression cross over its little circle of a face. And then the creature was gone, carried into the hospital by the stretcher bearers, who shot him an ugly glare as they passed. Roy took another drag on the cigarette butt still in his hand.
“What the hell was that?” he asked no one in particular. Then he felt like he’d been hit by the front four of the Notre Dame football team.
His head snapped back against the top of his spine as he went flying forward into the arms of a couple of MPs, who slammed him against an iron gate and kept him there until an officer—he thought it was a captain—walked up and stuck his finger directly into Danzer’s face.
“Just who are you, mister?” the captain bellowed into Danzer’s ear. Even before Danzer could answer, two other officers walked up and began demanding what authorization Danzer had to be on the base.
These guys weren’t kidding, Danzer thought to himself; they looked ugly and were working themselves up into a serious lather. For a few tense minutes, Roy Danzer thought he would never see his family again; he was that scared. But then a major approached and broke into the shouting.
“I know this guy,” the major said. “He works here with the other civilian contractors. He’s OK.”
“Sir,” the captain sputtered, but the major—Danzer didn’t know his name—took the captain by the arm right out of earshot. Danzer could see them talking and watched as the red-faced captain gradually calmed down. Then the two returned to where the MPs were holding Danzer against the wall.
“You saw nothing, you understand?” the captain said to Danzer, who just nodded. “You’re not to tell anybody about this, not your family, not your friends—nobody. You got that?”
“Yes, sir,” Danzer said. He was truly afraid now.
“We’ll know if you talk; we’ll know who you talk to and all of you will simply disappear.”
“Captain,” the major broke in.
“Sir, this guy has no business here and if he talks I can’t guarantee anything.” The captain complained as if he were trying to cover his ass to a superior who didn’t know as much as he did.
“So forget everything you saw,” the major said directly to Danzer. “And hightail it out of here before someone else sees you and wants to make sure you stay silent.”
“Yes, SIR,” Danzer just about shouted as he extricated himself from the grip of the MPs on either side of him and broke for his pickup truck on the other side of the base. He didn’t even look back to see the team of soldiers carrying the body bags of the remaining creatures into the hospital where, before there were any other briefings, the creatures were prepared for autopsy like bagged game waiting to be dressed.
The rest of the story about that week has become the subject of history. First, 509th base commander Bull Blanchard authorized the release of the “flying saucer” story that was picked up by news services and carried around the country. Then General Roger Ramey at 8th Army Air Force headquarters in Texas ordered Maj. Jesse Marcel to go back before the press and retract the flying saucer story. This time, Marcel was ordered to say that he’d made a mistake and realized the debris had actually come from a weather balloon. Swallowing a story he himself never believed, Jesse Marcel pos
ed with some faked debris from an actual balloon and confessed to an error he never could have made, even on a bad day. It was a confession that would haunt him the rest of his life until, decades later and shortly before he died, he would retract his public story and restate that he had actually retrieved an alien spacecraft that night in the Roswell desert.
Meanwhile, in the days and weeks after the crash and retrieval, Army Intelligence and CIC personnel fanned out through Roswell and neighboring communities to suppress whatever information they could. With ill-advised threats of violence, actual physical intimidation, and, according to some of the rumors, at least one homicide, army officers bludgeoned the community into silence. Mac Brazel, one of the civilians near whose property the crash took place and one of the visitors to the site, was allegedly bribed and threatened. He suddenly became silent about what he had seen in the desert even after he had told friends and newspeople that he’d retrieved pieces from a downed spacecraft. Officers from the Chavez County Sheriff’s Department and other law-enforcement agencies were forced to comply with the army edict that the incident outside of Roswell was a matter of national security and was not to be discussed. “It never happened,” the army decreed, and civilian authorities willingly complied. Even the local Roswell radio station news correspondents, John McBoyle from KSWS and Walt Whitmore Sr. from KGFL, who’d conducted interviews with witnesses to the debris field, were forced to submit to the official line that the army imposed and never broadcast their reports.
For some of the civilians who claimed to have experienced intimidation from the army officers who flooded into Roswell after the crash, the trauma remained with them for the rest of their lives. One was Dan Dwyer’s daughter, who was a young child in July 1947, and who endured the sight of a huge, helmeted army officer, his expression obscured by sunglasses, looming over her in her mother’s kitchen and telling her that if she didn’t forget what she had been told by her father, she and the rest of her family would simply disappear in the desert. Sally who had played with the metallic fabric her father had brought back to the firehouse that morning and had heard his description of the little people carried away on stretchers, quaked in terror as the officer finally got her to admit that she had seen nothing, heard nothing, and handled nothing. “It never happened,” he hissed at her. “And there’s nothing you will ever say about it for the rest of your life because we will be there and we will know it,” he repeated over and over again, slapping a police baton into his palm with a loud crack at every word. Even today, tears form at the corners of her eyes as she describes the scene and remembers the expression of her mother, who had been told to leave the kitchen while the officer spoke to Sally. It’s tough for a kid to see her parents so terrorized into silence that they will deny the truth before their eyes.
The Day After Roswell Page 3