The Day After Roswell

by William J. Birnes

  Roy Danzer’s daughter, too, was frightened at the sight of her father when he came home from the base that morning on July 5, 1947. He wouldn’t talk about what had gone on there, of course, even though the town was abuzz with rumors that creatures from outer space had invaded Roswell. Wasn’t it true that all the children in town knew about it and there’d been stories about flying saucers in newspapers for weeks? It was even on the radio. But Roy Danzer wouldn’t say a word in front of his daughter. She heard her parents talking through the closed door of her bedroom at nights and caught snippets of conversations about little creatures and “they’ll kill us all.” But she buried these in a part of her memory she never visited until her father, shortly before his death, told her what really happened at the base that day in July when the convoy arrived out of the desert.

  Steve Arnold stayed in Roswell, finishing out his official reenlistment with the army and, without his direct knowledge, remaining a part of my own team right through the 1960s. Some say he works for the government still, carrying out a job that fell to him right out of the New Mexico skies, pumping out disinformation from the army or the CIA or whomever, perpetuating a camouflage story that, fifty years later, has taken on a life of its own and goes forward, like a tale out of a Dickens novel, simply on inertia. You can see Steve today walking around Roswell, visiting old friends from his army days, giving interviews on television to the news crews that periodically pay visits to the folks at Roswell who want to talk about those days in the summer of 1947.

  As for the debris retrieved out of the desert that July, it had another destiny. Shipped to Fort Bliss, Texas, headquarters of the 8th Army Air Force, and summarily analyzed for what it was and what it might contain, all of it was transferred to the control of the military. As quickly as it arrived, some of the debris was flown to Ohio, where it was put under lock and key at Wright Airfield—later Wright-Patterson. The rest of it was loaded onto trucks and sent up to a rest stop at Fort Riley in Kansas. The 509th returned to its daily routine, Jesse Marcel went back to work as if he’d never held the wreckage from the strange craft in his own hands, and the contractors returned to their work on the pipes and doors and walls at the base just as if nothing had ever arrived there from the desert.

  By the time the first week of July 1947 was over, the crash outside of Roswell might as well have never taken place. Like the night that engulfs you as you drive through the expanse of desert and chaparral toward Roswell, so the night of silence engulfed the story of Roswell itself for over thirty years.

  These are the stories as I heard them, as people later told them to me. I wasn’t there at Roswell that night. I didn’t see these events for myself. I only heard them years later when the task fell to me to make something out of all this. But the debris from the crash of the object that was either caused by lightning or by our targeting radar, some say, and fell out of the sky that night was on its way to a collision course with my life. Our paths would cross officially at the Pentagon in the 1960s even though, for a very brief moment in 1947, when I was a young major at Fort Riley, fresh from the glory of victory in Europe, I would see something that I would tuck away in my memory and hope against hope I would never see again for the rest of my life.

  CHAPTER 2

  Convoy to Fort Riley

  I can remember a time when I was so young and feeling so invincible that there was nothing in the world I was afraid of. I had faced down fear in North Africa. With General Patton’s army I stood toe-to-toe against the artillery in Rommel’s Panzer Divisions and gave them better than they dished out to us. We were an army of young men from a country that hadn’t started the war but found itself right in the midst of it before we even got out of church the Sunday Pearl Harbor was attacked. The next thing we knew Hitler declared war on us and we were fighting in Europe. But by 1942, we drove the Germans right out of Africa and jumped across the sea to Sicily. Then, while Mussolini was still reeling from the punches, we invaded Italy and fought our way up the peninsula until we came to Rome. We were the first invading army to conquer Rome since the Middle Ages, and obviously the first invading army from the New World to ever occupy Rome.

  But there we were by early 1944, sitting in Rome after Mussolini fled and the German front collapsing all around us. And as a too-young captain in Army Intelligence, I was ordered to oversee the formation of a civilian government under Allied military rule in the magical city of my ancestors that I’d only read about in history books. Pope Pius himself offered me an audience to discuss our plans for the city government. You can’t even dream this stuff up. It has to happen to you in real life, and then you pinch yourself to make sure you don’t wake up in your own bed outside of Pittsburgh on a winter morning.

  I stayed in Rome for three years from the months before the landing at Normandy in 1944, when the German front lines were still only a few miles south of Rome and our boys were slugging their way up the slopes of Monte Casino, to early 1947, when I was shipped back home and my wife and I threw everything we had into the trunk of a used Chevy convertible and drove across the farmland state routes of peacetime America from Pennsylvania to Kansas. I’d been away five years. But now I was home! Driving top-down across Missouri to an assignment that was considered a plum for any young officer on his way up the army ladder: Military Intelligence School, only one step away from Strategic Intelligence, the army’s version of the Ivy League; I was moving up in the world. And what was I? Just a draftee out of Pennsylvania who was chosen for Officer Candidate School, and now fresh from a wartime intelligence command in Allied-occupied Europe and ready to begin my new career in Army Intelligence.

  Having been in Africa and Europe for so many years, I was anxious to see America again. By this time its people were not stooping under the weight of the depression nor in factories nor in uniform sweating out a desperate war across two oceans. This was an America exultant in victory, and you could see it as you drove through the small towns of southern Ohio and Illinois and then across the Mississippi. We didn’t stop overnight to see St. Louis or even to linger on the Kansas side of the river. I was so excited to be a career officer that we didn’t stop driving until we pulled straight into Fort Riley and set up an apartment in nearby Junction City, where we’d live while they got our house ready on the base.

  For most of the next few weeks, my wife and I got used to living in America again on a peacetime army base. We had lived in Rome after the war while I was still trying to help pacify the city and fend off the Communist attempts to take over the government. It was as if we were still fighting a war because each day had brought renewed challenges from either the Communists or the organized-crime families who had tried to infiltrate their way back into the civilian government. My life was also in danger each day from the different cadres of terrorists in the city, each group with its own agenda. So in contrast to Italy, Fort Riley was like the beginning of a vacation.

  And I was back in school again. This time, however, I was taking courses in career training. I knew how to be an intelligence officer and, in fact, had been trained by the British MI19, the premier wartime intelligence network in the world. My training had been so thorough that even though we were up against crack Soviet NKVD units operating within Rome, we were able to outthink them and actually destroy them. Prior to the war, the United States really didn’t have a peacetime intelligence service, which is why they quickly formed the OSS when war broke out. But the Army Intelligence units and the OSS didn’t operate together for most of the war because communication lines were faulty and we never really trusted the OSS agenda. Now with the war over and Army Intelligence having come into its own, I was part of a whole new cadre of career intelligence officers who would keep watch on Soviet activities. The Soviets had become our new old enemies.

  In intelligence school during those first months we reviewed not only the rudiments of good intelligence gathering—interrogation of enemy prisoners, analysis of raw intelligence data, and the like—but we learned the basics o
f administration and how to run a wartime intelligence unit called the aggressor force. None of us realized during those early days how quickly our newly acquired skills would be tested nor where our enemies would choose to fight. But those were confident days as the weather turned warmer on the plains and the days grew long with the coming of summer.

  Before the war broke out and when I was in high school back in California, Pennsylvania, my hometown, I was something of a bowler. It was a sport I wanted to get back to when the war ended, so when I got to Fort Riley, one of the first places I looked up was the bowling alley on the base, which had been built in one of the former stables. Fort Riley was a former cavalry base, the home of Custer’s 7th Cavalry, and still had a polo field after the war. I started practicing my bowling again and was soon rolling enough strikes that the enlisted men who bowled there began talking to me about my game. Before too many months had passed, M.Sgt. Bill Brown—the men called him “Brownie”—stopped me when I was changing out of my bowling shoes and said he wanted to talk.

  “Major, sir,” he began, more than a little embarrassed to address an officer out of uniform and not on any official army business. He couldn’t possibly have realized that I was a draftee just like him and had spent the first few months in the service taking orders from corporals in boot camp.

  “Sergeant?” I asked.

  “The men at the post want to start up a bowling league, sir, have teams to bowl against and maybe come up with a team to represent the base,” he began. “So we’ve been watching you bowl on Saturdays.”

  “So what am I doing wrong?” I asked. I figured at first maybe this sergeant was going to give me a tip or two and wanted to establish some authority. OK, I’ll take a tip from anybody. But that’s not what he asked.

  “No, sir. Nothing at all,” he stammered. “I’m saying something different. We, the guys, were wondering if you’ve bowled before—do you think maybe you’d like to become part of the team?” He had gotten more confidence the more he framed his request.

  “You want me for your team?” I asked. I was pretty surprised because officers weren’t supposed to fraternize with enlisted men at that time. Things are very different now, but then, fifty years ago, it was a different world, even for much of the officer corps that started out as draftees and went through officer training.

  “We know it’s out of the ordinary, sir, but there are no rules against it.” I gave him a very surprised look. “We checked,” he said. This was obviously not a spur-of-the-moment question.

  “You think I can hold up my end of things?” I asked. “It’s been a long time since I’ve bowled against anybody.”

  “Sir, we’ve been watching. We think you’ll really help us out. Besides,” he continued, “we do need an officer on the team.”

  Whether out of modesty or because he didn’t want to put me off, he had completely understated the nature of the bowling team. These guys had been champions in their own hometowns and, years later, you could have found them on Bowling for Dollars. There was no reason in the world I should have been on that team except that they wanted an officer because it would give them prestige.

  I told him I’d get back to him on it because I wanted to check on the rules, if there were any, for myself. In fact officers and enlisted personnel were allowed to compete on the same athletic teams, and, in very short order, I joined the team, along with Dave Bender, John Miller, Brownie, and Sal Federico. We became quite a remarkable team, winning most of our matches, more than a few trophies, and had lots of exciting moments when we made the impossible splits and bowled our way all the way to the state finals. We ultimately won the Army Bowling Championships, and the trophy sits on my desk to this very day. Magically, the barrier between officer and enlisted man seemed to drop. And that’s the real point of this story.

  Through the months I spent on the team, I became friends with Bender, Miller, Federico, and Brown. We didn’t socialize much, except for the bowling, but we also didn’t stand on ceremony with each other, and I liked it that way. I found that a lot of the career intelligence officers also liked to see some of the barriers drop because sometimes men will speak with more honesty to you if you don’t throw what’s on your shoulders into their faces every time you talk to them. So I became friends with these guys, and that’s what got me into the veterinary building on Sunday night, July 6, 1947.

  I remember how hot it had been that whole weekend of July 4th celebrations and fireworks. These were the days before everybody had to have air-conditioning, so we just sweltered inside the offices at the base and swatted away the fat lazy flies that buzzed around looking for hot dog crumbs or landing on chunks of pickle relish. By Sunday, the celebrations were over, guys who’d had too much beer had been dragged off to their barracks by members of their company before the MPs got hold of them, and the base was settling down to the business of the week. Nobody seemed to take much notice of the five deuce-and-a-halfs and side-by-side low-boy trailers that had pulled into the base that afternoon full of cargo from Fort Bliss in Texas on their way to Air Materiel Command at Wright Field in Ohio. If you had looked at the cargo manifests the drivers were carrying, you’d have seen lists itemizing landing-gear-assembly struts for B29s, wingtank pods for vintage P51s, piston rings for radial aircraft engines, ten crates of Motorola walkie-talkies, and you wouldn’t think anything of the shipment except for the fact that it was going the wrong way. These spare parts were usually shipped from Wright Field to bases like Fort Bliss rather than the other way around, but, of course, I wouldn’t know that until years later when the real cargo on those trucks fell straight onto my desk as if it had dropped out of the sky.

  It got quiet that evening right after dark, and I remember that it was very humid. Off in the distance you could see lightning, and I wondered if the storms were going to reach the base before morning. I was the post duty officer on that night—similar to the chief duty officer of the watch on a naval vessel—and hoped, even more fervently, that if a storm were on its way, it would wait until morning to break so that I might be spared walking through the mud from sentry post to sentry post in the midst of a summer downpour. I looked over the sentry duty roster for that night and saw that Brownie was standing a post over at one of the old veterinarian buildings near the center of the compound.

  The post duty officer spends his night at the main base headquarters, where he watches the phones and is the human firewall between an emergency and a disaster. Not much to do unless there’s a war on or a company of roustabouts decides to tear up a local bar. And by late night, the base settles into a pattern. The sentries walk their posts, the various administrative offices close down, and whoever is on night watch takes over the communications system—which in 1947 consisted primarily of telephone and telex cable. I had to walk a beat as well, checking the different buildings and sentry posts to make sure everyone was on duty. I also had to close down the social clubs. After I made my obligatory stops at the enlisted men’s and officers’ clubs, shutting down the bars and tossing, with all due respect to the senior officers, the drunks back to their quarters, I footed it over to the old veterinary building where Brown was standing watch. But when I got there, where he was supposed to be, I didn’t see him. Something was wrong.

  “Major Corso,” a voice hissed out of the darkness. It had an edge of terror and excitement to it.

  “What the hell are you doing in there, Brownie?” I began cussing out the figure that peeked out at me from behind the door. “Have you gone off your rocker?” He was supposed to be outside the building, not hiding in a doorway. It was a breach of duty.

  “You don’t understand, Major,” he whispered again. “You have to see this.”

  “Better be good,” I said as I walked over to where he was standing and waited for him outside the door. “Now you get out here where I can see you,” I ordered.

  Brown popped his head out from behind the door.

  “You know what’s in here?” he asked.

  What
ever was going on, I didn’t want to play any games. The post duty sheet for that night read that the veterinary building was off-limits to everyone. Not even the sentries were allowed inside because whatever had been loaded in had been classified as “No Access.” What was Brown doing on the inside?

  “Brownie, you know you’re not supposed to be in there,” I said. “Get out here and tell me what’s going on.”

  He stepped out from inside the door, and even through the shadow I could see that his face was a dead pale, just as if he’d seen a ghost. “You won’t believe this,” he said. “I don’t believe it and I just saw it.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked.

  “The guys who off-loaded those deuce-and-a-halfs,” he said. “They told us they brought these boxes up from Fort Bliss from some accident out in New Mexico?”