The Day After Roswell

by William J. Birnes

  “Yeah, so what?” I was getting impatient with this.

  “Well, they told us it was all top secret but they looked inside anyway. Everybody down there did when they were loading the trucks. MPs were walking around with sidearms and even the officers were standing guard,” Brown said. “But the guys who loaded the trucks said they looked inside the boxes and didn’t believe what they saw. You got security clearance, Major. You can come in here.”

  In fact, I was the post duty officer and could go anywhere I wanted during the watch. So I walked inside the old veterinary building, the medical dispensary for the cavalry horses before the First World War, and saw where the cargo from the convoy had been stacked up. There was no one in the building except for Bill Brown and myself.

  “What is all this stuff?” I asked.

  “That’s just it, Major, nobody knows,” he said. “The drivers told us it came from a plane crash out in the desert somewhere around the 509th. But when they looked inside, it was nothing like anything they’d seen before. Nothing from this planet.”

  It was the silliest thing I’d ever heard, enlisted men’s tall stories that floated from base to base getting more inflated every lap around the track. Maybe I wasn’t the world’s smartest guy, but I had enough engineering and intelligence schooling to pick my way around pieces of wreckage and come up with two plus two. We walked over to the tarpaulin-shrouded boxes, and I threw back the edge of the canvas.

  “You’re not supposed to be in here,” I told Brownie. “You better go.”

  “I’ll watch outside for you, Major.”

  I almost wanted to tell him that that’s what he was supposed to be doing all along instead of snooping into classified material, but I did what I used to do best and kept my mouth shut. I waited while he took up his position at the door to the building before I dug any further into the boxes.

  There were about thirty-odd wooden crates nailed shut and stacked together against the far wall the building. The light switches were the push type and I didn’t know which switch tripped which circuit, so I used my flashlight and stumbled around until my eyes got used to the darkness and shadows. I didn’t want to start pulling apart the nails, so I set the flashlight off to one side where it could throw light on the stack and then searched for a box that could open easily. Then I found an oblong box off to one side with a wide seam under the top that looked like it had been already opened. It looked like either the strangest weapons crate you’d ever see or the smallest shipping crate for a coffin. Maybe this was the box that Brownie had seen. I brought the flashlight over and set it up high on the wall so it would throw as broad a beam as possible. Then I set to work on the crate.

  The top was already loose. I was right—this one had just been opened. I jimmied the top back and forth, continuing to loosen the nails that had been pried up with a nail claw, until I felt them come out of the wood. Then I worked along the sides of the five-or-so-foot box until the top was loose all the way around. Not knowing which end of the box was the front, I picked up the top and slid it off to the edge. Then I lowered the flashlight, looked inside, and my stomach rolled right up into my throat and I almost became sick right then and there.

  Whatever they’d crated this way, it was a coffin, but not like any coffin I’d seen before. The contents, enclosed in a thick glass container, were submerged in a thick light blue liquid, almost as heavy as a gelling solution of diesel fuel. But the object was floating, actually suspended, and not sitting on the bottom with a fluid over top, and it was soft and shiny as the underbelly of a fish. At first I thought it was a dead child they were shipping somewhere. But this was no child. It was a four-foot human-shaped figure with arms, bizarre-looking four-fingered hands—I didn’t see a thumb—thin legs and feet, and an oversized incandescent lightbulb-shaped head that looked like it was floating over a balloon gondola for a chin. I know I must have cringed at first, but then I had the urge to pull off the top of the liquid container and touch the pale gray skin. But I couldn’t tell whether it was skin because it also looked like a very thin one-piece head-to-toe fabric covering the creature’s flesh.

  Its eyeballs must have been rolled way back in its head because I couldn’t see any pupils or iris or anything that resembled a human eye. But the eye sockets themselves were oversized and almond shaped and pointed down to its tiny nose, which didn’t really protrude from the skull. It was more like the tiny nose of a baby that never grew as the child grew, and it was mostly nostril.

  The creature’s skull was overgrown to the point where all of its facial features—such as they were—were arranged absolutely frontally, occupying only a small circle on the lower part of the head. The protruding ears of a human were nonexistent, its cheeks had no definition, and there were no eyebrows or any indications of facial hair. The creature had only a tiny flat slit for a mouth and it was completely closed, resembling more of a crease or indentation between the nose and the bottom of the chinless skull than a fully functioning orifice. I would find out years later how it communicated, but at that moment in Kansas, I could only stand there in shock over the clearly nonhuman face suspended in front of me in a semiliquid preservative.

  I could see no damage to the creature’s body and no indication that it had been involved in any accident. There was no blood, its limbs seemed intact, and I could find no lacerations on the skin or through the gray fabric. I looked through the crate encasing the container of liquid for any paperwork or shipping invoice or anything that would describe the nature or origin of this thing. What I found was an intriguing Army Intelligence document describing the creature as an inhabitant of a craft that had crash-landed in Roswell, New Mexico, earlier that week and a routing manifest for this creature to the log-in officer at the Air Materiel Command at Wright Field and from him to the Walter Reed Army Hospital morgue’s pathology section where, I supposed, the creature would be autopsied and stored. It was not a document I was meant to see, for sure, so I tucked it back in the envelope against the inside wall of the crate.

  I allowed myself more time to look at the creature than I should have, I suppose, because that night I missed the time checks on the rest of my rounds and believed I’d have to come up with a pretty good explanation for the lateness of my other stops to verify the sentry assignments. But what I was looking at was worth any trouble I’d get into the next day. This thing was truly fascinating and at the same time utterly horrible. It challenged every conception I had, and I hoped against hope that I was looking at some form of atomic human mutation. I knew I couldn’t ask anybody about it, and because I hoped I would never see its like again, I came up with explanation after explanation for its existence, despite what I’d read on the enclosed document: It was shipped here from Hiroshima, it was the result of a Nazi genetic experiment, it was a dead circus freak, it was anything but what I knew it said it was—what it had to be: an extraterrestrial.

  I slid the top of the crate back over the creature, knocked the nails loosely into their original holes with the butt end of my flashlight, and put the tarp back in position. Then I left the building and hoped I could close the door forever on what I’d seen. Just forget it, I told myself. You weren’t supposed to see it and maybe you can live your whole life without ever having to think about it. Maybe.

  Once outside the building I rejoined Brownie at his post.

  “You know you never saw this,” I said. “And you tell no one.”

  “Saw what, Major?” Brownie said, and I walked back to the base general headquarters, the image of the creature suspended in that liquid fading away with each and every step I took. By the time I slid back behind the desk, it was all a dream. No, not a dream, a nightmare—but it was over and, I hoped, it would never come back.

  CHAPTER 3

  The Roswell Artifacts

  The nightmare of the creature I saw at Fort Riley never faded from my memory, although I was able to bury it during my years as a guided-missile commander in Europe. And I never saw its body again the rest
of my life except for the autopsy photos and the medical-examiner sketches that would catch up to me, along with the rest of what happened at Roswell, when I returned to Washington from Germany for assignment at the Pentagon in 1961. I can remember my first day back when I was waiting outside my boss’s door for entry into the inner sanctum. And, boy, was I ever nervous.

  The last time I remembered being that nervous in Washington, I was standing in the little anteroom outside the Oval Office in the White House waiting for President Eisenhower to get off the phone. I had a big request to make and I wanted to do it face-to-face, not go through any aides or assistants or wait for special assistant C. D. Jackson to show up to make everything OK. I was almost a regular in the Oval Office those days, back in the 1950s, dropping off National Security Council staff papers for the President, making reports, and sometimes waiting while he read them just in case he wanted me to relay a message. But this time was different. I needed to speak to him myself, alone. But Ike was taking a longer time than he usually took on this phone call, and I shifted around and sneaked a glance at the switchboard lights on Mrs. Lehrer’s desk off to the side. Still on the phone, and you could see at the bottom of the switch panel where the calls were backing up.

  I was asking President Eisenhower for a personal favor: to let me out of my fifth year on the White House National Security staff so I could pick up the command of my own antiaircraft guided-missile battalion being formed up in Red Canyon, New Mexico. Ike had once promised me a command of my own when I returned from Korea and was posted to the White House. And in 1957 the opportunity came up, a juicy assignment at a high-security base with the coveted green tabs and all the trappings: train and command an antiaircraft battalion to use the army’s most secret new surface-to-air missile and then take it to Germany for some front-line target practice right where the Russians could see us. In case of World War III, the order of battle read, Soviet Backfire bombers will drop an inferno of high explosives on our positions first and the East German tanks will roll straight into our barracks. We stand and fight, torching off every missile we have so as to take out as many attacking aircraft as we have missiles, and get the hell out of there. I could almost taste the thrill in my mouth as I waited for Ike to get off the phone that day back in 1957.

  Those were my memories this afternoon as I stood outside the back door of General Trudeau’s office on the third floor of the outer ring of the Pentagon. It was 1961, four years after I left the White House and put on my uniform again to stand guard across the electronic no-man’s-land of radar sweeps and photo sensors just a few kilometers west of the Iron Curtain. Ike had retired to his farm in Pennsylvania, and my new boss was General Arthur Trudeau, one of the last fighting generals from the Korean War. Trudeau became an instant hero in my book when I heard about how his men were pinned down on the cratered slopes of Pork Chop Hill, dug into shallow foxholes with enemy mortars dropping round them like rain. You couldn’t order anyone up that hell of an incline to walk those boys back down; just too damn many explosions. So Trudeau pulled off his stars, clapped a sergeant’s helmet over his head, and fought back up the hill himself, leading a company of volunteers, and then fought his way back down. That was how he did things, with his own hands, and now I’d be working directly for him in the Army R&D Division.

  I was a lieutenant colonel when I came to the Pentagon in 1961, and all I brought with me were my bowling trophy from Fort Riley and a nameplate for my desk cut out of the fin of a Nike missile from Germany. My men made it for me and said it would bring me luck. After I got to the Pentagon—it was still a couple of days before my assignment actually began—I found out right away I’d need a lot of it. In fact, as I opened the door and let myself directly into the general’s inner office, I found out how much luck I’d need that very day.

  “So what’s the big secret, General?” I asked my new boss. It was strange talking to a general this way, but we’d become friends while I was on Eisenhower’s staff. “Why not the front door?”

  “Because they’re already watching you, Phil,” he said, knowing exactly what kind of cold chill that would send through me. “And I’d just as soon have this conversation in private before you show up officially.”

  He walked me over to a set of file cabinets. “Things haven’t changed that much around here since you went to Germany,” he said. “We still know who our friends are and who we can trust.”

  I knew his code. The Cold War was at its height and there were enemies all around us: in government, within the intelligence services, and within the White House itself. Those of us in military intelligence who knew the truth about how much danger the country was in were very circumspect about what we said, even to each other, and where we said it. Looking back on it now from the safe distance of forty years, it’s hard to believe that even as big eight-cylinder American cars rolled off the assembly lines and into suburban driveways and television antennas sprung up on roofs of brand-new houses in thousands of subdivisions around the country, we were in the midst of a treacherous war of nerves.

  Deep inside our intelligence services and even within the President’s own cabinet were cadres of career government officers working—some knowingly, some not—for the Soviet Union by carrying out policies devised inside the KGB. Some of the position papers that came out of these offices made no sense otherwise. We also knew the CIA had been penetrated by KGB moles, just as we knew that some of our own policy makers were advocating ideas that would only weaken the United States and lead us down the paths that served the best interests of our enemies.

  A handful of us knew the awful truth about Korea. We lost it not because we were beaten on the battlefield but because we were compromised from within. The Russian advisers fighting alongside the North Koreans were given our plans even before they reached those of us on MacArthur’s staff. And when we threw our best technology into the field and into the air, the Soviets had already formulated plans to capture it and take it back to Russia. When the time came to talk peace at Panmunjom and negotiate a POW exchange, I knew where those Americans were, ten miles north of the border, who wouldn’t be coming home. And there were people right inside our own government who let them stay there, in prison camps, where some of them might be alive to this very day.

  So General Trudeau gave me his very grim smile and said, as he walked me toward the locked dark olive military file cabinet on the wall of his private office, “I need you to cover my back, Colonel. I need you to watch because what I’m going to do, I can’t cover it myself.”

  Whatever Trudeau was planning, I knew he’d tell me in his own time. And he’d tell me only what he thought I needed to know when I needed it. For the immediate present, I was to be his special assistant in R&D, one of the most sensitive divisions in the whole Pentagon bureaucracy because that was where the most classified plans of the scientists and weapons designers were translated into the reality of defense contracts. R&D was the interface between the gleam in someone’s eye and a piece of hardware prototype rolling out of a factory to show its potential for the army brass. Only it was my job to keep it a secret while it was developed.

  “But there’s something else I want you to do for me, Phil,” General Trudeau continued as he put his hand on top of the cabinet. “I’m going to have this cabinet moved downstairs to your office.”

  The general had put me in an office on the second floor of the outer ring directly under him. That way, as I would soon find out, whenever he needed me in a hurry I could get upstairs and through the back door before anybody even knew where I was.

  “This has some special files, war materiel you’ve never seen before, that I want to put under your Foreign Technology responsibilities,” he continued.

  My specific assignment was to the Research & Development Division’s Foreign Technology desk, what I thought would be a pretty dry post because it mainly required me to keep up on the kinds of weapons and research our allies were doing. Read the intelligence reports, review films of weapons te
sts, debrief scientists and the research people at universities on what their colleagues overseas were doing, and write up proposals for weapons the army might need. It was important and it had its share of cloak and dagger, but after what I’d been through in Rome chasing down the Gestapo and SS officers the Nazis left behind and the Soviet NKVD units masquerading themselves as Italian Communist partisans, it seemed like a great opportunity to help General Trudeau keep some of the army’s ideas out of the hands of the other military services. But then I didn’t know what was inside that file cabinet.

  The army generally categorized the types of weapons research it was doing into two basic groups, domestic and foreign. There was the research that sprang out of work going on in the United States and research by people overseas. I knew I’d be keeping track of what the French were doing with advanced helicopter design and whether the British would be able to build a practical vertical takeoff and landing fighter, something we’d given up on after World War II. Then there was the German big gun, the V3, granddaughter of Big Bertha that the Germans threatened Paris with during the First World War. We’d found the barrel assemblies of the German artillery pieces near Calais after we invaded Normandy and knew that the Nazis were working on something that, like their jet engine fighter and new Panzer tank, could have changed the outcome of the war if they’d held us off any longer at the Battle of the Bulge.

  I was responsible for developing this technology, ideas we hadn’t come up with ourselves, and work up recommendations for how we could incorporate this into our weapons planning. But I didn’t know why the general kept on patting the top drawer of that file cabinet.

  “I’ll get to those files right away if you like, General,” I said. “And write up some preliminary reports on what I think about it.”

  “It’s going to take you a little longer than that, Phil,” Trudeau said. Now he was almost laughing, something he didn’t do very much in those days. In fact, the only time I remember him laughing that way was after he heard that his name had been put up to command the U.S. forces in Vietnam. He also heard that they wanted me to head up the intelligence section for the Army Special Forces command in Vietnam. We both knew that the army mission in Vietnam was headed for disaster because it was a think-tank war. And the people in the think tank were more worried about restraining the army than in wiping out the Vietcong. So Trudeau had a plan: “We’ll either win the war or get court-martialed,” he said. “But they’ll know we were there.” And he laughed when he said that the same way he was laughing as he told me to take my time with the contents of the file cabinet. “You’ll want to think about this before you start writing any reports,” he said.