“Where will you start?” the general asked.
“I’ll line up everything in the nut file,” I began. “Everything from what’s obvious to what I can’t make heads or tails out of. And I’ll go to scientists with clearance who we can trust, Oberth and von Braun, for advice.”
“I see what you mean,” Trudeau acknowledged. “Sure. We’ll line up our defense contractors, too. See which ones have ongoing development contracts that allow us to feed your development projects right into them.”
“Exactly. That way the existing defense contract becomes the cover for what we’re developing,” I said. “Nothing is ever out of the ordinary because we’re never starting up anything that hasn’t already been started up in a previous contract.”
“It’s just like a big mix and match,” Trudeau described it.
“Only what we’re doing, General, is mixing technology we’re developing in with technology not of this earth,” I said. “And we’ll let the companies we’re contracting with apply for the patents themselves.”
“Of course,” Trudeau realized. “If they own the patent we will have completely reverse-engineered the technology.”
“Yes, sir, that’s right. Nobody will ever know. We won’t even tell the companies we’re working with where this technology comes from. As far as the world will know the history of the patent is the history of the invention.”
“It’s the perfect cover, Phil,” the general said. “Where will you start?”
“I’ll write up my first analysis and recommendation tonight,” I promised. “There’s not a moment to lose.”
• • •
“The photographs in my file,” I began my report that night over the autopsy reports, which I attached, show a being of about 4 feet tall. The body seemed decomposed and the photos themselves aren’t of much use except to the curious. It’s the medical reports that are of interest. The organs, bones, and skin composition are different from ours. The being’s heart and lungs are bigger than a human’s. The bones are thinner but seem stronger as if the atoms are aligned differently for a greater tensile strength. The skin also shows a different atomic alignment in a way that appears the skin is supposed to protect the vital organs from cosmic ray or wave action or gravitational forces that we don’t yet understand. The overall medical report suggests that the medical examiners are more surprised at the similarities between the being found in the spacecraft (note: NSC reports refer to this creature as an Extraterrestrial Biological Entity [EBE]) and human beings than they are at the differences, especially the brain which is bigger in the EBE but not at all unlike ours.
• • •
I wrote on into the first of many nights that year, drafting rough notes that I would later type into formal reports that no one would ever see except General Trudeau, reaching conclusions that seemed more science fiction than real. I was most happy not because I was finally working on these files but, oddly enough, because when I sat down to write, I believed these reports would never see the light of day. In the harsh reality of the everyday world, they sound, even now as I remember them, fantastic. Even more fantastic, I remember, were the startling conclusions I allowed myself to come to. Was this really I writing, or was it somebody else? Where did these ideas come from?
• • •
If we consider similar biological factors that affect human beings, like long distance runners whose hearts and lungs are larger than average, hill and mountain dwellers whose lung capacity is greater than those who live closer to sea level, and even natural athletes whose long striated muscle alignment is different from those who are not athletes, can we not assume that the EBEs who have fallen into our possession represent the end process of genetic engineering designed to adapt them to long space voyages within an electromagnetic wave environment at speeds which create the physical conditions described by Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity? (Note for the record: Dr. Hermann Oberth suggests we consider the Roswell craft from the New Mexico desert not a spacecraft but a time machine. His technical report on propulsion will follow.)
CHAPTER 7
The EBE
Therefore, perhaps we should consider the EBEs as described in the medical autopsy reports humanoid robots rather then life forms, specifically engineered for long-distance travel through space or time.
• • •
A hot Washington summer morning had already settled over the Potomac like a wet towel on the day I finished the first of my reports for General Trudeau. And what a report it was. It set the tone for all of the other reports and recommendations I was to make for the general over the next two years. It began with the biggest find we had: the alien extraterrestrial itself.
Had I not read the medical examiner’s report of the alien from Walter Reed with my own eyes and reviewed the 1947 army photographs and sketches, I would have called any description of this creature pure science fiction; that is, had I not seen either this or its twin suspended in a transparent crypt at Fort Riley. But here it was again, just a yellowing sheaf of papers and a few cracked glossy prints in a brown folder sitting among scores of odds and ends, bits of debris, and strange devices in my nut file.
Even stranger to me than the medical examiner’s report was my reaction: What could we exploit from this entity? I wrote the general that “whether we found an ‘extraterrestrial biological entity’ is not as important in the R&D arena as are the ways we can develop what we learn from it so that man can travel in space.” This quickly became the overriding concern with all of the Roswell artifacts and the general format for all of my reports. Once I swallowed back the “oh wow” aspect to all of this life-altering information—and sometimes it took a very big swallow—I was still left with the job of sorting out what looked promising for R&D to develop from what seemed beyond our realistic grasp for the present. I began with the EBE.
The medical report and supporting photographs in front of me suggested that the creature was remarkably well adapted for long-distance space travel. For example, biological time, the Walter Reed medical examiners hypothesized, must have passed very slowly for the entity because it possessed a very slow metabolism, evidenced, they said, by the enormous capacities of the huge heart and lungs. The physiology of this thing indicated that this was not a creature whose body had to work hard to sustain it. A larger heart, my ME’s report read, meant that it took fewer beats than an average human heart to drive the thin, milky, almost lymphatic-like fluid through a limited, more primitive-looking, and apparently reduced-capacity circulatory system. As a result, the biological clock beat more slowly than a human’s and probably allowed the creature to travel great distances in a shorter biological time than humans.
The heart was very decomposed by the time the Walter Reed pathologists got their hands on it. It seemed to them that our atmosphere was quite toxic to the creature’s organs. Given the time that passed between the crash of the vehicle and the creature’s arrival at Walter Reed, it decomposed all of the organs far more rapidly than it would have decomposed human organs. This fact particularly impressed me because I had seen one of these things, if not the very one described in the report, suspended in a gel-like substance at Fort Riley. So whatever exposure it must have had was very minimal by human standards because the medical personnel at the 509th’s Walker Field got it into a liquid preservation state very quickly. Nevertheless, the Walter Reed pathologists were unable to determine with any certainty the structure of the creature’s heart except to guess that because it functioned as a passive blood-storage facility as well as a pumping muscle that it didn’t work the same way as did a four-chambered human heart. They said the alien heart seemed to have had internal diaphragm-like muscles that worked less hard than human heart muscle did because the creatures were meant to survive within a reduced gravity field as we understand gravity.
As camels store water, so did this creature store whatever atmosphere it breathed in the large capacity of its lungs. The lungs functioned in ways similar to a camel’s
humps or to our scuba tanks and released atmosphere very slowly into the creature’s system. Because of the large heart and the storage function we believed it had, we also surmised that it took far less breathable atmosphere to sustain the creature, thereby reducing the need for carrying large volumes of atmosphere along on the voyage. Perhaps the aircraft had a means of recirculating its atmosphere, recycling spent or waste air back into the craft. Moreover, because the creatures were only four or so feet tall, the large lungs occupied a far greater percentage of the chest cavity than human lungs did, further impressing the pathologists who examined the creatures’ remains. This also indicated to us that perhaps we were dealing with an entity specifically engineered for long-distance travel.
If we believed the heart and lungs seemed bioengineered for long-distance travel so, too, was the creature’s skeletal tissue. Although it was in a state of advanced decomposition, the creature’s bones looked to the army medical examiners to be fibrous, actually thinner than comparable human bones such as the ribs, sternum, clavicle, and pelvis. Pathologists speculated that the bones were more flexible than human bones and had a resiliency that might be related to the function of shock absorbers. More brittle human bones might more easily shatter under the stresses these alien entities must have been routinely subjected to. However, with a flexible skeletal frame, these entities appeared well suited for potential shocks and physical traumas of extreme forces and could withstand the fractures that would cripple human space travelers in a similar environment.
The military recovery team at the Roswell site had reported that the two creatures still alive after the crash had difficulty breathing our atmosphere. Whether that was because they were suddenly tossed out of their craft, unprotected, into our gravity envelope or whether our atmosphere itself was toxic to them, we don’t know. We also don’t know whether the one creature who died very shortly after the crash was struggling to breathe because he was fatally wounded by gunshots or because of other reasons. Military witnesses recounted different stories about the creature that survived and tried to run. Some said it was struggling to breathe from the moment the military had secured the area; others said that it was gasping only after it had been shot by one of the sentries. My guess was that it was the alien’s sudden exposure to the earth’s strong gravity that caused the creature to panic at first. That could have been one reason his breathing seemed labored. Then, after he fled and was shot, he was struggling to breathe because of his wounds. The medical examiner’s report mentioned nothing about toxic gases or the kind of atmosphere he believed the creatures naturally breathed.
If the Roswell craft were a scout or surveillance ship, as the military analysts back at Wright believed, then it was also more than likely that the creatures never intended to exit the craft. This was a craft equipped with a device that was capable of penetrating our nighttime or utilizing the temperature differentials of different objects to create a visual image, enabling the occupants to navigate and observe in darkness. And because it could elude our interceptors and appear and disappear on our radar screens at will, we believed that the occupants simply stayed inside and observed rather than roamed about. Perhaps other types of craft deployed from this same culture were equipped to land and carry out missions and therefore had breathing and antigravity apparatus on board for its crew that permitted them to exit the craft without suffering any consequences. The medical examiner didn’t speculate on this.
What did intrigue those who inspected the aircraft once it was shipped to Wright Field was the complete absence of any food-preparation facilities. Nor were there any stored foodstuffs on board. At a time when space travel was a science fiction writer’s fantasy, military analysts were already at work formulating ideas for how just such a technology could be practically implemented. It was not for travel to other planets, but for navigation around the earth because that’s the technology that military planners believed the Germans were developing as an extension of their V2 rocket program. If you’re going to put airmen into earth orbit, how do you process their waste products, provide adequate oxygen, and sustain them during prolonged periods? Clearly, after you’ve developed a launch vehicle with enough thrust to put a craft into earth orbit, keeping it there long enough for it to accomplish a mission is the next problem to tackle. The Roswell craft seemed to have tackled it because somehow it got here from somewhere else. But there was no indication of how such household problems as food preparation and the disposal of waste were solved.
There was much speculation from the different medical analysts about what these beings were composed of and what could have sustained them. First of all, doctors were more tantalized by the similarities the creatures shared with us than they were concerned about the differences. Rather than hideous-looking insects or the reptilian man-eaters that attacked Earth in War of the Worlds, these beings looked like little versions of us, only different. It was eerie.
While doctors couldn’t figure out how the entities’ essential body chemistry worked, they determined that they contained no new basic elements. However, the reports that I had suggested new combinations of organic compounds that required much more evaluation before doctors could form any opinions. Of specific interest was the fluid that served as blood but also seemed to regulate bodily functions in much the same way glandular secretions do for the human body. In these biological entities, the blood system and lymphatic systems seem to have been combined. And if an exchange of nutrients and waste occurred within their systems, that exchange could have only taken place through the creature’s skin or the outer protective covering they wore because there were no digestive or waste systems.
The medical report revealed that the creatures were enclosed within a one-piece protective covering like a jumpsuit or outer skin in which the atoms were aligned so as to provide a great tensile strength and flexibility. One examiner wrote that it reminded him of a spider’s web, which appears very fragile but is, in fact, very strong. The unique qualities of a spiderweb result from the alignment of fibers that provide great tenacity because they’re able to stretch under great pressure, yet display a resiliency that allows them to snap back into shape even after the shock of an impact. Similarly, the creature’s spacesuit or outer skin appeared to be stretched around it as if it were literally spun over the creature and seized up around it, providing a perfect skin-tight protective fit. The doctors had never seen anything like it before.
I think I finally understood it years later, after I had left the Pentagon and I was buying a Christmas tree. As I stood there in the frosty air, I watched as the young man who prepared the tree for transport inserted it, top first, into a stubby barrel-like device that automatically spun a twine mesh covering around the branches to keep them in place for the trip home. After I got home I had to cut through the mesh with a knife to remove the tree and separate the branches. This tree setup reminded me specifically of the medical report on the creature from the Roswell crash, and I imagined that maybe the spinning process of the creature’s outer garment resembled something like this.
The lengthwise alignment of the fibers in the suit also prompted the medical analysts to suggest that the suit might have been capable of protecting the wearer against the low-energy cosmic rays that would routinely bombard any craft during a space journey. The interior organs of the creature seemed so fragile and oversized that the Walter Reed medical analysts imagined that without the suit the entity would have been vulnerable to the cumulative physical trauma from a constant energy particle bombardment. Space travel without protection from subatomic particle bombardment might subject the traveler to the same kind of effects he’d experience if he were cooked in a microwave oven. The particle bombardment inside the craft, if heavy enough to constitute a shower, would so excite and accelerate the creature’s atomic structure that the resulting heat energy would literally cook the entity up.
The Walter Reed doctors were also fascinated by the nature of the creature’s inner skin. It resembled, although t
heir preliminary reports didn’t go into any chemical analysis, a thin layer of fatty tissue unlike any they’d ever seen before. And it was completely permeable, as if it were constantly exchanging chemicals back and forth with the combination blood/lymphatic system. Was this the way the creatures nourished themselves during their journeys and was this how waste was processed? The very small mouths and the lack of a human digestive system troubled the doctors at first because they didn’t know how these things were sustained. But their hypothesis that they processed chemicals released from their skin and maybe even recirculated waste chemicals would have explained the lack of any food-preparation or waste-processing facilities on the craft. I speculated, however, that they didn’t require food or facilities for waste disposal because they weren’t actual life-forms, only a kind of robot or android.
Another explanation, of course, suggested by the engineers at Wright Field, is that there would have been no need for food-preparation facilities had this craft been only a small scout ship that didn’t venture far from a larger craft. The creatures’ low metabolism meant that they could survive extended periods away from the main craft by subsisting on some form of military prepackaged foods until they returned to base. Neither the Wright Field engineers nor the Walter Reed medical examiners had an explanation for the lack of waste disposal on board the craft, nor could they explain how the creatures’ waste was processed. Maybe I was speculating too far about robots or androids when I was writing my report for General Trudeau, but I kept thinking, also, that the skin analysis that I was reading sounded more akin to the skin of a houseplant than the skin of a human being. That, too, could have been another explanation for the lack of food or waste facilities.
Much of the attention during the preliminary and later autopsies of the creatures focused on the size, nature, and anatomy of their brains. Much credence also was given to the firsthand descriptions of on-scene witnesses who said they received impressions from the dying creature that it was suffering and in great pain. No one heard the creature make any sounds, so any impressions, Army Intelligence personnel assumed, would have to have been created through some type of empathic projection or outright mental telepathy. But witnesses said they heard no “words” in their mind, only the resonance of a shared or projected impression much simpler than a sentence but far more complex because they were able to share with the creature a sense not only of suffering but of profound sadness, as if it were in mourning for the others who perished on board the craft. These witness reports intrigued me more than any other information we took from the crash site.
The Day After Roswell Page 12