They rode home in silence, driving north along 268. A bright flash behind the truck cast shadows of the family across the dashboard. Corky assumed it was another flash of lightning, but then a bright streak came over the top of the truck and shot away into the distance. A bright sizzle of white light, tearing through the night like a meteor. But it wasn’t like any meteor they’d ever seen. For one thing, it wasn’t falling. It was traveling parallel to the ground. And instead of a smooth stroke of light, this one was scattering blue-and-green energy. It reminded Corky of the shower of sparks created by a welder’s torch. As it sank behind the hills and disappeared from view, he pulled onto the shoulder of the road and told the girls to stay inside. He got out and climbed onto the front bumper, expecting whatever it was to explode on impact. He cupped his hands behind his ears and waited. But everything stayed quiet.
He climbed back inside feeling a little better. His fireworks show had turned out to be a disaster, but at least they’d seen something unusual. The girls were excited again. They said it was God playing with a sparkler and talked about it all the way home.
*
Grant Weston had spent the afternoon hunting for fossils. He was the leader of a group of seven archaeologists, vertebrate paleontologists to be exact, who had hiked into the desert and set up camp for the three-day holiday weekend. The sudden rain had nearly extinguished their campfire, and he was adding dry kindling to it when the sky lit up above his head. He looked up and watched the hissing fireball flash past. A few seconds after it disappeared behind the trees, the group heard two crashing noises in quick succession. The first was a hollow thud, while the second was a sharp echoing crack.
“What the hell was that?” everyone wanted to know.
One of the graduate students initiated a brief panic by proclaiming they had just witnessed the crash of a flying saucer. But Weston proposed a more plausible theory. Familiar with that part of New Mexico, he explained that nearby Roswell Field was a testing site for the Army’s new and experimental aircraft. Residents of the area, he said, had grown accustomed to seeing strange-looking planes in the sky. That calmed the nerves of his fellow campers. They discussed setting out immediately to look for the wreckage, but decided it was too dangerous. Judging from the trajectory of the streaking light and the sound of the crash, they estimated the craft had gone down about five miles north of their location. The moon was new, and the terrain could be treacherous even in daylight. There was nothing they could do until daybreak.
In all probability, Weston knew, there would be no survivors. But all night the possibility of a wounded survivor tangled in the wreckage haunted him. He couldn’t sleep, and he wasn’t the only one. Well before dawn, the archaeologists were sipping coffee, waiting for first light. They had packed up the first-aid kit and enough food and water for the day. As soon as they could see the edges of their campsite, they set out.
Progress was slow. The land was a mixture of rock, loose sand, and thorny scrub. Flash floods had cut steep ravines between the rolling hills, forcing the group to double back and find a new path every few minutes. About the time the sun began to rise, they noticed a spotter plane searching the area, a welcome sign. Within half an hour, the plane was circling over a spot about a mile east of them.
“They must have found the crash site,” Weston reasoned. “Let’s head in that direction.”
A set of steep hills separated them from where the plane was circling. They followed a path between two peaks and came into an arroyo. A few hundred yards to their left, they noticed the tail of the craft. As they moved farther into the dry riverbed, the archaeologists, who had spent their lives studying earth’s ancient past, stepped forward to meet its future.
“That doesn’t look like an Army plane to me, experimental or not.”
“It looks like a fat airplane without any wings.”
Skilled in the reconstruction of events, Weston deduced what had happened the night before. “See those flattened bushes on the crest of that ridge? The plane must have bottomed out there—that was the thud we heard—and then bounced up and come down here.” The black, roughly circular ship had plowed nose first into a sheer cliff. For the amount of rock it had shattered, Weston was surprised it wasn’t in worse shape. He headed up the incline for a closer look.
When Betty Kagayama saw what he meant to do, she yelled after him. “Grant, what are you doing? Please don’t go near it! Let’s wait for help.” She and Professor Weston had developed a relationship that was something more than platonic. “I don’t care what you say; that thing isn’t from earth.”
“I’ve got to check to see if anyone’s still alive. Here, take this.” He handed her his field camera. “I’ll climb up there and pose like a big-game hunter. We’ll laugh about it later.” Over Betty’s protests, he jogged up the hill.
As he got closer, he knew she was right. The black ship hadn’t been built by humans. He stopped a few feet from the tail section and examined the small markings cut into the surface. “Looks like hieroglyphics,” he called down the slope. There was a hole torn open along the side of the ship. He squatted down and looked up into it. “Hello? Anybody in there?” He could see sunlight on the interior walls of the vessel. He considered squeezing through the gap, but the foul, acrid smell coming out of it drove him away. He walked around to the front of the ship and saw there were windows. To get to them, he began clambering up the pile of debris caused by the crash.
“Grant, someone’s coming! Over there.”
He looked in the direction Betty was pointing. Two black sedans followed by a dozen military trucks were cutting cross-country toward the site. He started to come back down the slope, but curiosity got the better of him. He knew how the military was. They’d shoo him away, and he’d never get to see what was inside. So he climbed high enough onto the slope so that he could step onto the edge of the disk-shaped craft, then carefully walked across the surface and peered in the windows. A pair of blunt, bony faces was staring back at him through the window. They looked like large death masks fashioned out of living tissue, gristle, and tendon. Horrified and repulsed, Weston fell backwards off the ship, then ran down the slope. Before he had rejoined the group, the first black sedan pulled up. The man who stepped out introduced himself as Special Agent Ian Leigh.
He talked with the archaeologists for a moment. He asked Professor Weston to sit in the sedan and directed the others to wait in a group off to the side. He then jogged back to the head of the military convoy and called a huddle with the commanding officers. One of them asked if he should take the civilians into custody.
“They seem like a cooperative group. We’ll worry about them later. Right now our problem is these soldiers; they’ve already seen too much.” The group turned and noticed six troop transport vehicles, each one loaded to the brim with gawking enlisted men. Like everyone else, they were transfixed by the sight of the wreckage. Leigh thought for a minute before coming up with a plan. “Here’s what we’ll do. We’ll use these men to establish a cordon. Nobody comes in or out without my approval. Tell the men to walk back out of this ravine the same way we drove in. Put four or five guys up on the cliff above the ship and fan the rest of them out in a circle. Make sure they’re far enough away to where they can’t see what’s going on.”
“Why don’t we just have them turn their backs?”
“Good idea. As soon as they’re in position, you guys drive the trucks down close to the wreck, and we’ll use them to create a screen. OK, get busy.” Leigh moved around the crash site with impressive efficiency. It was as if he’d done all of this before. “Steiger, let’s go; this is your big moment, kid. You’re elected to be our welcoming committee,” he called across the gravel to one of the men he’d brought in from DC. “Put on that protective gear. You’re going in first.” Steiger, a rail-thin man who stood well over six feet, popped open the trunk of the first sedan. A minute later, covered head to toe in a rubbery, lead-lined suit, he was moving toward the fallen spacecraft.
He carried a Geiger counter. He moved around the outside of the ship for several minutes, sampling radiation levels, and found nothing abnormal. Very carefully, he approached the breach in the wall and reached in with the Geiger counter. Finding all levels normal again, he poked his head through the gap and cautiously climbed inside.
*
A few hours later, the work was finished. Every square inch of the impact area had been carefully photographed. The three large bodies found inside had been sealed in lead-lined body bags, lowered through the opening, and piled into the back of an ambulance, which took them to the base hospital. After a loading crane had hoisted the ship onto the back of a flatbed truck, it was buried under a collection of tarps and poles meant to disguise the vehicle’s shape. Before turning the archaeologists loose, Leigh had sworn them to secrecy. He reminded them that they were the only ones outside the military who knew about the ship, and he had cataloged a short list of accidents that might befall anyone who broke the silence. The next morning he would return to the site with a hundred soldiers, MPs with reputations for being able to keep their mouths shut gathered from six different bases across three states. After cleaning the area once by hand, they used industrial vacuum cleaners to remove every last shred of evidence. At that point, Leigh was convinced he had succeeded in making the whole situation disappear.
*
But that same morning, a man walked into the Chaves County Sheriff’s Headquarters carrying a crate full of a strange, lightweight material he’d found scattered over a large area of his ranch. His name was Mac Brazel. He was one of those leather-skinned, scuffed-up cowboys who eked out a living by keeping cattle and sheep herds up in the hardscrabble mountains.
On the night of July 4, he’d heard a loud crashing sound, one that didn’t sound like thunder. He’d forgotten about it completely until he found the field of shiny material. Initially he seemed angry. His sheep wouldn’t go near the stuff and he wanted to know who was going to come out there and clean it up. But then he asked if his discovery might lead to him collecting some of the reward money that magazines had been offering to anyone who could prove the existence of flying saucers. Until he arrived at the sheriff’s office, he’d heard none of the rumors concerning the craft that had gone down north of town.
The sheriff, George Wilcox, came out of his office and examined the material. It was unlike anything he’d seen before. It seemed to be some kind of metal. Although it was as light as balsa wood, none of the men in the office could bend it. They tried hammering on it with a stapler and burning it with their lighters, all to no avail.
Wilcox was angry with the way the Army had pushed him out of the investigation of the crashed ship, refusing him access to the site. Nevertheless, he called Roswell Field to report Brazel’s find. He spoke with Major Jesse Marcel, who said he’d come into town right away. Thinking the Army would shunt him aside once more, Wilcox dispatched two of his deputies to the Brazel ranch to look for the debris field. As soon as they left, the phone rang. It was Walt Wasserman, the owner of local radio station KGFL, calling to see if there had been any new developments in the investigation of the crash. Wilcox put Brazel on the phone and, after the two men talked for several minutes, Wasserman was given directions to the rancher’s home.
Major Marcel arrived with a plainclothes counterintelligence officer, Sheridan Cavitt. After they had inspected the debris that Mac Brazel had brought to town, they instructed Sheriff Wilcox to lock it in a secure office, then made plans to follow Brazel out to his ranch. Moments after they left, the two deputies returned from the ranch. Instead of finding the field of debris, they’d come across a large circular burn mark in the grass. It was their opinion that something hot had landed in the spot, scorching the grass and baking the earth to a hard clay beneath it. They had come back to get a camera before it got dark.
Brazel led the two military officers, each of them driving separate vehicles, across his rocky property to a wide-open Held of sand and knee-high dead grass. They were about twelve miles from the site of the downed saucer. Scattered over an area three-quarters of a mile long and two hundred feet wide, were thousands of pieces of the mysterious lightweight material. Most of them were very small, the size of a fingernail and just as thin; others were almost three feet long. After a short examination of the site, the officers agreed with Brazel that “something had exploded in the air while flying south by southeast.” Brazel left when the sun began to set, telling the men that he had agreed to give an interview to KGFL. Cavitt and Marcel loaded their cars with as much of the debris as they could pack up before darkness fell. Cavitt drove straight back to the base, but Marcel was so impressed with the strange material, he stopped at his house to show it to his wife and son.
That night, station-owner Wasserman drove out to the Brazel property, picked him up, and drove him into town, where they made a recording of the rancher’s story. By the time they were finished, the station was ready to sign off for the night. So they scheduled it for the next afternoon.
But the recording would never be aired. Much to Wasserman’s surprise, he got an early-morning phone call from the Federal Communications Commission. He was ordered not to broadcast the interview. “If you do,” the man warned, “you’d better start looking for another line of work because you’ll be out of the radio business permanently within twenty-four hours.”
Wasserman tried to get in touch with Brazel but learned a squad of soldiers had come to his house in the middle of the night and taken him somewhere.
*
Marcel spent about an hour at home. He brought in one of the boxes he’d filled that afternoon and spread the contents out on the kitchen floor. The family tried to fit the pieces together, but had no luck. They experimented with pliers, attempting to bend the paper-thin substance out of shape. They realized that there was more than one kind of material. While most of it was amazingly rigid, other pieces could be folded easily between their fingers. Whichever way this second material was folded or bent, it retained the shape.
“Look at this one, it has signs on it,” Jesse, Jr., said.
His mother said the writing looked like hieroglyphics. The piece in question looked like a very small I-beam. It was about four inches long and appeared undamaged. The writing was a dull purple color etched onto the gray surface of the beam. Eleven-year-old Jesse, Jr., had seen hieroglyphs in schoolbooks, and knew these were different. They were geometric shapes, including circles and one pattern that looked like a leaf. The family couldn’t tell if the images were meant to be read; they were evenly spaced up and down the flat surfaces of the beam.
The son asked the father if he could keep some of the pieces as souvenirs. Marcel said he would ask his commanding officer about it, but that night he made sure all the pieces were put back in the box, which he then delivered to the base.
*
The next morning, First Lieutenant Walter Haut, the information officer for the 509th Bomb Group, held a series of discussions with people who had information concerning the strange goings-on. He learned from Marcel about the debris scattered around Brazel’s ranch and spoke with a few of the soldiers who had been out to the site of the crashed ship. Haut had received hundreds of telegrams and phone calls from all over the country asking him to confirm or deny the rumors coming out of the area. After gathering what he felt was a sufficient amount of information, he sat down at his typewriter and composed a brief, not very accurate press release. He then drove into town to deliver it. His first stop was KGFL. Not wanting to be hounded with a lot of questions he didn’t have answers for, he handed a copy of the statement to the receptionist and slipped out the door while she was reading through it. He did the same thing at KSWS, the town’s other radio station. Next, he drove to the newspaper offices of the Roswell Daily Record, stopping to chat with one of the reporters for a few minutes. By the time he came to his final stop, the Roswell Morning Dispatch, their phones had already started ringing off the hooks. As soon as the story had gone out on the wi
re, news editors from all forty-eight states had picked up their phones to confirm the story. While Haut was standing in the office, a call came in from Hong Kong. He didn’t even know where Hong Kong was. There was certainly more interest in the story than he had anticipated. It was about noon, so he walked down the street to a hamburger stand and had lunch by himself, an extra copy of the press release sitting on the counter soaking up water and grease:
Roswell, N.M.—The many rumors regarding flying disks became a reality yesterday when the Intelligence Office of the 509th Bomb Group of the Eighth Air Force, Roswell Air Field, was fortunate enough to gain possession of a crashed flying object of extraterrestrial origin through the cooperation of one of the local ranchers and the sheriff’s office of Chaves County.
Action was taken immediately and the disk was picked up at the rancher’s home and taken to the Roswell Air Base. Following examination by Major Jesse A. Marcel of the 509th Intelligence Office, the disk was flown by intelligence officers in a B-29 superfortress to an undisclosed “Higher Headquarters.”
Residents near the ranch on which the disk was found reported seeing a strange blue light several days ago about three o’clock in the morning.
Complete Independence Day Omnibus, The Page 39