by Dayton Ward
“You can say that again.”
Following the debacle that Project Grudge turned into, a new attitude now gripped Wainwright, his fellow officers, and everyone connected to the secret work with which they had been charged.
Prior to this new shift, Project Grudge’s former primary directive—at least so far as the Air Force and the Pentagon were concerned—had been to find plausible explanations for any “UFO sightings” that did not point to extraterrestrial causes. It was a definite shift in mindset when compared to the attitudes that had driven Project Sign. The prior effort, which worked outward from the truth of what really had happened at Roswell, was motivated by a need to understand the larger ramifications of the aliens’ presence on Earth, and what it might mean for humanity in the years to come.
Now Project Grudge’s aim was to ignore or debunk any claims of extraterrestrial activity, engaging in a more organized public relations effort with the aim of presenting the results of its investigations to the citizenry, rather than pursuing the truth. Wainwright had come close to resigning his commission on two separate occasions, but Professor Carlson had talked him out of it, convinced that soon, something would happen to change the minds of skeptical leaders.
It did happen, on September 10, 1951, when both civilian and military pilots reported sightings and near collisions with varying numbers of unidentified disk-like craft in the skies over New Jersey. The mass sighting and sheer number of corroborating reports demanded an investigation, during which Project Grudge was called to answer for its seemingly apathetic approach to UFO sightings. In the aftermath of that investigation, Grudge was deactivated and a new project put into motion; one that would treat sightings and reports seriously, but with no bias for or against any extraterrestrial explanation. Indeed, the project’s primary mandate for all personnel was to vigorously pursue whatever evidence or other information presented itself, regardless of where it might lead. In short, the directive was simple: Keep an open mind.
And so it was in early 1952 that James Wainwright, with great enthusiasm and renewed hope, found himself once again transferred from Majestic 12 and assigned as an investigating officer for the newly christened Project Blue Book. Liaison officers for the project were assigned to every Air Force installation, acting as a starting point for reports submitted from those regions, with all such accounts sent up the chain of command to the project’s commander, Captain Edward Ruppelt, and the main task group at Wright-Patterson.
Wainwright, by virtue of seniority and his tenure with the previous projects, was a principal case officer, dispatched by Ruppelt himself to investigate any reports or sightings with a high probability of obtaining incontrovertible proof of extraterrestrial activity. The new initiative, grounded as it was by Ruppelt’s directive to carry out every investigation with all due rigor and attention to every detail, demanded even more from the officers in his charge. More research, more time spent traveling, and more long nights spent in this office, filing reports detailing the results of those efforts.
I know your work is important to you, and you’re driven by your duty. It’s one of the many things I’ve always loved and admired about you, but I’m tired of being the second most important thing in your life.
Deborah’s words, as though she stood before him speaking them aloud, rang in Wainwright’s ears. Balancing his work against his home life had been difficult during the eras of Sign and Grudge, but Blue Book had only increased that strain. While the new project was still in its earliest days, he had tried to prepare her for the increased requirements it would place upon him. Of course, many of her questions touched on those aspects of his assignment that he was not allowed to share.
You don’t talk to me, about anything. Is it because you can’t, or you just don’t want to?
Wainwright hoped one day to be able to tell Deborah everything, to show her what had so consumed him these past five years, and what it meant for the very safety of the human race. Since his arrival here and from the beginnings of the Air Force’s investigation, hundreds of UFO sightings had been reported. While the majority of these had proven either to be false or else explained by conventional causes, and many of these were reported as part of Project Grudge’s public relations endeavors, there were still dozens of reports requiring increased scrutiny. Some of these cases remained open because alien activity had not yet been ruled out. Then there was the even smaller number of files that pointed without doubt to vessels of extraterrestrial origin. According to the initial top-secret assessment provided to the Pentagon by Captain Ruppelt, there could be no denying that Earth was under almost constant surveillance.
It was a claim questioned by the highest tiers of government and military leadership, despite being supported by thousands of pages of information and photographs as collected by the Air Force during the past five years. Though Wainwright had not seen anything conclusive pointing to the existence of aliens on Earth since that day at Roswell in 1947, he had heard rumors of other case officers stumbling across spacecraft or advanced technology. There even were reports of bodies being recovered from crash sites, with all of the evidence spirited away to high-security storehouses around the country. There was an area of Wright-Patterson with several buildings operating under a tight security cordon, with access by visitors restricted to those authorized by the base commanding general. Even with the security clearance Wainwright held, he had never been granted access to that section.
Maybe one day, he thought, but he would not be holding his breath.
A knock from outside the office interrupted his thoughts, and Wainwright looked up to see a shadowy figure standing just beyond the door’s glazed, translucent window. “Come in.”
The door opened to reveal Lieutenant Darren Benjamin, one of Captain Ruppelt’s aides. Like Wainwright, he was dressed in the standard blue officer’s service dress uniform, with blue trousers and jacket over a light blue shirt with a dark blue tie. A lock of his dark brown hair dropped down across his forehead, and Wainwright suspected the younger man used some sort of hair tonic to achieve that look.
“Good morning, sir,” Benjamin said, closing the door behind him and moving to stand before Wainwright’s desk. He was carrying a green file folder; on the cover Wainwright could see the stamped words “TOP SECRET.” Stopping in front of the desk, Benjamin held out the folder. “Captain Ruppelt asked me to deliver this to you pronto.”
“Another sighting?” Wainwright asked, taking the folder and laying it on his desk. As he opened the file and began perusing its contents, his eyes locked on one particular piece of information on the report’s top sheet. “Yuma?”
“Yes, sir,” Benjamin replied. “Last Thursday, the seventeenth. At least a half dozen witnesses reported seeing a flat, white disk traveling in a straight line across the sky over the mountains of the testing ranges. Two more people reported seeing it again the next day. All of the observers were military personnel. We got the call that day, with the follow-up report arriving Saturday afternoon. Given the nature of the incident, and the witnesses involved, Captain Ruppelt wants you to head out there and have a look.”
Wainwright sighed, chastising himself for the breach in military bearing in the presence of a junior officer. “Sorry, Lieutenant. I guess I’m still tired from the last trip. We just got home last night.”
Never mind the empty house.
“Understood, sir,” Benjamin said. “For what it’s worth, the captain mentioned that very thing when he handed me the file. He told me to tell you he apologizes for sending you out again so soon, but . . .” The younger man’s expression turned sheepish. “You know how it is, sir.”
Nodding, Wainwright forced a small smile. “Yep. That’s how it is, all right.” He spent a brief moment scanning the report’s top sheet before flipping to the supplemental pages, looking for certain key phrases that Blue Book liaison officers at other bases had been instructed to use when taking statements from witnesses. So far as he could tell, the accounts as provided by
the Yuma base personnel were detailed, lacking the sort of embellishment he long ago had come to associate with reports submitted by less-credible observers. For a moment, his inner cynic—cultivated after years of taking reports of alleged sightings from people just looking for attention or validation from the government or society at large—wondered if the witnesses had worked together to arrive at a consistent story to tell the Yuma liaison officer. The questionnaire developed by Captain Ruppelt for use when interviewing those making such reports was designed to detect such collusion, but experience had taught Wainwright that the process was not foolproof. He knew he would not be able to judge the veracity of this report until he had a chance to question the observers for himself.
Guess I should start packing. Again.
SEVEN
Yuma Test Station, Yuma, Arizona
April 22, 1952
“Well, considering this is my first time here,” Wainwright said, guiding the Jeep down the narrow, dusty service road, “it’s definitely everything I hoped it’d be.”
As she held on to the dashboard from where she sat in the passenger seat, Marshall’s laugh carried over the sound of the vehicle’s engine. “Just once, why can’t they send us to Florida, or Paris?”
Wainwright did not reply, opting instead to swerve the Jeep so as to avoid a large rut in the unpaved road, which had appeared after the vehicle he was following also dodged to miss it. He still managed to catch the furrow with the Jeep’s rear tire, sending him and Marshall bouncing in their seats and Wainwright’s head brushing against the Jeep’s canvas top.
“I think I just broke my tailbone,” Marshall said, recovering her grip on the dashboard. “Are we sure this road isn’t part of the actual bombing range?”
“Might be,” Wainwright said, both hands on the wheel in what he hoped was not a vain attempt to keep the vehicle from swerving into the ditch on either side of the road. The sun was dropping lower on the horizon, and he wanted to be back at the base’s main garrison area, rather than driving out here in what promised to be near-total darkness with nothing but the Jeep’s dim headlights to guide the way.
Located in southwestern Arizona near the borders of California and Mexico, most of the land designated to the Yuma Test Station was uninhabited; nearly two thousand square miles of harsh, desolate desert landscape. Wainwright knew that the army had first established a presence at Fort Yuma before the Civil War and that the testing range now accounting for the immense size of the current base made it one of the largest military installations in the country if not the world. It had been used during World War II for testing various weapons and mechanized infantry equipment, and similar work had continued after the war’s end and even now as the current conflict raged in Korea.
“I hope we can get back without blowing a tire,” Marshall said after Wainwright failed to miss another bump in the road, “or one of my kidneys. Didn’t you hit that one on the way out?”
Chuckling, Wainwright replied, “This is nothing. In France, I actually broke the axle off a Jeep when I ran it into a crater made by one of our bombers. I thought the colonel I was driving back to his command post was going to kill me right there on the road.”
“That bad, huh?” Marshall asked, around what Wainwright thought might be a suppressed giggle.
“Yep. I couldn’t wait to get back to my unit. At least then, the only ones to be scared of were the Germans.”
A flickering light from somewhere behind him reflected off the Jeep’s metal dashboard and Wainwright glanced over his right shoulder to look for the source. “I think you left the Geiger counter on,” he said, returning his attention to the road.
Shifting in her seat, Marshall attempted to reach for the unit, which they had brought with them from Wright-Patterson. The device, along with their jackets and other items, lay just beyond her fingers. When the Jeep hit another rut, she turned back around in her seat. “Sorry about that, sir. I thought I’d turned it off.”
“The way we’re bouncing around here, the switch could’ve hit the side or something,” Wainwright said. “Wasn’t worth bringing along, anyway.”
Upon their arrival at the testing station, Wainwright and Marshall, accompanied by Lieutenant Brian Pearce, the Blue Book liaison officer from Luke Air Force Base near Glendale, Arizona, had visited with each of the witnesses to the previous week’s sighting. Each witness’s report was consistent with the others, without sounding as though the accounts had been rehearsed or coordinated. Further, their statements along with his own gut feelings told Wainwright the witnesses were being straight with him, and he believed they had seen an unidentified craft in the skies above the testing range where they had been carrying out a series of weapons-fire exercises.
A visit to the area where the sightings had taken place had proven to be a near-total waste of time through no fault of the witnesses, owing to the fact that there simply was nothing remarkable about the terrain making up ninety-eight percent of the Yuma Test Station. Still, he preferred to study the area with his own eyes, to get a sense of what the witnesses had seen. The vast expanses of undeveloped land and the surrounding mountains would seem the ideal place for a craft to fly in near seclusion, whether a product of top-secret military research or otherworldly origin. An examination of the ground over which the unknown object had been seen had yielded nothing in the way of physical evidence, and the sweeps Marshall had conducted with the Geiger counter also turned up nothing.
The Jeep ahead of his, which was carrying Lieutenant Pearce and driven by the on-duty range safety officer, slowed as both vehicles rounded a bend in the road and approached a quartet of small buildings. They had passed the buildings on their way out to the area where the sightings had been reported, and there had been no sign of occupancy. Now, however, a five-ton cargo truck sat before the largest of the structures.
“Wonder what’s going on?” Wainwright asked, guiding the Jeep to follow the lead vehicle off the road and onto the patch of gravel that served as a parking lot in front of the buildings. On the other side of the truck was another Jeep, which, unlike theirs, had no top. “They weren’t here before, right?”
Marshall shook her head. “No, sir.”
“Maybe they’re dropping off supplies for an upcoming exercise.”
Three of the buildings were Quonset huts; long, single-story structures fashioned from sheets of corrugated steel bent over a curved metal frame with a plywood façade covering each end of the resulting shelter. The fourth building was a larger, two-story warehouse. According to the safety officer—an army captain named David Cardillo—the buildings were staging areas for equipment and personnel assigned to training exercises in this area of the installation, and similar arrangements were scattered across the base. In and of itself, the outpost was unremarkable, as was the cargo truck and the trio of soldiers standing near its back end at the warehouse’s entrance.
Shutting off the Jeep’s engine, Wainwright watched Captain Cardillo and Lieutenant Pearce emerge from the passenger side of their vehicle. Cardillo, though of average height, possessed the brawny frame of a boxer or wrestler, his tan uniform tailored to his muscular frame almost like a second skin. Pearce, dressed in an Air Force blue duty uniform, was of slighter build, looking almost boyish standing next to the more imposing Cardillo. The enlisted soldier acting as their driver remained behind the wheel, though he was not visible through the rear window due to the fading sunlight. As the safety officer walked toward the soldiers and their truck, the threesome all came to positions of attention and rendered salutes.
The safety officer returned the salutes, and Wainwright heard him ask, “What are you boys doing out here?”
“Guard duty, sir,” one of the soldiers, a corporal, replied. They were dressed in typical field gear, including helmets and sidearms in black leather holsters suspended from the green cartridge belts around their waists. One of the troopers carried an M1 carbine rifle slung from his left shoulder. “The rest of our unit’s due here tomorrow at s
unup.”
“Due here for what, Corporal?” Cardillo asked.
“Weapons training, sir,” the soldier replied. “We’re getting ready for our annual requalifications.”
From his seat in the Jeep, Wainwright was able to see the frown on Cardillo’s face as the captain asked, “Really? I don’t know anything about that.”
Behind Wainwright, the Geiger counter squawked.
“What the hell?” he asked, frowning as he looked over his shoulder. The illuminated gauge on the unit’s face allowed him to see the indicator needle twitching. It was just a few ticks away from the gauge’s zero mark, but the reading was steady.
What the hell is right.
“Where’s it coming from?” Marshall asked, and they both looked to the warehouse before which Wainwright had parked the Jeep. “They wouldn’t store nuclear weapons out here, would they?”
Shaking his head, Wainwright replied, “Not likely, and not without a damned sight more than three guards. Wait here.” He pushed himself from the driver’s seat, making his way to where Cardillo was still talking to the soldier while Pearce stood nearby. The safety officer’s voice now had taken on an edge of irritation.
“Well, nobody informed the safety office of any exercise,” Cardillo was saying. “I’ll need to check this out.” Then, his voice softened a bit as he regarded the soldier. “Probably just a screwup. You boys grab a smoke while I call back to garrison and get it straightened out.”
Wainwright was the first to see one of the soldiers reach for his sidearm.
“Gun!” he shouted, his right hand already moving for the holstered .45 caliber pistol on his hip. With no time to brandish his own weapon, Cardillo charged the other man, throwing his body at the corporal and sending both men slamming into the side of the truck. Pearce, though unarmed, still moved forward to help but then he turned and dove for cover as the soldier with the M1 rifle brought that weapon to bear.