Majestic (21 page)

MR. ROSE CONCLUDED THE FIRST INTERROGATION SESSION. THE PRISONER WAS KEPT IN

ISOLATION UNDER CLOSE GUARD FOR TWENTY-FOUR HOURS.

2ND INTERROGATION SESSION

JPR: Good morning, Bob.

RU : I have committed no crime but I can't even get to a telephone. I want a lawyer now.

JPR: Let's just finish these couple of questions and you can go.

RU : Go home?

JPR: Yes, sir.

RU : Well, what is it now? I still ain't done anything. They had me in a cell in a brig. They fed me pancakes and water and coffee.

JPR: Would you like a cigarette?

RU : I sure would. What are those?

JPR: Medallions. A fine cigarette.

RU : [Lights up.] It tastes like hot air.

JPR: Sir, you are going to have to change your story for the press. You are going to have to tell the truth.

RU : I did that! I ain't never done nothing else in my life, fella!

JPR: We know that it's fun to get in the papers with a big story. But you have to tell the truth.

RU : The whole story was from them officers! The bum; wrote it! I am hardly even mentioned.

JPR: You have to tell the truth. And the truth is you found a weather balloon and pretended it was a flying disk, and you did that for the fun of gaining publicity.

RU : Oh, Lord. You are twisting - changing - why don't you put them officers in jail?

JPR: We have to do this. They have to say this. For the country,

Bob. For America.

RU : (Long silence.)

JPR: How many kids do you have?

RU : Two living at home and one married up in Albuquerque.

JPR: Kids are a beautiful thing. Do you hunt and fish with your boy?

RU : And with my girls. My oldest is an excellent shot.

JPR: Yes. Now, what you are going to do is to tell the papers that you found the weather balloon and called it a flying disk as a practical joke.

RU : I told the truth!

MR. ROSE CONCLUDED THE SECOND INTERROGATION SESSION. THE PRISONER WAS KEPT IN

ISOLATION UNDER CLOSE GUARD FOR ANOTHER TWENTY-FOUR HOURS. THE PRISONER WAS

STRIPPED AND THE FURNITURE WAS REMOVED FROM THE ISOLATION CELL. THE PRISONER WAS

GIVEN ONLY WATER.

3RD INTERROGATION SESSION

JPR: Good morning, Bob.

RU : I am in a lot of trouble.

JPR: You certainly are. Your country needs your help and you aren't helping. America needs you and you are saying, "No, not me, America. I am sticking by my story so I will look good."

RU : How can I get myself out of this mess?

JPR: Say what we need you to say. You were telling a tall story. There was no flying disk. Only a weather balloon.

RU : The officers said it! I didn't! Make them say the truth!

JPR: They gave a press conference in Fort Worth with the commanding general of the Eighth Air Force, and the officer that said it, Major Gray, he has taken it back. He is doing this for America. Because he loves his country even more than his own reputation.

RU : I love my country, but what am I doing in a cell without even my clothes! This is not what I call America.

JPR: But you love your country.

RU : I sure do.

JPR: Well, that's progress.

MR. ROSE CONCLUDED THE THIRD INTERROGATION SESSION. THE PRISONER WAS RETURNED TO

CLOSE SECURITY, BUT HE WAS ALLOWED A WALK IN ROSWELL IN THE COMPANY OF OFFICERS.

HE WAS FED A LARGE MEAL AND ALLOWED TO SLEEP IN A BED IN A ROOM IN THE VISITING

OFFICER'S BILLET.

4TH INTERROGATION SESSION

JPR: Good morning, Bob.

RU : Hiya. I want to go home. Are there any charges against me?

JPR: You can help your country. We cannot let it be known that this disk is real. We are just not ready.

RU : Why not!

JPR: Look, Bob. I hesitate even to tell you, but I will. I will tell you as long as you promise me on your honor -

and I know how important that is to you - promise me that you will go to your grave with this secret.

RU : Yes, sir, I will do that.

JPR: Well, the truth is that we have reason to believe that these aliens have stolen a number of people. Men, women, children.

RU : Oh, my Lord.

JPR: We cannot allow the people to know this until we can defend ourselves. Bob, America is being invaded by an alien force. And they are doing strange, awful things that we do not understand. That is what is secret.

RU : May the Lord be with us.

JPR: I agree. America has a need for you to say it's a weather balloon, so the people won't panic. For the sake of the country. Uncle Sam needs you.

RU : Not to lie, he don't.

JPR: Oh, Bob. There must be something.

RU : I don't lie. I ain't never done it.

JPR: Then what will you say?

RU : I want to help my country. Damn right I do. But not with a lie. I found what I found and I know it. I will say that I am sorry the whole thing happened. I'll say that and you can make it look like what you want.

JPR: I have your word of honor? You will say in a press conference we call that you are sorry you ever reported you'd found this? And we will imply that you were wrong about what you found.

RU : I will not lie, but I cannot stop you from doing it if that is what you feel you gotta do.

JPR: We all have to make sacrifices. You say you are sorry in a press conference and we will handle the rest.

From the Roswell Daily Record, August 1, 1947:

HARASSED RANCHER WHO LOCATED "SAUCER-SORRY HE TOLD ABOUT IT

Robert Ungar, 47, Lincoln County rancher living 30 miles southeast of Maricopa today told his story of finding what the Army at first described as a flying disk, but the publicity which attended his find caused him to add that if he ever found anything else short of a bomb he sure wasn't going to say anything about it.

Ungar related that he and an 8-year-old son Bob Jr. were about 7 or 8 miles from the ranch house of J. H. Foster, which he operates, when they came upon a large area of bright wreckage made up of rubber strips, tinfoil, a rather tough paper and sticks.

On July 3 he, his son, Bob Jr., and daughter, Mary, age 12, went back to the spot and gathered up quite a bit of the debris. There was no sign of any metal in the area which might have been used for an engine and no sign of propellers of any kind, although at least one paper fin had been glued to some of the tinfoil.

There were no words to be found anywhere on the instrument, although there were letters on some of the parts. Considerable Scotch tape and some tape with flowers printed on it had been used in the construction. Ungar said that he had previously found two weather observation balloons on the ranch, but that what he found this time did not in any way resemble either of these. "I am sure what I found was not any weather observation balloon," he said, "but if I find anything else besides a bomb they are going to have a hard time getting me to say anything about it."

Chapter Sixteen

I had been eager to follow up on the story of Corporal Jim Collins. What had happened to him? Had he married Kathy? And what of their children?

Will agreed that we might find out a great deal if we contacted them. I wondered, for example, why the visitors had been so intent that he marry Kathy, and what had been meant when they said that the first three children out of the marriage would be theirs.

Like everything the visitors seem to do, what happened that night at Fort Bliss had significance on many different levels.

Fortunately it wasn't hard to locate Jim and Kathy. Because of his visitor contact, Jim has been quietly monitored by the government for most of his life.

The Collinses live in Everly, New Jersey, a small town near the Pennsylvania border. As I drove up from Maryland I expected to enter a devastation of refineries. I found farms and trees budding with spring, and a town of big old houses and wide porches.

Jim is now sixty-one, Kathy sixty.

They live in one of the big houses, and there is a swing on their wide porch. Kathy cultivates a wonderful garden and they make their own wine from the grapes grown on an arbor in the back. On the walls of their living room are large framed photographs of their children, and they have a friendly old dog named Horace. I found it all very annoying.

They were at first extremely suspicious of me. I gave them the cover story that Will had recommended, that I was a new caseworker with the Agency and I just wanted to reconfirm some details. Given what I already knew about them, having read Jim's hypnosis and all the secret memoranda about the incident at Fort Bliss, I was entirely convincing.

Once they were sure that I was genuine, they became warm, friendly and open.

The Jim Collins who had never heard of any aliens and thought that flying saucers were "crazy" was transformed into a knowledgeable individual with considerable information about the visitors. His wife claimed ongoing contact, and suggested that some of their children were involved.

What I wanted to know was whether or not Kathy had ever given a baby to the visitors. When I asked her, she grew furtive. I didn't quite understand, then. But I do now.

Although shocked by my question, Jim and Kathy were fascinated that I wanted to know more about their personal relationship with the visitors. In all the years that they had been in contact with MAJIC, the secret group that controls human/alien affairs, they had never once been interviewed about this aspect. All of the other interviews had centered around the design and function of devices Jim had seen and touched. When he was lifted by the blue light, did he feel a tingling sensation? How hard had it been to insert the needles into the heads of his fellow soldiers? That sort of thing. MAJIC wanted to know how things worked, not what was being done with them.

Typical shortsightedness, in my opinion. The problem with keeping things like this secret is that they are removed from the free market of ideas, and understanding proceeds at a much slower pace.

I wanted to concentrate on Kathy's childbearing years. Why would the visitors want human children?

I went to Everly expecting answers to some very weighty questions.

I got Jim and Kathy. Even though their happy marriage and successful lives put me out a bit, I also found them a winning, charming couple. They were intelligent and full of humor.

And they told me this story.

Jim knew exactly what he wanted to do when his squad was granted compassionate leave just after the disappearance of Sweet Charlie.

Obedient to the subliminal instructions of the others he rushed straight into the arms of Katherine O'Mally.

He took the train to New Jersey with the explicit intention of asking Kathy to marry him. Since the night he'd fallen in love he'd been writing her a letter every couple of days.

By the time he arrived home he had just three days left before he had to report to his new unit in Pennsylvania.

He beat his most recent letters, so nobody knew he was coming. His own home was dark when the night train let him off. He went to Kathy's house and stood under the porch light nervously twirling his hat in his hands. Finally he gathered the nerve to ring the doorbell.

And there she was, her hair up, her robe fluttering about her, her face shiny with night cream. He gaped, he couldn't help it. She was more beautiful than anybody he had ever seen in his life. She was even more beautiful than she herself had been when he last saw her.

"Oh. My. God. Jim." Her voice was like a touch of air in the summer leaves.

"Hey."

"I'm a mess!"

"Nah."

"J-Jim - oh! Come in, come in!" She swept the door open. "Mom! Dad! Jim is here. Jim is here at home!"

He entered the house, feeling huge. Everything seemed too delicate, chairs that you could sit right through, pictures that would fall off the wall if you so much as brushed them. A vase of white flowers on the hall table might wilt if you breathed your beery breath upon them.

And it was so quiet! He was used to Army places now, green and gray and hard, full of loud guys who didn't know how to talk without dropping "fuckin' " or "cocksucker" at least three times into every sentence.

The flowers were gardenias. He looked hard at them, as if trying to consume them with his eyes. Though he couldn't say it or even think it very clearly, the obscure hurt that filled his heart when their scent reached him was a dirge for all the Army had taken from him.

Uncle Sam had stifled the little bit of poetry in him, but he didn't know that. He only knew that the gardenias were real nice.

There were greetings then, Seamus O'Mally and his wife Angela meeting him halfway down the hall, and the embrace of his pipe-smelling and her Lanvin bodies. Then there was a lot of laughter and Kathy disappeared to put on a new face.

"What about your folks?"

"They - I'll - do you want me to come back later?"

"No, son, but your mom would be glad to see you."

He recalled his own dark front porch. "I think they're at the movies. That's what I think."

"They didn't know you were coming?"

"I just got leave - I guess I got here ahead of my letters."

"Kathy didn't get a letter, she would have been singing the house down."

He laughed nervously. He was no good at these conversations with the parents. All he wanted to do was talk about her. Kathy looks real nice. Kathy smiled when she saw me. Was she surprised!

But he couldn't do that. That would be so incredibly embarrassing. He slid his hands along the tops of his legs. Seamus O'Mally lit his big Kaywoodie.

"I think the Dutch are falling apart in the Far East," he said.

Jim thought vaguely about the little boy who put his finger in the dike. The Dutch were in the Far East?

Where? "Yeah," he said, to cover his ignorance.

"The only empire that will survive the war is the British. The sun never sets on the British Empire. Except for India, sadly enough."

"India," Jim said. "Gandhi. He's - I like him." He thought of the little Indian man in the newsreels. Jim knew a good man. "He's got a lot of good things to say."

Seamus O'Mally stared at him, puffing slowly. Angie sipped her coffee, and he had the feeling that he'd just dropped his pants, somehow.