Majestic (6 page)

Thus we will be faced with a dispirited and hostile public on the one hand, and cruel and all-powerful aliens on the other.

Conclusion

If these cases of disappearance are indeed related to the flying disks, the conclusion can be drawn that the strangers are interested in us but do not have any regard for us . This is obviously a dangerous and highly undesirable state of affairs, and steps should be taken to correct it at once.

Recommendations

1. The public should be insulated from any certain knowledge that the disks are real until such time as we have a clear understanding of the nature and motives of their occupants, and can effectively maintain control over our own land and airspace, offering the public the protection that it mandates .

2. Every effort should be made to obtain samples of a flying disk as soon as possible, barring only hostile military action. This should be viewed by the AAF as its number one worldwide priority.

3. Because of the extremely disturbing nature of the phenomenon - and our helplessness - the whole affair should be given the highest classification rating that we possess, and should also be the subject of a rigorous propaganda campaign centered on denial. This campaign should be socially pervasive, so that it will continue to be effective even if a considerable number of disappearances take place.

4 . Under no circumstances whatsoever must the public be allowed to become aware of the probable seriousness of this situation, and of our impotence to act. The only way to be certain that they will remain ignorant is to impose the highest level of security ever achieved. If we are to maintain the impression that the government can provide essential security, this must be done at any and all cost. Should a disk land, or any debris be left behind, extreme efforts must be made to obscure the real meaning of the event. The fact that the strangers are real must not be revealed to the public until we understand their motives , and have gained effective control of their activities within the sovereign territory of the United States of America.

Chapter Four

In 1947 the most dangerous thing in the world consisted of twenty-four B-36 bombers polished to a high degree of shine. I have photographs of them standing along the flight line, back when Roswell Army Air Field had some meat on its bones.

Will Stone gave me the pictures, of course. He handled them with the excessive caution of the very old.

When he looked at them there was hunger in his eyes. "The times were dangerous," he said. And he smiled that shattering smile of his.

Our tradition of stalemate has made the use of atomic weapons seem improbable. But in July of 1947 it had been just twenty-four months since the U.S. had used such weapons against Japan, and the prospect of those good machines taking wing for Moscow was an immediate and fascinating possibility.

What the hell were those bombers doing in New Mexico, the chiefs of staff asked. Move them to Europe, give them a straight shot at the Kremlin.

One thing was certain, and that was that the 509th was ready. Every pilot had thousands of bomber hours.

Every one was a combat veteran, many from both the European and Pacific theaters. Everybody had clearances, even the cooks and janitors. The intelligence group was superb, the best air intelligence officers in the Army Air Force. Arguably theirs was the most sensitive command of its kind in the Army, and maybe in the world.

When I met some of those pilots I did not particularly like them. I doubt if there are twenty of them left; the ones I met ferried the debris found on the Ungar ranch to Eighth Air Force HQ in Fort Worth.

They would not allow me to use their names. One of them wouldn't even admit what he'd seen. "It was a crashed saucer," the other told me.

Their fear was remarkable. Later, I would find out the extraordinary reason that the cover-up has been so effective, the reason that so many people are so afraid to reveal what they know.

I must not promote the notion that a bunch of brainless military oafs were responsible for what went wrong.

They were good men, all of them.

Perhaps their situation was simply a hopeless one. Maybe Will Stone and his generation were bound to fail.

When he speaks of those days Will actually becomes queasy, so urgent is his wish to undo basic mistakes

. . . and yet there is something so poignant and so profoundly human about why they failed.

July 8, 1947, was a hot, still afternoon over most of the country. It got up to a hundred and two in Roswell, up to eighty-six in Washington. While Will worked on his Flying Disk Estimate in his stifling hole, the Maricopa sheriffs office got into contact with the Roswell AAF.

At Roswell Army Air Field the Intelligence staff killed time in its office on the base.

Major Donald Gray was reading Plato's Ion, to the amusement of the soldiers in his command. Lieutenant Peter Hesseltine was delighted by Gray's taste for the classics. For his birthday he'd given the major a copy of Be Glad You're Neurotic. Hesseltine had meant it as a commentary on Gray's literary obsession, but the major had been grateful. He'd obviously enjoyed the book, quoting from it at length. The lieutenant came to feel he'd wasted his two dollars.

He wanted to needle the major about the Plato, but he was no longer sure quite how to do it.

"You've got sex on the brain," he said by way of experiment.

"Yep."

"I'll bet that book's full of it."

"Nope. There's a bit of sex in Plato. Not a lot. You might be interested in it though. Your kind of thing." "All sex is my kind of thing, Major." Gray put the book down and looked at Hesseltine with an innocence that the younger man had come to fear. "Then the fact that it concerns the ethics of men becoming involved with boys won't put you off." He returned to his book.

Hesseltine hadn't been expecting this and was silenced by it.

An airman came into their office with a message. Far away in Washington a completely unsuspecting Wilfred Stone was in that moment snared in a thin and impregnable web. He scribbled away at his desk, filling sheets of legal paper that I have held in my hands. His original draft of the first "disk estimate" is now brittle and edged with rot. Will's hand is firm, full of young and very American confidence.

While Will wrote, events in Roswell continued to unfold. "A rancher reports debris in his pasture," the airman said aloud.

"Beer bottles? Condoms?" asked Hesseltine. He was drinking a Coke, and had a technical manual open on his desk before him. He had been memorizing the ranges of various Russian radars, and before the Plato episode had been in a self-congratulatory mood. The massive Soviet installations had ridiculously poor abilities, ranges like eight and ten and twenty miles.

Try two hundred miles. And in a few years, five hundred.

Major Gray did not answer Hesseltine directly. The major's sense of humor ran to formal jokes, which he would tell to generals' wives. Later, if they remembered him, they might say to their husbands, "Who was that young officer who told the joke about the pot roast?" And their husbands would laugh the sad, interior laugh of generals.

"The ranch is a hundred and twenty miles northwest of Roswell."

Hesseltine stood up and went to a large, black shade that covered something on one wall of the room. On this shade were stenciled the words, secret. authorized personnel only.

"Lock us down, please, Winters," he said to their clerk-typist who was sitting at a typewriter pecking out an order in triplicate for three more reams of onionskin.

PFC Winters got up and pulled a similar shade down on the door to the office, and locked that door. Then he went to each of the three windows and pulled a more ordinary brown shade. The room was now dim and yellow.

"Secure, sir," Winters said. He turned on the overhead lights, which came alive with a pale, fluorescent flutter.

Hesseltine raised the large shade. It revealed a wall map of New Mexico. There were various colored pins in this map, representing the presence of radar installations and air bases. A large section marked off by black dotted lines was labeled, "Proving Grounds." This area, which would become the White Sands Missile Range, was where the captured German V-2 rockets were being tested.

Hesseltine pulled down a parallel ruler that was attached to the map and maneuvered it until one side was in the middle of the dot that represented Roswell.

"A hundred and twenty miles north-northwest? That isn't anywhere. No installations nearby."

"What about a stray from the proving ground?" There was always a possibility that a rocket had gone off course.

"No problems since last month. And that baby got found two weeks ago."

Gray now walked over to the map. "Private aircraft?" "It's a restricted flyover area. There would have been an intrusion alert."

Gray stared at the map. "That's flat, miserable country. What does the man run?"

Hesseltine, from a suburb of Philadelphia, hadn't the least idea what ranchers raised in godforsaken deserts.

"Dunno," he said, "maybe lizards."

"There wouldn't be any money in that."

"Why, sure there would," Hesseltine said eagerly, realizing that Gray had taken his absurd remark at face value. "Plenty of money. Lizardskin wallets."

"It's not very likely, Hesseltine."

"A stray private flier was forced down in a storm. It's a matter for the civilian authorities," Hesseltine said. He covered the map. "Raise the blinds, Winters."

"Yes, sir."

"Not yet, Mr. Winters," Gray said. He put his finger on the map. "The flier was well within restricted airspace when he was forced down. We're required to examine the wreckage." He picked up a telephone and called the sheriff's office in Maricopa. "This is Major Gray at Roswell." "Yeah?"

"I just read your report on the plane that went down on the Ungar place."

"He came in this morning. Says it's a big mess. A bunch of tinfoil that you can't tear. I guess you guys know all about it."

"We'd like to take a look at the wreckage. Can you give us driving instructions?"

"Bob can do that himself. He's down in Roswell. You'll find him at Wooten's on North Main."

"I know the place."

"You get your directions from Bob. We haven't been out there. No call for us to go, not if you guys are going.

It's way the hell out in the middle of nothin', where that plane went down."

Gray hung up the phone. "Looks like this could be an all-nighter. We gotta go find the rancher. He's apparently buying ranching paraphernalia at Wooten's."

Only Major Gray would use a word like that in ordinary conversation. Paraphernalia.

"You mean reins and scabbards and whatnot?"

"I guess. We'd better get going if we expect to get out there before dark."

Hesseltine glanced at his watch. It was past three. When Gray got rolling, he was perfectly capable of continuing all night if the matter seemed important enough to him. "Why not first thing in the morning,"

Hesseltine asked briskly.

As he had feared, Gray had other ideas. "I think that we should go out there immediately, Lieutenant. And take Walters of CIC."

There was no point in arguing. Hesseltine called Counterintelligence. Walters wisely decided to come in his own Jeep.

Hesseltine would have liked to take a Jeep, too, but he knew that Gray preferred his staff car. Hesseltine kind of enjoyed getting in Jeeps and putting on his dark glasses and sitting with his foot up on the dash like a pilot being ferried out to the flight line. He had washed out of pilot training due to his tendency to become sick during maneuvers such as taking off, landing, and flying through smooth, clear air.

Hesseltine was convinced that he was second-rate. As far as he was concerned every officer in the Army Air Force who was not a flight officer had failed.

That Gray did not share his feelings was incomprehensible to Hesseltine. The best men flew fighters, as Gray himself had during the war. Second-best were on bombers and other aircraft. The rest were nowhere.

He was so humiliated by his failure that he would obsessively deadhead on bombers, taking the tail-gunner position. Nobody ever knew that his flight bag contained dozens of neatly folded canvas airsickness containers . . . nobody but Will Stone, who must at some time have ferreted it out of him. It is obvious from reading his meticulous notes and diaries that Will was obsessed with details like that, almost as if they might somehow provide the tiny, critical bit of information that would explain why things went so wrong.

Gray had once caused Hesseltine to run to the can with his cheeks puffed out by simply saying the word

"tailspin" and whirling him around a couple of times in his chair.

Gray was one of those men who viewed such miseries as the will of God. "The Almighty made you quick to get an upset stomach," he had said earnestly as Hesseltine came staggering back from the men's room.

Gray was also the man who had floored a viciously drunk captain from another bomber wing with a single, appalling left uppercut that had lifted this two-hundred-pound monster off the floor of the Lackland Army Air Force Base Officer's Club in Texas.

It was one of many reasons that Hesseltine resented Gray, and found it interesting to needle him. Now that there was no war to fight, the fact that the mild and methodical Gray could sometimes be enraged was about the most fascinating thing left in Hesseltine's life.

As I write, I try to imagine those two men as they were then. Strength. Promise. A little arrogance, perhaps.

Now they are both dead, Gray after a long and distinguished career.

Six months after the Roswell incident Pete Hesseltine began to hit the bottle so hard that he became pretty much of a professional at it. He died alone in a walkup in Sacramento, California, in September of 1955. He was not yet forty years old.

But on this day they were both young and at least somewhat happy, two victorious soldiers looking forward to glowing careers in the finest military organization in the world.

They went down the long, plywood corridor that led from their office to the front of the building and out into the blazing parking lot. As they crossed it soft tar stuck to the bottoms of their shoes. Gray seemed almost to prance as he moved along. He was a spit-and-polish dresser.