The Day After Roswell (2 page)

What happened after Roswell, how we turned the
extraterrestrials’ technology against them, and how we
actually won the Cold War is an incredible story. During the thick of
it, I didn’t even realize how incredible it was. I just did
my job, going to work at the Pentagon day in and day out until we put
enough of this alien technology into development that it began to move
forward under its own weight through industry and back into the army.
The full import of what we did at Army R&D and what General
Trudeau did to grow R&D from a disorganized unit under the
shadow of the Advanced Research Projects Agency, when he first took
command, to the army department that helped create the military guided
missile, the antimissile missile, and the guided missile launched
accelerated particle beam firing satellite killer, didn’t
really hit me until years later when I understood just how we were able
to make history.

I always thought of myself as just a little man from a little
American town in western Pennsylvania, and I didn’t assess
the weight of our accomplishments at Army R&D, especially how
we harvested the technology coming out of the Roswell crash, until
thirty-five years after I left the army when I sat down to write my
memoirs for an entirely different book. That was when I reviewed my old
journals, remembered some of the memos I’d written to General
Trudeau, and understood that the story of what happened in the days
after the Roswell crash was perhaps the most significant story of the
past fifty years. So, believe it or not, this is the story of what
happened in the days after Roswell and how a small group of military
intelligence officers changed the course of human history.

The Roswell Desert

THE NIGHT HUGS THE GROUND AND SWALLOWS YOU UP AS YOU drive out
of Albuquerque and into the desert. As you head east along 40 and then
south along 285 to Roswell, there’s only you and the tiny
universe ahead of you defined by your headlights. On either side,
beyond the circle of light, there is only scrub and sand. The rest is
all darkness that closes in behind you, flooding where you’ve
been under a giant ocean of black, and pushes you forward along the few
hundred feet of road directly ahead.

The sky is different out there, different from any sky
you’ve ever seen before. The black is so clear it looks like
the stars shining through it are tiny windows from the beginning of
time, millions of them, going on forever. On a hot summer night you can
sometimes see flashes of heat lightning explode in the distance.
Somewhere it is light for an instant, then the darkness returns. But
summer is the rainy season in the New Mexico desert, and thunderstorms
assemble over you out of nowhere, pound the earth with rain and
lightning, pummel the darkness with crashes of thunder, shake the
ground until you feel the earth is breaking apart, and then disappear.
The ranchers out there will tell you that the local storms can go on
all night, bouncing off the arroyos like pinballs in play until they
expend themselves over the horizon. That’s what it was like
fifty years ago on a night much like this.

Although I wasn’t there that night, I’ve
heard many different versions. Many of them go like this: Base radar at
the army’s 509th airfield Outside the town of Roswell had
been tracking strange blips all night on July 1, 1947. So had radar at
nearby White Sands, the army’s guided missile base where test
launches of German V2 rockets had been taking place since the end of
the war, and at the nuclear testing facility at Alamogordo. The blips
would appear at one corner of the screen and dart across at seemingly
impossible speeds for aircraft, only to disappear off another corner.
Then they’d start up again. No earthly craft could have
maneuvered at such speeds and changed direction so  sharply.
It was a signature no one could identify. Whether it was the same
aircraft, more than one, or simply an anomaly from the violent
lightning and thunderstorms was anybody’s guess. So after the
operators verified the calibrations of the radar equipment, they broke
down the units to run diagnostic checks on the circuitry of the screen
imaging devices to make sure their radar panels were operating
properly. Once they’d satisfied themselves that they
couldn’t report any equipment malfunction, the controllers
were forced to assume that the screen images were displays of something
that was truly out there. They confirmed the sightings with radar
controllers at White Sands, but found they could do little else but
track the blips as they darted across the screen with every sweep of
the silent beacon. The blips swarmed from position to position at will,
operating with complete freedom across the entire sky over the
army’s most secret nuclear and missile testing sites.

Throughout that night and the following day, Army Intelligence
stayed on high alert because something strange was going on out there.
Surveillance flights over the desert reported no sightings of strange
objects either in the sky or on the ground, but any sighting of
unidentified aircraft on radar was sufficient evidence for base
commanders to assume a hostile intent on the part of 
“something. ” And that was why the Army
Intelligence in Washington ordered additional counter intelligence
personnel to New Mexico, especially to the 509th, where the activity
seemed to be centered.

The radar anomalies continued into the next night as Dan
Wilmot, owner of a hardware store in Roswell, set up chairs on his
front porch after dinner to watch the streaks of lightning flash across
the sky in the distance. Shortly before ten that evening, the lightning
grew more intense and the ground shook under the explosions of thunder
from a summer storm that pounded the chaparral off in the northwest of
the city. Dan and his wife watched the spectacle from beneath the dry safety of their porch roof. It was as if each
new bolt of lightning were a spear that bent the heavens themselves.

“Better than any Fourth of July fireworks,
” the Wilmots must have been remarking as they watched in awe
as a bright oval object streaked over their house and headed off into
the northwest, sinking below a rise just before the horizon where it
was engulfed in darkness. The sky again became pitch black. By the time
the next bolt of lightning shot off“, the object was gone. A
most unusual sight, Dan Wilmot thought, but it was gone from his sight
and gone from his thoughts, at least until the end of the week.

Whatever it was that passed over the Wilmot house in Roswell
also flew over Steve Robinson as he drove his milk truck along its
route north of the city. Robinson tracked the object as it shot across
the sky at speeds faster than any airplane he’d ever seen. It
was a bright object, he noted, elliptical and solid rather than a
sequence of lights like the military aircraft that flew in and out of
the 509th airfield on the city’s outskirts. It disappeared
behind a rise off“ in the west toward Albuquerque, and Steve
put it out of his mind as he pushed forward on his route.

To the civilians in Roswell, nothing was amiss. Summer thunder
storms were common, the reports of flying saucers in the newspapers and
over the radio were simply circus side show amusements, and an object
streaking across the sky that so attracted the Wilmots’
attention could have been nothing more than the shooting star you make
a wish on if you’re lucky enough to see it before it
disappears forever in a “puff” of flame. Soon it
would be the July 4th weekend, and the Wilmots, Steve Robinson, and
thousands of other local residents were looking forward to the
unofficial start of the summer holiday. But at the 509th there was no
celebrating.

The isolated incidents of unidentified radar blips at Roswell
and White Sands continued to increase over the next couple of days
until it looked like a steady stream of airspace violations. Now it was
becoming more than serious. There was no denying that a traffic pattern
of strange aircraft overflights was emerging in the skies over the New
Mexico desert where, with impunity, these unidentifiable radar blips
hovered above and then darted away from our most secret military
installations. By the time the military’s own aircraft
scrambled, the intruders were gone. It was obvious to the base
commanders that they were under a heavy surveillance from a presence
they could only assume was hostile. At first, nobody gave much thought
to the possibility of extraterrestrials or flying saucers,
even though they’d been in the news for the past few weeks
that spring. Army officers at the 509th and White Sands thought it was
the Russians spying on the military’s first nuclear bomber
base and its guided-missile launching site.

By now Army Counter intelligence, this highly secret command
sector which in 1947 operated almost as much in the civilian sector as
it did in the military, had spun up to its highest alert and ordered a
full deployment of its most experienced crack World War II operatives
out to Roswell. CIC personnel had begun to arrive from Washington when
the first reports of strange radar blips were filed through
intelligence channels and kept coming as the reports continued to pile
up with increasing urgency over the next forty-eight hours. Officers
and enlisted men alike disembarked from the transport planes and
changed into civilian clothes for the investigation into enemy
activities on the area. They joined up with base intelligence officers
like Maj. Jesse Marcel and Steve Arnold, a Counter intelligence noncom
who’d served at the Roswell base during World War II when the
first nuclear bombing mission against Hiroshima was launched from there
in August 1945, just about two years earlier.

On the evening of July 4, 1947 (though the dates may differ
depending on who is telling the story), while the rest of the country
was celebrating Independence Day and looking with great optimism at the
costly peace that the sacrifice of its soldiers had brought, radar
operators at sites around Roswell noticed that the strange objects were
turning up again and looked almost as if they were changing their
shapes on the screen. They were pulsating - it was the only way you
could describe it - glowing more intensely and then dimly as tremendous
thunderstorms broke out over the desert. Steve Arnold, posted to the
Roswell airfield control tower that evening, had never seen a blip
behave like that as it darted across the screen between sweeps at
speeds over a thousand miles an hour. All the while it was pulsating,
throbbing almost, until, while the skies over the base exploded in a
biblical display of thunder and lightning, it arced to the lower left
hand quadrant of the screen, seemed to disappear for a moment, then
exploded in a brilliant white fluorescence and evaporated right before
his very eyes.

The screen was clear. The blips were gone. And as controllers
looked around at each other and at the CIC officers in the room, the
same thought arose in all their minds: An object, whatever it was, had
crashed. The military response was put into motion within seconds: This
was a national security issue - jump on that thing in the desert and
bring it back before anyone else could find it.

Even before the radar officer called the 509th base commander,
Col. William Blanchard, reporting that radar indicated the crash of an
unidentified aircraft to the north and west of Roswell, the CIC
dispatch team had already mobilized to deploy an immediate-response
crash-and-retrieval team to locate and secure the crash site. They
believed this was an enemy aircraft that had slipped through our radar
defense system either from South America or over the Canadian border
and had taken photos of top-secret military installations. They also
wanted to keep civilians away just in case, they said, there was any
radiation from the craft’s propulsion system, which allowed
it to make hairpin turns at three thousand miles an hour. Nobody knew
how this thing was powered, and nobody knew whether any personnel had
ejected from the aircraft and were wandering around the desert.
“Bull” Blanchard green-lighted the retrieval
mission to get out there as soon as possible, taking with them all the
night patrol equipment they could scare up, all the two-and-a-half-ton
trucks that they could roll, and the base’s
“low-boy” flatbed wreckers to bring the aircraft
back. If it was  a crash, they wanted to get it under wraps in
a hangar before any civilian authorities could get their hands on it
and blab to the newspapers.

But the air controllers at the 509th weren’t the
only ones who thought they saw an aircraft go down. On the outskirts of
the city, ranchers, families camping in the desert, and residents saw
an aircraft that exploded in a bright light in between flashes of
lightning and plummeted to earth in the direction of Corona, the
neighboring town to the north of Roswell. Chavez County sheriff George
Wilcox started receiving calls in his office shortly after midnight on
the morning of the fifth that an airplane had crashed out in the
desert, and he notified the Roswell Fire Department that he would
dispatch them as soon as he had an approximate location. No sense
pulling fire apparatus out of the station house to chase something
through the desert unless they knew where it was. Besides, Wilcox
didn’t like rolling the trucks out of town just in case there
was a fire in the city that needed all the apparatus they could throw
at it, especially the pumpers.

However, finding the crash site didn’t take long. A
group of Indian artifact hunters camping in the scrub brush north of
Roswell had also seen the pulsating light overhead, heard a hurtling
hiss and the strange, ground shaking “thunk” of a
crash nearby in the distance, and followed the sound to a group of low
hills just over arise. Before they even inspected the smoking wreckage,
they radioed the crash site location into Sheriff“
Wilcox’s office, which dispatched the fire department to a
spot about thirty-seven miles north and west of the city.

“I’m already on my way, ” he
told the radio operator at the firehouse, who also called the city
police for an escort.

And by about four-thirty that morning, a single pumper and
police car were bouncing through the desert taking Pine Lodge Road west
to where Sheriff  Wilcox had directed them. Neither the
sheriff nor the fire department knew that a military retrieval team was
also on its way to the site with orders to secure the location and, by
any means necessary, prevent the unauthorized dissemination of any
information about the crash.

It was still dark when, from another direction, Steve Arnold,
riding shotgun in one of the staff cars in the convoy of recovery
vehicles from the 509th, reached the crash site first. Even before
their trucks rolled into position, an MP lieutenant from the first jeep
posted a picket of sentries, and an engineer ordered his unit to string
a series of floodlights around the area. Then Arnold’s car
pulled up, and he got his own first glimpse of the wreckage. But it
wasn’t really wreckage at all - not in the way he’d
seen plane crashes during the war. From what he could make out through
the purple darkness, the dark skinned craft seemed mostly intact and
had lost no large pieces. Sure, there were bits and pieces of debris
all over the area, but the aircraft itself hadn’t broken
apart on impact the way a normal airplane would. And the whole scene
was still shrouded in darkness.

Then, the staff cars and jeeps that had accompanied the trucks
lined up head on to the crash and threw their headlights against the
arroyo to supplement the floodlights that were still being strung by
the engineers. In the sudden intersecting beams of headlights, Arnold
could see that, indeed, the soft cornered delta shaped eggshell type of
craft was essentially in one piece, even though it had embedded its
nose hard into the embankment of the arroyo with its tail high in the
air. Heat was still rising off the debris even though, according to the
base radar at the 509th, the crash probably took place before midnight
on the 4th. Then Arnold heard the brief sizzle of a battery charging up
and the hum of a gasoline generator. That’s when the string
of lights came up, and the whole site suddenly looked like a baseball
field before a big night game.