The Day After Roswell (6 page)

They loaded the file cabinet onto the dolly as if there were
nothing inside, pulled it toward the back door, and stared at me until
I followed them out. “Not too much time, Colonel, ”
General Trudeau called after me as we went out the door and down the
hall.

I remember I spent quite a while just looking at that cabinet
after it was loaded off the dolly and set up in my inner office. There
was an almost ominous quality to it that belied its quiet, official
army presence. So I must confess that, given the reverse hype of the
general’s introduction, part of me wanted to tear it open
right away as if it were a present on Christmas morning. But the part
of me that won just let it sit there, protected, until I thought about
what General Trudeau had said about Roswell and the amount of paper
work that had circulated through the White House when I was on the
National Security staff there. No, I wasn’t going to review
the Roswell files. Not just yet. Not until I took a long hard look at
what was inside this file cabinet. But even that was going to wait
until the rest of my office was set up. Whatever I was supposed to do,
I wanted to do it right.

I spent a little time pacing around my new office while I
thought some more about what the general said, why this file was
waiting for me in his private office, and why he had wanted to talk to
me specifically about it. It also wasn’t lost on me that I
had not seen one scrap of paper from the general covering his delivery
of the material to me nor my receipt of it. It could have just as
easily been that this file cabinet didn’t even exist. As far
as I knew, only his eyes and soon my eyes would review it. So whatever
it was, it was serious and, only if by omission, very secret.

I remembered a hot July night fourteen years before at Fort
Riley when I was the young intelligence officer after having just been
shipped back from Rome. I remembered being hustled into a storage
hangar by one of the sentries, a fellow member of the Fort Riley
bowling team. What he pointed to under the thick olive tarp that night
was also very, very secret, and I held my breath, hoping that what was
inside this cabinet wasn’t anything like what I saw that
night in Kansas, July 6, 1947.

I opened the cabinet, and almost immediately my heart sank. I
knew, from looking at the shoebox of tangled wires and the strange
cloth, from the vise-like headpiece and the little wafers that looked
like Ritz crackers only with broken edges and colored a dark
gray, and from an assortment or other items that I couldn’t
even relate to the shapes and sixes of things I was familiar with, that
my life was headed for a big change. Back in Kansas that night in July,
I told myself that I was seeing an illusion, something that if I wished
real hard, didn’t have to exist for me. Then, after I went to
the White House and saw all the National Security Council memos
describing the “incident” and talking about the
“package” and the “goods, ” I
knew that the strange figure I’d seen floating in liquid in a
casket within a casket at Fort Riley wasn’t just a bad dream
I could forget about. Nor could I forget about the radar anomalies at
the Red Canyon missile range or the strange alerts over Ramstein air
base in West Germany. I only hoped all of it would never catch up with
me again and I could go through the rest of my army career in some kind
of peace. But it was not to be. There, mangled like somebody
else’s junk, were the trinkets I knew would involve me in
something deeper than I had ever wanted. Whatever else I had to do in
this life, here was a job that would change it all.

You know how in the movies when Bud Abbott would open a
closet, see the dead body hanging there, close the closet door, open it
up again, and find the body gone? That’s what I actually did
with the file cabinet. Nobody was there to see me, or so I believed, so
I opened it, closed it, opened it again. But this was no movie and the
stuff was still there.

So here it was, some of the material they’d
recovered from Roswell. And now, just like a bad penny, it turned up
again. I heard footsteps outside my door and caught my breath. There
were always sounds in the Pentagon at night because the building was
never empty. Somewhere, in some office, in parts of the building most
people don’t even know about, some group is planning for a
war we hope we will never fight. Therefore, more than any other
building except for the White House, the Pentagon is a place where
someone is always walking around after something.

General Trudeau peeked his head around the door.

“Look inside?” he asked.

“What’d you do to me, General?”
I said. “I thought we were friends. ”

“That’s why I gave you this, Phil,
” he said, but he wasn’t laughing, wasn’t
even smiling. “You know how valuable this property is? You
know what any of the other agencies would do to get this into their
hands?‘

“They’d probably kill me, ” I
said.

“They probably want to kill you anyway, but this
makes them even more rabid. The air force wants it because they think
it belongs to them. The navy wants it because they want anything the
air force wants. The CIA wants it so they can give it to the Russians.
”

“What do you want me to do, General?” I
asked. I couldn’t figure out what he was thinking unless he
thought I should just bury the stuff and leave it at that.

“I need a plan from you, ” he said.
“Not simply what this property is, but what we can do with
it. Something that keeps it out of play until we know what we have and
what use we can make of it. ”

This had all the makings of a plot, pure and simple.

“Look, who’s our biggest
problem?” I asked, but it was a proforma question because I
already knew the answer.

“The same people who lost Korea for us and who you
had to fight over at the White House, ” he said.
“You know exactly who I mean. We got to keep
whatever’s valuable here from falling into the wrong hands
because as sure as we’re standing in this Pentagon,
it’ll find its way right to the Kremlin. ”

There were people floating around Washington right at that
very moment who, even out of the most well meaning intentions they
could muster, would have shipped this Roswell file over to Russia while
patting President Kennedy on the back and congratulating him for
contributing to world peace. Just as there were people who would have
cut Trudeau’s and my throat and left us right on the rug to
bleed to death while they packed that file away. Either way, Trudeau
didn’t have to quote me chapter and verse to explain that he
was handing me one of the most important assignments I would ever
receive from him. He was giving me the keys to a whole new kingdom, but
neither he nor I knew what in the world we could do with this stuff,
short of keeping it out of the hands of the Russians. At the very
least, that was a start.

“We have to know what we have first, ” I
said.

“Then that’s your job right away. What do
we have? Anything usable here? Put together people you can trust from
the specialists we have and go over the contacts at our defense
contractor lists. And this is only part of the property we have.
There’s some more of it downstairs in the file basement that
the other intelligence agencies don’t know anything about.
Came here from New Mexico instead of going out to Ohio. Don’t
ask me why. It’s coming up to you right now in boxes. Just
put everything together, take some time, and evaluate this for me.
”

“Anybody know I have this?” I asked.

“Everybody knows that if you’re poking
around something it’s got to be important, ” he
said. “So don’t act like the cat that ate the
canary. They’re watching you as much as they’re
watching me. ” Then he walked to the doorway, looked down
both ends of the hall, and turned back to me. “But move this
thing along, because we could be out of this office in under a year and
I don’t want to have to worry about running out of time on
this. ”

And he was gone in a heartbeat, as if we’d never had
the conversation.

I didn’t take the file apart that night, even after
another nondescript wooden crate that looked like something you ship
vegetables in was carted to my office by an equally nondescript army
corporal. I didn’t go through the material the next night,
either. But over the following week, whenever I could be sure that no
one was around who could pop in without warning, I moved the material
from the box into the file and allowed myself time to look at it. It
was just like falling through the looking glass into a different world,
a puzzle of separate pieces that only vaguely captured what had been in
the memos I’d read over at the White House. No wonder no one
had really wanted anything to do with this junk, which held out the
promise of a whole world we knew nothing about but that as far back as
1947, the government had decided to keep an absolute secret.

Career after career of anyone in government who even hinted at
the big dark secret of Roswell was pulverized by whoever was behind
this operation. And, although I knew far more than I had even admitted
to myself, I would never be the one to shoot off my mouth. But now this
file, what I would eventually call the “nut file”
to General Trudeau, had come into my possession, and as the ensuing
weeks turned into a month, I gradually figured out where some of the
puzzle pieces fit.

First there were the tiny, clear, single filament, flexible
glass like wires twisted together through a kind of gray harness as if
they were cables going into a junction. They were narrow filaments,
thinner than copper wire. As I held the harness of strands up to the
light from my desk, I could see an eerie glow coming through them as if
they were conducting the faint light and  breaking it up into
different colors. When the personnel at the retrieval site in the
desert outside of Roswell pulled this piece out of the wreckage of the
delta shaped object, they thought it was some sort of wiring device -a
harness is what they said - or maybe some of them thought it was a
junction box or electrical relay. But whatever they thought it was,
they believed there was nothing like it on this planet. As I turned the
object over in my hand, I figured, from the way the individual
filaments flexed back and forth but didn’t break and the way
they were able to conduct a light beam along their length, they were a
wire of some sort. But for what purpose I didn’t have a clue.

Then there were the thin two-inch-around matte gray oyster
cracker shaped wafers of a material that looked like plastic but had
tiny road maps of wires barely raised/etched along the surface. They
were the size of a twenty-five-cent piece, but the etchings on the
surface reminded me of squashed insects with their hundred legs spread
out at right angles from a flat body. Some were more rounded or
elliptical. It was a circuit - anyone could figure that out by 1961,
especially when you put it under a magnifying glass - but from the way
these wafers were stacked on each other, this was a circuitry unlike
any other I’d ever seen. I couldn’t figure out how
to plug it in and what kind of current it carried, but it was clearly a
wire circuitry of a sort that came from a larger board of wafers on
board the flying craft. My hand shook ever so slightly as I held these
pieces, not because they themselves were scary but because I was awed,
just for a few seconds, about the momentous nature of this find. It was
like an architectural treasure trove, the discoveries of some long
departed culture, a Rosetta stone, even though whoever crashed onto the
desert floor was still very active and roaming around our most secret
army and air force bases.

I was most interested in the file descriptions accompanying a
two piece set of dark elliptical eye pieces as thin as skin. The Walter
Reed pathologists said they adhered to the lenses of the
extraterrestrial creatures’ eyes and seemed to reflect
existing light, even in what looked like complete darkness, so as to
illuminate and intensify images in the darkness to allow their wearer
to pick out shapes. The reports had said that the pathologists at
Walter Reed hospital who autopsied one of these creatures tried to peer
through them in the darkness to watch the one or two army sentries and
medical orderlies walking down a corridor adjacent to the pathology
lab. These figures were illuminated in a greenish orange, depending
upon how they moved, but the pathologists could see only their outer
shape. And when they got close to each other, their shapes blended into
a single form. But they could also see the outlines of furniture and
the wall and objects on desktops. Maybe, I thought as I read this
report, soldiers could wear a visor that intensified images through the
reflection and amplification of available light and navigate in the
darkness of a battlefield with as much confidence as if they were
walking their sentry posts in broad daylight. But these eyepieces
didn’t turn night into day, they only highlighted the
exterior shapes of things.

There was a dull, grayish-silvery foil-like swatch of cloth
among these artifacts that you could not fold, bend, tear, or wad up
but that bounded right back into its original shape without any
creases. It was a metallic fiber with physical characteristics that
would later be called “supertenacity, ” but when I
tried to cut it with scissors, the arms just. slid right off without
making even a nick in the fibers. If you tried to stretch it, it
bounced back, but I noticed that all the threads seemed to be going in
one direction. When I tried to stretch it width wise instead of length
wise, it looked like the fibers had reoriented themselves to the
direction I was pulling in. This couldn’t be cloth, but it
obviously wasn’t metal. It was a combination, to my
unscientific eye, of a cloth woven with metal strands that had the
drape and malleability of a fabric and the strength and resistance of a
metal. I was on top of some of the most secret weapons projects at the
Pentagon, and we had nothing like this, even under the wish-list
category.