The Day After Roswell (4 page)

Dwyer nodded.

“I mean it, this is top security here, the kind of
thing that could get you put away, ” Marcel continued.
“Whatever this is, don’t talk about it,
don’t say anything until somebody tells you what to say. Now
get your truck out of here before someone else sees you and tries to
lock the whole bunch of you up. Move!” He faced the helmeted
MP. “Sergeant, get him back on that fire truck and move it
out. ”

Dwyer didn’t need any more invitations. He let the
sergeant hustle him along, put him back on the truck, and told his
driver to bring it back to the station. The MP sergeant came up to the
driver’s side window and looked up at the fireman behind the
wheel.

“You’ve been ordered to evacuate this
site, ” the MP told the driver. “At once!”

The Roswell police unit had already made a U-turn on the sand
and was motioning for the truck to back up. The driver dropped the
truck into reverse, gently fed it gas as its wheels dug into the sand,
made his U-turn, and headed back for the firehouse in Roswell. The Ford
flatbed had already passed through the sleeping town in the moments
between darkness and light, the sound of its engines causing no alarm
or stir, the sight of a large tarpaulin covered object on the back of
an army vehicle rolling along the main street of Roswell against the
purple gray sky raising nobody’s eyebrows because it was
nothing out of the ordinary. But later, by the time Dwyer backed his
field truck into the station house, the sun was already up and the
first of the CMC transport trucks was just reaching the main gate at
the 509th.

Plumbing subcontractor Roy Danzer, who had worked through the
night at the base fitting pipe, knew something was up from the way the
trucks tore out of the compound through the darkness. He had just
walked out of the base hospital to grab a cigarette before going back
to work. That’s when he heard the commotion over at the main
gate. Danzer had cut his hand a few days earlier cutting pipe, and the
infirmary nurse wanted to keep checking the stitches to make sure no
infection was setting in. So Danzer took the opportunity to get away
from the job for a few minutes while the nurse looked over her work and
changed his bandage. Then, on his way back to the job, he would grab a
cup of coffee and take an unscheduled cigarette break. But this
morning, things would be very different.

The commotion he heard by the main gate had now turned into a
swirling throng of soldiers and base workers shoved aside by what
looked like a squad of MPs using their bodies as a wedge to force a
pathway through the crowd. There didn’t even seem to be an
officer giving orders, just a crowd of soldiers. Strange. Then the
throng headed right for the base hospital, right for the main entrance,
right for the very spot where Roy was standing.

Nobody moved him out of the way or told him to vacate the
area. In fact, no one even spoke to him. Roy just looked down as the
line of soldiers passed him, and there it was, strapped tightly to a
stretcher that two bearers were carrying into the base hospital right
through the main door. Roy looked at it; it looked at Roy, and as their
eyes met Roy knew in an instant that he was not looking down at a human
being. It was a creature from somewhere else. The pleading look on its
face, occupying only a small frontal portion of its huge watermelon
sized skull, and the emotion of pain and suffering that played itself
behind Roy Danzer’s eyes and across his brain while he stared
down at the figure told Roy it was in its final moments of life. It
didn’t speak. It could barely move. But Roy actually saw, or
believed he saw, an expression cross over its little circle of a face.
And then the creature was gone, carried into the hospital by the
stretcher bearers, who shot him an ugly glare as they passed. Roy took
another drag on the cigarette butt still in his hand.

“What the hell was that?” he asked no one
in particular. Then he felt like he’d been hit by the front
four of the Notre Dame football team.

His head snapped back against the top of his spine as he went
flying forward into the arms of a couple of MPs, who slammed him
against an iron gate and kept him there until an officer - he thought
it was a captain - walked up and stuck his finger directly into
Danzer’s face.

“Just who are you, mister?” the captain
bellowed into Danzer’s car. Even before Danzer could answer,
two other officers walked up and began demanding what authorization
Danzer had to be on the base.

These guys weren’t kidding, Danzer thought to
himself; they looked ugly and were working themselves up into a serious
lather. For a few tense minutes, Roy Danzer thought he would never see
his family again; he was that scared. But then a major approached and
broke into the shouting.

“I know this guy, ” the major said.
“He works here with the other civilian contractors.
He’s OK. ”

“Sir, ” the captain sputtered, but the
major - Danzer didn’t know his name - took the captain by the
arm right out of earshot. Danzer could see them talking and watched as
the red faced captain gradually calmed down. Then the two returned to
where the MPs were holding Danzer against the wall.

“You saw nothing, you understand?” the
captain said to Danzer, who just nodded. “You’re
not to tell anybody about this, not your family, not your friends -
nobody. You got that?”

“Yes, sir, ” Danzer said. He was truly
afraid now.

“We’ll know if you talk; we’ll
know who you talk to and all of you will simply disappear. ”

“Captain, ” the major broke in.

“Sir, this guy has no business here and if he talks
I can’t guarantee anything. ” The captain
complained as if he were trying to cover his ass to a superior who
didn’t know as much as he did.

“So forget everything you saw, ” the major
said directly to Danzer. “And hightail it out of here before
someone else sees you and wants to make sure you stay silent.
”

“Yes, SIR, ” Danzer just about shouted as
he extricated himself from the grip of the MPs on either side of him
and broke for his pickup truck on the other side of the base. He
didn’t even look back to see the team of soldiers carrying
the body bags of the remaining creatures into the hospital where,
before there were any other briefings, the creatures were prepared for
autopsy like bagged game waiting to be dressed.

The rest of the story about that week has become the subject
of history. First, 509th base commander Bull Blanchard authorized the
release of the “flying saucer” story that was
picked up by news services and carried around the country. Then General
Roger Ramey at 8th Army Air Force headquarters in Texas ordered Maj.
Jesse Marcel to go back before the press and retract the flying saucer
story. This time, Marcel was ordered to say that he’d made a
mistake and realized the debris had actually come from a weather
balloon. Swallowing a story he himself never believed, Jesse Marcel
posed with some faked debris from an actual balloon and confessed to an
error he never could have made, even on a bad day. It was a confession
that would haunt him the rest of his life until, decades later and
shortly before he died, he would retract his public story and restate
that he had actually retrieved an alien spacecraft that night in the
Roswell desert.

Meanwhile, in the days and weeks after the crash and
retrieval, Army Intelligence and CIC personnel fanned out through
Roswell and neighboring communities to suppress whatever information
they could. With ill-advised threats of violence, actual physical
intimidation, and, according to some of the rumors, at least one
homicide, army officers bludgeoned the community into silence. Mac
Brazel, one of the civilians near whose property the crash took place
and one of the visitors to the site, was allegedly bribed and threatened. He suddenly became silent about what he had seen
in the desert even after he had told friends and news people that
he’d retrieved pieces from a downed spacecraft. Officers from
the Chavez County Sheriffs Department and other law enforcement
agencies were forced to comply with the army edict that the incident
outside of Roswell was a matter of national security and was not to be
discussed. “It never happened, ” the army decreed,
and civilian authorities willingly complied. Even the local Roswell
radio station news correspondents, John McBoyle from KSWS and Walt
Whitmore Sr. from KGFL, who’d conducted interviews with
witnesses to the debris field, were forced to submit to the official
line that the army imposed and never broadcast their reports.

For some of the civilians who claimed to have experienced
intimidation from the army officers who flooded into Roswell after the
crash, the trauma remained with them for the rest of their lives. One
was Dan Dwyer’s daughter, who was a young child in July1947,
and who endured the sight of a huge, helmeted army officer, his
expression obscured by sunglasses, looming over her in her
mother’s kitchen and telling her that if she didn’t
forget what she had been told by her father, she and the rest of her
family would simply disappear in the desert. Sally who had played with
the metallic fabric her father had brought back to the firehouse that
morning and had heard his description of the little people carried away
on stretchers, quaked in terror as the officer finally got her to admit
that she had seen nothing, heard nothing, and handled nothing.
“It never happened, ” he hissed at her.
“And there’s nothing you will ever say about it for
the rest of your life because we will be there and we will know it,
” he repeated over and over again, slapping a police baton
into his palm with a loud crack at every word. Even today, tears form
at the corners of her eyes as she describes the scene and remembers the
expression of her mother, who had been told to leave the kitchen while
the officer spoke to Sally. It’s tough for a kid to see her
parents so terrorized into silence that they will deny the truth before
their eyes.

Roy Danzer’s daughter, too, was frightened at the
sight of her father when he came home from the base that morning on
July 5,1947. He wouldn’t talk about what had gone on there,
of course, even though the town was abuzz with rumors that creatures
from outer space had invaded Roswell. Wasn’t it true that all
the children in town knew about it and there’d been stories
about flying saucers in newspapers for weeks? It was even on the radio.
But Roy Danzer wouldn’t say a word in front of his daughter.
She heard her parents talking through the closed door of her bedroom at
nights and caught snippets of conversations about little creatures and
“they’ll kill us all. ” But she buried
these in a part of her memory she never visited until her father,
shortly before his death, told her what really happened at the base
that day in July when the convoy arrived out of the desert.

Steve Arnold stayed in Roswell, finishing out his official
re-enlistment with the army and, without his direct knowledge,
remaining apart of my own team right through the 1960s. Some say he
works for the government still, carrying out a job that fell to him
right out of the New Mexico skies, pumping out disinformation from the
army or the CIA or whomever, perpetuating a camouflage story that,
fifty years later, has taken on a life of its own and goes forward,
like a tale out of a Dickens novel, simply on inertia. You can see
Steve today walking around Roswell, visiting old friends from his army
days, giving interviews on television to the news crews that
periodically pay visits to the folks at Roswell who want to talk about
those days in the summer of 1947.

As for the debris retrieved out of the desert that July, it
had another destiny. Shipped to Fort Bliss, Texas, headquarters of the
8th Army Air Force, and summarily analyzed for what it was and what it
might contain, all of it was transferred to the control of the
military. As quickly as it arrived, some of the debris was flown to
Ohio, where it was put under lock and key at Wright Airfield - later
Wright - Patterson. The rest of it was loaded onto trucks and sent up
to a rest stop at Fort Riley in Kansas. The 509th returned to its daily
routine, Jesse Marcel went back to work as if he’d never held
the wreckage from the strange craft in his own hands, and the
contractors returned to their work on the pipes and doors and walls at
the base just as if nothing had ever arrived there from the desert.

By the time the first week of July 1947 was over, the crash
outside of Roswell might as well have never taken place. Like the night
that engulfs you as you drive through the expanse of desert and
chaparral toward Roswell, so the night of silence engulfed the story of
Roswell itself for over thirty years.

These are the stories as I heard them, as people later told
them to me. I wasn’t there at Roswell that night. I
didn’t see these events for myself. I only heard them years
later when the task fell to me to make something out of all this. But
the debris from the crash of the object that was either caused by
lightning or by our targeting radar, sonic say, and fell out of the sky
that night was on its way to a collision course with my life. Our paths
would cross officially at the Pentagon in the 1960s even though, for a
very brief moment in 1947, when I was a young major at Fort Riley,
fresh from the glory of victory in Europe, I would see something that I
would tuck away in my memory and hope against hope I would never see
again for the rest of my life.

Convoy to Fort Riley

I CAN REMEMBER A TIME WHEN I WAS SO YOUNG AND FEELING so
invincible that there was nothing in the world I was afraid of. I had
faced down fear in North Africa. With General Patton’s army I
stood toe-to-toe against the artillery in Rommel’s Panzer
Divisions and gave them better than they dished out to us. We were an
army of young men from a country that hadn’t started the war
but found itself right in the midst of it before we even got out of
church the Sunday Pearl Harbor was attacked. The next thing we knew
Hitler declared war on us and we were fighting in Europe. But by 1942,
we drove the Germans right out of Africa and jumped across the sea to
Sicily. Then, while Mussolini was still reeling from the punches, we
invaded Italy and fought our way up the peninsula until we came to
Rome. We were the first invading army to conquer Rome since the Middle
Ages, and obviously the first invading army from the New World to ever
occupy Rome.

But there we were by early 1944, sitting in Rome after
Mussolini fled and the German front collapsing all around us. And as a
too young captain in Army Intelligence, I was ordered to oversee the
formation of a civilian government under Allied military rule in the
magical city of my ancestors that I’d only read about in
history books. Pope Pious himself offered me an audience to discuss our
plans for the city government. You can’t even dream this
stuff up. It has to happen to you in real life, and then you pinch
yourself to make sure you don’t wake up in your own bed
outside of Pittsburgh on a winter morning.

I stayed in Rome for three years from the months before the
landing at Normandy in 1944, when the German front lines were still
only a few miles south of Rome and our boys were slugging their way up
the slopes of Monte Casino, to early 1947, when I was shipped back home
and my wife and I threw everything we had into the trunk of a used
Chevy convertible and drove across the farmland state routes of peace
time America from Pennsylvania to Kansas. I’d been away five
years. But now I was home! Driving top-down across Missouri to an
assignment that was considered a plum for any young officer on his way
up the army ladder: Military Intelligence School, only one step away
from Strategic Intelligence, the army’s version of the Ivy
League; I was moving up in the world. And what was I? Just a draftee
out of Pennsylvania who was chosen for Officer Candidate School, and
now fresh from a wartime intelligence command in Allied occupied Europe
and ready to begin my new career in Army Intelligence.

Having been in Africa and Europe for so many years, I was
anxious to see America again. By this time its people were not stooping
under the weight of the depression nor in factories nor in uniform
sweating out a desperate war across two oceans. This was an America
victory, and you could see it as you drove through the small towns of
southern Ohio and Illinois and then across the Mississippi. We
didn’t stop overnight to see St. Louis or even to linger on
the Kansas side of the river. I was so excited to be a career officer
that we didn’t stop driving until we pulled straight into
Fort Riley and set up an apartment in nearby Junction City, where
we’d live while they got our house ready on the base.

For most of the next few weeks, my wife and I got used to
living in America again on a peacetime army base. We had lived in Rome
after the war while I was still trying to help pacify the city and fend
off the Communist attempts to take over the government. It was as if we
were still fighting a war because each day had brought renewed
challenges from either the Communists or the organized crime families
who had tried to infiltrate their way back into the civilian
government. My life was also in danger each day from the different
cadres of terrorists in the city, each group with its own agenda. So in
contrast to Italy, Fort Riley was like the beginning of a vacation.

And I was back in school again. This time, however, I was
taking courses in career training. I knew how to be an intelligence
officer and, in fact, had been trained by the British MI 19, the
premier wartime intelligence network in the world. My training had been
so thorough that even though we were up against crack Soviet NKVD units
operating within Rome, we were able to out think them and actually
destroy them. Prior to the war, the United States really
didn’t have a peacetime intelligence service, which is why
they quickly formed the OSS when war broke out. But the Army
Intelligence units and the OSS didn’t operate together for
most of the war because communication lines were faulty and we never
really trusted the OSS agenda. Now with the war over and Army
Intelligence having come into its own, I was part of a whole new cadre
of career intelligence officers who would keep watch on Soviet
activities. The Soviets had become our new old enemies.

In intelligence school during those first months we reviewed
not only the rudiments of good intelligence gathering - interrogation
of enemy prisoners, analysis of raw intelligence data, and the like -
but we learned the basics of administration and how to run a wartime
intelligence unit called the aggressor force. None of us realized
during those early days how quickly our newly acquired skills would be
tested nor where our enemies would choose to fight. But those were
confident days as the weather turned warmer on the plains and the days
grew long with the coming of summer.

Before the war broke out and when I was in high school back in
California, Pennsylvania, my hometown, I was something of a bowler. It
was a sport I wanted to get back to when the war ended, so when I got
to Fort Riley, one of the first places I looked up was the bowling
alley on the base, which had been built in one of the former stables.
Fort Riley was a former cavalry base, the home of Cutter’s
7th Cavalry, and still had a polo field after the war. I started
practicing my bowling again and was soon rolling enough strikes that
the enlisted men who bowled there began talking to me about my game.
Before too many months had passed, M. Sgt. Bill Brown - the men called
him “Brownie” - stopped me when I was changing out
of my bowling shoes and said he wanted to talk.

“Major, sir, ” he began, more than a
little embarrassed to address an officer out of uniform and not on any
official army business. He couldn’t possibly have realized
that I was a draftee just like him and had spent the first few months
in the service taking orders from corporals in boot camp.

“Sergeant?” I asked.

“The men at the post want to start up a bowling
league, sir, have teams to bowl against and maybe come up with a team
to represent the base, ” he began. “So
we’ve been watching you bowl on Saturdays. ”

“So what am I doing wrong?” I asked. I
figured at first maybe this sergeant was going to give me a tip or two
and wanted to establish some authority. OK, I’ll take a tip
from anybody. But that’s not what he asked.

“No, sir. Nothing at all, ” he stammered.
“I’m saying something different. We, the guys, were
wondering if you’ve bowled before - do you think maybe
you’d like to become part of the team?” He had
gotten more confidence the more he framed his request.

“You want me for your team?” I asked. I
was pretty surprised because officers weren’t supposed to
fraternize with enlisted men at that time. Things are very different
now, but then, fifty years ago, it was a different world, even for much
of the officer corps that started out as draftees and went through
officer training.

“We know it’s out of the ordinary, sir,
but there are no rules against it. ” I gave him a very
surprised look. “We checked, ” he said. This was
obviously not a spur of the moment question.

“You think I can hold up my end of
things?” I asked. “It’s been along time
since I’ve bowled against anybody. ”

“Sir, we’ve been watching. We think
you’ll really help us out. Besides, ” he continued,
“we do need an officer on the team. ”

Whether out of modesty or because he didn’t want to
put me off, he had completely understated the nature of the bowling
team. These guys had been champions in their own hometowns and, years
later, you could have found them on Bowling for Dollars. There was no
reason in the world I should have been on that team except that they
wanted an officer because it would give them prestige.

I told him I’d get back to him on it because I
wanted to check on the rules, if there were any, for myself. In fact
officers and enlisted personnel were allowed to compete on the same
athletic teams, and, in very short order, I joined the team, along with
Dave Bender, John Miller, Brownie, and Sal Federico. We became quite a
remarkable team, winning most of our matches, more than a few trophies,
and had lots of exciting moments when we made the impossible splits and
bowled our way all the way to the state finals. We ultimately won the
Army Bowling Championships, and the trophy sits on my desk to this very
day. Magically, the barrier between officer and enlisted man seemed to
drop. And that’s the real point of this story.

Through the months I spent on the team, I became friends with
Bender, Miller, Federico, and Brown. We didn’t socialize
much, except for the bowling, but we also didn’t stand on
ceremony with each other, and I liked it that way. I found that a lot
of the career intelligence officers also liked to see some of the
barriers drop because sometimes men will speak with more honesty to you
if you don’t throw what’s on your shoulders into
their faces every time you talk to them. So I became friends with these
guys, and that’s what got me into the veterinary building on
Sunday night, July 6, 1947.

I remember how hot it had been that whole weekend of July 4th
celebrations and fireworks. These were the days before everybody had to
have air-conditioning, so we just sweltered inside the offices at the
base and swatted away the fat lazy flies that buzzed around looking for
hot dog crumbs or landing on chunks of pickle relish. By Sunday, the
celebrations were over, guys who’d had too much beer had been
dragged off to their barracks by members of their company before the
MPs got hold of them, and the base was settling down to the business of
the week. Nobody seemed to take much notice of the five
deuce-and-a-halfs and side-by-side low-boy trailers that had pulled
into the base that afternoon full of cargo from Fort Bliss in Texas on
their way to Air Material Command at Wright Field in Ohio. If you had
looked at the cargo manifests the drivers were carrying,
you’d have seen lists itemizing landing gear assembly struts
for B29s, wing tank pods for vintage P51s, piston rings for radial
aircraft engines, ten crates of Motorola walkie-talkies, and you
wouldn’t think anything of the shipment except for the fact
that it was going the wrong way. These spare parts were usually shipped
from Wright Field to bases like Fort Bliss rather than the other way
around, but, of course, I wouldn’t know that until years
later when the real cargo on those trucks fell straight onto my desk as
if it had dropped out of the sky.

It got quiet that evening right after dark, and I remember
that it was very humid. Off in the distance you could see lightning,
and I wondered if the storms were going to reach the base before
morning. I was the post duty officer on that night - similar to the
chief duty officer of the watch on a naval vessel - and hoped, even
more fervently, that if a storm were on its way, it would wait until
morning to break so that I might be spared walking through the mud from
sentry post to sentry post in the midst of a summer downpour.
I looked over the sentry duty roster for that night and saw that
Brownie was standing a post over at one of the old veterinarian
buildings near the center of the compound.

The post duty officer spends his night at the main base
headquarters, where he watches the phones and is the human firewall
between an emergency and a disaster. Not much to do unless
there’s a war on or a company of roustabouts decides to tear
up a local bar. And by late night, the base settles into a pattern. The
sentries walk their posts, the various administrative offices close
down, and whoever is on night watch takes over the communications
system - which in1947 consisted primarily of telephone and telex cable.
I had to walk a beat as well, checking the different buildings and
sentry posts to make sure everyone was on duty. I also had to close
down the social clubs. After I made my obligatory stops at the enlisted
men’s and officers’ clubs, shutting down the bars
and tossing, with all due respect to the senior officers, the drunks
back to their quarters, I footed it over to the old veterinary building
where Brown was standing watch. But when I got there, where he was
supposed to be, I didn’t see him. Something was wrong.

“Major Corso, ” a voice hissed out of the
darkness. It had an edge of terror and excitement to it.

“What the hell are you doing in there,
Brownie?” I began cussing out the figure that peeked out at
me from behind the door. “Have you gone off your
rocker?” He was supposed to be outside the building, not
hiding in a doorway. It was a breach of duty.

“You don’t understand, Major, ”
he whispered again. “You have to see this. ”

“Better be good, ” I said as I walked over
to where he was standing and waited for him outside the door.
“Now you get out here where I can see you, ” I
ordered.

Brown popped his head out from behind the door.

“You know what’s in here?” he
asked.

Whatever was going on, I didn’t want to play any
games. The post duty sheet for that night read that the veterinary
building was off-limits to everyone. Not even the sentries were allowed
inside because whatever had been loaded in had been classified as
“No Access. ” What was Brown doing on the inside?