What really happened at Roswell?



  WHAT REALLY HAPPENED AT ROSWELL?

  Johnathon Devere

  Copyright 2012 Johnathon Devere.

  It was late in the evening when Mack Brazel first saw the object. The sun had just sunk behind the horizon and he was just about to pack up and head home for the day. Work on old man Fosters place had gone slower than it should have and they were all having to put in extra overtime to make up for it.

  The other ranch hands as well as his son had already taken off in the other pick-up truck and he was the only one still there. Rather than take off in his truck he decided to stay another twenty minutes or so and watch the sun go down behind the scrubby brush and tall Saguaro cacti. Out here in the desert, on a good clear night like this was, you could see a bright sprinkling of a million stars overhead. It was a sight to see, sure enough. He stretched his back, and paused a moment to gaze up at the broad misty band of the Milky Way. The night air was cool on his cheeks.

  Then he looked again and frowned in puzzlement. One star in particular seemed brighter than the others. He did not seem to remember seeing it before. Even in these few seconds it seemed like it had grown brighter.

  Slowly, it started to move. It drifted with dreamlike slowness across a field of stars. Was it some sort of aircraft? The war had only been over for two years. It was said that the airfield to the north had some mighty weird stuff in it they had brought back from Europe. Someone told him they had been outside another base one day, when he saw what looked for all the world like a giant cigar go straight up and vanish into the sky, flames coming out the bottom of it. Maybe this was something like that, one of them new-fangled jets maybe. It seemed to get brighter still, and larger. He could swear for a second that it was coming right toward him. Then it stopped, and doubled back on itself and went back the way it had come in a way no aircraft should have been able to, jet or no. He did not like the look of this at all. Then it elongated itself into a long horizontal shape, like a disc seen edge-on, with some sort of bulge at the leading edge. Then it stopped again. Something seemed to disturb it, for it dipped downward and began to descend rapidly at a steep angle, convulsing weirdly along its length as it did so. Then it disappeared behind the distant Saguaro. There was the sound of a distant crump as it impacted the desert floor.

  Almost immediately he got back in the truck and started it up, and pointed it to where he thought it had come down. It didn’t seem like it was that far away. The desert at night is very dark; there was little or nothing to guide his way beyond the small oval of light offered by the trucks headlamps. He could only make a best guess estimate and hope he wasn’t too far off. He stopped the truck and killed the lights. He waited a minute or so to let his eyes adjust to the dark and got out slowly. He hoped there weren’t any tarantulas around here to crawl up the warm tires and get inside the axles. He went round to the back of the pickup truck to retrieve the battered old metal torch. He trained it all around, lighting up the tops of the scrub.

  There. Something in the middle distance. It looked like a giant tarpaulin draped right over the tallest of the Saguaro. In the sharp torch beam it shone weirdly, like metallic or something. Some sort of parachute? There were no ropes or cables in evidence. He followed it with the torch, and found the ground there was littered all around with various sized bits and pieces of a jagged metal, like sheets of it had been torn up and tossed all around. Beyond that, there were some bent and dented metal tubes lying askew. There was also a very strange looking object indeed. It was an uneven lump, a package that had been partially flattened into the sand by the force of the impact. He bent to pick up one of the fragments. It shone like a brightly polished metal. But it had the consistency of a scrap of paper. He could bend and fold it in his fingers. But it was metal alright. Metal paper. Just what the heck is this, he thought. He trained the torch over the strange, ruined thing before him. It seemed to be made out of some sort of… paper like material, he saw. Layers of it were folded around each other intricately. Down one side were these queer black symbols, arranged in long narrow vertical lines, a bizarre alphabet the like of which he had never seen anywhere else.

  Suddenly, he felt inexplicably frightened. This was not of this Earth, no, not at all. He dropped the little triangle of metal paper out of his hand and rushed back to the Buick, slammed the door firmly shut and drove like crazy out of there. He was going to have to get help. First thing in the morning he would come back here with his son and take another look over this thing, whatever it was. He might even have to bring in the military. Perhaps the folk over at the Roswell Army air field could shed some light on it.

  “Uh, Major?”

  “Yeah, what is it?” replied Major Marcel, without even looking up from his paper.

  “I got the sheriff’s office on the line. He says a rancher has found something weird out in the desert, and he thinks we ought to take a look at it. He thinks it might be one of ours. He wants us to see it. He sounds real anxious. They don’t know what it is.”

  “Awright,” he sighed. “Gimme the phone.” The clerk handed the receiver over the desk to the Major. One nut job after another, he thought.

  “Yes, sheriff. How can I help you? Ahuh. Yeah. When was that? Coupla nights, okay. A disc, you say? A what, a parachute? Okay, I see. Where was this? Alright. No, we don’t. We don’t do any testing in these parts. I can’t really tell you that. Look, I tell you what. I’m gonna send someone down there to take a look at it, alright? We can quickly determine if it’s one of ours and what to do about it. No problem at all.”

  After thinking about it for a moment or so, he decided he might as well go and take a look out there himself. At least it would provide an excuse to get away from this stuffy office for a few hours or so. Anything to break the monotony. This had to be the most boring posting of all time. Even Tokyo had been more interesting. “Emily, I’m going to be out of the office for a bit. I gotta go check on something. Hold my calls, would you?”

  The Brazel homestead was about a half hours drive away. The object and all the other debris of the crash site was all stored within his barn at the back of the house. Mack and his family had gathered up from the crash site a range of materials including pieces of rubber, sticks, various kinds of paper, and fragments of tinfoil. A lot of it was held together with strips of tape, some of which had flowery designs across it, making it look like something you might see in a kindergarten.

  In the center stood the object itself.

  He slowly pulled the tarpaulin off it, and he saw what was written there, and his eyes widened in horror.

  The lettering was Japanese.

  For perhaps the first time in his life, he understood what it means to feel your blood run suddenly cold. He could not believe what he was looking at. It couldn’t be, he thought. Not here. They were supposed to have all been destroyed. How could this one have survived this far inland?

  Marcel had learned enough of it during his tour of duty in Japan to pick his way through it. It was a Shinto prayer, of the kind people would hang outside their houses for good fortune.

  Marcel dreaded to think what might be inside that package. He rushed back outside and pulled the door firmly shut behind him.

  “It’s a good thing you called us,” he told Mack. “You got a lock for this barn?”

  “Sure I have. What’s this all about? It ain’t one a them atom bombs is it? I mean, it ain’t gonna go off or nothin’, right?”

  “I don’t think so.” He wished he was as sure as he sounded.

  He got back in the jeep and drove like hell back to the airfield as fast as he could. As soon as he was there he marched into Colonel Blanchard’s office and demanded to see him straight away.

  �
��What the hell do you want, Marcel?” said Blanchard irritably. “I was just about to take off for the day.”

  “I’m sorry to bother you sir, but this is absolutely urgent. We’ve got an emergency on our hands.”

  Something about Marcel’s tone of voice convinced the colonel this was no joke. “What’s going on, Major?”

  “We need to put together a bomb disposal team right away. And a biological hazard team. We’ve got some unexploded ordinance on our hands and possibly maybe even something worse. I need them in gasmasks and hazard suits.”

  “What in the world for?” Blanchard was already reaching for the phone. “Is it something on here on the base?”

  No, sir. It’s outside of Roswell. Something came down in the desert and a guy called Mack Brazel found it and now