Majestic, Page 5

  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, "m
aybe 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.

  "Gonna have to stay up half the night polishing the bottoms of our goddamn shoes," Hesseltine said.

  "Why polish the bottoms of our shoes?"

  "You can't eat off floors that have tar on them."

  "Is that an example of your wit?"

  "Maybe it's wit. Or maybe I'm just crazy."

  "I think the former." Gray stepped into an especially soft spot and lifted his right foot out with a loud smack.

  The concrete apron of the runway started just the other side of a chain-link fence. On it were six jeeps lined up in a neat row, waiting to ferry crew to the planes, which stood in the distance shimmering with heat. There were no flights planned for this afternoon, and the line was quiet.

  Hesseltine fitted his aviation glasses to his face and looked longingly toward the rows of planes. Slowly he walked toward the car. In his mind he was, no doubt, running down a checklist, starting motors.

  The car was hot to touch, hotter to sit in. With a long sigh he started it and nosed it out of the lot.

  Walters's Jeep pulled in behind them, driven by a grim-faced PFC Winters, who had been dragooned into the job.

  Once they were on the two-lane blacktop that led over to Roswell, Hesseltine lit a cigarette and tuned in a radio station. A show called Sundown Roundup was on, and they listened in silence. He knew that Gray didn't particularly like country music, and also that he was too polite to twist the dial if Hesseltine appeared to be enjoying himself. Hesseltine snapped his fingers in time to the thin caterwauling of a lonesome cowboy.

  He hated the goddamn West. He would gladly have given an entire paycheck for a hoagie.

  They drove through the town, past the restaurants, the bars, the general stores, the offices of the Daily Record. Hesseltine glanced buck with longing as they left the last of the bars behind. He was a man for a tall, cool one. He had a possibility of a date tonight, and he was damned if he was going to waste time out on some godforsaken ranch with Gray and Walters when he Could be dancing with a WAAF at the Nixon Bar.

  He nosed the Chevy wagon to the sidewalk in front of Wooten's. The Jeep came in beside them. Gray got out of the wagon and trotted into

  the store.

  Hesseltine sat staring after him. Soon Walters came up to the car and leaned his head in. "Whaddaya think?"

  "Wild goose chase. Some private plane went down in a storm."

  "Funny place for a private plane to be. Middle of nowhere." "Flying Albuquerque-Roswell. Blown off course a few miles. Makes perfect sense."

  Walters regarded him, nodding slowly. Compared to Walters, Gray was a real card. "Could be Russian," he said in dark tones. "Up from Mexico, or even from the coast. A recce plane launched from a sub. After a look at the 509th." "Didn't make it."

  "How do we kno
w? Maybe it had a good look and radioed everything back to the sub."

  It struck Hesseltine as damned unlikely and he said so. "Well, Lieutenant, you may be right. But look at the stakes. Stalin wants, more than anything else in the world, to know exactly where the 509th is located, and its immediate orders." "But he can't get here. Surely not, Mr. Walters." "That isn't a CIC problem. You S-2s are supposed to be savvy in that department."

  Major Gray came out of the store. "That's a good man, that Bob Ungar. I like men like him. Honest as the day is long. Friendly as hell." He held up a hand-drawn map. "He can't lead us out, he's got too much to do here in town. But he gave me very explicit instructions to his house. His wife and kids are there."

  The tiny convoy started up again. A thought crossed Hesseltine's mind. "What kind of kids?"

  "Daughter, he mentioned. Son he has with him." "Daughter?"

  "A kid, Lieutenant. Twelve years old."

  Hesseltine got quiet.

  Beyond the clutch of Mexican shacks that ended the town Hesseltine picked up speed. Unable to stand any more of the whining music he spun the dial. A bad dance band pounded away at "Begin the Beguine." Father Coughlin screamed over waves of static. A woman explained that certain cactuses were edible. Somebody talked about how the DuBarry Success Course could bring more dates, more fun. You followed at home the same methods used at the Richard Hudnut Salon in New York.

  Hesseltine spoke longingly about a girl in a pale gray suit tapping along in heels. He wanted that sweet and anonymous image with an ache that made him fall silent.

  "They take the money of innocent kids," Gray intoned. "Nobody around here is ever going to look like she got within fifty miles of Richard Hudnut."

  "Give me one of those Fifth Avenue dames. I'd take her up to the Rainbow Room and dance her until she dropped. These New Mexico girls have sand between their teeth."

  "I wouldn't know. Jennine—"

  "Jennine, I dream of Lilac Time—' "

  "Please, Lieutenant."

  "I thought it was your song. You and Jennine."

  "The way you sing it, it's nobody's song."