I was not the first person to have the honor of meeting The Goose. That belongs to a Texas cotton farmer named Ian Angus MacGregor, who owned it before it became government property.
By summer of 1955 he had sent an even dozen of letters to the Department of Agriculture requesting information on the hatching of goose eggs. The department sent him all the booklets on hand that were anywhere near the subject, but his letters simply got more impassioned and freer in their references to his 'friend,' the local congressman.
My connection with this is that I am in the employ of the Department of Agriculture. Since I was attending a convention at San Antonio in July of 1955, my boss asked me to stop off at MacGregor's place and see what I could do to help him. We're servants of the public and besides we had finally received a letter from MacGregor's congressman.
On July 17,1955, I met The Goose.
I met MacGregor first. He was in his fifties, a tall man with a lined face full of suspicion. I went over all the information he had been given, then asked politely if I might see his geese. He said, 'Its not geese, mister; it's one goose.'
I said, 'May I see the one goose?'
'Rather not.'
'Well, then, I can't help you any further. If it's only one goose, then there's just something wrong with it. Why worry about one goose? Eat it.'
I got up and reached for my hat.
He said, 'Wait!' and I stood there while his lips tightened and his eyes wrinkled and he had a quiet fight with himself. 'Come with me.'
I went out with him to a pen near the house, surrounded by barbed wire, and a locked gate to it, and holding one goose-The Goose.
That's The Goose,' he said. The way he said it, I could hear the capitals.
I stared at it. It looked like any other goose, fat, self-satisfied, and short-tempered.
MacGregor said, 'And here's one of its eggs. It's been in the incubator. Nothing happens.' He produced it from a capacious overall pocket. There was a queer strain about his manner of holding it.
I frowned. There was something wrong with the egg. It was smaller and more spherical than normal. MacGregor said, Take it.'
I reached out and took it. Or tried to. I gave it the amount of heft an egg like that ought to deserve and it just sat where it was. I had to try harder and then up it came.
Now I knew what was queer about the way MacGregor held it. It weighed nearly two pounds.
I stared at it as it lay there, pressing down the palm of my hand, and MacGregor grinned sourly. 'Drop it,' he said.
I just looked at him, so he took it out of my hand and dropped it himself.
It hit soggy. It didn't smash. There was no spray of white and yolk. It just lay where it fell with the bottom caved in.
I picked it up again. The white eggshell had shattered where the egg had struck. Pieces of it had naked away and what shone through was a dull yellow in color. My hands trembled. It was all I could do to make my fingers work, but I got some of the rest of the shell flaked away, and stared at the yellow.
I didn't have to run any analyses. My heart told me.
I was face to face with The Goose!
The Goose That Laid The Golden Eggs! My first problem was to get MacGregor to give up that golden egg. I was almost hysterical about it.
I said, 'I'll give you a receipt. I'll guarantee you payment. I'll do anything in reason.'
'I don't want the government butting in,' he said stubbornly.
But I was twice as stubborn and in the end I signed a receipt and he dogged me out to my car and stood in the road as I drove away, following me with his eyes.
The head of my section at the Department of Agriculture is Louis P. Bronstein. He and I are on good terms and I felt I could explain things without being placed under immediate observation. Even so, I took no chances. I had the egg with me and when I got to the tricky part, I just laid it on the desk between us.
I said, 'It's a yellow metal and it could be brass only it isn't because it's inert to concentrated nitric acid.' Bronstein said, 'It's some sort of hoax. It must be.'
'A hoax that uses real gold? Remember, when I first saw this thing, it was covered completely with authentic unbroken eggshell. It's been easy to check a piece of the egg shell. Calcium carbonate.'
Project Goose was started. That was July 20, 1955.
I was the responsible investigator to begin with and remained in titular charge throughout., though matters quickly got beyond me.
We began with the one egg. Its average radius was 35 millimeters (major axis, 72 millimeters; minor axis, 68 millimeters). The gold shell was 2.45 millimeters in thickness. Studying other eggs later on, we found this value to be rather high. The average thickness turned out to be 2.1 millimeters.
Inside was egg. It looked like egg and it smelled like egg.
Aliquots were analyzed and the organic constituents were reasonably normal. The white was 9.7 per cent albumin. The yolk had the normal complement of vitellin, cholesterol, phospholipid, and carotenoid. We lacked enough material to test for trace constituents, but later on with more eggs at our disposal we did and nothing unusual showed up as far as contents of vitamins, coenzymes, nucleotides, sulfhydryl groups, et cetera, et cetera were concerned.
One important gross abnormality that showed was the egg's behavior on heating. A small portion of the yolk, heated, 'hard-boiled' almost at once. We fed a portion of the hard-boiled egg to a mouse. It survived.
I nibbled at another bit of it. Too small a quantity to taste, really, but it made me sick. Purely psychosomatic, I'm sure.
Boris W. Finley, of the Department of Biochemistry of Temple University-a department consultant-supervised these tests.
He said, referring to the hard-boiling, The ease with which the egg proteins are heat-denatured indicates a partial denaturation to begin with and, considering the nature of the shell, the obvious guilt would lie at the door of heavy-metal contamination.'
So a portion of the yolk was analyzed for inorganic constituents, and it was found to be high in chloraurate ion, which is a singly charged ion containing an atom of gold and four of chlorine, the symbol for which is AuCl4-. (The 'Au' symbol for gold comes from the fact that the Latin word for gold is 'aurum.') When I say the chloraurate ion content was high, I mean it was 3.2 parts per thousand, or 0.32 per cent. That's high enough to form insoluble complexes of 'gold protein' which would coagulate easily. Finley said, 'It's obvious this egg cannot hatch. Nor can any other such egg. It is heavy-metal poisoned.
Gold may be more glamorous than lead but it is just as poisonous to proteins.'
I agreed gloomily. 'At least it's safe from decay, too.'
'Quite right. No self-respecting bug would live in this chlorauriferous soup.'
The final spectrographic analysis of the gold of the shell came in. Virtually pure. The only detectable impurity was iron which amounted to 0-25 per cent of the whole. The iron content of the egg yolk had been twice normal, also. At the moment, however, the matter of the iron was neglected.
One week after Project Goose was begun, an expedition was sent into Texas. Five biochemists went-the accent was still on biochemistry, you see-along with three truckloads of equipment, and a squadron of army personnel. I went along too, of course.
As soon as we arrived, we cut MacGregor's farm off from the world.
That was a lucky thing, you know-the security measures we took right from the start. The reasoning was wrong, at first, but the results were good.
The Department wanted Project Goose kept quiet at the start simply because there was always the thought that this might still be an elaborate hoax and we couldn't risk the bad publicity if it were. And if it weren't a hoax, we couldn't risk the newspaper hounding that would definitely result over any goose-and-golden-egg story.