Also, my neck was getting prickly with apprehension at atomic bomb stuff turning up again, even in this sidebar to the Forrestal investigation: first Frank Wilson of the Atomic Energy Commission, and now SAC’s atom bomb watchdog, Major Marcel.
Who said, in a husky tenor, “Jesse Marcel, Mr. Heller. You are Mr. Heller?”
His tan sportshirt was a print design of cartoony representations of vacation spots: Miami, Cuba, Rio, palm trees, volcanoes, hotels.
“Nathan Heller, yes,” I said, shaking the hand he offered.
His smile was friendly but nervous. “Mind if I see some identification?”
“Not at all.” I got out my wallet, showed him my Illinois private operator’s ticket.
“No offense,” he said, and sucked on the stub of his cigarette. “Can’t be too careful. Swell day, huh? Nice breeze-my wife and son are over at the park, so we should have plenty of time to talk.”
“Major,” I said, slipping my wallet back in my hip pocket, “I read the newspaper accounts about the incident at Roswell, but considering the inconsistencies … I’d really like to hear your version of it.”
“Call me Jesse,” he said, dropping the spent cigarette to the granite, heeling it out. “We seem to be pretty much by ourselves here, but let’s keep it un-military, all right? You prefer Nathan or Nate?”
“Nate’ll do. Jesse, if you’re planning to reveal anything of a classified nature, I’ll have Pearson send somebody else over to talk to you.”
He shook his head, as he plucked a Camel out of a half-used pack. “Smoke?”
“No thanks.”
“None of this is classified, Nate, or top-secret or anything. But it’s military matters just the same, and I’m in intelligence, and I might get a tit in the wringer if it was known I was a damn source for ‘Washington Merry-Go-Round.’”
“Understood. I just have no desire to see the inside of Fort Leavenworth.”
“You’re comin’ in loud and clear on that one.” He fired up his Camel with a silver Zippo, which he snapped shut. “No, they clamped the lid on this thing, but oddly, I never got any kind of serious debriefing or orders to clam up or anything. But, understand, this deal blew over real quick.”
And it had. One day the headlines were trumpeting AIR FORCE CAPTURES FLYING SAUCER ON RANCH IN ROSWELL, the next ARMY DEBUNKS ROSWELL FLYING DISK AS WORLD SIMMERS WITH EXCITEMENT and GENERAL RAMEY EMPTIES ROSWELL SAUCER. These had been the headlines of Roswell’s own Daily Record and Dispatch, but the story had been carried via the Associated Press and United Press, and spread worldwide-the Pearson file had clips from Rome, London, Paris, Hamburg, Hong Kong, Tokyo-creating a momentary sensation, only to be laughed off as a fluke of the flying saucer “craze.”
“So what really happened at Roswell, Jesse?” I was getting out my small spiral notebook.
“No notes, Nate. We’re just two pals chatting, okay?”
“Sure.” I put the spiral pad away.
He plucked tobacco flakes off his tongue. “I can only tell you my part of it; I’ve heard of some fantastic things that other people witnessed, but I’m not gonna pass that along to you. If you’re interested, you can go talk to ’em in Roswell; I’ll even give you, or Mr. Pearson, a list of names. Make some calls for you-pave the way. But I’m in the intelligence game myself, Nate-and I’m not going to insult your intelligence with hearsay.”
“Fair enough. What’s your story, Jesse?”
Laughter echoed across the water, as pleasure boaters glided by; the afternoon sun was turning the surface of the Potomac a glimmering gold.
Marcel drew on the cigarette, held the smoke in, blew it out through his nostrils, dragon-style. “It was the first Monday after Independence Day weekend, what-two years ago. I was just sittin’ down to lunch, at the officers’ club, when I got called to the phone. It was Sheriff Wilcox, saying he had a man in his office tellin’ him something real strange.”
“This is the sheriff in Roswell.”
“That’s right-Chaves County sheriff, to be exact. Anyway, Wilcox says this rancher from over by Corona has come trampin’ into his office, yammering about a flying saucer crashing on his property. Well, as you can imagine, the sheriff took this with a big ol’ grain of salt, but this rancher-Mac Brazel, your typical dusty ol’ cowboy, not the owner of this ranch, just a guy running it for an absentee owner-had come three and a half hours over rotten roads and he wasn’t about to stand for the bum’s rush. Seems he had a few pieces of debris of this supposed saucer out in his pickup truck, which he shows the sheriff.”
“And this prompts the sheriff to call you.”
“Well, Sheriff Wilcox called the Army airfield and got put through to me, as Intelligence Corps officer. So the sheriff fills me in a little, and then he puts the rancher, Brazel, on the line, who says he’s found something on his ranch that crashed down either yesterday or the day before; didn’t know what it was-just that there was rubble all over a pasture of his, ‘bigger than a football field,’ he said, and that the grass looked like it had got burnt underneath.”
Despite the cool breeze, the sun was warm enough for me to slip out of my sportcoat, and drape it over the granite step beside me. “So you headed over there.”
“After I finished my lunch, I did. I wasn’t in any rush. You know the papers were full of this flying saucer baloney around then, and somebody or other, I don’t know, some radio station I think, was offering a reward to anybody who found one. I figured this might be a weather balloon-we had a lot of those come down-or some experimental thing from over at White Sands, which is nearby.”
“Or did you think it was a hoax, maybe? With a reward at stake?”
He shook his head, sucked some more on his cigarette. “That’s not the kind of thing that would occur to a guy like Mac Brazel; he was just your typical New Mexico salt-of-the-earth shitkicker.”
“So you went to the sheriff’s office.”
“I did, and I saw the stuff in Brazel’s truck, and it was pretty weird-there was this parchmentlike substance, extremely strong, so brown it was almost black, only more like a rough plastic than paper but it didn’t seem to be either one; and some scraps of this shiny, flexible metal, like tinfoil, only it wasn’t tinfoil, it was as thin as that, but much stronger. Here’s what was really peculiar-you could bend that stuff, and if you put some muscle in it, even kind of wad it up … but it would then assume its original shape-without a bend, without a crinkle.”
“Is that possible?”
“I would say no, if I hadn’t seen it, held it.” Marcel took his Zippo lighter from his shirt pocket. “I tried to burn the stuff with this very lighter-held the flame under a piece, and it wouldn’t burn. You couldn’t pierce it with a sharp knife, either!”
This subject clearly made him nervous, and he was drawing on the cigarette constantly, and on this beautiful sunny fresh afternoon, I was sitting in a swirl of smoke.
“So you saw these … samples of debris, in the rancher’s truck. What then, Jesse?”
He shrugged. “I thought the matter was certainly worth reporting, so I called Colonel Blanchard at the base, commanding officer, and he asked me to bring some of the debris back for him to take a look at. I told Brazel and the sheriff I’d come back in, in an hour so, asked ’em to wait for me, and I met with Colonel Blanchard at the base. I showed him a piece of that shiny shit and asked him what he’d advise me to do. He looked it over carefully, and got the gist of how curious this stuff was, and he asked me how much debris was at the ranch, and I said, according to this Brazel character, plenty. I told the colonel, ‘I believe we have some kind of downed aircraft of an unusual sort.’ Then he said, ‘Well then, I’d advise that you drive out to that site, and take one of our three counterintelligence agents along with you for support.’”
“And did you?”
Marcel nodded, sucking on the cigarette; he was almost ready for another. “I took the highest-ranking man we had, a CIC captain named Cavitt, who drove a jeep carry-all from the base. We took two cars-I was in a staff car, a prewar Buick-and we met up with Brazel at the sheriff’s office, and followed him out to the ranch.”