I got out my spiral notepad. “Why don’t you tell me your story, Glenn? Do you mind if I take notes?”
He didn’t mind. Back in ’47, on the afternoon of Saturday, July 5, Dennis had been “minding the store” at the Ballard Funeral Home in Roswell. Ballard’s, “the biggest firm of undertakers in town,” had a contract with the RAAF (Roswell Army Air Field) for both embalming and ambulance service.
So it was no surprise to Dennis, receiving a call from the RAAF’s mortuary affairs officer.
“This fella,” Dennis said, cradling his beer in both hands, “Captain somebody, don’t remember his name, he was more an administrator than a technical specialist, and didn’t know the ins and outs of handling corpses.”
The officer had asked Dennis if Ballard’s had any small caskets available, child- or youth-size, and if those caskets could be “hermetically sealed.” The assistant mortician had said there wasn’t much call for the latter, but as to the former, the funeral home had one kid casket in stock, and could call the warehouse in Amarillo and have more in by the next morning.
Dennis had asked, “Has there been some kind of crash, or accident, Captain?”
The Ballard Funeral Home had handled as many as twenty bodies at a time, from crashes out at the base, and had invested in building a special chamber next to the embalming room specifically for such emergencies.
But the captain had said, “No, no … we’re, uh, having a meeting and discussing provisions for, uh … future eventualities…. We’ll let you know when and if we need a coffin.”
“Well,” Dennis said, “if you need a bunch of little coffins quick, I gotta get the call in to Amarillo before three, and that’s just a couple hours from now.”
“At present I’m only gathering information,” the mortuary officer said, thanked the mortician and hung up. Dennis shrugged off the peculiar call and was in the driveway, washing one of the hearses, when the phone rang again. Running in to answer it, Dennis found the mortuary officer on the other end of the line.
“Glenn,” the captain asked, “how do you handle bodies that have been exposed out in the desert sun?”
“For how long?”
“Four or five days. What happens to tissue when it’s laid out in the sun like that?”
“Are you just gathering information, I mean is this a hypothetical situation, or do you need to know specifically how Ballard’s goes about it, what chemicals we use and suchlike?”
“It’s a hypothetical, but we want to know Ballard’s procedure. For example, what chemicals does your embalming fluid consist of? And what would you do if you didn’t want to change any of the chemical contents of the corpse? You know-not destroy any blood, destroy anything that might be of interest, down the road. Also, could holes in a body be sealed over, holes made by predators, I mean? What’s the best way to physically collect remains in such a condition?”
“That’s a whole lot of hypothetical, Captain….”
“Well, let’s start with the steps you could take not to change the chemical contents of the corpse.”
“Well, we usually use a strong solution of formaldehyde in water, and that’s damn sure gonna change the composition of the body. Of course, if a body’s been sunnin’ out on the prairie in July for four or five days, it’s already gone through some changes, lemme tell you, gonna be in real sorry shape. In a case like you’re describing, I’d recommend packing the body in dry ice and freezing it, for storage or transport or whatever…. Look, Captain, I can come right out there and help-”
“No! No thank you, Glenn. This is strictly for future reference.”
And the mortuary officer had hung up.
“Of course I knew right away,” Dennis told me, smiling as he sipped his beer, “that something big had happened, some VIP got killed or some such, and they weren’t ready to release it. But I might have forgot all about it, if an airman hadn’t got in a fender-bender that same afternoon.”
In routine Ballard’s business, Dennis had transported an airman who’d broken his nose in a minor traffic accident out to the base hospital. At about five p.m., Dennis-who was well known around the base, and had rather free access because of the funeral home’s contract with the RAAF-pulled around back to escort the injured airman in the emergency entrance.
But the ramp was blocked by three field ambulances, so the mortician parked alongside and walked the patient up and in, on the way noticing that standing near the rear doors of each of the boxy vehicles was an armed MP. The back doors of one vehicle stood open and Dennis glimpsed a pile of wreckage-thin, silver-metallic material, with a bluish cast.
“One piece was formed like the bottom of a canoe,” he told me, “and was maybe three feet long, with writing on it, about four inches high.”
“What kind of writing?” I asked him. By now I had my own beer to sip.
“Not English. It reminded me of Egyptian hieroglyphics.”
“You ever talk to Major Marcel about what you saw?”
“No. Anyway, I just glanced in and kept goin’-I had this patient to deliver, and I took him to Receiving and did the paperwork. There was a lot of activity in that emergency room, I’ll tell ya, a real hubbub, not just doctors either, I knew all of them-big birds I never saw before.”
He meant high-ranking Army Air Force officers.
“Anyway, I wandered down toward the lounge, to get a Coke, kinda hopin’ I would run into Maria. We were dating then, you know.”
“Nobody stopped you?”
“Anybody who knew me would’ve made the natural assumption I’d been called out there. This one MP, who I didn’t know, stopped me in the hall and I told him the mortuary officer called me, which was true, and he let me pass. I went on to the lounge, and got my Coke and kinda stood where I could see what was goin’ on, out in the hall … and that’s when I spotted Maria, comin’ out of an examining room, holding a cloth over her mouth.”
The mortician had also caught a glimpse of two doctors, also covering their lower faces with towels standing by a couple of gurneys, but not of who was on those gurneys.
Nurse Selff had been shocked to see him.
“How did you get in here, Glenn?” she’d asked him, lowering the cloth, looking “woozy” to him.
“I just walked in,” the mortician had shrugged.
“Well, my God, you’ve got to leave! You could get shot!”
“Don’t be silly …”
“Listen to me-get out of here as fast you can.”
Then she’d slipped into another room, just as a captain was coming out; Dennis didn’t know this captain, who was in his mid-forties and prematurely gray.
“Who the hell are you?” the captain had demanded. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m from the funeral home,” Dennis said. “I run the ambulance service-just delivered a guy at the emergency room, and now I’m havin’ a Coke. Hey, I can see you had an air crash, I saw some of the debris-can I help?”
The captain had glared at Dennis and pointed to the floor. “You just stay right where you are.”
“Sure.”
The next thing Dennis knew, two MPs were grabbing onto his arms and were in the process of hauling him bodily out of there, when another voice called, “We’re not through with that S.O.B.! Bring him back here-now!”
And the young mortician had been dragged back to a second captain, “a redhead with the meanest-looking eyes I ever saw,” who said, “You didn’t see a thing, understand? There was no crash here. You go into town, shooting off your big mouth about what you saw, or that there was any kind of crash, and your ass is gonna be in a major fucking sling. Do I make myself clear?”
“I’m a civilian, mister,” Dennis said. “Where do you get off, talkin’ to me like that? You can’t do a damn thing to me!”
The redheaded captain gave the mortician an “awful” smile, and said, “Don’t kid yourself, kid. Somebody’ll be picking your bones out of the sand.”
“Go to hell!”
The captain nodded to the MPs. “Get his scrawny ass outa here.”
Then the MPs had dragged Dennis out to his ambulance and followed him all the way back to the funeral home, in Roswell.