To true believers, the Majic-12 papers were the Holy Grail found; for professional UFO debunkers, the material was an obvious hoax. Both sides mounted impressive arguments, but those in the know recognized the extensive inside knowledge and expertise in military documents that would have had to go into such an elaborate fabrication. A few small voices cried, “Disinformation,” largely unheeded. The Majestic Twelve files remain a hotly debated topic among believers and debunkers alike.
Perhaps because my inquiry into Roswell had taken place almost two years after the various events that composed the “incident,” none of the researchers or documentary film-makers sought me out, at least not until the pending fiftieth anniversary of the crash in 1997 raised interest to a fever pitch. A freelance journalist from Davenport, Iowa-Matthew Clemens-had run across a mention of me in a Roswell-related FBI memo unearthed by the Freedom of Information Act, and tracked me down (by phone) at my Coral Springs condo.
“You talked to the eyewitnesses,” Clemens said over the phone, sounding young and eager, “in a contemporary time frame-everyone else who interviewed them did so thirty years after the fact, or more.”
“Yeah,” I said, sounding like the cranky old man that I was. “So?”
“So, did you uncover anything, back then, when memories were fresh, that the latter-day researchers haven’t?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t read any of the ‘latter-day researchers.’”
“Mr. Heller, I’m going down my own path, here, and I need to talk to somebody knowledgeable, somebody who was there, but who doesn’t have an agenda.”
“What do you mean, an agenda?”
“Well, guys like Walter Haut and Glenn Dennis, they’re caught up in it, now. Haut’s a longtime Roswell Chamber of Commerce guy, and both of ’em are involved with running a UFO museum there! I mean, it’s become the town industry.”
“So what road are you going down, Mr. Clemens?”
“I’ve been digging for information on the Nazi presence at White Sands, which was nearby. You know about Operation Paperclip, don’t you?”
“Putting Nazi scientists on the U.S. payroll. Got us to the moon.”
“Yeah, it did. We had … let me check my notes … seven hundred and sixty-five of ’em working for us, scientists, doctors, technicians; at least half, maybe as many as eighty percent of ’em, were Nazi party members and/or SS men. Of course those guys claim they only joined the party and SS because they couldn’t get research grants, otherwise.”
“And you think this has something to do with Roswell, Mr. Clemens?”
“Yeah, at first I thought the ‘saucer’ was one of these refurbished V-2s … you know, maybe the ‘aliens’ were monkeys; von Braun was obsessed with manned flight, you know. But I’m onto something better, something bigger. You ever hear of the Fugo incendiary bomb?”
“Yeah.”
“Really?”
“The Japs launched unmanned high-altitude balloons, with bombs on ’em, hoping to explode them in our Pacific Northwest.”
“I’m impressed, Mr. Heller. The hope was to ignite forest fires, and deny lumber to the war effort. And of course, the effort was a bust. But new evidence indicates the Japanese may have been working on a second-generation Fugo, with kamikaze pilots to target them. That never got off the drawing board.”
“So you think the Roswell crash was a Fugo balloon?”
“No. I think it was a VTOL.”
“And what would that be, Mr. Clemens?”
“A vertical-takeoff-and-landing aircraft. These German brothers, Walter and Reimar Horten, designed them-first for the Nazis, then for us, after the war. See, the German runways were shot to hell, and something that could lift off without a runway might have won the thing for them, and Hitler and his crowd would be carved on Mount Rushmore, right now. Also, the VTOL was the Reich’s only shot at trying out their new jet-engine propulsion system.”
“So was the Roswell crash a balloon or a, what? Vertical-takeoff whatever?”
“I think it was a combination of both, a hybrid craft utilizing Fugo lifting technology and a Horten-designed lifting body.”
He had just explained the balloon debris found on the Brazel ranch, and the aircraft discovered north of Roswell.
“Well, Mr. Heller? What do you think of my theory?”
“Son,” I said, “it’ll never fly.”
And that ended my one and only interview on Roswell.
I have finally broken my silence, including admitting a murder, confident that the United States government will not come to Florida looking for the old man making these absurd statements. The true believers will discount my tale-part of me hopes they’ll label it “disinformation”-and the debunkers will reject it, too, because they didn’t think of it.
As I write this, a new millennium approaches, and Roswell, New Mexico, has three UFO museums (retired mortician Glenn Dennis is the president of the International UFO Museum amp; Research Center). The town of fifty thousand also has bus tours to various impact sites, and numerous shops selling T-shirts, dolls, puppets, spaceship earrings, bumper stickers and UFO hats. More than five million earth dollars a year, of late, have been pumped into Roswell, where its annual summer UFO celebration-with rock concert, “Best Alien” costume contest, laser light show and film festival-has attracted as many as 150,000 tourists. The town’s new motto: “Crash in Roswell.” No one seems to care about the space program anymore, that trip to the moon the Nazi scientists helped us make; we’re more interested in watching science-fiction movies on our Japanese-designed video equipment. But, of course, everybody’s interested in Roswell, and why not? Something strange happened there.