Due west of the white-marble temple of the Lincoln Memorial, and bordering the low-slung but formidable granite-and-concrete Arlington Bridge, yawned a convex arc of granite steps known as the Water Gate. A couple hundred feet wide at the top, fanning out gently to maybe another thirty feet wide at bottom, these steep steps formed an ornamental buttress between the bridge and the roadway ramp angling from the memorial toward Rock Creek Park. The Water Gate was designed, in part, to serve as an outdoor amphitheater; in the summer, a barge outfitted with a band shell would be anchored at the foot of these forty or so steps as a stage for concerts by the National Symphony Orchestra, among others. But late March was too early for the band-shell barge and the only stage that stretched out in front of the scattering of Sunday-afternoon loungers seated there was the sun- shimmering gray-blue Potomac itself, where pleasure boats-mostly canoes streaking by-were the featured attraction.
He was easy enough to spot, as I came down the steps: seated alone, a third of the way down, a small, even mousy-looking man in a light tan short-sleeve sportshirt with a wide pointed collar and brown corduroy slacks. His hair was dark brown and cropped short, his forehead high, and-I noted when he turned to see who’d sat down next to him-his eyes were buggy, nose beaky, chin rather weak.
Major Jesse Marcel would have been unimpressive if I hadn’t read the material in the file folder Pearson had given me, a combination of newspaper clippings and background check, which I’d perused when I parked the rental Ford over by Honest Abe’s memorial.
Marcel had entered the U.S. Army Air Force in 1942; he had both studied and taught at the Air Intelligence School at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where his civilian experience with Shell Oil, making maps from aerial photographs, soon developed into a much-valued expertise in mapping, and photographic reconnaissance and interpretation. His duties in the South Pacific had included serving as squadron intelligence officer as well as flying several combat missions in B-24s, winning two Air Medals.
Promoted to group intelligence officer and transferred stateside, Marcel was involved with radar navigation study at Langley Field when his unit, the 509th, dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. Shortly thereafter he was named intelligence officer for the bomb group; his first assignment: observer at the atomic tests at Bikini.
Right now Major Marcel was assigned to Strategic Air Command headquarters here in Washington: the officer in charge of the War Room, Intelligence Branch Operations Division, AFOAT-1. Apparently this mousy little guy was head of something called the Long Range Detection Program, intended to alert the U.S. to any atomic explosions elsewhere in the world, in particular the Soviet Union.
This latter information was probably classified, at least, and possibly top-secret; and I had to wonder if Pearson had gotten it from Marcel himself-and why a guy so tied to intelligence work would share it with a muckraker like Pearson.
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
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
“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
“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?”
