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.”
“The sheriff didn’t come with you.”
“No. He’d tossed the ball to the military and that was fine with us. Anyway, it was a long, hot, bumpy ride, and it was five p.m. before we got out there. Brazel had some of the debris stored in a shed, more of the same plus some rods, maybe two and a half inches in girth, in various lengths, none of them very long.”
“What, metal rods?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know what the hell they were made of. They didn’t look or feel like metal, more like wood, and light as balsa wood.”
“Plastic, maybe?”
“If so, the toughest damn plastic I ever saw-kinda like that stuff, whaddyacallit, Bakelite? Anyway, you couldn’t bend it or break it.”
“These were just little pieces?”
“Well, later we saw bigger ones, but right then, in the shed, no-although there were large pieces of the shiny stuff, and of the parchmentlike material, as big as ten feet in diameter.”
“Jesus.”
“Colonel Cavitt-I don’t remember his first name, we just called him ‘Cav’-he says, ‘This could be radioactive,’ and I says, ‘Well, we’ll find out right now.’ I’d thrown a Geiger counter in the Buick trunk, so I got it and held the sensor near the pieces and got no radiation reading. ‘Whatever this is,’ I told the fellas, ‘it’s not dangerous.’ By this time it was gettin’ dark, no point going out to the pasture till morning. So we dined on canned beans and crackers and slept in sleeping bags in an empty shack, a hired hands’ bunkhouse.”
“Sounds quaint.”
“We turned in early-this was a sheep ranch, understand, no radio, no phone-but we did sit and talk awhile. Brazel said he’d heard an odd explosion, during an electrical storm, night of the fourth, but that he hadn’t paid it any heed, figuring it was a clap of thunder, or somethin’ getting hit by lightning. Next morning he found the wreckage.”
The gleeful screams of children playing echoed across the water.
“So Brazel didn’t report finding the debris immediately?”
“No. That first day he went into Corona-smaller town even than Roswell, closer to the ranch. Place was buzzing with talk about flying saucers; in late June and early July of that year, people all over New Mexico were spotting all sorts of strange lights and objects in the sky. Almost hate to admit it, but I had what they call a ‘sighting’ myself.”
“Sighting of what?”
He smirked, sighed, letting more smoke out. “A few days before the July Fourth holiday … must’ve been around eleven-thirty at night … Major Easley, the provost marshal, called me all excited and said, get out to the base-I lived in town-and he wouldn’t even say why. On my way there, in my car, on a straightaway, I spotted a group of lights moving north to south, bright lights flying a perfect V formation, movin’ like a bat out of hell. I mean, it was visible for maybe three or four seconds from overhead to the horizon. We didn’t have any planes in the air that night, not that any of ’em could’ve traveled at that speed; maybe they did at White Sands or Alamogordo.”
“The provost marshal saw what you saw?”
“Yeah. So did several other GIs and MPs…. Anyway, when Brazel went into Corona and heard all this saucer talk, it got him thinking, and somebody probably told him about that reward for finding a flying saucer, which I think was pretty good money, like three thousand or somethin’, so he decided to report it.”
“Why did he go to Roswell to make his report? Because that’s where the county sheriff was?”
“Exactly.” Marcel stopped to light up another cigarette, saying, “Sure you don’t want a coffin nail? Mr. Pearson said you were in the service …”
“Marines.”
“Guadalcanal, right?”
“That’s right.”
He grinned as he slipped his Zippo back in his breast pocket. “I thought everybody came back from overseas with a two- or three- or four-pack-a-day habit.”
“I did smoke, on the island,” I admitted. “But I managed to leave the habit there. So, uh-the next morning?”
He nodded, drew in smoke, exhaled it, saying, “Next morning, right after breakfast, right around seven o’clock, our rancher host starts saddling up horses. Now Cav was originally from Texas, so that was no problem for him; but I’d never sat a horse before and told ’em I’d follow ’em in the jeep. Besides, we could start loading up the debris that way, save some time.”
“So the debris wasn’t near the ranch house?”
“No, it was maybe three or four miles north of the house. Funny, bouncing along in that jeep, middle of nowhere, all that emptiness stretching to the horizon, and then, wham-all of a sudden, as far the eye could see, that weird wreckage.”
“There was that much of it?”
His buggy eyes bugged further. “Hell yes, spread over a wide area, three quarters of a mile long, two hundred, hell,
“More like a midair explosion?”
“Yes, like something must have exploded in the sky just over the pasture and strew this shit all over … although there
“And then, what, bounced up in the sky and exploded?”
He sighed out more smoke. “Who knows? Maybe some kind of craft had an explosion and kept going a ways before finally crashing. I learned later that north of Roswell, they found something else.”
“What?”
