officer?”
Haut leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, elbows winging. “Yeah, it was a pretty uneventful ride-except that Tuesday after the Fourth, in ’47. You gotta understand my job was kind of a funny mix- there was a lot we kept the lid on. Very tight security out at that base-keep in mind, you’re talking to the guy who dropped glass-gauged instruments smack dab into the Bikini explosion, and yet even I couldn’t get near aircraft with atomic bomb configuration.”
“Tightly run operation.”
He nodded vigorously. “Secure areas fenced off, MPs on twenty-four-hour guard-not only do you need a pass to get on that base, you need a further pass to even get near those aircraft.”
“Understandable.”
Haut sat forward again. “At the same time, for all of that, we wanted to foster good relations with the local community. Colonel Blanchard’s first duty out of West Point was same as mine, a public relations officer. So he had a real thing for building good feelings between the town and the base. Anything we were doing that was newsworthy, I was to let the two newspapers and two radio stations in on it. We let ’em come out and take pictures, whenever and whatever they wanted-long as they didn’t try to snap pictures of the B-29s.”
On the morning of July 8, 1947, Haut told me, he’d been called into the base commander’s office. Colonel Blanchard dictated a statement to his public information officer for immediate release to the local press acknowledging the 509th Bomb Group being “fortunate enough to gain possession” of a downed flying saucer (I had read the clipping in the file Pearson gave me).
“Around ten-thirty that morning,” Haut said, “I drove to town and made the rounds, dropping off the release at the radio stations, KGFL and KSWS, then over at the
“You didn’t think anything of it? Another day, another captured flying saucer?”
“Hey, it was lunchtime, so I ate lunch. I didn’t give it a second thought; when a superior officer said, ‘This is what it is,’ that was what it was. I went back to the base, to my office, and nothing much happened the rest of the afternoon, except the phone was ringing pretty heavily for a couple hours, there.”
“The press?”
“Oh, yeah, from all over the world!” Haut laughed, shaking his head, struck by a funny memory. “First call I got was from London, this very proper English accent asking me how the ‘chap’ who found the saucer had known how to fly the ‘craft’ back to the base! I had to explain it was just wreckage that was found.”
“Walt, you and I both know how cautious, and secretive, the military usually is. Here’s the first instance of the Air Force capturing a flying saucer … obviously, an event with national security implications, and international repercussions. Do you think Colonel Blanchard could have issued that press release on his own authority?”
Haut rocked in the chair, thought about that. “Well, the Old Man could put out just about anything he wanted, short of information about the atomic weapons on the base. Things of a secret nature, that’d have to be cleared with the Eighth Air Force, and probably further up the chain of command….”
“Don’t you think a flying saucer would fall into that category?”
The insurance agent sighed, nodded, mulling some more. “Come to think of it … I honestly don’t think Colonel Blanchard did authorize that release. My feeling is it went to General Ramey and probably on to higher headquarters.”
“Why would they sanction something this sensitive?”
An eyebrow lifted. “I can hazard an informed guess, if you like.”
“Guess away, Walt.”
Haut sat way forward, eyes narrowing. “That same afternoon, remember, word from General Ramey came down that the wreckage wasn’t from a flying saucer at all. And all of a sudden, we’re sending out pictures of Jesse Marcel holding up fragments of your everyday garden-variety weather balloon, looking like Public Idiot Number One.”
I was shaking my head, confused. “Why would the brass do that? Issue a statement about a flying saucer, then a couple hours later contradict themselves?”
Haut’s smile turned sly. “I believe they knew the cat was out of the bag … the rumors about a recovered saucer were flyin’, around here. So the best cover-up is to announce a saucer’s been found, attributing it to Major Screwup, then have the much smarter, more knowledgeable general say, ‘Oh no, you children got it wrong-it’s just a weather balloon.’ And the incident gets laughed off and forgotten. It was a real sleight-of-hand trick, typical disinformation.”
“Disinformation?”
“That’s an intelligence term, Nate-same as ‘black’ propaganda, purposeful misinformation issued by the government to confuse its citizens. And as a guy who put his ass on the line for his country, that ticks me off. I mean, America’s supposed to be in the truth business.”
“You believe a saucer
The boyish features tightened. “I believe Jesse Marcel knows a weather balloon when he sees it. And did you hear about that weird tinfoil shit?”
“Yes. Did you see any of it?”
“No. I saw nothing-no wreckage, no outer space creatures, none of it. A public relations officer is kept away from things that the public isn’t supposed to know; that’s a practice I was accustomed to.”
“But you believe Jesse Marcel.”
“We were friends. My wife and I would go play bridge with the Marcels; we rode to work together. He was rock-steady, and hell, they kept him on as intelligence officer for something like a year after that. Then he was transferred to a job of even higher responsibility!”
“You mentioned ‘outer space creatures’…”
Haut raised a hand. “You need to talk to Glenn Dennis about that.”
“I have.”
“Well, Glenn’s a friend, too, and I can tell you, he’s not a nut; if he tells you something, you can give it credence. Now, I don’t know much about this military clampdown that supposedly went on, and nobody threatened me or anything-but you might want to talk to Frank Joyce, over at the radio station.”
Which was my next stop, an adobe storefront operation with a small neon reading radio station, in small letters, over KGFL in large ones, above a sun-faded canvas awning. In a small control booth, I talked with Joyce, a sturdily stocky brown-haired kid in his mid-twenties, who ran a one-man operation on his afternoon show, reading the news, spinning records, doing live commercials and serving as his own engineer. I sat at the little table used for on-air interviews and we chatted sporadically, while discs spun-not flying ones, the kind with Crosby and Perry Como on them.
Joyce had Mickey Rooney-ish features clustered in the midst of his round face, making his rather large head seem even larger; he might have been young, but he had the no-nonsense attitude and manner of a seasoned reporter.
Doing twelve things at once on his control panel, he said, in his announcer’s mellifluous voice, “Late morning, Monday after the Fourth, I was making my usual calls, before the noon news, looking for any late-breaking items…. When I checked with Sheriff Wilcox, he put this rancher, Mac Brazel, on. Never met the man, and wasn’t sure I wanted to.”
“Why?”
“Well, this bizarre wreckage he described made me pretty skeptical; flying saucer talk, I mean, really! Little green men, that sort of thing. I asked him to put the sheriff back on, and recommended they call the RAAF, since they were the experts on everything that flies.”
“Did you put the story on the radio?”
“No. This was Monday; that story didn’t break till Tuesday.”
“I see.”
“Anyway, having been in the military, I knew they’d frown on something like this getting out-assuming there was anything to it. We’re just a little station, and we were just starting out, then-we didn’t need to alienate the local air base. Funny thing is, my pal Walt Haut was the p.r. officer out there, and I’d been giving him a hard time
