THE WAY IT WENT DOWN: I WAS THERE

I wasn’t at Roswell base when it happened, but I was at Wright Field...next best thing since that’s where they brought it through directly. This was my second year of studying recovered junk. A German fighter. Some weird Jap sub-launched jobbie. A bunch of balloons. Nothing special. And then, summer of 1947, they bring in this wreck.

And the bodies. But I heard that later.

I only seen the debris in person. The metallurgist who studied it for a week only shook his head and whistled as he signed it over to us.

But before we could lay eye one on the stuff we was read into a project called SIGN. Doesn’t matter now. I seen it on TV the other day. Can you imagine? Just out there on TV? When we was young nothing like that would happen. People kept their secrets. But now? Most of this stuff. It’s on the TV. So what? I’m talking now. What are they going to do to me? Shoot me?

Anyways, we had no clue what any of this debris from the wreck was, really. Looked like foil from a cigarette pack, but when stretched, it could stop a bullet without a mark on it. His report called it “unknown metal A.” We called it “magic” or sometimes “Mars metal.”

I ain’t going to lie. The four of us in ATIC restoration and review thought it was from a flying saucer.

We had one chalk diagram of the...vehicle, but that was all. No photos. No inspection of the wreck like usual (though I heard it was on the base). It was kind of like a disc, and kind of like a boomerang. Curved and swept back. But the drawings weren’t too detailed, see. They were just detailed enough, if you get my meaning, and nothing more. No names. No labels. Just measurements.

I don’t care what no one else says. That’s what I seen. Okay? We’re here for what I seen, right?

A section of it had been blown outward, revealing what the nearly entirely blacked out report that came with the blueprints called a “baked clay interior.” As far as I know, we never found out what caused that.

We spent nearly five months flattening, measuring, numbering and placing pieces of that metal to fill that gap the diagram said was blown out of the vehicle. In the end, we covered all but about 200 mm or so. Not bad for not ever having really seen the thing, nah? Not bad.

We did the best we could.

For four years, requests came in to ATIC and our reports went back out, and all the while we didn’t know who we were getting the requests from or who they were sent back to. Usually, there’d be a form, but here, for the metal, there was only a courier.

The courier was a four-square man in an Air Force getup, who looked like a human rounded up to the nearest decimal point. He wore a metal case latched to his wrist, and when he was moving papers, photos or samples, was escorted by men with submachine guns. The flight he came in on was called the Bluebell, because it was an old transport plane all painted silver with a blue tail and an orange A painted on it. No numbers. It got so when we saw or heard Bluebell was on the tarmac, we knew we were going to be working.

So it turns out I become the point of contact with Bluebell, whose name was George. George what, I couldn’t tell you, because he didn’t have no tag on his uniform and he never offered much in way of that information. But it got to the point, over those years, where I became friendly with the man. And so it comes to pass that we’re both on base, Christmas, 1950 in the bar, cleared out. And we was drinking.

And he looks around and leans in and tells me things. Suddenly and all at once. And it was so long ago I don’t remember exactly what he says, but it’s like, “the ship was alien, and two of the pilots died in the crash, and they kept one alive, somewhere out west.”

Now, this all just kind of spilled out of him in between war stories and beers and it was over as soon as it started. Anyway, after that, I never seen George again.

I got called to the General’s office the following week, ready to be fired, or hauled off or whatever, instead, they read me in.

And what does it matter now? Hell, the Soviets aren’t even there anymore. So here it goes.

This is what happened.The Roswell vehicle was a long-range, high-altitude balloon-borne Nazi vehicle captured by the Russians and piloted by children to spy on our nukes in New Mexico.

It was detected by radar and shot down by rocket. Instead of setting off World War III, the big lie was made up and all this was hushed up. Money changed hands. The kids’ bodies (I heard some were deformed) were put on ice, and America set to studying this Kraut metal. That metal is used in a lot of aerospace things today. 

That’s it. That’s the big to do. Any other questions? Like I said, I don’t care what you heard, because this is what happened.

I was there.