What really happened at Roswell? Read online

he’s got it on his property. It’s, well, it’s an aerial weapon sir, and it may have some unexploded stuff on board.”

  “Are you saying one of our planes has crashed?”

  “No, sir. It- it’s Japanese.”

  Colonel Blanchard stopped in mid dialling and looked at him. “Son, have you been drinking?”

  “No colonel, I have not. It’s kind of a secret weapon.”

  “Alright. You better give me the details.” The colonel got back on the phone and ordered a defusal team to the Brazel ranch.

  Cutting into the object proved no problem; it was mostly made out of a tough folded paper, and silk. The explosive device they found inside, though powerful, turned out to be harmless. The wiring had long since corroded away in the damp and cold of the upper atmosphere through which it had drifted for three years. It was all then gathered up and brought back to the airfield, to be securely locked away from any prying eyes. They reported back to Colonel Blanchard that the device was secure.

  “Alright,” said Blanchard, “now suppose you tell me just what in tarnation’s going on here. Why is there an unexploded Japanese bomb in the New Mexico desert?”

  Major Marcel did not answer straight away. He stood and slowly went over to the door, then made sure it was closed firmly, and peered out briefly to see if anyone was in the corridor outside.

  “Colonel, what I’m about to tell you can’t ever leave this room. Not ever.”

  Colonel Blanchard nodded. “Go on.”

  “Alright. Well, it’s a paper balloon. Full of explosives, for use against civilian targets. They launched tens of thousands of them against us in the war. They drifted through the Jetstream till they got to the west coast where they were supposed to cause havoc and panic amongst the civilian populace.”

  “My god. Did any of ‘em get through?”

  “Only a few. Most of them just splashed in the ocean. A few of them did cause a bit of minor damage. There were some school kids came across on that came down in forty-five. They started tinkering with it, and got blown to bits.”

  “Jesus. Why weren’t we told about this?”

  “Because these things are still a threat to our national security, that’s why. The press were told not to report on any that came down and it was kept on a strict need to know basis afterwards. You see, a foreign enemy, or just anyone with a grudge, could pack a balloon full of mustard gas and send it drifting over our borders. Or pack it full of incendiaries and launch a cloud of them against an oil refinery. We haven’t got any response to that form of attack. Not yet, anyway. And what if someone built one big enough to carry the A-bomb? How would you like something like coming down some night?”

  “But… we’re the only ones with the bomb,” said the colonel.

  “You think that’s going to be the case forever? Hell’s bell’s, it’s got to be only a matter of time before the Russians or who knows who else gets the know-how. The laws of physics that allowed us to develop these weapons are every bit as comprehensible to your Russian physicist.”

  “But the Russians are our allies aren’t they?”

  “Not if you believe some of Comrade Stalin’s latest speeches. He’s made no secret of the fact that he’s going to spread communism across the world any way he can. And he is desperate to get his dirty red hands on the bomb. Make no mistake about it, there’s a new conflict shaping up, and sooner or later it’s all going to cut loose in a big way. If the Japs could try a stunt like this there’s every chance the commies will do likewise as soon as they get the chance. They could send swarms of these damn things down over the North Pole. Even the best radar coverage can’t screen for stuff up that high. Jet bombers, no problem. Balloons on the edge of space? Not a chance.”

  “I see,” said Blanchard gravely.

  “And you wanna know the damnedest part? You know who they got to put those things together originally? School children. Grade school kids. All the adults were busy either making arms or fighting in the war. That’s how easy they are to put together. Until we have the means to detect them, no one can know about it.”

  Blanchard wiped his brow with a grey old napkin. Then he reached under his desk and brought a bottle of Jack Daniels. He poured himself a generous measure. Then he poured another for Marcel.

  “That rancher knows,” said Blanchard. “That Brazel guy. There’s no telling how many people he’s going to talk to.”

  “We’re probably going to have to figure out some form of damage control then. There’s a General Roger Ramey, stationed over in Fort Worth. Back in the war he was the general liaison officer for dealing with this stuff. He’s the one you ought to get in touch with about this. He was the one who briefed me and a couple of others.”

  “Alright.”

  “At least there aren’t any other civilians in on it. This Brazel fellow seems to have no real idea what he found.”

  “Well… not really. There’s been a civilian right here on the base all day. A reporter. He’s been doing some human interest piece for the local rag.

  “Whaat? Why the hell didn’t anyone tell me? Where the hell’s he now?” He got up from the desk. “We need to find me that sonofabitch.”

  Unfortunately, the reporter by then was long gone. That wasn’t the worst of it, though. A few of the soldiers who had gone out there had posed with some of the strips of silver foil that the lower parts of the balloon had been sheathed in as insulation.

  Over the next few days the reporter went and made hay while the sun shined, and then some. He latched onto the rancher’s description of a ‘saucer shaped object that looked like it was not of this world,’ and ran with it. He busied himself turning it all into something out of Flash Gordon. The screen of silence that had been ordered around the affair by the Pentagon only served to fuel the fire still further. Over the next few days the airfields phone system was inundated with calls from people wanting to know what had been done with ‘the Martian spaceship,’ and whether it was the vanguard of an invasion. It was Orson Welles all over again.

  The official story which came back soon afterward from General Ramey at the Fort Worth army air field was that it was a crashed experimental weather balloon, sent up for climate studies. That neatly explained the balloon fabric hanging over the Saguaro, as well as its unusual construction.

  It was Major Marcel who had to field most of these calls, and repeat the official line about navigation balloons. As he did so he often looked out the window and out at the bright blue sky outside. It looked deceptively peaceful. How many more of them were up there? How far would they get before finally coming down? Someone was going to have to deal with them some day. Sooner or later they would begin to menace commercial flights, and then where would they be? There’d be a tragedy, even worse than that nightmare with those poor school kids in California. Then the truth about them would come out. Then no one would be safe.

  But as the years passed the story snowballed until it became an alien scout craft complete with crewmembers who had been taken to the base for autopsies, and the vanguard for future clandestine bases beneath the Nevada desert. The military as a whole never contradicted or confirmed any of these stories. It suited their purpose well to have multiple conflicting stories swirling around the Roswell Incident. The mini industry which eventually grew up around the whole affair ensured the truth about the Japanese bomb balloons was forever buried beneath ever more layers of obfuscation.

  The last of the balloons was not finally brought down until the mid nineteen-fifties, with jets equipped with radar and missiles. Their full existence was not finally revealed until 1974. By then the damage had been done: sightings of them paved the way for everything from abductions to cattle mutilations to clandestine deals by government agencies which allowed the US to do everything from beat the Russians to the moon to developing stealth bombers. It all began in a quiet mesa outside the town of Roswell.

  NEW PART

  One of the devices came down in the vicinity of the Trinity test site in the mid
dle of the Nevada desert. By a staggering, indeed some might say suspiciously improbable coincidence, this was the very spot where work was being carried out on another quite different weapon of mass destruction.

  It bumped down on and came to rest less than a hundred yards from a high steel tower which itself lay in the middle of a fake balsa wood and papier mache town that consisted of a dozen houses and a few painted on shopfronts.

  After rolling end on end it came to rest and just lay there, with its balloon draped over the nearest of the balsa houses. The gaggle of scientists and generals, who were at that moment hunched inside a low concrete bunker with a viewing slit in the front, saw the distance object come down but did not know what to make of it. It was like a giant, somewhat disc-shaped object of folded paper and twine, like a bizarre express delivery from another planet. They stared at it in some consternation for a minute or so, passing the binoculars between them. Was it some sort of military thing? They had not been told of any such thing. The two generals looked every bit as puzzled.

  And then, to their even greater surprise, it split open along its seams, and a greyish white smoke spewed forth and quickly obscured the lower part of the tower from view. It was a heavy, thick fog which lay close to the ground and did seem to want to disperse.

  It was far too late to go investigate now, however. The