The Roswell Accident

Illustration by George M. Krauter

It was sweat that finally brought up the subject of Roswell and what really happened there in 1947.

The bar was one of those low-lit, low-rent holes-in-the-wall you can still find in the non-yuppie parts of Las Cruces, part cowboy-redneck, part Chicano, a sort of neutral watering-hole where the two cultures met and mixed in an uneasy, alcohol-blurred truce. And so it was that Francisco Herrera Silva—“Frank”—and I were sharing an easy New Mexico afternoon savoring the cool darkness together, sipping beer and telling stories, yet overshadowed by a stratum of incipient sadness. I had met this man nearly forty years ago, when I was a co-op student at White Sands Missile Range, but I had been gone a long time, working on, let us say, “other areas of interest.” Last week he had called with news of his bad heart condition and I hurried back from Washington for what we both knew would be our final meeting. Frank was very important to me—and potentially, for other reasons, to others in my agency.

Picture Frank Herrera, descendant of Conquistadors and Indian warriors: skin the texture of greasewood, dark and scoured after a lifetime of working as a missile tracker in the hot, bright, high desert that was the missile range on the other side of the lunar-like Organ Mountains twenty miles to our East. Skinny as a rail even after seventy years of tortillas, frijoles, and cerveza. “It’s them jalapenos, Andy, the Hatch specials, they keep you in good trim.” I said I thought that genetics had something to do with it, too—in the days before air conditioning fat people couldn’t live in the desert. They simply died; I guess it had something to do with the fact that volume is dimension cubed, skin area is dimension squared, so they couldn’t sweat fast enough. Anyhow, it was me explaining that conjecture to Frank, how sweat brought up the topic of what happened in Roswell, fifty years ago.

“Andy,” he said, “speaking of sweat out here on the desert, I’ve been sweating something a long, long time.” I felt my pulse race; my search for the truth might be nearly over. “I’ve been retired ten years now, you know. Doctor says my ticker is about out, I could go at any minute.” I nodded, slugging down more beer to calm my nerves a bit. “Somethin’ I always wanted to tell you, but couldn’t back then. You know how it was, security and everything.” Acknowledging my nod, he continued.

He hesitated a moment, grimacing as though his heart might be giving out right then and there. I was afraid for him, but in an instant that familiar old smile returned and he reached for his beer mug. “In those earliest days,” he said, “there was sometimes only one launch per week, maybe per month, so we trackers had a lot of time on our hands—we used to hang out with the launch crews.” Sometimes they were even called upon to help with the launches themselves, short-handed as the army base was then, especially for trained electronic-optical technicians like Frank. “That’s when I met the Germans, you know, those Paperclip dudes.”

I nodded again. “Operation Paperclip” was the Army’s cover name for bringing over the entire infrastructure of the German V-2 program—rockets, parts, engineering drawings, special machine tools, even the scientists and engineers that the Russians hadn’t grabbed first.

His eyes met mine, his face drawn tight. “Andy, I’ve gotta tell you. We shouldn’t have shaved the monkey. I’m sorry I ever suggested it.” Gently I set my empty mug on the table, fighting back the urge to choke up and spit it out. So Frank actually had been a participant in the Incident Scenario? I managed to swallow the mouthful of beer and let loose a sigh. He frowned. “You know about the monkey, Andy?”

Lying, I shook my head. At that moment, I knew the Roswell Incident was coming up.

You might’ve heard of the so-called “Roswell Incident.” Back in July 1947 a rancher near Roswell, New Mexico, found some unknown material debris on his property, like a busted up aircraft of some kind. The story goes that something strange had been flying across the desert in a thunderstorm, then crashed on the man’s property. The unsuspecting discoverer took some of the pieces in to the sheriff at Roswell and then all hell broke loose.

Seems like the world’s only atomic bomb squadron was located at Roswell Army Air Force Base, and the military was really sensitive about unknown aircraft flying nearby. All kinds of military people flew into Roswell in a hurry, went out and scoured the “crash site,” then toted all the stuff away. Many stranger things happened back in Cold War I, and you never heard of them, probably never will. This incident, too, should have been kept quiet and would have, except that when the sheriff called the Army Air Force base, he mentioned the pieces were probably from a flying saucer. The headline the next day—all around the world—read “Army Recovers Crashed Disk Near Roswell.”

Immediately the pieces were flown elsewhere, and the Army Air Force had a press conference showing pictures of a weather balloon. Given the mood of the country in those days—fifty years back, you recall, most Americans still trusted their government. After all, this was before Dallas, Vietnam, Watergate, the Lake Affair and the Bessarabian Event; for the most part, back then, when the government said forget it, people forgot and went on about their business. But in the Eighties, the whole Roswell thing was resurrected, dusted off, and became a cottage industry for the down-in-the-financial-dumps “experts” of the all-but-defunct pseudoscience of flying saucers. For kickers, they added little dead gray aliens to the crash scene!

To the uninformed citizen, there was a rough kind of “logic” to all this, especially if you believe in Big Government Conspiracy: “The government found a UFO and has kept it for fifty years. Fifty years of lying to us about the existence of alien beings.”

You get the picture—fifty years of cover-up, lies and deception, all stemming from “The Roswell Incident.” What a waste of energy; shows you the depth of paranoia against the duly elected officials of the government. To me, it means there are too many people with too much time and money on their hands and not enough actual work in the real world to keep them off the streets and out of trouble.

That’s “The Roswell Incident,” in a nutshell. Accent on the “nut.”

Frank continued on, about shaving the monkey. “Andy, these Germans, they had to stay on the base so they got kind of lonely, know what I mean? I even wound up teaching them English.” I laughed aloud at the picture of stiff German scientists and technicians learning English from a Chicano with a decidedly border Spanglish accent. Back then, while they were inventing the future, I would have been only about seven years old, hadn’t yet read any Heinlein, probably still thought of rockets as the Fourth of July kind. “I helped them work out the paint pattern so we could measure yaw, pitch and roll, the missile attitude, from the film images from our tracking cameras.

“But, Andy,” his tone dropped and his eyes sought out every person in the uncrowded bar, instantly evaluating their status, the “yaw, pitch and roll” of their body language, an analog to the missile tracking parameters he had spent most of his working life concerned with, “It was those younger Germans I was working with, when it happened.”

I smiled. “Go ahead, Frank. When what happened?” I was dying to know about the monkey.

“Guenther and Heinz were their names, their first names. After all this time, I don’t remember their last names—long German names, as long as ‘Schikelgrubergratz,’ names like that. They had originally signed on under von Braun during the war because they thought that rockets would take mankind out into space, you know, the Moon and planets.”

My third mug of beer was taking hold, and I enjoyed the mellow feeling. The leveling drug I had taken before meeting Frank today would keep my blood alcohol at precisely this level, no matter how much more I drank. One of the nice perqs of working at—where I work.

“Them Germans wanted to get into space in the worst way, and they figured that our country, being the victor over theirs and all, was rich enough to afford it. So one day in the fall of 1946, I believe it was, we were sitting and drinking some great German beer in the O-Club on base. We start talking about this idea to find a monkey, shoot it up a hundred miles on top of a V-2, bring it back by a parachute on the nose cone compartment, and then tell the world about it, and get us all excited about sending a man up there, too.” Frank said that the Germans themselves had gotten really excited once back in the 1930s, when their press reported one of their guys had been inside a rocket that went up fifty miles. Turned out to be a hoax, but millions of Germans remembered the excitement. Guenther and Heinz, they wanted to recreate that sensation over here in New Mexico, get Americans just as excited, and get started toward the Moon.

“Heinz, he really wanted to go up on the V-2 himself, right away, but they couldn’t guarantee recovery; German parachutes hadn’t worked all that well, and as much as he wanted to go, he didn’t want to die so soon. So we came up with the idea of borrowing the monkey.”

A retired NCO in the nearby sleepy village of Alamogordo had built a little bar on the main drag, got hold of some exotic animals, and was putting together a small zoo for the patrons. Frank had never seen the connection between alcohol and animals, but the zoo was a-borning. And the star attraction was the monkey. The chimpanzee looked to weigh about seventy-five pounds, when the three went for a visit to the bar, and in that very bar they plotted mankind’s future in space. (I should put in here that I know a chimp isn’t actually a monkey, but you get the picture and I wasn’t about to interrupt Frank, not when I was finally onto the truth.)

“Heinz said that the monkey should be put in a space suit. Paperclip had brought over some high-altitude suits, from their jet-airplane projects and they would cut one down to size.” So, Frank continued, he and the two Germans plotted the kidnapping and the subsequent launching of the chimp in the forward section of a V-2. “The Germans, Andy, they whipped up a kind of pancakeshaped contraption that tit into the base of the nose cone of the V-2, to substitute for the real instrument package. The rest of the pointy section was a parachute to bring it and the monkey back safely. Just slide him down into a slot and tie him in. They just had a couple of inches on each side of him where they were going to put in a lot of mohair padding just in case it was a rough ride.”

It hadn’t worked out quite so simple; then again it never does in the real world, unlike the way those super-techies on TV do it.

“Real early on the morning of the launch, we did grab the monkey just like we planned, out of the cage just after the bar closed in Alamogordo. A little chloroform from the Germans’ dispensary did the trick real good. I drove that little chingaso back to the range with Guenther there to hold him down if he woke up. Back at Launch Area One, Heinz had arranged with the launch director to make a ‘final inspection’ of the V-2 instrument before it was erected. Originally the other scientists were going to do a barometric atmospheric instrumentation drop—letting a package fall out of the V-2 when it reached its peak altitude of about a hundred miles, measuring the air pressure and temperature all the way down. It was the planning for that mission that had given my Germans the idea about the monkey in the first place.

“At the last hour somebody apparently tried to scrub the launch, but Heinz and Guenther went to von Braun and Durrenberger and some other high mucky-mucks and convinced them to go ahead. In those days you didn’t need an act of goddamned Congress to launch a scientific rocket experiment, and it only took a dozen men to set it all up anyhow. Whatever they said must have worked; I never have been sure if it was even an authorized launch, now that I think back on it, but I didn’t concern myself then with that kind of stuff. All I knew, it was working out like we wanted. My Germans even made sure I was going to be part of the set-up ground crew, and that’s why I was allowed in.

“Well, we took our wrapped-up monkey to the tent where Heinz was. And that’s when the trouble started.” Frank swallowed a long draught of beer and wiped his mouth on his forearm. God, but his eyes twinkled, his mouth and those hundreds of dark wrinkles forming up a smile that involved summing the complex topologies of all the muscles of that inscrutable face. “That’s when the trouble started, Andy. God, what a mess!

“That monkey wouldn’t fit into the cut-down space-suit, was the first problem: he was hairy and the suit was rough and they couldn’t get him into it. And, even if he did, they saw that he wasn’t going to fit into the slot in their pancake package. They jabbered something about English and metric units, but whatever it was, they had screwed up pretty bad and were going to have to cut the chimp down to size or re-do their pancake pilot’s compartment, and so either way they would get caught. They had put the trimmed-down altitude helmet on the little guy, and they were trying to put the suit on it when the critter woke up.” He chuckled and that smile continued its way around his whole face, his squinting eyes fairly disappearing behind his upraised cheeks.

“There we were—just a couple of minutes to ‘inspect the instrumentation’—with a wild monkey screeching and screaming, flailing away at the Germans and doing his best to get out of that suit. And no way were they going to be able to stuff him into that tiny torture chamber. We’re inside a little tent barely big enough for three men, that covers us and the V-2 nose cone portion. The tent was for protecting the instruments and things from all the sand and trash that blows around the desert in the early mornings. You know how that is, over on the Range.” Remembering the wind effects vividly, I smiled broadly.

“Anyway, with the wind whipping the tent flaps and the monkey screaming and the two scared Germans yelling at each other for screwing up the chimp pilot’s door, I started laughing out loud. The Germans turned to glare at me, and the monkey calmed down, too. That’s what I said, ‘Hey, Alemans’—that’s Spanish for ‘Germans’—‘Hey, Alemans, why don’t you shave the little chingaso naked,’ and Guenther, he goes to the blockhouse to explain that a barometer recorder or something is on the fritz and will take a couple minutes longer. My idea worked pretty good. Only thing was, the grease we used to pack the naked monkey in, was a kind of instrument grease the Germans had brought over in Paperclip stocks, a gray gooey stuff. We were able to slide the little dude into the suit, and get the instruments hooked up to him.

“Boy, did that poor creature ever look strange; four feet tall, jammed into a too-small suit with a jerry-rigged”—Frank laughed at his unintentional pun—“space helmet on him, and wires dangling all over, hooked into the on-board wire recorders and some radio transmitters. Barometric parameters!”

“So how’d it go,” I asked, “the launch, I mean? And the recovery?”

Frank shrugged. “I went back to my station, one of those little mobile jobs, a single-man kind with the twin telescopes. Tracked that sucker up and over and out of sight, right at dawn. She lit up the sky something fierce, perfect for a couple miles up.” He frowned. “Then something fell off, twisting and turning down and I had to track that piece. My assignment was to record unusual events. Other stations tracked the V-2 itself.”

“That was the morning of July 7, 1947?”

“Yeah, Andy, the one they later said never was launched. But it was. And the monkey went up with it.”

I studied Frank’s face in the darkness, illuminated by the reddish neon on the wall above us. He was telling the truth—As he remembers it, I told myself. But then, that’s all any of us can ever do! ‘You ever find out what happened to the monkey, Frank?”

“Nah, Andy, not really. I heard some Army guys and a German say later that it might have crashed near Roswell, but that was when the ‘flying saucer’ scare went on over there. I didn’t know if the two were the same thing or not, figured I’d better not say anything. I was just starting at the Range and didn’t want to lose my job, maybe go to jail for screwing with government property. Of a sudden, it didn’t seem like such a good idea.” The front door opened, a sliver of white desert light shot briefly across Frank’s dark face, revealing a semi-serious expression that faded quickly back into the darkness of eclipse. “Hell, now I’m retired, just about dead, and I read about the ‘Roswell Incident,’ and I figure you ought to know what we did back then. Now I know, it had to be the same thing. After all this time, had to be.”

He went on to tell a rollicking version about how the pancake contraption probably popped out of the V-2 nosecone, parachuting itself and the chimp pilot to Earth. “Can you imagine, Andy? This old rancher goes out there, and he sees a goddamned ‘flying saucer’ on his ranch? He hears some screeching and hollering inside, opens up the handy-dandy knob on the door and a wild-ass greased monkey, scared shitless and tearing off its space suit, jumps out, dangling wires and cables and runs off into the desert?”

I laughed so hard the tears came. “Frank,” I finally gurgled out, “you should have been a stand-up comic, this story is funnier than hell!”

“So, Andy, this rancher guy takes a piece of the compartment to the local sheriff, and an Army Air Force guy hears the description of the craft, and pretty soon they are all convinced they’ve got a ‘flying disk’ out in the desert. In the meantime, since it’s so near the world’s only atomic bomb airplane squadron, a couple of investigators go out and find that it does look like a disc, but it’s made of some German parts and some White Sands parts, and so they freak out.

“All I know for sure is Heinz and Guenther don’t show up any more around the Range, and so I take the hint and stay away from all Germans.” He smiled once more, the beer and the confession flushing out his relief. He’d lived with the story fifty years and now it was out, and he felt a lot better for sharing it.

“Tell you what I’d do Frank,” I said in a conspiratorial tone, “I’d write it up, just like you told me, and sell it to Reader’s Digest for five or ten thousand bucks.”

His beer mug gently sank to the tabletop and his mouth dropped open. “Andy, you think they’d take it? And pay for it? That much?”

“I’m sure of it, Frank,” I said cheerfully, and I was; and the editor there owed me a big favor. Hell, the story would have sold on its own merits, but timing and contacts and expediting are everything in my job. “It’ll be a hell of a splash! And you’ll put some of these UFO nuts out of business.”

Calling a cab to take him home, I guided a happy and inebriated Frank to the front door as we said our last goodbyes, and he promised to write the story. I would make sure of that, I said, and at this moment I have an Agency person transcribing his side of the story into a salable narrative form. Tomorrow I’ll deliver it to Frank and he can send it in with the pre-paid Fed Ex envelope I’ll give him, and in a week he’ll be ten thousand dollars richer and in two months he’ll be notorious worldwide as “The Man Who Hoaxed The Roswell Incident.”

If his heart holds out, there’ll be appearances on Letterman, Montel, Oprah, and Sally Jesse, plus a contract for a book-length version, and serious inquiries by two very famous West Coast sci-fi movie producers. We want Frank to succeed; we will guarantee that he succeeds. Believe me, his story has to be told until everyone on Earth believes it.

After all, Frank is a very important person, maybe the most important person in the world, and this project has been in the making for half a century. Even my original, innocent friendship with Frank had led to my own recruitment by the Agency. It had taken some brilliant foresight by Donovan and the others who founded the Agency in that same momentous year of 1947, to decide to leave Frank alone after they finally believed the Germans’ stories. His final testament would be all the more believable, although we’d have to edit out a lot about Heinz and Guenther. Those two, non-citizens and members of a recently-hostile weapons group, hadn’t survived their interrogation and solitary internments at Leavenworth.

Alone with my thoughts and the micro-camcorder that had documented the entire interview, I sat thinking over Frank’s story. It was all true, but it was not true enough. The space-monkey business was an excellent idea, and under other circumstances could have opened space up to us a lot sooner. Heinz and Guenther and Frank would have been world wide celebrities back in 1947 and we could have had men on the Moon ten or fifteen years sooner. But I still don’t know if we would have given up space travel that much sooner, too.

But I am sure that they changed history, all the same.

Because in the agency I represent, it’s our business always to know the rest of the story. And that story is this, I tell myself, because only ten of us know and we can never tell anyone else: In June of 1947, a radio message was received directly at the White House main radio-receiver—the one used for highest-rated secret encrypted communication—and nowhere else; it was beamed that tight, something not possible with human technology of the day. The communication stated that interested parties from off the Earth were coming to visit the United States. From their star system—unspecified—they had witnessed the atomic bomb explosions in 1945 and were en route to discuss matters of mutual interest. They would make themselves known to the government in several fly-by displays of top-secret installations, and then they would land in secret at the most secure facility in the country, in all the world. That was the Army Air Force Atomic Bomb Base at Roswell, New Mexico.

Through a screwup, the V-2 launch crew never got the word to stop all activities. (Or maybe, now that I know Frank’s story, the reason is clear why they launched.) The aliens—whoever they were, wherever they were coming from—must have seen the rocket being launched just as they were descending. They apparently took it as a threat and flew in close to inspect it or, I suppose, zap it out of the sky. But even aliens are kind of human, I guess, because somehow they screwed up and smacked into the V-2. Our eyewitnesses were all confused about exactly what happened, but the two craft did impact, probably a glancing blow.

We figure that most of the V-2 disintegrated in the crash, even though part of the monkey compartment survived. That’s the stuff the rancher picked up and took in to the sheriff, starting the whole crashed flying saucer business. I still can’t find out what happened to the monkey, but that’s not important. What is important is that the alien ship was hurt, too; I guess that much deceleration, a huge crash at thousands of miles per hour—no telling how fast the aliens were going—was enough to kill even high-tech interstellar visitors. So that rancher’s reports and all the rest of the weird stuff surrounding the “Roswell Incident,” it happened, too, but not right there and not like the “researchers” believe. It’s kind of humorous, occasionally, to think that a false report could have started all the ruckus, and that the real crashed saucer was some distance away and never reported. But recently some too-inquisitive amateur UFO researchers apparently got onto something like the real story, and too many books were getting too close to the truth, and we had to squelch it once and, hopefully, for all. We can’t let any other nations know what we’ve got, even if we can’t use it, not with the bubbling instabilities of the clandestine Cold War II about to split the international scene wide open.

So the damaged saucer with its dead crew landed nearby, apparently on automatic, and fortunately for us, a door popped open, whether by accident or design we will never know. Not that getting inside the ship helped us at all. You see, although we picked up the spacecraft and its crew of little gray men, in fifty years we haven’t been able to find out anything about their technology. Literally, we can’t even scratch the surface of any of their materials, and the alien space suits are the same. We can’t even get into the space suits to autopsy the little gray guys! And no, they haven’t rotted.

In other words, we haven’t learned a single damned thing, in all this time. Not that any other nation—or our own public—would believe us.

We’ve been waiting for fifty years for another contact, so we can at least say we’re sorry and would they like to try again, please, but they haven’t said anything else at all. Not so much as a radio message, even though their craft still buzz our nuclear bases regularly. Are they looking for their people or what? We don’t know what their crew reported back home before the V-2 crashed into them; we don’t know if they’re pissed off out there or what. For obvious reasons, we never told any other countries about this, and sure don’t want them to find out now, after all this time, not in the shape CWII has got us into. So we’ve got to kill any and all rumors of crashed vehicles from space, and Roswell was Numero Uno on that list. Now I’ll be able to squelch it for good, with Frank’s hilarious revelations about the Space Monkey of 1947.

But I’m not laughing. If Frank and the German’s hadn’t tried their misbegotten monkey experiment, if that V-2 hadn’t been launched, if it hadn’t killed that alien delegation, no telling where we might be traveling today—Alpha Centauri, maybe, or out in the Magellanic Cloud. We just don’t know, even though the Agency has people studying possible alien psychologies. I don’t even understand some humans very well; I’m afraid aliens might be even weirder than we can imagine.

But surely something is going on with those guys out there. Even for aliens, fifty years is a long time to hold a grudge, don’t you think?