Max Collins - Majic Man

“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, three hundred feet wide. From the way the stuff was scattered, I had the feeling no aircraft had hit the ground, you know, bounced on the ground or anything.”

“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 was this deep scorched gouge, maybe five hundred feet long, and that could’ve been where something touched down and skipped along.”

“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?”

“That I can’t say. I only know what I saw, and what I saw was enough.”

“The debris, was it just more of the same as in the shed?”

“Pretty much, just a lot more of the same, bigger pieces in some cases. A ton of that blackish-brown parchment material, from scraps to sheets. And we found a piece of that foil-like metal about two feet long and maybe a foot wide, so thin, so light it weighed practically nothing. But back at the base, we couldn’t tear it or cut it, we even tried to make a dent in it with a sixteen-pound sledgehammer. Nothing.”

“Not a dent?”

“Well, it made a dent, but then the damn stuff went back the way it was. It was right out of Ripley-you could bend it but you couldn’t crease it. But you know, those rods were just as weird as the magic tinfoil.”

“Rods?”

“Yeah, that stuff I told you about, that was light as balsa but didn’t seem to be wood? They ranged in length from a few inches to a yard. Flexible stuff, but hard! We couldn’t break that shit or burn it; didn’t even smoke!”

The same couldn’t be said for Marcel; my eyes were burning from his Camels.

“But the truly bizarre thing,” he said, and I was certainly glad we were getting around to something bizarre, “was the markings on them, the writing.”

“Writing?” I had to smile. “Outer space writing, Jesse?”

“I don’t know what it was, symbols, maybe numbers … but not our numbers. It reminded me of hieroglyphics only without any animal-like characters: purple and pink embossed writing on the inner surface of the rods, which were kind of like I-beams.”

“Maybe it was Chinese or Japanese or Russian …”

“No, I have some familiarity with those. That’s not what it was.”

“You saw nothing you recognized as man-made?”

Marcel shook his head, smirking humorlessly. “You know, I’m interested in electronics and kept looking for something that would resemble instruments or electronic equipment, ’cause then we’d know what the hell we were dealing with. But I came up empty on that front, though Cav found a black, metallic box, several inches square. There was no apparent way to open it, so we threw it in with the rest of the stuff. I don’t know what became of it, but it went along with the rest of the material back to the base.”

“Did you gather up all the debris?”

The buggy eyes bugged again, eyebrows climbing his high forehead. “Hell, no! We worked all morning and most of the afternoon, loading up the jeep carryall and transferring it to the Buick staff car’s trunk and backseat, then filled the carry-all again.”

“So how much were you able to haul?”

He shrugged. “A fraction. But after we got back to the base, Colonel Blanchard took a look at the wreckage, then the next morning sent Cav and Major Easley back, to cordon off the field. Thirty men cleared it.”

“How did the press get ahold of the story?”

He grinned, which made his weak chin seem weaker. “It was a press release straight off the air base! Walt Haut, the lieutenant who was public information officer, was kind of an eager beaver, and it would’ve been like him to jump the gun.”

“You can hardly blame the guy. It’s not every day the Air Force finds a flying saucer.”

“Yeah, but when I asked Walt about it, he claimed Colonel Blanchard personally dictated the press release to him, that same morning, and instructed him to hand-deliver the release to the two newspapers and the radio stations, there in Roswell.”

“Why would your commanding officer have done that?”

“I understand word about the saucer was getting around town, and Blanchard prided himself on good relations with the community, and keeping ’em informed. Or maybe he wanted some glory. They say he always resented he didn’t fly the Enola Gay.”

“But within twenty-four hours, it was all retracted.”

Marcel’s eyes flared. “Hell, that same day the colonel ordered me to fly to Fort Worth and make a personal report to General Ramey. A B-29 was loaded up with all of the wreckage, most of it boxed up, the bigger pieces wrapped up in brown paper; damn plane was stuffed like a Thanksgiving turkey with that debris. When we got to Fort Worth, the wreckage was transferred to a B-25, which I heard later was flown to Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio. Me, I was taken to General Ramey’s office, with a box or two of debris, which I showed him, making my report. He listened, politely, nodding, and I left the samples of debris behind when we went to the map room, ’cause the general said he wanted me to show him on a map where we found the wreckage. After we had dinner at the officers’ mess, there was a press conference, and I was instructed to keep my mouth shut, let the general answer all the questions, while I bent down and smiled for the camera with the debris … only it wasn’t the debris.”