Max Collins - Majic Man

Noncommissioned officer in charge.

“You must’ve had a pretty high clearance,” I said, “considering the 509th was the only air squadron flying atomic bombs.”

“I knew what I was doin’. When I left the service in ’45, I was offered my old duties at RAAF, in a civilian capacity, this time. It’s delicate, maintaining friendly relations with a nearby community, like Roswell, when you’ve got top-secret stuff goin’ on. The press makes requests, the mayor wants to take dignitaries on tours, and sometimes you gotta say no. Me bein’ out of uniform helped smooth that kinda thing over.”

“Did it.” This guy was striking me as a blowhard and a bore.

Kaufmann chuckled, then lifted a hand from the wheel to gesture toward the desolation around us. “You know, looking out at all this tranquillity, you’d never guess such earth-shakin’ events could take place out in these wide open spaces…. First atom bomb went off not far from here, at the Trinity test site. Manhattan Project, that was over at Los Alamos. Did you know that when they set that bomb off, a bunch of the scientists thought there was a real chance it’d spark a chain reaction that’d lead to the end of the world?”

“No.” I was listening closer now.

“Well, they thought that, all right, and went ahead and set it off, anyway. What does that tell you about scientists? Not to mention ol’ Uncle Sam.”

“It is a sobering thought,” I said, and wasn’t kidding.

Kaufmann glanced at me and his eyes had turned as sly as his smile. “You know what they’re doin’ over at White Sands?”

“No.”

“You remember the V-2s, don’t you? Them big firecrackers that leveled London?”

The V-2-the fabled buzz bomb-was a rocket, the world’s first large-scale one, at that.

“Well,” Kaufmann was saying, “over at White Sands, the Air Force is playin’ with captured V-2s, and you know who’s helping them? You know who’s in charge?”

“No.”

“Bunch of goddamn Nazis.”

“Nazis. Are running the White Sands Proving Ground.”

He nodded emphatically. “I’ve seen it with my own eyes. Smooth son of a bitch named von Braun is runnin’ things-he’s a ‘technical adviser.’ He’s not the only one, either-more Nazi scientists runnin’ around over there than you can shake a stick at. Gettin’ kowtowed to, when they oughta be lined up and shot, or maybe hung with piano wire.”

My first impulse was to laugh at this nonsense, but then Teddy Kollek’s words flashed through my brain: You can’t imagine how many scientists fresh from factories run by concentration-camp labor are on Uncle Sam’s payroll, now.

“They’re launching rockets over there,” Kaufmann was saying. “Real Flash Gordon stuff. Revamped V-2s. Trying to see how high they can shoot the sumbitches, trying to be more accurate, go further, carry a bigger payload of explosives. Sometimes, instead of TNT, they’re loadin’ up the noses with photographic equipment, and X-ray, and mice, and even monkeys.”

“What for?”

“The Nazis say we’re goin’ to the moon, someday. Outer space. They talk about it like it’s their goddamn religion.”

This guy was clearly insane-yet another candidate for the suite next to Forrestal’s; I was starting to wish Blanchard had sent me with the MPs, instead. Roswell was looming up ahead, and I was relieved.

And yet I was curious enough to ask: “Why are you telling me this, Frank? This sounds like classified material, to me….”

Kaufmann shrugged, and one eye under one wild eyebrow winked at me. “Some of it is. What the hell, one civilian to another … one veteran to another. Thought you might like to know what your government’s capable of. What our military’s willing to go along with. Jesus Christ, goddamn Nazis! Hell, I’m of German heritage myself, and it sickens me…. You’re a Jewish fella, aren’t you?”

“That’s part of my German heritage.”

“Well, how do you like the idea, Uncle Sam in bed with fuckin’ Nazis?” Kaufmann shook his head, sighed heavily. “I’m sure as hell glad this is my last week.”

“Of what?”

“Of working out at the base. I’ve had all I can stomach of the postwar Air Force. Anyway, I got offered a better job.”

“Yeah?”

His expression turned proud. “I’m gonna head up the Roswell Chamber of Commerce.”

All that smoothing over had paid off.

“Where you staying, Mr. Heller?”

“Don’t you know? You seem to know everything else.”

Kaufmann grinned at me, a big wide grin, maybe not as winning as Blanchard’s but much more real. “You think I’m a bag of wind, don’t you? Well, I’ll tell you something you probably will believe-Jesse Marcel called me and asked me to talk to you.”

“… You weren’t on the list.”

He shrugged a shoulder. “I turned Jess down, at first. Didn’t want to compromise my job.”

“But now you have another job.”

“That’s part of it,” Kaufmann admitted, and this time it was the wild eyebrows that shrugged. “Another part is thinkin’ about what a fool they made out of a good man like Jesse. And another is thinkin’ about what a fool they’re makin’ out of all of us … the great unwashed American people.”

I pointed. “I’m at the El Capitan.”

The hotel, just around the corner from Roswell Drug on Main Street, was just up ahead.

Kaufmann gave me his sliest look yet. “I can drop you there … unless, of course, you’d like me to take you out to the crash site, first.”

“What?” Now the son of a bitch really had my attention. “The Brazel ranch, you mean?”

Making a face, he said, “Hell no, not there; too long a drive, and anyway, there’s nothin’ to see, all that debris got picked up-they vacuumed that damn pasture! I’m talkin’ about the saucer … and the little bodies.”

“Saucer. Bodies.”

Kaufmann pulled over, double-parking the jeep in front of the drugstore, turning to grin at me. “Well, here we are, Mr. Heller-Hotel Capitan. Nice meetin’ you.”

I grinned back at him. “Pretty cute, aren’t you, Kaufmann? How far is it?”

“Just about a half hour. You think what I told you so far was good? Wait’ll you hear this….”

As we headed north, on the concrete ribbon of 285, into a mostly brown, occasionally green landscape of scrub brush and cactus and sand, under a sky as infinite and wide as the blue eyes of a child, Kaufmann told me a yarn that had me laughing in wonder, even as I wrote it down in my spiral notebook. He was, it seemed to me, one of the following: a raving lunatic; an outrageous bullshit artist; or the witness to something truly extraordinary.

On July 2, 1947, Brigadier General Scanlon of Air Defense Command had dispatched Kaufmann to White Sands Proving Ground at Alamogordo, where radar had detected strange movements, indicating an unidentified object flying over southwestern New Mexico, violating the restricted airspace. With orders to report directly to the general, Kaufmann and two others had, in shifts around the clock, charted the object.

“The blips were just dancin’ from one end of the screen to the other,” Kaufmann said. “Now, we’d had similar blips back at Roswell, but intermittent-the thing showing up only when it was above the Capitan Mountains. We kept up watch for almost two days. Then late on the night of July Fourth, God decided to serve up His own fireworks show, by way of one incredible lightning storm.”

At around eleven-twenty p.m., with the storm at its height, the object on the radar screen stopped flitting, began pulsating, growing larger; finally the object blossomed in “a white flash,” then shrank to its original size, dove down and winked out. The assumption was the craft-if that’s what it was-had been struck by lightning and possibly exploded, or crash-landed.