David Golemon - Event

"Mr. President, ladies and gentlemen, in front of you is a case file that doesn't show up on any computer and doesn't exist as far as the Event Group is concerned. None of you save Niles here has ever seen it."

The men and women around the room exchanged glances. The president just looked on.

"The much-denied yet well-known incident on July the third, 1947, happened. The Roswell Incident was real, and this is the order in which it occurred. On that date an unidentified flying object did go down in the rugged cattle country of Lincoln County, New Mexico, not far from the small town of Roswell. There were believed to be no survivors at that time. On that July third, at sunrise, a rancher by the name of Mac Brazel and a neighbor boy, seven-year-old Dee Proctor, investigated a loud boom they had heard the night before. On his property they found what was described as wreckage of an aircraft, and in Brazel's words, 'It must have been a bomber or something, 'cause it was strewn over hell and back.' "The senator paused; he looked at the man at Camp David and saw he was listening intently. As Lee spoke, eighteen flat-screen plasma monitors lit up around the circumference of the conference room. The file images of Mac Brazel and those of the Roswell crash site came into crystal clarity. The president saw the same images on his screen at Camp David on a split screen.

"After, Brazel collected a little of the wreckage and took it home and contacted the county sheriff, who in turn notified the U.S. Army Air Force at Roswell, the home of the 509th Bomb Group--the only base in the world known at the time to have atomic weapons on-site, I might add. The base's intelligence officer, a Major Jesse Marcel, was sent out with another man to investigate the report." At this point several of the monitors changed pictures and showed a smiling Army Air Corp officer out in the dusty crash site where he and several military police officers were standing in a large debris field.

"Upon returning to the base with strange material from the crash site, Marcel notified the base commander, and by this time radio station KSWS in Roswell begins to teletype information of the strange crash to the world, but the transmission was cut, presumably by the FBI. But it didn't end there." The senator poured a glass of water from a pitcher and took a sip. "On July eighth; a second lieutenant by the name of Walter Haut was ordered to issue a press release by the public relations officer for the 509th." They all saw the photostat of the famous newspaper headline. "Well, that angered quite a few people with stars on their shoulders, and if it weren't for President Truman's and the Event Group's intervention, certain elements inside the United States were prepared to act against its own citizens to protect the fact they had UFO wreckage in their possession."

"What do you mean when you say 'act against our citizens,' Senator?" the president asked.

"Just what that implies, sir, that the military and whoever was pulling the strings at that time, were ready to eliminate people to keep their secret. I know, I was there in Roswell when it happened," Lee said sadly.

"Where are the remains of the craft now?" Celia Brown asked the senator.

"We don't know. The convoy that was transporting the remains back to the Event Center disappeared in between New Mexico and Nevada. No remains were ever found, and that included ten of my best security personnel and a very good friend, a Dr. Kenneth Early."

"Was there any trace of the crash ever uncovered?" the president asked.

"The FBI investigation ordered by Mr. Truman got a lead that some of it may have shown up in Fort Worth, Texas, then Wright Air Force Base in Ohio. But by the time the FBI arrived the material had disappeared along with the people who reported the strange debris at each of the two bases."

There was a lot of whispered talk around the table now. Collins was looking at the president on the television screen, watching his commander in chief's expression changes. It wasn't every day you were told you'd had a flying saucer in your possession, only to hear that it had strangely vanished without a trace.

"Tell me you have some background, or at the very least a suspicion, on this?" the president asked.

"Yes, sir, but it's something that I would rather go into with you and my new security commander, Major Jack Collins. The FBI report was sealed by President Eisenhower in 1957."

"I think maybe the director of FBI should be in on that meeting, possibly the boys across the river also," the president said, referring to the CIA. His eyes had finally found Jack at his spot down the length of the conference table. He held the gaze for a moment, then looked at the others around the table.

"Yes, sir," Lee answered, then quickly saw he had to get the president back on track.

"Now, if you will open your folders, people. Mr. President, you have the same information in yours, which we faxed over. At this point I'll turn this over to Director Compton."

Niles stood once again. "From the records the senator turned over to me, we were able to compile a pretty accurate record of the flight path the vehicle was on in July of 1947." Niles pulled a sheet of paper out of his folder and held it up.

The others followed what he was pointing to on their own copies. At the rear of the conference room a clear plastic sheet that was ten feet in width and six feet in length came down from a hidden recess in the ceiling, and the four plasma monitors it covered were shut off. The new technology of holographic imagery, a new form of light-induced liquid crystal sandwiched between two sheets of clear plastic, came to life with the diagram Niles held in his hand. One of his assistants in the computer center had set up the program on a moment's notice from the comp center for this briefing. The result was an image that was detailed enough to show the movement of clouds and the blinking of lights in the cities the map displayed.

"Venezuela, South America, approximately 2350 hours, July second, 1947. The weather factors have been added by computer from records kept by the National Weather Service. On that date, an unidentified airborne object was reported by a Panamanian airline crew on course for Panama City to the west, and they stated to Venezuelan traffic control, 'It was round and moving at an incredible speed.' At exactly 2355 hours another report was intercepted by the United States Army in Panama, eavesdropped from a British battle cruiser off the coast of that country. It read as follows:

HMS Royal Fox , "'A low-flying unidentified object passed HMS causing burns to exposed personnel on deck. This object was believed to be damaged, as Royal Navy seamen witnessing the craft sighted smoke exiting the strange vehicle from the stern portion of the craft.'

"Now, we have it tracked to Panama at the very least, and possibly, and I do mean possibly, damaged, just like the object this morning."

"Now we move north," Compton continued. "Witnesses on the ground just north of Mexico City stated:

"'At 2359 hours, a small aircraft was taking off from an airfield when a roar filled the air to the south. As witnesses turned, they saw a huge round shape fill the sky. It flew low to the ground, so low it caused cars to rock and trees to sway so hard they cracked limbs. At that point a second disk-shaped craft dropped from the sky at an accelerated speed, enough so its wake parted and then sucked the darkened rain clouds down after its passing, and then the object slammed into a small Cessna that had just lifted off from the airfield, killing an entire family. This saucer then followed the track of the first object. Both craft swerved to the north and continued on.'

"Exactly twenty minutes later, the crash in New Mexico occurred during a rainstorm." As Compton said this, a small target blip on the hologram disappeared into moving clouds and a bright flash appeared on the screen inside the borders of New Mexico. "The senator is convinced the sightings in '47 were of the same type of saucer involved in the attack today on our naval pilots."