PHOENIX: (Projekt Saucer series) Read online

  No, those tyre tracks clearly visible beyond the ring of armed troops belonged to the trucks that had taken the debris of the flying saucer, as well as its dead occupants, back to the Roswell Army Air Base. This coldly handsome young CIA agent, Fuller, and the friendlier Air Force First Lieutenant Harris were undoubtedly covering up the real crash. Convinced of this, Marlon became even more determined to keep his mouth shut. He was therefore relieved when the driver turned the jeep around and headed back to the ranch.

  See no evil, hear no evil, Marlon thought, keeping his gaze fixed resolutely on the road ahead.

  It was best to be silent.

  Marlon awoke in the early hours of the morning, haunted by the remnants of bad dreams and frightening realities. At first confused about where he was, hardly remembering going to bed, he saw his bedroom in darkness, stars framed by the window, then recalled that crashed flying saucer and the three strange, scorched bodies. He groaned aloud, hearing something - feeling something - then remembered waving goodbye to Fuller and Harris as they drove away from his house, having grimly warned him to forget flying saucers and accept that what he had seen was a crashed weather balloon.

  ‘Shit,’ Marlon said, hearing something - feeling something - then realised that he’d been awakened by a strange bass humming sound that seemed physical and made his head hurt. ‘Shit!’ he said. ‘What the hell...?’

  The sound was growing louder, as if descending on his roof. As it did so, the whole house shook to the pulsations of a dazzling light that had suddenly obliterated the stars as it poured in through his window.

  The house shook more violently as the pulsations became more rapid and the light blinded Marlon. The bass humming sound grew louder and more... physical, threatening to crush his skull.

  He jerked upright on the bed and covered his ears with his hands, letting out a scream of anguish and terror.

  The noise cut out abruptly and the pulsating light disappeared, leaving normal darkness, and... unnatural silence.

  Marlon lowered his hands, staring fearfully at the window. Hearing and seeing nothing other than starlit darkness, he jerked the sheet from his sweating body and slid off the bed. He put his pants on, picked up his shotgun, then went to the window and looked out. Still seeing nothing unusual, he padded back to the front door and stepped out onto the porch.

  A large, silvery, saucer-shaped craft was resting on the ground at the end of Marlon’s moonlit yard. It appeared to be seamless and had no protuberances other than four retractable legs.

  It looked just like the crashed flying saucer that Marlon had seen on the Plain of Magdalena.

  Even as a wave of fearful disbelief swept over him, making him drop the shotgun, which made a godalmighty clattering, the saucer suddenly gave off a bass humming sound that shook him to his bones, vibrated slightly, and became surrounded by an aura of pulsating white light. A transparent dome rose up from the saucer’s raised centre to reveal three human-shaped silhouettes inside. Then a beam of dazzling light shot from the saucer, almost blinding Marlon.

  Crying out and covering his eyes with his hands, he fell back against the wall of the house. The light shone through his fingers, showing the blood beneath the skin, and the bass humming sound pressed in on his skull. Marlon slid down the wall, whimpering in pain and terror, until he was resting on the porch with his chin on his raised knees. Then the light faded away, the bass humming sound cut out, and he looked up as a trap door opened silently in the bottom of the saucer, tilting down to the ground.

  Three men, all dressed in black to match the night, dropped out, one after the other.

  They spread out across the yard to advance upon Marlon.

  Something about those three men in black told him that they had come to take him away and that he could not escape.

  Marlon just sat there, paralysed by terror, until the men stepped up on the porch and closed in around him. Then something exploded in his head and he sank down through spinning stars.

  Chapter Two Captain Dwight Randall, of the Air Technical Intelligence Centre, or the ATIC, was not feeling too happy when introducing himself to First Lieutenant William B. Harris, Flight Intelligence Officer of the Roswell Army Air Base. Back in Wright-Patterson AFB, in Dayton, Ohio, Dwight's wife, Beth, nursing their first child, Nichola, was also nursing her resentment because again he was on a trip away from home. She knew that he had no choice, being compelled to obey orders, but that hadn't helped him when he waved her goodbye for the third time in the four weeks since Nichola had been born. Dwight had optimistically promised her that he would be at home a lot more, at least during the first few months of their new baby's life, but unfortunately the recent, unexpected spate of UFO sightings had taken precedence over domestic matters. Now, as Dwight returned the salute of First Lieutenant Harris, then shook his hand, he felt guilty that he was here instead of in Dayton, looking after his family.

  ‘Please, Captain,’ Harris said, indicating the chair at the other side of his desk, ‘take a seat. Can I get you a coffee?’

  Dwight glanced out the window at the distant aircraft hangars, then shook his head and sat in the chair. ‘No, thanks. I’ve drunk gallons since leaving Wright-Patterson, so I’ll beg off for now. Do you mind if I smoke?’ Harris just spread his hands in the air and offered a natural, charming smile, so Dwight lit up, inhaled, blew a smoke ring, and watched it drifting away... like a flying saucer. ‘So,’ he said, ‘I’ve been sent by the ATIC to investigate the so-called Socorro sighting of last week. Do you resent my intrusion?’

  ‘No, sir,’ Harris said. ‘My intelligence training didn’t include flying saucers, so any help I get will be appreciated. It’s also good to know that the Air Force, which has so strenuously denied the existence of the phenomenon, now has some tangible evidence.’

  ‘One of the functions of the Air Technical Intelligence Centre is to gather data on Unidentified Flying Objects. The fact that most of them turn out to be natural atmospheric phenomena may explain our former reluctance to accept the reality of the UFOs.’

  It was a disingenuous statement. What Dwight could not tell Harris was that contrary to the Air Force’s own publicity it was in a state of near panic over a whole series of recent UFO sightings, particularly those over Muroc Air Base - the top secret Air Force test centre in the Mojave Desert - on July 8, just two days ago and six days after the Socorro sightings.

  The first UFO flap had actually occurred in 1946 when, throughout the summer and fall, thousands of ‘ghost rockets’ appeared in the skies over Scandinavia and Western Europe. Mostly seen at night, they were reported as being ‘cigar-shaped’ and with flames issuing from the tail. Estimates of their speed ranged from that of a ‘slow airplane’ to 500 miles per hour. In the month of July alone, the Swedish military received more than 600 reports, which encouraged the Swedish general staff to declare the situation ‘extremely serious.’ Then, when sightings of the unidentifieds spread out from Sweden to Finland and close to the Soviet border, the Americans also took the phenomenon seriously - certainly enough to express their fear that the rockets might be secret weapons developed by the Russians with the help of the captured German technical specialists and material.

  Their fears were in no way eased by the knowledge that whereas the mysterious ‘Foo fighters’ had not shown up on radar, the ghost rockets certainly had, and therefore could not be classified as hoaxes, misidentifications or the products of mass hallucination.

  The Soviets denied any knowledge of the rockets, but US suspicions remained unabated while the rockets continued to fly and be reported from as far afield as Greece, Turkey, French Morocco and Spain, before gradually fading away the following year.

  However, on June 21, 1947, only a couple of weeks ago, a harbour patrolman, Harold Dahl, accompanied by his fifteen-year old son and two crewmen, was on harbour patrol near Maury Island in Puget Sound, off Tacoma, Washington, when he observed six objects shaped like ‘inflated inner tubes’ hovering about 2,000 feet above his boat.
Five of the objects were circling about the sixth as it descended to about five hundred feet above the boat, where, appearing to hover magically, it was seen more clearly. The object appeared to be about a hundred feet in diameter, metallic, with no jets, rockets, wings, or propellers, but with a ‘hole’ in the centre, or base, symmetrically placed portholes around the perimeter, and observatory windows on its underside. After discharging what appeared to be a cloud of aluminiumcoloured debris, which littered the sea, where they gave off clouds of steam, suggesting that they were hot, the circular craft ascended to rejoin the others, then they all flew at high speed toward the open sea and soon disappeared.

  Three days later, on June 24, an American businessman, Kenneth Arnold, reported that when flying his private Piper Club airplane near Mount Rainier in the Cascades, Washington, searching for the debris of the Marine Corps C-46 transport that had crashed against the south shoulder of Mount Rainier the night before, he observed nine disk-shaped, apparently metallic objects flying in ‘a diagonal chain-like line’ and making an undulating motion ‘like a saucer skipping over water.’ According to Arnold's report, the objects performed impossible manoeuvres in the sky, before flying off at supersonic speed to disappear in the direction of the Canadian border.

  As Arnold had been a deputy sheriff and was a reputable businessman, as well as an experienced mountain air-rescue pilot, his story was taken seriously and the term ‘flying saucer’ came into being. It was therefore used widely over the next few weeks when the media spread Arnold’s story nation-wide and encouraged a spate of similar sightings, many of which were hoaxes, some of which were by trained observers and seemed highly credible.

  By this time the US military authorities, while publicly ridiculing the reported sightings, were secretly in a state of panic over their own plague of UFO sightings: the first, on June 28, over Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama; the next, on June 29, near Alamogordo, New Mexico, right over the top-secret White Sands Proving Ground; then, on July 8, a whole spate of sightings of spherically shaped, white aluminium-coloured objects flying over Muroc Air Base, the supersecret air force test centre in the Mojave Desert. Because those particular sightings were made by trained technicians and pilots, and because the reported objects were appearing increasingly over top-and-supersecret military research bases, a growing suspicion in intelligence circles was that the men and material deported from Nazi Germany to Russia had led to a dangerous Soviet lead in space technology. And now one of the damned things had crashed and all hell had broken loose.

  ‘Anyway,’ Dwight continued, ‘the so-called Socorro sighting has caused a hell of a stir in the media and placed us in an uncomfortable position. I believe you're the one who compiled the first official report on it.’

  ‘Yes, sir. I take it you’ve read it.’

  ‘About a dozen times,’ Dwight told him. ‘I kept re-reading it because I couldn’t believe my own eyes.’ He withdrew Harris’s report from the briefcase on his lap, leafed through it, then looked up again. ‘You say the UFO appeared to have suffered damage in a lightning storm near Roswell, but managed to fly on to Magdalena, where it crashed. It was a real flying saucer - or at least a disc-shaped aircraft – and the wreckage contained three dead bodies. Naturally the report came as a shock. Are you sure...?’

  ‘I stand by that report,’ Harris said, brushing a lock of dark hair back from his brown, candid gaze and offering a slight, nervous smile. He looked like an honest, reliable officer, but clearly he was uncomfortable over this matter. ‘What that farmer told me, I was able to confirm with my own eyes: a crashed flying saucer with three dead bodies in it.’

  ‘Marlon Clarke was the farmer.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘A known drunkard who was drinking at the time.’

  ‘Not that drunk - and I confirmed with my own eyes what he’d told me when he phoned us shortly after finding the wreckage.’

  ‘You say the bodies seemed human.’

  ‘They were burnt beyond recognition and I couldn’t examine them thoroughly, but they certainly seemed like human beings.’

  ‘This is quite a story, lieutenant, but not one I’d want public. How the hell did it get out to the press?’

  ‘Not guilty. The story was picked up by Johnny McBoyle, reporter and part owner of Radio KSWS in Roswell. McBoyle personally investigated the case and found that a lot of people had reported seeing the UFO flying overhead. Others reported hearing a loud banging sound as the object flew through that lightning storm over Corona - presumably when it was first damaged. Others reported hearing an explosion from the Plain of Magdalena - when the object crashed. As soon as I heard that McBoyle was going to put the story out on the teletype, I blocked the message with one of my own

  - sent anonymously, of course - telling him not to transmit. That scared him enough to make him cancel his transmission. Unfortunately, the following day, our enthusiastic young public information officer, Lieutenant Walter Haut, acting on odd bits of information coming into Roswell, issued a press release without the authorisation of myself or the base commander. His vague story of a crashed saucer - no mention of the dead bodies – was subsequently published in the Roswell Daily Record of July 8 - the day after the crash. Hunt has been reprimanded and will probably be posted out of here.’

  ‘Alas, too late to kill the story.’

  ‘I'm afraid so.’

  Dwight turned over another page in the report, then looked up again. ‘The saucer wreckage and dead crew members have been removed from the scene of the crash?’

  ‘Yes, sir. We did that immediately. At the insistence of no less than the Deputy Chief of the Air Force, General Hoyt Vandenburg, the three charred bodies and the debris from the crash were picked up by an intelligence team from the 509th Bomb Group and transported in strict secrecy to Carswell AFB, Fort Worth, Texas. There’s no trace of it left at the crash site.’

  ‘Subsequently you paid Clarke a visit.’

  ‘Yes, sir. On the instructions of CIA agent Jack Fuller, we scattered the pieces of a Rawin weather balloon around the crash site and went through a charade of picking them up for examination when Fuller and I took Clarke back out there. We insisted it was the balloon that had crashed and that Clarke had simply imagined the dead bodies. Clarke finally pretended to believe us, but I don’t think he did.’

  ‘I better have another talk with this Clarke.’

  ‘You can’t. He vanished the day after the crash and hasn’t been seen since.’

  ‘Vanished?’

  ‘Completely. We’ve searched high and low, but we can’t track him down. Neither could the Roswell Daily Record. He’s vanished into thin air.’

  Dwight leaned forward in his chair, suddenly feeling cold and frightened. ‘Christ, you must have some idea of what happened to him. This is a small, intimate community, Lieutenant. Someone must know something.’

  Harris simply shrugged and raised his hands in a gesture of defeat. ‘No-one knows anything. When we checked Clarke’s shack, we found his bed unmade - suggesting he’d slept in it the night before. His old truck was still parked out the back. The only clue to his disappearance was what might have been a group of footprints in the earth, leading from the steps of the porch to just outside the front yard, where they stopped abruptly. There were no signs of tyre tracks, but a circular patch of brush, about twenty-five feet wide, was flattened and slightly singed in an odd way - I mean, not from the sun. A real mystery there.’

  ‘A circular patch of brush, about twenty-five feet wide - approximately the same size and shape as the crashed saucer.’

  ‘Right. It bears thinking about.’

  ‘What’s the story on Bradley? It says here that as soon as you received word of the crash, you invited former intelligence officer, now UFO authority, Mike Bradley to go with you to view the crash. Bradley, normally obsessed with flying saucers, surprised you by not turning up and by later refusing to discuss his reasons. Has he talked to you since?’

&nbs
p; ‘I haven't been in touch with him since.’

  ‘Can we drive out and see him right now?’

  ‘Yes. He lives out in Eden Valley, near Robert Goddard’s old rocket-launching ground. It’s not a long drive.’

  ‘Okay, let’s go.’

  Dwight slipped the report back into his briefcase and got to his feet while Harris phoned through for a jeep to come around and pick them up. The jeep was waiting for them by the time they got outside. Dwight glanced up as three F-86 jet interceptors roared over the great semicircular hangars along the edge of the runway, under a cloudless blue sky. He did it automatically, perhaps looking for a flying saucer, and felt instantly foolish when he realised what he had done.

  Sitting beside First Lieutenant Harris in the rear of the jeep being driven by a U.S. Air Force corporal, Dwight put his head back, closed his eyes, and let the beating wind cool his face as they left the base and headed for Eden Valley, just outside Roswell. Opening his eyes again, he saw the El Capitán Mountain rising from the foothills near the southwestern horizon and, to the east, the sunlit slopes of the Caprock where, within living memory, the Comanche Indians, Spanish explorers, and even Billy the Kid had roamed. It therefore seemed incredible that this same area was already filled with highly advanced defence installations, including atomic research, aircraft, missile and rocket development, and a lot of highly advanced radarelectronics and stratospheric flight experimentation. Not far away, in Los Alamos, was the top-secret Manhattan atom bomb project. The White Sands Missile Range and Proving Range, at Alamogordo, was the most important of its kind in the United States. Also, the only combat-trained atom bomb group in the world was the 509th Bomb Group of the US Army Air Force Base, located right here in Roswell and given high prominence in Harris’s report. This area was also, incidentally, the one producing the most UFO reports in the whole country, most of them by professional pilots and military observers.