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Park were, they say, hunting for garter snakes. The Barnes boy said that at first they all thought the object was a rubber mask lying in the grass. But his friends said they knew at once that it was ‘something weird’. What is the truth here?
    They experimented, trying to turn it over with sticks. They bruised it, and scratched the cheek, which bled. Barnes and Schmidt later claimed it was the third boy, Dalston, who committed ‘most’ of these injuries. By way of appeasement, they brought the object offerings of fresh flowers. Finally Barnes told his parents. Barnes senior, a water inspector, visited the site and immediately called the police.
    The police report speaks of the object as ‘face of a partly buried Caucasian, sex unknown’. According to the medical examiner, the person was unconscious: ‘Respiration shallow, estimated temperature subnormal, pulse slow. Pupils dilated. The mouth could not be opened.’
    The discovery was unusual enough for the evening papers, who headlined it as
Live Burial Mystery
. A few reporters hung around the site, waiting for the police to uncover the rest of the supposed person.
    A few minutes after the digging started, it stopped. The police held a whispered conference and then cleared the reporters from the area. That night they put up steel barriers and canvas screens.
    Newsmen could only guess at what was happening by the comings and goings of important men: city officials, army officers and medicalspecialists. The morning papers guessed wildly that the buried person was a spy, a ‘living bomb’, a plague victim. In the evening editions, the story was killed.
    It was killed in this case by unofficial pressure – friendly phone calls from certain government offices to city editors. For this reason, reporters felt free to continue chasing down leads.
    One man (Cobb of the
Sentinel
) made two discoveries that led in the right direction. Tie talked to a homicide detective who admitted being puzzled by the undisturbed grass around the face. In his opinion, no one had been digging there for months.
    Secondly, a park gardener said he was surprised to hear of a burial in that spot, high on the side of the hill.
    ‘The soil’s thin there,’ he said. ‘Bedrock’s only three or four inches down.’
    Cobb continued digging. He asked the boys if they’d noticed anything unusual, when they’d found the face. Two hadn’t, and the Schmidt boy (obviously enjoying his sudden fame) now recalled noticing all too much: The face had a third eye, it gave off an eerie blue glow, there was human blood on the lips, etc., etc.
    Finally, Cobb talked to one of the rescue workers who’d been digging for the body.
    ‘Everywhere we went down, we struck rock. I didn’t know it was rock right away, I thought maybe the guy was wearing a suit of armour or something, see? Anyway, I went down around the head, and more rock. I says, Hell, where is the rest of this guy?
    ‘So then I got down with a trowel, cleared the soil around the head, and got my hand under it, see, to lift it up. So I’m like this, see, with my right hand under the head, and my left on the face. I can feel the guy’s breath on the back of my hand. I start to lift, and then I look.
    ‘I couldn’t believe it. I can feel the guy’s breath. I’m lifting, and I’m looking right where the guy’s brain ought to be. And I’m seeing a handful of room and dirt, with slugs and things crawling around in it.
There’s no back to his head.
Just a face!’
    Slugs and things. Any chance of heading off public hysteria was now gone. Wire services repeated Cobb’s story, heating it up. Within hours, police and army spokesmen had denied it, confirmed it and refused to comment. The medical examiner cleared his throat and admitted to sixty million viewers that, well, yes, he would have to say the face was alive, in a way. Medically speaking. Well, yes, it was breathing. And no, he had no explanation at the moment. But the experts were no