The Day After Roswell Read Online Free PDF Page A

strapped directly onto the stretcher. The
police officer saw it, too. This one, Dwyer could tell, was moving
around and seemed to be alive. He had to get closer.
    “What about them?” he asked.
    “Hey, get those things loaded, ” the
captain shouted at the enlisted men loading the stretchers into the
truck. “You didn’t see anything here tonight,
Officer, ” he told the driver of the police unit.
“Nothing at all. ”
    “But, I gotta… ”
    The captain cut him off. “Later today, I’m
sure, there’ll be someone from the base out to talk to the
shift; meanwhile, let this one alone. Strictly military business.
”
    By this time Dwyer thought he recognized people he knew from the army airfield. He thought he could see the base
intelligence officer, Jesse Marcel, who lived off“ the base
in Roswell, and other personnel who came into town on a regular basis.
He saw debris from whatever had crashed still lying all over the ground
as the flatbed truck pulled out, passed the fire apparatus, and rumbled
off through the sand back on the road toward the base.
    Dwyer took off his fire helmet, climbed down from the truck,
and worked his way through the shadows around the flank of the line of
MPs. There was so much confusion at the site Dwyer knew no one would
notice if he looked around. He walked around in back of the truck,
across the perimeter, and from the other side of the military transport
truck walked up to the stretcher. He looked directly down into the eyes
of the creature strapped onto the stretcher and just stared.
    It was no bigger than a child, he thought. But it
wasn’t a child. No child had such an oversized balloon shaped
head. It didn’t even look human, although it had human like
features. It’s eyes were large and dark, set apart from each
other on a downward slope. It’s nose and mouth were
especially tiny, almost like slits. And its ears were not much more
than indentations along the sides of its huge head. In the glare of the
floodlight, Dwyer could see that the creature was a grayish brown and
completely hairless, but it looked directly at him as if it were a
helpless animal in a trap. It didn’t make a sound, but
somehow Dwyer understood that the creature understood it was dying. He
could gape in astonishment at the thing, but it was quickly loaded onto
the truck by a couple of soldiers in helmets who asked him what he was
doing. Dwyer knew this was bigger than anything he ever wanted to see
and got out of there right away, losing himself amidst a group of
personnel working around a pile of debris.
    The whole site was scattered with articles that Dwyer assumed
had fallen out of the craft when it hit. He could see the indentation
in the arroyo where it looked like the object embedded itself and
followed with his eyes the pattern of debris stretching out from the
small crater into the darkness beyond the floodlights. The soldiers
were crawling all over on their hands and knees with scraping devices
and carrying sacks or walking in straight lines waving metal detectors
in front of them. They were sweeping the area clean, it seemed to him,
so that any curiosity seekers who floated out here during the day would
find nothing to reveal the identity of what had been here. Dwyer
reached down to pick up a patch of a dull gray metallic cloth like
material that seemed to shine up at him from the sand. He slipped it
into his fist and rolled it into a hall. Then he released it and the
metallic fabric snapped hack into shape without any creases or folds.
He thought no one was looking at him, so he stuffed it into the pocket
of his fire jacket to bring back to the firehouse.
    He would later show it to his young daughter, who forty-five
years later and long after the piece of metallic fabric itself had
disappeared into history, would describe it on television documentaries
to millions of people. But that night in July 1947, if Dwyer thought he
was invisible, he was wrong.
    “Hey you, ” a sergeant wearing an