The Roswell Accident
by Arlan Andrews, Sr.
Illustration by George M. Krauter
It was sweat that finally brought up the subject of Roswell and what really happened there in 1947.
The bar was one of those low-lit, low-rent holes-in-the-wall you can still find in the non-yuppie parts of Las Cruces, part cowboy-redneck, part Chicano, a sort of neutral watering-hole where the two cultures met and mixed in an uneasy, alcohol-blurred truce. And so it was that Francisco Herrera Silva—“Frank”—and I were sharing an easy New Mexico afternoon savoring the cool darkness together, sipping beer and telling stories, yet overshadowed by a stratum of incipient sadness. I had met this man nearly forty years ago, when I was a co-op student at White Sands Missile Range, but I had been gone a long time, working on, let us say, “other areas of interest.” Last week he had called with news of his bad heart condition and I hurried back from Washington for what we both knew would be our final meeting. Frank was very important to me—and potentially, for other reasons, to others in my agency.
Picture Frank Herrera, descendant of Conquistadors and Indian warriors: skin the texture of greasewood, dark and scoured after a lifetime of working as a missile tracker in the hot, bright, high desert that was the missile range on the other side of the lunar-like Organ Mountains twenty miles to our East. Skinny as a rail even after seventy years of tortillas, frijoles, and cerveza. “It’s them jalapenos, Andy, the Hatch specials, they keep you in good trim.” I said I thought that genetics had something to do with it, too—in the days before air conditioning fat people couldn’t live in the desert. They simply died; I guess it had something to do with the fact that volume is dimension cubed, skin area is dimension squared, so they couldn’t sweat fast enough. Anyhow, it was me explaining that conjecture to Frank, how sweat brought up the topic of what happened in Roswell, fifty years ago.
“Andy,” he said, “speaking of sweat out here on the desert, I’ve been sweating something a long, long time.” I felt my pulse race; my search for the truth might be nearly over. “I’ve been retired ten years now, you know. Doctor says my ticker is about out, I could go at any minute.” I nodded, slugging down more beer to calm my nerves a bit. “Somethin’ I always wanted to tell you, but couldn’t back then. You know how it was, security and everything.” Acknowledging my nod, he continued.
He hesitated a moment, grimacing as though his heart might be giving out right then and there. I was afraid for him, but in an instant that familiar old smile returned and he reached for his beer mug. “In those earliest days,” he said, “there was sometimes only one launch per week, maybe per month, so we trackers had a lot of time on our hands—we used to hang out with the launch crews.” Sometimes they were even called upon to help with the launches themselves, short-handed as the army base was then, especially for trained electronic-optical technicians like Frank. “That’s when I met the Germans, you know, those Paperclip dudes.”
I nodded again. “Operation Paperclip” was the Army’s cover name for bringing over the entire infrastructure of the German V-2 program—rockets, parts, engineering drawings, special machine tools, even the scientists and engineers that the Russians hadn’t grabbed first.
His eyes met mine, his face drawn tight. “Andy, I’ve gotta tell you. We shouldn’t have shaved the monkey. I’m sorry I ever suggested it.” Gently I set my empty mug on the table, fighting back the urge to choke up and spit it out. So Frank actually had been a participant in the Incident Scenario? I managed to swallow the mouthful of beer and let loose a sigh. He frowned. “You know about the monkey, Andy?”
Lying, I shook my head. At that moment, I knew the Roswell Incident was coming up.
You might’ve heard of the so-called “Roswell Incident.” Back in July 1947 a rancher near Roswell, New Mexico, found some unknown material debris on his property, like a busted up aircraft of some kind. The story goes that something strange had been flying across the desert in a thunderstorm, then crashed on the man’s property. The unsuspecting discoverer took some of the pieces in to the sheriff at Roswell and then all hell broke loose.
Seems like the world’s only atomic bomb squadron was located at Roswell Army Air Force Base, and the military was really sensitive about unknown aircraft flying nearby. All kinds of military people flew into Roswell in a hurry, went out and scoured the “crash site,” then toted all the stuff away. Many stranger things happened back in Cold War I, and you never heard of them, probably never will. This incident, too, should have been kept quiet and would have, except that when the sheriff called the Army Air Force base, he mentioned the pieces were probably from a flying saucer. The headline the next day—all around the world—read “Army Recovers Crashed Disk Near Roswell.”
Immediately the pieces were flown elsewhere, and the Army Air Force had a press conference showing pictures of a weather balloon. Given the mood of the country in those days—fifty years back, you recall, most Americans still trusted their government. After all, this was before Dallas, Vietnam, Watergate, the Lake Affair and the Bessarabian Event; for the most part, back then, when the government said forget it, people forgot and went on about their business. But in the Eighties, the whole Roswell thing was resurrected, dusted off, and became a cottage industry for the down-in-the-financial-dumps “experts” of the all-but-defunct pseudoscience of flying saucers. For kickers, they added little dead gray aliens to the crash scene!
To the uninformed citizen, there was a rough kind of “logic” to all this, especially if you believe in Big Government Conspiracy: “The government found a UFO and has kept it for fifty years. Fifty years of lying to us about the existence of alien beings.”
You get the picture—fifty years of cover-up, lies and deception, all stemming from “The Roswell Incident.” What a waste of energy; shows you the depth of paranoia against the duly elected officials of the government. To me, it means there are too many people with too much time and money on their hands and not enough actual work in the real world to keep them off the streets and out of trouble.
That’s “The Roswell Incident,” in a nutshell. Accent on the “nut.”
Frank continued on, about shaving the monkey. “Andy, these Germans, they had to stay on the base so they got kind of lonely, know what I mean? I even wound up teaching them English.” I laughed aloud at the picture of stiff German scientists and technicians learning English from a Chicano with a decidedly border Spanglish accent. Back then, while they were inventing the future, I would have been only about seven years old, hadn’t yet read any Heinlein, probably still thought of rockets as the Fourth of July kind. “I helped them work out the paint pattern so we could measure yaw, pitch and roll, the missile attitude, from the film images from our tracking cameras.
“But, Andy,” his tone dropped and his eyes sought out every person in the uncrowded bar, instantly evaluating their status, the “yaw, pitch and roll” of their body language, an analog to the missile tracking parameters he had spent most of his working life concerned with, “It was those younger Germans I was working with, when it happened.”
I smiled. “Go ahead, Frank. When what happened?” I was dying to know about the monkey.
“Guenther and Heinz were their names, their first names. After all this time, I don’t remember their last names—long German names, as long as ‘Schikelgrubergratz,’ names like that. They had originally signed on under von Braun during the war because they thought that rockets would take mankind out into space, you know, the Moon and planets.”