“That was the morning of July 7, 1947?”
“Yeah, Andy, the one they later said never was launched. But it was. And the monkey went up with it.”
I studied Frank’s face in the darkness, illuminated by the reddish neon on the wall above us. He was telling the truth—As he remembers it, I told myself. But then, that’s all any of us can ever do! ‘You ever find out what happened to the monkey, Frank?”
“Nah, Andy, not really. I heard some Army guys and a German say later that it might have crashed near Roswell, but that was when the ‘flying saucer’ scare went on over there. I didn’t know if the two were the same thing or not, figured I’d better not say anything. I was just starting at the Range and didn’t want to lose my job, maybe go to jail for screwing with government property. Of a sudden, it didn’t seem like such a good idea.” The front door opened, a sliver of white desert light shot briefly across Frank’s dark face, revealing a semi-serious expression that faded quickly back into the darkness of eclipse. “Hell, now I’m retired, just about dead, and I read about the ‘Roswell Incident,’ and I figure you ought to know what we did back then. Now I know, it had to be the same thing. After all this time, had to be.”
He went on to tell a rollicking version about how the pancake contraption probably popped out of the V-2 nosecone, parachuting itself and the chimp pilot to Earth. “Can you imagine, Andy? This old rancher goes out there, and he sees a goddamned ‘flying saucer’ on his ranch? He hears some screeching and hollering inside, opens up the handy-dandy knob on the door and a wild-ass greased monkey, scared shitless and tearing off its space suit, jumps out, dangling wires and cables and runs off into the desert?”
I laughed so hard the tears came. “Frank,” I finally gurgled out, “you should have been a stand-up comic, this story is funnier than hell!”
“So, Andy, this rancher guy takes a piece of the compartment to the local sheriff, and an Army Air Force guy hears the description of the craft, and pretty soon they are all convinced they’ve got a ‘flying disk’ out in the desert. In the meantime, since it’s so near the world’s only atomic bomb airplane squadron, a couple of investigators go out and find that it does look like a disc, but it’s made of some German parts and some White Sands parts, and so they freak out.
“All I know for sure is Heinz and Guenther don’t show up any more around the Range, and so I take the hint and stay away from all Germans.” He smiled once more, the beer and the confession flushing out his relief. He’d lived with the story fifty years and now it was out, and he felt a lot better for sharing it.
“Tell you what I’d do Frank,” I said in a conspiratorial tone, “I’d write it up, just like you told me, and sell it to Reader’s Digest for five or ten thousand bucks.”
His beer mug gently sank to the tabletop and his mouth dropped open. “Andy, you think they’d take it? And pay for it? That much?”
“I’m sure of it, Frank,” I said cheerfully, and I was; and the editor there owed me a big favor. Hell, the story would have sold on its own merits, but timing and contacts and expediting are everything in my job. “It’ll be a hell of a splash! And you’ll put some of these UFO nuts out of business.”
Calling a cab to take him home, I guided a happy and inebriated Frank to the front door as we said our last goodbyes, and he promised to write the story. I would make sure of that, I said, and at this moment I have an Agency person transcribing his side of the story into a salable narrative form. Tomorrow I’ll deliver it to Frank and he can send it in with the pre-paid Fed Ex envelope I’ll give him, and in a week he’ll be ten thousand dollars richer and in two months he’ll be notorious worldwide as “The Man Who Hoaxed The Roswell Incident.”
If his heart holds out, there’ll be appearances on Letterman, Montel, Oprah, and Sally Jesse, plus a contract for a book-length version, and serious inquiries by two very famous West Coast sci-fi movie producers. We want Frank to succeed; we will guarantee that he succeeds. Believe me, his story has to be told until everyone on Earth believes it.
After all, Frank is a very important person, maybe the most important person in the world, and this project has been in the making for half a century. Even my original, innocent friendship with Frank had led to my own recruitment by the Agency. It had taken some brilliant foresight by Donovan and the others who founded the Agency in that same momentous year of 1947, to decide to leave Frank alone after they finally believed the Germans’ stories. His final testament would be all the more believable, although we’d have to edit out a lot about Heinz and Guenther. Those two, non-citizens and members of a recently-hostile weapons group, hadn’t survived their interrogation and solitary internments at Leavenworth.
Alone with my thoughts and the micro-camcorder that had documented the entire interview, I sat thinking over Frank’s story. It was all true, but it was not true enough. The space-monkey business was an excellent idea, and under other circumstances could have opened space up to us a lot sooner. Heinz and Guenther and Frank would have been world wide celebrities back in 1947 and we could have had men on the Moon ten or fifteen years sooner. But I still don’t know if we would have given up space travel that much sooner, too.
But I am sure that they changed history, all the same.
Because in the agency I represent, it’s our business always to know the rest of the story. And that story is this, I tell myself, because only ten of us know and we can never tell anyone else: In June of 1947, a radio message was received directly at the White House main radio-receiver—the one used for highest-rated secret encrypted communication—and nowhere else; it was beamed that tight, something not possible with human technology of the day. The communication stated that interested parties from off the Earth were coming to visit the United States. From their star system—unspecified—they had witnessed the atomic bomb explosions in 1945 and were en route to discuss matters of mutual interest. They would make themselves known to the government in several fly-by displays of top-secret installations, and then they would land in secret at the most secure facility in the country, in all the world. That was the Army Air Force Atomic Bomb Base at Roswell, New Mexico.
Through a screwup, the V-2 launch crew never got the word to stop all activities. (Or maybe, now that I know Frank’s story, the reason is clear why they launched.) The aliens—whoever they were, wherever they were coming from—must have seen the rocket being launched just as they were descending. They apparently took it as a threat and flew in close to inspect it or, I suppose, zap it out of the sky. But even aliens are kind of human, I guess, because somehow they screwed up and smacked into the V-2. Our eyewitnesses were all confused about exactly what happened, but the two craft did impact, probably a glancing blow.
We figure that most of the V-2 disintegrated in the crash, even though part of the monkey compartment survived. That’s the stuff the rancher picked up and took in to the sheriff, starting the whole crashed flying saucer business. I still can’t find out what happened to the monkey, but that’s not important. What is important is that the alien ship was hurt, too; I guess that much deceleration, a huge crash at thousands of miles per hour—no telling how fast the aliens were going—was enough to kill even high-tech interstellar visitors. So that rancher’s reports and all the rest of the weird stuff surrounding the “Roswell Incident,” it happened, too, but not right there and not like the “researchers” believe. It’s kind of humorous, occasionally, to think that a false report could have started all the ruckus, and that the real crashed saucer was some distance away and never reported. But recently some too-inquisitive amateur UFO researchers apparently got onto something like the real story, and too many books were getting too close to the truth, and we had to squelch it once and, hopefully, for all. We can’t let any other nations know what we’ve got, even if we can’t use it, not with the bubbling instabilities of the clandestine Cold War II about to split the international scene wide open.