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Then the MP grabbed him as if he were under arrest and hustled him off to a major, who was shouting orders near the generator that was powering the string of floodlights. He recognized him as Roswell resident Jesse Marcel. Marcel obviously recognized Dwyer, although the two weren't friends, and gave him what the fireman only remembered as an agonized look. "You got to get out of here, " he said. "And never tell anyone where you were or what you saw. " Dwyer nodded. "| mean it, this is top security here, the kind of thing that could get you put away, " Marcel continued. "Whatever this is, don't talk about it, don't say anything until somebody tells you what to say. Now get your truck out of here before someone else sees you and tries to lock the whole bunch of you up. Move!" He faced the helmeted MP. "Sergeant, get him back on that fire truck and move it out." Dwyer didn't need any more invitations. He let the sergeant hustle him along, put him back on the truck, and told his driver to bring it back to the station. The MP sergeant came up to the driver's side window and looked up at the fireman behind the wheel. The Roswell police unit had already made a U-turn on the sand and was motioning for the truck to back up. The driver dropped the truck into reverse, gently fed it gas as its wheels dug into the sand, made his U-turn, and headed back for the firehouse in Roswell. The Ford flatbed had already passed through the sleeping town in the moments between darkness and light, the sound of its engines causing no alarm or stir, the sight of a large tarpaulin covered object on the back of an army vehicle rolling along the main street of Roswell against the purple gray sky raising nobody's eyebrows because it was nothing out of the ordinary. But later, by the time Dwyer backed his field truck into the station house, the sun was already up and the first of the CMC transport trucks was just reaching the main gate at the 509th. Plumbing subcontractor Roy Danzer, who had worked through the night at the base fitting pipe, knew something was up from the way the trucks tore out of the compound through the darkness. He had just walked out of the base hospital to grab a cigarette before going back to work. That's when he heard the commotion over at the main gate. Danzer had cut his hand a few days earlier cutting pipe, and the infirmary nurse wanted to keep checking the stitches to make sure no infection was setting in. So Danzer took the opportunity to get away from the job for a few minutes while the nurse looked over her work and changed his bandage. Then, on his way back to the job, he would grab a cup of coffee and take an unscheduled cigarette break. But this morning, things would be very different. The commotion he heard by the main gate had now turned into a swirling throng of soldiers and base workers shoved aside by what looked like a squad of MPs using their bodies as a wedge to force a pathway through the crowd. There didn't even seem to be an officer giving orders, just a crowd of soldiers. Strange. Then the throng headed right for the base hospital, right for the main entrance, right for the very spot where Roy was standing. Nobody moved him out of the way or told him to vacate the area. In fact, no one even spoke to him. Roy just looked down as the line of soldiers passed him, and there it was, strapped tightly to a stretcher that two bearers were carrying into the base hospital right through the main door. Roy looked at it; it looked at Roy, and as their eyes met Roy knew in an instant that he was not looking down at a human being. It was a creature from somewhere else. The pleading look on its face, occupying only a small frontal portion of its huge watermelon sized skull, and the emotion of pain and suffering that played itself behind Roy Danzer's eyes and across his brain while he stared down at the figure told Roy it was in its final moments of life. It didn't speak. It could barely move. But Roy actually saw, or believed he saw, an expression cross over its little circle of a face. And then the creature was gone, carried into the hospital by the stretcher bearers, who shot him an ugly glare as they passed. Roy took another drag on the cigarette butt still in his hand. "What the hell was that?" he asked no one in particular. Then he felt like he'd been hit by the front four of the Notre Dame football team. His head snapped back against the top of his spine as he went flying forward into the arms of a couple of MPs, who slammed him against an iron gate and kept him there until an officer - he thought it was a captain - walked up and stuck his finger directly into Danzer's face. "Just who are you, mister?" the captain bellowed into Danzer's car. Even before Danzer could answer, two other officers walked up and began demanding what authorization Danzer had to be on the base. “Caught this fireman wandering around in the debris, sir, " the sergeant reported. "You've been ordered to evacuate this site, " the MP told the driver. "At once!"