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These guys weren't kidding, Danzer thought to himself; they looked ugly and were working themselves up into a serious lather. For a few tense minutes, Roy Danzer thought he would never see his family again; he was that scared. But then a major approached and broke into the shouting. "Sir," the captain sputtered, but the major - Danzer didn't know his name - took the captain by the arm right out of earshot. Danzer could see them talking and watched as the red faced captain gradually calmed down. Then the two returned to where the MPs were holding Danzer against the wall. "You saw nothing, you understand?" the captain said to Danzer, who just nodded. "You're not to tell anybody about this, not your family, not your friends - nobody. You got that?" "Sir, this guy has no business here and if he talks | can't guarantee anything. " The captain complained as if he were trying to cover his ass to a superior who didn't know as much as he did. "So forget everything you saw, " the major said directly to Danzer. "And hightail it out of here before someone else sees you and wants to make sure you stay silent. " "Yes, SIR, " Danzer just about shouted as he extricated himself from the grip of the MPs on either side of him and broke for his pickup truck on the other side of the base. He didn't even look back to see the team of soldiers carrying the body bags of the remaining creatures into the hospital where, before there were any other briefings, the creatures were prepared for autopsy like bagged game waiting to be dressed. The rest of the story about that week has become the subject of history. First, 509th base commander Bull Blanchard authorized the release of the "flying saucer" story that was picked up by news services and carried around the country. Then General Roger Ramey at 8th Army Air Force headquarters in Texas ordered Maj. Jesse Marcel to go back before the press and retract the flying saucer story. This time, Marcel was ordered to say that he'd made a mistake and realized the debris had actually come from a weather balloon. Swallowing a story he himself never believed, Jesse Marcel posed with some faked debris from an actual balloon and confessed to an error he never could have made, even on a bad day. It was a confession that would haunt him the rest of his life until, decades later and shortly before he died, he would retract his public story and restate that he had actually retrieved an alien spacecraft that night in the Roswell desert. Meanwhile, in the days and weeks after the crash and retrieval, Army Intelligence and CIC personnel fanned out through Roswell and neighboring communities to suppress whatever information they could. With ill-advised threats of violence, actual physical intimidation, and, according to some of the rumors, at least one homicide, army officers bludgeoned the community into silence. Mac Brazel, one of the civilians near whose property the crash took place and one of the visitors to the site, was allegedly bribed and threatened. He suddenly became silent about what he had seen in the desert even after he had told friends and news people that he'd retrieved pieces from a downed spacecraft. Officers from the Chavez County Sheriffs Department and other law enforcement agencies were forced to comply with the army edict that the incident outside of Roswell was a matter of national security and was not to be discussed. "It never happened, " the army decreed, and civilian authorities willingly complied. Even the local Roswell radio station news correspondents, John McBoyle from KSWS and Walt Whitmore Sr. from KGFL, who'd conducted interviews with witnesses to the debris field, were forced to submit to the official line that the army imposed and never broadcast their reports. For some of the civilians who claimed to have experienced intimidation from the army officers who flooded into Roswell after the crash, the trauma remained with them for the rest of their lives. One was Dan Dwyer's daughter, who was a young child in July1947, and who endured the sight of a huge, helmeted army officer, his expression obscured by sunglasses, looming over her in her mother's kitchen and telling her that if she didn't forget what she had been told by her father, she and the rest of her family would simply disappear in the desert. Sally who had played with the metallic fabric her father had brought back to the firehouse that morning and had heard his description of the little people carried away on stretchers, quaked in terror as the officer finally got her to admit that she had seen nothing, heard nothing, and handled nothing. "It never happened, " he hissed at her. "And there's nothing you will ever say about it for the rest of your life because we will be there and we will know it, "he repeated over and over again, slapping a police baton into his palm with a loud crack at every word. Even today, tears form at the corners of her eyes as she describes the scene and remembers the expression of her mother, who had been told to leave the kitchen while the officer spoke to Sally. It's tough for a kid to see her parents so terrorized into silence that they will deny the truth before their eyes. 10 "| know this guy, " the major said. "He works here with the other civilian contractors. He's OK. " "Yes, sir," Danzer said. He was truly afraid now. "We'll know if you talk; we'll know who you talk to and all of you will simply disappear. " “Captain, " the major broke in.