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Roy Danzer's daughter, too, was frightened at the sight of her father when he came home from the base that morning on July 5,1947. He wouldn't talk about what had gone on there, of course, even though the town was abuzz with rumors that creatures from outer space had invaded Roswell. Wasn't it true that all the children in town knew about it and there'd been stories about flying saucers in newspapers for weeks? It was even on the radio. But Roy Danzer wouldn't say a word in front of his daughter. She heard her parents talking through the closed door of her bedroom at nights and caught snippets of conversations about little creatures and "they'll kill us all." But she buried these in a part of her memory she never visited until her father, shortly before his death, told her what really happened at the base that day in July when the convoy arrived out of the desert. Steve Arnold stayed in Roswell, finishing out his official re-enlistment with the army and, without his direct knowledge, remaining apart of my own team right through the 1960s. Some say he works for the government still, carrying out a job that fell to him right out of the New Mexico skies, pumping out disinformation from the army or the CIA or whomever, perpetuating a camouflage story that, fifty years later, has taken on a life of its own and goes forward, like a tale out of a Dickens novel, simply on inertia. You can see Steve today walking around Roswell, visiting old friends from his army days, giving interviews on television to the news crews that periodically Pay visits to the folks at Roswell who want to talk about those days in the summer of 1947. As for the debris retrieved out of the desert that July, it had another destiny. Shipped to Fort Bliss, Texas, headquarters of the 8th Army Air Force, and summarily analyzed for what it was and what it might contain, all of it was transferred to the control of the military. As quickly as it arrived, some of the debris was flown to Ohio, where it was put under lock and key at Wright Airfield - later Wright - Patterson. The rest of it was loaded onto trucks and sent up to a rest stop at Fort Riley in Kansas. The 509th returned to its daily routine, Jesse Marcel went back to work as if he'd never held the wreckage from the strange craft in his own hands, and the contractors returned to their work on the pipes and doors and walls at the base just as if nothing had ever arrived there from the desert. By the time the first week of July 1947 was over, the crash outside of Roswell might as well have never taken place. Like the night that engulfs you as you drive through the expanse of desert and chaparral toward Roswell, so the night of silence engulfed the story of Roswell itself for over thirty years. These are the stories as | heard them, as people later told them to me. | wasn't there at Roswell that night. | didn't see these events for myself. | only heard them years later when the task fell to me to make something out of all this. But the debris from the crash of the object that was either caused by lightning or by our targeting radar, sonic say, and fell out of the sky that night was on its way to a collision course with my life. Our paths would cross officially at the Pentagon in the 1960s even though, for a very brief moment in 1947, when | was a young major at Fort Riley, fresh from the glory of victory in Europe, | would see something that | would tuck away in my memory and hope against hope | would never see again for the rest of my life. CHAPTER 2 | CAN REMEMBER A TIME WHEN | WAS SO YOUNG AND FEELING so invincible that there was nothing in the world | was afraid of. | had faced down fear in North Africa. With General Patton's army | stood toe-to-toe against the artillery in Rommel's Panzer Divisions and gave them better than they dished out to us. We were an army of young men from a country that hadn't started the war but found itself right in the midst of it before we even got out of church the Sunday Pearl Harbor was attacked. The next thing we knew Hitler declared war on us and we were fighting in Europe. But by 1942, we drove the Germans right out of Africa and jumped across the sea to Sicily. Then, while Mussolini was still reeling from the punches, we invaded Italy and fought our way up the peninsula until we came to Rome. We were the first invading army to conquer Rome since the Middle Ages, and obviously the first invading army from the New World to ever occupy Rome. But there we were by early 1944, sitting in Rome after Mussolini fled and the German front collapsing all around us. And as a too young captain in Army Intelligence, | was ordered to oversee the formation of a civilian government under Allied military rule in the magical city of my ancestors that I'd only read about in history books. Pope Pious himself offered me an audience to discuss our plans for the city government. You can't even dream 11 Convoy to Fort Riley