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"Everybody knows that if you're poking around something it's got to be important, " he said. "So don't act like the cat that ate the canary. They're watching you as much as they're watching me. " Then he walked to the doorway, looked down both ends of the hall, and turned back to me. "But move this thing along, because we could be out of this office in under a year and | don't want to have to worry about running out of time on this. " | didn't take the file apart that night, even after another nondescript wooden crate that looked like something you ship vegetables in was carted to my office by an equally nondescript army corporal. | didn't go through the material the next night, either. But over the following week, whenever | could be sure that no one was around who could pop in without warning, | moved the material from the box into the file and allowed myself time to look at it. It was just like falling through the looking glass into a different world, a puzzle of separate pieces that only vaguely captured what had been in the memos I'd read over at the White House. No wonder no one had really wanted anything to do with this junk, which held out the promise of a whole world we knew nothing about but that as far back as 1947, the government had decided to keep an absolute secret. Career after career of anyone in government who even hinted at the big dark secret of Roswell was pulverized by whoever was behind this operation. And, although | knew far more than | had even admitted to myself, | would never be the one to shoot off my mouth. But now this file, what | would eventually call the "nut file" to General Trudeau, had come into my possession, and as the ensuing weeks turned into a month, | gradually figured out where some of the puzzle pieces fit. First there were the tiny, clear, single filament, flexible glass like wires twisted together through a kind of gray harness as if they were cables going into a junction. They were narrow filaments, thinner than copper wire. As | held the harness of strands up to the light from my desk, | could see an eerie glow coming through them as if they were conducting the faint light and breaking it up into different colors. When the personnel at the retrieval site in the desert outside of Roswell pulled this piece out of the wreckage of the delta shaped object, they thought it was some sort of wiring device -a harness is what they said - or maybe some of them thought it was a junction box or electrical relay. But whatever they thought it was, they believed there was nothing like it on this planet. As | turned the object over in my hand, | figured, from the way the individual filaments flexed back and forth but didn't break and the way they were able to conduct a light beam along their length, they were a wire of some sort. But for what purpose | didn't have a clue. Then there were the thin two-inch-around matte gray oyster cracker shaped wafers of a material that looked like plastic but had tiny road maps of wires barely raised/etched along the surface. They were the size of a twenty-five-cent piece, but the etchings on the surface reminded me of squashed insects with their hundred legs spread out at right angles from a flat body. Some were more rounded or elliptical. It was a circuit - anyone could figure that out by 1961, especially when you put it under a magnifying glass - but from the way these wafers were stacked on each other, this was a circuitry unlike any other I'd ever seen. | couldn't figure out how to plug it in and what kind of current it carried, but it was clearly a wire circuitry of a sort that came from a larger board of wafers on board the flying craft. My hand shook ever so slightly as | held these pieces, not because they themselves were scary but because | was awed, just for a few seconds, about the momentous nature of this find. It was like an architectural treasure trove, the discoveries of some long departed culture, a Rosetta stone, even though whoever crashed onto the desert floor was still very active and roaming around our most secret army and air force bases. | was most interested in the file descriptions accompanying a two piece set of dark elliptical eye pieces as thin as skin. The Walter Reed pathologists said they adhered to the lenses of the extraterrestrial creatures' eyes and seemed to reflect existing light, even in what looked like complete darkness, so as to illuminate and intensify images in the darkness to allow their wearer to pick out shapes. The reports had said that the pathologists at Walter Reed hospital who autopsied one of these creatures tried to peer through them in the darkness to watch the one or two army sentries and medical orderlies walking down a corridor adjacent to the pathology lab. These figures were illuminated in a greenish orange, depending upon how they moved, but the pathologists could see only their outer shape. And when they got close to each other, their shapes blended into a single form. But they could also see the outlines of furniture and the wall and objects on desktops. Maybe, | thought as | read this report, soldiers could wear a visor that intensified images through the reflection and amplification of available light and navigate in the darkness of a battlefield with as much confidence as if they were walking their sentry posts in broad daylight. But these eyepieces didn't turn night into day, they only highlighted the exterior shapes of things. There was a dull, grayish-silvery foil-like swatch of cloth among these artifacts that you could not fold, bend, tear, or wad up but that bounded right back into its original shape without any creases. It was a metallic fiber with physical characteristics that would later be called "supertenacity, " but when | tried to cut it with scissors, the arms just. slid right off without making even a nick in the fibers. If you tried to stretch it, it bounced back, but | noticed that all the threads seemed to be going in one direction. When | tried to stretch it width wise instead of 20 "Anybody know | have this?" | asked. And he was gone in a heartbeat, as if we'd never had the conversation.