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CHAPTER 1 THE NIGHT HUGS THE GROUND AND SWALLOWS YOU UP AS YOU drive out of Albuquerque and into the desert. As you head east along 40 and then south along 285 to Roswell, there's only you and the tiny universe ahead of you defined by your headlights. On either side, beyond the circle of light, there is only scrub and sand. The rest is all darkness that closes in behind you, flooding where you've been under a giant ocean of black, and pushes you forward along the few hundred feet of road directly ahead. The sky is different out there, different from any sky you've ever seen before. The black is so clear it looks like the stars shining through it are tiny windows from the beginning of time, millions of them, going on forever. On a hot summer night you can sometimes see flashes of heat lightning explode in the distance. Somewhere it is light for an instant, then the darkness returns. But summer is the rainy season in the New Mexico desert, and thunderstorms assemble over you out of nowhere, pound the earth with rain and lightning, pummel the darkness with crashes of thunder, shake the ground until you feel the earth is breaking apart, and then disappear. The ranchers out there will tell you that the local storms can go on all night, bouncing off the arroyos like pinballs in play until they expend themselves over the horizon. That's what it was like fifty years ago on a night much like this. Although | wasn't there that night, I've heard many different versions. Many of them go like this: Base radar at the army's 509th airfield Outside the town of Roswell had been tracking strange blips all night on July 1, 1947. So had radar at nearby White Sands, the army's guided missile base where test launches of German V2 rockets had been taking place since the end of the war, and at the nuclear testing facility at Alamogordo. The blips would appear at one corner of the screen and dart across at seemingly impossible speeds for aircraft, only to disappear off another corner. Then they'd start up again. No earthly craft could have maneuvered at such speeds and changed direction so sharply. It was a signature no one could identify. Whether it was the same aircraft, more than one, or simply an anomaly from the violent lightning and thunderstorms was anybody's guess. So after the operators verified the calibrations of the radar equipment, they broke down the units to run diagnostic checks on the circuitry of the screen imaging devices to make sure their radar panels were operating properly. Once they'd satisfied themselves that they couldn't report any equipment malfunction, the controllers were forced to assume that the screen images were displays of something that was truly out there. They confirmed the sightings with radar controllers at White Sands, but found they could do little else but track the blips as they darted across the screen with every sweep of the silent beacon. The blips swarmed from position to position at will, operating with complete freedom across the entire sky over the army's most secret nuclear and missile testing sites. Throughout that night and the following day, Army Intelligence stayed on high alert because something strange was going on out there. Surveillance flights over the desert reported no sightings of strange objects either in the sky or on the ground, but any sighting of unidentified aircraft on radar was sufficient evidence for base commanders to assume a hostile intent on the part of "something. " And that was why the Army Intelligence in Washington ordered additional counter intelligence personnel to New Mexico, especially to the 509th, where the activity seemed to be centered. The radar anomalies continued into the next night as Dan Wilmot, owner of a hardware store in Roswell, set up chairs on his front porch after dinner to watch the streaks of lightning flash across the sky in the distance. Shortly before ten that evening, the lightning grew more intense and the ground shook under the explosions of thunder from a summer storm that pounded the chaparral off in the northwest of the city. Dan and his wife watched the spectacle from beneath the dry safety of their porch roof. It was as if each new bolt of lightning were a spear that bent the heavens themselves. "Better than any Fourth of July fireworks, " the Wilmots must have been remarking as they watched in awe asa bright oval object streaked over their house and headed off into the northwest, sinking below a rise just before the horizon where it was engulfed in darkness. The sky again became pitch black. By the time the next bolt of lightning shot off", the object was gone. A most unusual sight, Dan Wilmot thought, but it was gone from his sight and gone from his thoughts, at least until the end of the week. Whatever it was that passed over the Wilmot house in Roswell also flew over Steve Robinson as he drove his milk truck along its route north of the city. Robinson tracked the object as it shot across the sky at speeds faster than any airplane he'd ever seen. It was a bright object, he noted, elliptical and solid rather than a sequence of lights like the military aircraft that flew in and out of the 509th airfield on the city's outskirts. It disappeared behind a tise off" in the west toward Albuquerque, and Steve put it out of his mind as he pushed forward on his route. To the civilians in Roswell, nothing was amiss. Summer thunder storms were common, the reports of flying saucers in the newspapers and over the radio were simply circus side show amusements, and an object streaking across the sky that so attracted the Wilmots' attention could have been nothing more than the shooting star you The Roswell Desert