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And with that | held up the first of the army's 1947 sketches of the night viewer we pulled from the wreckage at Roswell. | handed it across to Dr. Fredericks, who looked at it and turned it around with his fingertips as if he were holding one of the Dead Sea Scrolls. "At the time, nobody, "| told him. "According to the field report, they found this in the sand near one of the bodies." "Bodies? At the Roswell crash?" Now he was completely incredulous. "General Trudeau didn't tell anyone about bodies. " "No, that's true, "| said. "That's not information we give out. General Trudeau authorized me to answer any questions you have up to a certain level of security classification. " "But we're close, "| suggested. "| can talk about the device, talk about where it was found, but that's probably as far as | can go myself. If General Trudeau wants to give a background briefing and authorizes me to do so, then | can go deeper." "Funny, but | always thought Roswell was a kind of legend. You know, they found something but maybe it was Russian, " Dr. Fredericks said. Then he asked again if anyone at the Roswell retrieval had actually seen any of the creatures wearing the night vision device in the sketches. "No, "| said. "There was a lot of debris that spilled out of the craft. The soldiers on the retrieval team looked through one of the seams that had been split open running along the craft's lengthwise axis and they saw view ports built into the hull. Well, what astonished them was that when they looked through the view ports, they could see daylight, or a greenish, hazy kind of diffused light that looked like dusk, but outside it was completely dark." "No one at the crash site knew anything about the night viewers the Germans were developing during the war, "| explained. "So even the officers on the retrieval team were amazed at what they were seeing. When they autopsied the alien at the 509th and pulled off these 'eyepieces,' is the only word | can use for them, they realized that they were a complicated set of reflectors that gathered all the available light and turned them into night time image intensifiers. "| continued, pointing to the sketch in Paul Fredericks's hands. "Some medical officer tried to look through it down a darkened hall and it made the images stand out, but nothing was ever done with it and they packed it away with the rest of the alien. " "Some, "| told him. "But they had no facilities at the 509th and had to wait until they brought it back to Wright. It wasn't until the intelligence boys at the Air Materiel Command got hold of it that they realized that this was something the Germans were trying to deploy." "Yes, sir, "| said. "Not even close. And that's what got the intelligence people at Wright so concerned. Just how close were the Germans about to get when the war ended? What else had they gotten their hands on? Did they have help?" "And if the Germans could get their hands on this material, wnat about the Soviets?" he asked. But he was talking to himself now, talking in a way that made him sound as if he were really thinking out loud. "Why not the Chinese or any of our European allies? Just how much of this stuff is out there?" he finally asked me. "We don't have any of those answers, "| told him. "At least not those of us in the army. And for obvious reasons nobody's walking around sharing this information back and forth among the services or with any other agencies. We have what we have, and that's as far as we're willing to go. " 57 "You don't have to be so careful with it, Dr. Fredericks, "| said. "| made a few thermal copies. " "Do you have the actual device?" he asked. "Back at the Pentagon." "Who was wearing this?" he continued. "We're not there yet, " Dr. Fredericks asked and asserted at the same time. Paul Fredericks was on the edge of his seat now. "Did they perform any analysis on this when they brought it back?" Fredericks asked. "But this is far more sophisticated, " Dr. Fredericks said. "The Germans weren't even close to something like this. " "Or, " Dr. Fredericks said very slowly, "did they find a crash just like we found?" "That's exactly the point, Dr. Fredericks, "| said. "What did they find?"