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However, finding the crash site didn't take long. A group of Indian artifact hunters camping in the scrub brush north of Roswell had also seen the pulsating light overhead, heard a hurtling hiss and the strange, ground shaking "thunk" of a crash nearby in the distance, and followed the sound to a group of low hills just over arise. Before they even inspected the smoking wreckage, they radioed the crash site location into Sheriff" Wilcox's office, which dispatched the fire department to a spot about thirty-seven miles north and west of the city. "I'm already on my way, " he told the radio operator at the firehouse, who also called the city police for an escort. And by about four-thirty that morning, a single pumper and police car were bouncing through the desert taking Pine Lodge Road west to where Sheriff Wilcox had directed them. Neither the sheriff nor the fire department knew that a military retrieval team was also on its way to the site with orders to secure the location and, by any means necessary, prevent the unauthorized dissemination of any information about the crash. It was still dark when, from another direction, Steve Arnold, riding shotgun in one of the staff cars in the convoy of recovery vehicles from the 509th, reached the crash site first. Even before their trucks rolled into position, an MP lieutenant from the first jeep posted a picket of sentries, and an engineer ordered his unit to string a series of floodlights around the area. Then Arnold's car pulled up, and he got his own first glimpse of the wreckage. But it wasn't really wreckage at all - not in the way he'd seen plane crashes during the war. From what he could make out through the purple darkness, the dark skinned craft seemed mostly intact and had lost no large pieces. Sure, there were bits and pieces of debris all over the area, but the aircraft itself hadn't broken apart on impact the way a normal airplane would. And the whole scene was still shrouded in darkness. Then, the staff cars and jeeps that had accompanied the trucks lined up head on to the crash and threw their headlights against the arroyo to supplement the floodlights that were still being strung by the engineers. In the sudden intersecting beams of headlights, Arnold could see that, indeed, the soft cornered delta shaped eggshell type of craft was essentially in one piece, even though it had embedded its nose hard into the embankment of the arroyo with its tail high in the air. Heat was still rising off the debris even though, according to the base radar at the 509th, the crash probably took place before midnight on the 4th. Then Arnold heard the brief sizzle of a battery charging up and the hum of a gasoline generator. That's when the string of lights came up, and the whole site suddenly looked like a baseball field before a big night game. In the stark light of the military searchlights, Arnold saw the entire landscape of the crash. He thought it looked more like a crash landing because the craft was intact except for a split seam running lengthwise along the side and the steep forty-five-plus-degree angle of the craft's incline. He assumed it was a craft, even though it was like no airplane he'd ever seen. It was small, but it looked more like the flying wing shape of an old Curtis than an ellipse or a saucer. And it had two tail fins on the top sides of the delta's feet that pointed up and out. He angled himself as close to the split seam of the craft as he could get without stepping in front of the workers in hazardous material suits who were checking the site for radiation, and that was when he saw them in the shadow. Little dark gray figures - maybe four, four and a half feet in length - sprawled across the ground. "Are those people?" Arnold heard someone say as medics rushed up with stretchers to the knife like laceration along the side of the craft through which the bodies had either crawled or tumbled. Arnold looked around the perimeter of light and saw another figure, motionless but menacing nevertheless, and another leaning against a small rise in the desert sand. There was a fifth figure near the opening of the craft. As radiation technicians gave the all clear and medics ran to the bodies with stretchers, Arnold sneaked a look through the rip in the aircraft and stared out through the top. Jehosaphat! It looked like the sun was already up. Just to make sure, Steve Arnold looked around the outside again and, sure enough, it was still too dark to call it daylight. But through the top of the craft, as if he were looking through a lens, Arnold could see an eerie stream of light, not daylight or lamplight, but light nevertheless. He'd never seen anything like that before and thought that maybe this was a weapon the Russians or somebody else had developed. The scene at the crash site was a microcosm of chaos. Technicians with specific tasks, such as medics, hazardous material sweepers, signalmen and radio operators, and sentries were carrying out their jobs as methodically and unthinkingly as if they were the Emperor Ming's brainwashed furnace stoking zombies from the Flash Gordon serials. But everyone else, including the officers, were simply awestruck. They'd never seen anything like this before, and they stood there, overpowered, it seemed, by simply a general sense of amazement that would not let them out of its grip. "Hey, this one's alive, " Arnold heard, and turned around to see one of the little figures struggling on the ground. With the rest of the medics, he ran over to it and watched as it shuddered and made a crying sound that echoed not in the air but in his brain. He heard nothing through his ears, but felt an overwhelming sense of sadness as the little figure convulsed on the ground, its oversized egg shaped skull flipping from side to side as if it was trying to gasp for something to breathe. That's when he heard the sentry shout, "Hey, you!" and turned back to the shallow rise opposite the arroyo.