Majestic by Whitley Strieber Read Free Book Online Page B

just twenty-four months since the U.S. had used such weapons against Japan, and the prospect of those good machines taking wing for Moscow was an immediate and fascinating possibility.
    What the hell were those bombers doing in New Mexico, the chiefs of staff asked. Move them to Europe, give them a straight shot at the Kremlin.
    One thing was certain, and that was that the 509th was ready. Every pilot had thousands of bomber hours.
    Every one was a combat veteran, many from both the European and Pacific theaters. Everybody had clearances, even the cooks and janitors. The intelligence group was superb, the best air intelligence officers in the Army Air Force. Arguably theirs was the most sensitive command of its kind in the Army, and maybe in the world.
    When I met some of those pilots I did not particularly like them. I doubt if there are twenty of them left; the ones I met ferried the debris found on the Ungar ranch to Eighth Air Force HQ in Fort Worth.
    They would not allow me to use their names. One of them wouldn't even admit what he'd seen. "It was a crashed saucer," the other told me.
    Their fear was remarkable. Later, I would find out the extraordinary reason that the cover-up has been so effective, the reason that so many people are so afraid to reveal what they know.
    I must not promote the notion that a bunch of brainless military oafs were responsible for what went wrong.
    They were good men, all of them.
    Perhaps their situation was simply a hopeless one. Maybe Will Stone and his generation were bound to fail.
    When he speaks of those days Will actually becomes queasy, so urgent is his wish to undo basic mistakes
    . . . and yet there is something so poignant and so profoundly human about why they failed.
    July 8, 1947, was a hot, still afternoon over most of the country. It got up to a hundred and two in Roswell, up to eighty-six in Washington. While Will worked on his Flying Disk Estimate in his stifling hole, the Maricopa sheriffs office got into contact with the Roswell AAF.
    At Roswell Army Air Field the Intelligence staff killed time in its office on the base.
    Major Donald Gray was reading Plato's Ion, to the amusement of the soldiers in his command. Lieutenant Peter Hesseltine was delighted by Gray's taste for the classics. For his birthday he'd given the major a copy of Be Glad You're Neurotic. Hesseltine had meant it as a commentary on Gray's literary obsession, but the major had been grateful. He'd obviously enjoyed the book, quoting from it at length. The lieutenant came to feel he'd wasted his two dollars.
    He wanted to needle the major about the Plato, but he was no longer sure quite how to do it.
    "You've got sex on the brain," he said by way of experiment.
    "Yep."
    "I'll bet that book's full of it."
    "Nope. There's a bit of sex in Plato. Not a lot. You might be interested in it though. Your kind of thing." "All sex is my kind of thing, Major." Gray put the book down and looked at Hesseltine with an innocence that the younger man had come to fear. "Then the fact that it concerns the ethics of men becoming involved with boys won't put you off." He returned to his book.
    Hesseltine hadn't been expecting this and was silenced by it.
    An airman came into their office with a message. Far away in Washington a completely unsuspecting Wilfred Stone was in that moment snared in a thin and impregnable web. He scribbled away at his desk, filling sheets of legal paper that I have held in my hands. His original draft of the first "disk estimate" is now brittle and edged with rot. Will's hand is firm, full of young and very American confidence.
    While Will wrote, events in Roswell continued to unfold. "A rancher reports debris in his pasture," the airman said aloud.
    "Beer bottles? Condoms?" asked Hesseltine. He was drinking a Coke, and had a technical manual open on his desk before him. He had been memorizing the ranges of various Russian radars, and before the Plato episode had been in a self-congratulatory mood.