Diablo Mesa(16)
“When we get there, I want you to take charge and establish your authority in a nice, easy way. I’ll remain in the background.”
“Yes, sir.” Her nervousness increased.
Like all rookie agents, Corrie had been assigned a mentor for her first two years, someone to supervise her cases and make sure she didn’t screw up. When she first met Morwood, she had not been impressed. The supervisory special agent was approaching fifty, a plain man in a blue suit, balding, with a stock of forgettable ties and a dry manner. The only surprising thing about him was the confiscated Nissan pickup truck he used as his G-ride, with its racing stripes and giant decal of a Chinese dragon emblazoned across the side and hood. He joked that it allowed him to go around incognito.
Early on, his cool manner and devotion to the rule book had put her off. But over time, she’d realized he genuinely had her best interests at heart and was, in fact, a very fine agent—even while the reason he’d given up a stellar field career to supervise new hires remained an endless source of conjecture among the junior agents. While the two would never have anything approaching a friendship, it was, at least, a relationship of mutual respect and even regard.
Another brief silence, and then Morwood asked: “So. What do you know about the Roswell Incident?”
“Not much beyond what I read on the internet last night. It didn’t make a lot of sense.” Corrie had spent hours reading and taking notes, astonished by the mass of contradictory and bizarre information. Apparently it was one of those things, like the Kennedy assassination, that drew conspiracy theorists like moths to a flame.
Morwood chuckled. “More like nonsense. How did your friend Nora Kelly get involved in this?”
“I’ve no idea. And I wouldn’t actually call her a friend. More like a colleague.”
“The Roswell Incident,” Morwood said after a moment, “is actually pretty banal—once you strip away the layers of conspiracies. What’s known for sure is that something crashed in a remote section of J. B. Foster’s ranch in July 1947. The land had been leased by the rancher from the BLM, Department of the Interior—making it federal land. The ranch foreman was said to have found a bunch of silvery material, along with a disk and other strange stuff. The foreman called the sheriff, who called the Roswell Army Air Field and spoke to one Major Jesse Marcell. The RAAF command went out to the site, allegedly collected everything, and issued a hasty and poorly written press release that spoke of a crashed ‘disk.’ That generated a front-page story in the Roswell Daily Record with the headline: RAAF CAPTURES FLYING SAUCER ON RANCH IN ROSWELL REGION. A day later the RAAF quickly issued another press release contradicting the first and insisting it was nothing more than the wreckage of a weather balloon. And then the story simply sank from sight.”
“But it somehow got revived?”
“Yes. In the late seventies, interest in UFOs went through the roof and people began to focus once again on the Roswell Incident. The two contradictory press releases gave the impression of a government cover-up, and that, of course, fired up everyone’s imagination. By this time, the recollections of those involved had faded—or become exaggerated. There were also plenty of opportunists who leapt onto the story looking to make a buck. In 1980, a book called The Roswell Incident came out, and that really set the story on fire. It claimed there had been a massive conspiracy to cover up the fact that a UFO had crashed and that alien bodies and technology had been recovered. More books followed, including one by a retired lieutenant colonel named Philip Corso. In his book, Corso actually claimed to have been in charge of a storehouse of alien artifacts and bodies recovered from the crash. He said that some of the key inventions of the modern age—lasers, computer chips, fiber optics—had come from reverse engineering the alien technology.” He shook his head. “People just ate it up. The thing is, they were right on one level: there was a government cover-up. Only it wasn’t of a UFO crash.”
“What was it?”
“In 1994, the government produced an official report on the Roswell Incident that finally explained what really happened. It wasn’t a weather balloon, after all, but a classified nuclear-test monitoring device sent aloft that crashed. Part of a secret program called Project Mogul. The device had a large dish that acted as a radar reflector, for tracking purposes. To cover up the true nature of the device, the government insisted it was a weather balloon and did nothing to tamp down stories of a UFO. But by that point, the conspiracy theorists had already put such a huge investment into the UFO theory that this report seemed like just another effort at covering up. And then, there was the crazy theory promoted in a book published a few years ago, Area 51.”
“I’ve heard of that one.”
“It rejected the alien theory entirely. It said the crash was a Soviet disinformation effort, in which deformed children who looked like aliens were put in a bizarre aircraft and sent over the North Pole to crash in North America. The idea was to trigger hysteria over fears of an alien invasion. Taking a page from the Orson Welles playbook, with his War of the Worlds broadcast.”
“That’s nuts.”
“Even crazier than a UFO, if such a thing is possible.”
“If you don’t mind me asking, sir: How did you learn so much about Roswell?”
Morwood was silent for a moment, then shook his head in a rueful way. “Back in the late nineties, when I was a rookie agent just like you, I was ghosted by a man named Mickey Starr. He was an upstanding guy, a real brick agent.”