The Day After Roswell

Carl Miller

Active Member
Messages
980
“Major Corso, “ a voice hissed out of the darkness. It had an edge of terror and excitement to it.
“What the hell are you doing in there, Brownie?” I began cussing out the figure that peeked out at me from behind the door. “Have you gone off your rocker?” He was supposed to be outside the building, not hiding in a doorway. It was a breach of duty.
“You don’t understand, Major, “ he whispered again. “You have to see this. “
“Better be good, “ I said as I walked over to where he was standing and waited for him outside the door. “Now you get out here where I can see you, “ I ordered.
Brown popped his head out from behind the door.

“You know what’s in here?” he asked.
Whatever was going on, I didn’t want to play any games. The post duty sheet for that night read that the veterinary building was off-limits to everyone. Not even the sentries were allowed inside because whatever had been loaded in had been classified as “No Access.“ What was Brown doing on the inside? “Brownie, you know you’re not supposed to be in there, “ I said. “Get out here and tell me what’s going on. “
He stepped out from inside the door, and even through the shadow I could see that his face was a dead pale, just as if he’d seen a ghost. “You won’t believe this, “ he said. “I don’t believe it and I just saw it. “
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“The guys who off-loaded those deuce-and-a-halfs, “ he said. “They told us they brought these boxes up from Fort Bliss from some accident out in New Mexico?”
“Yeah, so what?” I was getting impatient with this.
“Well, they told us it was all top secret but they looked inside anyway. Everybody down there did when they were loading the trucks. MPs were walking around with sidearms and even the officers were standing guard, “ Brown said. “But the guys who loaded the trucks said they looked inside the boxes and didn’t believe what they saw. You got security clearance, Major. You can come in here. “
In fact, I was the post duty officer and could go anywhere I wanted during the watch. So I walked inside the old veterinary building, the medical dispensary for the cavalry horses before the First World War, and saw where the cargo from the convoy had been stacked up. There was no one in the building except for Bill Brown and myself. “What is all this stuff?” I asked.
“That’s just it, Major, nobody knows, “ he said. “The drivers told us it came from a plane crash out in the desert somewhere around the 509th. But when they looked inside, it was nothing like anything they’d seen before. Nothing from this planet. “
It was the silliest thing I’d ever heard, enlisted men’s tall stories that floated from base to base getting more inflated every lap around the track. Maybe I wasn’t the world’s smartest guy, but I had enough engineering and intelligence schooling to pick my way around pieces of wreckage and come up with two plus two. We walked over to the tarpaulin shrouded boxes, and I threw back the edge of the canvas. “You’re not supposed to be in here, “ I told Brownie. “You better go. “
“I’ll watch outside for you, Major. “
I almost wanted to tell him that that’s what he was supposed to be doing all along instead of snooping into classified material, but I did what I used to do best and kept my mouth shut. I waited while he took up his position at the door to the building before I dug any further into the boxes. There were about thirty-odd wooden crates nailed shut and stacked together against the far wall the building. The light switches were the push type and I didn’t know which switch tripped which circuit, so I used my flashlight and stumbled around until my eyes got used to the darkness and shadows. I didn’t want to start pulling apart the nails, so I set the flashlight off to one side where it could throw light on the stack and then searched for a box that could open easily. Then I found an oblong box off to one side with a wide seam under the top that looked like it had been already opened. It looked like either the strangest weapons crate you’d ever see or the smallest shipping crate for a coffin. Maybe this was the box that Brownie had seen. I brought the flashlight over and set it up high on the wall so it would throw as broad a beam as possible. Then I set to work on the crate.

The top was already loose. I was right - this one had just been opened. I jimmied the top back and forth, continuing to loosen the nails that had been pried up with a nail claw, until I felt them come out of the wood. Then I worked along the sides of the five-or-so-foot box until the top was loose all the way around. Not knowing which end of the box was the front, I picked up the top and slid it off to the edge. Then I lowered the flashlight, looked inside, and my stomach rolled right up into my throat and I almost became sick right then and there. Whatever they’d crated this way, it was a coffin, but not like any coffin I’d seen before. The contents, enclosed in a thick glass container, were submerged in a thick light blue liquid, almost as heavy as a gelling solution of diesel fuel. But the object was floating, actually suspended, and not sitting on the bottom with a fluid overtop, and it was soft and shiny as the underbelly of a fish. At first I thought it was a dead child they were shipping somewhere. But this was no child. It was a four-foot human shaped figure with arms, bizarrelooking four-fingered hands - I didn’t see a thumb - thin legs and feet, and an oversized incandescent lightbulb shaped head that looked like it was floating over a balloon gondola for a chin. I know I must have cringed at first, but then I had the urge to pull off the top of the liquid container and touch the pale gray skin. But I couldn’t tell whether it was skin because it also looked like a very thin one-piece head-to-toe fabric covering the creature’s flesh. Its eyeballs must have been rolled way back in its head because I couldn’t see any pupils or iris or anything that resembled a human eye. But the eye sockets themselves were oversized and almond shaped and pointed down to its tiny nose, which didn’t really protrude from the skull. It was more like the tiny nose of a baby that never grew as the child grew, and it was mostly nostril. The creature’s skull was over grown to the point where all of its facial features - such as they were - were arranged absolutely frontally, occupying only a small circle on the lower part of the head. The protruding ears of a human were nonexistent, its cheeks had no definition, and there were no eyebrows or any indications of facial hair. The creature had only a tiny flat slit for a mouth and it was completely closed, resembling more of a crease or indentation between the nose and the bottom of the chinless skull than a fully functioning orifice. I would find out years later how it communicated, but at that moment in Kansas, I could only stand there in shock over the clearly non-human face suspended in front of me in a semi-liquid preservative. I could see no damage to the creature’s body and no indication that it had been involved in any accident. There was no blood, its limbs seemed intact, and I could find no lacerations on the skin or through the gray fabric. I looked through the crate encasing the container of liquid for any paperwork or shipping invoice or anything that would describe the nature or origin of this thing. What I found was an intriguing Army Intelligence document describing the creature as an inhabitant of a craft that had crash landed in Roswell, New Mexico, earlier that week and a routing manifest for this creature to the login officer at the Air Materiel Command at Wright Field and from him to the Walter Reed Army Hospital morgue’s pathology section where, I supposed, the creature would be autopsied and stored. It was not a document I was meant to see, for sure, so I tucked it back in the envelope against the inside wall of the crate. I allowed myself more time to look at the creature than I should have, I suppose, because that night I missed the time checks on the rest of my rounds and believed I’d have to come up with a pretty good explanation for the lateness of my other stops to verify the sentry assignments. But what I was looking at was worth any trouble I’d get into the next day. This thing was truly fascinating and at the same time utterly horrible. It challenged every conception I had, and I hoped against hope that I was looking at some form of atomic human mutation. I knew I couldn’t ask anybody about it, and because I hoped I would never see its like again, I came up with explanation after explanation for its existence, despite what I’d read on the enclosed document: It was shipped here from Hiroshima, it was the result of a Nazi genetic experiment, it was a dead circus freak, it was anything but what I knew it said it was - what it had to be: an extraterrestrial. I slid the top of the crate back over the creature, knocked the nails loosely into their original holes with the butt end of my flashlight, and put the tarp back in position. Then I left the building and hoped I could close the door forever on what I’d seen. Just forget it, I told myself. You weren’t supposed to see it and maybe you can live your whole life without ever having to think about it. Maybe. Once outside the building I rejoined Brownie at his post. “You know you never saw this, “ I said. “And you tell no one. “


The Day After Roswell- by Phillip Corso
 

Top