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Authors: Philip J. Corso
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door, and stared at me until
I followed them out. “Not too much time, Colonel, ”
General Trudeau called after me as we went out the door and down the
hall.
I remember I spent quite a while just looking at that cabinet
after it was loaded off the dolly and set up in my inner office. There
was an almost ominous quality to it that belied its quiet, official
army presence. So I must confess that, given the reverse hype of the
general’s introduction, part of me wanted to tear it open
right away as if it were a present on Christmas morning. But the part
of me that won just let it sit there, protected, until I thought about
what General Trudeau had said about Roswell and the amount of paper
work that had circulated through the White House when I was on the
National Security staff there. No, I wasn’t going to review
the Roswell files. Not just yet. Not until I took a long hard look at
what was inside this file cabinet. But even that was going to wait
until the rest of my office was set up. Whatever I was supposed to do,
I wanted to do it right.
I spent a little time pacing around my new office while I
thought some more about what the general said, why this file was
waiting for me in his private office, and why he had wanted to talk to
me specifically about it. It also wasn’t lost on me that I
had not seen one scrap of paper from the general covering his delivery
of the material to me nor my receipt of it. It could have just as
easily been that this file cabinet didn’t even exist. As far
as I knew, only his eyes and soon my eyes would review it. So whatever
it was, it was serious and, only if by omission, very secret.
I remembered a hot July night fourteen years before at Fort
Riley when I was the young intelligence officer after having just been
shipped back from Rome. I remembered being hustled into a storage
hangar by one of the sentries, a fellow member of the Fort Riley
bowling team. What he pointed to under the thick olive tarp that night
was also very, very secret, and I held my breath, hoping that what was
inside this cabinet wasn’t anything like what I saw that
night in Kansas, July 6, 1947.
I opened the cabinet, and almost immediately my heart sank. I
knew, from looking at the shoebox of tangled wires and the strange
cloth, from the vise-like headpiece and the little wafers that looked
like Ritz crackers only with broken edges and colored a dark
gray, and from an assortment or other items that I couldn’t
even relate to the shapes and sixes of things I was familiar with, that
my life was headed for a big change. Back in Kansas that night in July,
I told myself that I was seeing an illusion, something that if I wished
real hard, didn’t have to exist for me. Then, after I went to
the White House and saw all the National Security Council memos
describing the “incident” and talking about the
“package” and the “goods, ” I
knew that the strange figure I’d seen floating in liquid in a
casket within a casket at Fort Riley wasn’t just a bad dream
I could forget about. Nor could I forget about the radar anomalies at
the Red Canyon missile range or the strange alerts over Ramstein air
base in West Germany. I only hoped all of it would never catch up with
me again and I could go through the rest of my army career in some kind
of peace. But it was not to be. There, mangled like somebody
else’s junk, were the trinkets I knew would involve me in
something deeper than I had ever wanted. Whatever else I had to do in
this life, here was a job that would change it all.
You know how in the movies when Bud Abbott would open a
closet, see the dead body hanging there, close the closet door, open it
up again, and find the body gone? That’s what I actually did
with the file cabinet. Nobody was there to see me, or so I believed, so
I opened it, closed it, opened it again. But this was no movie and the
stuff was still there.
So here it was, some of the material they’d
recovered from Roswell. And now, just
I followed them out. “Not too much time, Colonel, ”
General Trudeau called after me as we went out the door and down the
hall.
I remember I spent quite a while just looking at that cabinet
after it was loaded off the dolly and set up in my inner office. There
was an almost ominous quality to it that belied its quiet, official
army presence. So I must confess that, given the reverse hype of the
general’s introduction, part of me wanted to tear it open
right away as if it were a present on Christmas morning. But the part
of me that won just let it sit there, protected, until I thought about
what General Trudeau had said about Roswell and the amount of paper
work that had circulated through the White House when I was on the
National Security staff there. No, I wasn’t going to review
the Roswell files. Not just yet. Not until I took a long hard look at
what was inside this file cabinet. But even that was going to wait
until the rest of my office was set up. Whatever I was supposed to do,
I wanted to do it right.
I spent a little time pacing around my new office while I
thought some more about what the general said, why this file was
waiting for me in his private office, and why he had wanted to talk to
me specifically about it. It also wasn’t lost on me that I
had not seen one scrap of paper from the general covering his delivery
of the material to me nor my receipt of it. It could have just as
easily been that this file cabinet didn’t even exist. As far
as I knew, only his eyes and soon my eyes would review it. So whatever
it was, it was serious and, only if by omission, very secret.
I remembered a hot July night fourteen years before at Fort
Riley when I was the young intelligence officer after having just been
shipped back from Rome. I remembered being hustled into a storage
hangar by one of the sentries, a fellow member of the Fort Riley
bowling team. What he pointed to under the thick olive tarp that night
was also very, very secret, and I held my breath, hoping that what was
inside this cabinet wasn’t anything like what I saw that
night in Kansas, July 6, 1947.
I opened the cabinet, and almost immediately my heart sank. I
knew, from looking at the shoebox of tangled wires and the strange
cloth, from the vise-like headpiece and the little wafers that looked
like Ritz crackers only with broken edges and colored a dark
gray, and from an assortment or other items that I couldn’t
even relate to the shapes and sixes of things I was familiar with, that
my life was headed for a big change. Back in Kansas that night in July,
I told myself that I was seeing an illusion, something that if I wished
real hard, didn’t have to exist for me. Then, after I went to
the White House and saw all the National Security Council memos
describing the “incident” and talking about the
“package” and the “goods, ” I
knew that the strange figure I’d seen floating in liquid in a
casket within a casket at Fort Riley wasn’t just a bad dream
I could forget about. Nor could I forget about the radar anomalies at
the Red Canyon missile range or the strange alerts over Ramstein air
base in West Germany. I only hoped all of it would never catch up with
me again and I could go through the rest of my army career in some kind
of peace. But it was not to be. There, mangled like somebody
else’s junk, were the trinkets I knew would involve me in
something deeper than I had ever wanted. Whatever else I had to do in
this life, here was a job that would change it all.
You know how in the movies when Bud Abbott would open a
closet, see the dead body hanging there, close the closet door, open it
up again, and find the body gone? That’s what I actually did
with the file cabinet. Nobody was there to see me, or so I believed, so
I opened it, closed it, opened it again. But this was no movie and the
stuff was still there.
So here it was, some of the material they’d
recovered from Roswell. And now, just
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