Majestic (38 page)

"You get lost up a branch?" somebody asked.

"No."

Then I realized the truth. I must have been out all night. How could that be? Had I fished in some water of dreams?

"Thank the Lord you're all right," said Ann. Her eyes were hollow.

"Yeah. I took a damned good brookie."

They did not exactly shun me, but they looked at me out of the sides of their eyes. It developed that I had been gone for three days. I had reappeared fishing happily in water they had dragged ten times for my body.

I called Hilly.

"I'm fine," I said. "I was fishing some pretty isolated water."

"For three days, Will? What did you eat?"

"Pancakes," I blurted. "I had some buckwheats."

Why had I said that?

"Get back here," Hilly said. "We've got a hell of a lot of work to do."

"I'll be there as soon as I can."

I stopped in Roscoe at the taxidermist and left my fish. Then I drove back to Poughkeepsie and chartered a plane, which bounced me down to La Guardia Field, where I took an American Airlines DC-3 to Washington National Airport.

When I landed in Washington an agency car was waiting for me. I sat back in the plush of it and watched the sights pass, the memorials and the White House, the Washington Monument gleaming like bone in the middle morning.

Hilly sat reading a report and gnawing on a roast beef sandwich. "We're having our problems in China," he said, "and the President wants to know if Gromyko can be made a friend of the Marshall Plan, and the Dutch are screaming that the East Indies are going to go communist and there will be an election in Italy that we could buy for about twenty million. If we don't, communism crosses the Danube and France will go next. I can give you and your little men five minutes, Will." "Yes, sir."

"I want the detailed organizational plans for Majestic on this desk by the end of the week. No more sudden vacations, fish or no fish."

"It was a hell of a catch."

"I expect to see it mounted in your office." It remained there for forty years.

Now it hangs in the shadows of my living room, its varnish browned with time. But the shape of the fish is beautiful to see. It hangs there frozen in the moment of its perfect death.

Now that the shadows of the dead come close around me I have at last remembered.

Flights of angels came and we called them hordes of demons. The light of the soul shone upon us and we hid our faces. A chance was offered to every man to extend himself beyond the boundaries of Earth. In the interest of maintaining the integrity of the nation, we denied you this chance.

If they should return with their wonderful offering, do not turn away. There will be tests and dangers. But be of courage, for at some point they will hold out to you a little yellow flower! Take the flower.

Afterword

This novel is based on a factual reality that has been hidden and denied. I have used what little is known for certain of the crash of a so-called alien spacecraft near Roswell, New Mexico, in July of 1947 as the springboard for my story.

My vision of the others, their world, their motives and their objectives is based on my own understanding.

Where what I have seen with my own eyes departs from conventional wisdom, I have always trusted my personal observations.

Insofar as military and governmental involvement is concerned, I have adhered to the available facts as I understand them. Thanks to the kind assistance of UFO researcher William Moore, I was able to interview many of the witnesses still living in the Roswell area.

When Moore took me there, I found that he and researcher Stanton Friedman, who along with Jaime Shandera have investigated the whole story with meticulous expertise, were well known to the local people, and well respected for their honesty and thoroughness.

By contrast, none of the "debunkers" like aviation writer Philip J. Klass, who have made so many facile pronouncements about this case, had ever so much as interviewed these witnesses.

After spending considerable time in and around Roswell, and reviewing the extraordinary admissions concerning this matter, it seems virtually certain to me that a disk crashed and this fact became top secret.

This was done as part of what has become an elaborate process of "official secrecy and ridicule," as described by former CIA Director Roscoe Hillenkoetter in the New York Times of February 28,1960, quoted in the frontispiece of this book.

The Roswell Army Air Field issued an initial press release that announced that the debris of an alien spacecraft had been found. I have personally met and spoken with Walter Haut, the press officer who wrote this report. Colonel (then Major) Jesse Marcel was the intelligence officer who originally picked up the strange debris on the ranch of William "Mac" Brazel. In 1979, shortly before his death, Colonel Marcel had the courage to admit in a number of videotaped interviews that the debris he found was really from an apparent alien spacecraft, and that the Air Force had covered this up.

I have met and spoken with his son, Dr. Jesse Marcel, Jr. Dr. Marcel assured me that his father was of sound mind when he gave his 1979 interviews.

As in my book, General Ramey, the commanding general of the Eighth Air Force, held a press conference shortly after the recovery of the debris. He claimed, in effect, that a group of the nation's best intelligence officers had mistaken a commonplace radar target of a kind they saw every day for the remains of an unknown craft. Marcel was ordered to participate in this press conference, an act which his family and friends claim made him extremely unhappy.

The press accepted the general's statements.

In their writings, "debunkers" avoid mentioning Colonel Marcel's interviews, no doubt because they are the key to the case, and cannot be refuted except by making the patently ridiculous charge that this honorable military officer was a liar.

The colonel was asked if he thought what he had observed was the remains of a weather balloon.

He answered, "It was not. I was pretty well acquainted with most everything that was in the air at that time, both ours and foreign. I was also acquainted with virtually every type of weather-observation or tracking device being used by either the civilians or the military. It was definitely not a weather or tracking device, nor was it any sort of plane or missile. What it was we didn't know."

Marcel went on to describe what he had found. "There was all kinds of stuff - small beams about three-eighths or a half-inch square with some sort of hieroglyphics on them that nobody could decipher.

These looked something like balsa wood, and were of about the same weight, except that they were not wood at all. They were very hard, although flexible, and would not burn. There was a great deal of an unusual parchment-like substance which was brown in color and extremely strong, and a great number of small pieces of a metal like tinfoil, except that it wasn't tinfoil." Later "Mac" Brazel's daughter Bessie described the paper as having apparent flowers pressed in it.

Marcel took this material back to the base. He was so far from thinking that it might become a security issue that he stopped at home to show some of it to his son, who was then eleven. Dr. Marcel remembers the incident well and has described the material he saw to me.

If the major had actually mistaken the remains of a commonplace device for those of an alien spacecraft, and caused this information to become public, surely his career would have suffered. But it did not suffer. Far from it. Later he was transferred from Roswell to Washington, D.C., where he worked on the Air Force program that eventually detected the fact that the Soviets had exploded an atomic bomb.

In other words, after he found the debris and reported on it publicly, he was transferred from the 509th into the most important intelligence project that the Air Force was then pursuing. Far from being discredited, he continued to be held in the highest regard by the Air Force.

He reached the rank of colonel before retiring from a successful career.

That the cover-up has remained intact is astonishing, considering the existence of the Marcel interviews, and the statements CIA Director Hillenkoetter has made.

Interestingly, Admiral Hillenkoetter joined a prominent UFO organization after his 1960 admission of the cover-up. Later, on resigning from the group, he made an extraordinary declaration: "I know the UFOs are not U.S. or Soviet devices. All we can do now is wait for some action by the UFOs. The Air Force cannot do any more under the circumstances. It has been a difficult assignment for them, and I believe we should not continue to criticize their investigations."

Despite all this the "debunkers" are still taken seriously by the press and among scientists. In their refutations of the Roswell incident, they concentrate on rancher Brazel's testimony. After a week of being held in isolation by Air Force officials, in total contravention of his Constitutional rights, Mr. Brazel very understandably said that he was sorry that he'd ever shown the debris to authorities. Family members feel that he was coerced. It seems clear that he was forced to provide the government with support for its cover-up, and that his coerced testimony has been used by "debunkers" with close governmental ties.

In any case, Mr. Brazel was not a qualified observer. He knew nothing about radar targets and such. Major Marcel, the one professional who has spoken out, stated that the debris was of unknown origin.

The truth must be faced: this careful, professional man did not misidentify anything. When General Ramey told his press conference that the remains were of a weather balloon or radar target, he was, quite simply, lying on behalf of national security. This was the beginning of the cover-up that has remained in place to this day.

What happened in Roswell remains a deep, dark national secret over forty years later. Fantastically, despite all the obvious proof to the contrary, the fiction that the others don't exist is rigorously maintained as official policy and generally accepted by the scientific establishment.

It is time for our serious investigative reporters to wake up and do some digging into this matter. If they did so, they would soon discover the hollowness and the propagandistic nature of the "debunker's" assertions.

The apparent appearance of someone else in our midst - a marvelous event by any ordinary estimate - has ended up as an ugly secret and a source of nasty journalistic humor, irrational denial and sleazy sensationalism.

I do not wish, by this book, to create the impression that I am asserting that the others are aliens from another planet.

What I am saying, very specifically, is that they are an apparently intelligent unknown. That is all I am saying, and that is all that presently can be said.

The truth, if known, is held secret. I would be very surprised indeed if the government had the least understanding of the others. If what I am beginning to discover about them is correct, real understanding will change our most basic ideas about the nature of reality.

What secrets the government does possess must be opened to the light of common life. Only then will we be on our way at last to understanding the mystery that has appeared among us.

Despite all policy and no matter with whom it originated, our government must now take a calculated risk -

perhaps even defy the others themselves - and officially admit that they are real.

When this is done we will finally begin to gain insight into what is happening to us.

It is time for the truth to be told.

- Whitley Strieber

Table of Contents

MAJESTIC

Whitley Strieber

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS NEW YORK

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Part One

THE FIELD OF BONES

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Part Two

THE LOST SHIP

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Eighteen

Part Three

CONGRESS OF LIES

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three

Chapter Twenty-four

Part Four

THE FLOWER

Chapter Twenty-five

Chapter Twenty-six