LITMIR.BIZ

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      “I said, Commander, do we understand one another?”

      It was all real. The UFO. The conspiracies.

      The threats.

      “Sir. Yes, sir,” Hunter replied.

      There was no option but to play along.

       CHAPTER TWO

      I can assure you the flying saucers, given that they exist, are not constructed by any power on Earth.

      PRESIDENT HARRY S. TRUMAN, 1950

       22 September 1947

       HE RATTLED THE papers in his hand. “This is horseshit, Roscoe!”

       “Maybe so, Mr. President,” Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter replied. “But it’s damned critical horseshit. We need to know what’s happening here.”

       “Yes, but … flying saucers? Little green men from Mars?” He dropped the report dismissively on his desk. “Show me! I’m from Missouri.”

       “So am I, Mr. President. And you’ve seen the reports out of Wright Field.”

       Roscoe Hillenkoetter had been the director of the Central Intelligence Group since May of this year … before that he’d been the director of Central Intelligence, as well. And as of four days ago, with the National Security Act and the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency, he was the director of that, too, the Central Intelligence Agency’s very first.

      For Hillenkoetter, the world had become a very different place in the last few months, much more uncertain, much stranger, much scarier ever since something had crashed in the desert outside of a town called Roswell, New Mexico. He’d only been head of the CIG for two months at that point.

       What a hell of a way to kick things off.

       But he was one of the few men who’d been in the know almost from the beginning—not to mention one of the men who’d been trying to shut down the rampant rumors and speculation coming out of New Mexico since early July.

      “Yes,” Truman said. “But I don’t like it. Who are these things, these creatures anyway? What are they doing in our airspace? Why the hell are they here? Is it an invasion?”

       “Mr. President, I just wish to hell I knew.”

       The wreckage from the desert crash site had been gathered up and shipped to Wright Field outside of Dayton, Ohio. Wright Field was the location of the Air Force’s T-2 Intelligence Department—formerly the Technical Data Laboratory created in 1942—the place where captured German aircraft had been shipped after the war to see what made them tick. Now they were being tasked with the same for whatever this thing was. Whether they would be able to make anything out of the debris remained to be seen.

      They also had several bodies from the crash on ice. Hillenkoetter shuddered at the memory. He’d seen them. Those creatures had not been human.

       A number of reports had come out of T-2 since July of that year, including the one Truman had just mentioned. The crash wreckage did not incorporate technology known to any nation or group on Earth, and was therefore almost certainly extraterrestrial in origin. Mars was the popularly assumed origin of the craft and its diminutive crew, though the planet Venus was sometimes bandied about as an alternative. In fact, nothing was known about the craft’s origins or capability, and that single, simple statement was terrifying in its implications. Somebody, no one knew who, was able to travel to Earth from God knew where, enter US airspace with impunity, and outrun or outmaneuver the best combat aircraft in the US inventory.

       What was even worse was the fact that these extraterrestrials had been here for years before 1947. The US government had even recovered wreckage from one after the so-called Battle of Los Angeles in early 1942, and from Cape Girardeau, Missouri, the year before that.

      And there were rumors, originating with the German scientists of Operation Paperclip, that a ship had crashed in Germany back in 1936 or 1939—the stories differed—and that some of the amazing technology coming out of the Third Reich during the war had been due to back-engineering technology from recovered vehicles. Alien vehicles.

       “Okay, Roscoe,” Truman said. “According to this report you’ve just submitted, you want to create a kind of scientific committee to study these crashed saucers. That right?”

       “Yes, Mr. President.”

       “Who do you suggest we approach?”

       “There’s a list appended at the end, sir. Vannevar Bush, certainly. And the new secretary of defense.”

       “James Forrestal? Okay.”

       “General Vandenberg, of course.” Hoyt Vandenberg had been the second director of central intelligence before Hillenkoetter, and had been the duputy commander in chief for the US Army Air Forces.

       Truman leafed ahead to the list of suggested names. “Okay. I’ve got it. And the upshot of all this is to create a group to recover crashed saucers?”

      “In part, yes, sir. We know that these … people aren’t perfect. Sometimes their aircraft crash. One, maybe two in Germany before the war. One in New Mexico. One in Missouri. The one we shot down over Los Angeles in ’42. When they crash, we need to be able to dispatch teams to cordon off the area, and keep civilians out. We need to recover the wreckage, as we did at Roswell, and move it to a safe location. We need to have engineers and scientists, good engineers and scientists, who can learn all they can from the debris, and see how we can use it.”

       “You mean build our own flying saucers …”

      Hillenkoetter shrugged. “Maybe. We know the Germans were working on that.” He’d seen the drawings and schematics for the Nazi Haunebu I, II, and III. The Allies had come so damned close to losing, closer than any man on the street was aware.

       Some things simply had to be kept secret from the public.

       “We also need,” he continued, “to keep a lid on this whole thing. If we fail to maintain control over what the public knows about this, there could be real panic.”

       Truman grunted. “That damned radio show.”

      Hillenkoetter nodded. The War of the Worlds had panicked a good many people who’d heard it. In fact, the degree of panic had been grossly overstated by the newspapers—they were keen on pointing out the deficiencies of radio, their new competitor, as opposed to print media—but war jitters certainly had contributed to some small degree of panic, at the very least, especially in New Jersey where the Martians were supposed to have landed.

       “Yes, sir.”

       “I don’t mind telling you, Roscoe, that I don’t like the idea of deliberately deceiving the American public.”

       “Neither do I, Mr. President. But it’ll be necessary, at least for a time. And we don’t want the Soviets getting wind of this.”

       “No, we do not.” Truman considered the problem for a moment. “Okay. I’ll draw up an executive order.”

       “Thank you, sir.”

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