"The Day After Roswell" (an excerpt) by by William J. Birnes and Philip Corso

We here at The Crypto Blast believe in promoting paranormal authors and giving them the opportunity to be seen to a bigger audience. We have given many authors the spotlight, but this book: "The Day After Roswell"  is probably the most compelling and jaw dropping book on the topic of Roswell and the UFO debate.

The following is an excerpt from the book: "The Day After Roswell" by by William J. Birnes and Philip Corso. You can purchase it by clicking here.

CHAPTER 1

The Roswell Desert

THE NIGHT HUGS THE GROUND AND SWALLOWS YOU UP AS YOU drive out of Albuquerque and into the desert. As you head east along 40 and then south along 285 to Roswell, there's only you and the tiny universe ahead of you defined by your headlights. On either side, beyond the circle of light, there is only scrub and sand. The rest is all darkness that closes in behind you, flooding where you've been under a giant ocean of black, and pushes you forward along the few hundred feet of road directly ahead.

The sky is different out there, different from any sky you've ever seen before. The black is so clear it looks like the stars shining through it are tiny windows from the beginning of time, millions of them, going on forever. On a hot summer night you can sometimes see flashes of heat lightning explode in the distance. Somewhere it is light for an instant, then the darkness returns. But summer is the rainy season in the New Mexico desert, and thunderstorms assemble over you out of nowhere, pound the earth with rain and lightning, pummel the darkness with crashes of thunder, shake the ground until you feel the earth is breaking apart, and then disappear. The ranchers out there will tell you that the local storms can go on all night, bouncing off the arroyos like pinballs in play until they expend themselves over the horizon. That's what it was like fifty years ago on a night much like this. Although I wasn't there that night, I've heard many different versions. Many of them go like this:

Base radar at the army's 509th airfield outside the town of Roswell had been tracking strange blips all night on July 1, 1947. So had radar at nearby White Sands, the army's guided-missile base where test launches of German V2 rockets had been taking place since the end of the war, and at the nuclear-testing facility at Alamogordo. The blips would appear at one corner of the screen and dart across at seemingly impossible speeds for aircraft, only to disappear off another corner. Then they'd start up again. No earthly craft could have maneuvered at such speeds and changed direction so sharply. It was a signature no one could identify. Whether it was the same aircraft, more than one, or simply an anomaly from the violent lightning and thunderstorms was anybody's guess. So after the operators verified the calibrations of the radar equipment, they broke down the units to run diagnostic checks on the circuitry of the screen-imaging devices to make sure their radar panels were operating properly. Once they'd satisfied themselves that they couldn't report any equipment malfunction, the controllers were forced to assume that the screen images were displays of something that was truly out there. They confirmed the sightings with radar controllers at White Sands, but found they could do little else but track the blips as they darted across the screen with every sweep of the silent beacon. The blips swarmed from position to position at will, operating with complete freedom across the entire sky over the army's most secret nuclear and missile-testing sites. 

Throughout that night and the following day, Army Intelligence stayed on high alert because something strange was going on out there. Surveillance flights over the desert reported no sightings of strange objects either in the sky or on the ground, but any sighting of unidentified aircraft on radar was sufficient evidence for base commanders to assume a hostile intent on the part of "something." And that was why the Army Intelligence in Washington ordered additional counterintelligence personnel to New Mexico, especially to the 509th, where the activity seemed to be centered. 

The radar anomalies continued into the next night as Dan Wilmot, owner of a hardware store in Roswell, set up chairs on his front porch after dinner to watch the streaks of lightning flash across the sky in the distance. Shortly before ten that evening, the lightning grew more intense and the ground shook under the explosions of thunder-from a summer storm that pounded the chaparral off in the northwest of the city. Dan and his wife watched the spectacle from beneath the dry safety of their porch roof. It was as if each new bolt of lightning were a spear that rent the heavens themselves. 

"Better than any Fourth of July_ fireworks," the Wilmots must have been remarking as they watched in awe as a bright oval object streaked over their house and headed off into the northwest, sinking below a rise just before the horizon where it was engulfed in darkness. The sky again became pitch black. By the time the next bolt of lightning shot off, the object was gone. A most unusual sight, Dan Wilmot thought, but it was gone from his sight and gone from his thoughts, at least until the end of the week. 

Whatever it was that passed over the Wilmot house in Roswell also flew over Steve Robinson as he drove his milk truck along its route north of the city. Robinson tracked the object as it shot across the sky at speeds faster than any airplane he'd ever seen. It was a bright object, he noted, elliptical and solid rather than a sequence of lights like the military aircraft that flew in and out of the 509th airfield on the city's outskirts. It disappeared behind a rise off in the west toward Albuquerque, and Steve put it out of his mind as he pushed forward on his route. 

To the civilians in Roswell, nothing was amiss. Summer thunderstorms were common, the reports of flying saucers in the newspapers and over the radio were simply circus sideshow amusements, and an object streaking across the sky that so attracted the Wilmots' attention could have been nothing more than the shooting star you make a wish on if you're lucky enough to see it before it disappears forever in a puff of flame. Soon it would be the July 4th weekend, and the Wilmots, Steve Robinson, and thousands of other local residents were looking forward to the unofficial start of the summer holiday. But at the 509th there was no celebrating. 

The isolated incidents of unidentified radar blips at Roswell and White Sands continued to increase over the next couple of days until it looked like a steady stream of airspace violations. Now it was becoming more than serious. There was no denying that a traffic pattern of strange aircraft overflights was emerging in the skies over the New Mexico desert where, with impunity, these unidentifiable radar blips hovered above and then darted away from our most secret military installations. By the time the military's own aircraft scrambled, the intruders were gone. It was obvious to the base commanders that they were under a heavy surveillance from a presence they could only assume was hostile. At first, nobody gave much thought to the possibility of extraterrestrials or flying saucers, even though they'd been in the news for the past few weeks that spring. Army officers at the 509th and White Sands thought it was the Russians spying on the military's first nuclear bomber base and its guided-missile launching site. 

By now Army Counterintelligence, this highly secret command sector which in 1947 operated almost as much in the civilian sector as it did in the military, had spun up to its highest alert and ordered a full deployment of its most experienced crack World War II operatives out to Roswell. CIC personnel had begun to arrive from Washington when the first reports of strange radar blips were filed through intelligence channels and kept coming as the reports continued to pile up with increasing urgency over the next forty-eight hours. Officers and enlisted men alike disembarked from the transport planes and changed into civilian clothes for the investigation into enemy activities on the area. They joined up with base intelligence officers like Maj. Jesse Marcel and Steve Arnold, a counterintelligence noncom who'd served at the Roswell base during World War II when the first nuclear bombing mission against Hiroshima was launched from there in August 1945, just about two years earlier. 

On the evening of July 4, 1947 (though the dates may differ depending on who is telling the story), while the rest of the country was celebrating Independence Day and looking with great optimism at the costly peace that the sacrifice of its soldiers had brought, radar operators at sites around Roswell noticed that the strange objects were turning up again and looked almost as if they were changing their shapes on the screen. They were pulsating—it was the only way you could describe it—glowing more intensely and then dimly as tremendous thunderstorms broke out over the desert. Steve Arnold, posted to the Roswell airfield control tower that evening, had never seen a blip behave like that as it darted across the screen between sweeps at speeds over a thousand miles an hour. All the while it was pulsating, throbbing almost, until, while the skies over the base, exploded in a biblical display of thunder and lightning, it arced to the lower left-hand quadrant of the screen, seemed to disappear for a moment, then exploded in a brilliant white fluorescence and evaporated right before his very eyes. 

The screen was clear. The blips were gone. And as controllers looked around at each other and at the CIC officers in the room, the same thought arose in all their minds: An object, whatever it was, had crashed. The military response was put into motion within seconds: This was a national security issue—jump on that thing in the desert and bring it back before anyone else could find it. 

Even before the radar officer called the 509th base commander, Col. William Blanchard, reporting that radar indicated the crash of an unidentified aircraft to the north and west of Roswell, the CIC dispatch team had already mobilized to deploy an immediate-response crash-and-retrieval team to locate and secure the crash site. They believed this was an enemy aircraft that had slipped through our radar defense system either from South America or over the Canadian border and had taken photos of top-secret military installations. They also wanted to keep civilians away just in case, they said, there was any radiation from the craft's propulsion system, which allowed it to make hairpin turns at three thousand miles an hour. Nobody knew how this thing was powered, and nobody knew whether any personnel had ejected from the aircraft and were wandering around the desert. "Bull" Blanchard green-lighted the retrieval mission to get out there as soon as possible, taking with them all the night-patrol equipment they could scare up, all the two-and-a-half-ton trucks that they could roll, and the base's "low-boy" flatbed wreckers to bring the aircraft back. If it was a crash, they wanted to get it under wraps in a hangar before any civilian authorities could get their hands on it and blab to the newspapers. 

But the air controllers at the 509th weren't the only ones who thought they saw an aircraft go down. On the outskirts of the city, ranchers, families camping in the desert, and residents saw an aircraft that exploded in a bright light in between flashes of lightning and plummeted to earth in the direction of Corona, the neighboring town to the north of Roswell. Chavez County sheriff George Wilcox started receiving calls in his office shortly after midnight on the morning of the fifth that an airplane had crashed out in the desert, and he notified the Roswell Fire Department that he would dispatch them as soon as he had an approximate location. No sense pulling fire apparatus out of the station house to chase something through the desert unless they knew where it was. Besides, Wilcox didn't like rolling the trucks out of town just in case there was a fire in the city that needed all the apparatus they could throw at it, especially the pumpers. 

However, finding the crash site didn't take long. A group of Indian artifact hunters camping in the scrub brush north of Roswell had also seen the pulsating light overhead, heard a burning hiss and the strange, ground-shaking "thunk" of a crash nearby in the distance, and followed the sound to a group of low hills just over a rise. Before they even inspected the smoking wreckage, they radioed the crash-site location into Sheriff Wilcox's office, which dispatched the fire department to a spot about thirty-seven miles north and west of the city.

"I'm already on my way," he told the radio operator at the firehouse, who also called the city police for an escort. 

And by about four-thirty that morning, a single pumper and police car were bouncing through the desert taking Pine Lodge Road west to where Sheriff Wilcox had directed them. Neither the sheriff nor the fire department knew that a military retrieval team was also on its way to the site with orders to secure the location and, by any means necessary, prevent the unauthorized dissemination of any information about the crash. 

To read more of this compelling book: "The Day After Roswell" by by William J. Birnes and Philip Corso, click here.