“Thanks for that. You’re an asshole, you know? And you’re crazy. UFOs. Roswell. What a crock.” All her anger spilled out.
“Okay, fine. I’ve been told all that before and worse. Five minutes? Please?”
She was about to drive off, but then stopped. All of a sudden, she felt herself deflate, as if her energy had escaped along with her anger. Had the last two hours really happened? Earlier that morning, she’d been in her office, working on one of the final Tsankawi write-ups…and now she had no office, no job, only a couple of burned bridges still smoking in her rearview mirror.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake. Five minutes, then.” She waited behind the wheel, crossing her arms.
“Do you think maybe we could not have this conversation through a car window? I want to show you something.”
Against her better judgment, Nora eased the car back into the parking space and got out, then followed Tappan to what was obviously his vehicle. An ice-blue Tesla. Of course.
“Would you mind getting into the passenger seat?”
She did as he requested, sliding onto the buttery white leather. The dashboard gleamed with burl wood, satin nickel, and a large computer screen.
She shut the door; the man pushed a button, and the windows magically darkened. He reached under the dash and removed a large rolled-up document, which he proceeded to unfurl.
“Take a look.” He held it open so she could see.
Nora immediately recognized it.
“It’s a ground-penetrating radar survey—” he began.
“I know what it is,” said Nora impatiently.
“Good. Now, do you see this area here? This is our target area—where the UFO is said to have crashed. What do you see?”
Nora looked closer at the grayscale image. It was clear, right off the bat, that something had happened there.
“You tell me: Is that disturbance consistent with the crash of a weather balloon?”
She looked still more closely. She could see, just barely, a blurry but deep-looking furrow or groove in the sand, along with other evidence of extensive and widespread disturbance.
“Not really,” she replied.
“That’s right. And look how it’s surrounded by old traces of earthmoving equipment and vehicles. The GPR also revealed two faint roads leading from the area, and another one circling around it. At one time this was a heavily trafficked place. Suggestive, don’t you think?”
“Isn’t this kind of small for a UFO? I mean, that groove isn’t very wide. And it could be anything—a missile, small plane, even a meteorite. I don’t see evidence it was a UFO.”
“The point is,” said Tappan, “that something happened here totally inconsistent with a balloon or nuclear monitoring device crash. And then you can see where topsoil, here and here, was moved to bury the target area and cover up all these tracks—and smoothed over. Why would they have gone to so much trouble to cover up a balloon crash? That’s a lot of earthmoving.”
She scrutinized the survey more closely in the confines of the car. There were signs of a lot of old activity extending from the target area.
Tappan smiled. He took out another chart and unrolled it. This was obviously a magnetometer survey, a tool archaeologists used to record the magnetic properties of soil for mapping subsurface terrain. There were various anomalies and dark spots in and around the target area. The disturbed area with its faint furrow was also vaguely delineated.
“All those dark spots and smudges are what we laymen would call ‘buried stuff,’” said Tappan. “Stuff that your excavation will unearth.”
“It could be anything,” Nora said. “Rocks, tin cans, trash.”
Tappan tapped the charts with a finger. “Maybe so, but this proves one thing: The government lied. There was no weather balloon or secret nuclear surveillance device. Why would they lie?”
He stared at her with gray, searching eyes. It was a fair question.
“And the lying goes on,” Tappan said. “A few years ago, the government allegedly declassified its files on UFOs. There was some startling stuff in there, as you probably know—videos of objects taken by fighter pilots and so forth. But even earlier they had released documents indicating the Roswell crash was not a weather balloon, but a classified government device, developed at Los Alamos for detecting aboveground nuclear blasts. It was being tested but got away in high winds and crashed at the Roswell site. The ‘disk’ that witnesses described was actually a radar reflector, used for tracking purposes.”