"Whitley Strieber - Majestic" - читать интересную книгу автора (Strieber Whitley)

We can only know
what is out there
from an animal's features

for we make even infants
turn and look back
at the way things are shaped

not toward the open
that lies so deep
in an animal's face.

- Rainer Maria Rilke Eighth Elegy, Duino Elegies

Chapter One

Will enthralled and horrified me. While his complete authenticity was obvious, I nevertheless felt that I had to
do some basic research.
He claimed that the story had begun in Roswell, New Mexico, in July of 1947. He named names, dates,
places, showed me news clippings and memoranda.
Fine, I would see for myself. I took a week off (I was still being fed by the Express) and got a super-saver to
Albuquerque, rented a Vega and drove the hundred-odd miles south to Roswell.
It took me about ten minutes to fall in love with the town. Roswell is American perfect, a middle-sized city at
peace with itself. It's an agricultural community with a smattering of light industry. The streets mix fifties
modern with older architecture. Everywhere I went - the motel, the radio and television stations, the local
newspaper - I was struck by the fact that this place was populated by decent people. Honest people.
At the Roswell Daily Record they were frank about the story. Everybody in town knew about it. The fact that
something real had happened in July of 1947 and been covered up turned out to be an open secret across
most of southern New Mexico.
Will tells me that I won't feel so much anger when I get older, but I felt anger now, interviewing people, walking
the site of the crash near Maricopa, viewing the ruins of the old ranch on which the disk fell.
I was choked with bitterness. I'd dismissed the whole UFO question with a laugh and I'd been a dupe!
My ego was involved and I thought I'd never get over hating Will.
One of the most annoying things about him is how wise he is. He knew that I wouldn't always despise him.
I wish I could comfort that old man somehow, but he is beyond words, beyond touch, beyond everything.
South of Roswell stand the empty remains of the Roswell Army Air Field, now being transformed into an
industrial park.
I walked that crooked tarmac on a warm spring day, and let the ghosts of the past rise up around me. There
was no feeling of elegy or remembrance. I was angry, and the ghosts were angry, too.
At least two of those ghosts, and possibly a third, were not human. I wondered if they looked back also, and
if they did not remember the night that they arrived, and died.
Through the ten o'clock dark they came, silent and slow, watching the streets of Roswell unfold below them.
More carefully they were watching the flight line, counting the planes, counting the bombs.
At that moment the 509th Strategic Bomber Wing stationed at Roswell was the only atomic bomber force in
the world.
Perhaps they came to warn us, or perhaps theirs was a more subtle mission. But Roswell could not have
been chosen by accident. Will explained to me that they have a definite tendency to appear right in the
middle of our most sensitive, most dangerous, most heavily guarded military installations.
This was one of the things that caused the hostilities. "Be as little children," Will says. Indeed, innocence