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of soft, blue light. He sat up. A fire? There was nothing to burn. They had a wood cookstove but it was just embers now. And the lanterns were out. His nostrils dilated, but he smelled no smoke.
    Not the barn! He vaulted out of bed, burst through the house and into the restless night.
    The barn was fine, but there was some kind of lightning in the sky the likes of which he had never seen before. It looked like a huge star floating around below the clouds. It was so big and so close that he stifled a shout of surprise and jerked back against the screen door.
    He stared up. The thing was sliding and floating in the air, and it was hissing. A sort of shock went through him. He was all covered with tingling. His heart started thundering.
    It must be a burning plane. Oh, Lord, coming down on the I house! It got closer and closer, practically blinding him with its flight.
    "Ellie, God, Ellie!"
    There was an answering murmur from the house.
    "Ellie!"
    The thing was hissing and buzzing, and there was a buzzing in the middle of his head. He grabbed his temples.
    High-pitched children's screams mixed with the buzzing, and then Ellie came urging the kids along, her own voice all shaky. He went toward her, turning his back on the thing, which was now almost on top of him. As he ran toward them the buzzing got so loud that he almost couldn't bear it. The world seemed to go round and round and he felt himself falling. For a second it seemed as if he was floating upward, but then he hit the ground with a thud.
    Ellie and the children were already out the backdoor. The thing went buzzing and skipping and jerking through the air above them. Then it was skimming the hill, then it was a glow behind the hill.
    He heard the most god-awful sound he had ever heard in his life: an explosion to beat all. It was a huge clap of a sound, it winded him, it shook the back windows right out of their frames, it made Sadie scream in the barn and the chickens start squawking in the coop. Ellie and the kids were screaming, and Bob heard his own voice too, rising against the echoes of the blast.
    And then, quite suddenly, there was silence. And the night returned.
    And that's how it began, pretty much. In the secrecy of that late hour, thus did our innocence perish.
    From the Roswell Daily Record, July 8, 1947:
    ROSWELL HARDWARE MAN AND WIFE REPORT DISK SEEN
    Mr. and Mrs. Sam White apparently were the only persons in Roswell who have seen what they thought was a flying disk. They were sitting on their porch at 105 North Foster last Wednesday night at about ten minutes before ten o'clock when a large glowing object zoomed out of the sky from the southeast, going in a northwesterly direction at a high rate of speed.
    White called Mrs. White's attention to it and both ran down into the yard to watch. It was in sight less than a minute, perhaps forty or fifty seconds, White estimated.
    White said that it appeared to him to be about 1,500 feet high and going fast. He estimated between 400 and 500 miles per hour.
    In appearance it looked oval in shape like two inverted saucers faced mouth to mouth, or two old-type washbowls placed together in the same fashion. The entire body glowed as though light were showing through from inside, though not like it would be if a light were merely underneath.
    From where he stood White said that the object looked to be about 15 feet in size and making allowance for the distance it was from town he figured that it must have been 15 or 20 feet in diameter, though this was just a guess.
    The object came into view from the southeast and disappeared over the treetops in the general vicinity of Six-Mile Hill.
    White, who is one of the most respected and reliable citizens in town, kept the story to himself hoping that someone else would come out and tell about having seen one, but finally today decided that he would go ahead and tell about seeing it.

Chapter Two
    Even after all these years I could see the terror in Ellie's face as she told