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The Last Man Who Guarded the Roswell Gray Reveals It All — He Says He's Already Dying Anyway — Transcript

by The Fourth Encounter · 3,250 words · 510 segments · language en · Watch on YouTube

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0:00In the summer of 1994, a man named
0:03Walter Hayes sat down in a lawn chair
0:05outside a double wide trailer in Dming,
0:07New Mexico, hooked a microphone to his
0:10collar, and said, "I held its hand. I
0:13held its hand, and it looked at me, and
0:16I knew right then that nothing I had
0:18ever been told about anything was true.
0:22He was dying of pancreatic cancer. He
0:25had maybe 4 months. He had nothing left
0:28to protect. What he said next has never
0:30been officially acknowledged. The tape
0:33came to me through a secuitous route
0:35that I still don't fully understand. A
0:38researcher named Donna Faulk, operating
0:40out of Albuquerque, had been quietly
0:43collecting deathbed testimonies from
0:45former military personnel for the better
0:47part of a decade. men and women who had
0:50served in the American Southwest during
0:52the late 1940s and early 1950s,
0:56many of them stationed or near Roswell
0:59Army Airfield in New Mexico.
1:03She wasn't looking for sensation. She
1:05was, by her own description, a retired
1:08archavist with a surplus of time and a
1:10nagging conviction that the official
1:12record was riddled with gaps.
1:16She found Walter Hayes in July of 1994
1:19through a mutual acquaintance, a former
1:22quartermaster sergeant who had served at
1:24White Sands Proving Ground and who told
1:26Donna over the phone that there was a
1:28man she needed to meet before the cancer
1:31finished the job. She drove 5 hours. She
1:33set up a recorder and Walter Hayes
1:36talked for 4 hours and 11 minutes
1:38without stopping. I have heard that
1:41tape. Not all of it is coherent. Some
1:44sections are lost to wind interference.
1:46In one long stretch, perhaps 40 minutes,
1:49the audio quality degrades into
1:51something that sounds almost deliberate,
1:53a kind of wobbling distortion that
1:55Donna's sound technician later described
1:58as consistent with magnetic
2:00interference. Whether that interference
2:02was accidental or something else is a
2:04question I'm not equipped to answer
2:06definitively. But enough of it is clear.
2:09Enough of it is devastating. And that's
2:11where Walter Hayes becomes impossible to
2:14ignore. Let me tell you what he
2:16describes. Not in abstractions, not in
2:18the vague hedged language of men who are
2:20afraid. Walter Hayes describes
2:22specifics. He gives dates. He gives
2:25locations within locations. Not just
2:27Roswell, but specific coordinates within
2:30the base, building designations, shift
2:32schedules, the names of the sandwiches
2:34served in the commissary on the morning
2:36of July 9th, 1947.
2:40He describes being summoned. He was 23
2:43years old. He had been stationed at
2:45Roswell Army Airfield for 14 months,
2:48working as a security perimeter guard.
2:50The most unremarkable of assignments.
2:53Walk the fence, check the gate, sign the
2:56clipboard. He was not an officer. He was
2:58not a scientist. He was not by any
3:01conventional measure the kind of man you
3:03would select for something extraordinary
3:05which is he suggests precisely why they
3:09selected him. They needed someone who
3:11wouldn't ask too many questions he says
3:12on the tape someone who hadn't yet
3:14learned to be ambitious. I was just a
3:16kid from Dothan Alabama who knew how to
3:18follow orders and keep his mouth shut.
3:22On the morning of July 9th, 2 days after
3:24the initial recovery of the crash debris
3:26from the Foster Ranch outside Corona,
3:29New Mexico, Walter Hayes was pulled from
3:31his regular rotation by a man he
3:34identifies only as the major.
3:37He is careful not to give a full name.
3:40Whether this is a choice born of
3:42loyalty, fear, or fading memory is
3:44unclear. He refers to him as the major
3:48throughout all four hours of the
3:50recording. The major brought him to a
3:53section of the base that Walter had
3:54never accessed. Building 84. He had
3:58walked past it dozens of times. It
4:01appeared unremarkable. A low concrete
4:04structure, no windows, a single door, no
4:07signage beyond a standard restricted
4:09area placard that was, Walter notes,
4:12identical to the ones posted outside the
4:14motorpool in the quarterm's warehouse.
4:17That's the thing nobody understands. He
4:18says they hid it in the ordinary. They
4:21put it right next to everything else. No
4:22fanfare, no extra guards. Just a door
4:25that looked like every other door on
4:26that base. He was told only two things
4:29before he went inside. Do not speak to
4:32it. Do not touch it unless it reaches
4:34for you first. The deeper you go into
4:36Walter's account, the more it resists
4:38easy categorization.
4:40He is not describing the wideeyed silver
4:43skinned entities of science fiction. He
4:46is describing something more disquing
4:48than that, something more specific.
4:51There were two of them initially, he
4:53says. One was unresponsive, lying on a
4:56table covered by what he describes as a
4:58heavy canvas sheet, motionless in a way
5:01that he understood immediately to be
5:03permanent, dead or something like dead.
5:07I don't know if they die the way we die,
5:09he says, but whatever it was, it wasn't
5:12moving and everyone in the room treated
5:13it like a thing. Not a body, a thing.
5:17The other one was seated. Walter spends
5:20nearly 20 minutes describing this being.
5:22And I want to be careful here, not to
5:24embellish, not to dramatize, but to
5:26relay what he actually says in the order
5:29he says it because the sequence of his
5:32observations matters. He doesn't begin
5:34with the eyes or the head the way a
5:36person inventing a story might. He
5:39begins with the hands. Its hands were in
5:42its lap, he says. And the first thing I
5:44thought, the very first thing was that
5:46they looked tired. The way your
5:48grandmother's hands looked tired, like
5:50they'd done too much for too long. The
5:53hands were pale, not white, pale, the
5:56color, he says, of old newspaper left in
5:59the sun. The fingers were longer than
6:01human fingers, but not grotesqually so.
6:04Four of them. No visible nails. The
6:07knuckles were pronounced in a way that
6:09made him think of erosion, of stone worn
6:12smooth by water over a very long time.
6:16He stood at the door for what he
6:18estimates was 3 minutes before he walked
6:20closer. Nobody told him to. Nobody told
6:24him not to.
6:26It turned its head when I moved, he
6:28says. Not fast, slow, like it had been
6:31expecting me for a while and wasn't in a
6:33hurry about it. Here is where the
6:36official explanation, such as it is,
6:38completely breaks down. Because what
6:41Walter describes next is not a passive
6:43specimen. It is not a body recovering
6:45from trauma, not a non-responsive entity
6:48behaving according to some animal
6:50instinct. What he describes is
6:52deliberate, attentive, curious.
6:56It looked at me the way you look at
6:57something you've already figured out. He
6:59says, not like it was studying me. Like
7:02it had finished studying me and was just
7:05looking patient.
7:07He was inside building 84 for
7:09approximately 3 hours on that first day.
7:13First day because there was a second day
7:15and a third.
7:18This raises a critical but simple
7:20question. Why Walter?
7:23He asked it himself on the tape. He
7:26spent 47 years asking it. And the answer
7:29he eventually arrives at is the one that
7:31unsettles me most because it is not
7:33dramatic. It is bureaucratic.
7:36According to Walter, a base physician, a
7:38man he calls Doc Reeves, determined
7:41within the first 12 hours of contact
7:43that the being responded differently to
7:45different individuals, to officers, to
7:48scientists, to most of the personnel who
7:50cycled through building 84 in those
7:52initial days. It was unresponsive, still
7:56present, but sealed. To Walter, it
7:59oriented.
8:00Doc Reeves said it was probably my age.
8:03Walter recalls that I was closer to
8:06something, some frequency, he said. I
8:09don't know what that means. I didn't
8:10know then either. But they kept bringing
8:12me back. He became in effect its guard,
8:16its companion, its point of contact.
8:19Though that phrase implies a two-way
8:21communication that Walter is at pains to
8:23both affirm and complicate throughout
8:26the recording.
8:28We didn't talk, he says. Not with words,
8:31but I'd be lying if I told you nothing
8:33passed between us. Something passed
8:34between us every single day. He guarded
8:37the being for 22 days. 22 days. And
8:41here's the strangest part. There are no
8:43records. Not of Walter's reassignment,
8:45not of building 84's modified access
8:48logs for July and August of 1947.
8:52Donafolk spent three years submitting
8:54Freedom of Information Act requests
8:57targeting the relevant date ranges and
9:00personnel rosters for Roswell Army
9:02Airfield.
9:04What she received pages of heavily
9:06redacted documents in early 1997
9:09contained a gap July 8th through August
9:123rd, 1947.
9:15a gap of 26 days in the official duty
9:18logs for a base that was otherwise
9:20documented with bureaucratic
9:21obsessiveness.
9:2326 days. Walter was there for 22 of
9:26them. The silence in those documents is
9:29deafening.
9:31On the 19th day, and he is precise about
9:33this, he has counted it, recounted it,
9:37apparently spent decades counting it.
9:39The being reached for him.
9:42Walter had been sitting in a folding
9:44chair approximately 4 feet from where
9:46the being was seated. This was their
9:48routine. He would arrive at 0600. He
9:51would sit, the being would orient toward
9:54him. They would remain like that in the
9:56silence that Walter increasingly
9:58describes not as emptiness but as
10:01fullness until his shift ended at 1400.
10:05On the 19th day, the being extended its
10:08hand. It moves slow, he says. Everything
10:12it did was slow, like it was being
10:14careful with us, like it knew we were
10:16fragile, and it didn't want to break
10:18anything. Walter reached back. I know I
10:21wasn't supposed to initiate, but it had
10:23reached first. That was the rule. And I
10:25I wasn't afraid. That's the thing I want
10:28people to understand. I should have been
10:29afraid, and I wasn't. I was calm. I was
10:32the calmst I have ever been in my entire
10:34life. Their hands made contact. The
10:37being's fingers, three of them, he says,
10:40curling around the back of his right
10:41hand, while the fourth remained
10:43extended, were warm. Not body
10:46temperature warm, warmer than that. He
10:49says it felt like holding something that
10:51had been sitting in the sun. And then he
10:53stops talking for almost a full minute
10:55on the tape. When he resumes, his voice
10:58is different, quieter, more careful.
11:01Something happened that I cannot explain
11:03to you in words. Not because I don't
11:05want to because words aren't. They're
11:08not built for it. It's like trying to
11:11describe a color to someone who's never
11:13seen. I saw things. I felt things.
11:16Whether it was putting them there or
11:18whether it was just opening a door I
11:20didn't know I had, I don't know. I don't
11:23know. He tries over the next 37 minutes
11:27of the recording to describe what he
11:29experienced during that contact. What
11:32emerges is fragmented, circular,
11:34sometimes contradictory, which is
11:37paradoxically what makes it feel
11:39credible.
11:40A fabricator constructs a coherent
11:43narrative. Walter Hayes is trying to
11:46translate something for which he has no
11:47vocabulary, and the failure of his
11:50language feels like evidence of
11:51something real. He describes imagery
11:56not visions exactly understanding he
11:58says in the form of imagery distances.
12:03He understood distances in a way that
12:05made the distance between the earth and
12:07the moon feel like the space between two
12:10adjacent chairs. He describes pattern, a
12:14sense of pattern so pervasive and so
12:16intricate that his own life, his
12:18childhood in Dothan, his 14 months at
12:21Roswell, his placement in that building
12:23on that morning, suddenly appeared to
12:26him not as accident, but as something
12:28else, not destiny, he is careful to say
12:31something more mechanical than destiny,
12:33something more like precision, like I
12:35have been placed there, he says. not
12:38chosen, placed the way you place a tool
12:40where you're going to need it. The
12:43contact lasted, by his estimate,
12:45somewhere between 2 and 15 minutes.
12:47Time, he says, was behaving strangely.
12:50The being was gone by August 1st. Walter
12:53doesn't know how. He arrived on the
12:56morning of the 20th day, and building 84
12:58was empty. Not reorganized, not vacated
13:02with the deliberateness of a relocation.
13:04Empty.
13:05The folding chairs were still there. The
13:08table was still there. The canvas sheet
13:10that had covered the motionless body was
13:12folded neatly in the corner. But
13:15everything else, the beings, the
13:17equipment that had surrounded them, the
13:18small cluster of medical personnel and
13:20observers who had occupied the room's
13:22periphery during Walter's visits was
13:25gone. The door was unlocked. He walked
13:28in. He stood where he had sat for 19
13:31mornings. He looked at the chair where
13:33it had been seated.
13:35I stood there for a long time, he says,
13:38and I felt this is going to sound like
13:40nothing. I felt like I'd missed
13:42something important, like I'd almost
13:44understood something and then it was
13:47taken away before I could finish
13:48understanding it. He was reassigned to
13:51fence patrol the following morning. No
13:54debrief, no official acknowledgement of
13:56what he had participated in. The major
13:59appeared once more briefly and told him,
14:02and this is Walter's precise
14:03recollection, "Son, the best thing you
14:06can do for yourself and for your country
14:08is to forget that you were ever cold."
14:10That phrase, "Forget that you were ever
14:13cold." He never forgot it. He spent 47
14:16years not forgetting it. The
14:18accumulation of what followed, a career,
14:20a marriage, children, grandchildren, the
14:23long, ordinary decades of a life lived
14:25in the American Southwest, none of it
14:28displaced what had happened in building
14:2984. If anything, the mundane weight of
14:32ordinary life made it more present, more
14:35insistent.
14:37Once you carry something like that,
14:39Walter says, you can't set it down. You
14:42can't unsee what was placed behind your
14:44eyes. I tried, he says quietly. Lord
14:46knows I tried.
14:48The deeper I went into the ancillary
14:50record, the fragmented documentation
14:52that surrounds the known events of July
14:551947,
14:57the more a specific pattern emerged. And
14:59the pattern does not repeat
15:01occasionally. It repeats with unsettling
15:03consistency.
15:05personnel who were stationed at Roswell
15:07in the summer of 1947
15:10and who later attempted to speak
15:12publicly, not in books, not in
15:14sensationalist venues, but in sworn
15:16affidavit, in deathbed recordings, in
15:19letters to congressmen and senators that
15:21were quietly referred back to the
15:23Department of Defense share a remarkably
15:26uniform set of experiences in the
15:28aftermath. Reassignment within weeks of
15:31the event, separation from peers who had
15:34served alongside them, careers that were
15:36either prematurely ended or elevated in
15:39ways that insulated them from the
15:41civilian world. And almost universally,
15:45a period of what Walter calls the
15:47forgetting years, a span of time,
15:50typically 5 to 10 years post Roswell, in
15:53which their memories of the event became
15:55strangely inaccessible.
15:58not suppressed, several of them note
15:59carefully, not traumatic amnesia, which
16:03has a recognizable texture, something
16:06different, something almost
16:07administered.
16:09Walter Hayes describes this period as
16:11feeling like trying to remember a dream
16:13in the middle of another dream. This
16:16raises an uncomfortable question. How
16:19many others were there? How many Walter
16:21Hazes, ordinary men and women placed
16:24precisely, who held something
16:26extraordinary in their hands and were
16:28then reassigned to fence patrol and told
16:31to forget they were ever cold. We don't
16:33know. We may never know because the
16:36evidence, the specific granular human
16:39evidence of individual experience was
16:42not preserved. It was scattered. Men
16:45died, recordings degraded, letters were
16:48lost or confiscated or simply never
16:51written because the people who should
16:53have written them have been persuaded
16:55somehow that their experience was not
16:58the kind of thing you wrote down. And
17:01that is where the official account
17:03becomes impossible to accept at face
17:05value. Not because it lies outright, but
17:09because it leaves these people out
17:11entirely. It has no architecture for
17:13them. It was not designed to include
17:16them. And a record that systematically
17:18excludes the most intimate human
17:20evidence of an event is not a complete
17:22record. It is a selected one. Walter
17:25Hayes died on November 14th, 1994.
17:30Donna Faulk attended the funeral in
17:32deeming. She was the only person present
17:34who knew what he had told her. She has
17:36shared the tape with three researchers
17:38over the past three decades. A number
17:41deliberately kept small, she explains,
17:43because she is not interested in
17:45sensation. She is interested in
17:48preservation. The tape exists. Copies
17:51exist. Their locations are known to
17:54people she trusts.
17:57Near the end of the 4-hour recording,
17:59Walter says something that I keep
18:00returning to, something that I cannot
18:03contextualize satisfactorily no matter
18:06how many times I replay it.
18:09The worst part, he says, isn't that they
18:12took it away. The worst part is that I
18:14think it wanted to finish. I think it
18:16was trying to give me something
18:18specific, something it knew, something
18:20it came here knowing. And we ran out of
18:23time. And I've spent my whole life
18:25wondering what the last thing was, what
18:28it was trying to hand me at the end,
18:30whether it was something small or
18:32whether it was everything. Whether I
18:35almost had everything and didn't know
18:37it.
18:39He pauses. I think about the other one.
18:43The one on the table. Where it went,
18:46whether there's a place it went to,
18:48whether anything of what it knew made it
18:50back.
18:52Another pause. I hope something made it
18:55back. What do we do with Walter Hayes?
18:58We can dismiss him. That is always
19:00available to us. The clean, frictionless
19:02exit of dismissal. an old man dying who
19:06spent 47 years constructing a memory out
19:08of guilt and longing and the ordinary
19:10human need to have been part of
19:12something larger than himself. We can do
19:15that. But I keep coming back to the
19:16hands. He begins with the hands. Not the
19:19eyes, not the head, the hands, the tired
19:22hands. He goes there first. The way a
19:25man goes to the detail that hit him
19:26hardest, the detail that lodged in him
19:29before he had time to craft it into
19:31something presentable. And I keep coming
19:33back to the phrase he uses not once but
19:36four times over four hours. Always
19:38unprompted, always with the same
19:40inflection. It was trying to give me
19:43something. Not communicate, not
19:46transmit, not signal, give.
19:49What was it? What knowledge arrived
19:51here? traveled whatever distance that
19:53distance represents and then sat quietly
19:55in a folding chair in a concrete
19:57building in Roswell, New Mexico, waiting
20:00patiently for a 23-year-old boy from
20:03Dothan, Alabama to be placed close
20:05enough to receive it.
20:07What was almost handed to us to all of
20:10us in those 19 days before everything
20:13went quiet and the canvas was folded
20:16into the corner and the door was left
20:18unlocked.
20:20And how many other buildings are there?
20:22How many other chairs? How many other
20:24moments where something waited with the
20:26patience of deep time for a human hand
20:28to reach back and then was taken away
20:31before the last thing could be said.
20:34Walter Hayes died not knowing what he
20:36almost understood. I'm not sure we're
20:39supposed to know either, but I find
20:41myself unable to accept that nothing was
20:43lost. Something was lost. Something was
20:46lost in building 84 on a morning in
20:49early August 1947
20:51when a 23-year-old man arrived for his
20:54shift and found only folded canvas and
20:56silence and a chair pointed at an empty
20:59wall. What it was remains as of this
21:02moment completely and perhaps
21:04deliberately unknown.

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