Jacques Vallée - TRINITY: The Best-Kept Secret

THE OWL BAR & CAF, OCTOBER 2017

San Antonio, New Mexico

If my friend Ron Brinkley hadnt insisted on buying me a drink at the legendary Owl Bar & Caf in San Antonio, New Mexico, I would never have become absorbed in the complex drama of Trinity, and in the forgotten records about the first UFO crash in modern history.

We were driving back after a long, tiring day spent on one of our digging explorations on the Plains of San Augustin ( ), as we tried to verify some ancient stories of early UFO crashes in New Mexico, and to retrieve evidence of them that we could actually test in the lab. There were many rumors, dating back to the 1940s, when farmers and ranchers claimed to have picked up strange pieces of metal on their land after seeing a weird object in the sky, often right under the noses of Army grunts who boasted of deep secrets and threatened the locals with jail, or worse, if they ever talked about what theyd found.

Secrecy or not, seventy years had passed, and we had in fact picked up a number of interesting pieces of shredded material, undoubtedly from the crash of something. I was in a hurry to take them back to a lab in Silicon Valley, where interested colleagues had made plans to run them through the latest testing equipment. I knew the old stories, some of which I had verified, about such items getting lost or stolen, so I felt I was on a mission to secure our data once and for all.

I had a plane to catch, back to San Francisco, and I was a bit nervous. Yet I had known Ron long enough to trust his instinct. It wasnt the first time we had chased elusive witnesses, climbed up and down western hillsides around sites where local people spoke of unidentified lights and scary encounters, and dug up interesting material. Both of us were dusty and tired from the long drive, exposure to the thin air and to the sun at that altitude, so he had little difficulty convincing me that a cup of hot coffee and a piece of apple pie, or a beer with salted almonds, would be a nice break on the way back to the airport in Albuquerque.

I also knew that he must have had something else to tell me; or to teach me.

Over the years I have learned to love the special atmosphere of New Mexico. I had traveled there with Dr. Hynek, back in the 1970s, to work at Corralitos Observatory. I had returned occasionally for meetings of scientists at Los Alamos and other places with a keen, albeit discreet, professional interest in UFOs. But this latest trip had been the most beautiful, an exciting survey of the High Desert, culminating in the recovery of long-buried material samples at a place local researchers had suspected from their own observations, contacts and confidences from trusted neighbors, to be the actual site of a very weird crash.

Ron, the local boy, was proud of his New Mexico ancestry. His family had owned thousands of acres there, raising Longhorns on large ranches, well before White Sands became a huge military base, long before the American West became a modern place with big cities, universities and factories and airports, and lost some of its unique beauty. Yet the mystery remained.

^ ^ ^

You need to see this place, Ron said as we were sliding into a booth, past dozens of old pictures on the walls, memorabilia from World War Two, bits of letters and many dollar bills stapled to the plaster, fluttering in the air every time someone swung the door open.

This is where it all started, he went on. Nineteen-forty-five. Forget everything youve heard about the Roswell crash: Its a very significant story, obviously, but it came two years later; there are many conflicting tales about it, but no tangible evidence remains, and nobody was there to watch it fall. As for the Kenneth Arnolds sighting, which led to the term flying saucer, that was also in June 1947... Thats important, but only in terms of what the public was told. Or not told.

Yes, but the journalists loved it, I said. People could relate to it.

The journalists loved it, yes, and the TV people loved it even more, Ron replied, but in the process everybody had missed the most significant case. It had quietly taken place here, precisely one month after the first nuclear explosion in history, as if in direct response to it. Nobody spoke about it for many years. It happened just a few miles from this diner. Thats where weve got to start.

The waitress walked over and took our order. The place was quiet. Local customers were drinking at the bar, relaxing after a days work. Ron rested his back against the wooden booth and gestured to the open space between us and the other tables.

Back in 1945, the scientists of Project Manhattan lived around here, in San Antonio, at the critical time for the assembly of the Bomb, he said as quietly as if hed spoken about his neighbors in some sleepy little village. If you were an American scientist yanked out of your university campus by the Army, or a Nobel prize-winning atomic physicist from Europe working hard to defeat Hitler, this was the only half-decent place for a meal.