Flight 7 Is Missing Page 2

  “Hold on now, Mr. Crosthwaite. I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about. Just slow down and start from the beginning. Now, what exactly is the matter? Give it to me slowly this time.”

  “What’s the matter? What’s the matter? I’ll tell you what’s the matter—Tania. That’s my daughter. Not my real daughter, my real daughter is Billie JoAnn. She lives with my ex-wife.”

  “How old is Tania?”

  “Sixteen. She graduated from Holy Cross High a couple of months ago. Didn’t I tell you that already? I travel a lot with Pan Am—that’s my job—and even her grandmother says she can’t control her. She can’t find a job, and I don’t know if she even really wants one.”

  “Slow down, Mr. Crosthwaite. I’m trying to take notes and understand what you’re saying at the same time.”

  “OK. I’ll slow down, but I ain’t gonna repeat this no more. I’ve already told the sheriff and he didn’t do nothing. Not a damn thing. He sent me to you. Tania’s my adopted daughter. She’s not my real blood, and I told her so a couple of months ago. Her real father was some Italian-Russian sailor who died in China during the war. She’s the matter. You’ve got to do something with her!”

  Crosthwaite rubs his temples and clamps his eyes tightly shut.

  “Look, now I’ve got another one of those damn headaches. Had ’em ever since I was a kid.”

  “Just slow down, Mr. Crosthwaite, and tell me the problem. Everything’s going to be OK, but I can’t do anything until I understand what this is all about. It’s very confusing right now. Please, just start at the beginning.”

  For the next few minutes Crosthwaite weaves an improbable tale of paranoia and persecution, centered on his stepdaughter and Pan Am. He believes both are out to get him. He is against the world; the world is against him. Something has to give.

  Soon. Very soon.

  “And I’ll tell you another damn thing, too. She killed my wife, just worried her to death. The doctor says it was stomach cancer, but Tania caused it. I know she did, staying out all hours of the night, refusing to do what I told her to do. Me and her, we just don’t get along. Look, this is crazy. I’ve already told the sheriff. Do I have to tell it all again?”

  “I’m afraid so, Mr. Crosthwaite. You’re doing just fine. Go ahead, but please slow down.”

  “I just can’t get her to do nothing. She just sits around the house and never lifts a damn finger. I’ve tried to help her get a job. I’ve even driven her from here to San Francisco and back so she can put in applications everywhere, but she don’t ever get a callback.”

  “Well, now, Mr. Crosthwaite. That’s not really unusual. She’s just sixteen years old, you know, and with no experience.”

  “When I tell her to do something, she refuses,” Crosthwaite interrupts. “She really thinks she’s something. Ever since her mother died back in August, all she does is give me trouble.”

  “Most teenagers seem to give their parents trouble, Mr. Crosthwaite.”

  “Not like this one. Not like Tania. She does it all the time. Trouble oughtta be her middle name.”

  “What does she do?”

  “She drives me up a wall. Right up a wall. She’s a demon, I tell you.”

  Crosthwaite neglects to tell Sergeant Johnson that his job as a Pan American purser takes him away from home for weeks at a time, denying Tania both the love she craves and the parental guidance all teens need. Instead, he focuses on what he sees as her faults, her shortcomings, and what he considers her blatant attempts to drive him crazy.

  If driving him crazy is Tania’s goal—and Sergeant Johnson doubts that it is—she obviously is succeeding. Crosthwaite’s neuroses are plain to see; he is a certifiable nutcase.

  “As long as she lives in my house, she’ll do what I say when I say it. And I’ll tell you another damn thing. If Pan Am thinks they’re gonna fire me, they’d better think again.”

  “Fire you? What’s Pan American got to do with this?”

  “Everything! They want to fire me. They’ve been on my damn back ever since I had tuberculosis. Hell, that was more than a year ago, but some of them hotshots in the office say it’s not safe for me to breathe around passengers in an airplane. Confined in an airplane is what they say. That’s just a bunch of crap, and the union told ’em so. I had to force Pan Am to let me go back to work. I’m the best purser they’ve got, but they’re still on my back. I filed a workman’s compensation claim against them, but they’ve got me over the barrel with all their attorneys. Between Tania and Pan Am, I’ve had it up to here. You’ve got to do something with her. You’ve just got to! She needs to be locked up. Behind bars, I tell you. Can’t you put her in some kind of juvenile detention place? I’m sure she’s breaking the law staying out all hours of the night. Can’t I sign something that says she is out of control?”

  Johnson scribbles some notes on a legal pad, leans back in his seat and briefly closes his eyes attempting to make sense out of all this madness.

  “Julia tried. God knows she tried. But Tania wouldn’t listen. Julia died in August in the hospital in San Mateo. Did I tell you that? Yeah, I believe I did. My God, she wasn’t but thirty-two years old. Anyway, I’ve had it with Tania. She’s the reason Julia is dead, and no one can tell me otherwise.”

  “People don’t cause cancer, Mr. Crosthwaite.”

  “Well, I know that’s what they say, but I ain’t so sure. Julia was only sixteen when Tania was born, and she just about died bringing her into the world. I’ve heard people say that having a hard childbirth can cause all kinds of female problems later on in life for some women, and I think worry has a lot to do with it, too. Tania worried Julia to death. Just worried her right to her grave. Haven’t you heard of people worrying themselves sick? That poor woman was just sick with worry about Tania. She worried so much it made her stomach hurt all the time. All the damn time.”

  Crosthwaite puts his face in his hands and begins to softly cry, but quickly regains his composure and continues rambling, almost incoherently at times.

  Sergeant Johnson makes some more notes on his pad, but he makes some mental notes, too. This man Crosthwaite is trouble. Big trouble.

  He just doesn’t know how big.

  “Tell you what I’ll do, Mr. Crosthwaite. I’ll look into this and I’ll talk with Tania, too. After that, we’ll get back together and come up with a plan that will be good for everyone. OK? Let’s make an appointment for Tania to come and talk with me.”

  Crosthwaite isn’t impressed, but he doesn’t have much of a choice.

  “I’m flying to Honolulu next Friday, but I guess that’ll have to do for now. But I’m not kidding, sergeant. Something bad’s gonna happen, I just know it. Tania needs to be straightened out. She won’t even listen to her grandmother. She’s from Russia, did I tell you that? She don’t speak much English.”

  He reluctantly shakes Johnson’s hand and walks outside, fumbling for his car keys.

  “Who’s that son of a bitch trying to fool, dammit?” he asks himself as he unlocks the door to his Ford sedan. “He’s not going to do anything to Tania. He’s just like the rest of them. No one believes me. Not a single damn person! Well, if he won’t do something about her, I will. I’ll have the last word.”

  Crosthwaite hops into his car and drives south to his home on Hillside Drive in Felton, but not before stopping off at Green’s Service Station for a bottle of his favorite whiskey, which he tucks reassuringly at his side on the front seat. He resists the temptation to open the bottle and take a small sip for comfort. He’s been trying to cut back on his drinking since his bout with tuberculosis, but he isn’t having much success.

  Crosthwaite spends much of the rest of the afternoon in private, tinkering with God knows what in his basement workshop, and later that night he barks again at Tania as she tiptoes into the living room on her way to bed.

  It’s becoming a sick and predictable routine.

  He demands that she pay room and board.

  “Fifteen
dollars a week or out you go!” he shouts. “You need to find a job. And I mean right now!”

  She ignores him, not because of a lack of respect but because she is terrified of the gloomy, angry man he has become in the past couple of years. He wasn’t much of a father before her mother died, but he’s been even less so since. He’s never shown her any love, even as her mother was passing away, and his tough, my-way-or-the-highway parenting is leaving both of them miserable.

  Without a word, Tania backs away and tiptoes quickly to her bedroom. She’s seen and heard enough of her angry stepfather for one day.

  Crosthwaite sits down in his oversized chair in the living room and stares out the second-story bay window. He sits there for the rest of the evening, seething inside with all sorts of crazy ideas that are fighting for attention in his mixed-up head. He speaks to no one, but angrily glares at Tania when she passes by on her way downstairs to talk with her grandmother. She can see the hatred in his cold eyes and feels his anger from across the room but doesn’t have a clue what she has done to make him so mad, and isn’t about to ask.

  Sitting. Staring. Brooding.

  Crosthwaite finally reaches his boiling point—that hellish moment where liquor, depression, paranoia, and anger crash together—and he gets out of his chair, stumbles over to an antique Chinese desk, and pulls some papers from a drawer. Then, like the madman he has become, he tosses them into the fireplace and contentedly watches them go up in flames. Seconds later, he goes on a tear, yanking everything—legal documents, personal letters, photographs—from other drawers in the red desk and throws them into the fire. He stares in strange satisfaction as they shrivel up and disappear into ashes.

  As he is about to return to the desk for another round of fire fuel, his mother-in-law, Russian-born Katherina Stub, walks into the room and is frightened by what she sees.

  “What are you doing, Gene? What is wrong?” she pleads, wondering not only why he is burning the papers, but also what has become of the man she used to know.

  Crosthwaite ignores her and continues to toss documents into the fireplace.

  “Gene! No, Gene! Not those!” she screams, and grabs Tania’s adoption papers from his hands, stashing them behind her back for safety. “Please, not those! Why are you doing this, Gene? No more, Gene. No more! Please stop!”

  Briefly interrupted in his moment of insanity, Crosthwaite storms away, slams shut the door to his bedroom, and locks it. Tight.

  Tough man Oscar Eugene Crosthwaite climbs into bed and quietly cries himself to a restless sleep.

  Saturday, November 2, 1957

  Levelland, Texas

  “Good God Almighty! What the hell is that?”

  Pedro Saucedo and Joe Salaz are frozen in fright. Their eyes wide open, they stare in disbelief as a mystery as old as the ages unfolds in front of them. They think they might be seeing things in the clear, cool Texas night sky, and in fact, they are.

  What the petrified farmworkers are seeing about four miles west of Levelland ultimately will send nearly everyone in this ranching town of about 10,000 into a frenzy and make headlines all over the world. Before the sun rises tomorrow, one of the most active weeks in the history of UFO sightings will be well underway, and across the planet dozens of unexplained sightings by ordinary citizens will be reported to government bureaucrats.

  The bureaucrats will promptly kiss off the UFO reports as everything from mirages and imaginations gone wild to weather balloons and meteorites. But Saucedo and Salaz are not imagining things; what they are seeing is real. Exactly what it is, however, is another matter. Right now, they aren’t worried about how scientists and bureaucrats might react tomorrow and how their skeptical friends might laugh and talk about them. Right now, they are just crouching low to the ground in utter, fearful silence.

  Moments earlier, as they had cruised along Texas Rural Road 114, a long, runway-like stretch of asphalt in the middle of nowhere, a brightly lit, cigar-shaped object about 200 feet long suddenly appeared out of the dark sky and headed directly toward their vehicle.

  “When it got near, the lights of my truck went out and then the motor died. I jumped out of the truck and hit the dirt because I was afraid,” Saucedo, a thirty-year-old Korean War veteran declared later. “I called out to Joe, but he didn’t get out. The thing passed directly over my truck with a great sound and rush of wind.

  “It sounded like thunder, and my truck rocked from the blast. I felt a lot of heat. Then I got up and watched it go out of sight toward Levelland.”

  The UFO disappears with an ear-deafening noise and a wild rush of wind, and Saucedo and Salaz restart the truck and race to nearby Whiteface, where Saucedo stops at a roadside Southwestern Bell phone booth. He swats away the annoying bugs that cluster near the overhead light, plunks a nickel into the slot, and dials the operator, who connects him with the police

  Levelland police officer A.J. Fowler politely listens to his improbable tale, dismisses the men as a couple of Saturday night drunks, and hangs up. Until the call from Saucedo, it had been a routine night for the officer, but things are about to change—in a big way.

  A few minutes later, the police department phone rings again. This time the call comes from the tiny town of Whitharral, about four miles north of Levelland, and once again officer Fowler listens to a story that is simply too improbable to believe. The caller tells him that he has just encountered a brightly lit egg-shaped object in the middle of the road. The caller reports that he got out of his car and cautiously approached it but was too afraid to get very close.

  Seconds later the object slowly lifted off the ground and disappeared into the night. His vehicle, like that of Saucedo and Salaz, had been immobilized by the object, but as soon as it was gone, he was able to restart his car and quickly made his way to the closest phone booth.

  One call becomes two. Two calls quickly become three.

  At midnight, a man driving about eleven miles north of Levelland encounters a UFO hovering over the roadway. His vehicle is suddenly disabled, and he sits in shocked silence, staring at the unidentified object on the roadway. A few minutes later, the UFO swiftly flies way, disappearing like the others into the big, wide Texas night. The caller tells the police dispatcher that his car fired up immediately after the UFO was out of sight.

  Ten minutes later, nineteen-year-old Texas Tech freshman Newell Wright is driving about nine miles east of Levelland when his car engine abruptly stops. Wright gets out of the car, opens the hood, and checks to see if an electrical problem has disabled his vehicle. Suddenly he sees a weird, bluish-green object about 120 feet long land on the pavement just down the road from him. Then it quickly rises into the sky and disappears.

  What in the hell is going on in Hockley County, Texas?

  At 12:15 a.m., just five minutes after Wright’s call to the cops, another driver near Whitharral comes across something unusual in the middle of the road. Like the other vehicles, his is totally disabled. By this time police officer-dispatcher Fowler realizes that something is going on—something so incredible that he can’t begin to fathom it—and he urgently calls out on the radio for all patrol cars in the Levelland area to be on the lookout for a UFO. He feels a little silly, but he can no longer ignore the truth. Something is happening out there.

  The calls keep coming. A ball-like object changes color as it lands on a highway. A truck driver reports a 200-foot object floating in the sky. His vehicle has been disabled. Another vehicle is stopped by some weird object. Thunder-like sounds emanate from floating objects. By 1:30 a.m. it is no longer just civilians reporting the unknown objects in the sky. Two cops, about three miles out of Levelland, report that a large, glowing object passed directly in front of them as they drove along a highway. A fire chief driving about seventeen miles north reports a glowing object in the night, and even the county’s respected sheriff sees something he can’t begin to comprehend.

  During a two-and-a-half-hour span this evening, at least fifteen frightened people—nei
ther crackpots nor Saturday-night drunks—will report mysterious objects in the skies above Levelland.

  And this is only one night in one little Texas town in early November 1957.

  Monday, November 4, 1957

  The overnight flight from Porto Alegre to São Paulo, Brazil, is on schedule and perfectly routine as Captain Jean V. de Beyssac, chief pilot of the Varig Airlines Curtiss C-46 airfreighter, commands the twin-engine plane to a height of 7,500 feet and maintains his altitude above the thin clouds.

  At 1:30 a.m. the routine flight turns into a real-life nightmare.

  Captain de Beyssac notices a strange red light below and to the left of the aircraft and asks his copilot to lean over and see if he notices a flying saucer. They both joke for a second or two, but not for long. Moments later, the fast-moving object approaches the aircraft, and before the startled pilots can change course, a strong, strange smell of something burning enters the cockpit. The red UFO moves closer to the plane, then suddenly dashes away.

  No fire detectors are activated, and as the UFO fades into the distance, the pilots realize that their radio transmitter, the magneto of the right engine, the right-engine generator, and the radio goniometer have all mysteriously been fried to a crisp by whatever just occurred. They turn the plane around, return safely but frighteningly on one engine to Porto Alegre, and make a complete report to authorities about the event.

  As it turns out, it is the second time in less than ninety days that a Varig Airlines crew has had a close encounter with a UFO. On August 14 another crew was flying above the clouds on a route to Rio when the pilots saw a brilliant, disk-shaped object dash by at superhuman speed. The engines failed, the radio quit, and the plane began plummeting to the earth. As the pilots struggled to regain control of the plane, the UFO vanished, and electrical power suddenly was restored. It was a near-death experience—and a close encounter they would never forget.

  A continent away, near Alamogordo, New Mexico, retired Navy man James Stokes is driving along an isolated desert stretch of Highway 54 in his late-model Mercury when the radio begins to crackle and fade away. He reaches down and tries to turn up the volume, and that’s when the engine falters and dies. Frightened nearly out of his mind, Stokes gets out of his car and notices other vehicles stopping nearby. One motorist steps out of his car and points excitedly to the sky.