INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT: Lt. General Thomas L. Palmerston, high commander of NATO forces; Operation Verne.
“For the record, I assumed overall command of NATO ground forces in Iceland at approximately 10.30am on 23rd April 1958. My first action was to establish a perimeter around the crash site to prevent the local civilians accessing the area. Then we locked the place down and awaited the arrival of the Soviet ground forces. I believe the official line was a malfunctioning B-52 bomber had come down. I doubt anyone believed us.
“The bulk of the Soviet forces arrived at 1pm, the lead elements of the Soviet Fourth Army. They looked like hard men, mostly paratroopers, probably mixed in with special forces. A couple of their big cargo planes landed at our airstrip and unloaded a handful of T-54 tanks too. I met their commander, Mikhail Kirov, and I found him quietly impressive. I guessed KGB, but I never found out any more about him than his name. I don’t even know if he survived or not. We spent ten minutes going over the situation, then I lent him our trucks and we headed over to the crash site.
“I had soldiers from the 95th Airborne and the 202nd Infantry on the perimeter, supported by half a dozen Patton medium tanks. We ceded half of the perimeter to the Soviets and, when they were in position, we began our advance. You could see the remains of the UFO from the perimeter – it was heavily damaged, but still in one piece. Everything around the impact site that could burn was either ablaze or had already charred to a cinder. It was a desolate, hellish scene. The men did not look comfortable there.
“We slowly tightened the perimeter ring, closing in on the downed UFO until we were about a kilometre away. It was at that point that we began to take enemy fire. The extraterrestrials were concealed in the shattered hull of their ship and the wreckage around it, and we were advancing over a barren wasteland. There was almost no cover. We were taking horrific losses from the second they opened
fire.
“Their weaponry seemed to take two main forms, either energy beams or searing bolts of superheated energy. I saw a beam, a thrumming red ray of light, carve a Patton in two. It cut through the steel as if it were tissue paper. The energy bolts were scything down my soldiers, charring the flesh from the bones of any man unlucky enough to be struck by one. One flicked past my ear, only missing me by a couple of yards. It leaves you half-blind and tasting the ozone in the air.
“We replied as best we could. Our tanks pounded the crashed vessel with dozens, perhaps hundreds, of cannon rounds. The soldiers stitched anything that moved with streams of machine-gun fire. The battle was fierce, but by mid-afternoon the extraterrestrial return fire had slackened enough that we could resume the advance and tighten the perimeter. I returned to the nearby command post and left the operation in the charge of my assistants. At just before 5:00pm I received a message informing me the perimeter had closed to within half a kilometre of the downed spaceship.
“At 5:07pm a detonation centred on the crash site was picked up across the entire globe. Seismologists estimated the yield to be in the region of fifty megatons. I was later informed that the ground-level detonation and peculiar behaviour of the blast meant that it inflicted far less damage on the surrounding area than a conventional nuclear weapon would have, but it still extinguished all life within ten kilometres of the crash site. Windows were reportedly shattered as far away as fifty kilometers. The mobilised elements of the 95th Airborne, 202nd Infantry and Soviet Fourth Army were all wiped out in their entirety – only the staff officers located at the remote command facility and the wounded who had been pulled back from the battle survived the blast.
“Later analysis of the seismological data suggested that an extremely large power store had exploded, assumed to be either the vessel’s power core or munitions stocks. We guessed the aliens had done it deliberately, knowing they could not hold out forever. In any case, neither NATO nor Soviet scientists were able to find any recoverable trace of the crashed vessel after the detonation, leaving us little the wiser about our alien brethren or their technology.
“Inevitably, the incident was hushed up. I took a lead role in the later press conferences – the official story being a Soviet invasion of Iceland was thwarted by the deployment of nuclear weapons. A permanent joint NATO/Soviet military presence was established on the island as a show of good faith, allowing both sides free access to the remains of the crash site. But, as far as I know, none of the
countless military scientists studying the site has ever managed to uncover anything of worth. I doubt they ever will.”
