Route 72 Woodland Exotic Materials Anomaly – Google Docs
Route 72 Woodland Exotic Materials Anomaly
This site used to be an illegal industrial dump located in Woodland Township, Burlington County, New Jersey. Well, technically the site still is, but the EPA swooped in once they got word that Woodland was emitting unsafe levels of gamma radiation. Officially, the site’s cleanup and restoration progress is moving right along. Officially.
Unofficially, don’t expect the state and federal government to clear Woodland any time soon. Back when they started working on the site in the 1980s, workers found about six corpses of something. What that something was, wasn’t clear, but the corpses were definitely not human. Humanoid, but not human. However, they wore clothing, jewelry, had empty pockets suggestive of weapons holsters, were all bound behind their arms with heavy-duty plastic wires highly evocative of zip-ties and seemingly serving the same purpose, and each was shot in what is presumably the back of the head, wrapped in a thick clear plastic sheet, and buried. A precise date is impossible, of course, but the general consensus is that the corpses were buried at some point in the 1960s.
The first FBI agents who were called in on the mistaken belief that this was a mob hit eventually more or less concluded that it was still a mob hit, only not an Earth mob hit. Or something similar. After all, despite the mild incongruity that the corpses were all sapient nonhumans the rest of the scene looked very much like something that organized crime might do to dispose of some bodies: to wit, wrap ‘em in plastic and shove them underneath something disgusting that nobody would want to move. Why a bunch of aliens would pick a New Jersey landfill to do this, instead of just throwing them into the sun or something, has not yet been determined; then again, there’s just not much info to go on.
Needless to say, these six bodies and their gear have been forensically examined down to the electron microscope record for decades. They were humanoid oxygen-breathers with maybe neon in the atmosphere where we have argon; what’s left of the flesh suggests that they weren’t particularly compatible with our ecosystem and vice versa. Even the organisms that promote decomposition in Earth life don’t seem to like alien flesh.
Their items are limited to small bits of jewelry or unpowered tools, easily overlooked; several of the corpses show signs of larger worn items being forcibly removed. Twenty years of examination of the site provided one example of a larger, presumably powered item; and while the advances in materials science that followed a careful analysis of the object ended up paying for the entire project, it’s nevertheless been a frustrating exercise for researchers. Everybody involved expected there to be more to the likely first official (if deeply covert) investigation of another sapient alien species than a played-out collection of a half-dozen whacked alien goodfellas. Is this why they went to school?
So that’s why it’s very exciting that, last Friday, the staff on-site at the dump reported twenty minutes of lost time — and, afterwards, there was another plastic-wrapped alien corpse buried in a ditch. A fresh one. And isn’t everybody involved trying to figure out what to do about it, too.
The arguments range from trying to intercept the next one to keeping their trap shut and letting the aliens keep supplying fresh autopsy subjects (oh, the preliminary results on that are amazing); but what everybody involve does agree on is that there needs to be an extra security presence on-site. But not pedestrian security, of course. This situation needs people with flexible thinking, and an uncritical willingness to not dismiss outlandish, yet highly possible, answers to odd questions.
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