By summer of 1955 he had sent an even dozen of letters to the Department of Agriculture requesting information on the hatching of goose eggs. The department sent him all the booklets on hand that were anywhere near the subject, but his letters simply got more impassioned and freer in their references to his ‘friend,’ the local congressman.
My connection with this is that I am in the employ of the Department of Agriculture. Since I was attending a convention at San Antonio in July of 1955, my boss asked me to stop off at MacGregor’s place and see what I could do to help him. We’re servants of the public and besides we had finally received a letter from MacGregor’s congressman.
On July 17, 1955, I met The Goose.
I met MacGregor first. He was in his fifties, a tall man witha lined face full of sus 1c10 . I went over all the information he had been given then asked pohtely 1f I might see his geese.
He said, ‘It’s not geese, mister; it’s one goose.’
I said, ‘May I see the one goose?’
‘Rather not.’
‘Well , then,I can’t help you any further. If it’s only one goose then there’s Just somethmg wrong with it. Why worry about one goose? Eat it.’
I got up and reached for my hat.
He said, ‘Wait!’ and I stood there while his lips tightened and his eyes wnnkled and he had a quiet fight with himself. ‘Come with.’
I went out with him to a pen near the house, surrounded by barbed wire, wtih a locked ga to it, and holding one goose – The Goose.
‘That’s The Goose,’ he said. The way he said it I could hear the capitals.
I stared at it. It looked like any other goose, fat self-satisfied d short-tempered.
MacGr gor said, ‘And here’s one of its eggs. It’s been in the incubator. Nothmg happens.’ He produced it from a capacious overall pocket ere was a queer strain about his manner of holding it.
I frowned. T ere was something wrong with the egg. It was smaller an more sphencal than, normal.
MacGregor said, ‘Toke it.’
I reached out and took it. Or tried to. I gave it the amount of heft an egg hke that ought to deserve and it just sat where it was I had tot harder and then up it came.
Now I knew what was queer about the way MacGregor held it It we1g ed nearly two pounds.
I stared at i as it lay there, pressing down the palm of my hand and MacGregor gnnned sourly. ‘Drop it,’ he said.
I just looked at him, so he took it out of my hand and dropped it himself.
It hit soggy. It didn’t smash. There was no spray of white and yolk It Just lay where It fell with the bottom caved in.
I picked it up again. The white eggshell had shattered where the egg a struck. Pieces of It had flaked away and what shone through dull yellow m color.
My hands trembled. It was all I could do to make my fingers work, but I got some of the rest of the shell flaked away, and stared at the yellow.
I didn’t have to run any analyses. My heart told me. I was fac·e to face with The Goose!
The Goose That Laid The Golden Eggs! My first problem was to get MacGregor to give up that golden egg. I was almost hysterical about it.
I said, ‘I’ll give you a receipt. I’ll guarantee you payment. I’ll do anything in reason.’
‘I don’t want the government butting in,’ he said stubbornly.
But I was twice as stubborn and in the end I signed a receipt and he dogged me out to my car and stood in the road as I drove away, following me with his eyes.
The head of my section at the Department of Agriculture is Louis P. Bronstein. He and I are on good terms and I felt I could explain things without being placed under immediate obseration. Even so, I took no chances. I had the egg with me and when I got to the tricky part, I just laid it on the desk between us.
I said, ‘It’s a yellow metal and it could be brass only it isn’t because it’s inert to concentrated nitric acid.’
Bronstein said, ‘It’s some sort of hoax. It must be.’
‘A hoax that uses real gold? Remember, when I first saw this thing, it was covered completely with authentic unbroken eggshell. It’s been easy to check a piece of the eggshell. Calcium carbonate.’
Project Goose was started. That was July 20, 1955.
I was the responsible investigator to begin with and remained in titular charge throughout, though matters quickly got beyond me.
We began with the one egg. Its average radius was 35 millimeters (major axis, 72 millimeters; minor axis, 68 millimeters). The gold shell was 2.45 millimeters in thickness. Studying other eggs later on, we found this value to be rather high. The average thickness turned out to be 2.1 millimeters.
Inside was egg. It looked like egg and it smelled like egg.
Aliquots were analyzed and the organic constituents were reasonably normal. The white was 9.7 per cent albumin. The yolk had the normal complement of vitellin, cholesterol, phospholipid, and carotenoid. We lacked enough material to test for trace constituents, but later on with more eggs at our disposal we did and nothing unusual showed up as far as contents of vitamins, coenzymes, nucleotides, sulfhydryl groups, et cetera, et cetera were concerned.
One important gross abnormality that showed was the egg’s behavior on heating. A small portion of the yolk, heated, ‘hard-boiled’ almost at once. We fed a portion of the hard-boiled egg to a mouse. It survived.
I nibbled a another bit of it. Too small a quantity to taste, really, but 1t made me sick. Purely psychosomatic, I’m sure.
Boris W. Finley, of the Department of Bichemistry of Temple University – a department consultant – supervised these tests.
