by Ian Watson
At the end of the second week in April 1954, in a restricted area of Edwards Base, he’d seen five flying saucers land. And remain on the ground for two whole days, during which scientists, military experts and even churchmen were invited over them by their humanoid operators—the humans bewildered and overwhelmed by craft that could change Shape and size at will, become transparent, invisible, even insubstantial so that people could walk through their walls.
He’d seen all this from a little way off. Yet he’d recognized, unmistakably, Dwight D. Eisenhower, spirited in from a supposed golfing holiday at Palm Springs. He saw the President himself, meeting the Space People. He’d spotted Bishop McIntyre of Los Angeles. Many others faces too. Right there.
And he’d known that President Eisenhower would address the nation within a matter of weeks. Then Barry would know where his buddy of the Korean War had gone to, and why.
But nothing happened.
Nothing at all.
People wouldn’t speak about those two days at Muroc, subsequently. It was more than a blanket of silence; it seemed an actual subtraction of what had happened from actuality—a deletion of it ever hewing happened…
Cold War, then. Red Alerts. He was posted to Germany. Under a pen-name he published a booklet, 48 Hours at Muroc. Seeing his own account in print, he too had begun to wonder; had it ever really happened? He knew perfectly well that it had, yet as the years went by, each with its own crop of contradictory, paradoxical sightings and close encounters, nothing was ever learnt, and the more he knew, the less he knew.
He married a German woman, later she divorced him. The subtraction of Gisela from his life didn’t deny that she had ever been there, though—in the way that Muroc implacably denied itself. He grew angry; then patient and defiant. He left the Air Force and helped found the Aerial Phenomena Association in London, a city he had taken a liking to during leaves.
The phone rang; he lifted the receiver.
“It’s Norman Tate here. I’ve got a really super CE-2 report for you. Local paper—Granton Herald. This one could be worth chasing up at source. Alas, I’m off to Scotland on business. A saucer buzzed and burnt some students—”
Enthusiastic Norman—yet the man was a meticulous, fussy investigator. As Shriver listened, he watched a jumbo jet straining heavily through the clouds on its flight path in to Heathrow, and imagined an absurd blob of light engulfing it, and deleting it from the natural world.
What had he experienced at Muroc? A hallucination? Or something more sinister: a breach in reality itself? A collapse of consensus causal law, which had sucked into itself temporarily some hundreds of air force officers, scientists and politicians? Including the President of the land himself who, God bless his golf clubs, recognized the anomaly for the treacherous thing it was: a hole, of warped reality, in the midst of Edwards Air Force Base—something which released its captives after a while as normality reasserted itself. Released them so that perhaps even they no longer knew! Quite clearly this was different from an ordinary…
“Hallucination,” he whispered into the phone.
“What’s that? Listen, man, actual burns. The makings of a classic case!”
“I’m sorry Norman, I was thinking about my book. Do you like UFO: Buyers Beware! for a title? Caveat emptor, you know!”
“No-o-o.” It was a long drawn-out reproof. “Frankly I don’t like it. The reading public might take you at your word and never buy the damned thing.”
“Well, my idea is that there might be hallucinations of a very special sort, which affect non-psychotics, and which can be shared among witnesses miles apart—”
“That’s hardly tenable, Barry. How can strangers possibly share the same hallucination? Everybody has a different breaking point. We all snap in different, unique ways.”
“Isn’t the Indian rope trick a collective hallucination?This would be a sort of rope trick, without a fakir. The people trick themselves.”
“Oh, I’ve seen the rope trick. That was in Bangalore. I saw it, but did my camera see it? Not likely. The rope trick is some kind of powerful hypno-telepathy. But cameras don’t see anything because they haven’t got any minds, and nothing actually happens. UFOs, my boy, make real holes in the ground, as we all know. They burn people and knock planes out of the sky. Smack. Solid events.”
“Mightn’t there be hallucinations that are also at the same time, in a sense, real? Hallucinations that have a temporary, conditional reality?”
“Either something is real, or it isn’t real.”
“But need it be? UFOs seem to act as though they both are, and aren’t at one and the same time. As though they occupy some middle ground.” Just as the Muroc episode both was, and was-not…
“There is such a thing as a law of the excluded middle, Barry. That’s basic to all logic. A thing can only be, or not be.”
“That isn’t true of subatomic particles.”
“Of course I mean in the world at large—which is where UFOs operate.”
Shriver sighed. “Are UFOs logical?”
He heard Norman laugh, assuming that his remark was a joke. “The public won’t buy the book, boy. Caveat yourself!”
“Okay, can you give me the phone number of that hospital?”
Five
On this morning of their discharge, with two days’ spare supply of corticosteroid tablets in their pockets, they found the American waiting to meet them. Introducing himself, he offered drinks and lunch. So now they sat sunburnt in a dark lounge bar, Suzie the more disfigured of the two. Her eyes smarted behind fat sunglasses; her skin was peeling into white dead leaves. She looked, she thought, like a parboiled beetroot wrapped in torn clingfilm. Her body stung pinkly. She felt restless, humiliated and angry, and mildly resented the American, laughing at the loud, near-tartan sports jacket he wore under a thin black raincoat; though Michael, pink and peeling too, had taken to him quickly as an honourable confidant, who obviously knew far more than Deacon about what he referred to as “The Phenomenon”.
“There’s a pattern to these phenomenon, Mike. Though what that pattern is God only knows.” Shriver sounded wistful. “You can’t just blithely assume that UFOs are alien spacecraft working on some different principle from any we know. Even if their operators tell you that’s what they are! You have to see the phenomenon whole. A large part of it is sheer misinformation on the part of the supposed ufonauts. All that nonsense about galactic confederations and hundreds of planets with funny names! It’s only paralleled for sheer idiocy by the way these marvellous scoutships seem to be constantly blowing up or having bits fall off them. Not to mention seeming to be navigated by half-witted butterflies—or the nasty tricks they play: kidnapping, scaring, chasing cars, and, oh yes, sunburning people.”
“I feel diseased by it,” frowned Suzie.
“Maybe the sunburn is to prove to us that it’s real, not imaginary?”
“Ha. What does it prove. Mike? Like that doctor said, you could have done it with a sunlamp. There’s never any proof. Actually this whole thing has been going on for thousands of years in one form or another, and we’re still no nearer knowing what it is. You think that’s an overstatement, Suzie? I can show you full documentation.”
“This lager tastes like piss,” she said.
“Suzie!” hissed Michael.
Shriver seemed unperturbed. “I quite agree. Most lager does, to me. Try something stronger.”
“Brandy, please.”
After soothing Suzie’s eyes the other morning, till she could open them a crack, Michael and Suzie had visited a doctor who diagnosed Klieg conjunctivitis. The probable cause was over-exposure to ultraviolet rays. The morning news on the local radio station mentioned strange lights seen over the Common the night before… The doctor had shrugged, non-committally; however, Suzie’s attack of nausea and the exhaustion they both reported bothered him sufficiently for him to phone the hospital. There they had spent the past forty-eight hours in separate wards, faces smeared with cort
icosteroid cream, having their blood count monitored and enduring jokes about moonbathing. A local reporter had visited them on the first day, as word leaked out. Later, an interviewer came from the local radio. When Michael finally got round to phoning John Deacon, Deacon had already seen the story in print in the Granton Herald and intended to visit them that evening. Michael put Deacon off. He had remembered the trance and what he now had to say couldn’t be said in a public ward. So far, Michael had kept quiet about his earlier “encounter”, except to Suzie—and now, to her annoyance, the American…
Shriver reseated himself, with a glass of brandy for Suzie.
“The trouble,” he went on, “is that the phenomenon constantly suits itself to the frame of reference of the moment. Once, that framework was religious. So you got battles of angels in the sky, God walking the Earth, Burning Bushes, Ezekiel’s Chariot and whatnot—in Israel, China, Ancient Mexico, wherever.”
Suzie coughed on the brandy. “Ezekiel and Moses saw flying saucers, did they?”
“No! They encountered exactly what they saw—which is to say a conditioning and manipulating phenomenon. It’s no use picturing Ezekiel’s chariot as some spaceship and trying to work out what sort of propulsion it used. That isn’t the point. Ezekiel didn’t meet an alien spacecraft. He met something of this Earth. Aliens? No way! This has been here all along. How else can we explain the huge volume of inexplicable sightings of one sort and another down the ages?”
“How about downright ignorance and superstition?” she Suggested.
“Take those woodcuts of spinning fiery wheels seen over Nuremburg in the Middle Ages—”
“Cohn’s book on cults of the millennium,” she began.
“That isn’t the answer, Suzie. Our forebears weren’t quite so dumb or deluded as we like to think. Life would be a lot simpler if these things were ‘just’ alien spaceships! How can we explain the huge amount of things of one sort or another dumped out of the sky—ranging from neatly sorted snails all of one species, through blocks of ice and piles of clinker, to gallons of blood—all poltergeisted down on to this world? Orthodox science ignores these events, of course. They don’t fit into the scheme anywhere, so they can’t have happened Except that they did.”
“That’s just, what’s his name… Charles Fort?” Suzie emptied her glass and sat playing with it, trying to make the rim ring like a bell by dragging a moistened fingertip around it.
“All that Charles Fort did to earn your scorn, my dear, was simply collect reports from perfectly respectable sources—annual registers, weather reviews, meteorological reports. He never invented a damn thing. Now, I just said ‘poltergeisted’, didn’t I? The fact is that UFOs and their kin have a lot in common with poltergeists and ghosts—and with fairies and leprechauns too, and with the angels and demons of the occultists. There’s a remarkable similarity of structure between pacts with fairies and summonings of spirits and modern contact stories about the different types of so-called aliens, and what happens to the people who meet them. You get offered fabulous revelations and crocks of gold, then you’re systematically hoodwinked, cheated and discredited.
“Did you know that giant dirigibles were flying around the Mid West of America in the eighteen nineties—before any such dirigibles existed? Whole towns spotted them. Local papers are full of them. There are stacks of notarized reports by solid citizens. The crews of these dirigibles used to drop in from time to time for cups of water, or to borrow a screwdriver. The damned dirigibles were breaking down all the time, of course! These fliers promised great revelations, real soon—which never matured. They dumped cryptic messages overboard. They winched up cattle—which were found surgically dissected later on. They even hoisted one guy up by the seat of his pants on their trailing anchor! Which is a rather interesting echo, incidentally, of other aerial ships’ anchors that got snared in church steeples in the Middle Ages. Bristol, circa A.D. 1200, to name but one—it’s in the chronicler Gervase of Tilbury. So what were those dirigibles in the eighteen nineties?”
“Obviously some kind of practical joke.”
“Just so! A practical joke. But not one that was quite within the technology of the day, even though it fitted the frame of reference of the time. There’s a hoax all right, but the hoax is by the UFOs! They’re leading Humanity by the nose, now as ever. Busily making themselves seem bizarre and inexplicable in the process!”
Her glass harmonica gave tongue at last, in a cool silver hooting.
“Will you have another brandy?” he offered.
• • •
“Perhaps you could try to explain all the hundreds of silent, unmarked airplanes seen over Scandinavia in the nineteen thirties? Or the rain of phantom rockets there, just when the Cold War was starting up? They generally vanished into lakes, after sending out ‘alien’ broadcasts in broken Swedish.”
“How about the Russians?” she giggled. “A spot of psychological warfare? They captured enough rocket experts at Peenemunde.”
“No way, Suzie. No more than the ‘foo fighters’ of the Second World War were Axis or Allied—”
“ ‘Foo fighters’? What are they? They sound like people who can’t stand tapioca. Or is it Fu Manchu’s air force?”
Shriver sighed. “It was a piece of pilots’ slang in the Second World War. I guess the word was a mispronunciation of feu—fire. These UFOs looked like globes of fire. Though the word could have come from a line in the Smokey Stover comic strip: ‘Where there’s foo, there’s fire.’ ”
“I’ve never heard of it.”
“I guess you’re too young. Anyway, the alien spaceship—the Adamski model—is the same old beast in a new guise. It fits our current frame of reference—of Moon flights, radio telescopes, and the hunt for life in the Universe. Do you realize, the very same messages, verbatim, have been picked Up by ham radio buffs, by Ufo contactees and by psychics in trances who thought they were in touch with the dead?”
“The same structures of hysteria,” frowned Suzie.
“Structures I’ll buy. But the very same words! The very same sentences? I tell you, something is broadcasting—on the waveband of the human mind, and on radios and telephones and any electrical gear, and right across the visible spectrum too. It even produces materializations—up to and including a whole menagerie of apparently living entities. And the whole phenomenon, with this Cheshire cat grin on its face, is constantly mixing authentic bits of information and true prophecies in with a whole farrago of nonsense. It plays childish, and pretty complicated, games that quite often turn out nasty—apparently with the main aim of discrediting itself!”
“Paranoia,” she said. “That’s all this is. It’s the biggest bloody example of persecution mania I’ve ever heard of—”
“Induced delusions do enter into it. Adamski and the others aren’t all lying, A lot of contactees genuinely believe what they’ve been shown, even if believing it wrecks their lives!”
“Everything tied together, from Ezekiel to leprechauns to… to…”
Shriver smiled wanly. “How about; Uri Geller? He’s another contactee, did you know? Serving a cosmic metaconsciousness. According to him there’s some sort of super computer in the sky a million years ahead that helps him do his tricks.”
“It’s paranoid, don’t you realize?”
“It’s happening.”
“I’m not getting drawn into this sort of nuttiness, no thank you! A sweet, sane life for me!”
Michael sat unhappily. His encounter with Loova no longer seemed so clear. It had certainly happened. He had no doubts on that score. The fact that it had happened mattered intensely. But what was it that had happened?
Shriver read his expression; he knew it well enough. “She’s right in a way,” he conceded. “People do get sucked into all kinds of obsessive beliefs and make fools of themselves. That’s one way the phenomenon protects itself. Anyway, I promised to buy you both a meal.” Appraising Suzie’s tattered, blotched face, he added, “In some suitabl
y dark and dingy restaurant… Do you figure I could sit in when Dr Deacon next hypnotizes you?”
“Heavens, I ought to call him. I… we’ve a lot to tell him.”
“I haven’t,” said Suzie. “Get out of this, Mike, it’s madness.”
“We promised, love.”
“You did.”
“Just tell Deacon what we both saw—please. We do owe it to him. We wouldn’t have seen anything if it hadn’t been for the trance, and me telling him—”
“About your space seductress?”
“Christ, don’t sound jealous. I don’t even know what she was now.”
“That’s the spirit,” nodded Shriver. “Keep your neutrality—but don’t let ’em get away with it.”
Suzie looked furious, but kept quiet
Six
Suzie stared out of Deacon’s window at the jumble of felled, diseased elms. The buzz of the chain-saw slicing them into manageable sections reminded her naggingly of something unpleasant long ago, perhaps a dentist’s drill…
The intrusive noise reminded Deacon of something else. He searched for associations. This same room, yes. The topic of UFOs… There it was—his telephone had rung while the tape was rewinding. He’d heard a screeching sound in the receiver. Then the tape had nothing on it, almost as if the noise had wiped it clean. Surely there was no connection.
“Mr Shriver, if you were hoping to hear the tape of Michael’s trance, I’m afraid you’re in for a disappointment.”
Shriver leaned forward. “The tape turned out blank? Am I right?” He chuckled. “I can see I am.”
Michael rounded on Deacon. “Surely you didn’t erase it? You said—”
Shriver laid a restraining hand on the boy’s arm. “Of course he didn’t. What exactly happened, Sir?”
Deacon explained the circumstances, including the freak phone call which he’d dismissed as trivial previously.
