PHOENIX: (Projekt Saucer series)

by W. A. Harbinson

  A former Mafioso with his hands steeped in blood, Fallaci had been abducted and brain-implanted to obey Wilson’s every whim as a scout and roving executioner; otherwise he seemed perfectly normal. He was reporting to Wilson after having just returned from a tour of Antarctica by flying saucer, checking on the movements and activities of the various nations that now had polar exploration bases here.

  ‘It’s been a long time since I studied the situation,’ Wilson replied. ‘What’s it like out there nowadays?’

  Fallaci glanced down at his notes. ‘The US are based at McMurdo Sound and still have their Ronne Antarctic Research Expedition in the old Service East Base camp at Marguerite Bay. Australia has established stations on Heard and Macquarie islands, as well as their Mawson Station on the mainland coast of Macrobertson Land. France has established permanent bases in the Kerguelen and Crozet islands. The Argentines have established General Belgrano Station on the Filchner Ice Shelf. The Norwegians are at Cape Norvegia. The USSR, long active in East Antarctica, now also has Bellingshausen Station in the Antarctic Peninsula, is constructing at Novolazarevskaya, and plans additional stations in West Antarctica. A profusion of British, Chilean and Argentine bases are now located so close together around McMurdo Sound that we must seriously consider the possibility that they’re there for intelligence rather than science.’

  ‘You think they’re foolish enough to try that?’

  ‘Yes, boss. The more you give them, the more confident they’ll become – not really able to imagine just how much farther you’ve advanced – and the more confident they become, the more foolish they’ll be.’

  ‘That’s true enough,’ Wilson replied, though he didn’t seem concerned. ‘Good Sicilian logic. So what else are they up to?’

  ‘Inland stations for the observation of the sun, weather, the aurora, the magnetic field, the ionosphere and cosmic rays include the Byrd Station for the US in West Antarctica, Vostok for the USSR at the south geomagnetic pole and the pole of relative inaccessibility, and Amundsen-Scott Station at the South Pole, also for the US. I should also remind you that a nuclear power plant was set up at McMurdo Station in 1962 and a seawater distillation plant is being installed right now and should be ready by next year. The Antarctic is no longer a safe haven for us. We’re not alone, boss.’

  Wilson smiled bleakly at that remark. ‘We’re not alone’ was a catch phrase now widely used in the West about flying saucers, still generally believed to be of extraterrestrial origin.

  ‘So apart from the possibility of intelligence gathering,’ he said, ‘what else excites their interest here?’

  ‘They believe that western Queen Maud Land, actually Neu Schwabenland, right on our doorstep, could be similar to the gold-producing Witwatersrand beds of South Africa; that the mountain belt of the Antarctic Peninsula could be similar to the copper-rich Andes; that the Antarctic continental shelves near Coats Land and the Adéle and George V coasts could be comparable to the Agulhas Basin off South Africa and the Otway Basin off southern Australia, which are potentially great sources of petroleum. They’re also racing to find the metal minerals for chromium, copper, gold, lead, tin and zinc. Even more ominous, their realisation that Antarctica contains nearly ninety percent of the world’s ice has led them to serious discussion and experimentation regarding the possibility of harnessing it as a limitless supply of non-salt water. Last but by no means least, they’re presently investigating the possibility of using the Antarctic as a long-term deep-freeze storage site for grain and other foods; and, even worse, as a site for radioactive-waste disposal and storage.’

  ‘I would never permit that,’ Wilson said.

  ‘I needn’t remind you of the increasing ruthlessness of the hunters of fur seals and the whaling ships operating around our shores and depleting the waters. I should remind you, however, that tourism, which commenced way back in 1958 with nineto-twelve day tours of the Antarctic Peninsula, arranged by the Argentine Naval Transport Command, is now expanding rapidly with hotels proposed for the McMurdo dry valleys and plans already being drawn up for the introduction of various alpine sports, including skiing and mountaineering, as well as commercial tourist helicopter flights over the wilderness. Between the planes of the tourists and those of the various exploration bases, we have a potentially serious security problem.’

  ‘I’m not too concerned,’ Wilson said. ‘As long as our mutually beneficial, clandestine trade continues with the various nations located here, they’ll keep their aircraft well away from Neu Schwabenland.’

  ‘That’s only the United States, Great Britain, Canada, and the USSR. The smaller countries aren’t included in the trade and therefore don’t know of our existence; so they’ll continue to fly in this direction, and, so far, have only been prevented from seeing us by the relative inaccessibility of the terrain. But they’re developing better aircraft every year – aircraft designed specifically to fly in polar regions – and some day, I believe, they’ll be able to reach us. Likewise, the forthcoming tourist-flight pilots won’t know about us and could choose this area as one of their flight routes. The mountain is, after all, particular spectacular from the point of view of the average tourist.’

  ‘I’ve anticipated that possibility,’ Wilson said, ‘and been working on a means of preventing it. As you just said, the mountain is already an area of inaccessibility. Before the smaller countries or tour operators develop an aircraft that can reach here

  – and, indeed, before the nations we’re trading with grow arrogant and turn against us

  – we’ll have developed an invisible force field that will, like the saucer satellites, which in turn were based on our old Feuerballs, cause normal aircraft engines to malfunction and force them either to crash or turn back before entering the area. Should anything manage to slip through the force field, we will have by then, as a last resort, a working pulse-beam weapon. So I think we’re safe for the foreseeable future. In the meantime, our saucers will continue to haunt the various Antarctic exploration bases by hovering over them, causing blips on their radar screens, or otherwise harassing their aircraft – as, in fact, we’ve been doing for some time now, to the consternation of the pilots and intelligence agents.’

  ‘That’s why they describe a lot of the areas in Antarctica as inaccessible.’

  ‘Precisely,’ Wilson said.

  Glancing through the window, down those dizzying depths between the sheer walls of the mountain where it formed a natural well, he saw the latest 250-foot diameter mother ship on its landing pad, surrounded by smaller saucers of various sizes. Viewed from above, especially from this great height, they looked like perfectly formed, silvery plates turned upside-down. With no protruberances of any kind, no identifying marks, not even a visible seam, they had their own bizarre beauty.

  ‘So what’s the general UFO situation in America?’ Wilson asked his roving scout and assassin.

  ‘No problem,’ Fallaci replied. ‘I can confirm that the virtual dissolving of Project Blue Book, combined with the ridicule heaped upon UFO witnesses and the suppression of information and news about UFOs – a task undertaken by Air Force intelligence and supervised by CIA agent Jack Fuller – has reduced public interest in the subject almost to zero, removed pressure from the Air Force, and given the civilian UFO organisations severe problems, most of them due to a lack of funds caused by falling memberships.’

  ‘Falling because UFOs have been systematically erased from public consciousness by the choking off of news about the subject.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘This all sounds very good to me,’ Wilson said with a thin, almost good-humoured smile.

  ‘It’s certainly not bad,’ Fallaci said. ‘Still, we must continue to keep a watchful eye on the Europeans, Americans and Soviets who have, over the past few years, been cooperating more openly, which isn’t good news for us.’

  ‘They’re co-operating more openly?’ Wilson said. ‘That does surprise me.’

  ‘Me, too,’
Fallaci said, ‘but it’s true. They’ve been drawing closer for the past few years, but really got into bed together in December 1962 with the formation of a multilateral NATO nuclear force; the signing in July 1963 of a treaty between Britain, America and the Soviet Union, banning nuclear weapons tests in the atmosphere, outer space and underwater; and, finally, the installing, on August 10, 1963, of a ‘hot line’ between the Kremlin and the White House, to reduce the risk of accidental war. This unprecedented co-operation between these old enemies suggests that they may be hoping to unite into the one, all-powerful force that can eventually be turned against us.’

  ‘Fear not,’ Wilson replied with the supreme confidence of a man to whom emotion is alien. ‘I’m giving them someone else to worry about. The assassination of President Kennedy – a good job well done, incidentally – ’

  ‘Thanks, boss.’

  ‘As I was saying, the assassination of President Kennedy has already strained the US-Soviet relationship. As we anticipated, many Americans view his death as the result of a Soviet plot. Also, before this year is out, the Chinese will, with our help, successfully test their atomic bomb over Sinkiang, a western province bordering the Soviet Union. That will, I believe, make the Soviets more concerned with the Chinese than with us; while the Americans, still obsessed with the death of their president and his Soviet-loving assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, will be extremely suspicious of the Soviets and much less concerned with us.’

  The intercom on the table beside Wilson rang shrilly. Picking it up, he listened intently, then he put the intercom down, swivelled around in his chair, and used his remote-control to turn on the 28”-TV standing across the room. A machine known as a video-recorder was resting on a stand beneath the TV set and it came on automatically to record the programme being shown.

  ‘Intelligence,’ Wilson explained to Fallaci. ‘They say there’s something on CBSTV that I should see. It’s starting right now.’

  When the picture on the TV screen came into focus, Wilson instantly recognised the parched terrain of Socorro, New Mexico, where the famous UFO crash had occurred on July 2, 1947. The very same day, Wilson recollected, that farmer Marlon Clarke, who had been unfortunate enough to see the debris of the crash and the corpses of the crew, had been abducted by another flying saucer and brought here. Clarke’s severed head, which they had managed to keep alive for years, had recently been attached to a combination of human and mechanical parts. It was therefore still functioning, though programmed by a stereotaxic skullcap, as part of what would soon be a perfect, totally obedient, killing-machine cyborg. Now, thinking he was about to see a documentary of that old crash, Wilson was surprised to find himself viewing a documentary on another UFO crash in Socorro – but one that had taken place just a few days ago.

  What he saw enraged him.

  On Friday, April 24, 1964, somewhere between 5.50pm and 6.00pm, Opal Grinder, manager of the Whiting Brothers’ service station in Socorro, claimed that the driver of a 1955 model Cadillac, which had a Colorado licence plate and also contained the driver’s wife and three boys, stopped at Grinder’s service station for gas. The agitated driver told Grinder that ‘something travelling across the highway from east to west’ almost ‘took the roof off’ his car as he was driving just south of town, north of the airport. He suspected that the object had either landed or crashed, as he had also seen ‘a police car head off the road and up a hill in that direction.’ Continuing into town, he had met another police car heading in the same direction. To Grinder’s suggestion that he might have seen a helicopter, the unnamed man said, ‘That sure would be some funny helicopter!’

  Subsequent investigations by the police revealed that the object had been observed flying only a few hundred feet to the northeast of the north-bound Cadillac at 5.45pm on April 24; it was ‘egg-shaped, had a smooth aluminium or magnesium-like surface, and seemed to be a little longer than the four-door green 1955 Cadillac in which the family was riding.’ The object dropped to barely ten feet above the ground, flew directly at the Cadillac, and passed silently within ten feet of its top, almost touching the tip of the radio antenna. It streaked onward a few hundred yards to the southwest, where it stopped abruptly, hung in mid-air for about thirty seconds, then descended vertically, silhouetted by the low afternoon sun, to land just beyond a small hill that hid it from the view of those in the Cadillac.

  The driver of the Cadillac and his wife then observed a white Pontiac police car as it turned off a north-south road that ran west of US Highway 85, cut across the rough terrain, and headed for the rise beyond which the strange flying object had landed. Thinking that perhaps they had seen some ‘new type of aircraft’ that was being developed in the area, the driver of the Cadillac kept driving towards Socorro, eventually passing another police car. This one, which was from the New Mexico State Police, was moving urgently in the opposite direction, also heading for where the strange aircraft had descended.

  Once in Socorro, the driver of the Cadillac stopped at the Whiting Brothers’ service station on the north side of town, where he told the manager, Opal Grinder, that someone was flying ‘a funny looking aircraft’ dangerously low over the highway on Socorro’s south side, had landed, and was probably being checked out by the officer of the pursuing police car. Then the driver of the Cadillac continued his journey with his family.

  The man in the white Pontiac was later identified as Lonnie Zamora, a thirty-oneyear old Socorro policeman described in a subsequent report by investigating FBI agent J. Arthur Byrnes Jr as a ‘sober, industrious and conscientious officer, and not given to fantasy.’

  Zamora’s extraordinary experience had begun at approximately 5.45pm when he set off in pursuit of a speeding black 1964 Chevrolet, following it south, after pulling away from the west side of the courthouse. About a minute later, at approximately the same time as the unknown man from Colorado had sighted his UFO, when Zamora was a half-mile south of Spring Street, he heard a roar and noticed a brilliant blue ‘cone of flame’ low to the south-southwest, at a distance of approximately 2,400 ft. As Zamora was wearing prescription glasses with green sunshades, he was at this stage unable to distinguish the difference between the flying object’s body and the ‘blue cone of flame’ shooting out of it. As the flame was over the location of a dynamite shack owned by the town mayor, Zamora assumed that the dynamite was blowing up; so instead of continuing his pursuit of the Chevrolet, he turned off the paved road and headed across the rough terrain, toward what now looked like a descending flame and sounded like a ‘continuous roaring’.

  Because of the position of the speeding Chevrolet, it was assumed by the investigators that its driver would have either seen or heard the descending object.

  Zamora drove across the rough terrain, towards the roaring ‘flame’, for about twenty seconds. By this time he was able to note that the flame definitely was ‘bluish, very brilliant, a little orange around the edges, more so near the bottom’ and that it was ‘sort of motionless, but appeared to descend slowly.’ He could not see the bottom of the flame, which had just descended behind a hill; nor did he notice smoke. But some dust seemed to be moving over the area where the object had landed.

  The ‘flame’ disappeared completely behind the hill, but the roaring continued as Zamora tried more than once to make his Pontiac climb the steep, gravel-covered slope. Then, as he finally began to ascend successfully, the roaring of the hidden ‘flame’ died away.

  Turning over the hilltop, Zamora saw a ‘shiny type object’ down in the ravine, or arroyo, to the southwest, at a distance of about 150 yards. He stopped his car for a few seconds, in order to study the object. At first he thought it was ‘an overturned white car’ with the far end raised higher than the nearest one. Then he saw two people in white coveralls standing close to the object.

  As if having heard Zamora’s arrival, one of the individuals turned and looked straight at his car, then jumped slightly, as if startled by seeing him there.

  Zamora had only stopp
ed for a few seconds. Now, as he started forward again in his car, he noted that the object was ‘like aluminium – it was whitish against the mesa background, but not chrome’ and it seemed oval or ‘egg-shaped’ with support legs extending obliquely from it.

  The individuals in white coveralls looked like normal human beings, but ‘possibly they were small adults or large kids.’

  As he drove on again, Zamora descended into a dip and temporarily lost sight of the object and the two people beside it. Worried that he might have come across a top-secret experimental vehicle from the White Sands Proving Ground, and wanting one reliable witness other than himself in case of trouble with the authorities, he radioed to the sheriff's office that he was checking a possible 10-40, or accident, down in the arroyo, and wanted a New Mexico State Police Sergeant, Samuel Chavez, to come alone to the location.

  As his message was being relayed to Chavez by Ned Lopez, the Socorro chief dispatcher, Zamora stopped his car again and started to get out, still talking on the radio. He dropped the microphone accidentally and leaned down to retrieve it. Even as he was straightening up again, he heard ‘a heavy slam, metal-like, heavier than a tank hatch... then another slam, real loud.’ He was completely out of his car and could see the object in clear view, about fifty feet away from the arroyo, with two of its four support legs extending obliquely down to the ground. He could also see, for the first time, a large, red insignia on one side of the object’s otherwise smooth, featureless, egg-shaped body.

  The two individuals in white coveralls had disappeared – a fact that, combined with the metallic ‘slamming’ noises heard by Zamora, made him assume that they had entered the strange craft by some unseen door.

  He had only taken two or three steps toward the object when he heard ‘a roar... not exactly a blast, very loud roar... not like a jet... started low frequency quickly, then rose in frequency – a higher tone – and in loudness, from loud to very loud.’ At the same time he saw ‘bright blue flame’ shooting out from the underside of the object as it started to rise vertically from the ground.