PHOENIX: (Projekt Saucer series)

by W. A. Harbinson

  The only thing known for certain at this point in time was that the failure had occurred somewhere in the flow between the Niagara Falls generators and the Clay power sub-station, an automatic control unit through which the electric power flowed from Niagara to New York.

  Shortly after Fuller had digested this report, he received a call from a CIA friend, Dick Lamont, at Andrews Air Force Base.

  ‘There’s a UFO connection,’ Lamont said.

  ‘What kind?’

  ‘The first report of an unidentified,’ Lamont told him, ‘was made by the Deputy Aviation Commissioner of Syracuse, Robert C. Walsh, and several other witnesses. Just after the power failed at Syracuse, all of them saw what resembled a huge fireball ascending from a fairly low altitude near Hancock Airport. Approaching for landing at that time was flight instructor Weldon Ross and his passenger, computer technician James Brooding, both of whom saw the same object. At first they mistook it for a burning building on the ground – something corroborating the fact that the fireball was at low altitude – but then they realised that it was something in the air... a single, round-shaped object about a hundred feet in diameter, later described in their formal report as a “flame-coloured globe”. And according to Ross’s calculations, that object was directly over the Clay power sub-station...’

  No sooner had Fuller put the phone down than it rang again. This time it was Wilson.

  ‘Well?’ he asked softly.

  ‘I have to talk to the President,’ Wilson replied.

  ‘You do that,’ Wilson said.

  A few hours later, at 3.30 in the morning, after his ‘emergency’ telephone conversation with President Lyndon B. Johnson, Fuller was landing by helicopter in the most heavily guarded area of Nellis AFB, Las Vegas, Nevada. Two crude coffins and a pile of large wooden crates had already been loaded onto a caravan of US Army trucks, which were surrounded by a ring of heavily armed troops. Fuller clambered into the back of a diplomatic limousine and told the driver to go. The limousine, which had tinted, bulletproof windows, led the convoy of trucks away from the floodlit hangar to a restricted airstrip at the northern edge of the base.

  Clambering out of the limousine, Fuller glanced about him and noted that the whole area was surrounded by barbed wire and protected by more helmeted, armed troops. Satisfied with the security arrangements, he supervised the unloading of the two coffins and crates. When they were unloaded and forming one large, pyramidshaped heap in the middle of the airstrip, the armed soldiers were ordered into the trucks and driven back to camp, leaving Fuller alone with a high-ranking Air Force officer.

  Not intimidated by high-ranking Air Force officers, Fuller lit a cigarette and smoked while he waited.

  Eventually, one of Wilson’s mother ships descended silently, majestically, a great pyramid of steel cocooned in a white haze, its rainbow lights flashing rapidly around its circular rim, to settle just above the field at the far side of the runway. When it had landed, the lights flickered off, one after the other in quick sequence, the white haze disappeared, as if the light had been sucked back in through the porous metal of the saucer’s body, and then a large, formerly seamless panel moved outwards and down to form a doorway with a wide ramp leading from the holding bay of the saucer to the ground.

  At first seen as no more than a sharp-edged silhouette in the dazzling light of the holding bay, Wilson’s assistant, Salvatore Fallaci, became recognisably human as he advanced down the ramp and approached Fuller, now just getting out of his limousine.

  As Fuller noted instantly, Wilson was not present. Instead, Fallaci was surrounded by four creatures who could have been easily mistaken for aliens, or extraterrestrials, but were, as Fuller now knew, cyborgs surgically mutated from what had once been normal human beings: the small Ache Indians of Paraguay. Averaging five feet tall, sometimes even smaller, only occasionally taller, they’d had facial surgery to replace the nose, mouth and throat with metal-covered prosthetics. While this alone would have made them look bizarre, they were rendered even more ‘alien’ by their remotecontrolled metal hands, which were actually small CAMS of the kind used for seabed exploration.

  The children of Frankenstein, Fuller thought. That’s who I’m dealing with. That fucker Wilson is Frankenstein.

  ‘Good evening, Mr Fuller,’ Fallaci said.

  ‘More like good morning,’ Fuller responded.

  Fallaci smiled. He had that Italian charm. ‘Normal people keep normal hours,’ he said, ‘and are always boring.’ He glanced at the trucks lined up behind Fuller. ‘Is everything there, Mr Fuller? By which I mean the crashed saucer and its dead cyborgs. Those and every other single item you took into that hangar.’

  ‘Every single item,’ Fuller said. ‘You’re getting everything back.’

  ‘It’s good to know that above and beyond you, there are people with some common sense.’

  ‘Go screw yourself,’ Fuller said.

  He had finally come to accept (and it hadn’t been easy) that he was frightened of Wilson. He had never been frightened of anyone in his life – not until he met Wilson, who had always been icily polite and curiously civilised. Fuller was frightened of Wilson’s steady blue gaze, of his absolute pragmatism, of the way he could look directly at you without blinking and reduce you to nothing. Wilson lacked normal feelings. He passed judgement, then acted. What he did was dictated by a logic so pure that it had to be inhuman.

  Fuller accepted that. He didn’t like it, but he understood it. Pragmatism was his own meat and potatoes - a man did what he had to do. That was Wilson. That was Fuller, also. In truth, he and Wilson were opposite sides of the same coin.

  You couldn’t believe this shit coming down, but there it was on your plate. You either ate it or you starved to death. That was life in a nutshell. On the other hand, though Fuller patriotically ate this shit, he wasn’t about to do so in front of Salvatore Fallaci. The former Mafioso was only Wilson’s minion and as such could be used as an antidote to Fuller’s fear and frustration. All the things that Fuller wanted to say to Wilson – but did not dare say – he could say to Fallaci.

  ‘You hear me? I said, go screw yourself.’

  ‘I’m not here to be insulted,’ Fallaci said, ‘so let’s just do what we have to do. May I start?’

  ‘What the fuck do you think?’ Fuller responded, trying to obliterate his fear of Wilson by shitting on his assistant. ‘We didn’t come here at this hour to rock and roll. Take what you want and then leave.’

  ‘I will do exactly that,’ Fallaci said. ‘Thank you, Mr Fuller.’

  Using what appeared to be a miniature microphone strapped to his throat, Fallaci directed the hideous cyborgs, step by step, as they removed the crates containing the separate parts of the crashed flying saucer and the coffins containing the dead crew from the army trucks, then carried them up the ramp, into the dazzling holding bay of the mother ship. When this task was completed, the cyborgs also entered the mother ship, leaving only Fallaci outside, once more facing Fuller.

  ‘You’ve shown sound sense,’ Fallaci said to Fuller. ‘Mr Wilson thanks you.’

  ‘Don’t mention it,’ Fuller replied, trying to sound sardonic, though his stomach was churning with tension.

  Fallaci grinned, turned away and walked up the ramp, into the mother ship. The ramp folded back in and the great saucer-shaped craft, again looking seamless, emitted a bass humming sound, gave off a magically pulsating whitish glowing, lifted gently off the ground, like a soap bubble floating on water, then ascended vertically to the heavens and eventually disappeared.

  ‘Good God,’ the high-ranking Air Force officer beside Fuller exclaimed softly, ‘I don’t believe my own eyes.’

  ‘That’s what those bastards are banking on,’ Fuller responded. Then, defeated, but trying not to show it, he turned away and walked back across the dark, eerily silent airstrip.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine Dwight had begun to feel that he had no real life – out there, where the real world was. He seemed to have s
pent the past decade indoors, pouring over reports of UFO sightings and UFO photographs, piecing this and that together, trying to make sense of what seemed senseless, hoping to find logic in his nightmares. The nightmares were, of course, based on what had happened not only to him, but also to Beth, and for that very reason he had been keeping a low profile with regard to his UFO researches. So low, indeed, that even Dr Epstein and Tony Scaduto of the APII had begun sending him letters, asking him what the hell he was doing.

  Finally, in November 1966, a year after the Great Northeast Blackout, Dwight pulled himself out of that dark hole he was living in – not his home, but his bruised and frightened soul – to meet Epstein and Scaduto, who’d flown in from Washington DC, in a Chinese restaurant in Dayton, for lunch and a talk. With his hair and Vandyke beard now mostly grey, Epstein looked a lot older, but Scaduto, given the benefits of youth, hadn’t changed that much and still wore his black-leather biker’s gear. They made an unusual team.

  ‘My feeling,’ Epstein said as he turned his Singapore noodles expertly on his chopsticks, ‘is that you’ve practically given up your UFO research. We’re getting nothing back, Dwight.’

  Dwight shrugged. ‘I won’t deny it. I have practically given up. Ever since that incident with Beth, I’ve been frightened for her and Nichola, so I decided to keep a low profile and not draw any attention to myself. What the hell! Why lie about it? I was so scared, I decided to drop out altogether, in the hope that those bastards, the men in black, or whoever, would forget us entirely.’

  ‘Perfectly understandable,’ Epstein said, nodding sympathetically. ‘Had I been in your situation, I’d have been just as scared.’

  ‘You probably are in his situation,’ Scaduto said. ‘You just don’t know it yet. I mean, man, if you’re running an organisation like the APII, those bastards are bound to be watching you.’

  ‘But they’ve never bothered me,’ Epstein replied.

  ‘They have their own ways and reasons,’ Dwight said. ‘But living with the constant expectation of a visitation is just as bad as the visitation itself.’

  ‘So nothing new to recount?’

  ‘Only that Nichola’s turned nineteen and is planning to marry.’

  ‘Nineteen!’ Scaduto exclaimed. ‘I can hardly believe it. Makes me feel like an old man.’

  ‘We age overnight,’ Epstein said gloomily, clearly thinking of himself, then he brightened up enough to ask: ‘So you’ve been involved in the arrangements for the wedding?’

  ‘Right,’ Dwight said.

  ‘And Beth... How has she been coping?’

  ‘You mean the forthcoming nuptials or her CE-Four experience?’

  ‘Both.’

  ‘She’s thrilled that Nichola’s getting married – she’s very romantic that way. I think it’s been a healthy distraction for her, regarding the other thing. It’s kept her mind off it.’

  ‘And what about the so-called “other thing” – the CE-Four experience?’

  ‘Since having her hypnotic treatments her headaches and nightmares have gone, but she’s gradually remembering the details of her abduction and now lives in fear of the men in black and the possibility of being abducted again. That, in a nutshell, is why I’ve virtually stopped working for you. It’s for Beth. I’m frightened for her. I think that what they did to her was a warning – and it’s one that I’m heeding.’

  Indeed, just thinking about it made Dwight feel that a wall of darkness was closing in around him, even in daylight. You were there, in that dungeon of the mind, and you might never get out. That’s what they could do to you. Though who ‘they’ were, he still didn’t know.

  ‘I don’t mind admitting that we’re desperate to get you back to work,’ Epstein said. ‘A recent Gallup Poll has shown that approximately nine million Americans now believe they’ve seen a UFO. Our research supports that figure. To put it mildly, we’re being overwhelmed with reports. So we need all the help we can get.’

  ‘Nine million?’ Dwight asked, finding it hard to believe what he was hearing.

  ‘Yes. An astonishing figure, right? The Gallup Poll was undertaken in the wake of one of the most widely publicised events in the history of the UFO controversy: the furore over the Dexter and Hillsdale, Michigan, sightings that occurred eighteen months ago. Did you read about them?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Dwight recalled them only vaguely. ‘I remember reading about them and seeing some news items on TV. It was at a time when I couldn’t face anything about UFOs, so I guess I gave them a miss. I used to just turn my head away.’

  ‘You must’ve been in a fucking bad way,’ Scaduto said.

  ‘I was.’

  ‘May I refresh your memory?’ Epstein asked.

  ‘Sure. Go ahead.’

  ‘On March 20 last year, eighty-seven women students and a civil defence director at Hillsdale College, Michigan, saw a glowing, football-shaped object hovering over an empty swamp a few hundred yards from the women’s dorm. It repeatedly raced at, then retreated from, the dorm, dodged an airport beacon light, and flew back and forth for hours before disappearing. The next day, in Dexter, sixty-three miles away, five people, including two police officers, reported seeing a large, glowing object rising from a swampy area on a farm, hover for a few minutes at about a thousand feet, and then leave the area.’

  ‘An impressive set of witnesses,’ Scaduto said.

  ‘Quite so. And within a few days, nearly every newspaper in the country and all national TV news programmes were carrying reports on the sightings. This placed intense pressure on the Air Force to investigate the incidents.’

  ‘I remember that much,’ Dwight said, growing interested despite himself. ‘The head of Project Blue Book, Major Hector Quintanilla, sent Dr J. Allen Hynek to investigate the sightings.’

  ‘Right – and Hynek had to virtually fight his way through the reporters to get at the witnesses. Later, he stated that the entire region was gripped by near-hysteria. He did, however, manage to complete his investigation and afterwards held what was reported as being the largest press conference in the history of the Detroit Press Club.’

  ‘Hynek’s widely respected,’ Dwight said, ‘so where he goes, the press goes.’

  ‘Knows his stuff,’ Scaduto murmured.

  ‘He’s brought respectability to the subject,’ Epstein said, ‘and I’m grateful for that. Unfortunately, in this instance, he fell flat on his face.’

  ‘Oh?’ Dwight said. ‘How?’

  ‘He made the simple mistake of not thinking before he opened his mouth. With the news hounds all baying for an instant explanation for the sightings, he suggested – purely as a hypothesis – that they might have been caused by marsh gas.’

  ‘What the hell’s that?’ Scaduto, an urban man, asked.

  ‘It’s a phenomenon caused by the spontaneous ignition of decaying vegetation and it produces eerie, glowing lights.’

  ‘Thank you, professor.’

  ‘Anyway, the press latched onto the words “swamp gas” and had a field day making fun of them, with the ironic result that coverage of UFOs reached unprecedented levels during March and April – particularly regarding the DexterHillsdale sightings. So much so, in fact, that Weston E. Vivian, Democratic Congressman from Michigan, and Gerald Ford, House Republican minority leader, formally called for Congressional hearings.’

  ‘Oh, Christ, yes,’ Dwight said. ‘I remember it all now. But that’s about as far as I got. That’s when I stopped reading about it. And I started switching the TV off when the subject was raised. So what happened next?’

  ‘The House Armed Services Committee,’ Epstein said, ‘acted on Ford’s suggestion and on April 15 – for the first time in the history of the UFO controversy – Congress held an open hearing on the subject. When the hearings were completed, the Secretary of the Air Force, Harold D. Brown, directed the Air Force chief of staff to make arrangements for a special, independent, civilian team to investigate selected UFO sightings. Subsequently, on May 9, the Air For
ce announced that it was planning to contract with scientists for a full-scale UFO investigation.’

  ‘And last month,’ Scaduto interjected excitedly, ‘the Air Force announced that the University of Colorado had accepted the UFO study project and that Edward C. Condon would be in charge.’

  ‘Who’s Condon?’ Dwight asked, more intrigued every minute, feeling that he was coming back to life after being buried alive.

  ‘An internationally known physicist and former head of the National Bureau of Standards,’ Epstein told him.

  ‘Impressive,’ Dwight said.

  ‘Which is exactly why they picked that bastard,’ Scaduto said with surprising, unexpected bitterness.

  ‘Here’s the interesting part,’ Epstein said. ‘The part not included in the press reports.’

  ‘Go on,’ Dwight responded, leaning forward, as if drawn to Epstein by a magnet.

  Epstein smiled slightly, knowing that he’d hooked Dwight again. ‘Dr James E. McDonald,’ he said, ‘a senior atmospheric physicist at the University of Arizona’s Department of Atmospheric Sciences and one of the nation’s leading scientific authorities on UFOs, had accidentally seen the classified version of the previous Robertson Panel report at Wright-Patterson AFB. This led him to reveal, when speaking to members of the university’s Department of Meteorology, that the CIA had ordered the Air Force to debunk UFOs. He had read this, he said, in the uncensored version of the Robertson Panel report.’

  ‘Fucking A!’ Scaduto exclaimed, looking happier.

  ‘The news services picked up this story,’ Epstein continued, ‘and publicised it widely on the same day that the Air Force announced the establishment of the Condon Committee.’

  ‘Condon was picked,’ Scaduto added enthusiastically, ‘because he’s already shown he doesn’t believe in UFOs. He’s been tasked with helping the Air Force deny that they deliberately debunked UFO reports and to help them bury this subject once and for all. What say you, Dwight?’

  ‘I say you’re right,’ Dwight said without thinking. ‘And what we have to look into is...’