With that she turned away and stomped back into the kitchen. Dwight followed her in and placed his arms around her. ‘It’s okay,’ he said, hoping to hide his acute disappointment. ‘I won’t go. I guess I just didn’t think.’
When she turned into his arms, smiling, he was reminded of how lovely she had been when they first married and how, despite the still barely perceptible lines of middle age, she had retained that beauty. Touched, he kissed her lightly on the lips and patted her rump.
‘Still pleasantly firm,’ he said.
She had started to cry and now wiped tears from her eyes. ‘You’d have found that out sooner if you’d touched it more often,’ she said. ‘A woman gets to miss certain things.’
‘Well, I guess I’m not as young as I used to be.’
‘Young enough. If you can’t manage everything, a little touch here and there can work wonders.'
‘I’ll bear that in mind.’
‘At least you still know how to kiss.’
‘It’s like learning to swim: once learnt, it’s never forgotten.’
‘Then plant another one on me, then get out of here and let me get on with the dinner. Nichola’s coming to join us.’
‘Terrific,’ Dwight said.
After kissing her again, then patting her rump once more, he returned to the living room. He realised instantly, however, that he was extremely depressed at losing the possibility of actually seeing a man-made flying saucer on the ground. More than that: he felt crushed. Though he hadn’t been drinking seriously since the days when he was separated from Beth and on an alcoholic binge, he now poured himself a tall, consoling bourbon, hoping to drink it before Beth came back into the living room. Unfortunately, at that moment, Nichola, now twenty-one years old, married, and four months pregnant, opened the front door and walked in, coming for dinner.
She saw the glass of bourbon in Dwight’s hand before he could set it down. Still blonde and as pretty as a picture, she frowned disapprovingly.
‘What’s that, Dad?’
‘Only an aperitif.’
‘You only have the odd beer these days, Dad, and even then only with meals or when with friends.’ She took her coat off and threw it carelessly over the back of the sofa. ‘So what’s the occasion?’
‘No occasion. I just felt like it. Your husband has one of these every evening before dinner, so why do I need a special occasion?’
Nichola’s husband, Larry Fisher, was eight years her senior and working as a civilian engineer with the military aviation development branch of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. A decent, good-humoured man, he had a fondness for cigars and his glass of bourbon every evening before dinner. Apart from that, he had no drinking problem, so Nichola didn’t mind. She clearly did, however, feel troubled to see her father drinking bourbon again – and, worse, before dinner. ‘Larry’s never had a drinking problem in his life,’ Dwight’s stern daughter said, ‘but you did.’
‘Only once, sweetheart.’
‘Once was enough to make you a wreck and force Mom to leave you for a few years. Here, give me that.’ She took the bourbon from Dwight, then sat on the sofa, where she crossed her shapely legs, deliberately had a sip of the bourbon, and said, ‘So what’s happened to make you reach for a drink?’
‘I just wanted to give you an excuse for having one,’ Dwight replied, unable to resist the gentle sarcasm.
Nichola smiled. ‘I have one every evening with Larry. It slips down real easy.’
‘My boozing daughter.’
‘So why did I have to stop you from boozing like your loving daughter?’
‘He wants to go chasing after UFOs,’ Beth told her, entering the room from the kitchen at that moment, ‘and I won’t let him.’
‘How do you mean, chasing UFOs? Dad’s been doing that for years.’
When Dwight told her, preferring to do it himself, Nichola said, ‘You mean there’s a real chance you could solve this mystery once and for all? I mean, resolve this business that’s been tormenting you for years?’
‘Yes,’ Dwight said. ‘If we can find those saucers on the ground, the game’s up.’ ‘And you can stop feeling that you’re being driven crazy by things you don’t understand?’
‘Yeah, Nichola, right.’
Nichola turned to her mother. ‘Then I think you should let him do it, Mom.’
‘What?’ Beth was shocked.
‘I think you should let him do it,’ Nichola insisted. ‘If a simple flight over the mountains of Alberta is going to end years of confusion and fear, then obviously you should let Dad take it and pray that he returns with what he needs to let him feel at peace with himself. Otherwise, if you tell him he can’t go...’ She held up the glass of bourbon and tapped it deliberately with her fingertips... ‘He’ll be back on this. So let the man go.’
‘You don’t understand, Nichola. It could be dangerous. It could draw attention to him, and then all that dreadful... business will start again. I don’t think I could bear that.’
‘You’ll be able to bear it if you know that the pain could end pretty soon... End for all time.’
‘It’s dangerous.’
‘But worth the risk. He goes to Canada with Scaduto, he charters an airplane, and a couple of days later, if things turn out okay – and that’s the chance we’ve got to take
– he’s back here and we’re all home and dry, with the whole damn business exposed for good. No more mysteries. No hauntings. No visits from men in black. For God’s sake, Mom, he’s been trying to solve this mystery since 1947, so you can’t possibly make him stop now. He’d certainly go back on the bottle and might even go crazy. So let him take this chance, Mom. Let him leap this final hurdle. Besides, the odds on something happening to him – like being blown out of the sky by a flying saucer – are pretty damned slim.’
‘At the very least, he could end up in prison,’ Beth said, now clutching at straws.
‘You’re imprisoning him with your fear,’ Nichola told her, ‘and that isn’t right.’
Taken aback by her daughter’s maturity and bluntness, but also proud of her, Beth said, 'All right, okay, you win. I just can’t bear the thought of being...’
‘Alone here.’ Nichola finished the sentence for her. ‘But you don’t have to be. You can come and stay with Larry and me in Springfield until Dad returns. You can even have a bourbon every evening, which is more than he’ll get. So are we agreed, folks?’
‘Yes,’ Beth said.
‘Thanks,’ Dwight said.
Deeply moved and certainly proud, like Beth, of his daughter, he kissed both of his women on the cheek, then he picked up the phone and spoke to Scaduto in his hotel in Dayton.
‘When do we leave?’ he asked.
Chapter Forty-Four On the commercial airline flight to Calgary, Alberta, Scaduto drank a hell of a lot and became pretty drunk. When Dwight commented on this, Scaduto said, ‘You know this is gonna sound crazy – particularly with what you and Beth have been through – but now I’ve begun to feel – definitely, absolutely – that I’m being watched, though I can’t put my finger on exactly how. No men in black or black limousines, yet I’m being observed some way, I’m sure. I don’t know if it’s real or just goddamned paranoia, but that’s what I feel. And so I find myself drinking, trying to deaden it, trying to say, “Go away!”.’
Glancing through the window of the airplane, Dwight saw a sea of deeply shadowed white clouds and, below, great swathes of forested hills. It looked desolate down there.
‘I’ve got to confess,’ he said, ‘that while out of deference to Beth’s fear that I’d bring attention to myself I was reducing my UFO activities, I was intrigued by the revelation that the US-Canadian saucers had been based on World War Two designs. Ever since you told me that I’ve been spending most of my time holed up in libraries
– even wrote to England’s Imperial War Museum and corresponded with German and American UFOlogists about the subject. So naturally I was pretty astonished to learn th
at it was true.’
‘You proved it?’
‘Yeah.’
Scaduto sipped more bourbon, looking excited. ‘So what did you find?’ Though he now knew most of it off by heart, Dwight automatically glanced at his
notes to ensure that he made no mistakes.
‘According to official reports, Allied aircraft during World War Two were
harassed by UFOs – mostly in the shape of balls of fire – from as far back as 1944.
Shortly after the war, in the summer of 1946, the more familiar types of UFOs, most
cigar-shaped, swarmed across Scandinavia, seemingly coming from the general
direction of the Soviet Union. The conclusion at the Pentagon was that German
scientists, seized by the Russians at Peenemunde, where the V-2 rocket had been
developed, were constructing advanced weapons for the Soviets and that the
unidentified, so-called missiles were being launched from the rocket test site of
Peenemunde, which was then in the Russian-occupied zone of Germany. This
suspicion became stronger when the British, who’d also seized and taken back to
Britain a wealth of Germany’s top-secret scientific and weapons-research material,
announced that the Germans had been working since 1941 on extraordinary
aeronautical projects and on processes to release atomic energy. Included in the
former was a – this is a straight quote from the documents – “remotely controlled,
pilotless aircraft and a device that could be controlled at a considerable distance by
another aircraft” – unquote.’
‘Which would account for the balls of fire,’ Scaduto said.
‘Right. Anyway, faced with this, and thinking of the Soviet so-called missiles,
possibly more balls of fire, that had been seen over Scandinavia, there was a sudden
British-Canadian-US alliance to beat the Soviets in the race to follow through the
German designs and complete their extraordinary aeronautical projects.’ ‘Which gets us to the man-made flying saucers,’ Scaduto interjected with growing
excitement.
‘Yes. It’s true that what they were attempting to build in the underground plants in
Canada right after the war – with British and US back-up – was a machine with the
remarkable capabilities of the ones suggested in the incomplete German material.
They wouldn’t achieve that goal for another twenty years, but the first, fairly crude
versions of their saucers were successfully tested over the Canadian border on June
21, 1947: a total of five disc-shaped aircraft, two of them piloted and approximately
fifty feet in diameter, the remaining three remote-controlled by the pilots flying
nearby, these three a mere three to six feet in diameter. Those particular flying
saucers could reach an altitude of approximately seven thousand feet, could hover
uncertainly in the air, and had a horizontal flight speed of about six hundred miles an
hour.’
‘That test flight,’ Scaduto said, ‘could account for the Harold Dahl sighting of the
same day.’
‘Right,’ Dwight said. ‘But it was what happened after that test flight that really got
the ball rolling. On June 24, three days after the first successful test flights of the five
Canadian-US saucers, a total of nine highly sophisticated, unknown saucers flew
down over the Canadian underground plants, hovered there for about twenty minutes,
shot off toward the Cascades, where reportedly they circled the test area; returned,
circled the plant for another twenty minutes, then shot off at incredible speed. From
that day on – the day, incidentally, of the famous Kenneth Arnold sighting – those
flying saucers, and others, returned again and again... and eventually spread out
across the whole world.’
‘Holy shit!’ Scaduto whispered melodramatically, as if frightened of being
overheard, then he finished his drink as the airplane came in to land at Calgary. ‘So
where the hell do the others come from?’
‘That’s the million-dollar question,’ Dwight said, ‘and it keeps me awake at night.’
A few minutes later, the airplane landed. Once they had disembarked and passed through Customs and baggage inspection, Scaduto’s friend, the pilot Hank Lomax, met them in the arrival’s lounge. Lomax was a short, feisty character with fiery red hair and a good-humoured face mottled by a combination of sunshine and booze. He was wearing a logger’s red-and-black checkered shirt, oil-smeared blue denims, and buckled black-leather boots. After being introduced to Dwight, he led both of them from the airport terminal to his old Ford car parked outside.
‘We’re going straight to my flight-training school on the outskirts of town,’ he explained when they were being driven by him out of the airport. ‘From there we’ll fly out in my Piper Tri-Pacer to the region you want. You being an old buddy, Tony, you don’t even have to charter it. You just pay for the gas used and we’re quits. I’m doing this for my own amusement. Which means, of course, that you don’t have to charter the airplane and there’ll be no record of either of you having passed through my flight-school. Now do you love me or not?’
‘I love you,’ Scaduto said. ‘Never mind that you’re an ugly bastard - I just love the hell out of you.’
‘Don’t make me blush,’ Lomax said.
As they were driven up ever deeper into the spectacular, forest-covered hills, Scaduto glanced around him and said, ‘Just look at those goddamned hills and peaks. Easy to hide lots of things up here! Hell, man, you could hide a whole fucking town.’
‘Just wait till we get in my Piper,’ Lomax told him. ‘Then you’ll really see something. We’ll be heading for British Columbia and that’s one wild place.’
During the drive he told them about some of the people he had worked with at the Avro-Canada plant in Malton, Ontario. ‘A surprising number were Germans,’ he said. ‘I remember that much. And one of them in particular, Otto Miethe, claimed to have worked on a programme called “Projekt Saucer” in Nazi Germany. Jesus, man, I could hardly believe it: there we were, working for the sons of bitches we’d fought in France and Germany. Anyway, that’s exactly what we were working on: saucershaped jet aircraft with circular, rotating wings and the pilot’s cabin fixed in the middle, based on those old Nazi designs. They weren’t as advanced as some of the flying saucers you read about, but they were definitely based on the German designs and more advanced than the original German prototypes. The smallest ones, about three feet wide, were really remote-controlled probing devices that could also be used to block radar and cause other malfunctions in any aircraft they flew near. You could control ‘em from the ground or from another aircraft in flight; and they certainly resembled balls of fire when in the air. The larger ones came in different sizes and were all piloted. When I left, the largest was about seventy-five feet in diameter, but I know they had plans for an even larger one.’
‘Who ran this company?’
‘It was part of the A. V. Roe company, later called Avro-Canada, but it was backed by the British, Canadian and US governments, and guarded like a military camp. You had to sign a top-secret clause to work there, with imprisonment as just one of the many punishments listed if you broke the secrecy, even after leaving the company. I’m taking one hell of a chance with you guys, I can tell you, but what the hell!’
‘And other companies like it were, or are, scattered all over British Columbia and Alberta.’
‘Right. See, what they’d do to really keep their projects secret and help them with disinformation, was, they’d use a company like A. V. Roe – the main plant in Malton, Ontario – as a front. When something leaked out about what they were doing, or when there was a public
outcry, they’d call a press conference and show the reporters and politicians a piece of shit like the Avrocar. Meanwhile, they’d have another plant, run by A. V. Roe or some other big company, but listed as a legitimate experimental aircraft company. That one would do the real flying saucer construction work in a location hidden well away from view – like the one I’m going to show you today. Every couple of years, they’d formally close the factory down, listing it as bankrupt, when in actual fact they were simply moving the programme to a new, hidden location. That way, though they couldn’t hide the plants completely from prying eyes, they were all over the place, opening and closing down again, and that made them almost impossible to trace. For instance, this plant I’m taking you to, you can bet your balls it’ll be gone if you come back in a year’s time. That’s how they operate.’
‘Neat,’ Dwight said, forced to admire the diabolical cleverness of the faceless men who had made his life a torment.
A few minutes later they reached Lomax’s flight-training school located just north of Calgary. There, they squeezed into his four-seater Piper Tri-Pacer and then took off immediately, heading across Alberta, flying above the spectacular plateau that fell down from the Rocky Mountains to eventually form the southern part of the boundary with British Columbia. Though not personally flying the airplane, Dwight almost had a lump in his throat, being reminded of his early days, when he had been a bombardier and radar operator, flying to India, China, and the Pacific with the original B-29 wing; then as a navigator with an Air Force Reserve Troop Carrier Wing. Those days were long gone now.
‘Hey, what did you think of the results of last July’s Congressional hearings on the Condon Committee?’ Lomax asked Dwight, having to shout against the noise of the wind and the airplane’s engine. ‘I read that they’d resulted in a resolve to form a proper, official UFO enquiry.’
PHOENIX: (Projekt Saucer series) Page 51
