The Orion Protocol
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A senior counsel to the Jesuits who had been the White House’s unsuccessful go-between with the Vatican has since publicly acknowledged his effort and the subject matter.
7. Space Weapons Technology. During the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan publicly offered Mikhail Gorbachev the U.S. research and technology for the Space Defense Initiative, a.k.a. Star Wars, as a gift to the Russian people, and made public remarks about the future need for planetary defense. The Soviets declined the offer, proceeding to develop a photon laser cannon capable of striking targets in space. This work continues under various names in both countries, along with the development of so-called scalar weapons and other microwave beams adapted for military purposes and capable of intercepting targets at high altitude.
In a speech at the University of Georgia in 1997, Secretary of Defense William Cohen expressed concerns about terrorists having access to newly developed electromagnetic scalar beams capable of weaponizing weather and causing earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and even hurricanes.
In 1998, the Russians offered to put out a raging forest fire in Indonesia by creating an artificial hurricane, which they announced could be done from space. The Indonesians declined. Though this was reported in such major newspapers as the Los Angeles Times, there was no comment offered by the U.S. government.
8. The Great Pyramid at Giza. The Great Pyramid is aligned with Sirius, the brightest star in the Southern Hemisphere, and with the constellation Orion in a way that makes it a “planetary clock,” capable of measuring the precessional movement of the Earth. The three oldest Pyramids at Giza are geometrically aligned on the ground in the same precise relationship to one another as the three stars that make up the “belt” in the constellation we call Orion. These pyramids are no more than five thousand years old, but their orientation and alignments appear to reference an earlier time: 10,500 B.C.E.
9. The Sphinx. In 1995, American and British university scientists studied water damage on the monument that had been previously assumed to be caused by wind and sand. Their confirmation that the damage had been caused by water places the building of the Sphinx at approximately 10,500 B.C.E., thousands of years before the existence of any known civilization considered capable of such a feat. This break with the theories of classical Egyptology has created an ongoing controversy. The Sphinx is oriented to the rising of the planet Mars and the word Cairo does mean “Mars” in ancient Sumerian.
10. The Billion-Dollar Mars Observer Mission, 1991–1993. From the moment it was launched, the Mars Observer mission was dogged by controversy over the issue of reimaging the Cydonia region. It carried cameras with a fifty-times greater resolution capability than those of the Viking mission in 1976 and would easily have been able to settle the question of whether the Face or the so-called pyramids in the Cydonia region were natural rock formations or products of intelligence. NASA promised that the pictures would be taken. The entire imaging contract, however, had been taken away from the famous Jet Propulsion Lab, in Pasadena, and subbed out for the first time in NASA history to a private contractor. NASA was then no longer responsible for imaging priorities, no longer committed to any live broadcast of images from Mars, and the private contractor could delay the release of any photographs for up to eighteen months.
Mars Observer performed flawlessly until forty-eight hours before it arrived at Mars, at which point it inexplicably “went dark” before any images could be transmitted back to Earth. It was officially declared lost. For years, NASA offered no explanation, and only recently confirmed rumors that the crucial radio link to the satellite had, against all established protocols, been accidentally turned off.
11. The Red Planet. The Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Odyssey satellites have confirmed that Mars did at one time have abundant water, a dense atmosphere, and a much warmer overall temperature, similar to Earth’s. According to NASA, the fossils present in the Martian asteroid ALH 84000 strongly suggest microbial life on the planet appeared 3.5 billion years ago: 1 billion years before life is known to have appeared on™ Earth. This presents a potential time frame for the development of life, possibly intelligent life, on Mars that would give it a considerable head start on the Earth.
12. The Last Ice Age. Civilization is something that occurs between periods of glaciation. And the most recent such period ended abruptly about 12,500 years ago. The end of the Ice Age was marked by vast flooding, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and extreme temperature swings, which had devastating effects on life all over the planet, including mankind.
Ice-core samplings in Greenland and the Antarctic taken in the 1990s confirm rapid, catastrophic climate changes during this prehistoric time, resulting in the extinction of thousands of plant and animal species.
The impact of two huge Leonid meteors capable of causing crustal dislocation and continental shifting are among the prime suspects in the triggering of this extinction event. The Leonid group is a collection of asteroids and cometary bodies that follow a long but calculable Earth-crossing orbit around the sun. Egyptian astronomers were keenly aware of the danger this cyclical phenomenon posed to mankind over periods of thousands of years and followed it closely.
After just such an event, God-like beings called the Old Ones are said to have helped the indigenous people to rebuild, and gave them new arts, science, and architectural knowledge. And then they either “flew away across the water” or were chased away or killed. The same origin legend in different forms also appears in the oral traditions of the pyramid-building cultures of pre-Mayan Mexico, Central America, and Egypt.
13. The USA and the Moon, 1995. In 1995, the Defense Department sent an unmanned satellite to photograph the Moon with the latest imaging technology. This lunar mapping mission, dubbed Clementine, was the first known all-military planetary surveillance mission. Though aided by scientists borrowed from NASA, the military acted outside the NASA charter, and the American public has no inherent rights to access the Clementine images.
Also in 1995, despite military security restrictions, a composite of leaked images from Clementine were posted on the World Wide Web. Within twenty-four hours these classified photos disappeared. Selected photographs have been subsequently published, but research-quality copies of all collected Clementine imaging are not available to the public.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For unflagging perseverance, support, and invaluable “notes”: Richard Dreyfuss, Judith James, Carl Borack, Greg Szimonisz, and Laurence Rosenthal. For editorial wisdom and heavy lifting: Michael Shohl, Jennifer Sawyer Fisher, and Stephen Power, with help from Kaitlin Blasdell and Krista Stroever. For ongoing guidance, stewardship, and advocacy: Matt Bialer and Cheryl Capitani at Trident Media Group. And for their timely encouragement and reality checks: Rebecca Bonar, Harley Jane Kozack, Jill Wright, and Julie Cobb. Special thanks to Christina Simelaro, Charlotte Cohen, and Leonard Cohen.
I would also like to acknowledge the late Brandon Tartikoff, without whose early enthusiasm this book is unlikely to have been written. And my father, Captain Orville G. Tigerman, an aviator with his own measure of the Right Stuff, whose passing reminded me that there is world enough, but not that much time.
E-BOOK EXTRA
The Truth is in Here: An Interview with Gary Tigerman
Question: How does Mars figure into The Orion Protocol?
Answer: I wanted to write a book about going to Mars because it didn’t look like we were going to get there anytime soon, and I wanted it so badly, I decided I had to experience it by envisioning it. I really had no idea where that seed of inspiration would take me.
Question: Where did it take you?
Answer: To a much more political world than I had imagined. It’s going to take two, maybe three books to get to Mars.
Question: Do you consider yourself a “conspiracy” freak?
Answer: No, even though my book turns on a complex conspiracy. What most people might call conspiracy, I simply think of as real politik. The world is run behind closed doors by peo
ple no one elected to a larger extent than most people would be comfortable with. And this isn’t even the conspiracy. This is business as usual and it just feels like a conspiracy if you’re obliged to look at it at work. It’s like the expression, “There are two things you don’t want to watch being made. One is sausages. The other is legislation.” So, I don’t consider myself a conspiracy freak because I’m just calling it as I see it.
Question: What’s happening on the movie front?
Answer: Maybe that’s the third thing you don’t want to watch being made. The Orion Protocol has been optioned. I’ve written the screenplay adaptation from the book. And it’s getting read by actors and directors.
Question: What’s Richard Dreyfuss’ involvement -- how did you get him into this?
Answer: Richard and I were actually in a movie together when we were 19, and we’ve been friends ever since. I told him there’d be two astronauts who’d gone to the Moon together and seen something they weren’t allowed to talk about. And some smart female science journalist in the present who was tracking down their secret. And I knew I wanted a Capra-esque ending where the truth got told and the world got changed. How all that was going to come together, exactly, I didn’t know yet. But, he was sold. The Orion Protocol was born as a movie project, took form as a novel, and now Richard’s production company is shopping the film.
Question: Since this is your first novel, people might want to know, how would you describe your writing style?
Answer: Stephen King once said something I took to heart. It’s very simple: “The adverb is not really your friend.” And that helped me in making more lean and clean what would otherwise be a convoluted verbose writing exercise with a potential for unlimited sentence length that would try the patience of any reader -- kind of like this one.
Question: Do you believe the things you wrote about “former intelligent life”?
Answer: I think there are extraordinary images that NASA satellites have sent back which they don’t even bother to try to explain in scientific terms. I’ve posted some on my site to give an idea of what might be waiting for us to explore once we get there.
Question: If you had a dream dinner party to discuss all this, who’d be the most intelligent life of the party?
Answer: Former Apollo astronaut Buzz Aldrin. You know he says he hasn’t personally seen UFO’s but he’s spoken publicly about conversations he’s had with other astronauts who have had that experience.
Arthur C. Clarke. He’s an ardent advocate for human space exploration too, who makes the argument in terms of the human spirit and our evolution as a species that I find compelling. He’s also convinced that some of the photographic evidence suggests the possibility not just of former intelligent life but current organic life.
Bill Clinton. When Clinton came into office he was very curious about whether there was evidence in national security documents in the Pentagon, CIA, etc. about UFO’s and extraterrestrial contact. He even sent a White House emissary to try and uncover what he could about all this stuff that’s speculated about in books, movies, and TV shows like the XFiles. What came of that has never been told publicly, so maybe with a couple of glasses of decent California Chardonnay we could pry it out of him.
Dr. Mark Carlotto. He’s the foremost satellite imaging expert who has worked for NASA in this capacity and many of the top aerospace companies and his analysis and examination of the Face on Mars and other anomalous objects is the most complete, thoughtful, and credible to me.
Charlie Rose. Because he’s the best moderator and best listener and I think he has a wide-ranging curiosity that would extend to this subject.
Question: Do you have an agenda -- anything you hope will happen because of people reading this book?
Answer: I hope The Orion Protocol will help inspire a rebirth of the once-and-future enterprise of manned space exploration, the greatest peaceful challenge ever taken up by Mankind... and the most ennobling.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gary Tigerman has worked as an actor, songwriter, and screenwriter. His multiple skills eventually led him to a career in advertising and four subsequent Clio awards. He lives in Los Angeles, California, where he is currently developing several feature film and television projects. Please visit www.garytigerman.com.
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Credits
Cover illustration and design by John Lewis
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.
THE ORION PROTOCOL. Copyright © 2003 by Gary Tigerman. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © NOVEMBER 2003 ISBN: 9780061833007
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