ERO

by F. P. Dorchak

  “Right now I don’t seem to have any control over my life. I’m trying—but,” he said, shaking his head, “it’s just not working.

  “I wrote, you know. Every week.”

  Erica searched his face.

  “You did not.”

  “I did. They never let them through.”

  “Who ‘they’—the government—the Air Force?”

  Cherko shrugged. “Whoever controls that sort of thing, I don’t know. But I wrote you every week. I still do.”

  Erica began to cry anew. “I never got them!”

  This time she completely broke down and Cherko took her up into his arms. She’d so missed those arms, so strong, so protective, so him.

  “How can they do this! It’s not right! It’s not!”

  “I know,” Cherko said, calming her. “I know....”

  * * *

  Erica and Jimmy sat back in the shadows in the center garden area, hidden among the Rocky Mountain juniper and young Ponderosa pine. They sat on a blanket Erica never remembered throwing into her car on the way over here, Jimmy cradled her from behind.

  “So... how did you get here?”

  “I... flew in. For a brief stay.”

  “You can’t tell me anything about your job?”

  “I’m sorry, I wish I could but I can’t. I can tell you that I love you, though.” Jimmy lowered his lips to her upturned face and gently kissed her.

  “I don’t know what to say—how to deal with this.”

  Jimmy remained silent.

  “I’ll move—I’ll move to where you live—I can get any job, continue my degree at another college.”

  “You’d do that?”

  Erica turned around to face him.

  “Of course I would. Wouldn’t you?”

  Cherko nodded, wiping at a tear running out the corner of an eye. “I’d really love that.”

  For the first time in what felt like a long, long time, Jimmy smiled, and it felt good.

  “I’ll start looking into that as soon as I get home.” She turned back around to Cherko. “God, how I’ve missed you!” They again kissed.

  “How long are you staying?”

  Cherko glanced toward the east.

  “I have to leave at sunrise.”

  “No!”

  “I can’t help it, Erica.” He looked up into the night. “I’m on another’s schedule.”

  “Can’t you change it?”

  Cherko shook his head, uttering a soft chuckle. “I’m sorry—but I don’t have to go just yet,” he said, massaging Erica’s shoulders. Then he wrapped his arms around her and hugged her fiercely. Erica closed her eyes and sighed deeply.

  “Make love with me,” she whispered without opening her eyes. Cherko kissed her around the base of her soft, tender, neck and ears....

  2

  Cherko watched Erica as she drove off into the rising sun, which just barely began to kick its morning glow up and over the horizon that wasn’t visible from this side of the mesa blocking its view. Cherko looked up to see the ship hovering above.

  Right on time.

  They were nothing if not punctual.

  Again, what a neat shot this would make for another Buzzelli photograph, the early morning rays just beginning to hit the hull of the UFO above him. Hovering in the central area of Garden of the Gods.

  He promised Erica he’d be back... but somehow he didn’t think he’d ever be able to keep that promise.

  Before he’d even completed that thought, he was back aboard the ship, and in the sweep of yet another segment of the second hand, would once again be back in New Mexico....

  * * *

  The return to his Dulce office had been anything but exciting. After all he’d seen, all he’d experienced, Cherko doubted whether what he was doing was really a help to Humanity at all—or some hidden Hammond agenda.

  Maybe it was all simply in service to Hammond himself.

  How much of this had Hammond been lying about?

  And to what end? The “good fight” against some extraterrestrial domination? Why would he feel that was the truth? Such a battle would be a losing one, were any of it true. He saw their capabilities. There was no way we had anything remotely close to what they had. No way could we ever consider opposing them, let alone consider anything called “winning.” It would be like ants fighting against Black Flag—and we didn’t even have the numbers to attempt that.

  No, what it looked like to him was that Hammond was part of some misguided government-within-a-government scheme that was trying to protect humanity from some nonexistent threat for some shady reason.

  Why?

  For bigger bucks?

  More war toy development?

  How and why had things gotten so terribly screwed up?

  Cherko tossed his satchel and flight cap down onto his desk. He then went to one of his safes and opened it. Pulling out a couple folders, something caught his eye. The tip of a manila envelope was shoved under all the hanging folders. Placing the folders he’d pulled out on his desk, he returned to the safe’s drawer, and pulled out handfuls of the remaining folders, pushing the others farther back into the drawer.

  There it was.

  A sturdy nine-by-twelve envelope.

  Cherko pulled it out. It was worn and looked like it had literally been around the world. He turned it over as he returned to his desk.

  It was sealed, the metal clasp also engaged through its little paper hole. Tape was sealed over the edge of the flap, with what looked like ball-point pen hashmarks across the tape and running onto the envelope on both sides of the tape.

  Cherko sat and placed the envelope on his desk.

  He pulled out his pocketknife, opened a blade, and sliced open the package. The enclosure was maybe fifty pages or less of, no, not exactly a report... but what looked like an informal write-up of some kind, perhaps an unofficial memo or Whitepaper?—and there were areas in the document where sections were literally cut out of the paper.

  Cut out.

  Rectangular holes that looked as if they’d been cut out with an X-ACTO knife. He could see the over-cut slices into the paper around the holes.

  What he found turned his world upside down.

  * * *

  Cherko found that in 1932 Bucharest, Henri Marie Coandă, a Romanian aeronautical engineer and inventor, discovered something so revolutionary that it forever changed the face of black-world aeronautical development. He found that if he designed a circular air ship, one that used turbine blades powered by jet engines sucking the air down around and into the airfoil, it created an interesting effect: the airflow around the saucer-shaped airfoil hugged the saucer shape through application of surface tension, or Van der Walls forces. The air traveled under the vehicle and—in short—caused by the evacuating effect of the air flow itself, lowered the air pressure above and raised the pressure below, thereby pushing the craft up.

  He coined the term the Coandă Effect, and it became the principle for human-developed flying saucers.

  Not UFOs—but HEUFOs.

  Human-engineered UFOs.

  Cherko reread the section.

  They had to be kidding.

  We’d developed this stuff on our own?

  Back in 1932?

  The document claimed that the Germans had eventually gotten hold of this engineering principle and had begun their own highly classified development during World War II; development that would have altered the outcome of the war had it not ended so abruptly for the Axis power.

  An attack on New York City in bomb-wielding HEUFOs?

  Cherko was flabbergasted at the names associated with this and other human flying saucer development.

  Himmler, von Braun, Oberth, Dornberger. Schauberger.

  Development at Nazi R&D facilities with names like Peenemuende, Kahla, and Skoda. Underground bases in the Antarctic? Also associated with the deep black programs were a host of other, lesser-known names: Radu Manicatide, Luigi Romersa, and Andreas Epp.
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br />   And these aerospace-disk crafts had attained speeds of well over a thousand miles an hour, with additional claims of sustained and repeatable altitude climbs of up to forty-thousand feet.

  Successful flights.

  Luftwaffe projects called Feuerball that were experimental devices designed to mess with Allied radar and electromagnetics, and Kugelblitz that were round, symmetrical aircraft.

  All during the thirties and forties?

  Yeah, “Foo-fighters.”

  And it just kept getting weirder.

  After the war, the U.S. and Russia made a mad-dash to scoop up as much of this technology and the minds behind it as possible. Both scored intellectual coups with brilliant German scientists coming over to each side to continue not only their saucer projects, but to also further both side’s space programs.

  And to where had these new brains been imported in the U.S.?

  The Northwest and Southwest.

  And where, Cherko mused, had the initial sightings of so-called UFOs originated?

  The states of Washington and New Mexico.

  Coincidence?

  So what had people really been observing?

  According to this document... HEUFOs.

  And the government needed to get control of the situation right quick. Too many people were seeing too many things they ought not to be seeing. Psychological warfare specialists had been called in, and they had put into effect an incredibly effective dual-pronged, self-perpetuating, approach:

  1) Get senior military officials to deny everything.

  2) Infiltrate the public mindset with extraterrestrial UFOs.

  In 1952 Major General John Sanford and retired Major Donald Keyhoe were placed head-to-head. One denied, the other lavished.

  The self-perpetuating propaganda machine had been forever set into motion. The public would get so confused it would never be able to figure what part of the dog wagged what.

  Cherko flew through the remainder of the document.

  It was unbelievable. The government had been, since the 1940s, developing flying saucer technology spirited from the killing fields of World War II Germany, and had been continuing this very same development unabated to the present day. There was simply no telling where all that technology was today. It also wasn’t much of a reach to fit Area-51 into the puzzle.

  And that went for psychological advancements, as well.

  The Germans had performed plenty of experimentation on the human mind, and in many not-so-pleasant ways, not to mention the CIA’s own domestic efforts. Psychological warfare had also risen to its own astonishing prominence.

  And there was even an author mentioned in these pages that Cherko had never heard of. Whitley Strieber. The document said that at the time of this document’s creation, he was pushing a manuscript about his own alien abduction experiences. There was also mention of another civilian, Stanton Friedman, who was poking his nose around into the whole Roswell affair.

  Civilians were being tracked by our government?

  Good God, things were starting to make sense.

  Kenneth Arnold had seen saucers undulating in the skies over Washington, like skipping across water. That’s exactly what he’d said. Skipping.

  What UFO—real not a HEUFO—would “skip” through any atmosphere?

  Surely such technology would be far and away more advanced to handle air currents and other terrestrial aerodynamic forces much more gracefully. If what She had told him was correct that they generated their own gravity, it seemed any aerodynamic forces would become entirely moot.

  And Hammond had told him that a wing-shaped craft had been found in Roswell.

  Wing shaped.

  Come on, what interplanetary, interstellar, UFO needed an aerodynamic design?

  The wing form was designed to cut through air. Make use of it. UFOs, those piloted by actual aliens—the ones Cherko had been with—had no need for such terrestrial concerns. They flew through space, for crying out loud. Any such wing design meant absolutely nothing.

  No, what all this sounded like was what seemed to be standard government concealment for legitimate national security projects.

  HEUFO R&D.

  And exactly in a manner in keeping for the protection of such deep secrets as were being developed. The public simply didn’t have a need-to-know for everything they were curious about.

  That Black Onion again.

  He could get behind that.

  The author of this document, who’s name had been summarily redacted by X-ACTO, went on to say that the more far-fetched something was the less likely the population would believe it.

  No kidding.

  Also throw in intentional muddying of the waters with He-said/She-said (pardon the pun) set-ups with the likes of Sanfords and Keyhoes and you have the perfect self-perpetuating propaganda machine. Self perpetuating and essentially free from any and all Black budget funding.

  It was pure genius.

  But it was also highly disappointing. What this implied was that Roswell had nothing to do with aliens or extraterrestrial craft, but human-engineered flying saucer development.

  If the capability he’d just read about existed in 1932, how far of a leap would it be to say that by 1947—and then again in contemporary time—with U.S. government funding and critical scientific focus that there weren’t human-engineered UFOs flying around the unsuspecting skies of the U.S.?

  But that still didn’t explain his trip with She—and visiting Erica. He’d actually been there. To both places. To Canada—and had seen the Earth from twenty-four-thousand-or-more miles out.

  Or had he?

  If psychological operations had been around for at least as long, how did he know he’d hadn’t been drugged or whatever else it was “they” did to people?

  He’d read the Project Blue Book documents—the real ones—read how people had been abducted and subjected to sometimes horrendous tests involving needles and all manner of degrading experimentation.

  Why would aliens—true extraterrestrials—have need of such mechanizations?

  It just didn’t add up!

  No, something else was at work here, something extremely sinister. Hammond was only partially correct, and Cherko didn’t know if Hammond was in on it or was merely a voice-activated relay, a puppet for other factions far more powerful. There was a war going on, but Cherko still didn’t believe it was with extraterrestrials. It was with whatever government-within-a-government was running the whole “UFO” show.

  Cherko had always wondered how certain people seemed to escape retribution for “coming out” about anything UFO. After having been a part of some black project (or so they claimed). In all the books he’d read, there was always someone who broke their so-called security vows, and they weren’t taken out nor thrown in jail.

  Well, except for one guy he’d read about in all his study. One Captain Edward Ruppelt, U.S. Air Force. He had for several years actually managed the Air Force’s project Blue Book, but after having gotten out of the military had severely taken the government to task over their perpetual obfuscation and denial. He seemed to have been a legitimate thorn in their side, and had made many public and not-so-public attacks. Even had a TV show. But on May 6, 1958, in a completely unheralded statement to the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, had summarily (and curtly, Cherko noted) recanted his entire stance on UFOs and extraterrestrials.

  Who would do such a thing after a lifetime of effort?

  It was highly suspected (though not noted in the reports he’d read) that he’d been “turned,” since he’d worked for a government contractor following his time in service.

  And to further drive the stake into his heart, he had, at the ripe-old age of thirty-seven, died of a heart attack—his second.

  A heart attack.

  The first had been three years earlier. A man who had no (okay, apparent) history of heart issues and wasn’t obese.

  But, the report he’d read also went on to say that pe
ople didn’t just die of heart attacks from obesity and smoking. Stress also played a major role in heart attacks. Lots of stress. It created harmful chemicals that attacked and weakened the heart.

  Just as covertly administered compounds also did.

  Coincidence?

  The first heart attack had been Ruppelt’s warning.

  It was all speculation. Unless you had been an actual part of the cover-up, an actual black project participant (and in which case if you were, then you truly were in a load of trouble), you had no actual standing upon which to base your claims. It was all conjecture. All further fueled the propaganda disinformation machine.

  And for that, you were left alone.

  The Black Onion.

  It all works for the cause. Claims of aliens and claims of denial. The total, utter, confusion of facts. Fact manipulation.

  Had an extraterrestrial spaceship really crashed in Roswell?

  Who knew any longer.

  But Hammond had mentioned that there had been a wing-shaped craft that had crashed. And that alien bodies had been found. And that there had been crashes at that Foster Ranch, with that debris field, and one farther west in San Agustin.

  To apply the logic of what he’d just read, it appeared to Cherko that the debris field had been for real and the flying wing-and-aliens scenario disinformation. To Cherko it would appear that the wing-shaped crash was more than likely a human-engineered UFO, with alien bodies thrown in for fact manipulation. Aliens and their vessels didn’t need wings nor vanes, nor any other aerodynamic surfaces. But he also thought that there really might have been alien bodies found at another location—knowledge he, Cherko, didn’t have, even from all his research. He doubted even alien bodies could have withstood the total annihilation that that debris field strewn across the Foster Ranch had implied.

  Cherko backed away from his desk and went out before it. Stood looking to his claustrophobic little office full of papers and safes and binders. Turned back around to his desk. Looked to the document full of rectangular holes cut into it.

  Good Lord, what the hell was he supposed to believe?

  Had his ride-along with She been real? Or had all he experienced been psychologically engineered?