‘A noble idea,’ Fuller said.
‘Once the agreement is signed,’ Wilson continued, ignoring Fuller’s sarcasm, ‘scientific and exploratory bases will be springing up all over Antarctica.’
‘Which gives you a problem,’ Fuller said.
‘Yes.’ Wilson’s gaze was as icy as the continent he seemed to love. ‘So in return for a guarantee that there will be no attempts to locate or capture my base and that all sightings of my flying saucers over Antarctica will be treated with ridicule or suppressed entirely – as already they are in the United States and elsewhere – I’ll guarantee that America will be the first to land men on the moon.’
‘Well, we’d certainly appreciate that,’ Fuller said. ‘But unfortunately the US can’t place restrictions on the other nations signing the Antarctic agreement.’
‘The US is the only nation with the capability of launching an attack on my otherwise inaccessible part of Neu Schwabenland – still known to the West as Queen Maud Land – so I’m not yet concerned with the other nations, but only with the US.’
Realising that Wilson was as genuinely concerned as his kind could be, which wasn’t much, though it was at least something, Fuller felt a flicker of pleasure, while also accepting that this trade, no matter how indecent, could not be refused. Whether or not he – or the White House or the Pentagon – liked it, they could not afford to let the Soviets be the first to land on the moon and would therefore have to accede to Wilson’s demands – just as they had done so often in the past. This was truly a bitter pill to swallow.
‘I’m still not sure that we can do as you ask,’ Fuller lied, ‘but I’ll certainly present it to the President with my personal, strong recommendation.’
‘Good,’ Wilson replied, showing no sign of gratitude.
After a lengthy silence, in which Wilson seemed deep in thought, Fuller, losing patience, said, ‘Well? Anything else, Mr Wilson?’
‘Yes, there is another matter. I’m concerned that a certain Professor J. Allen Hynek, well known UFOlogist and codirector of the Smithsonian Institution’s satellite tracking programme, has been allowed to head an unofficial UFO advisory group recruited by Project Blue Book and including, as well as the redoubtable Hynek, an astronomer, a physicist, a psychologist, and Major Robert J. Friend, the present head of Project Blue Book and a man too co-operative with civilian UFO groups for my liking.’
‘Stop worrying about Hynek and his group,’ Fuller said. ‘Project Blue Book is practically on its knees and its so-called advisory group is just another red herring for the increasing number of professional and amateur UFO sleuths. That advisory group, believe me, will be disbanded by the end of next year, after serving its real purpose, which is to spread so much doubt and confusion amongst the UFOlogists that most of them will give up completely and go back to playing with toy submarines in their baths.’
‘And Hynek?’
‘What about him? When the group sinks, he’ll probably go down with it. As for Project Blue Book, while it’s continued to make a strong show of examining UFO cases, it’s now under pressure from above – don’t look at me! – to produce a report stating that after twelve years of investigating and analysing UFO sightings, the ATIC has no evidence to suggest that UFOs are either space vehicles, a threat to national security, or of any scientific value whatsoever. The same report will describe the UFO programme as a costly and unproductive burden on the Air Force. Finally, it’ll recommend that Project Blue Book’s staff could be more constructively used on other programmes.’
‘Very good, Fuller.’
‘I’ve nothing to do with it,’ Fuller lied again, though he couldn’t resist a proud grin. ‘Anyway, while that report’s being prepared, we’re still encouraging the public to think of the UFOs in terms of extraterrestrials – your men in black are widely believed to be just that. So all in all, the UFOlogists are imagining everything except man-made UFOs.’
‘I know you’re reluctant to take credit for this,’ Wilson said, ‘but I have to tell you it pleases me.’
‘Good. So we’re even until you next need supplies. Can I leave now, Wilson?’
‘Your detestation is all too obvious,’ Wilson said, ‘if badly misplaced. Look to your own government – the one you revere – and then tell me which one of us is truly moral.’
‘I’m not up to that, Wilson.’
‘No, I don’t suppose you are. Morals aren’t your strong point.’ Wilson glanced across the field, to where the other Marines were hidden in darkness. Though he couldn’t see them, he knew that they were there and was amused by the thought. ‘One last thing,’ he said, returning his gaze to Fuller.
‘What?’
‘Have you heard about the woman from Maine?’
‘No.’
‘Stop lying. If I know about her – and I do – you must know that I know you were involved.’
Now understanding that Wilson really did have eyes and ears everywhere, Fuller, badly shaken, which was rare, simply shrugged as if it was of no consequence. ‘Yeah, right, I know about her. So? What about her?’
‘I’ll tell you about her,’ Wilson said, suddenly sounding as angry as Fuller had ever heard him. ‘I’ve learnt from this case that the CIA, like the KGB, is heavily involved in parapsychological research, particularly the possibilities of telepathic communication with regard to spying. Before you try denying it, please let me say that regarding the woman from Maine, I can tell you that she accidentally broke into an experimental communication between a land-based, ESP-trained Naval intelligence officer and a submerged submarine. Any story to the contrary is nonsense.’
That Wilson had found this out was a truly frightening revelation to the normally fearless Fuller.
‘I can’t confirm or deny that,’ he said, knowing how lame it sounded.
Wilson shook his head from side to side, as if pitying the attempted deceptions of Fuller and his kind. ‘You’re hoping to reach our level of achievement in this field,’ he told him, ‘but you’re wasting your time. I know about your woman from Maine because I broke into your telepathic communication in that office in CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and arranged for that flying saucer to hover over Capitol Hill as a demonstration of how advanced we’ve become telepathically. So you see, Mr Fuller, no matter how advanced you believe you’re becoming, we’ll always be at least one step ahead of you – just as we are with our flying saucer technology. Your men are wasting their time.’
‘Maybe’ Fuller responded, trying to sound more confident than he felt. ‘Maybe not. You’re playing a dangerous game with these trade-offs, so you just might slip up some day.’
‘I don’t think so,’ Wilson said. ‘Thank you and good night.’
Flanked by his two hideous, deadly cyborgs, he turned away without another word and marched back up the ramp, into his towering flying saucer. Knowing better than to be within that circle of marker lamps when the saucer took off, Fuller hurried away with his two armed Marines, clambered back into his jeep, and let himself be driven back to the other Marines keeping guard around the electrified barbed-wire fence. From the other side of that fence, Fuller and the soldiers looked up in awe as the flying saucer turned into a magically glowing, egg-shaped craft that had lights of different colours flashing in rapid sequence around its revolving rings. It lifted off vertically, hovered a few seconds above the ground, illuminating the surrounding darkness with its eerie whitish glow and kaleidoscopic lights, then suddenly shot up vertically, made an abrupt turn to the west, about a hundred feet high, hovered again for a moment, then shot off and dwindled rapidly, until it was no more than a glowing light the size of a diamond. That light also shrank, merging with the stars, then abruptly blinked out.
Though nothing unusual could now be seen up there, Fuller and the many men around him kept scanning the night sky.
‘Jesus Christ!’ one of the soldiers behind Fuller exclaimed in a stunned, disbelieving way.
‘No,’ Fuller responded, now star
ing at the sky and accepting that he might indeed be defeated. ‘Jesus Christ was in the past, soldier. You’ve just seen the future.’
He clambered back into the jeep and told the driver to return him to the Vanguard Hotel in Cocoa Beach. He didn’t anticipate getting a good night’s sleep, but at least he could be alone there.
Fuller needed a dark cave.
Chapter Thirty-One ‘I don’t scare easily,’ Scaduto told Dwight when they were having cold beers in the sweltering heat of an outdoor bar in Carillon Park, Dayton, Ohio, in July 1960. ‘But I don’t mind admitting that this business is starting to put me on edge. Particularly this latest piece of news.’
‘What news?’
‘Haven’t you heard?’ Despite the heat, Scaduto was wearing his customary blackleather jacket, blue denims and high-heeled boots. His sideburns were ink-black and prominent. ‘It was in yesterday’s newspapers. Your former Project Blue Book chief, Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, has died of an unexpected heart attack.’
Dwight was shocked to hear that. Captain Ruppelt was even younger than he was. The last time Dwight had seen him was that sad day in December 1953 when he had informed them of the dire results of the Robertson panel report and, even worse, told them that Project Blue Book was being run down and most of its staff, including Ruppelt, dispersed to other locations. It had been a sad day for all of them, but Ruppelt had at least been his relatively young, decent, healthy self. Certainly not heart attack material.
‘I don’t like it,’ Scaduto said. ‘In 1953, Ruppelt leaves the Air Force. Three years later he writes a book in which he states categorically that UFOs are for real. Three years after that, he revises the book, reversing his previous opinions and insisting that UFOs are probably natural phenomena. And approximately one year later, in 1960, weary before his time, he dies of a heart attack. It sure makes you think, doesn’t it?’
‘Yes, it does.’ In fact, this shocking piece of news had reminded Dwight not only of the many other people involved in UFO investigations who had died unexpectedly, been killed in surprising ways, or committed ‘suicide’ for no discernible reason. It had also reminded him of the many other ways in which UFO investigators had been made to suffer, including financial hardship, problems at work, sudden transfers to far-flung locations, actual threats and other forms of harassment from the mysterious ‘men in black’, and marital breakdowns based on one or other of the former. Something else not easy to forget was the fact that many UFO researchers had disappeared completely, leaving no indication of why or where they had gone. They had simply never been seen again.
Last but by no means least, the news of Ruppelt’s unexpected death, added to the mysterious nature of his unexplained reversal regarding the reality of the UFO phenomenon and subsequent slide into depression and poor health after leaving the Air Force, had brutally reminded Dwight of Beth’s bizarre, frightening experience eighteen months ago, when she had been driving (or so she had thought) past the garage that Dwight had worked and lived in during the years of their separation.
For months prior to the incident, Beth had been complaining that she was having bad nightmares, relating to UFOs and tormenting men in black, that she felt she was being followed, though she had never actually seen anyone following her, and that she was haunted by the general feeling that something unknown was making her constantly fretful. The day of the incident in question, when she had just dropped Dwight off at the Dayton airport for his flight to Washington DC for his first normal visit to Dr Frederick Epstein at the APII, she had imagined she was driving past the garage, taken over from Dwight by bachelor Frank Bancroft, then realised that she had actually being staring at it for some time through the window of her car, which was parked inexplicably by the side of the road. She then noticed that her wristwatch had stopped two hours previously – at approximately the time she would have passed the garage after leaving the airport. Yet her wristwatch was not the only item to have malfunctioned: when she tried to switch on the ignition of her car, it wouldn’t start. Presumably, then, it had stopped of its own accord, just as Beth was driving past the garage, about ten minutes after leaving Dayton airport. Which in turn meant that Beth
– who could not recollect having stopped and had, for some time, clearly been imagining that she was driving past the garage, not just parked across the road from it
– had blacked out, either just before or just after the vehicle had stopped, and had then remained unconscious for almost two hours.
It was damned mysterious.
Even worse was what Beth saw when she awakened... the immense circle created by the unnatural blowing of the wind, then given sharper definition by the inexplicable scorching of the windblown grass, which ended up charred and smouldering; and then, infinitely more frightening, the discovery of Frank Bancroft, who had clearly died suddenly in mortal terror.
Since that incident, Beth had been more frightened than ever and Dwight, though he tried not to show it, had become more concerned for her and himself – he had even started worrying about Nichola’s safety. Indeed, from that day on he had begun worrying that his UFO investigations were putting them all in mortal danger; but when he discussed this matter with Beth, she insisted that no matter the danger, he must continue the work and solve the mystery that was tormenting him, thus ridding himself of the obsession once and for all. Dwight had been deeply moved by her concern and courage.
‘The news about Ruppelt is terrible,’ he said to Scaduto, ‘but obviously it isn’t why you called this meeting. You could have told me about Ruppelt on the phone, so what you have brought me?’
‘Man-made flying saucers,’ Scaduto said.
Dwight glanced left and right, at the other customers packed around the trestle tables to take in the sun while drinking and eating. There were really too many people here... too many... too close to him.
‘Finish your beer and let’s go for a walk,’ he said, feeling paranoid.
‘Sure,’ Scaduto said. ‘I understand.’ He hurriedly gulped the last of his beer, threw the can into the trash can near the table, then proceeded to stroll with Dwight through the park, which was, on this sunny day in July, filled with local people walking their dogs, teenagers careening about on roller-skates or bicycles, children playing with bats and balls. ‘I think it’s becoming more certain,’ he began, ‘that the UFOs seen over various Air Force installations are actually top-secret, highly advanced USCanadian aircraft.’
He fell silent for a moment, letting Dwight take this in, but also relishing the melodrama, and continued talking as they meandered on through the park.
‘I should remind you, Dwight, that at least some kind of saucer-shaped prototypes were actually constructed by the US and Canada: first, the US Navy’s Flying Flounder and the Air Force’s Flying Flapjack – projects reportedly worked on sometime between 1942 and 1947 – followed by the flying saucer that the Canadian government claimed had been aborted and passed over to the US in 1954.’
‘Right,’ Dwight said. ‘I remember.’
‘Now the most interesting thing about those projects is that the US Navy claimed to have dropped its project back in 1947, though it was known to be still involved in super-secret aeronautical projects scattered around the White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico – where so many flying saucers have been reported. Also, the Canadian government, while admitting that the enormous UFO seen over Albuquerque in 1951 was similar to the one they’d tried to build, claimed that they’d passed the project on to the US because they couldn’t afford it... In other words, the UFO over Albuquerque could have been a US product based on the Canadian designs of 1947.’
‘Where’s all this leading, Tony?’
Scaduto stopped to light a cigarette and contaminate the pure air of the park with smoke. Though bright, he had an addictive personality that, so far, had given him a taste for alcohol, cigarettes and easy women. He had also flirted with marijuana, but so far had kept a decent reign on it. Inhaling, then exhaling a cloud of smoke, he
started walking again.
‘Ever since I began this man-made UFO business,’ he said, ‘I’ve found myself harping back on the fact that the first major contemporary sightings, the Kenneth Arnold sightings of June 24, 1947, took place near Mount Rainier in the Cascades in the state of Washington – which divides Canada from Oregon – and that Arnold had stated that nine silvery discs had disappeared in the direction of the Canadian border. As I’ve since found out, however, what wasn’t so widely known at the time was the fact that on that very same day another man, Fred Johnson, prospecting about four thousand feet up in the Cascades, reported seeing six similar objects; and three days before that, on June 21, Harold Dahl, on harbour patrol in Puget Sound – which runs from the Canadian border to Tacoma – was following the coastline of Maury Island when he saw five UFOs manoeuvring fifteen hundred feet above the coast, before disappearing towards the open sea.’
‘So what?’ Dwight said, surprised by his own lack of patience. ‘It’s true that those facts weren’t widely known at the time, but we covered the Arnold case pretty extensively at the ATIC, so we learnt about those other sightings a year or so later.’
‘Okay,’ Scaduto said, not remotely deterred by Dwight’s show of impatience. ‘Let’s take it from there.’
Two young people were lying in the middle of the field on the right, under the shade of an elm tree. The girl, wearing tight blue jeans and a figure-hugging sweater, was practically buried under a young man wearing the same kind of jeans, but stripped to the waist. Writhing together and kissing passionately, they were lost to the real world – something that Scaduto clearly noticed with his envious gaze.
‘Throughout that whole month,’ he continued, tearing his eyes away from the couple on the grass, ‘there were a hell of a lot of sightings over the northwestern corner of the United States. By the first week in July there were also reports of strange, luminous bodies in the skies over the Province of Quebec, Oregon and New England. The following week, those sightings spread to California and New Mexico. By the end of the year – the same year the US Navy had, reportedly, dropped their flying saucer project – flying saucers were being reported from all over the country.’
PHOENIX: (Projekt Saucer series) Page 36