Lomax was referring to the end result of the notorious Low Memorandum, which brought heavy criticism down on the head of Edward C. Condon and his committee, most of it insisting that the committee’s work had been inept or, more likely, a snow job for the Air Force or the CIA, designed specifically to kill off the UFO controversy. So loud was the furore that Congressman J. Edward Roush delivered a speech on the House floor, saying that the Low Memorandum and a subsequent Look article by journalist John Fuller had ‘raised grave doubts as to the scientific profundity and objectivity of the project.’ Roush therefore called for a new Congressional investigation under the auspices of the House Science and Astronautics Committee. Scheduled for July 29, it was set up more ambitiously as a symposium and included an impressive array of participants, including J. Allen Hynek, astronomer Carl Sagan, the engineer James A. Harder, an astronautics engineer, Robert M. Barker, and even the widely respected, trouble-shooting atmospheric physicist, Dr James E. McDonald. Concerning the reality or non-reality of UFOs, some of those men were sceptics, but the deliberations of the hearingsymposium resulted in a general, implied criticism of the Condon Committee and a strong recommendation for the continued study of UFOs. Ironically, the hearings came to an end during a peak period of sightings that resurrected nation-wide public and press interest in the subject.
‘Well, the hearing-symposium might have made that recommendation,’ Dwight said, also shouting against the noise, ‘but personally I’m sceptical that it’ll happen. The Condon Report has just been delivered to the National Academy of Sciences for review and it’s my belief that no matter what its conclusions are, the recommendations of the Congressional hearing-symposium will be overridden and we’ll be back where we started – with no official support for UFO investigations.’
‘You’re just a cynic,’ Scaduto said.
‘You’re like that about marriage,’ Dwight replied, ‘so I can feel free to swing that way about official UFO studies.’
‘So it goes!’ Scaduto said.
Glancing down, Dwight saw just how dense and seemingly impenetrable the forested hills and mountain ranges were. Noticing the direction of his gaze, Lomax said, ‘You’re wondering how they could even transport an aircraft plant into these regions, right?’
‘Right.’
‘Well, it may look impenetrable from here, but inventive men can do anything, and down there, spread right across the region from Alberta to British Columbia, there are not only hidden aircraft factories, but also coal mines, the odd oil field, plants for the utilisation of natural gas, and even cleared areas for the cultivation of wheat, oats and barley. So though they’re all hidden from each other, as well as from us, that place is a hive of activity. And we’ve just started to fly over the region you’ve come here to find.’
Glancing down again, Dwight saw that they were now flying over snow-covered mountain peaks edged sharply against the azure sky, casting their shadows along the slopes of the dense, tree-covered plateau. Lomax flew them east and west, north and south, in a criss-crossing pattern, sometimes at high altitude, thus giving them excellent, panoramic visual coverage; other times at an altitude so low, Dwight thought they were going to crash, though they always made it up again, missing the canopy of the trees by what seemed like a hair’s breadth, flying through the starklyshadowed gorges where the wind howled dementedly.
They flew for a couple of hours, until early afternoon, yet saw nothing except the forests and mountain peaks. Eventually, when the three of them were in agreement that they had done enough for one day, they decided to turn back.
The Piper was already at high altitude, heading back across Alberta, when Dwight saw something glinting in the falling sun. At first he thought it was nothing special – sunlight flashing off the ice – but then, as the airplane advanced and he saw more of that glinting object, he realised that it was solid and… metallic.
‘Down there!’ he bawled.
Glancing down, Scaduto and Lomax both agreed that the object was indeed solid and metallic. Lomax immediately took the airplane down to a low altitude that enabled him to fly along a steep-sided gorge that wound dangerously through the mountain range until it came to an open area where the forest had been cleared to make way for a compact collection of stone-block workshops, pine-board administration huts and living accommodations, and what were certainly aircraft hangars.
It was an aeronautical construction plant surrounded by high barbed-wire fences and soaring cliffs... and there, on the ground, some barely perceptible in the shadowy interior of the aircraft hangars, a few exposed on landing pads on the frost-covered ground, were half-a-dozen solid, metallic, flying saucers.
They were all about 120 feet in diameter and had their pilot cabins located at the centre of gravity. None had any markings of any kind.
Dwight and Scaduto whooped and hollered with exultation as Lomax flew the Piper directly over the flying saucers and then ascended again until the aeronautical establishment had disappeared from view.
While Scaduto was frantically marking the location on his map, Lomax turned the airplane around to make another run over the flying-saucer construction plant.
‘I don’t think you should,’ Dwight warned him. ‘They might stop us the next time.’
‘We’ve got to get some photos,’ Scaduto reminded him while removing a 35mm camera with a telephoto lens from his satchel. ‘We can’t miss this one, Dwight.’
‘Damned right!’ Dwight said, now just as excited as his friend. ‘It’s too late to stop now.’
‘You’re sure you want me to go back?’ Lomax asked.
‘Yep,’ Scaduto said, withdrawing the camera from its case and screwing on its high-power, telephoto lens. ‘And fly as low as you possibly can.’
‘You want it, you’ve got it.’
Lomax turned the airplane in a wide arc until it was facing the gorge again, then he descended until he was flying below the soaring cliffs, which whipped past in a blur as he flew on, following the gorge’s dangerously winding course until the flyingsaucer construction plant came into view again. This time, as the airplane streaked above the saucers parked outside the hangars, he banked sharply to enable Scaduto to aim the camera down and snap as many pictures as the brief time allowed. Scaduto managed to click the lens-trigger five or six times before, within seconds, the Piper was nosing back up, making its swift ascent out of the gorge.
Looking backwards and downwards for his final glimpse of the construction plant, Dwight saw one of the parked saucers swaying from side to side, then lifting a few feet off the ground. Even as the snow-covered mountain peaks falling away from the ascending airplane cut off the view, he saw the saucer shooting up vertically at tremendous speed. Before he could say a word to the others, the saucer had vanished above the clouds.
‘I just saw one take off!’ he bawled, to make himself heard above the wind’s demented howling and the roaring of the airplane’s engine. ‘It went straight up there!’
Suddenly, with a speed that defied credibility, the clouds directly above were blown apart and a dark pinprick descended in the blinking of an eye to become an immense, circular, swirling, light-flecked blackness that roared directly above them.
‘Oh, shit!’ Lomax exclaimed, instinctively covering his head with one crooked arm, assuming that the... thing up there was going to crash down upon the Piper.
‘It’s going to hit us!’ Scaduto bawled, as if reading Lomax’s mind.
But it didn’t. Instead, with magical precision, it stopped abruptly, mere inches above the Piper’s cockpit, and hovered there, now so enormous that it looked like an inverted whirlpool or cosmic funnel, swirling rapidly and giving off a bass humming sound.
Even though the airplane was still flying horizontally, that great mass remained directly above it.
A swirling, circular, light-flecked blackness with a glowing edge.
As the airplane continued on its horizontal course, beneath that immense, swirling, humming dark mass, Scaduto, regaining his scatter
ed senses, raised his camera to take a photo of the UFO’s underside. Instantly, a pyramid of brilliant light shot out of the centre of the swirling blackness, temporarily blinding the three men in the cockpit. Though his eyes were closed, Scaduto was still holding his camera upwards, clicking off as many shots as he could... until the airplane started shuddering and then rocking wildly.
‘Jesus Christ!’ Lomax bawled. ‘We’re going out of control!’
Then the Piper’s engine cut out.
Miraculously, the airplane did not plummet downwards; instead, with no sound whatsoever from its engine, with only the UFO’s bass humming sound to be heard, it continued to fly on an even course, though shuddering and rocking wildly, as if held up by the pyramid of light. It flew on like this for a few seconds, but then, as abruptly as the pyramid of light had exploded over the airplane, it blinked out and, simultaneously, with a speed that defied all sense, that swirling hole of light-flecked blackness shrank to a mere dot and then disappeared into the clouds above.
Instantly, the airplane, with its engine still silent, plunged towards Earth.
‘We’re going down!’ Lomax bawled a second time.
Yet at that very moment, the engine suddenly roared back into life, as powerful as it had been before, thus lifting the airplane too quickly and throwing it into a violent, dangerous spin. As Lomax fought to regain control, the spinning airplane plunged towards the forested hills of Alberta; but eventually Lomax managed to pull it back up, control the spin, and then level it out completely, to fly on as normal.
‘That light, whatever it was, cut the engine out,’ Lomax said. ‘The light, or something above it, held us up in the air while the engine was out.’
‘Incredible precision,’ Dwight said, recalling what he had witnessed and amazed by it. ‘That saucer came down on us so fast, you could hardly see it descending; then it stopped mere inches above the cockpit and moved sideways as we were moving forward, remaining in exactly the same position above us. When it left, I hardly saw it going, it ascended so fast. I’ve never seen anything like it. It was damned miraculous.’
‘But why did the crew of the saucer let us go,’ Scaduto asked, ‘instead of wiping us out in a crash, as they could easily have done and, indeed, almost did?’
‘Because they’re assuming that if we report the sighting,’ Dwight replied, ‘we won’t be believed and might even become laughing stocks. If they’d made us crash, on the other hand, that crash would have been investigated and that, in turn, could have led the authorities to that secret flying-saucer construction plant. That’s what they were hoping to avoid when they let us go.’
‘Hoping?’ Lomax asked.
‘Yes,’ Scaduto said. ‘Presumably it never entered their heads that at last we have proof of their existence.’ He held the camera up and grinned. ‘We photographed the saucers.’
‘Hallelujah!’ Dwight said.
They were flown back to Calgary with all possible speed, stunned and thrilled by the experience they’d just had, exhilarated at finally having the evidence they had been seeking for years.
When they had returned to Dayton, Ohio, a few days later, they learned, as Dwight had guessed, that the Condon Report, which had just been released, had savaged the UFOlogists, mocked those who had criticised the committee’s project before the report was in, vilified the other UFO research programmes, and recommended the closing down of Project Blue Book.
They also learned, when Scaduto processed the photos he had taken of the swirling, light-flecked, black base of the 120-foot flying saucer, that the film had been lightly scorched and the negatives destroyed while still in the camera.
‘It was the light,’ Dwight said bitterly.
Chapter Forty-Five In March, 1969, Fuller attended a meeting at Air Force Headquarters in Washington DC with representatives of the Air Defence Command, the Air Force Systems Command, the Office of Aerospace Research, the Office of Scientific Research, and the Office of Information. Not required to be present for the first half of the meeting, which was closed even to him, he arrived just as most of the gold-braids were into their second or third whisky, bourbon or brandy and puffing clouds of smoke from fat Havana cigars, all paid for by the unwitting taxpayer. Looking at the faces of those seated around the long table, some reasonably decent, most the sagging, untrustworthy masks of those who have told a lot of lies and learned to live with them, Fuller was not overly impressed and decided that his own brand of patriotic vice was at least emotionally less stultifying.
‘Welcome, Mr Fuller,’ an Air Force Systems Command general said when Fuller finally entered the room. ‘The meeting’s over, so what was it you wanted to ask?’
‘I have to report to Wilson, sir, about your recommendations regarding the Condon Report.’
‘Christ, I wish we could get ahead of that bastard and blow him away,’ the representative of the Air Defence Command said vehemently.
‘We might eventually get to do that, sir,’ Fuller said, ‘but we still have a long way to go.’
‘Unfortunately, that’s true.’
‘So what are your recommendations, sir? I have to pass them on to Wilson.’
‘We’ve chosen to ignore the widespread criticism of the Condon Report and instead implement its recommendations.’
‘I welcome that decision, sir. I’m sure Wilson will be pleased. But I have to remind you that since those recommendations have already been widely criticised, we have to be particularly careful about how we handle this matter.’
‘The report was viewed thus by the civilian UFO groups and UFOlogists, neither of whom concern us here.’
‘The report was also widely attacked by the media.’
‘The media is filled with communists, Fuller, so we can safely ignore it. Frankly, we’re more concerned with not offending Wilson than we are with inciting squeals of rage from reds under the beds.’
‘What about Project Blue Book?’
‘It’s been officially closed down at this meeting. Project Blue Book is dead and buried.’
‘I have to say, sir,’ said the representative of the Office of Scientific Research, ‘that I strongly disagree with closing Project Blue Book down completely. I agree that interest in UFOlogy must be dampened, but Project Blue Book now has historical roots and should be preserved in some form, no matter how modest, to give the illusion that we did, at least originally, sincerely believe in it.’
‘I agree,’ Fuller said, ‘and even presented the notion to Wilson. He replied by saying that all roots, even historical ones, die quickly and crumble to dust when torn from the ground – so he insisted that we kill Project Blue Book entirely.’
‘Do we have to do everything that bastard says?’ asked the representative from the Office of Information.
‘For the time being, yes,’ Fuller said. ‘I should perhaps remind you that Wilson has kept his promise by ensuring that the US is in the lead in the space race and that an American, Neil Armstrong, will certainly be walking on the Moon this coming July – the first man in history to do so.’
‘I second that motion,’ said the gold-braided representative of the Office of Aerospace Research. ‘Even though we pay dearly, we have been given some invaluable aid from Wilson, so we must keep him happy until we’re perfectly sure we can move successfully against him.’
‘Exactly,’ Fuller said. ‘And it’s also my belief that the Project Blue Book records should be made as inaccessible as possible, to make life difficult for future researchers. Any suggestions?’
‘Yes,’ said the representative of the Office of Information. ‘I recommend Maxwell AFB in Montgomery, Alabama. It’s not a place too many people want to visit unless they really have to. Also, those southern officers are notoriously prickly to deal with and even hardened researchers give up more often than not when trying to get something out of them.’
‘That’s fine by me,’ Fuller said. ‘Anything else to pass on to Wilson?’
‘No,’ the chorus came back from that cl
oud of cigar smoke.
‘Fine,’ Fuller said. ‘Thank you, gentlemen.’
Leaving the meeting, he drove to a dark field in a pastoral, desolate area of Virginia. He sat patiently in his car until a flying saucer, infinitely more advanced than the US-Canadian saucers he was protecting, landed nearby in the same field. It descended silently, with no lights flashing, and was only revealed by the moonlight shining off its silvery, cathedral-like dome. When the front ramp fell down, the interior light beaming out was unusually weak and would have shown little to drivers passing by on the distant road.
Wilson emerged from that light, flanked as usual by armed cyborgs. He wore his customary faint smile of disdain when he walked up to Fuller.
His greeting was: ‘So what did they say?’
Fuller told him what had taken place at the meeting in Air Force Headquarters. Wilson was pleased, but wanted to know what President Nixon thought about the UFO situation in general and him in particular.
‘Nixon’s the supreme pragmatist,’ Fuller said. ‘and accepts the status quo. He doesn’t like it, but he accepts the necessity of dealing with you. No need for anxieties there, Wilson.’
‘There’s no-one more pragmatic than me,’ Wilson replied, ‘and I never suffer anxieties.’
Ignoring the remark, Fuller removed a piece of notepaper from his billfold. He checked the details written on it, then returned it to the billfold and put the billfold back into his pocket.
‘I thought I should tell you,’ he said to Wilson, ‘that Tony Scaduto, the UFO researcher I mentioned to you before...’
‘He works for NICAP,’ Wilson interjected impatiently, ‘but also does a lot on the side for Dr Epstein’s APII.’
‘Yes,’ Fuller said, ‘that’s the one.’
‘What about him?’
‘He recently flew to Calgary, Canada, with that former ATIC officer and present APII investigator, Dwight Randall. As I’d already had them placed under CIA observation, I can confirm that they were met at Calgary airport by a private flighttrainer, Hank Lomax, and taken by him to his flight-training school, located north of Calgary. From there, the three of them flew in Lomax’s personal Piper Tri-Pacer to Alberta and then, more dangerously, over a US-Canadian flying saucer production plant in British Columbia. There, after clearly viewing the saucers resting outside the hangars – the advanced, 120-foot saucers recently delivered by you – the airplane was pursued and harassed until it left the area.’
PHOENIX: (Projekt Saucer series) Page 52