Tales of Tinfoil: Stories of Paranoia and Conspiracy

by David Gatewood (ed)

  “There he is,” Parnell said. “Your pilot.”

  Michael drifted toward it. A small dark hole stood out from its broad forehead. Where did it come from?

  “Classified. Which is surely somebody’s idea of a joke. Truth is? We don’t have any goddamn idea.”

  Let me guess. It would only tell you its name, rank, and serial number.

  The colonel laughed, squinting. “You got a sick sense of humor, son.”

  Michael moved closer to the glass box. Until that moment, a piece of him had stayed convinced this wasn’t real. That the saucer was a fake, a perverse experiment for an unknown purpose. But the body was real. Once, it had walked. Breathed. Loved.

  He stopped, close enough to touch the box. The hole in its brow—it was a bullet hole.

  “Seen enough?” Parnell said.

  That was what his note meant, wasn’t it? The alien had died to give them a way to win the war. How could he do any less?

  * * *

  That night, when he dreamed, the woman in the flames spoke his name.

  The next morning, he cleared Tanaka to fly. Behind the controls, Michael felt at home: everything else was lost, but he’d kept this, the same way he could still read or walk. The saucer lifted as gently as a father lifting his daughter from the couch to her bed. It was night, and there wasn’t a single light besides the base and the stars. He took it to five hundred feet and hovered.

  Hold on tight, he wrote.

  The main controls had two wheels: one for speed, one for course. He rolled the accelerator hard right. Multiple gees thrust them into their chairs. The lights below them drew closer to each other, dwindling away. Within moments, they were ten thousand feet above the hardpan. A klaxon warned him they were approaching the limits of their approved operational range. He rolled the wheel back to its resting state, bringing them to a stop.

  Tanaka whooped. “How did you ever figure this out?”

  Michael found his pad. Figure what out?

  “How to fly this crazy thing.” Tanaka eyed him. He was the kind of man who would talk to fill the silence that Michael couldn’t. “You’re the man who cracked it. You really don’t remember?”

  He shook his head.

  Tanaka leaned forward. “You’re Nisei. Like me.” He drew back, watching Michael’s face. “It’s true, isn’t it? It’s all gone.”

  From the crash.

  The lieutenant’s gaze drifted to the bandage that still swathed Michael’s forehead. “It’s a miracle you survived.”

  * * *

  That night, the woman and the young girl screamed his name from the jungle. The strike of the bomb erased them in heat. This time, though, after the blast faded, he staggered to his feet and walked toward the crater. To find them. To get them out.

  There was nothing left. They were gone. Transmuted to heat, and light, and ash. He woke terrified that he could do nothing for them and guilty that he knew nothing about them. He would soon die, too, but at least he would be remembered as a hero. The man who’d saved the very nation. Better to be dead and remembered than to live with no memory of your own.

  Parnell instructed him to push Tanaka faster. The first time Michael turned over the controls, Tanaka grasped them like a lover’s hips. He learned fast. He had it easy, though. They weren’t training him to take off or to land. Only to set course and drop the bombs.

  The mood around the base grew more somber than ever. People hardly spoke at all. At mess, they stared down at their plates, as if to find answers in the gravy. Parnell called Michael in for an update.

  His touch is poor, he wrote. It could be weeks before he’s ready to land.

  “But he could get you from A to B.”

  If that is all you need.

  “’Fraid so. Each day we wait is a gamble with the end.”

  Something stirred in him. It felt like a memory, but nothing came. He found himself on the brink of tears. The alien had shown him it was all right to die. But what could show him that it was all right to ruin?

  May I see the pictures again? Of the bombings?

  Parnell sniffed. “You bet. Any ones in particular?”

  All of them. He gestured to his head. When you showed me in the hospital, I was fuzzy.

  The colonel unlocked a drawer in his desk and got out the manila folder. Michael examined each picture for a long time. San Francisco. Seattle. San Diego. No matter how closely he looked, he couldn’t find a single body. There was nothing left. They’d been erased.

  Just like he had. Just like the Soviets would be.

  Parnell’s eyes shifted between his. “You want to see the real thing?”

  One of the cities?

  “Too risky. But I got something else for you.”

  An hour later, they were airborne, buckled in behind a laconic pilot. Parnell had to shout above the roar of the props. “Completely wiped out Sherman Field. We’re lucky they didn’t get us, too.”

  The plane carried over the mountains to the north and into a basin of scrub. It banked, slowing.

  “There you go,” Parnell said. “That right there? That’s what an atomic bomb looks like.”

  A crater plunged in the desert floor, steep and vast. It was surrounded by a black ring hundreds of feet wide. An abscess in the earth. The ground around it was scarred, moon-like. Scattered with planks and twisted metal. Nothing grew. Maybe it never would.

  Parnell put his cheek to the scratched window. “Looks like hell, don’t it?”

  Michael nodded. Even if his voice had worked, he wouldn’t have been able to speak.

  * * *

  Parnell called them in five days later. Veins traced his cheeks like rivers on a map. “Orders from Washington. We’re a go. Three days.”

  Tanaka hugged Michael fiercely. “Time to pay them back. For everything they’ve done.”

  They would come in at night. Over the Pacific and in from the east—the Soviets ran too many patrols around the poles. No radio contact. They would carry twelve bombs. Enough to make sure the enemy would have no way to finish what it had started.

  “There won’t be enough fuel to make it back,” Parnell said. “You understand?”

  Tanaka inclined his head. “Two men is a small sacrifice for the future of our nation.”

  Michael nodded too. Back at his hut, he searched it top to bottom, but there was nothing to find.

  They ran no more flights. They spent their remaining time with the saucer’s navigation system. Michael stuck to their route. Tanaka wouldn’t have the skills to vary it, but by the end of forty-eight hours, Michael was confident he’d be able to follow it.

  The day of, they slept. Michael woke to a cool desert evening that smelled like dust and sage. He prepared, assisted by a silent orderly. A jeep took him and Tanaka to the tarmac. The saucer waited. Forty men watched them walk to it. Parnell waited at the ladder.

  “This is the most important night in the history of our nation,” he said. “And you two will never be forgotten.”

  He drew his shoes together and saluted. Behind them, every man did the same. Did each one of them believe, or was there some doubt hidden behind their masks of adoration? Michael saluted back.

  He climbed aboard. Tanaka buckled in. The hatch closed over them. Pressure spiked in Michael’s ears.

  Check systems, he wrote.

  Tanaka glanced at him, then went to work. On the tarmac, the marshaller signaled them clear. Michael took the controls. The craft hummed. Lifted. The ground receded beneath them.

  Mountains. Desert. Low clouds enveloping the land. He climbed above them, a circle of silver in the darkness. When the clouds fell away, the Pacific stretched beneath them. For weeks, he’d waited for something to return. To be handed an answer. He knew, at last, that none would come.

  Five hundred miles off the remains of the West Coast, Michael Aoki brought the UFO to a stop.

  Tanaka straightened in his chair, glancing out the window. “What’s wrong?”

  The craft is fine, he
wrote.

  “We can’t stop here. We could be spotted.”

  We can’t do this.

  The lieutenant went very still. “You said the craft is fine.”

  Have you seen what happens when a bomb strikes a person?

  “Yes, sir. I was at Pearl Harbor, sir.”

  It leaves nothing, he wrote. How many millions are we about to erase?

  “Millions will die if we don’t.” Accusation rang in Tanaka’s words. “They nuked us first. Do you want them to destroy what little we have left?”

  This would destroy us, too. Michael dropped the pad of paper in his lap and reached for the controls.

  Tanaka laughed, incredulous and sickly. “No wonder they had to bring me in. The Japanese killed your wife. Your daughter. And you still chickened out.”

  Michael blinked, hands frozen halfway to the control wheels. The woman. The girl. The fire. The sky aswarm with planes that had arrived from nowhere on a warm December day. The harbor blackened with burning ships.

  Across the cockpit, Tanaka held a pistol trained on Michael’s chest. Michael noticed this the way he might notice that it was cloudy outside. Hands shaking, he reached for the pad of paper.

  Tanaka lifted the pistol an inch, his teeth clenched tight. “You volunteered for this, Aoki! And when you did, it didn’t take some Looney Tunes story about the destruction of the West Coast. Because this gave you the chance to get revenge for what they did to your family.”

  The mouth of the pistol was as dark as Tanaka’s eyes. As black as the hole in the alien’s forehead. He thought: His sacrifice is yours. He hadn’t written the note to inspire himself, had he? He’d meant it as a warning: that he was a piece in a game he’d never understand.

  It played across his mind like a newsreel. The saucer streaking in from the east. Bombs bursting across the Soviet Union. And when the vessel crashed, and they pried it open? They’d find two Japanese men inside. One of whom couldn’t speak, and a second who never would.

  He pointed to the pad in his lap. Tanaka nodded permission. Michael picked it up and wrote, We’re going to bomb the Soviets. And blame the Japanese.

  “We only have enough to take out their nuclear sites. Not enough to stop them from making war. Someone else has to take the fall. Why not the one who killed millions in the Pacific? Who took away your little girl? And my father?”

  Insane.

  Tanaka rolled his eyes. “You want to know insane? Letting our enemy develop a weapon that can annihilate us overnight. Within two years, they’ll have the bomb. The Soviets haven’t nuked us yet—and we’re about to guarantee they never will.”

  Michael waited for his memory to flood back. But whatever they’d done to him after the first time he’d turned against the mission, it had been thorough. He had nothing left. Michael Aoki was as dead and gone as the wife and daughter he couldn’t remember.

  Yet a ghost remained: the feeling that he could still save others.

  He flipped the page to a blank one. Filled it with questions. Held it out to Tanaka. The other man bent toward it, squinting against the gloom of the cockpit. Michael drove his pen into the side of Tanaka’s neck and yanked it forward.

  The gun went off, deafeningly close. Michael dropped the pen and grappled for the gun, shoving it into Tanaka’s lap, unbuckling himself with his other hand. The pistol went off again, shattering one of the crystal clear TVs. Tanaka clutched at his throat. Blood gleamed darkly.

  A minute later, Tanaka stopped moving. The UFO hovered ten miles over the ocean. The cockpit smelled like blood. He turned around, setting course toward the mainland. He couldn’t land it. It was a weapon as deadly as the bombs it carried. He’d have to crash it. The thought should have filled him with fear, but instead, he felt a calm resolve.

  Because his first crash, it hadn’t been an accident, had it?

  He spent the flight back trying to remember his wife’s name. By the time Area 51 unfolded below him, he still didn’t have it. Knowing he never would, he lifted the saucer to fifty thousand feet, then a hundred thousand. He tilted down the saucer’s nose and cranked the speed wheel as far as it would go.

  The hardpan rushed toward him.

  He had no memory of himself. But when the world learned what he had saved them from—he would be remembered then, wouldn’t he?

  About the Conspiracy Theory:

  Roswell

  By nature, conspiracy theories exist on the fringe. Some—JFK, the moon landing, 9/11—are mainstream enough that your average American can discuss them as fluently as they can discuss the latest betrayal on Game of Thrones. (Depending on the conspiracy, that discussion might end up just as violent as the Red Wedding.) But even the biggies aren’t something you engage with on a daily basis. They’re rabbit holes. Hidden from sight unless you choose to dive in.

  What makes Roswell so crazy is that it has become the culture. Flying saucers, Greys, abductions, Men in Black—when we talk about aliens, we see the iconography of the conspiracy. Someone looking at us from outside might think we have met aliens. We sure seem to know how they look and act.

  Fun fact: the term “flying saucer”—coined after the first highly publicized sighting, which occurred two weeks before Roswell—was a misquote of the witness. (He was describing how they flew, not how they looked.) If and when we do encounter aliens, we might be in for a bit of a surprise.

  Anyway, as for Roswell. The real crash—if you can believe the U.S. military—was an experimental balloon designed to detect Soviet atomic bomb tests. That’s been known for twenty years. Nobody cares.

  Because a government cover-up of a crashed alien spaceship is way, way, way cooler.

  I sometimes write about aliens. You can find my books on my website or find me on Facebook.

  Fear of the Unknown and Loathing in Hollywood

  (or Doc Midnite and the Great White Whale Hunt of ’73)

  by Nick Cole

  My one and only article as a legit journalist, post the Company and Pat Buchanan’s fall from the long table at the West Wing, was never actually published by the Hollywood Scene Beat. Buchanan’s fall from the White House had managed to drag me down like some latter-day spear-carrier for the Roman imperator of the moment, who happened to be on the wrong end of the long knives as ’92 wound down. Even though the article was never published for the Hollywood Scene Beat, it took me right to the very gates of hell, up close, where I could look in through the bars and see the horror.

  “Too controversial,” said Mays, the editor of the Beat.

  Too controversial? Since that last Tuesday when he bailed me out of studio jail and we walked off the lot at NBC into the afternoon Burbank traffic, I’ve dedicated one day out of every year to making Mays’s life a living nightmare via the interwebz. On that day, I sign him up for all kinds of hardcore gun-nut periodicals, right-wing newsletters, build-your-own-compound-slash-bomb-bunker online chatboards, darknet Eastern European dating sites, and a Richard Simmons Deal-A-Meal daily inspirational email, along with a series of very small donations to various Tea Party candidates. That’ll teach him to stick me with the “too controversial” bumper sticker. You see, Mays is a life-long bagman for the DNC. He knows where the bodies are buried. I’ll bet he’s paid off Jerry Brown’s pharmacists and niche escort service providers in Chuck E. Cheese parking lots all up and down the central valley.

  I’m almost sure of it. I would bet Mom’s grandfather’s pile of cash on it before I’d ever bet another horse.

  But Mays did bail me out of studio jail when it looked like I might spend some survivor time in real jail—down at LA County.

  He also drove away in the Butterscotch Bomber, a rented Cutlass Sierra I’d illegally “sunroofed” late one night in Hollywood. He never said anything about the dangerous pharmaceuticals in the trunk. But he probably didn’t know about them, so that’s a wash regarding his account balance with the Not So Friendly Savings and Revenge Company I run once a year.

  One day a year is enough to de
dicate to someone’s personal ruin for not publishing my hard-hitting deep-cover investigation of Mark-Paul Gosselaar’s rise to the top of Saturday morning sitcoms somewhere around 1993.

  One day is enough.

  I have other enemies. Everyone gets their day, center mass, inside the scope mounted to the payback rifle I aim at them from the various rooftops of the interwebz.

  Like I said, I’d been kicked out and cast west. West out of Sodom. West from DC. The Reagan years were over and the think tanks were self-destructing with the new Democrat optimism centered on alleged-adulterer-slash-accused-rapist Bill Clinton. Alleged. The rape, that is.

  Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop” was still ringing in everyone’s ears. People are easily misled that way by mere minstrels. Ask that village that lost all its children to the guy who played the flute and promised to get rid of the rats. That’s the dark side of the fairy tale, and no one really remembers that part.

  You can call someone an alleged rapist. It’s one of the great things about America.

  People do it all the time.

  But back then, when they were still selling the Bill and Hillary love story while trying to cover up Paula, Juanita, Kathleen, Gennifer, and the rest, the Reagan-Bush era of real-world big-boy groupthink was ending. We weren’t playing to win anymore; as a nation, that is. It was the season to feel good and Rock the Vote. It was time to vote for sex. Lilith Fair was on the horizon like a Twister making a beeline for the nearest trailer park. The once-favored were falling out of favor. The exodus of sober, conservative thinking had begun in full. And when they ejected Buchanan, I knew my days were short. If I was honest with myself, truthful in that way one can only be on the back side of a three-day Clevinger’s binge, then I had known all along it would have to end, eventually. Sumptuous retreats in the deserts of Saudi Arabia as a guest of the Arab Prince of Cocaine were over. I’m talking an actual member of the royal family. A lunatic coked to the gills reveling in the night as we tried to sell him bulk farm equipment the House of Saud would never, ever, need. I use the word “reveling” not lightly, but knowingly on scales of galactic magnitude. Reveling in George Lucas’s 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special as the Prince consumed Al Pacino levels of cocaine, talking crazy like the Che Guevara of the Rebel Alliance.