Scarborough sketched and elaborated for a while, detailing the history of UFOs, threading in his theme of suggestion. When he finished, he made a joke about saucer clubs, which earned a rousing round of laughter.
“Look,” said Scarborough, winding things down. “I have had a lot of fun with the people called UFOols, granted. I must be pretty fascinated with the whole subject to study it so much, right? I guess I don’t have much room to talk. We’ve all got to explore this mysterious world we inhabit and I applaud everyone who does. Curiosity is a wonderful thing. But I guess if I have a single message that I’m trying to drive into the international consciousness, it’s that we have developed an absolutely wonderful and useful tool with which we can study the unknown. It’s called the scientific method and it’s derived from logic. This is the yardstick we can use to measure what we know. It’s the sword that can separate knowledge from ignorance. And if I can communicate the value of this incredible tool to the masses by applying it fiercely and unmercifully to the modern mythology of flying-saucer hokum, then I can feel that this life has been worthwhile.”
Thunderous applause met those words. People actually stood up, clapping wildly. Not more than a handful, but it was enough. Scarborough stood, accepting the accolade, wearing a serious and somber expression.
“Thank you. Thank you very much. But as time is running out, let’s have another question, at the most two. And then you can all rush out to the lobby where pre-signed copies of my new book, Above Us Only Sky, await your purchase.”
He returned to the podium, poured a glass of ice water. Ice cubes tinkled, and he could hear the murmur of the crowd. He took a long cool drink, then took the linen handkerchief from a shelf below the podium and wiped the perspiration off his brow. One of these days, he thought, they’re going to invent stage lighting that doesn’t turn a suit into a steam bath. Still, he wondered if he cared to give up the effect that simple sweat contributed to a performance. It was like a soggy underline of passion—a much needed complement to a message that was, after all, meant to be cold and clear reason.
Scarborough was reminded of the story that James Randi told him about the revival-tent preacher who would paint a cross on his forehead with a special type of invisible paint. When the preacher got to sweating hard toward the end of his sermon, the cross would begin to glow a fiery red, and the congregation would proclaim a miracle of God.
No such tricks tonight. Oh, certainly, tricks and subtleties of persuasion and argument and rhetoric—but all in good cause. Science. Logic. Even that good old American staple simple common sense.
Putting the half-empty glass down, he looked back at the audience. Several arms were raised, but he was immediately attracted to the hand raised by a young female student in jeans, standing out in the aisle toward the front. She reminded him of his daughter, Diane, and so on a whim he called on her, remembering that spring break was just around the corner and Diane would be visiting soon.
“Yes! The lovely young woman in the front! You look like an intelligent person. You have a question?”
“Yes, I do!” she said adamantly. “You know, Dr. Scarborough, you’re a most entertaining speaker, and you’re a very intelligent and learned man, and I’ve enjoyed myself very much tonight. In fact, I understand you’re single—“
“Please ... I like to keep these speaking engagements purely business. I am very flattered, miss, but—“
“Actually,” she said, her voice loud enough for most of the hall to hear, “I was thinking of introducing you to my widowed mother!”
Scarborough affected a Jack Benny “Well!” stance, staring out at the audience with contrived exasperation. They erupted into laughter. Excellent! Everett Scarborough had learned to use all kinds of humor to his advantage, and gentle self-mockery without loss of dignity was absolutely classic. The laughter lasted hard and long. He’d learned very quickly that the public figure that could not make fun of himself was soon called “arrogant” and “obnoxious.” Everett Scarborough knew that he certainly had his moments of both qualities—but thanks to Phyllis, he’d at least learned not to take himself too seriously. His scientific opinions, of course, were sterling—but being human, he knew he had a few foibles.
When the laughter had died down a bit, he said, “My dear, I’m sure your mother is as beautiful as you, and I’d love to meet her, as long as she has a book for me to sign. Now, if we can return to the less serious business at hand—flying saucers!”
“Sorry. But really, Doctor, has it ever occurred to you that you believe what you want to believe too?”
“It’s not a matter of belief, my dear, nor faith. I use a system constructed specifically to deal with empirical facts.”
“Okay, you won’t accept that ... Let me ask you another one. You’ve been talking a lot about the recent abduction experiences. I was watching a film on the late show the other night. It had James Earl Jones in it and it was about a couple who were abducted in 1961!”
“Yes. That would be The UFO Encounter ... A TV movie from the seventies, I think.”
“Right. But even the movie was made before all this business ... And Dr. Scarborough, the things that happened to the Hills ... They were a lot like what’s been described in the past few years! Maybe this has been going on for a long time, and it’s just coming to light!”
Scarborough stroked his square, clean-shaven chin for a moment. “I’m glad you brought that case up. Don’t think that I’m not familiar with it. The book to read on the subject is John Fuller’s Interrupted Journey. And I address the matter from chapter five through chapter ten in my second book, Unidentified Flying Oddballs. It just focuses further on my previous theory of suggestion, actually.
“But for those who aren’t familiar with the case, let me summarize it briefly.”
He turned to face the audience fully.
“Betty and Barney Hill were returning from a vacation in Canada to their home in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. They observed a UFO. For some reason, Barney Hill pulled into a side road. The next thing they knew, it was several hours later.
“They tried to continue in their normal lives, but were deeply troubled by that night, both of them, and they sought professional counseling. When the matter of the observed Unidentified Flying Object was brought into the forefront, Dr. Benjamin Simon, a specialist in hypnotherapy who enabled his patients to relive forgotten experiences, was brought in. Dr. Simon hypnotized the Hills and this was the story that they relived—with a great deal of angst and melodrama, actually.”
Scarborough paused for effect. The great thing about discussing saucer tales was that even though they were generally the sheerest gobbledygook, they made for great storytelling. Most of the audience had been persuaded tonight that UFOs were the stuff of fairy tales—but still, he could see their eyes trained on him in fascination, leaning forward slightly in their chairs, listening to the suspenseful tale unfold.
“According to the Hills, a group of humanoid creatures about four feet tall intercepted them, and used some kind of hypnotic method to make them get out of their car and accompany them to their vehicle—a landed saucer-shaped vehicle, of course—deeper in the woods. Inside the saucer, the Hills were subjected to a number of tests. Skin was taken from Mrs. Hill’s arm. Mr. Hill claimed that a semen sample was taken from him. At first, the Hills were quite frightened, but then they began talking to the visitors and calmed down somewhat. Then they were released and returned to their car, and told they would not remember the experience.
“Now, this is the first documented case of creatures doing biopsies and taking sperm and perhaps egg samples, and we don’t get a great deal of that through the late sixties and early seventies. But notice—immediately after that film was shown on nationwide television to millions of people, these cases of alien physical tamperings after abductions began to be reported. You know, that makes me wonder if I shouldn’t do a private study of just how many of the people who report this kind of experience saw that TV film.<
br />
“Of course, we can’t just blame that particular film. For thirty years you haven’t been able to get through a grocery line without being regaled with tales of alien sexual encounters and kidnappings. Maybe that Julie Brown song ‘Earth Girls are Easy’ is a galactic hit!”
The audience laughed. But then a man walked down the aisle, holding a book in one hand. He stood patiently near the stage until the noise died down, and then cried out, “You edit your stories for your own purposes, Scarborough.”
Scarborough recognized the man and cringed a bit. The fellow had accosted him earlier. He was a plump man with short hair, and thick, horn-rimmed glasses through which myopic eyes glared like those of an angry turtle. He had a Roman nose, and classic nerd-garb, all the way from untied shoes to white short-sleeve shirt and a plastic pocket-protector crammed with pens. This was a man far past the UFOol stage—he was what Scarborough termed an Unidentified Flying Oddball. He couldn’t remember his name, but he knew that the man held some position with the local office of MUFON, the flying-saucer investigation organization.
“Oh dear. What did I leave out?” said Scarborough, giving a martyred expression to the audience.
“The most important part of the Hill abduction case. How can you have forgotten! The Zeta Reticuli connection!”
“Oh my goodness,” said Scarborough, “The Zeta Reticuli connection! How could it have slipped my mind?”
Someone from far back in the audience cried out, “What the hell is a Zit Ridicule connection?”
“I’ll tell you what it is!” said the man, holding a book above his head. “It’s one of the most important proofs that exist that we are being visited by creatures in ships from some other planet! If you’ll just let me use your overhead projector, Dr. Scarborough, I’ll be glad to prove my point.”
Scarborough shrugged. “By all means, Mr. . ... “
“Tamowitz, Jacob Tamowitz, vice president of the local MUFON group.” He started up the steps to the stage while Scarborough used the mike to make sure that the audience didn’t think his knowledge of UFOs was less than encyclopedic.
“According to Betty Hill, when she asked the creatures where they were from, they showed her a three-dimensional map depicting a constellation of stars. Some of these stars were connected by thick lines that the aliens claimed were ‘star routes’ between the stars. When this fact came out during hypnosis, Dr. Simon asked if Mrs. Hill could reconstruct that map. She did. It wasn’t until several years later, after the publication of Fuller’s book on the Hills’ experience that anything came of it—and I believe Mr. Tamowitz here wants me to show you a picture of that map.”
Indeed, Mr. Tamowitz did. He was standing by Scarborough, glaring balefully, his face an indelicate shade of red, clutching the book, opened, to his chest. He was so close that Scarborough could smell a cloying mixture of Right Guard and Brut emanating from the angry saucer-freak.
Scarborough took the book and placed it atop the lens of the overhead projector, then switched the machine on. The star charts appeared on the screen: a collection of dots, dotted lines, and solid lines in various configurations, labeled at the bottom respectively, “Betty Hill’s Original Sketch,” “The Fish Interpretation,” and “The Atterberg Interpretation.”
Tamowitz grabbed the mike and proceeded to talk, explaining.
“It’s funny how you twist the facts to your own means by simply leaving out certain key information, Scarborough. The Betty Hill Star Chart is perhaps the most important fact about the Hill abduction. It not only confirms the validity of the Hills’ story—it also proves that the visitors from these flying saucers are from other planets in our universe.”
Scarborough threw up his hands, mugging to the audience. No problem, he thought. Things were still well under control. He signaled to the wings, and one of the student assistants posted to him ran out with a wireless microphone, ready and waiting for just such an eventuality as this. “Proves?” he said. “This is a new one on me! Would you elucidate, please, Mr. Tamowitz?”
“I’d be happy to! In 1968, after seeing Mrs. Hill’s chart, Mrs. Marjorie Fish—a member of MENSA—took the map and compared it to Dorrit Hoffliet’s Catalog of Bright Stars. She recognized this as the first possibility of astronomical evidence of alien visitors. She built a three-dimensional scale model of the Hill chart. After six months of searching and aligning, she discovered stars in the exact same positions! This work was continued when a new book was published, The Catalog of Nearby Stars by Wilhelm Gleiss. Mrs. Fish continued her work, built more models, and discovered that the view presented by the Hill map was from a few light years past the stars Zeta 1 and Zeta Reticuli, looking back toward our sun. The star 82 Eridani is also included. But the really startling aspect is that this pattern exists! Astronomers agree that these systems contain planets that could hold living beings, Dr. Scarborough! Mrs. Hill must have been shown an actual map! What do you say to that?”
“Well, I’d say that since there are billions and billions,” he smiled at the applause for the Carl Sagan catchphrase, “of stars out there within range of our telescopes, chances are pretty good that there’d be a pattern similar to the one Mrs. Hill drew.
“This, Mr. Tamowitz, is hardly what I would term scientific evidence. It’s more like connect-the-dots for MENSA members.”
That infuriated the man. “I’ll have you know that I am a member of MENSA, and it is a valuable and distinguished organization for people with far above-average intelligence.”
“I’ve got nothing against intelligence at all! I just wish people would use it on more constructive projects than looking for extraterrestrials where there aren’t any!”
“I’m not finished,” Tamowitz said, jabbing at the illustration with a forefinger, shaking the screen. “After Mrs. Fish published her account at a Mutual UFO network convention and it was subsequently printed in Astronomy Magazine, an aeronautical engineer and amateur astronomer named Charles Atterberg—‘ ,
Scarborough wondered why Tamowitz was bringing up Atterberg, who claimed that there was another possible area of stars that could have been charted in the Hill map. It played right into the points he had made about superimposing patterns and meaning over random facts. What was that called? He’d have to use that word in his rebuttal, if he could remember it.
But he never got the chance.
Because that was when the shots broke out.
The first shot sounded like nothing more than a backfiring truck from the parking lot. The shot echoed around in the faulty acoustics of the auditorium.
Before the echoes, though, the top of podium exploded into splinters.
In 1987, a comedian named Dick Shawn died onstage in the middle of his act, of a heart attack. He lay prostrate in front of hundreds of people who waited patiently for him to get up and continue his routine; his style of performance was such that people thought falling down and looking dead was part of the act.
The audience at Everett Scarborough’s lecture at the Tawes Auditorium on the University of Maryland took only a few seconds to realize that shots and an exploding podium were not part of the show—but since the demonstrations had included some startling magic tricks, it was understandable that for a while they were quite confused and did nothing, watching the events unfold in stunned silence. Dr. Everett Scarborough, however, certainly knew that exploding podiums were not a part of the act. Split seconds after the gunfire and the sting of the wood pieces against his cheek, he was down on the floor, less of a target.
The second bullet sang over Scarborough’s head as he crawled away for cover, smashing into the overhead projector, sending a shatter of glass across the floor. “Get down!” he cried to the paralyzed Tamowitz, who stood transfixed in the same position, like a startled deer caught in auto headlights.
“What—?” the man managed before the third bullet caught him full in the chest, knocking him down and sending a splash of blood onto the white screen behind him.
By the second sho
t, the Hoppers knew that it was the man dressed in all-black clothing who was doing the shooting. They had been so immersed in the proceedings on that stage, though, that they had not noticed the man getting up and going to the intersection of the balcony railing and the right auditorium wall. He stood there now, just squeezing off the third shot from his long-nosed .44, his longish, limp hair parted in the middle and hanging down the sides of his face. He held the gun with both hands. There was no expression on his face at all.
“Hey!” Alfred Hopper cried, getting up.
Gertie Hopper screamed and clutched at her husband frantically, pulling him back in the seat, not wanting to be the widow of a dead hero.
At the sight of the MUFON official’s blood on the screen, several other people in the audience screamed, others cried out, pointing up toward the direction of the shots.
Everett Scarborough struggled to control the panic that gripped him. His instinct told him to just get up and run, but he’d had enough time to judge the angle of the bullets, and knew that the assassin had him pinned. All he could do was crawl to the base of the podium, which provided some cover. As he reached it, he realized that he was trailing blood. He lifted a hand to his face, and his palm came away scarlet. The splinters had gouged into his face. Nearby, was the shuddering body of the man with the star charts, lying on his face. A pool of blood was slowly collecting to his left side, then rivulating down the proscenium. “Turn out the lights!” Scarborough heard himself yelling. With the lights on, he still presented a target.
The UFO Conspiracy Trilogy Page 7