The UFO Conspiracy Trilogy

by David Bischoff

  “Gee, I’m sorry, Diane.” A moment of silence. “Look, I guess you know how your father feels about me ... “

  “Yes, Jake. But we need somebody to help!” Oh God! Was Jake Camden going to tum them down too?

  “Oh, kiddo, hey! I’ll do what I can. This sounds too good a case to pass up ... I mean, like I said, it could be a breakthrough. A benevolent UFO-abduction. Wow. No, I just don’t wanna hurt you, Diane. I just wanna be in the clear with you that bringin’ me on will tick your pop off something fierce!”

  “That will be his problem, won’t it, Jake?” Diane Scarborough said, coldly.

  “Yeah. Yeah, I guess it will be. Listen, sounds like I should meet you and this Reilly guy, go out and check the place where you say the saucer landed. By the way, anyone else see the thing? Any reports to the cops, anything in the papers?”

  “Not that I know of ... ‘Course, we haven’t really checked, I guess. Didn’t think to.”

  “That’s okay. That’s my specialty. We’ll interview the neighbors; we’ll do lots of good stuff. We’ll get to the bottom of this business, Diane. I promise. You just relax and feel good, because you’re a very special person, and you’re going to get the help and attention that you deserve.”

  What a nice guy, she thought. Not at all the sleaze-ball whom her father described. Just talking with him seemed to lift a weight from her shoulders. “Thank you, Jake. When can you come out?”

  “Tomorrow. Will that be okay? I’ve got some stuff to take care of at the office, but I can fly in tomorrow, rent a car, and come and see you. But you’re going to have to give me some directions. “

  “I’m not very good at that sort of thing,” said Diane. “But my boyfriend is. He’ll set it all up. And Jake—thanks so much for your help. I guess the hardest part of this whole business is the way people look at me when I talk about it.”

  “Part of the syndrome, kid. You’re not alone. See you tomorrow, Diane.”

  She pulled the phone back to the bed and handed it to Tim Reilly. “It’s Jake Camden, Tim!”

  “No kidding,” Tim said, taking the receiver. “Hello, Mr. Camden. I’m so happy you returned the call.”

  As Tim spoke to her father’s nemesis, Diane slipped back into her underwear, blouse, and jeans, feeling curiously empty.

  When Tim hung the phone up, he was smiling. Diane had picked a book from the stack on the desk: The National Intruder Book of UFO Investigation, by Jake Camden. She was sitting in an old reclining chair, flipping through the pages. Tim went over and knelt beside her, rubbing her back.

  “Well, he’ll be here tomorrow morning,” he said. Tim still had the sheet wrapped around his midsection, but it was clear he wouldn’t mind taking it off and proceeding with what they’d been doing before. Diane, however, was not at all in the mood anymore.

  “Good. We better get back to boning up,” she said.

  “Um—I think I’m already there, lover,” he said cheerfully.

  “Tim, love of my life and trusted companion—there are more important things in this life than expressions of pure carnality.”

  He laughed and kissed her on the cheek. “Yeah, I guess you’re right.” He grabbed a book and lounged back on the bed. “The sucker called! I can’t believe it, but the sucker actually called! We got ourselves a qualified UFO investigator. We’re going to get the bottom of this business!”

  “Did you tell him about the hypnosis appointment with that psychologist?” asked Diane, looking up from artist renderings of almond-eyed aliens.

  “No. Why, should I have?”

  “We can tell him tomorrow, I guess,” she said, tapping the picture for a moment, then abruptly holding up the book for Tim to see. “Timothy. Does this picture jog anything in your memory?”

  Tim looked over and chuckled. “Yeah, it looks a lot like the cover of Communion.”

  “No, I mean ... do you think we saw creatures like this during our memory lapse?”

  Tim shrugged. “I don’t remember a damn thing, Diane, but that is supposed to be the prototypical alien. Many people have identified it. It’s like part of the collective unconscious on the subject.”

  Diane Scarborough looked down at the picture of the almost insect-like eyes, the triangular face, the expressive mouth, and the delicate nose.

  “Tim, I don’t remember anything either… but my intuition tells me we saw absolutely nothing that looked like this.”

  Chapter 16

  Everett Scarborough stopped at the Vietnamese refreshment stand on the Pentagon grounds, and waited his tum to buy his ritual spring roll and iced jasmine tea from the oriental couple who ran the concession booth and sold not only the usual hot dogs, Cokes and chips but also a small array of Far Eastern treats.

  Scarborough had calculated once that the spot which the stand occupied was precisely Ground Zero for Russian nuclear missiles; and the first stuff to go in the flash would be a lot of minted fried rice, then the fire storm would seep through this gigantic five-sided monster of military bureaucracy, and afterward across the Potomac to deal with the rest of the government buildings.

  “Thanks, Anna,” he said to the dark-haired woman as he accepted his purchase.

  “Dr. Everett!” she said, smiling. “We not see you much lately! Three, four week since you been here!” Anna and Trung Dai had been business people in South Vietnam before the communists had taken over. They’d fled to the States, and lived in Clarendon, Virginia, a section of Arlington that soon came to be called “Little Saigon” because of all the immigrants. The Dais had used what little money they had to start up this booth. Now they owned two more like it and were once again prosperous business people—but they still insisted on running the lunch hour here themselves.

  “I’ve been very busy lately, Anna.”

  Several years ago, doing work on one of his books, Scarborough had almost camped out at the Pentagon. This was when he frequented the Vietnamese food-stand so often that he’d gotten to know the friendly owners. They’d taken him up one night to a restaurant on Wilson Boulevard, where they’d feasted on what Trung called “slow Vietnamese food”—spicy soups and delicious satays, chicken with lemon grass, and marvelous fried rice with a touch of fish sauce. Now, he made sure that they got autographed copies of all his books.

  “Trung, look who is here!”

  The grey-haired man greeted Scarborough cordially. “I read your book with great interest, Dr. Everett. But I swear to you, I see a flying thing some miles from Saigon, and it was no U.S. helicopter! “

  “Trung, you’ve got to admit, there’s a hell of a lot of swamp gas in your part of the world!”

  They laughed, and insisted on giving him an extra spring roll for free.

  He took the afternoon treat and sat on some nearby stone steps in the afternoon sun, enjoying the light breeze rippling from the trees in the general direction of Arlington Cemetery. He took a sip of the cold tea, enjoying the crunch of the shaved ice, and then dipped the first spring roll that was on the tray into the small container of duck sauce that the diminutive Vietnamese lady had given him.

  He looked up at the monolithic expanse of the Pentagon, and he whispered, “Dolan, I’m comin’ to get you.”

  That morning, he still couldn’t raise Mac, so he’d called Colonel Walter Dolan, his liaison with the Air Force, whose office was located here amongst the hundreds of other Department of Defense, Army, Navy, and Air Force offices holding over 23,000 workers. He’d told Colonel Dolan about the missing files. Dolan’s response was warm but disbelieving, and he’d ended the conversation with an abrupt excuse, promising to get back “later on in the week.” That date, of course, was much too late for Scarborough. He wanted his confrontation with the man, and he wanted it now.

  Your normal citizen, of course, would have to wait. Fortunately, because of his constant visits here, Scarborough had a permanent pass. Dolan’s inner offices might be a problem if he’d thought to warn the Pentagon MPs. But Everett Scarborough was a calm, law-a
biding man, wasn’t he? There’d be no problem with Scarborough.

  Scarborough smiled at himself as he chewed on the batter-coated shrimp and vegetables. The colonel’s estimation of him was what he was counting on.

  He finished up his snack, wiped his hands with a napkin, drank down the rest of the tea, and then chucked the refuse into a waste-bin.

  Then he headed for the office security checkpoint, pulling his name-badge from his pocket.

  The Pentagon was built on a mud-flat called “Hell’s Bottom,” and it was this difficult site that dictated its unusual shape. General Brehon Burke Somervell, the Army’s supply-services director during World War II, came up with the idea: why not house all the essential offices of the U.S. military establishment in one large building, to expedite communication and cooperation? The architect’s design—five pentagonal structures arranged in concentric rings around an open court and connected by ten spoke like corridors—had no elevators, afforded little silhouette, and conserved structural steel, since metal was in short supply during the 1941-43 building period.

  During the Second World War, and the Korean and Vietnam wars, it seemed to work fine. So what if a well-placed nuclear weapon would take out some of the highest officials in the government in a snap. There were plenty of other military sites more than happy to lob a few missiles at the bad guys. In matters of world destruction, there were megatons to spare. However, it wasn’t the cold war or the threat of nuclear obliteration that was dragging the Pentagon down—it was the simple disease of bureaucracy, complicated by corruption, fraud, and bribery. Scarborough had watched it all happening with a kind of detached horror. A longtime liberal, he didn’t care much at all for the military, and he simply despised the Republican regime that ran the Executive branch for eight years. He let his steam off in his lectures and books, and it was for this reason that no critic could accuse him of being an establishment sort, a fat cat protecting the fatter cats, helping in a conspiracy. As far as Scarborough was concerned, the bureaucrats of the past and present, whether they be CIA, NSA, or FDA, were far too dull and stupid to properly cover-up crashed flying saucers. And the military! Whew! They didn’t call marines jar-heads for nothing, and marines tended to be the

  smartest of the sorry, gun-crazy bunch! He counted his dealings with the Air Force in the Project Blue Book as unfortunate but necessary, which was just how he felt about his further contacts. Somehow, though, the country had muddled through, despite everything, and Scarborough was happy about that—he kept his cynicism about the government at an amused and witty level, an attitude that most military and government sorts could not only tolerate, but could actually privately sympathize with as well. “The saving grace of this whole convoluted mess,” Scarborough had once written in a book, “is purely and simply the process of democracy and this nation’s lovely and vital Constitution.”

  Scarborough’s pass got him all the way through several checkpoints stationed along dull linoleum and Hellenic passageways in the mammoth complex. In fact, it got him all the way to Colonel Dolan’s secretary, a severe-looking WAVE in starched blues and horn-rims who registered surprise to see him.

  “Doctor Scarborough, what are you doing here?” she said in her nasal Queens accent. “You haven’t got an appointment.”

  “That’s right,” said Scarborough, “but I need to talk to the colonel right away. I know he’s in today, I talked to him on the phone.”

  The secretary’s hands clenched above a mass of paperwork. “I’m sorry, but the colonel’s having a meeting now. You’ll either have to come back later—or make an appointment later in the week.”

  “Hmm. I see,” said Scarborough, looking around at the spartan office, complete with aerial photographs of Washington, D.C. and portraits of several recent presidents and famous U.S. generals. “Well, in that case, maybe I’d better make an appointment. The colonel didn’t seem to have time to do that himself, so perhaps you can tell me when he’ll be free this week.”

  The secretary—Corporal Ellen Nichols, Scarborough knew from past meetings and from the plate propped on her desk, if he’d forgotten—relaxed visibly. She leaned over, pulled open a drawer, and removed the colonel’s appointment calendar. “Yes, I think that I can take care of that for you, Doctor,” she said in a monotone, turning her attention away from him.

  Scarborough used the opportunity to scoot past the desk, turn the knob on the glassed door and walk into Colonel Walter Dolan’s office.

  “Dr. Scarborough!” cried the secretary.

  Colonel Walter Dolan, USAF, sat at a large walnut desk, a phone cradled at his ear, pudgy neck, and blue dress-shirt. His tie was undone, and his sleeves were rolled up. His much-decorated blue air force jacket hung neatly on a coatrack, right by his stiff drum like blue cap. His seat squeaked as he swiveled to see who this unscheduled visitor was, and his dark eyebrows—particularly pronounced against his mane of white hair—rose with surprise.

  Scarborough walked forward and slammed the desk with the heel of his hand, “Dolan, I demand that you explain what the hell is going on with my files!” He leaned over and glared at the officer, who blinked and grinned stupidly.

  “Captain, can we continue this conversation later? I’ve got an unexpected guest. Yes, a half hour will do.” Calmly, he cradled the phone and leaned forward, folding his hands in a fatherly gesture of relaxed authority. “Ev, I don’t remember telling you to come down here.”

  “He just stormed through, sir,” said the corporal, looking nervously at the tall, overbearing sight of Everett Scarborough in fighting stance. “Do you want me to get Security?”

  Colonel Dolan shook his head adamantly. “What? No, of course not! Ev Scarborough’s been in this office plenty of times. But I must say, never without an invitation.” He directed a disapproving look at his colleague.

  Scarborough did not flinch from the cold expression. “I’m sorry, Walter, but I don’t like to be brushed off. I’ve got an important matter to deal with here, and I demand an answer.”

  For a moment, Dolan looked as though he was going to change his mind and summon Security; a flash of anger, chagrin, perhaps even a touch of fear went through his usually friendly grey eyes. But then he looked down at his desk for a moment, took a breath, and looked back, cracking a wry grin. “Hell, you don’t take no for an answer, do you, boy!” he said, affecting a bit of the East Texas drawl he grew up with.

  “That’s why you hired me back for the Blue, that’s why we’ve kept in touch, Walter. You’ve got to know that if I’m acting like an ass on this, it’s got to be something that merits that kind of behavior.”

  The colonel gestured to his secretary. “He’ll be okay, Corporal. Don’t call the Mumps.” Dolan sat back into his deep, yielding chair. “’Course, this bozo better have something — important to chew about, or you’ll have to call the medical corps.”

  Not quite totally satisfied, but nonetheless obeying orders, the woman marched stiffly out. Scarborough waited for the door to close, then turned back to the older man. “Colonel Dolan, you know why I’m here. We didn’t speak long this morning, but I gave you the gist.”

  “Ev! What’s this ‘Colonel Dolan’ business? For the past fifteen years it’s been ‘Walt’—here, sit down. You wanna cup of coffee?” Dolan hefted his girth up and strode to a Mr. Coffee machine, where he commenced to pour some brew into a mug labeled “Sirly.” “How ‘bout I sweeten it up just a tad,” he said, pulling out a whiskey bottle from a drawer.

  “Just coffee, Walt. We’ve got to talk. This is serious.”

  “Okay, fella. Talk is cheap enough. Here you go.” Dolan settled the mug of steaming coffee in front of Scarborough, and then sat down. “I really couldn’t gab this morning, Ev. Damn busy. You know, I only got a couple of years before mandatory retirement, and I think the government wants to squeeze every bit of juice outta this pour dried-out husk before they let the winds just blow me away.”

  “Colonel—Walt—” Scarborough took the folded Xer
ox copies of his relevant file-papers that Mac had sent him. “You remember Captain MacKenzie, don’t you?”

  “‘Course I remember the crooked bastard. Cheated me out of a huge poker-pot back in ‘68.” Dolan leaned forward in his chair, pointing to the side of Scarborough’s face. “You okay, Evvie? I heard about that business on Friday night at your revival meetin’. We don’t want to lose you pal. You take care, now, hear?”

  Scarborough touched his bandages. “It’s nothing. I’m sure you know all that needs to be known about it.” He tendered the papers to the colonel, tapping them emphatically after he’d laid them on the desk. “This needs your attention, now, Walt.”

  “This those reports you were talking about, Ev?”

  “Copies of reports from Mac’s files,” Scarborough said, getting up and crossing to a large bookcase. He scanned the displayed spines—bound Congressional Quarterlies, military publications, a copy of Pentagon by Allen Drury—until he found what he was looking for. A leather-bound volume of The Abridged Report on Project Blue Book. He pulled the large tome from its place and hefted it over to the desk. Quickly, he found the pages he’d found in his own copy yesterday, opened the volume to the first appropriate passage, and proffered it to the air force officer.

  “I’m supposed to read these?” said Dolan, taking out half-frame reading glasses.

  “I’ll summarize. You can read later. What you’ve got there are some significant changes of information. Particularly on the Iowa business. The Blue Book report is very different from the investigation report. Mac found a few more large discrepancies like that, so he asked me to check them out as well. I didn’t think it was all that important—”

  “Well, shit, Ev, it’s not! This bullcrap is twenty years stale! This is UFO stuff, Evvie, and you know that the Air Force closed the whole investigation with Blue Book. You helped us do it! Now, we’re keeping a hand in helpin’ people like you disseminate our information to the public. We figure we owe it to people to remind them that all this stuff about people from other planets is hog pucky! But that’s about the extent of our present involvement. You know that, pal! You’ve written about Air Force involvement with UFOs!”