Diane caught a glimpse of the tatty man in the rearview mirror, and there seemed an actual glow of wonder in his eyes.
On the way back, Camden explained.
“It’s simple enough, kids. Virtually all the abduction stuff that I’ve dealt with that seems remotely sincere has got big black bands of paranoia running through it. We’re talking deep psychological trauma. Now, who knows if this stuff really happens. If it does, we’ve got some pretty stupid aliens we’re dealing with.” Camden laughed to himself. “This Budd Hopkins and Maximillian Shroeder stuff makes for great press copy—Christ, it’s my bread and butter. But as your father has doubtless pointed out, if alien races are developed enough to travel the trillions of miles, they’re surely bright enough to realize that they’re dealing with civilized beings here and not lab rats!”
“But what about the observations we do to dolphins and park animals and such?” noted Tim. “You know, marking them, tracking them.”
“Jesus, Timothy! Do dolphins drive cars? Do bears build skyscrapers? This isn’t a Gary Larsen “Far Side” cartoon, this is real life! For one thing, if this abduction stuff has been going on as long as we experts in the field would have you believe, then you’d think they’d realize that we humans have got long memories and we’re into heavy things like retribution and revenge. The way some of these poor slobs talk, if one of these almond-eyed little guys chooses to walk into a saucer convention of abductees, it’s Bela Lugosi time. He’ll get ripped limb from limb. Personally, I don’t buy most of this shit. I exploit it, sure, it’s my job. But I don’t buy it.”
“What do you think, Mr. Camden,” said Diane, a little of the starch coming out with the man’s disingenuousness.
Camden laughed, leaning forward and tapping his head. “I think that most of these bozos have got something loose in their noggins.”
“I thought you said you honestly thought there is something behind the whole UFO business,” said Tim.
“Oh, I do, I do! And I’d like to find out, really and truly I do. But let me put it this way, there’s very little evidence that we’re being visited by aliens from another planet.” His voice became suddenly small and introspective. “On the other hand, there’s a great deal of evidence that the human mind is subject to extreme—er—aberrations.”
Diane had to smile. “Mr. Camden, that sounds like something my father would say.”
“Well, you can give the quote to him, because in my business, I sure as hell can’t use it! No, actually, to get back to why I’m excited about you two: This appears to be an abduction experience you’ve had—UFO sighting, missing time and all—but you’re normal, well-adjusted human beings and you don’t have any sense of foreboding or emotional upset on the matter. Man, this is unique! I really do hope we do have actual contact here!”
Tim dropped Diane off back at his place. She all but lived there, and she had some mundane matters to take care of, like bills that were due, and a quick shower. He would take Camden to check in at his Motel 6, and then would return. He and Diane needed something to get their minds off this business, and they decided that a movie this evening would do the trick. As for Camden, he just asked to be directed to the nearest strip-joint, where he could “celebrate this latest terrific development. “
It was late afternoon when Diane got left off. She decided that a short nap would do her a lot of good. She flopped onto Tim’s big bed, and tried to doze off, but so much swirled in her head that she had great difficulty.
This Jake Camden guy—maybe he’d work out after all. True, he was a bit seedy, but her first impression had not been entirely correct. He did seem honestly interested in helping them, in uncovering the truth.
The hypnosis session was on Thursday. It was their one hope to discover what had happened, the key to dig out those memories. She lay on Tim’s bed for a long time, wondering just what those memories were, feeling unanchored and adrift, but not overly concerned. Camden was right. There seemed no undue fear and dread here, which were keystones to other abduction cases.
She had just decided to get up and take that shower, when the phone call came.
It was from her father.
Chapter 20
There are no degrees in UFO Investigation from colleges.
There are no late-night TV commercials or ads in magazines regaling consumers with “Your Opportunities in the Exciting Field of Unidentified Flying Objects—Acme Technical Training!”
UFO investigators tend to be hobbyists and aficionados and just plain kooks, fascinated with the phenomenon and eager for knowledge and truth on the subject. Unfortunately for the field, though—and this was something that Scarborough would point out constantly—was the “quantum mechanics effect,” which was what he called the effect of enthusiasm on the scientific study of the subject, an analogy to the recent discovery in physics of the “Viewer-Participant” syndrome, wherein merely observing things below the cause-and-effect level influences the events themselves. In other words, because they tended to be so enraptured by the thought of discovering real vessels from outer space—real aliens—the investigators influenced the data they dug up, to say nothing of wrongly interpreting it.
The only actually legitimate UFO investigators were those employed by Project Blue Book in the fifties and sixties, whether they were military and government personnel, or just
specialists brought in to consult. Everett Scarborough was one of these. His exemplary work in astrophysics at MIT would probably have gone unnoticed if not for the appearance of several articles on such subjects as the “Aerodynamic Unfeasibility of Flying Saucers” and “Atmospheric Delusions” in Astronomy Magazine in the mid-sixties. These articles were so lucid, interesting, and amusing that they were reprinted in larger magazines, including Reader’s Digest. Perhaps that was when some high mucky-muck read them—probably, Scarborough always suspected, while sitting on the crapper—and decided that this man was necessary for Project Blue Book, a so-called “investigation” on the part of the Air Force, in which, according to a later article by Charles Corddry, military correspondent for the Baltimore Sun, “as little as possible” was done.
Into this malaise stepped the eager and serious young scientist, Everett Scarborough, who rapidly discovered how spotty and supercilious the UFO investigatory methods were. One of his colleagues at the time was Dr. J. Allen Hyenk, a distinguished astronomer who’d been working with the Air Force since the fifties. However, Hyenk and Scarborough had never gotten on. Not long after Scarborough had started work on investigations, Hyenk had been dispatched to Michigan to investigate some sightings, which he later attributed to swamp gas. This statement was skewed enough by the media to make it sound as though Hyenk was describing all sightings as swamp gas, a notion that was met with derision by the pro-UFO factions. Clearly upset and disgusted, Hyenk was never the same. He’d become, with good reason, discouraged with the Air Force investigations over the years, and began to change his skepticism to credulousness. Later, of course, he was heralded as the key scientist-expert on the matter—a man who actually believed that these UFOs could contain extraterrestrial life. Hyenk was the man who consulted on Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Scarborough immediately detected this change of heart in Hyenk, and opposed it. His attitude toward the shoddiness of the Air Force’s efforts toward investigating the UFO sightings was not to assume that something was being hidden, but rather, that the Air Force, hopelessly burdened with silly bureaucratic rules and attitudes, just didn’t take that much interest in the
subject, and was bungling along in the matter purely on the momentum from the early fifties, when they had been concerned.
With Scarborough’s help, the investigatory methods were revised and honed to strict measures. Under his guidance both the O’Brien Report of 1966 and the Condon Committee from 1966 to 1968 were presented with the hard, cold facts, thus allowing Project Blue Book to wrap in December 1969 with the statement that there was insufficient evi
dence to conclude that extraterrestrials were buzzing the country in flying disks.
Scarborough’s investigation methods were simple but effective, modeled on various literary detective methods, including those of Sherlock Holmes. He more than realized that these could not be strict scientific investigations, because the scientific method demanded not only specified conditions, but also such aspects as controlled subjects. A UFO report was usually so jumbled by the human interactions involved that it had to be first taken apart and examined bit by bit. To do this, all information available was necessary. Routinely, in the field, Scarborough would interview all the people who’d seen the object, and several in the same area who had not. He obtained precise meteorological information for the time involved, as well as any radar reports for the area. He researched the location for local power sources, power wires, and such. He became fully apprised of geological and geographical facts about the area involved. Any photographic evidence was thoroughly examined under strict scientific conditions. Soil samples were taken of so-called “landing spots.” Scarborough told all those involved that if there indeed had been flying saucers or aliens in the area, he was the one who most wanted to prove that they had been there. Of course, he never did—quite the opposite.
The UFO generally turned out to be local aircraft which had reflected local light oddly, weather balloons, Venus, a bright star, a sun dog, a moon dog, a cloud formation, drifting spider-webs, an odd weather condition refracting ice crystals in the sky—and sometimes, even “plasma” formations, an electrical phenomenon pointed out by one of Scarborough’s more respected colleagues, Philip Klass, that was caused by power lines or power-generation plants.
It was this attitude that he and Captain Eric MacKenzie had brought to that Iowa farm in Johnson County, in 1968. The case had seemed simple enough then: a silvery vessel sighted cruising through the sky by a farmer. Who knew, thought Scarborough, as he studied the files on the case, that it would snowball into this, over twenty years later?
“Charles Higsdon,” murmured Scarborough, tapping the files with a pencil. His ever-present field notebook for scribbles lay by his side at the coffee table. He looked up from the swath of cheap paper to Mac, who was making notes in the Air Force book with a yellow magic marker. “I only remember him vaguely. Younger guy, with a family. Kids didn’t see the saucer, wife didn’t see it either. He was out late, plowing—and at twilight, he made the sighting. The wife did concur that there were electrical problems in the house for hours afterward. And several other people in the neighboring town did see something strange scooting in the sky. But that was all. A simple enough investigation, a simple enough case.”
Mac spread open the book for him, and pointed the tip of the marker at the sentences he’d underlined. “Now look. Green and red lights here ... and in our report, red and blue...”
“Yes, a simple enough mistake.”
“Wait ... according to the Blue Book file, the thing landed. There’s nothing about landing in our files on the subject.”
Scarborough shrugged. “So what if it did an Immelmann roll around a crow? We established that there was insufficient evidence in this case.”
Mac forged on. “There are other seemingly insignificant disparities. I realize that most of this stuff is pure apocryphal. But it made me go back and check other stuff. There’s a homogeneity to the whole Blue Book file reports, which I think is very strange, considering the number of different consultants and investigators they used. Like in the sixties, they used entire university science staffs—and yet there’s a similarity in the reports. Now we can’t possibly go back and check on the other reports, but we know ours. And we know it was changed.”
Scarborough nodded. “A little unsettling. On the other hand, you and I well know the way the subject was treated—pretty loosely. The write-ups were done by a staff of career Air Force bureaucrats who were probably dropouts from Stars and Stripes and wrote Air Force manuals on latrine-digging specs.”
“The whole megillah is available if you want to go down to an Alabama air force base to go over it—which maybe I will, one day. But I know what I’ll find. Scrubbed up, standardized reports. Altered reports.”
“That could very well be, but, like I say, what difference, really, are the colors?”
“Suppose there is something you wanna hide. What do you use? I’ll tell you—camouflage. If all leopards have spots, you won’t see the lion that’s been dabbed with paint. One or two genuinely puzzling sightings of UFOs are going to look a hell of a lot less puzzling amidst many other easily provable hoaxes and optical illusions cobbled up.”
“Wait just a minute, Mac. You’re saying that the Air Force deliberately manufactured UFO sightings, and modified details about actual sightings, to obscure the meanings of genuine sightings.” Scarborough shook his head with disbelief.
“It all spells out clearly enough to me, Ev.”
“Yeah. It spells out p-a-r-a-n-o-i-a!”
Mac ignored the jibe. “Here’s something else, and the one thing that we can truly check up on, whether or not we get hold of Charles Higsdon again. Look here at the address of Higsdon’s farm in the report.”
“2319 Hillcrest Street,” Scarborough read.
“Now look at what we put down.”
The address was plainly spelled out: 1352 Ludlow Road.
Scarborough mulled that over for a moment. “Okay, so maybe Higsdon didn’t want his correct address printed.”
“Weak, Ev. Weak. When so many eggs are busted, you look for the fox, right? So okay, maybe you’re right about all this—but I say we go out to Johnson County and we see if Higsdon still lives there. If he’s there, we interview. Harmless enough, right?”
“Yeah, I guess so,” Scarborough said, unconvinced.
“That’s the boy!” Mac got up and clapped him on the back. “Here, I’ll go down and rustle up some more brew. Then we’ll wade into this report some more, and cook up some possibilities. I’ve got a shitload of. theories to dump on you.”
“I bet you do.”
They worked on through the afternoon, drinking beer and plowing through notes and ideas. Old Mac had a pretty feverish imagination, Scarborough had to admit. Maybe if they went out to see about this farm and it was all harmless enough, then the man would finally settle down and get back to what he did best: fiction writing.
“So then,” said Mac, happily closing books and re-sorting the files. “When are you getting around to dealing with Diane?”
“I guess I should give her a call or something, shouldn’t I?” Scarborough mused, feeling a little light-headed from the beer.
“Right. Tell her you’ll be down there soon as you’ve dealt with the old fool in Iowa.” Mac mimed neon lights on a marquee. “Doc Scarborough—UFO Exorcist!”
Scarborough chuckled. “I’m going to need something stronger than Grolsch to wash this one down, Mac.”
Mac grinned. “You got it. Straight from the land of my forebears.”
“Mac, I always suspected that you were descended from bears!”
Mac winked and went to get the Scotch.
Scarborough pulled out his address book from his briefcase, and looked up Diane’s Kansas phone number. He dialed it and got no reply. Mac was bringing up a half-empty bottle of Dewar’s from his wet bar on the first floor when Scarborough cradled the phone.
“Well, so much for that. No answer.”
Mac poured several fingers of Scotch into a smudged bachelor glass, and handed it to his friend. “Don’t give me that bull, Ev. Hasn’t she got that graduate boyfriend or something?”
“Yeah. Tim.” Scarborough spat the name out, not hiding his disgust.
“So, you try Tim’s number. She’s probably there, doing his laundry or something.”
Scarborough paged through his address book. Diane had made him take Tim Reilly’s number as soon as they’d started seeing each other a lot. He strongly suspected it was just her subtle way of hurting him, possibly suggesting that th
e couple were living together.
He dialed the 913 number. A female voice answered on the third ring.
“Diane. This is your penitent father,” he said. He took a quick hit of the Scotch, but the crow didn’t taste much better.
“Dad!” she said, excited. “Hi! I’m so happy to hear from you! You actually called me at Tim’s! You’ve never done that before.”
“Right. Well, I should have called before. I’m sorry I lost my temper. We’re a real pair, aren’t we?”
“Where are you, Dad?”
“I’m visiting the Iowa hermit, Diane. He’s got me on a wild-goose chase. Soon as I shoot down his goose, I’m going to come and shoot down yours.”
There was a pause at the other end. Then: “You mean, you’re going to come down ... and investigate?”
“Yes. That’s all right, isn’t it?”
“Dad, of course it is. It’s wonderful. It’s just that ... Well, sure! Come on down whenever you can.”
“What’s wrong, Diane? Are you all right?”
“Oh, sure ... We’re just trying to figure out what happened, Dad—Tim and I. Just, uh, hanging in there ... “
“You left so quickly ... I’ve been worried about you.”
“You know I pretty much fall on my feet.”
“Yes. Your catlike abilities ... When you were small, you thought you were a cat.”
“Yes, and now I know it. No problem. How’s Uncle Mac?”
“Oh, he’s fine.”
Mac took his cue and hollered, “Hello, Diane.”
“Bastard knocked some sense into me, I guess. I’m up here doing some reinvestigation out in Johnson County. Mac thinks there’s some kind of sinister doings there, UFO-wise.”
“No kidding. How exciting!”
“And I’d like to come down and see you too, Diane. We’re going up tomorrow to Johnson County—but Mac says he can drive me down on Thursday. You’ll have two UFO investigators for the price of none!”
The UFO Conspiracy Trilogy Page 25