The first item he removed was an ancient unmarked film reel. He gave it to Jess.
“We’ll see if we can find a projector for that in town,” he said.
The other item was a thick file folder containing a raft of yellowed documents.
He smiled when he saw the file’s title and showed it to Jess.
It was labeled Project Caelus.
* * *
It took some effort, but they finally found a teacher at a local high school willing to loan them a compatible film projector from their store room. After they put the antiquated device in the trunk, Jess drove down a street lined with buildings like the International UFO Museum and the Roswell Space Center while Tyler flipped through Dombrovski’s files. It took only a few minutes to appreciate the significance of their find.
By the time Jess turned into the driveway of the Roswell Regional Hospital, he had enough information about Caelus to understand what Fay had experienced all those years ago.
They parked and carried the projection equipment to the hospital’s third floor. In room 308 they found Fay dozing.
Although she’d received chemotherapy treatment, the cancer had ravaged her over the past month. Despite her weakened condition, she had elected to make the trip to Roswell with Tyler and Jess, her intense need for closure before death evident. But upon arrival at the airport, she’d collapsed and they’d rushed her to the hospital. Jess had wanted to stay with her, but Fay prodded her to go to the cemetery with Tyler to find out if his theory was true.
Tyler set up the projector, and while they waited for Fay to wake up, he walked Jess through the files. An hour later Fay blinked her eyes to see the two of them at her bedside.
“Well?” she said, her voice wavering. “I don’t have much time for suspense.”
“We found it,” Jess said. “Catherine Dombrovski’s headstone. There was a compartment hidden inside.”
“It wasn’t an alien, was it? I know that now. I just want answers, whatever they are.”
Tyler sighed. He didn’t want to disappoint her, but she deserved the truth. “I think you should see this.”
He turned down the lights and flicked on the projector. While the silent film played on the wall opposite Fay’s bed, he narrated what they were watching.
The first shot was of a smiling bald man in a white lab coat. He had his arm around a beautiful white-haired woman.
“Dombrovski and his second wife. They were the scientists who conceived of Project Caelus. Dombrovski was a physicist and Catherine was an aeronautical engineer originally from the Ukraine. Both of them defected from Communist Russia. She died of influenza in 1946.”
In the background was an unsmiling man with round spectacles and crew-cut hair.
“That’s Fyodor Dinovich, their colleague, also from Russia. Dombrovski suspected him of being a Russian spy but could never prove it. Based on Colchev’s statement, I think it’s now confirmed. Dinovich was the reason Dombrovski designed the hiding place for his most critical notes.”
The next shot was a wide view inside a closed hangar. Spotlights focused on a massive silver wing that dwarfed the workers buzzing around it. The sleek aircraft was built from the plans of captured German designs.
“That’s the XB-32, an experimental bomber that was powered by the xenobium. Project Caelus was designed to create an aircraft that could stay aloft — unrefueled — for days, and the flying wing shape was the most efficient platform for it. Dombrovski had high hopes that xenobium could be a safer power source than nuclear energy because it couldn’t be repurposed to create atomic bombs.”
“That’s what I saw,” Fay said weakly. “That’s what crashed on the Foster ranch.
“Notice from the front it looks very much like a disk shape. The design was far ahead of its time. I can see why you would have thought it was a spaceship. The records show that the test flight was to take place on July second, 1947. I think Dinovich intentionally brought the plane down where it happened to crash near you. He must have been killed in the explosion.”
Before Fay could ask her next question, the film cut to Dombrovski in a silver flight suit.
“He wore that for protection while they were airborne. Because of the lead lining, it’s suffused with a liquid coolant to keep him from overheating while on board. If the suit were damaged and leaked, it would look like bright blue blood.”
When he put the suit’s helmet on and locked it in place, Fay gasped. Two softball-sized black lenses covered the eyes, and a narrow slit was slashed across the mouth.
Tyler turned to Fay. “The alien you met — the creature who saved you — was Ivan Dombrovski.”
Tears streamed down Fay’s face.
“Are you disappointed?” he said.
She shook her head. “He knew the xenobium would explode, so he used his last breath to save me. And although I lost my daughter, I now have a beautiful granddaughter because of his actions. I just wish I could thank him.”
“You completed his search. I think he would have been pleased.”
“But a few things still bother me. Why did he speak Russian to me instead of English?”
“The trauma of the crash might have caused him to revert to his native language.”
“He did seem very weak at the end when he gave me the wood engraving. How did he find the engraving in the first place?”
“According to his notes, during his worldwide search for more xenobium, he came upon an antiquities dealer with the wood engraving that he claimed was from Easter Island. The engraving had a tiny speck of xenobium embedded in it, just large enough to suggest that more of it might exist.”
“If Dombrovski went to Easter Island,” Fay said, “why didn’t he take the xenobium from the cave?”
Tyler shrugged. “My radiation meter was eighty years more sophisticated than whatever he had. He probably never realized it was there.”
“And why the big US government conspiracy to cover up the Roswell crash?”
“After the plane exploded and Dombrovski’s office files were destroyed, I’m sure the government didn’t want the word to get out about its prototype in case there was more xenobium to be discovered. The remaining pieces of the plane are probably hidden deep in a cavern under Area 51.”
The film ended, the strip flapping in the reel. Tyler switched it off and turned on the lights.
Fay smiled at Tyler. “What a great adventure you’ve given me. Thank you.”
Tyler took her hand. He was going to tell her more, but she dozed off again.
He collected the film and files and went into the hall with Jess.
“What are you going to do with those?” she asked.
“I haven’t decided yet. I may just hang onto them for a while. No sense in spoiling everyone’s fun. Let them keep thinking it was a UFO.”
“How illogical of you.”
Tyler gave her a light but tender kiss. This was where they parted ways. She’d made her decision.
“If it doesn’t work out with what’s-his-name,” Tyler said, “you know where I am.”
“I love you, Tyler. I always will.”
“You know I will, too. Give my best to Fay.”
“Sure. I just wish we didn’t have to dash her beliefs like that. She put on a brave face, but I know it must have been heartbreaking for her, especially because she’s not going to write her book about Roswell. Even if she had time to finish it, she wouldn’t want to get you in trouble for revealing classified information.”
Tyler nodded his thanks. “She fell asleep before I could tell her something.”
“About the Roswell incident?”
“In a way. About the xenobium. Tunguska. Australia. Nazca. They all suggest the metal has an extraterrestrial origin.”
“Right. It’s from space.”
“But how was the xenobium made?”
Jess frowned in confusion at what he was suggesting. “Made? It’s just a rock, isn’t it?”
“Is it? I don’t know.
We humans couldn’t produce it artificially, and Kessler didn’t have a theory for how the xenobium could be created naturally. So tell Fay it’s possible that she had an encounter with proof of extraterrestrial life.”
“You don’t believe that, do you?”
“Until proved otherwise, who can say?”
Jess smiled. “Thank you for that. She’ll love it.”
They embraced, just happy to be holding each other one final time before Jess drew away. After a last look, she brushed his arm and turned to go back into Fay’s room.
Tyler lingered for a moment, then ambled down the hall with a melancholy grin. Although he was sorry to leave Jess, at least he’d given her grandmother some peace in the end. It felt good not only to fulfill Fay’s last wish to find closure but also to leave her with something to dream about.
After all, Tyler thought, what’s the point of life if there isn’t any mystery?
— The End-
AFTERWORD
In a thriller like this one that explores the boundaries of technological possibilities and posits alternative explanations for ancient mysteries, it’s often difficult to know where the real world ends and the fiction begins. It might surprise you to find out how little I had to make up in this story.
The strange 1908 blast in Tunguska, Siberia, continues to be an enduring enigma. According to The Mystery of the Tunguska Fireball by Surendra Verma, a goldsmith named Suzdalev was the first Western explorer to visit the disaster area, but there were only vague rumors about what he found there. The fallen trees can still be seen in an area the size of London, and the flies are still nasty. A similar mysterious explosion occurred in Western Australia in 1993, and no one has yet determined the cause.
I’ve had the thrill of taking a ride on the Shotover River jet boats in Queenstown. The river isn’t far from the Southern Proving Grounds, which does winter testing of cars during the Northern Hemisphere’s summer.
The ultra-secret Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap is located just outside Alice Springs, Australia. I wouldn’t suggest driving down their private road, but you can get a good view of the facility on Google Maps.
Though Project Caelus is a fantasy, the Air Force did study the feasibility of building nuclear-powered aircraft, even going so far as to install a nuclear reactor on a B-36 bomber. To my knowledge, it was never attempted on the wing-shaped B-49, a jet-powered Air Force prototype built in 1947.
Four-trailer road trains are the longest street-legal trucks in the world and range across the vast Australian outback.
The Sydney Harbour BridgeClimb is another adventure I’ve been privileged to experience. The bridge is designed as I’ve described, including the maintenance cranes and catwalks.
The US military has poured millions of dollars into developing tracking dust, also called smart dust or ID dust, to be used for identifying and following enemies coated with the material.
Drug-smuggling tunnels burrowed under the border between Tijuana and San Diego continue to be discovered on a regular basis. The tunnel I feature in this book is cruder than some of the more sophisticated operations that have been constructed with concrete linings and elevators.
Privately built spaceplanes are already a reality with the launch of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo and will soon carry paying passengers into space seventy miles above the Earth. Airbus is exploring the feasibility of developing a plane with a bird-bone frame like I used in the Skyward. The multitude of windows would provide a great view, but you better have a strong stomach if you tend toward motion sickness.
Joseph Kittinger’s real exploits on the Project Excelsior high-altitude skydiving program are even more incredible when you consider that he undertook his mission over fifty years ago and no one has duplicated the feat since.
I had a great time at the AirVenture show in Oshkosh last year, and the vast rows of airplanes lined up as far as the eye can see are truly overwhelming. If you love aircraft, for one week in July Oshkosh is your mecca.
The theories for how to move Easter Island Moai are even more varied than the few I list in the novel. However, rocking the statues back and forth to walk them forward does work. Lava tube caves and the colorful paintings on their walls abound on the island.
Although xenobium is fictional, hafnium-3 is an actual isomer of the element hafnium. Its explosive potential is vast, as is its cost to manufacture. Isomer bombs and induced gamma emission weapons are theoretically possible and could produce effects scarily similar to the ones produced by the Killswitch.
Electromagnetic pulse from a nuclear explosion is a very real threat. In fact war-game planners always assumed a Soviet first strike would consist of a massive hydrogen bomb detonated over the central US to disable its electronic infrastructure and hinder the military’s ability to retaliate. Now the same threat comes from terrorists and rogue nations. The target in this book was the United States, but the weapon would work equally well at setting the technological clock of any industrialized nation back by a hundred years.
The Nazca lines and symbols, the Mandala geometric pattern, and the ancient city of Cahuachi in Peru have all become popular tourist destinations, yet no one has deciphered their true meaning as of this writing.
The Roswell incident continues to fascinate me as it does the rest of the world. What really crashed there? Why did the Air Force’s explanation of the event change? What happened to the wreckage that was found? An explanation as prosaic as a stray weather balloon would be a disappointing answer to say the least. But do I think it was an alien spacecraft? I’m a skeptic, though it sure would be cool to think so. However, I’d like to think an alien race that had traveled light-years to get here using technology we can barely imagine could make a better landing. If you’d like to give me a tour of Area 51 and prove me wrong, I will take you up on it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Boyd Morrison is an author, actor, engineer, and Jeopardy! champion. He started his career working on NASA's space station project at Johnson Space Center, where he got the opportunity to fly on the Vomit Comet, the same plane used to train astronauts for zero gravity. After earning a PhD in engineering from Virginia Tech, he used his training to develop thirteen US patents at Thomson/RCA. Boyd then managed a video game testing group in Microsoft's Xbox division before becoming a full-time writer. For non-fiction thrills, he enjoys white water rafting, skiing, scuba diving, and bungee jumping. Boyd is also a professional actor, appearing in films, commercials, and stage plays. In 2003 he fulfilled a lifelong dream and became a Jeopardy! champion. He currently lives in Seattle with his wife.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Writing a novel like this without the help of others would be impossible, so I’d like to take this opportunity to thank those who contributed so generously to making this book a reality.
My agent Irene Goodman has been a rock-steady presence throughout this process, and I couldn’t think of anyone better to guide me on this roller-coaster ride. Her wisdom and support are invaluable.
It’s a privilege to work with my foreign rights agents, Danny Baror and Heather Baror-Shapiro, who are not only the best at what they do, but are also really nice people.
Thanks to my editors Jade Chandler and David Shelley for believing in my storytelling and for helping me create the best book I can. Their enthusiasm got me to the finish line.
I often rely on experts in the field when my research requires, so I’m fortunate to have a talented pool of friends and family to draw on. Nevertheless, any mistakes or intentional alterations in technology, history, or locations are my responsibility alone.
I appreciate Jeff Davis, Noreen Moen, and John Hopkins for answering my questions at the EAA AirVenture show.
My friend, oncologist Dr. Craig Lockhart, provided crucial insights into pancreatic cancer.
My conference pal, Susan Tunis, once again bestowed her keen editorial eye on the manuscript.
Many thanks to my brother, retired Air Force pilot Lieutenant Colonel Martin Westerfiel
d, for his expertise on the military and aviation.
Beth Morrison, in addition to being my sister and curator of illuminated manuscripts at the Getty, is also a whiz at pointing out my bone-headed plot holes.
I sincerely appreciate the time my father-in-law, Frank Moretti, spent in giving me feedback on several different revisions of the novel.
Finally, my wife, Randi, has been more than a mere supporter of my work. She has been instrumental at every phase of the story creation process, from late-night bull sessions on plot direction to character development decisions to multiple editorial passes. It’s no exaggeration to say that I couldn’t have done this without her. And she’s just downright wonderful. I’m a lucky guy.
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