However with the Earth’s technological advances of the last hundred years, things had obviously taken a different turn. Instead of being adored and honored, they were now feared. Of course, there were some justifications for fear. Amie revealed that there were several different inter-planetary visitors that had been studying Earth’s environment and inhabitants for centuries. Not all were as benign as her people.
Amie revealed that her space voyagers had come to aid early humans in the building of monuments that would enhance telepathic communications between those living on the Earth and their comrades traveling through the cosmos. Such was the case with the pyramids, both those of Egypt and South America. Also her people had supervised and instructed in the building of airport-like landing bases in various high-energy locations around the Earth for their spacecraft.
“Why did your people wish to live among us and be so helpful?” Nick had questioned.
Her explanation was that they were scientists and the evolution of the human animal greatly interested them. They merely wished to aid in Earth’s progress to its modern state of advancement.
But something did not ring true in what Amie told Nick about this and his mind was unsettled by her explanation. Because she could read all of Nick’s thoughts, Amie decided to tell him the rest of the historical story. She explained in some detail how, in each culture throughout Earth’s history, there had been certain individuals who seemed more advanced, brighter, more open to learning than others.
“The cream of the crop,” Nick muttered out loud, as he mused on this.
Amie did not understand the meaning of this expression but she went on to tell how these “superior humans” were invited to travel back to her own world for advanced learning opportunities.
“Did they ever come back here?”
“No, they all chose to remain with us. There are colonies of them on our planet. If you were to go there you would find them now. Former Egyptians, Incans, Sumerians, Chinese, Celts – all living in separate enclaves.
“Sort of like a zoo,” Nick stated flatly. “Do your people visit these enclaves, like visiting a tourist spot? To watch the humans interact.”
Amie sensed animosity coming from Nick. “It is not like that.” Her eyes grew dark and blank as her vibrations decreased in energy.
Another time they had spoken of the inter-planetary visitors. Amie told Nick that there were aliens from other star systems that had also crashed on Earth and been recovered. She revealed what Nick, through his briefings, already knew; that these aliens were being held by various nations at secret locations around the globe.
But there were others at Groom Lake as well. They inhabited different dormitories and, especially with one race of beings, they were none too friendly. In fact, their intentions were quite hostile to human life. Only Amie and her companions were actually volunteering to help their human rescuers with their technological progress. The other beings refused to cooperate at best, or wished humans harm, at worst. These beings posed a danger, if not properly maintained.
“What was the intent of the hostile beings?” Nick wanted to know.
“I am not sure. But I know that these are the ones of your horror movies. Those that beam unwilling people in to their ships and test and experiment with them.”
“And you have no idea why?”
“Well, they test not just your people but your animals also. They are like us, scientists and biologists. I suspect there is a possible desire for cross breeding. But it may be they are looking for a food source,” she mentioned ominously.
Nick’s energy level immediately plummeted upon learning that disquieting bit of information and their thought-speak abruptly ended.
Chapter 4
The Janet Airlines 737 rolled to a stop at their terminal area in Area 51, forcing Nick to abandon his reverie. Before climbing down the exit steps to the tarmac, he turned to help Shelley, his long time assistant, with her carry-on luggage. She deferred, preferring to carry it herself on the short walk to the bus stop that would take them to the hangar where they worked. Shelley was a slight woman, only a few years younger than he, and extremely athletic, with a youthful spring in her walk and a vibrant air.
Nick looked forward to this liaison visit on the X-56, which had formerly been called project Aurora by the press, and later X-33. He was always amused to find information about the Area 51 “black ops” projects, as they were called on the Internet. Sometimes the information was amazingly accurate, but often it was not. A government disinformation program had routinely planted mis-information on various blogs and UFO websites, which discussed the latest updates about Area 51 projects.
The X-56 was supposed to be the answer to an interplanetary space vehicle. When it became obvious that this was too far a reach for its technology, the military wanted it for high altitude surveillance, and strike missions. Nick now knew that many of the purported UFO sightings around the world were actually X-56’s or its predecessors.
Yet some of the sightings were actually real alien spacecraft. There was no information disseminated by anyone to that effect at Area 51. In fact, only a carefully selected cadre of people associated with X-56 even knew aliens were working on the project. But many speculated, as did the various far-out UFO websites and Area 51 websites, that living aliens were housed somewhere on the base.
On arrival, Nick and Shelley traveled to their hangar and settled into their project. Nick went over the latest test reports for the pulse wave detonation engine that allowed the X-56 to achieve supersonic speeds above anything previously developed, including the legendary SR-71 Blackbird. Unfortunately, it created what the public termed “donut-on-a-rope contrails”. Although most flights occurred at night, far from the public view, occasionally a few were in daylight hours. Nick was amazed at how many UFO believers keenly watched the skies and instantly speculated that super-secret airplanes had produced these contrails. They were right, he thought, but what if they knew what else was flying around out there.
As usual Amie was present for the project team briefing and, like the others, was wearing a blue colored jumpsuit. Shelley and Nick had immediately donned similar coveralls, as these were required of all those working the hangar. The aliens had their own skin-tight attire, which they relaxed in when they retreated to their pod residence. It was of a fiber that had been grown to their bodies from their time of birth, almost a second skin. It protected them from heat and cold as well as dirt and bacteria. However, it was security policy for all workers to dress alike so as to be easily identifiable on the hangar floor.
Amie had also taken to wearing a titian-colored, medium length wig. She and her companions did not have hair growing on their heads, nor anywhere else on their bodies. Her male companions sported their bald look, which had gradually become a fashion statement for the other men in the hangar, especially the military members. But Amie was conscious of her appearance and had wanted, from early on, to appear more like the women employees. After her first few months at the hangar she had begun wearing a wig, and Nick had never seen her without it.
The X-56 fuselage was in one hanger and the spacecraft brought years ago from Rendlesham was located in an adjacent hanger. The X-56 was a little smaller, measuring approximately 100-feet long and 77-feet wide. The covering for the pulse wave detonation engine was off, as that was the focus for Nick’s team.
The idea behind the use of a pulse wave lay in the thrust wall created by an aircraft traveling beyond the speed of sound. As the aircraft reached the speed of sound, a build up of air molecules in front of the craft created the wall. The concept required a detonation outside the airplane to push the wall forward in turn creating a forward thrust for the aircraft.
Amies’ ship did not use an external detonation, but rather overcame the wall using a high-energy force field. Despite having access to her ship, the technology to utilize this force field had so far evaded the team. Thus, they had experimented with various propulsion concepts from linear aero spike
to the current pulse wave detonation.
Nick’s job was to ready the X-56 for another test flight by the end of the week. However, one of the control modules for the engine continued failing its bench tests and, until it was repaired, the X-56 was grounded. So Nick did what he always did in these situations. He approached Amie after the meeting and asked if she would join him in the break room, attached to the hangar, for lunch.
From the time when they were first able to converse telepathically, Nick had realized that Amie was a veritable “treasure trove” of technical information. As she began to relax around him and he with her, it seemed that she was willing to reveal more and more of her knowledge. Nick began to appreciate that she was aiding him far more than she was helping any of her other human co-workers. More than a few times she had been willing to help Nick out of his plight when his project had stalled.
Because of this, his “friendship” with Amie evolved to become more than an “alien co-worker” relationship. Hard as it was for Nick to imagine, he was coming to rely on her technical advice and council far more than other team members. This caused suspicion and even jealousy among the others, who strongly suspected that some of Nick’s trumpeted “revelations” were not his own.
But Nick was cautious and kept his conversations with Amie carefully controlled. Since the telepathic abilities were only transferable between Amie and any other team member and vice versa, there was little danger any of his human teammates would discover the true source of his technical genius.
So far, Nick had convinced the Pentagon that the specification of Mach 13 was possible, but speeds above that were not in the reach of the current engine technologies, at least not in a sustainable design that offered power plus safety. Despite assertions, his military masters grew impatient anyway and constantly pressured him and his team to exceed that, asking him to reach Mach 20 or even above. This pressure was another factor weighing on Nick, as he approached the year before retirement and his 64th birthday.
Chapter 5
Amie remembered the day her craft crashed at Rendlesham. She and her four companions had been on a mission to ostensibly record life forms and plants in the Northern Hemisphere of the planet they referred to in English as Earth, but were also assigned to keep watch on military installations in certain parts of their exploration area. It was one of many vaguely defined, routine missions undertaken by her interplanetary exploration community. As a novice, it was the first time that she had traveled to Earth.
According to Nick, the crash occurred in Earth time late December. Amie was aboard what would be called a “Seeker” class spacecraft, if her language could be translated into an English equivalent.
The Seeker used a newly designed propulsion system that combined light wave energy and electromagnetic pulse bursts to create what would be best described as a wave of energy propelling the craft. She once described it to her Aurora project team as a wave similar to the motion of a cloth undulating in the wind. In the denser Earth atmosphere, the wave engine was shut down and the Seeker used a pulse effect. Using the wave propulsion and an energy field projected around the ship, it allowed the craft to reduce the resistance in front of the craft as it traveled beyond supersonic speeds. While it could not achieve light speed, it nearly approached it in the regions of outer space. However, the pulse engine was considerably slower, approximating Mach 8-10 depending on the density of the atmosphere. The Seeker was highly maneuverable and could instantaneously roll, pitch or yaw and even reverse direction at Mach speeds. In short, it could out perform any aircraft the United States Air Force had in service, or would produce in the years of her captivity.
The problem, Amie recalled, on the day she and the five others crashed at Rendlesham, was a difficulty with the Seeker when they switched to pulse drive. It seemed to work intermittently, and they attempted to set the craft down in an isolated field in a forest in order to perform a maintenance check. But coming through the rather small clearing, a harder than normal landing damaged one of the landing gear.
As they were shutting the system down, their onboard sensors detected humans approaching the craft. One man eventually came close enough to touch the outside skin. Fortunately for him, she mused, the energy field had been shut off, otherwise he would have been disintegrated.
They managed to power up and take off, but the pulse drive failed again in low altitude flight, causing the craft to rapidly descend, enter uncontrollable flight, and crash about a mile away from their original landing spot. Two of her companions were killed on impact. The four remaining realized they had no hope to repair the Seeker, and exited the craft.
All of the crewmembers were injured and badly shaken. Amie was in the worst shape, having broken her leg in the accident. Because it was nighttime and quite dark in the forest, the remaining Seeker crew decided to wait until daylight to try and move elsewhere. However, as they waited in the darkness, they soon heard voices, then saw beams of lights being directed in a sweeping fashion. The military personnel holding the flashlights eventually located them, and security airmen took them into custody.
The aliens initial contact with U.S. Air Force security was a frightening experience. Their first impression of these humans was that they were an aggressive and threatening race. Insecure men, with hands shaking as they pointed and gestured with their weapons, shouted loudly and angrily at the aliens, as if they could not hear or did not understand that they were trying to herd them through the forest.
Fortunately, Amie and her companions had been through a year of language school before this Seeker mission. Her academicians had created a syllabus that taught the strange languages of the major Earth nations to all Seeker mission crew being assigned to explore planet Earth. They even utilized English, Russian, Arabic, and Chinese speaking “visitors” which they had “invited” to return with them as instructors. Thus her kind could vocally speak, even though it would have been easier to simply think and use brain waves to send thoughts between themselves and others.
Upon hearing English words spoken, the alien beings tried to tell their captors in spoken English that they were injured. But the humans seemed too agitated to understand their words.
Feeling under extreme duress, the crew member who would eventually be called Mike, used a special mental burst that produced the equivalent to a loud “th, th” sound in the human head, causing much distress to those receiving it, even to his own alien species. The discomfort resulted in an immediate distrust and fear of what the alien beings might be up to. After the shock of capture wore off, Mike grew calm enough so that he no longer produced this annoying sound, but his captors remained wary of him, and forced him to spend several weeks in isolation.
Since all four crewmembers were severely injured, their pilot eventually instructed them through thought-speak to stop walking and lie down. They fell panting, pained, and exhausted to the forest floor. Eventually the United States military leader recognized their plight and shouted to the young men in his charge to stand down and render medical aid. Amie had actually blacked out at that point, and had only recovered consciousness when she awoke to find herself firmly strapped down in a bed in a military hospital facility.
After the aliens had recovered, they were flown to Area 51 at Groom Lake, Nevada. Amie recalled being shackled in transport, both hands and feet, and removed from the plane under cover of darkness. All were taken to their current living quarters, a more remote section of Area 51. This area became off limits to all Area 51 personnel unless properly cleared. The building they were housed in had no windows, with the exception of the solarium covered with specially designed glass.
Amie later learned their craft had been transported, thoroughly camouflaged, and placed aboard a boat where it was taken to the United States and then trucked to Area 51. When she and her crew arrived at Area 51, Amie and the others were soon asked to describe how to operate their vehicle, and to reveal details about its energy system and propulsion as well as telemetry. What they eventually r
evealed about the physics of the system was so far advanced and beyond the knowledge base of the engineering staff assigned to this project, that it would take years to duplicate a similar type of design for their own purposes.
At first the four aliens were most unwilling to help their captors, who had treated them so roughly. But time in the isolated pod had passed slowly for the four, as they sat idly together. Many promises for good food and treatment had been made, in hopes of winning their cooperation. As the four began to resent their useless, idol hours as much as their captivity, they voted to cooperate with their captors. But always they had hoped to devise some means of escape.
With this hope in mind, Amie began to “warm up” to her captors. Ultimately she was assigned to a project team consisting of a few, handpicked engineers brought in from NASA, the Air Force, and various aerospace companies. Their objective was the designing of a more advanced propulsion system for a craft called Aurora and later X-33 and X-56. This was how Amie eventually became introduced to Nick Rossi, the defense contractor liaison.
Nick would begin his usual weekly routine by discussing the project direction on Monday afternoons, soon after he arrived with his team. Amie sat in during these meetings, always occupying the seat beside Nick. No one else wanted to sit beside her.
Always, an empty chair remained between Amie and any of the others in the conference room. Amie detected that they were all slightly afraid to sit too close to her. The team valued her highly, as she silently offered her own complex thought-speak opinions to them, one-on-one, when asked. She even spoke verbally to the group sometimes, if an issue was a simple one. But the humans were oddly leery of her. No matter that she wore a wig to appear feminine. No matter that she used make-up so that her face would appear less gray and her small lips would appear larger and more colorful, or that she wore the blue jumpsuit uniform that made her appear more like them. She was not of their race and they were very uneasy being around her.
SKY WOMAN OF GROOM LAKE Page 2