Jennifer went off to bed after her show and I followed shortly after, setting my phone on the nightstand. I took a quick shower and once in bed, knew that I should make peace with her. I snuggled up to her. Needless to say, she was facing away from me. I put my arm over her affectionately.
“I’m sorry about missing the baby shower. I wish I could have been there,” I said softly.
“Yep,” she said, pulling the covers up to her chin.
“I just need to go to this conference next weekend. I should be able to write this story after that. Then I’ll be done, I promise.”
“You promise?”
“Yes, I promise,” I said, spooning her. “I missed you.”
I buried my nose in her hair and began rubbing her shoulders. Eventually, she turned towards me. We kissed again, and again. I wasn’t expecting sex that night, but her willingness was a good sign. A minute later I was on top of her, going at it. About two minutes into it, my phone lit up, nearly vibrating itself off the nightstand. I leaned over and glanced at it, doing my best to keep the rhythm of my thrusts. It was a text from a Missoula, Montana number. I squinted but had no luck in reading the message. Was it Brenda? Nadine or Daniel?
“Are you looking at your phone?” Jennifer asked suspiciously.
I glanced down at her and realized her eyes were open.
“No,” I lied.
“You are! Get off of me,” she said, pushing me off and shoving me over to the other side of the bed so that I nearly rolled off.
“I wasn’t looking at it,” I said.
She sat up. “Yes, you were, I saw you. Who is it?”
“Jesus, Jenn, I don’t know, it’s a text. What’s the big deal?” I knew I was in big shit now and likely wasn’t going to get out of it anytime soon.
“You can sleep on the couch tonight,” she said, turning away from me and pulling the covers back up.
“Fine.” I put on my boxers, grabbed my phone, and went into the living room, closing the bedroom door on my way out. I sat on the sofa in the dark and read the text message. It was from Brenda.
Got some information today about my Aunt. You may be interested. Call me.
I checked the time. It was 10:35—late, but not too late to call. I paused for a moment to make sure Jennifer wasn’t going to storm out and yell at me some more, then call Brenda.
I spoke softly. “Hi, Brenda? It’s Ben Davenport. What’s going on?”
She sounded incensed. “My aunt’s funeral was today, a closed casket. They wouldn’t let the family see her. My uncle told me that someone who knows one of the Sheriff’s deputies said that she’d been burned and mutilated, her organs taken out, some sick shit.”
“What?”
“Yeah, and the police won’t talk to the family. The FBI wouldn’t tell my uncle anything. I don’t understand why.”
“Who do you think did it?”
“I think it was the culties, maybe their leader—what’s his name?”
“Daniel Byrne,” I said. “What makes you think that?”
“I don’t know. Maybe she was onto them or something, and he found out.”
“Was your aunt into UFOs? I mean, was she doing a story on it?”
“My uncle said she became interested in UFOs lately, but I don’t know if it was for an official story or not.” Her voice cracked with emotion. “I just don’t know why she was out there by herself at night.”
I felt for her. “I’ll tell you what—I’ll call the TV station again tomorrow and see if she was assigned to cover the Proxima people or not. I’ll let you know what I find out.”
There was a long pause.
“I hope I didn’t interrupt anything,” she finally said.
“No, not at all, call anytime.”
In the morning I went into the Hot Reports office in downtown Seattle. I checked my email and the fax machine, hoping for the financial documents from Nadine. Nothing.
I called Channel 4 in Missoula to see what I could find out about Sally Jensen’s last story and what she might have been doing at the Valley of the Moon. I finally got through to Robert Shaw, the station manager.
“She was off duty,” Shaw said. “We have no idea what Sally was doing over there that night.”
I asked him for some more background on her, how long she’d been at the station, etc. Sally had been employed there for almost five years, having come from a local newspaper. Shaw said she’d done a small piece on UFOs, but that was it. I asked if Channel 4 was going to cover any information about the manner of her death.
“We’ve been told it’s an active investigation and that the FBI will let us know when they have something.”
“Do you have anyone on the story, following up on local leads?”
“We’re monitoring the situation and will report it when we have all of the facts.”
I thanked him for his time and hung up, discouraged. The FBI was being secretive, and law enforcement hadn’t held a press conference. Why all the hush hush? There was nothing ordinary about this murder case.
I checked in with Marcus, my forty-something editor with salt-and-pepper hair and square-rimmed hipster glasses. He had a nice corner office with big windows overlooking Pioneer Square. I told him about my adventure in Missoula.
“Have you decided on your angle? If you’re going with fraud, then you better have substantiating documentation,” he said.
“I’ve got a request in on their financials. I definitely think the Proxima Foundation is bull-hooky.”
“You have any idea how they may be gaming this stuff?”
“Not yet,” I said. My plan was to drive down to McMinnville on Friday night for Byrne’s talk and perhaps interview some of the attendees.
Marcus was skeptical. “Another trip? You’re not going down a rabbit hole on this. Are you?”
“You want me to go down the rabbit hole, don’t you?” I countered.
He looked at me for a moment. “What about the murdered TV journalist? Anything on that?”
“Yeah. Law enforcement isn’t talking, but I’ve got a family member source.” I told him what Brenda had said on the phone the night before.
Marcus arched his back, lacing his fingers behind his neck. “Okay, keep working on it, but don’t lose sight of the deadline. I need the story in two weeks.”
I headed for the door.
“And stay somewhere inexpensive and keep your receipts,” he said to my back. Marcus was cheap, but he gave me lots of leeway, a perk I’d never get at a corporate job.
On the way home that evening, I grabbed a bouquet of flowers, a quart of cherry-vanilla gelato, and some of Jennifer’s favorite breakfast scones from the bakery down the street. I was feeling contrite about forgetting her social events and wanted to smooth things over. It took a little work, but we made up, cuddled on the sofa, and binged on ice cream and lord knows how many episodes of her favorite celebrity cooking show.
4: Extraordinary Claims
McMinnville is surrounded by rolling green hills, vineyards, and fields that smell of fresh manure. On the 11th of May, 1950, local farmers Evelyn Trent and her husband Paul snapped several photos of what appeared to be a saucer-shaped craft flying slow from the direction of Mount Rainier. The Trent Farm UFO photographs are among the most iconic UFO photos ever taken. Independent photometric studies conducted at the time suggested the photos were of a distant object and not fakes. Some years later, someone noticed that the object in the Trent photos closely resembled the chrome side view mirror of an old Ford pick-up truck. There’s a saying that if it smells like bullshit, it probably is. Curious, though, is the striking similarity between the object in the Trent photos and the 2014 Navy Thimble UFO I saw on YouTube.
McMinnville’s 35,000 residents now had to put up with the buzzing of the UFO conference. The historic Hotel Oregon was full, so I settled for a hotel just outside of town. I registered for the conference and picked up my complementary bag of alien swag. Daniel Byrne was smiling back at me on page t
wo of the schedule of events. He was indeed the keynote speaker and would be presenting after dinner.
With time to kill, I went to hear about “Deception and Disinformation: What the Government Doesn’t Want You to Know about UFOs.” About eighty people were in attendance in the Community Center auditorium. I sat at the back next to a middle-aged man sporting a dark brown Stetson-style western hat, sports jacket, and tan trousers. Maybe a retiree and self-proclaimed UFOlogist. We made eye contact.
“Jack Clark.”
“Ben Davenport, with the magazine Hot Reports. I’m from Seattle.”
We exchanged business cards. His read Jack Clark. Washington State Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) Director.
“Oh. Reporter. Have you been to this conference before?”
“No, never been to a UFO conference.” I smiled.
“Get ready for a room full of mirrors.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“You’re going to hear all kinds of claims. Some true, some maybe not, but all interesting.”
The first speaker was Dr. Max Steiner, a former nuclear physicist and government contractor, a short, round fellow, with a mustache and bald head. He wore a black suit and large-rimmed glasses that went out of style twenty-five years ago.
“I’m going to reveal to you the links between UFO technology, the monetary system, and what the government doesn’t want you to know,” Dr. Steiner promised. In a quick clip he covered official government investigations into UFOs (Project Blue Book, Majestic-12, the Condon Report, and the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program sponsored by Senator Harry Reid, etc.), finishing with how they were all public disinformation fronts aimed at denying the presence of alien visitors and quelling public interest in the matter. His proof was slide after slide of leaked government reports with more black redactions than content.
“Don’t you think it’s suspicious that government inquiries into UFOs only report cases that are easily debunked, or that there are trite explanations for credible mass sightings? Mainstream media are just a wing of the government existing to mislead the public. The motivation for the secrecy and misdirection is obvious: keep the public in the dark about free-energy technology. This is all about military-industrial complex control over oil and thus our monetary system.”
I was sure that there were other machinations, but I kept listening.
He showed a few clips of government whistleblowers, mostly enlisted military personnel and contract technicians like Phil Schneider who had gone on record about having seen reverse-engineered alien technology, from antigravity generators to flying saucers, more than 35 years ago. There was an interview with NASA astronaut Gordon Cooper who claimed to have seen footage of a disk-shaped UFO that landed in the desert near Edwards Air Force Base in California in the late 1950s. The government had buried the original footage.
“When we have credible witnesses like these, we need to be paying attention,” Steiner stressed.
When he took questions from the audience, I couldn’t resist throwing one in. “Do you think it’s possible that the documents you’ve shown were not about alien craft at all but sightings of classified aircraft, perhaps our own or from other countries?”
Steiner shrugged. “But then what do we do with all of the eyewitness testimony that corroborates the documents?” He flipped back to the slides loaded with the black redactions. “There’s no doubt that alien spacecraft are here, and the government doesn’t want the people to know about it.”
I sat down, unsatisfied. I saw no link between so-called eyewitness testimony and redacted documents.
The next speaker was Dr. Richard Mazzotti, a former NASA astronaut with a full head of white hair. He’d witnessed a UFO on Space Shuttle STS-9 in 1983 and showed an image of a faint red object he’d taken through the window.
“What was it?” he asked the crowd. “Neither we, nor anyone else on Earth, have anything like what I saw up there.”
He showed photos and videos taken from the International Space Station (ISS) and other shuttle missions, all fuzzy, floating, and darting about, looking like they could be satellites or out of focus ice particles. Dr. Mazzotti, however, believed: “Space junk doesn’t change its trajectories like this. These are alien craft under intentional, conscious control.”
The 2004 Navy video of the Tic-Tac UFO took a different trajectory, however.
“The USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group had been tracking these tic-tac looking objects for a week,” Mazzotti explained. “On radar, they appeared to be dropping from 60,000 feet to the surface of the ocean. This is some of the best proof we have to date that alien probes are here on Earth. The U.S. Navy has finally released this evidence to the public. As Carl Sagan said, extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence. Well, if you were in doubt, here it is.”
Why had the government released the videos to begin with? I wondered. There was speculation that the video was illegally leaked, but it seemed contradictory to what Steiner had said about the government and media misdirecting the public—or was it?
During the lunch hour, I grabbed a quick bite to eat and perused the books for sale at the registration booths. Byrne’s new book was prominent, surrounded by other works like Alien Species: What We Know and Roswell Revisited.
After lunch, I couldn’t pass up a UFO abductee “lived experience” panel. The sign outside the door said, Please refrain from wearing costumes or masks of unfriendly alien species. These may upset some of the conference attendees. Thank you. On stage were three seated people, all claiming to have been snatched up by aliens. Anna Jo, a portly young woman with curly blond hair, said she’d been repeatedly abducted by aliens for the purpose of researching her reproductive organs. With tears in her eyes, she said she’d been unable to have a baby ever since.
Mark was beer-bellied and middle-aged, an IT technician from Ohio who said that he’d been having sex with tall, blue-eyed, blond aliens for decades, having lost his virginity to one when he was thirteen. He stated that he might have seen one of his alien hybrid children on his last mothership rendezvous. I wondered what the blue-eyed beauties saw in Mark to begin with.
The third was Chester, thinner and younger, with black bags under his eyes. He claimed to have been abducted on a dark desert road outside Bakersfield, California three years before. “A week later I started seeing numbers, formulas,” he said in a soft voice. “I’m convinced that they took me up because they wanted me to help build zero-energy technologies.” Either he’d been through some serious trauma in his life or had been out drinking all night.
The audience was transfixed, whereas my bullshit meter was off the charts.
During the Q & A, I asked, “Do any of you have any hard evidence that you were taken up into an alien spaceship? By hard evidence, I mean a photo or another eyewitness account? Anything to corroborate what you are telling us?”
Mark glared at me. “I don’t need evidence. I know what happened to me.”
Anna Jo nodded, while Chester gazed blankly out at the audience.
All I could think was, if all it takes is believing, then the world is in serious trouble.
But Chester wasn’t done. He pulled his shirt out of his trousers and showed his bare stomach and chest. “I have this,” he said. Just above his sternum, a small, red mark in the shape of a hexagon was seared into his skin. “They marked me,” he said.
Someone in audience behind me called out, “They do that, you know. It means you’ve been chosen.”
At last, I headed to the main hotel ballroom for the keynote. The room was packed. Patricia Neumann, one of the conference organizers and author of a series of books about alien species, introduced Byrne.
“I’ve always thought, if an alien visitor came to me and said, Take me to your leader, I’d take them to Mr. Byrne. He’s been called the guru of alien contact, the ambassador of intergalactic goodwill, and the keeper of cosmic truth. With no further ado, Mr. Daniel Byrne.”
Applause erupted while Dan
iel mounted the stage with a tiny wireless microphone by his chin and a huge smile on his face. He wore khaki trousers and a white button-down shirt (no tie) displaying the Proxima Foundation symbol.
“Thank you, Patricia, and thank you, everyone.” His face went serious. “We are living in the most important time in modern history, the turning point when we will be free from the shackles of fossil fuels. No more energy costs, no more pollution, no more global warming. Zero-point energy, brought to us by our extraterrestrial friends, is here. It will change everything. Are you ready for it?” He paused, looking out at the audience.
Several dozen people in crowd began shouting. “Yes!” and “We’re ready!”
“But wait,” said Byrne, his voice booming through the PA system. “The shadow governments of the world will not allow it. They will stop at nothing to keep the truth about this technology and our alien friends a secret.” Walking back and forth, making quick eye contact with people in the audience, he continued. “You may have heard Dr. Max Steiner this morning. I hope you did. The government has been covering up the presence of aliens for 70 years. Up to this point, they haven’t wanted you to know, but what I’m about to tell you should scare the living hell out of you.”
The crowd went dead silent.
Daniel waited, then quietly said, “They’re going to fake an alien attack. They’re going to make you believe that the aliens are here to cause harm and they will use draconian scare tactics—that’s right, another Pearl Harbor, Gulf of Tonkin, and 9/11 all rolled into one, except bigger, much bigger. Once this happens, they will take what remains of your freedoms away from you and levy economic and social control like you’ve never seen.”
I noticed how already he was becoming exhausted. He stood still for a moment, resting his arm on the podium, and exhaled, his face wet with sweat. He wiped his face and looked at the audience. “People ask me all the time, why do I do this? Why put myself and my wife and colleagues at such risk to bring the truth out? I’ll tell you why.”
The Goldilocks Zone Page 4