BLUE BOOK REVISITED (2025 Edit)

U.S.A.F. pilot imagines (?) he sees a UFO. Or was it real?

Flight Lieutenant Harry Easton stared at the submarine-shaped object in front of his Lockheed Martin SR-72 Darkstar fighter.

“Oh my God, it’s real!” he said softly. He had been up investigating UFO sightings at least a dozen times over the last two years. But until now, they had all turned out to be weather balloons, advertising blimps, ball lightning, or other explicable phenomena. But this time, there could be no doubt. “A real flying saucer!” Although the silvery object was more cigar-shaped than saucer-like.

As his fighter caught up with the UFO, Harry saw that it was the size of an ocean liner with thousands of portholes in neat rows down the side. “It’s real, dammit!” he said, reaching for his microphone.

“Able-Baker...” he started to say. But his words turned to a cry of, “Holy Jesus!” half prayer, half curse as a blinding white light streamed from the rear of the UFO. For a second, he thought that the UFO had blown up. “It’s accelerating!” he cried, as he covered his eyes with his hands. Then -- too late -- he realised that the white light was some form of beam directed at him.

“Able-Baker, Able-Baker,” he called into his microphone. But he received back only a static hiss. Then, as the dials on his flight console began spinning crazily, he realised that it was a lot more serious than just the radio playing up.

“I’m going down!” he said as his plane began to disintegrate around him. “The damn thing has shot me down.” He activated his ejector seat, then promptly blacked out.


When he came to, Harry Easton was lying amid the tangled cords of his parachute in a field of tall corn, staring up at a clear azure sky. And at a tall, muscular-looking white-bearded farmer wearing blue coveralls and holding a pitchfork in his left hand. “Either they’ve got cornfields in hell,” thought Harry, staring warily at the pitchfork, “or I’ve landed safely on someone’s farm.”

As a strong wind rustled through the cornfield, Harry could suddenly also smell wheat, rice, and soya beans.

“Soya beans?” said Harry in surprise as the farmer reached down with his right hand to pull him to his feet.

“That’s right,” agreed the old man as Harry tentatively stood up.

Harry felt as though he’d broken every bone in his body as he tried to walk, but he knew that that couldn’t be true, or else he wouldn’t be able to stand. “I didn’t think we grew soya beans in America?” said Harry, pressing the release valve for his parachute.

“Yes indeed, we do,” said the farmer who identified himself as Josh. “Soya beans are the most valuable crop produced in the state of Missouri these days.”

“If you say so,” agreed Harry as he started to gather up his parachute. He suddenly stopped as he realised what Josh had said, “The state of Missouri?”

“That’s right, young fella.”

“But we can’t be in Missouri!” protested Harry. He finished gathering up his parachute.

“I orta know,” insisted Josh. “I lived here all me life. Nigh on eighty years.”

Missouri? thought Harry. But I was only twenty miles or so from Beale Air Force Base in California when I encountered the UFO! But he knew better than to say that aloud to Josh, knowing that the Air Force would want to debrief him first. And probably put the lid on what he saw before it leaks out to the news media, he realised.

With Josh’s help, Harry staggered over to the pine-wood porch of the small farmhouse. Seeing Josh lean his pitchfork against the wall of the cabin, Harry dropped his parachute on the porch and staggered inside, where the bitter aroma of soya beans was even stronger than outside.

“Since the kids left, I bin using the spare rooms as storage silos,” explained Josh as he helped Harry to sit at a hardwood chair at the wooden table.

Looking around at the wooden furnishings, which all looked handmade, Harry asked dubiously, “I don’t suppose you’d have a phone that I could use to ring Beale Air Force Base?”

“Sure do, young fella,” said Josh.

Harry expected the old man to head toward the next room; instead, he walked over to the kitchen sink, where he pulled out one of the drawers and removed an expensive-looking digital mobile phone.

Seeing Harry's astonished look, Josh laughed and said, “With a growed son and three daughters all livin’ in diff’rent states, I gotta have some means of keepin’ in touch with ’em.”

“Yes, of course,” agreed Harry, accepting the phone from the old man. After ringing through to report his situation to Beale, he said, “Sorry to put you out further, but is there somewhere I can lie down till they come to pick me up?”

“There’s a cot in the back room,” said Josh. “But it’s in where I store the soya beans.”

“That’s all right, I won’t mind if they don’t,” joked Harry and Josh helped him down the corridor to the room at the back of the cabin.

As Josh had promised, sacks of soya beans were stacked against three walls of the room. There was also a metal cot, with what looked like a three-centimetre-thick mattress on it, but no sheet or blankets. Harry lay down and, to his surprise, fell asleep almost immediately.

Less than two hours later, he was shaken awake by a hand on his shoulder.

“Josh? What?” asked Harry, disoriented. Waking to the overpowering smell of soya beans, for a second he thought that he was out in the fields again. Then he remembered he was in the elderly farmer’s storage silo-cum-spare bedroom.

“Thar’s a coupla fellas here to see yer,” said Josh.

“A couple of fellows? Who?” asked Harry, sitting up groggily on the side of the squeaky cot.

“Special Agent Dennis Fraser,” a tall black man, identified himself.

He flashed his CIA identification at Harry, who was still rubbing the sleep from his eyes.

“Special Agent Jackson Laguna,” said a tall white man.

Both men looked as though they spent a lot of time bodybuilding; both seemed to bulge out of the smart, navy-blue suits that they wore.

“Would you mind coming with us, please, Lieutenant Easton?” said Dennis Fraser, in a tone that left no doubt that it was not really a question.

“Sure, okay,” said Harry, rising a little unsteadily from the cot. Turning toward Josh, he said, “Well, thanks....” But he was bundled outside before he could finish thanking the old man for his help. As they stepped out onto the porch of the log cabin, he pointed to his parachute and said, “My chute.”

“They’ll send someone to pick it up,” said Jackson Laguna.

“But if we’re going back to Beale anyway ...?” said Harry.

He stopped in amazement at the sight of the car parked before the log house.

“We’re not going straight back to Beale,” said Dennis Fraser. However, Harry did not hear him, so intent was he on staring at the car: the longest Cadillac he had ever seen in his life. A white Eldorado stretch limousine.

Oh my God, they’ve brought the Battlestar Galactica with them! thought Harry.


The next few days were a blur to Harry, as they sped across country, stopping for eight hours each night at CIA safe houses. Until three days later, the stretch limo was racing down the George Washington Parkway, past the heavily wooded pine forest alongside the Potomac River, at Langley, Virginia. Throughout the three-day drive, Agents Fraser and Laguna were friendly but taciturn, speaking little and refusing to talk at all about Harry Easton’s “close encounter”. “Please wait till you speak to the general,” Agent Fraser said for the umpteenth time as they turned off the George Washington Parkway and started down a side road toward a large wire-mesh gate. “General Prendergast will want to speak to you in private about your experience.”

They stopped at the first set of gates and were approached by an armed security guard.

“Hello, George,” said Jackson Laguna, flashing his CIA ID.

“Jackson,” said the security guard, checking Dennis Fraser’s ID also.

He returned to his security box and opened the gates electronically, then the long white stretch limo cruised through.

After passing through a second set of gates, the Cadillac drove across to a mammoth eight-story, white concrete building, which looked for all the world like an ancient walled-in city -- only on a grander scale.

Harry Easton let out a low whistle of appreciation. Of course, he had heard reports of the massive CIA complex at Langley, Virginia, but had never quite believed the stories.

The two agents chuckled, and Dennis Fraser said, “That’s nothing, wait till you get inside. Most of the complex is underground. Some of it so deep that it’d survive a direct hit from a nuclear missile.”

Harry whistled again.

Inside the “walled city”, Harry was taken down a long white corridor to a small elevator that plummeted so fast that it made his ears ring. My God, I wonder how deep underground we are? he thought when they finally stepped out into the wide corridor again. Although he had never been claustrophobic before, he felt his head swimming, and for a moment, he almost panicked, thinking the walls were closing in on him. My God, a mountain! It’s like being buried alive beneath a great mountain of concrete. They weren’t exaggerating about how deep underground it is!

Harry was escorted to a small bedroom with an en suite -- both in the same sterile white as the corridors -- where he showered and freshened up, then returned to the small bedroom. He walked over to the steel-grey door and checked around it for a handle or button. Seeing a narrow slit the size of a credit card slot in an automatic teller, he recalled that Dennis Fraser had used a plastic key card to open it when he had entered.

Turning, he looked about the sparsely furnished room. In one corner was a military-grey, double-door wardrobe. In another was a small white dressing cabinet. Beside which was a single wooden-framed bed. There were also two high-backed, hardwood chairs near the dressing cabinet.

Harry headed toward the bed, but then he noticed the silver tray with a coffee pot and a covered dish for his dinner.

“At least they’re not planning to starve me,” he said, sitting down to the meal of a T-bone steak, French fries and corn on the cob -- the latter reminding him of old Josh’s farm.

Harry had almost finished when he heard the electronic hiss of the door to his left. Looking around, he saw Dennis Fraser and Jackson Laguna standing in the doorway.

“General Prendergast would like to see you now,” said Jackson Laguna.

“Okay,” said Harry. Getting up, he followed after them.

They led Harry back to the elevator, this time to only travel up half a dozen stories. Then he was taken down a labyrinth-like series of identical white-walled corridors, before reaching his final destination: an office whose walls were covered in large-scale maps of the world, as well as two great crossed Stars-and-Stripes behind a vast blackwood, glass-topped desk. At which was seated a huge bear of a man: nearly two metres tall, bulging with muscles, General Wallace T. Prendergast was a fiercely blond man in his mid-sixties, with more than a passing resemblance to George C. Scott. As Harry stepped forward, he almost gagged on the smell of the general’s body odour -- which was overpowering despite the liberal splashing of cologne that he used.

Smelling the sweeter smell of roses, Harry looked around to the right, and saw an attractive brunette who looked in her early thirties. She sat at one corner of the vast desk, holding a large notepad and a blue biro.

Not knowing whether to salute or shake hands, Harry hesitated for a moment, then chose to do the former. General Prendergast casually returned the salute and introduced himself. Then, as Harry sat down as invited, as an obvious afterthought, the general indicated the brunette, saying, “This is Colonel Verna Madison.”

She flashed Harry a broad smile by way of welcome, and for the first time in three days, Harry began to relax a little.

“Okay, let’s get down to it,” said General Prendergast. He leant forward until he was perched over his desk slightly like an eagle poised to swoop down at some prey hundreds of feet below. And Harry was almost gagging again on the general’s B.O.

Harry sat back in his chair, trying to breathe as shallowly as possible and waiting for the general to continue. Finally, he realised that Prendergast was waiting for Harry to tell his story.

“Er, well,” Harry stammered, going on to relate the incident. Prendergast and Madison listened intently, Verna flashing Harry a smile of encouragement from time to time. While he spoke, Verna copied down his report in shorthand to Harry’s surprise.

For thirty seconds or so after Harry finished, General Prendergast sat in silence, clasping his hands together as though in prayer. Finally, he sat back in his chair, to Harry’s relief, and asked, “You said you were over California, not far from Beale, when you encountered the UFO?”

“Yes.”

“Yet when you parachuted to earth, you were in Missouri?”

“Yes.”

“That’s a hell of a long way to fall.”

The lieutenant started to smile, but saw Verna Madison shake her head hurriedly and tap her lips with one finger. And Harry realised that the general was not trying to be humorous.

When he failed to comment, Prendergast leant forward, making Harry gag again, and asked, “How do you account for such a discrepancy, Lieutenant Easton?”

“Well, er, as I said, general, the UFO hit me with some kind of blinding white light ... and I thought it was just some kind of weapon.” He hesitated for a moment, not wanting to wander into the realms of science fiction if he could help it, “But, er,” he shrugged, “maybe it was more than just a weapon.”

“More than just a weapon?” repeated Prendergast, sitting back in his seat, to Harry’s relief.

“Yes, er, maybe it was some kind of er ... some kind of teleportation ray?”

“Some kind of teleportation ray?” asked Prendergast, raising an eyebrow menacingly. “What, ‘Beam me up, Scotty’?” He rocked back in his plush, black-leather chair as though about to burst out into laughter. Instead, he sat forward again and said, “Oh come on, Easton, this is the 2020s, for God’s sake! No one believes in that kind of crap anymore. It’s just a 1960s psychedelic space-dream.”

“Then how do you explain it?” demanded Harry. He regretted the question as soon as he asked it.

“I don’t have to explain it! You’re the one telling this goddamn fairy story, not me!” shouted the general, no longer bothering to hide his animosity.

“General, please,” said Verna Madison. She reached out to take his left arm.

Shaking off her grip, he said, “Don’t ‘general, please’ me, Colonel.” Harry half expected him to add, “Why don’t you go back to the typing pool, where you belong?”

Verna Madison flushed deeply, as though she also expected the general to add the sexist addendum. Harry couldn’t help thinking that the red flush suited her and flashed her a smile of encouragement.

“Just what were you sniffing in that plane anyway?” demanded Prendergast. “Super-glue or liquid paper? I hear they both can send you off down the yellow brick road if you’re not careful.”

“Look, I don’t have to put up with this kind of abuse!” shouted Harry, leaping to his feet. He only hoped that he sounded more sure of himself than he felt.

“Yes, you do! Yes, you do!” shouted the general. He stood and leant across the desk like a huge bear about to attack. “In case it has slipped your mind, that was a billion dollars' worth of SR-72 Darkstar fighter that you left scattered across some yokel’s farm in Missouri. And unless you can account for it, you’re in deep shit!”

For a few seconds, Harry stood his ground, eyeballing the general. But in the end, his resolve collapsed, and he slumped, defeated back into his hardwood chair.

General Prendergast sneered a wide shit-eater grin toward Verna Madison, then turned back to Harry. “Isn’t it much more likely that you saw a weather balloon or ... or the planet Venus?”

“It shot me down!” insisted Harry. “How often does a weather balloon or Venus shoot down a Darkstar jet-fighter?”

The general considered for a moment, then, dropping back into his armchair, said more calmly, “You’d be amazed how often highly skilled pilots have chased Venus, thinking that it was a UFO, then crashed when their fuel finally gave out.”

“No!” protested Harry, but less confidently than before. “I saw ... I saw a silver submarine.”

“We all live in a silver submarine,” sang the general in a strident voice.

Verna glared at the general, then said to Harry, “The mind can play all kinds of strange tricks, lieutenant. Perhaps there was a defect in your oxygen apparatus?”

“Exactly,” agreed General Prendergast. “The same thing happens to deep-sea divers when something goes haywire with their oxygen supply. They imagine all kinds of wacky things: undersea palaces, giant sea serpents, beautiful green mermaids ... You name it.”

“No, no, I ... I saw it,” persisted Harry. But he had started to have doubts.

“Look, son,” said Prendergast, in a suddenly sympathetic tone, “why don’t you just admit that you chased Venus from Beale to Missouri, then blacked out?”

“It could happen to any pilot,” added Verna.

Harry turned to look at the tall, attractive brunette. “No, no, it happened just as I explained,” he insisted. He looked down, refusing to meet the eyes of the two officers, lest they see the onset of doubt in his own eyes.

“All right then,” said the general, “let’s go through it all again.”

“Okay,” said Harry, sighing in frustration.

Stubbornly refusing to allow them to break down his story, he repeated it almost word for word. This time, he saw Wallace Prendergast turn on a cassette recorder in the top drawer of the glass-topped desk, while Verna flicked through her copious notes, occasionally making alterations or additions.

“But how could a cigar-shaped vessel fly?” demanded Prendergast at one point. “Surely it would be aerodynamically unsound in the heavy atmosphere of Earth?”

“I don’t know,” admitted Harry.

“Could it have had some form of wings that you didn’t see?” asked Verna.

“Why not? Were they hidden in the fifth dimension?” asked General Wallace T. Prendergast, causing the brunette to flush deeply again. The general sat forward again and had Harry gagging on his overwhelming B.O. again.

“No, I meant they may have been hidden from sight by the outline of the superstructure.”

“All right,” said Prendergast, “let’s go through it all again.”

So Harry told his story for a third time. Then a fourth, then a fifth ... until he had lost count.

In the claustrophobic underground “castle”, Harry had lost all track of time, since the only clock in the room was on the wall behind him, and he didn’t dare turn around to look at it. So he was relieved when Prendergast finally looked at his watch and said, “That will be all for today, Lieutenant.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Harry. He slowly stood up, stretching wide to relieve a crick in his back from hours on the hardwood seat. As Special Agents Dennis Fraser and Jackson Laguna entered the office, Harry asked, “Will I be leaving for Beale tonight, sir? Or in the morning?”

General Prendergast looked up, obviously surprised at the question. He hesitated so long that Harry had started to think that he was not going to answer at all. Finally, the general said:

“I’m afraid you won’t be returning to Beale for quite a while yet, Lieutenant. We still have to straighten a few things out in your story.”

“Don’t worry,” said Verna, “your stay here has been approved by Beale, so there will be no problems on that score.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, a little crestfallen.

Harry managed to snap off a half salute before being led outside into the monotonous white-walled corridor.

They walked down the labyrinth of white corridors in silence, till nearly back at Harry’s room, before he decided to try to break through the two agents’ aloofness:

“General Prendergast seems reluctant to believe my story.”

For half a minute, neither agent responded. Then Jackson Laguna stopped and said, “General Prendergast is of the old school of down-to-earth soldiers. His biggest regret in life is that he was born too late to serve under General Patton. But he served in Desert Storm, and he modelled himself on Old Blood-And-Guts. There’s no way you’ll ever convince General Prendergast that you saw a real UFO if he keeps you here till doomsday.”

Laguna hesitated for a moment before adding, “And frankly, he probably will if you aren’t smart enough to change your story. Since Blue Book, no one in the Agency, or the US military, has been prepared to acknowledge the possibility that UFOs might be really from other planets.”

Harry waited for a second, expecting Laguna to continue. Then he realised that the agent had said all he intended to. Reluctantly, Harry turned back and found the reason that they had stopped was that they were outside his room. Cell! he thought. And he immediately wondered what had put that thought into his head.

Harry stepped aside as Dennis Fraser took what looked like an oversized credit card from a pocket of his coat. He put the key card into a slot in the wall, and the steel door opened with a whoosh. Then it whooshed shut behind Harry again.

It is like being in a cell, he decided as he stepped across to the bed. Or an underground dungeon perhaps? But as he sat on the springy bed, he realised, No dungeon ever had this kind of comfort. However, he couldn’t stop the nagging idea that he was a prisoner.

Looking at the bland white dressing table, in the bland white room, Harry thought: Why do I need this, when I don’t have any change of clothes with me? Unless they’ve kindly provided me with something? He pulled the top drawer out and stared in amazement at a drawer full of underwear. His underwear. Which should have been in his apartment in California.

He hurriedly opened another drawer and found it was full of his sweaters. The third was full of his pyjamas -- both light summer and woollen winter varieties. “My God, he wasn’t kidding about Prendergast keeping me here till I admit I was hallucinating!”

Harry hurried across to the white double-door wardrobe. Both sides of the wardrobe were full of clothes: the left a lieutenant’s uniform, the right civilian shirts, coats, and trousers. Again, his clothes, as he quickly confirmed by checking the name tag on the uniforms.

“What the hell is going on here?” he said aloud. Then, quickly, he started to look around the room for any hidden listening devices.

“Jesus, I’m getting paranoid!” Harry said as he knelt to look under the bed. “But what the hell is going on here? Why go to all the trouble of transporting my entire wardrobe from California to Virginia?”

And what the hell did Jackson Laguna mean by that crack about Blue Book? he suddenly wondered. Project Blue Book was an official US government investigation into UFOs from about ... He had to ponder for a moment. From about 1952 until it was suddenly shut down in 1970. He stopped for a moment to consider again. No, I’m wrong. It was 1969. December 1969, the time of the Flower Children!

“We all live in the silver submarine!” he said aloud, recalling Prendergast’s sarcasm earlier. Of course, Blue Book and the Flower Power movement were from the same era, but so what? Maybe Prendergast’s sarcasm and Laguna’s remark are unrelated. Just a coincidence. But how far does coincidence stretch?

And if it’s not a coincidence, what does it mean? he wondered. He sat down on the bed to ponder, and without realising it, started to lightly bounce up and down on the mattress. “Blue Book was suddenly shut down in December 1969 with no proper explanation. Officially, it was shut down because it had failed to locate any firm evidence that UFOs are spacecraft. Yet at least one Blue Book scientist publicly said otherwise. Professor Allen Hynek claimed that Blue Book sorted the cases from easiest to disprove to hardest to disprove. Then only investigated the easiest to disprove. Although he made it plain that he did not believe UFOs were from other planets, he savaged Blue Book for its unscientific approach.

“Yes,” he said aloud. He remembered back to his teen years when Hynek had risked the wrath of his former Blue Book colleagues by “coming clean” as UFO-believers liked to call it. Or “flipping his lid”, as the sceptics preferred to say.

Harry recalled that throughout his teen years, all kinds of conspiracy theories had abounded after Hynek’s outspoken comments. “Some people insisted that Blue Book was speedily wrapped up because the U.S. government already knew what UFOs are. The most common theory was that they were super-secret Soviet spy planes, capable of flying ten times the speed of any known jets. But other people suggested that they were US stealth jets!” Harry recalled. Because they were often sighted off the coast of Australia or New Zealand. Places too far from the former Soviet Union for them to be able to reach, even at such phenomenal speeds, test the planes, then get home again in a single night. But close enough to the USA for American stealth fighters to have two or three hours’ testing each night and still get home again in one night.

And, of course, sceptics have often pointed out that Flying Wings and UFOs have one thing in common: the tendency to crash frequently. UFO-believers have pointed out that craft built for space flight would be less aerodynamically sound in a heavy atmosphere. (Such as a flying submarine! Harry thought.) But sceptics have answered that the same applies to the Flying Wing. Officially, the Flying Wing had ceased production in the early 1960s. But in reality, they kept experimenting, modifying, improving, till it transmogrified into the SR-71 by 1968!

Whatever the truth about UFOs, though, the US government reportedly has used terror tactics to get eye witnesses to change their reports or withdraw them completely.

Just like General Prendergast has been trying to badger me into doing! Harry thought. A common aspect of UFO sightings is the Men-In-Black (MIBs). Mysterious strangers who dress like the Blues Brothers and arrive at UFO crash sites in long black Cadillacs. Just like the Battlestar Galactica that Fraser and Laguna arrived at Josh’s farm to collect me! Except it was a long, white Cadillac. Still, the colour doesn’t matter, the principle’s the same. Only Fraser and Laguna weren’t openly hostile toward Harry, like MIBs are supposed to be. Just a little reluctant to talk.

And I haven’t been mistreated in any way since being brought here. But he shuddered as he recalled Jackson Laguna’s comment, “There’s no way you’ll ever convince General Prendergast that you saw a real UFO, if he keeps you here till doomsday. And frankly, he probably will if you aren’t smart enough to change your story.”

“Surely he was only kidding?” said Harry. But he couldn’t help thinking, MIBs are reported to not only intimidate UFO-witnesses, but also to kidnap and even murder them ... So if UFOs are some kind of super-secret U.S. spy plane whose identity the American government is determined to keep secret at all costs ... Even to the point of kidnapping or murdering US citizens...? He left the thought hanging, not daring even to think it.


When supper arrived that evening, Harry was sitting up on the bed, reading a four-day-old newspaper that he had found among his clothes in the dressing cabinet. As he heard the whoosh of the electronic door, he looked up and saw Dennis Fraser carrying his supper tray.

“Hi,” said Harry. He received a nod of greeting from the agent. When he looked around, expecting to see Jackson Laguna, instead, he saw the smiling figure of Verna Madison.

“Hi, yourself,” said Verna. “How are you getting on?”

“Okay, I guess,” Harry said. “What are my chances of springing bail from this place tomorrow?”

The smile vanished from Verna’s mouth, and she turned to look at Dennis Fraser for a second. When she looked back, she was smiling again, but it now looked forced.

“Don’t tell me that you’re tired of our company already?” she joked. “Don’t worry, you shouldn’t have to be here more than a few days ... A week at the outside.”

“But what about my work at Beale?” Harry asked.

“Don’t worry, it’s all been approved by the US Air Force. You’re on temporary special leave with full pay.”

“At least could I have something more recent to read?” Harry asked. He pointed to the old newspaper.

Fraser and Madison exchanged a look, as though this was a tricky question. Finally, Dennis said, “We can get you the New York Times and the Washington Post each day, if that’s okay?”

“Yes, that’s fine,” Harry said. Although he had never read either paper in his life, he decided that they would be better than nothing.

Harry tried to make small talk with first Versa Madison, then Dennis Fraser, hoping that they would keep him company while he ate. But both cried off, claiming to have work that they still had to do that night.

“But it’s almost nine o’clock?” said Harry after checking his watch. “Surely you don’t have to stay on duty beyond that time?”

Verna smiled nervously and said, “No rest for the wicked.”

Harry started to laugh. But he realised that neither Dennis nor Verna had laughed at the “joke”.

After they had left, Harry discovered that he was ravenous. Sitting on one of the high-backed wooden chairs, using the dressing cabinet as a table, he quickly devoured his supper of lamb chops, mashed potatoes, peas, gravy, and a large pot of coffee. Normally, he liked to read for an hour or two after supper. But that night, he could hardly keep his eyes open.

“Oh, Lord!” he said as he almost fell asleep on the bed, reading the old newspaper. “I must have been de-energised by the grilling that I received from the general earlier.”

He lurched toward the dressing cabinet to get a pair of pyjamas. But as his head began to swim, he realised that he would not be able to change. Instead, he stripped down to his underwear and collapsed into the bed, barely having the strength to pull the bedclothes over himself.


Flight Lieutenant Harry Easton stared out at the giant submarine-shaped object in front of his Lockheed Martin SR-72 Darkstar fighter:

“Oh my God, it’s real!” he said into the microphone.

“Say again, Able-Baker,” came the crackly voice over the radio.

“It’s real, dammit, it’s real. A real flying saucer!” cried Harry in excitement. “Oh God, for two years you’ve been sending me up chasing weather balloons and ball-lightning, but finally it’s the real thing! A real flying saucer!”

“Calm down, lieutenant,” advised the voice of General Wallace T. Prendergast over the radio. “You must be having a hallucination.”

“It’s an illusion caused by oxygen starvation at high altitude,” suggested Colonel Verna Madison over the radio. “Check your oxygen valve.”

“No, sir, ma’am, it’s no hallucination,” Harry insisted. Still, he checked his oxygen valve to be on the safe side. “Oxygen valve checks out.”

As he began to overtake the spacecraft, Harry could see it was immense. “It’s as big as the Battlestar Galactica,” Harry said into the mike. “But shaped like a silver submarine.

“Hello, are you there?” he called as the radio began to crackle. For a few seconds, it went completely dead. Then a voice doing a bad imitation of Wolfman Jack came over the radio to announce:

“This is radio KRAP operating out of Jefferson City, Missouri, bringing you a golden mouldy, a farce from the past. The Silver Beatles from 1969 singing their smash hit single ‘Silver Submarine’.”

For a second, there was the sound of a stylus scratching around an old vinyl LP record, then a voice, sounding remarkably like Ringo Star, began singing, “We all live in a silver submarine. A silver submarine. A silver submarine ....”

“What the Hell?” Harry cried. He began fiddling with the controls of the radio, and the voice faded out.

Harry continued fiddling with the controls for a moment. But as he approached within a few hundred yards of the “submarine”, he was transfixed by the sight of thousands of small, round portholes running in at least a score of rows along the side of the craft. “My God, it is as big as the Battlestar Galactica,” Harry said.

He strained to try to peer in through one of the portholes. At first, the glass shone silvery like mirror-glass, making it impossible to see inside. But halfway along the vessel, three of the portholes had something visible through them. Harry had approached to within fifty yards of the “submarine” before he could make out what he was seeing.

“Aliens!” he said in shock.

Three dwarf-sized aliens -- two bone-white, the third a pale ash colour -- stood by the windows staring out at him. They were bald and had oversized heart-shaped heads, which seemed to sit directly upon their necks. Their eyes were jet-black and seemed the size of tennis balls.

“My God, aliens!” Harry cried. He began fiddling with his mike again. But before he could get it operational, the grey alien held up a long white baton and pointed it at Harry.

A blinding yellow-white beam poured from the baton and thumped into the SR-72 Darkstar jet like an oversized fist.

“Able-Baker! Able-Baker!” the radio began to announce. But too late. Harry’s plane had begun to disintegrate around him.

“I’m breaking up! I’m breaking up!” Harry shouted into his mike. “It’s shot me down. The damned UFO has shot me down!”

“Are you sure it’s not just a weather balloon or ball-lightning?” asked the voice of General Wallace T. Prendergast.

“Weather balloons and ball-lightning don’t shoot down Darkstar fighter planes as a general rule,” the voice of Verna Madison said over the radio.

Harry attempted to activate the ejector seat on his plane, but even that had collapsed. “Oh Jesus!” he shrieked as he fell through the bottom of the SR-72 Darkstar, which had become as brittle as age-yellowed paper.

“Jeeee ... suuuuus!” shrieked Harry as he free-fell through the air. As he fell, he was suddenly swamped by a sugary smell as though the air itself had become sweet.


Harry awakened with a start in his “cell” in the underground fortress in Langley, Virginia.

For a moment, he thought that he was still dreaming. He could still smell the sweet, sugary aroma. And although he was back in the bland white room, the heart-faced aliens had not vanished. There now seemed to be a dozen of them. Most of the aliens were pulling out drawers in the dressing cabinet, examining his clothing. Others pored through his uniforms and trousers in the double-door wardrobe.

Three others stood around his bed, staring down at him with their large, limpid black eyes.

For a second, Harry was puzzled as he heard what sounded like the twittering of small birds. Then he realised that the twittering was coming from the dwarf-sized aliens. So that’s what aliens sound like, he thought, twittering canaries?

Then he detected other sounds like tongue-clicking as part of their speech and decided that they sounded more like African bushmen.

I’m still asleep and dreaming! thought Harry. But he could still smell the sugary sweet odour, which he realised was the breath of the grey alien leaning over him. Can you dream smells? he wondered.

The aliens continued to poke and probe Harry like a doctor trying to find where it hurts, for nearly a minute. Then the grey alien noticed that Harry’s eyes were open. The ash-grey alien pointed its left hand toward Harry and began screeching like an excited monkey.

Instantly, the hive of activity by the wardrobe and dressing cabinet ceased. The twittering-clicking aliens all fell silent and turned to stare toward Harry.

“Hello,” said Harry, not knowing what else to say.

All twelve of the aliens began shrieking monkey-like, running around madly like living Dodgem cars. Then the grey alien, who seemed to be their leader, shrilled louder, and the others fell silent and turned to stare at him. Their tennis-ball-sized eyes seemed to shine fluorescently.

The leader pointed toward the electronic door, and the aliens all fled toward it.

“No, wait,” cried Harry. He tried to leap out of bed, but his head spun and he fell to the floor.

As he looked up, the door opened with a whoosh, and the aliens raced out into the corridor.

“No, please,” called Harry. He struggled for a moment to untangle his feet from the bedclothes, which had fallen off the bed with him. Then he crawled after the aliens, afraid to attempt to stand again.

Harry had almost reached the corridor when the last of the aliens fled through. And the electronic door whooshed shut again.

“No, come back, dammit!” hollered Harry. He banged his fists on the cold metal door for a moment, then looked around for a handle. Seeing the small slot beside the door, he recalled that Dennis Fraser and Jackson Laguna had used a plastic key card to open the door.

Then how the hell did the aliens open the door to get in, then escape again? he wondered. Unless they had their own key cards!

Although he thought that he was too excited to get back to sleep, the instant that his head hit the pillow, Harry was asleep again.


“Rise and shine,” said Verna Madison, shaking Harry awake by the shoulder at 8:30.

“What?” said Harry, smelling the sweet smell of red roses as he sat up with a start.

For a moment, he did not know where he was and expected to see heart-faced aliens swarming around his bed. Seeing the dark-haired colonel standing near his bed, Harry blushed and pulled his bedclothes up a bit.

Verna laughed, then said, “Don’t worry, I’ve seen men in their underwear before.”

“And out of it,” added Dennis Fraser.

He laughed at his own joke till the colonel turned to glare at him. Fraser placed Harry’s breakfast tray on the dressing table beside the bed, then placed the two newspapers on the foot of the bed.

“We’ll wait outside while you dress,” said Verna.

As she started to turn away, Harry asked, “What happened to Officer Laguna? Isn’t he assigned to me anymore?”

Dennis Fraser and the brunette exchanged a look, then after a moment, Verna said, “No, he was transferred to Illinois.”

“Poor bastard,” added Fraser with a laugh.

They went out into the corridor so that Harry could change. Then Harry wolfed down his breakfast, hardly noticing what he ate, so keen was he to tell General Prendergast what he had seen the night before.


“Dwarf-sized aliens with oversized, heart-shaped heads and black, limpid eyes the size of tennis balls?” asked General Wallace T. Prendergast, sounding as though he could not believe his ears. “Jesus, this is straight out of Whitley Strieber’s version of the Twilight Zone.”

Verna Madison sat forward and placed one arm on the glass top of the general’s huge blackwood desk.

“Are you sure you weren’t still dreaming?” she asked.

“Of course, he was still dreaming!” insisted Prendergast. He leant forward across his desk, and Harry was again almost gagging from the general’s pungent body odour. “For one thing, how did the aliens get your bedroom door open? It’s electronically operated.”

“They must have stolen one of the key cards somehow,” Harry said. Although he had been certain the night before, he now realised how feeble it sounded.

“Stolen one of the keys, which no one has missed!” said the general. “Every one of those keys must be accounted for every day in the central registry.”

“Besides, to get from one end of the complex to another, they’d need more than one key,” said Verna. “They’d need half a dozen or more. Different doors use different codes.”

“Exactly!” agreed Prendergast.

“I don’t know,” admitted Harry. He stared at the two giant Stars-and-Stripes crossed on the wall behind the general’s desk, hoping that they would inspire him. “Maybe they don’t need a key to operate the doors. Or maybe they’ve managed to copy them somehow.”

“Copy them somehow? How? They’d have to steal one before they could copy it, and don’t you think we’d notice if one went missing for a while?”

The general stopped for a moment and sat back in his armchair, thinking. After a moment, he said, “Look, one thing I’ve always wondered about so-called aliens is how they are supposed to come to Earth?”

“In flying saucers,” said Harry, puzzled by the question.

“Across hundreds of light-years of space? The nearest constellation to us which could have planets around it is two hundred light-years away. The fastest spacecraft ever built on this planet, the rocket that launched Apollo 14 all those years ago, could travel at nearly 1% of the speed of light. So it would take 20,000 years to get from there to Earth. If the alien race were ten times as advanced as us, it would still take them 2,000 years.”

“Maybe they put themselves in cryonic sleep for thousands of years,” began Harry.

“Cryonics has one fatal flaw. You can't freeze human, or presumably humanoid, blood; it rots. So you can cryonically freeze people, but we are thousands of years away from knowing how to unfreeze them without killing them!” explained the general, staring hard at the flight lieutenant.

“Maybe they have gigantic spaceships and have colonies of thousands, breeding generation after generation, until the latest generation finally reaches Earth?”

“Like in Battlestar the Spastica or Spaced-Out In 1999? You're forgetting that you only have to be in space for a few months to start suffering from bone loss. After a few generations, your space settlers would be like Daleks; squishy blobs needing to live within a self-contained life-support vehicle!”

He paused for a moment to allow the assertion to sink in, then hurried on before Harry could answer: “And no one yet, other than Doctor Who fans, has talked about seeing any even vaguely Daley-shaped aliens. Of course, their life-support vehicles would not have to be pepper-pot shaped.”

“Well, maybe ...?”

“Please don't suggest that they could use hyperdrive to cross hyperspace like in Star Krap where they turn their engines on super duper fast and magically bypass Einstein's restraints on travelling faster than the speed of light! Hyperspace is a sci-fi invention. Unlike the 21st Century, when the only commandment of writing Sci-Fi seems to be, Thou Shalt Know Fuck All About Science!, a hundred years ago, Sci-Fi writers had a great knowledge of science. And knowing that it was impossible to travel from any other habitable planet to ours, did make writing alien invasion stories rather passe. So in the 1930s, a Sci-Fi writer invented hyperspace as a cheat around the impossibility of aliens ever getting here.”

“What about wormholes in space to cross vast distances rapidly?”

Verna Madison flashed Harry a broad smile. However, she quickly wiped it from her mouth when the general turned around to glare at her.

Prendergast continued to stare in her direction for a moment, while Verna pretended to be checking through her handwritten notes of Harry’s account. After a moment, satisfied he had cowed her insurrection, the general turned back toward Harry.

“I know Einstein predicted wormholes in space, but he was probably also fantasising a cheat solution to allow aliens to get here. Even geniuses can have their foibles. The great Carl Sagan badgered the U.S. government into wasting billions of dollars trying to make contact with aliens. Yet, with his IQ, he should have known that it was impossible. But like Fox Mulder, Sagan wanted to believe. Probably too much!

“And even if life has evolved elsewhere in the Cosmos, how do we know it is as advanced as us?” he said, “I mean, Christ, there’s almost no intelligent life down here on Earth. Why should there be any up there in space?”

Prendergast broke into a broad grin for the first time since Harry had known him. Maybe he is human after all? thought Harry. Although he doubted it.

After a second, when no one else joined him, the general stopped smiling and became serious again. “All right,” he said, sitting back in his armchair, “let’s go through it all again.”

And just like the previous day, Harry had to repeat his story over and over. Once again, General Prendergast recorded each account, while Verna Madison read through her handwritten account, occasionally making notations. By the end of the day, Harry’s back ached from sitting in the hardwood chair. Staring at General Prendergast’s plush leather armchair, Harry thought: What I wouldn’t give for a chair like that!

“Well, I guess that’s all for today,” said the general at last.

Thank God! thought Harry, climbing a little shakily to his feet. He resisted the temptation to stretch wide; instead, he saluted the general and then turned to leave as Dennis Fraser entered the room.

As they walked down the long white-walled corridor, Harry asked, “Have you had any word from the general yet about when I can return to California?”

Verna stopped for a second to consider the question. Finally, she said, “You must understand that this second encounter means that we need to question you at much greater depths!”

“Then Jackson Laguna was right,” said Harry. He noticed Verna Madison exchange a look with Dennis Fraser. “I would be better off if I changed my story and said that I had hallucinated the whole thing.”

“Well, no one wants you to lie,” said Verna. “But if you are starting to have your doubts about what you saw ...?”

“No! No!” insisted Harry. He only hoped that he wasn’t making a dreadful mistake. “I know what I saw, and I’m not about to change my story.”

When they reached his room, Harry’s supper was waiting for him. “Why don’t you have your dinner now, while I make your bed?” offered Verna.

“You’re lucky,” joked Dennis Fraser, as Harry sat on one of the chairs at the dressing cabinet, “she won’t do that for me.” The brunette turned to glare at the black man, and he said, “I’ll wait outside in the corridor for you, Colonel.”

“That might be a good idea, Special Agent Fraser,” agreed Verna. She went on to quickly make Harry’s bed, also making small talk.

Harry watched the attractive brunette as he ate, wondering if her interest in him went beyond the professional. He wondered, Should I make a pass at her? But his unease over his predicament was great enough, and he decided: It’s probably best not to risk getting on her bad side. So far, she seems to be on my side, while the general seems convinced that I’m crazy. I can’t afford to risk losing the only ally that I’ve got.

Still, watching the brunette, he took a sip of coffee and grimaced at the slightly bitter aftertaste. My God, can’t they get real coffee at this place? Harry thought. He hurriedly ate the meat and vegetables, but after another small sip left the coffee almost untouched.

“Finished?” asked Verna a few minutes later. She started to pick up the tray, then said, “Drink up your coffee.”

“I’m not very thirsty,” said Harry. “Besides, it’s a bit tart.”

Verna hesitated for a moment, looking as though she were going to argue. Then she picked up the tray, saying, “Well, goodnight. I’ll be here first thing in the morning to escort you to the general again.”

Harry watched the brunette leave, still wondering if he should have made a pass at her. In here? he thought, going across to sit on the bed. With Dennis Fraser standing outside waiting for her? What would have been the point?

Lying back on the bed, he picked up the copy of the Washington Post and began to read. After half an hour or so, he had started yawning and decided to retire for the night.

Here we go again! he thought as his head began to swim when he stood up. However, unlike the previous night, when he had collapsed too quickly to even change into his pyjamas, tonight he was able to fight off the drowsiness. “At least tonight I won’t end up sleeping in my underwear!” he said to himself. He had already changed and climbed into bed when he thought, Like I slept in my underwear last night? He wondered why he had suddenly thought of that. Then he realised, When Verna and Dennis brought my breakfast this morning, they weren’t the least bit surprised to find I had slept in my underwear. It was almost as though they already knew it! ‘Don’t worry, I’ve seen men in their underwear before,’ Verna said as soon as she entered the bedroom. But wouldn’t she normally say, ‘in their pyjamas,’ expecting that that’s what I’d be wearing in bed?”

Although he knew that he was probably being paranoid, Harry started looking around the sterile-white walls of the bedroom. Surely they don’t have some kind of video cameras watching me in here? he wondered. But why? What would be the point? I’m not that important, surely?

Harry started to climb out of bed to check around the room properly. But then, as his head began to swim, he thought, Too tired. Have to wait till the morning.


Flight Lieutenant Harry Easton stared at the giant silver submarine-shaped object in the sky in front of his Lockheed Martin SR-72 Darkstar fighter. “Oh God, it’s real! The damn thing is real!” he said into his microphone.

“Say again, Able-Baker,” came a vaguely familiar voice over the radio.

“It’s a flying saucer, dammit, a real flying saucer!” said Harry into his mike.

“Calm down, Flight Lieutenant,” said General Wallace T. Prendergast over the radio. “You must be hallucinating. There are no flying saucers over California at this time of year.”

“They’re out of season,” agreed Colonel Verna Madison. “You must be suffering from altitude-induced oxygen starvation.”

“No, ma’am, it’s real. A genuine flying saucer,” insisted Harry. Then, as the plane started to overtake the weird flying sub, “My God, I can see right in through the portholes. I can see ....” He stopped, shocked at the sight of three dwarf-sized aliens. Each with oversized heart-shaped heads, sitting directly on their shoulders.

“You can see what, dammit?” demanded General Prendergast. “Spit it out, man, for Christ’s sake.”

“I can see three tiny aliens.”

“Little green men?” said Prendergast caustically. “Jesus, they went out with John W. Campbell and the so-called golden age of science fiction.”

“No, not green. Little white men with pointy chins and large, dome-shaped craniums.”

“Hey!” protested Dennis Fraser over the radio. “It’s always the same with you white racist types: all aliens have to be white.”

“No, no,” corrected Harry, staring intently at the “sub”. “Only two aliens are white. The third is a light ash-grey colour.”

“Don’t say any more,” warned Jackson Laguna over the radio. “If you stick to your story, you’ll never get out of the Langley complex alive. They’ll silence you any way they can. Even if they have to kill you. Like they killed me!”

Startled, Harry reached for the microphone to speak to Special Agent Laguna. But all he could pick up was static. Then, after a few seconds, the static gave way to a canary-like twittering, with just the occasional light clicking of a tongue. The aliens! Harry thought. And this time, as the yellow ray shot from the submarine, Harry was not afraid: he knew that he was only dreaming. And as soon as he realised that, he began to awaken.

When he awakened, Harry could smell the sweet sugary breath of the aliens and could still hear the bird-like twittering and realised that the aliens were in his room again. This time, he kept his eyes tightly closed, hoping not to scare them away, thinking: I’ve got to try to communicate with them! But how? They sound like African bushmen for Christ’s sake.

He decided to risk opening his eyes the tiniest fraction. Just enough to see a vague image of the grey alien standing on one of the two hardwood chairs, bending over him. Until now, he had not felt any sensation, but seeing the heart-faced alien’s tiny grey hands probing downward like a doctor or a concert pianist, he realised that the alien was probing his body again. But too gently for him to feel without seeing that it was happening.

Don’t frighten him away this time! he told himself. He tried desperately to keep his breathing even so that they would not suspect that he was awake.

For what seemed like half an hour, the grey alien poked and prodded Harry, twitter-clicking to the other aliens. Then, finally, the twittering stopped. After a few seconds, Harry realised that the aliens had all moved away from his bed. Hearing footsteps near the door, he risked turning his head and saw the aliens -- eight or ten at least -- standing near the electronic door. The ash-grey alien held out his left hand, and the door whooshed open.

Stay calm, for God’s sake, stay calm, Harry willed himself, resisting the temptation to leap out of bed and chase after them.

He waited till he heard the door whoosh shut again, then climbed from the bed, narrowly avoiding falling over the high-back chair, and tiptoed over to the door. How did they open it? he wondered. The grey alien had certainly held his hand out toward the key card slot beside the door. But he didn’t seem to have a key card.

He tried waving his hand over the key card slot. But naturally, the door did not open for him. “Open, dammit,” he cursed, "you opened for the aliens. Why won’t you open for me?”


“Well, how did you sleep last night?” asked Verna Madison by way of greeting as Dennis Fraser placed Harry’s breakfast tray on the dressing cabinet beside his bed.

“Less than I expected,” Harry answered. He saw Verna and Dennis exchange a puzzled look. What the hell are they up to? he wondered. He almost voiced the question aloud, but then thought better of it.

Harry hurriedly dressed while Verna and Fraser waited in the corridor. Then he gulped down his breakfast of serial, toast with cranberry jelly, and coffee. He hesitated for a moment before sipping the coffee; however, unlike the previous night, there was no bitter aftertaste.

“Enjoy your breakfast?” asked Verna, re-entering the room.

“Yes, thanks, especially the coffee. It tasted a little bitter last night, but this morning it’s fine.”

Verna and Dennis Fraser exchanged a quick look, then the brunette said, “They finally got around to making a fresh pot.”

“Yeah,” agreed Fraser, “they say coffee tastes better reheated. But I keep telling them, ‘Not for two years running’.”

Then they led Harry down the labyrinth of white corridors to the interview room. Where Wallace T. Prendergast sat at the blackwood desk, on the wall behind which were crossed the two great Stars-and-Stripes.

“Well, what’s the latest episode in the Aliens-in-Wonderland saga?” asked the general as Harry sat in the high-backed wooden chair before the desk. The general leant forward again, so Harry was gagging on his pungent B.O. again.

It’s almost as though he already knows that I’ve had another encounter? thought Harry. Suppressing the notion, he related his latest dream -- only leaving out Jackson Laguna’s claim to have been murdered by the CIA -- and then his second encounter with the aliens.

“I’m damned if I know how they operated the electronic door,” admitted Harry. “But they certainly didn’t use a key card.”

“Maybe he just waved his little hand over it and muttered, ‘Open sez a-me’!” suggested General Prendergast, not bothering to keep the contempt from his voice.

Harry started to rise from his chair to reply in equally scathing terms. But seeing Verna Madison shaking her head and tapping her lips with one finger, he sat down again.

Just whose side are you really on? thought Harry. He wondered if he was starting to become paranoid about the way that he was being treated.

Reluctantly, Harry suffered through General Wallace T. Prendergast’s sarcasm, trying to turn a deaf ear as much as possible. Hoping that Verna really was on his side. And that they’re not just working together against me. Using the old hot-and-cold approach to break me down and get me to change my story!

Over the next four hours, Harry tried to simply block out Prendergast’s sarcasm while still answering his questions. He felt relieved when at last they stopped for lunch. But then all too soon the grilling commenced again.

“All right, let’s go back to your very first encounter over Beale Air Force Base,” said the general, late in the afternoon.

So, for what seemed like the fiftieth time, Harry related how he had been shot down by the “silver submarine” and had parachuted down to Josh’s farm.

“In Missouri?” said General Wallace T. Prendergast for the fiftieth time. Still with more than a hint of disbelief in his voice.

“Yes!” insisted Harry.

As the general sat back in his plush leather armchair, Harry sat up straight to relieve his aching back, envious of the general’s luxurious seating.

By the time that the grilling was finished, Harry’s back throbbed. As he climbed painfully to his feet, he thought, How do you like your grilled pilot? Raw, medium, or well-done?

“Don’t worry,” soothed Verna as she and Dennis Fraser led Harry down the corridor, “the general isn’t as mean as he likes to act. His bark is worse than his bite.”

“Yeah, like a mega-mouth shark,” said Dennis Fraser, receiving a glare from Verna.

Once again, Verna made Harry’s bed while he ate his supper. And once again, his coffee tasted bitter. They’ve drugged it! he realised, watching the curvaceous figure of the brunette bending over his bed: But why?

Then a terrible thought struck him: maybe Prendergast was right! Maybe the aliens were only an illusion. He recalled reading a report once of illegal LSD experiments that the CIA had conducted in the 1960s. Hundreds of college students had been paid $5.00 an hour to take part in “sleep experiments”. Unknown to the teenagers, they were fed massive amounts of LSD, Peyote, and other dangerous hallucinogenic drugs. Dozens of the students had died or ended up in mental asylums, so the experiments were stopped.

But what if they weren’t really stopped? Harry wondered: What if they simply went underground? That would explain why the general keeps insisting that the aliens are all hallucinations. Because that’s what they are! An LSD dream that Prendergast himself is in charge of? He knows that they’re hallucinations, but needs to test my resolve that they’re real? It would sure explain how the aliens get out without having a key card. If they’re not even real!

Then he realised: But that would mean my supervisors at Beale must be in on it too. Since the first hallucination occurred before I ever met Prendergast! But surely that isn’t possible? California and Langley, Virginia, are virtually on opposite sides of the continental USA. Why would they be working in conjunction with each other? How would they have ever joined up? Still, it would explain how I got from California to Missouri in what seemed like the blink of an eye. Maybe I was spaced out for hours!

But then a more insidious thought occurred to him: Unless the experiments went underground like the Flying Wing, and there is a nationwide conspiracy involving the CIA and all Air Force bases in the USA. That would explain the great number of pilots who have crashed chasing UFOs since the early 1960s! If they were all flying while high on LSD!

“Finished?” asked Verna, waking Harry from his reverie.

“Er, um, no. No, you can take the tray away in the morning.”

Verna hesitated as though about to argue the point. But finally she said, “Okay. See you tomorrow.”

“Yeah, see you,” agreed Harry, watching her leave. She must be in on it, too! he reminded himself, only wishing that it wasn’t so.

Harry waited till the electronic door whooshed shut behind Verna Madison. Then he waited a few more seconds to allow her to get down the hallway before standing and heading toward the en-suite. Lifting the pink plastic seat, he poured the coffee into the toilet, saying to himself, I’ve got to keep my wits about me if there really is some kind of conspiracy going on. He flushed the toilet to remove all traces of the coffee. Then he washed his hands before returning to the bedroom to finish his supper. Before changing into his pyjamas.

“Well, let’s see what’s happening in the real world,” Harry said aloud. Picking up the Washington Post, he went across and lay on the bed to read.

Ten minutes later, despite his resolution not to fall asleep before the aliens arrived, if they did, Harry started to yawn and thought, Dammit, I’m tired. I wish now that I'd had some coffee to help keep me awake.”

He stretched wide and realised, too late, that he was falling asleep.


Once more, Harry awakened in the wee hours to the twittering bird-like sounds of the aliens. Careful not to let on that he was awake, he opened his eyes the tiniest crack to peer out at the dozen or so dwarf-sized shadows swarming around his bedroom.

As on the other occasions, some of the aliens hunted through his clothes and underwear as though looking for something. Or concealing something? thought Harry. The other aliens continued to study Harry himself. The touch of the alien on Harry’s flesh was light as a feather, yet occasionally there was a slight tingling, pins-and-needles feeling, almost like an acupuncture needle being inserted into a nerve point.

What are they doing? wondered Harry. Examining me? Or trying to physically manipulate me in some way?

For a moment, he wondered if they were sticking him with tiny hypodermics, injecting him with some dangerous or hallucinogenic substance? But the pins-and-needles effect didn’t really feel like needles physically entering his flesh. Perhaps some form of light sensors to take readings of my body reactions?

Harry was so intent upon his theories that he almost didn’t notice when the aliens started leaving. By the time he realised it, only four aliens remained in the bedroom. Jesus, I’ve gotta move! Harry thought. Forgetting caution, he leapt out of the bed and raced across to where the grey alien held its hand above the key card slot while the white aliens sauntered out into the corridor.

“Not so fast!” cried Harry.

He grabbed the left hand of the grey alien before it could run away. The heart-faced creature began canary-twittering, and three or four white aliens raced back to assist it. But Harry soon realised that they were so weak compared to him that there was virtually no contest.

“Get away!” called Harry, hoping to frighten off the tiny invaders. Although they could do him no real harm, he did not want to hurt them.

They’re only a hallucination! decided Harry. He was tempted to kick out at one of the pint-sized aliens when it grabbed his left leg and began wrestling with it. But he couldn’t quite convince himself they weren’t real. What if he’s not a hallucination, and I kill him? He stopped the kick just before it could connect.

“Come on, get out of it!” Harry shouted.

He found himself wrestling with an ever-increasing mass of tiny aliens who were swarming ant-like over each other and Harry in their bid to free the grey alien. It’s like that episode of Star Trek, where they’re overrun with squeaking powderpuffs! Harry thought. He almost laughed, then realised that he was being overwhelmed by the sheer bulk of numbers of the small, ghostly-white, canary-twittering aliens. He wondered, How many powderpuffs does it take to overwhelm a grown man?

Despite Harry’s determination to hold onto the grey alien, he felt the small hand slipping from his grasp. Until he held onto the alien by only the index finger. For a moment, he managed to hold onto the finger, feeling a strange knobbly lump in his hands. At first, he thought that it was the middle knuckle of the alien’s index finger. Then the alien’s hand finally slipped from Harry’s grasp, leaving the knobbly lump behind.

With a canary-twitter of relief, the grey dwarf-sized alien raced toward the electronic door. It held out its left hand, but this time the door did not open for it.

“Open sez a-me!” said Harry, recalling Prendergast’s sarcasm earlier. “Why won’t the door open for him now?”

A second alien raced across and held out its left hand. The door whooshed open and the grey alien raced out into the corridor, closely followed by the other aliens. Who had begun to drop away from Harry, to race out into the corridor after their leader.

How many powderpuffs does it take to overwhelm a grown man? Harry thought for the second time.

As the door whooshed shut again, Harry looked down into his hands and for the first time saw what he had taken from the alien’s index finger.

“A red ring?” said Harry, looking down at the crimson stone. “They’ve been using a red ring to somehow activate the key card sensor in the door!”

He walked across to the electronic door. Holding out the ring, he said, “Open sez a-me.”

Nothing happened.

Staring at the grey-metal door, he said, “Why doesn’t the stupid thing open?”

Harry stared at the red, faceted “stone” on the ring, running one finger along it. The stone was cold to the touch and had a smooth talcum-like feel to it. Although it was much harder than talc. When he held it up to sniff at the ring, it had a tart chemical smell, “Like correction fluid,” Harry decided.

Harry scratched at the ring for a second with his thumbnail. Then, afraid to damage the ring, he stopped and held it out toward the door again.

Again, nothing happened.

“Maybe you have to hold it at a particular angle?” he said. He tried holding the ring at a dozen different angles before it occurred to him: Or at a particular height? I must be almost twice the height of the aliens! He dropped to his knees and began experimenting again.

After two or three minutes, there was a low humming from the key card slot. The door thump-thump-thumped in its bracket for a moment, as though it were about to open.

“No dice,” said Harry aloud. “Well, what’s wrong now?” He continued trying the ring at the same angle -- level with the top of the key card slot, but at a forty-degree angle to the left. He received the same result several times: the key card slot would hum and the door opened perhaps a centimetre before slamming shut again.

Finally, more from desperation than any real hope of success, Harry slipped the ring onto his left little finger.

The key card slot hummed a degree louder and emitted a slight ozone smell that he had not noticed before, and finally, the electronic door whooshed open.

“Success!” cried Harry in satisfaction.

Standing, he walked across to the door and held it open with his left hand, while looking tentatively down the white-walled corridor to the left, then right.

There was no sign of the aliens, and no guards either. “Well, I guess this proves that the aliens are more than mere hallucinations! Unless this whole damn thing is one giant LSD trip!” Harry said. He gingerly stepped out into the corridor.

Hearing the electronic door whoosh closed behind him, Harry turned back, startled. “Just relax!” he told himself.

He held his left hand out toward the key card slot outside the door. After a few seconds of experimenting, he found the right height and angle, and with a puff of ozone, the slot hummed and the door whooshed open again.

Harry hurriedly stepped back into the bedroom, then thought, No! I’ve got to go out and look around! Got to find the aliens, or ... He almost thought, Or a way out of here, then he decided, It’s not as though I’m being held prisoner here. I’m just being debriefed in an unusual situation! But he couldn’t quite convince himself. The electronic sealing doors certainly made him feel like a prisoner.

Harry stepped hesitantly back out into the corridor. He decided: It can’t hurt just to look around. And if I’m not a prisoner, then it’s not as though I’m escaping or anything!

He looked left, then right down the seemingly endless white corridor, before finally starting down to the left.

Every ten metres or so on each side of the corridor was a metal door. But Harry didn’t test the ring on the other doors, thinking: With my luck, I’d probably walk straight into General Prendergast’s sleeping quarters!

After walking what seemed like miles, Harry finally came to a T-junction. Which way now? he wondered, looking down each endless white corridor in turn. He had already started down toward the left when he realised that the two metal doors in front of him were elevators.

Do I dare go up to another level and risk getting lost? Harry wondered. Then he decided, Sure, why not? They’re not likely to shoot me, are they?” He held his left hand out toward the elevator. After all, the CIA can’t be as bad as Stephen King and Dean Koontz want us to believe.

Again, there was a sharp smell of ozone from the key card slot, followed by a low humming. Then the metal doors whooshed open.

Harry started forward ....

And almost stepped out into open space.

“Holy shit!” Harry cried, backing away from the empty elevator shaft. “The damn thing opened even though the lift isn’t there.”

Holding onto the metal railing halfway up the wall, he tentatively leant out into space to peer down into the seemingly bottomless chasm. And I thought I was already deep underground! he thought. After a second, he craned around to peer upwards and saw that the shaft extended as far again overhead as underfoot.

Fearful of falling, Harry reeled himself back to safety, then used the red ring to shut the elevator doors again, afraid of someone else falling down the shaft. So much for using the magic ring to summon an elevator, Harry decided.

He looked about himself for a moment, still wondering which way he should head. After a moment, he realised: I’ll never get out of this place without the elevators and the aliens seem to be gone -- if they were ever here -- so I might as well return to my cell. Assuming that I can find it again?

He turned and started back down the corridor.


After three-quarters of an hour, Harry had returned to the portion of the corridor where he believed his room to be. But although the doors were numbered, he had not thought to check what his room number was before leaving.

Seeing the rooms on one side numbered CM1171, CM1173, and CM1175, he hesitated, fairly certain that it was one of these three doors. But which one? he wondered: And who will I burst in on if I enter the wrong room?

After a few seconds’ hesitation, he decided to try the rooms in order and held the ring up to the key card slot outside room CM1171. After a few seconds of experimenting, he found the right height and angle, and with a burst of ozone, the door opened, and Harry stepped inside.

The room was a plain white-walled bedroom, the same as his own. Except that the bed was unmade and the closet was empty when he checked.

“Well, this isn’t it, that’s for sure,” Harry said, stepping back into the corridor.

Room CM1173 looked at first like a laboratory, with racks of glass piping and metalware, beakers of varicoloured powders or liquids, and metal tables holding all kinds of wooden or metal instruments. But then, noticing the leather straps on the padded table in the centre of the room, Harry said, “An operating table! Jesus, why would the CIA perform operations?” He gulped nervously and joked, “Looks like Stephen King and Dean Koontz were right after all.” He tried to smile at his attempt at humour, but the joke fell flat.

Harry stood staring at the table for a minute or more. “After all, it’s an operating table, not a torture device!” he said. Still, he had his doubts as he backed out into the corridor, wondering why they would need to keep patients strapped down.

“Well, third time lucky, I hope,” said Harry, approaching room CM1175.

Again, there was a strong smell of ozone from the key card slot as the door whooshed open. He stepped into the bedroom and sighed his relief, recognising his uniform folded on top of the dressing cabinet beside the bed.

“Thank God,” Harry said, as the door whooshed shut behind him.

At the sound of his voice, there was a rustling sound from his bed.

“What ...?” said Harry. He stepped back suddenly, expecting to discover a number of the heart-faced aliens hidden, waiting to jump him. They’ve come back for the red ring! he thought. He slipped the ring off his little finger and placed the ring into his pocket.

“All right, come out,” Harry called, trying to sound braver than he felt.

Instead of lurking behind the bed, though, as he approached, the “visitor” revealed herself in the bed.

“Hello, been out walking?” asked Verna Madison, rolling over in the bed.

“I’m sorry, I thought this was ...” said Harry, starting to back toward the door. He stopped to stare as Verna allowed the blankets to drop, revealing her opulent, pear-shaped breasts.

“Holy shit!” said Harry, unable to take his gaze away from her body.

Verna laughed, then said, “Take off your pyjamas and join me. After all, it is your bed.”

Looking down at himself, Harry realised for the first time that he had spent the last couple of hours exploring the labyrinth-like corridors in only his pyjamas. It’s a good thing I didn’t find my way back to the surface! Harry thought. I would have looked great strolling down the George Washington Parkway in my pyjamas.

“Come on, don’t be shy,” teased Verna. She threw back the blankets and stepped out naked to saunter across toward him.

“Holy Jesus!” said Harry, wondering if this were a hallucination too. But he did not resist as the beautiful brunette hurriedly undressed him.

She neatly folded his pyjamas on top of his uniform on the dressing cabinet.

“Now come to bed like a good boy,” Verna teased, pulling him by one arm.

Please God, don’t let this be just a hallucination! thought Harry as he eagerly followed her to bed.

“Don’t worry, I’ll be gentle with you,” teased the brunette, almost dragging him down on top of her.

“Be as rough as you like,” he answered, trying to match her light-hearted tone as his hardness sank deep into her soft, moist core.

This is so good! Harry thought as his body seemed to liquefy and melt into hers. It was like swimming a sweet-perfumed ocean, whose rolling waves of soft flesh enveloped him almost vampire-like, to draw his power and energy out of him.

Oh God, please don’t let it ever end! Harry thought, seemingly hours into their marathon lovemaking session. But eventually it did end, and Harry and Verna collapsed exhausted into each other’s arms.


It seemed only minutes later when Harry awakened again. Sitting up in bed, he found that he was alone and wondered: Was she only a hallucination after all? But the sweet rose smell of Verna’s perfume still scented the air.

Every muscle in his body ached as though he had just run a marathon. So he staggered to the en-suite to have a long, hot shower.

This is more like it! he thought as the heat and steam took the aching from his body. However, the hot water reminded him of the warmth of Verna Madison’s soft body a few hours earlier.

“Now, how much do I tell the general about last night?” Harry wondered aloud as he returned naked to the bedroom.

Harry had dressed and was putting away his pyjamas under his pillow when he remembered the red ring he had taken from the aliens.

He hesitated for a moment, looking around his bedroom. He recalled: I put it into my pyjama jacket pocket when I first entered the room last night. Except then I didn’t realise that I was only wearing my pyjamas.

Picking up his pyjama jacket, he began quickly feeling around for the bulge of the ring. It must be here somewhere, he thought as his fingers failed to locate the ring.

Throwing the pyjama top onto his bed, he felt through the pants, in case the ring had fallen out of his pocket. “It can’t have just disappeared!” He threw the pants onto his bed, also.

Harry dropped to his knees to start poring through the lush white carpet. He spent nearly fifteen minutes scouring the deep carpet before finally conceding that the ring was not there.

Perhaps the aliens returned and took it when I was showering? he thought. But how could they have found it? Without knowing where it was, they would have had to turn the room inside out! Even with the shower water running, he would have heard them.

But the only other time that they could have entered was while I was sleeping? When we were sleeping! he corrected himself: How could they have searched through the whole room to find it without waking one of us? Even if I was exhausted, Verna ....

He stopped as another thought occurred to him: Unless Verna took it? In which case, she must be in league with the aliens!

He didn’t want to believe it. But he recalled Verna leaping naked from his bed to help him out of his pyjamas the night before. “Which she neatly folded onto the dressing cabinet!” he remembered. “Which would have allowed her to feel the ring in the pocket. Even if she didn’t see me put it there when I entered the room.”

Harry was still down on his hands and knees when he heard the whoosh of the electronic door. He looked around, expecting to see Verna Madison with his breakfast tray. But when he looked up, he saw two black CIA agents. The first, Dennis Fraser, carried Harry’s breakfast tray. The second man was a stranger to Harry.

“Hi,” said Fraser, setting Harry’s tray down on the dressing table. He thumbed back toward the other man, “This is Deke Thompkins.”

“Hello, Deke,” said Harry. For a second, the black man simply stared at Harry. Finally, by way of answer, he nodded his head ever so slightly.

“I guess he must be the strong, silent type,” joked Harry, hoping to lighten the mood a little. Dennis Fraser chortled; however, Deke Thompkins merely stared at Harry. Not openly hostile, but certainly not encouraging friendship.

“What happened to Verna this morning?” asked Harry, hoping to change the subject.

For a moment, Fraser stared at him, as though not comprehending the question. Finally, he said, “Oh, you mean why didn’t she come with your breakfast tray? She was only filling in till we found a replacement for Jackson Laguna.

“I guess you’ll have to make your own bed today,” added the black man with a slight lecherous smirk.

Surely he doesn’t know Verna slept her last night? Surely she wouldn’t have told him something like that? Harry thought.

“You can’t have Verna and toast every morning for breakfast, you know,” joked Deke Thompkins, speaking for the first time. The two agents burst into chortling laughter while Harry blushed from embarrassment.


“A red ring?” asked General Wallace T. Prendergast in disbelief. Harry had told him everything that had happened the night before, only leaving out Verna’s visit to his room.

“That’s right,” agreed Harry.

He stared up at the Stars-and-Stripes above the general’s desk to avoid looking Verna in the eye. However, he was unable to ignore the rose scent of her perfume and found himself glancing around toward her from time to time. He sensed that she was also stealing half-guilty looks in his direction, although their eyes never met.

“What was it, a big red ruby?” asked Prendergast. “From the cave of the forty thieves, perhaps?” The general waved his left hand as though he were making magical passes, “‘Open sez a-me,’ and with a wave of the magic ruby, the electronic door swings open?”

“It wasn’t a ruby,” said Harry defensively, trying his best to ignore the general’s sarcasm. “It was soft like feldspar or gypsum, and I could scratch it with my fingernail.”

“Well, maybe they have soft rubies on Mars or Alpha Centauri, or wherever your little heart-faced aliens come from?” suggested General Prendergast. He leant forward in his chair and stared hard at the lieutenant for a moment. Before finally saying the words that Harry had heard so many times over the last few days: “All right, let’s go through it all again.”

After a deep sigh of frustration, Harry told his story from the beginning again. This time afraid that he might trip himself up since he had had to make minor modifications to the truth to avoid mentioning Verna Madison’s role in the disappearance of the red ring.

“All right, so you grabbed one of the little white aliens and wrestled off the ring?” repeated General Prendergast. “So how did they get outta the room?”

“Another alien had a second ring.”

“Jesus, how many magic red ruby rings do they have? They really must have tracked down the cave of the forty thieves.” The general sat forward in his chair again -- making Harry gag from the overpowering smell of body odour and cheap cologne -- and asked the question Harry had been dreading: “Okay, so you grabbed the ring ... The first ring from the alien’s finger, so what happened to the ring?”

“I placed it in my pyjama pocket. Then, after taking a shower this morning, I looked for the ring, but it was gone,” explained Harry. Knowing that it was starting to sound implausible, he added, “I guess they came back for it while I was showering.”

“The aliens came back for it while you were showering?” repeated Prendergast. He stared at Harry so hard that the lieutenant had to break eye contact to stare down into his hands in his lap.

“That’s what I assume,” agreed Harry. He expected the general to grill him long and hard on that point. Instead, to Harry’s surprise, Prendergast said:

“Well, I guess that’s no screwier than anything else you’ve told me so far.” He got Harry to tell the story a second time, then a third, then a fourth, until Harry lost count of how many times he had repeated his story. Sometimes just the previous night’s episode, sometimes from his first encounter over Beale Air Force Base right through to the present. Or up to some point when the general would suddenly interrupt with some question or piece of sarcasm.

By the end of the day, Harry’s back ached almost as much as his head. He felt as though he had been grilled both inside and out.

As he stood to salute the general, Harry caught a glimpse of Verna Madison staring guiltily in his direction, but she hurriedly looked away. But as the general went over to the door, Verna hurried across to Harry. To his astonishment, she grabbed his right hand, gave it a quick squeeze, and whispered, “Thank you.”

“What ...?” began Harry. He wanted to ask why she had taken the ring, but before he could ask, she had breezed past him, leaving behind only a faint trace of her perfume.

Looking past Verna, Harry saw Dennis Fraser and Deke Thompkins standing by the door waiting to escort him back to his room.

As Harry walked over, Fraser grinned and said, “I wouldn’t waste my time on her, Lieutenant. She has the reputation for being a bit of an iceberg. They say that if the Titanic had crashed into her, there’d have been no survivors at all.”

Dennis Fraser and Deke Thompkins chortled at the joke. But Harry thought, You might be surprised! He remembered with fondness Verna, as she had been in his room the previous night.


That night, Harry again tipped his coffee down the toilet. Then he climbed into bed, hoping that Verna would appear again. Not likely, she was only trying to get back the ring for her alien friends, he realised. Yet he couldn’t help wishing, half believing that she might return to his room.

Looking across at his uniform folded upon the dressing cabinet, he remembered Verna undressing him the night before and folding his pyjamas on top of the uniform. At some stage, taking the red ring from my pyjama pocket! he thought, wondering why she had done it.


Flight Lieutenant Harry Easton stared out through the windshield of his Lockheed Martin SR-72 Darkstar fighter. The long, silver submarine-shaped object was still well ahead of him, however, his fighter was rapidly overtaking it.

“Able-Baker,” Harry reported into his microphone. “I have the UFO in sight now.”

“Are you within clear visual range?” asked the flight controller.

“Negative, but I am rapidly approaching visual range,” Harry said. At first, for just a second, he thought, My God, it’s real! A real flying saucer! as he approached. Then he realised that it was only the way that the sunlight reflected off the object.

“Affirmative, I have the UFO in visual range now,” Harry said. “Sorry to disappoint you, Tom, but it’s just another advertising blimp that’s broken its moorings.”

“Whew,” said the flight controller in mock relief. “I was afraid we were under attack from Mars or Alpha Centauri.”

“Not this time, Tom,” said Harry with a laugh. “You guys have been sending me up chasing UFOs for two years now, and I’ve never yet seen a single little green alien. I’m beginning to think that there ain’t no sich animal.”

“Oh, don’t say that,” teased the flight controller. “You’ll take all the expectancy out of this job.”

“I’m turning to begin ...” started Harry.

He stopped and stared intently at the blimp, which for just a second had seemed to have rows of small portholes running along its side.

“What’s up?” asked Tom.

“For a second, I thought I saw a white dwarf-sized alien, holding what looked like a white baton.”

“A baton? Maybe it’s the alien equivalent of a cheerleader. Did it do handstands and shout, ‘Rah! Rah! Rah!’ or ‘Sez Boom Bah!’?”

Harry chuckled, but then a long yellow beam shot from the advertising blimp and encased the outer hull of his SR-72 Darkstar.

“Oh my God, it’s shot me!” Harry called into his mike. “It’s shot me, and my fighter is breaking up around me!”

“But advertising blimps don’t shoot down Darkstar fighter planes,” said a voice that sounded remarkably like Harry’s own voice, over the microphone.

Then the Lockheed Martin SR-72 fell apart, and Harry began plummeting back toward the Earth.


Harry awakened with a start to hear a very familiar voice say, “He’s still not buying all of it. He remembers it shot him down.”

There was an answering canary-like twittering, and Harry thought: They’ve come back and brought a human quisling with them! He caught the aroma of strong B.O. and cheap cologne and thought: General Prendergast? Surely he can’t be involved with them?

Harry opened his lids the slightest crack and saw dozens of the white or grey, heart-faced aliens. At first, he thought that they were in his bedroom. Then, to his shock, he smelt the chemical odours and realised: I’m in the laboratory! He tentatively tried to move his hands and legs, then realised that he was strapped to the operating table.

So this is what the straps are for? Harry thought. He had visions of being tortured or having portions of his brain cut out. Harry’s first instinct was to panic. But he told himself: Hold on, if they were going to operate, I’d have been anaesthetised.

Harry could feel the light-as-a-feather touch of the grey-fleshed alien and knew that he was being examined again. After a few seconds, the grey alien moved over to stand near the head of the table. He felt the feathery touch around his temples, then the alien’s heart-shaped head loomed toward him as it bent down to examine Harry.

He could smell its sweet, sugary breath for a few seconds as their faces were almost touching. Then the alien pulled away and began canary-twittering at a furious rate.

Harry smelt the overpowering aroma of B.O. as Wallace Prendergast stepped forward.

“There’s no use pretending. We know that you’re awake,” said the general.

Reluctantly, Harry opened his eyes. Although his arms and legs were restrained, he managed to move his neck and saw Verna Madison standing behind the general. The brunette smiled wanly at Harry, then looked down at her feet guiltily. Behind Verna, Harry saw Dennis Fraser and Deke Thompkins.

“So you’re all working with them,” said Harry. More from resignation at his fate than from accusation.

“If you want to put it like that,” said General Prendergast.

“How else could you put it, you quisling?” demanded Harry. And for the first time since they had met, the general seemed intimidated by Harry.

“Well, er ...” began Wallace T. Prendergast, quickly recovering his composure. “Throughout human history, right back to biblical times, there have been sightings of alien spacecraft, you know.”

“So what?” asked Harry, puzzled.

“So, haven’t you ever wondered why they have been observing us for so long?”

“Well, um,” said Harry, finding himself on the back foot this time.

“The answer is that their planet is dying. It’s not Mars by the way, or Alpha Centauri, as I said earlier. It’s many, many light-years from Earth. Far too distant even for the Hubble Space Telescope to pick up.”

He stopped for a moment and adjusted his tie, although it already looked immaculate. “Anyway, they need a new planet to colonise. They’ve been coming here in dribs and drabs for millennia, planning an invasion and takeover of this planet.”

“Well, for God’s sake,” said Harry, straining against the arm straps, “if you know all that, why are you conspiring with them? Why aren’t you trying to stop them? Surely we’ve got the technology: neutron bombs, A-bombs, what have you?”

“Perhaps,” said the general. “But even if we could use them, how would we get to them? Their planet is thousands of light-years from here. They have some kind of teleportation drive that allows them to warp from one place to another in nanoseconds.”

“That’s how you were shot down in California and parachuted to Earth in Missouri,” explained Verna Madison.

Ignoring the colonel, Prendergast continued: “But we don’t have that capability. We could never send neutron devices to their planet with any real hope of getting them there. Or of being able to stop them, simply abandoning their planet en masse to come to Earth.” He paused and breathed deeply, nervously, before adding, “Even if it hadn’t already been too late.”

“I don’t understand?” said Harry.

“Haven’t you ever wondered how loonies like Nixon, Reagan, Bush, or Donald Dum-Dum managed to get elected president in the USA? How did deadbeats like Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Yeltsin, and Putin ever get into power in Russia? How bozos like Wilson, Thatcher, Major, Blair could be elected Prime Minister in England ...?” He stopped and shrugged. “Hell, the list is endless.”

“You’re saying that these deadbeats and airheads aren’t up to taking on and defeating the alien invasion?” guessed Harry.

“No. I’m saying that we fought and lost a war of the worlds five and a half decades ago.”

“We fought ...?” echoed Harry, not believing his own ears. “Five and a half decades ago?”

“We’ve been monitoring your dreams, Lieutenant. We know that you’ve wondered about why Project Blue Book shut down so mysteriously in 1969. The answer is that there was an alien invasion that year. Not just here in the USA, but in Canada, Europe, Asia, Australia, Africa, and South America. Hundreds of simultaneous strikes at hundreds of army, navy, and air force bases around the world. The whole thing was over in a matter of hours.”

“But surely people must have noticed something odd going on?”

“Possibly. But there was the Vietnam War on the front page in this country and Australia. Any number of other wars in Europe and Asia. There may have been an unusual number of UFO sightings that day, but the war news managed to keep them off the front page.”

“And ever since they’ve ruled the world?” asked Harry. He fervently hoped that this was some kind of CIA-induced LSD trip.

“Only the various presidents, prime ministers, chairpersons, and other world leaders have ever known.”

“But it’s preposterous,” began Harry. But looking around at the dwarf-sized aliens (some standing on stools to lean over him) and CIA officers around the room, he wondered: Or is it?

“Ever since December 1969, we’ve kept it hushed up,” continued Prendergast. “Which is why you present us with a bit of a problem. As you know, we’ve sent the Men in Black to silence UFO witnesses down the years. Most could be quickly scared off or bought off. But there were always a few troublemakers."

As the general spoke, one of the aliens started to lower a plastic breathing mask toward the lieutenant.

“Nooooo!” cried Harry as the foul-smelling gas descended toward him. Oh God, they’re going to murder me! thought Harry as the mask covered his face. The gas seemed to suck his breath away, empty his lungs of air, as though smothering him to death.

“Relax, it’ll all be over soon,” he heard Verna say in a soothing voice as he began to go under.


Flight Lieutenant Harry Easton stared out through the windshield of his Lockheed Martin SR-72 Darkstar fighter. The long, silver-white object was still some distance away. But it was close enough to allow him to make an identification.

“Able-Baker,” Harry reported into his microphone, “I have a UFO in visual range now.”

“Confirm identification of UFO,” instructed the flight controller.

“UFO is a semi-deflated weather balloon,” confirmed Harry.

“Roger, Able-Baker.”

“Am now turning to return ...” began Harry. Then he realised that he was in trouble.

“Able-Baker, Able-Baker, my engine has seized up. I have no flight control.”

“Attempt to glide toward the ocean to abandon your fighter in the water,” instructed the flight controller.

“Roger,” replied Harry. For the next five minutes, he glided the plane toward the ocean before conceding that he could never make it.

The last thing that Harry remembered before crashing was a great grove of oak trees as his SR-72 Darkstar came down in Yosemite National Park.


Harry Easton awakened to the smell of antiseptic and the sight of starched-uniformed nurses bustling around him. There was also the sweet smell of red roses and the foul odour of B.O., badly masked by an abundance of cologne.

Turning his head slowly to the right, Harry saw a tall, heavily-built, fiercely blond, bear of a man -- from whom the B.O. emanated. And also a tall, shapely brunette, whose perfume reminded him of roses.

“Hello, Harry,” said the brunette. “I’m Colonel Verna Madison. And this is General Wallace T. Prendergast.”

Harry nodded toward them, too weak still to sit up or try to salute. He found the brunette both attractive and vaguely familiar.

“Hello, lieutenant,” said the general, his bear-like face suddenly breaking into a broad smile. “Don’t worry, your injuries are only superficial -- you were lucky. Doctor Chang says that you’ll be released in a week at the outside.”

Harry was astonished. He had assumed that he had been badly hurt in the crash. He allowed Verna Madison to help him to a seated position in bed, enjoying the closeness of the brunette.

“When you’re well enough, the colonel will need to take down your account of the accident. Then in a few weeks you’ll be up there chasing weather balloons again,” joked the general.

Harry smiled at the humour, although he had the disconcerting idea that it was not natural to the general; that he was forcing himself to act friendly.

“But there’s plenty of time for that in a couple of days, when you’ve got your strength back,” said Verna. She gave Harry a broad smile, which seemed more natural than the general’s.

Harry attempted to return the smile, only hoping that it wasn’t looking like some kind of lopsided sneer. His face felt strangely numb, so that he really did not know what his facial muscles were doing.

“I’m sure we’re going to be good friends,” said Verna.

Harry felt his pulse racing and his loins stirring. I hope so, he thought, I certainly hope so!

THE END
© Copyright 2025 Philip Roberts
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia