Gary Tigerman, page 27
Like a sudden course shift by a school of fish, that media attention turned to Sandy Sokoff and Representative Phillip Lowe as they emerged from the Oval Office, and took places on a raised platform with an assemblage of cabinet heads, service-branch chiefs, astronauts, and National Science Academy guiding lights, including Nobelist Dr. Paula Winnick.
Things quieted down only when the White House press secretary appeared, stepping to the lectern decorated with the presidential seal and adjusting the microphone. Looking gamely out and around, he then willed everyone to a respectful silence, holding the event hostage until he got it.
“The President will make a short statement and then take your questions. Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.”
Reaching their assigned seats as the French doors opened off the West Wing, Jake and Angela stayed standing with the other journalists and dignitaries now rising to their feet as the first notes of “Hail to the Chief,” played with nineteenth-century vigor by the Marine Corps Band.
And then he was there, striding up to the presidential podium, the smiling leader of the greatest nation on Earth, seeming to enjoy the inexplicably warm February sun and the wash of camera flashes before hurtling into his speech without preamble.
Republican and Democratic presidents alike have wrestled over the years with the duty and responsibility of protecting this nation, oftentimes at the expense of a more perfect candor with the American people. During the Second World War, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman both bore the terrible burden of their knowledge of the top-secret Manhattan Project, developing the first atomic weapons, something that could not have been shared openly with the public during wartime, for obvious reasons.
Governments must be able to keep defense-related secrets. It is a legitimate and crucial element of a nation’s overall security.
A few miles away, the President’s speech was being heard on a portable boom box in a morguelike medical lab at the CIA’s compound in Langley, Virginia. On a stainless steel table in the chilly room, a cadaver identified only as Dunsinane Man was having nail samples taken from its six-fingered hands.
During the long Cold War period, every administration faced a similarly difficult national security problem as a result of the Space Race with the Soviets and discoveries made by both Russian and American satellites and confirmed by Apollo astronauts on the Moon …
The CIA nurse/technician placed genetic samples into tiny glass vials for testing and sealed each one with a label marked DUNSINANE.
On another metal table a few feet away, another body waited its turn. This one, however, was smaller, less than four feet in length, and encased in a Lucite chamber in which a precisely controlled environment was maintained. Through the thick plastic casing she could just make out the texture of its tough, gray skin and hairless limbs and torso: so different from the robust quasisimian quality of Dunsinane Man, but the finger-count of six digits on its hands was the same.
As most of you now know, what was discovered on the Moon were artifacts left behind or abandoned by another intelligent species, a space-faring species like ourselves, who visited the Moon thousands of years ago. However, who they were, where they were from, why they left, and where they went—these are questions that remain a mystery.
At an enclave in Maryland horse country, every nuance of the President’s speech was being weighed and dissected by Admiral James T. Ingraham and a den full of key intelligence officers, Pentagon officials, and others from the private sector.
This has been one of our nation’s most closely guarded secrets for many reasons: one reason, frankly, was our pursuit of strategic advantage against America’s Communist adversaries during the Cold War decades. Our leaders wanted, understandably, to turn any technological discoveries made by the space program into a defense advantage for the free world. I personally believe it was a well-intentioned policy, a justified response during a difficult era in our history, but it was a policy that evolved beyond its usefulness.
Unfortunately, the almost obsessive secrecy that come to surround it ultimately caused the government, our democratically elected government, to break faith with the governed: with us, the American people.
“We can work with this.”
Admiral Ingraham’s commanding voice seemed to resonate with confidence. But exactly how reassured his grim-faced guests were was hard to determine at the moment.
From somewhere in the direction of the guarded front entrance to the compound, Ingraham’s two well-trained German shepherds began to bark and then went silent in a way that made the Admiral turn away from the President’s words.
Listening intently, he heard shouting from the direction of the heavy, electronic back gate. And then hard-to-identify scuffling sounds.
“Christ,” he said, when he was certain what it meant.
Then the den was awash in armed FBI and ATF agents taking both Admiral Ingraham and his outraged guests into custody and reading them their rights.
Into the homestretch of what would thereafter be referred to as “The Rose Garden Speech,” the President looked out at the assemblage of leaders, scientists, astronauts, and journalists and then turn his gaze straight into the TV cameras.
We share a different world now, a world of uncertainties beyond even those of the Cold War. In the face of the challenge of international terrorism, the great Russian and Chinese peoples are counted among America’s friends and allies. Many of you may wonder why, then, the profound truth that we are not the only intelligent life-form in God’s universe continued to be kept a secret by your government. The simple and most basic answer is: Your leaders were afraid. They were afraid that you would be afraid. But I believe that the American people prefer to know the truth and deserve to be told the truth.
Stopped by cheers and standing applause from everyone, including the press, the President waited for the reaction to die down.
Eyeing Jake’s more reserved reaction, Angela pulled him close.
“What?”
“Nothing about Orion,” he said. “Nothing about hearings.”
Angela squeezed his arm, refusing to be unhappy.
“It’s a beginning. A huge, important beginning.”
At Bethesda, Augie’s sister Emily opened the curtains to the sunlight and watched with a professional eye as the Navy nurses deftly changed the linens underneath the former astronaut’s unconscious body.
The veteran ICU nurses were proud to be attending the Space Hero as they changed the bags on his IV, took a blood pressure reading, and listened along with Emily to the President’s speech on the hospital-room TV.
Today, this administration intends to forge a new path of peaceful, international manned exploration of space and a new era of trust between the American people and their government. But before we talk about the future, I’d like to commend Commander Jake Deaver and Colonel Augie Blake for their public statements and for their moral integrity.
In particular, I want to send our heartfelt best wishes for a speedy recovery to Colonel Blake, who underwent heart surgery at Bethesda Naval Hospital last night …
When the loud alarm on the heart monitor went off, Emily jumped up to help the attending nurses in their heroic effort to revive her brother. Despite their ministrations and those of the attending physician, Augie had suffered a severe stroke, and twenty-three minutes and eighteen seconds later, he was officially pronounced.
86
In high Earth orbit, the Orion array of mirror satellites had been computer-tweaked into perfect alignment.
With a sharp stab of white igniting it from below, the Shield was silently illuminated in the awful, perfect deafness of space, encircling the world for sixty seconds in a Fulleresque soccer ball pattern of laser light.
And then, by executive order of the President of United States, the test activation of the planetary defense system was over.
87
February 21/West Texas
It wasn’t bitter cold, but the temperature was low enough that they could see their breath. They had parked the rented Subaru Outback on a dark rural road miles from the highway, but big-rig headlights could still be seen navigating toward the diffuse glow in the distance that was Houston.
Clamping two mesh cables on the terminals of the SUV’s battery, Jake followed the shielded lines with his little halogen flashlight to a black electronic device that had been set up between two camp chairs. He checked the settings.
In one of the chairs, wrapped in a thick wool Navajo blanket, Angela sat holding a cigar box and looking up at the stars.
“You know what?”
“What?” Jake wiped his hands on his jeans.
“Sometimes I feel this odd little rush of panic. You know? And then these waves of longing for I don’t know what that just haven’t made any sense to me. But I think I just figured it out …”
“Is it about innocence?” Jake held the flashlight so he could see her face.
“Or maybe just simpler times.” Angela shielded her eyes with the back of her hand. “Or the illusion of simpler times. Y’know what I mean?”
“Yes, I do.”
Jake kissed her impulsively, then aimed the flash back down on the black box device. He could feel her smile without having to see it.
“You ready?”
“Good to go.”
Deaver then tripped a toggle switch, triggering six pencil-thin red lasers that shot up into the desert sky, forming a three-sided pyramid.
Out beyond the laser geometry, the belt stars of Orion and the winking yellow light of Mars seemed to swing above them in the small wind that had come up, a breeze carrying the smell of sage and mesquite.
A gibbous moon waxed huge on the horizon.
Augie had been cremated and buried with ceremonial honors at the Arlington National Cemetery. But when Jake asked as a favor that his sister allow part of his ashes to be brought back to West Texas, she had agreed that Augie would probably like that.
Angela looked at the moon, imagining the young Colonel Blake in his spacesuit at Sinus Medii with Earthrise reflected in his gold visor. She then opened the cigar box she’d been holding.
Inside, a small amount of ashes kept company with a few tiny pieces of bone that had refused to burn.
Then, standing together, she and Jake each took a handful and looked out through the ruby laser projection now etching new geometries in the night air: pentagons, tetrahedrons, rhombuses.
“Well, hell.” Angela tossed the ashes into the lines of light and Deaver followed suit, transforming the gritty remains into the whirling carbon glitter of star dust, which is the beginning of all things.
“And good luck, Mr. Grotsky …”
“Wherever you are.”
A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR
Although this book is a work of fiction, readers often ask how much of the story is true. And basically the answer is: “as much as possible” and “more than could be included.” Here are a few of the more intriguing facts I uncovered in my research.
1. The Brookings Report. Commissioned by President Eisenhower in 1958, it was submitted to Congress a year later. The purpose of this blue-ribbon study was to identify the potential consequences and dangers to mankind inherent in NASA’s proposed exploration of our solar system. In regard to the issue of revealing evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence to the public, the report cited a potential for unprecedented social, religious, and political chaos. Authored by Margaret Meade, among others, the report recommended that the government consider not disclosing such information.
2. The Authority of the Department of Defense. All exploration of space is officially considered by the U.S. government to be under the jurisdiction of the Department of Defense, regardless of the NASA charter establishing the Space Agency as civilian. The Defense Department is also the primary client of the Space Shuttle program.
3. The ET Exposure Act. In 1968, the year before the Apollo program succeeded in putting a man on the Moon, Congress passed a little-known piece of legislation called the Extraterrestrial Exposure Act. It gave the head of NASA the right to indefinitely “quarantine” anyone exposed to extraterrestrial life or alien artifacts. Only the President could overrule the NASA administrator’s judgment, and anyone quarantined had no right to a judicial hearing and no recourse beyond appealing to the President of the United States.
4. The USA and the Moon, 1969–1975. After six manned trips to the Moon, the Americans came home and never set foot there again.
5. The Face on Mars. It was first photographed by the Viking mission in 1976. The Face and
“pyramidlike objects” found in the Cydonia region on Mars are aligned with planetary primes similar to the alignments of the oldest Pyramids found on the Giza Plateau in Egypt and at Teotihuacan in Mexico.
Sir Arthur C. Clarke has called attention to striking symmetries in many monumental objects on the Martian surface, which suggest “manmade” rather than natural creation. NASA’s official position remains that these are all natural formations, that the symmetries suggesting the work of intelligent beings are coincidental, and that the Face and the “pyramids” are tricks of light and shadow.
6. President Carter and the Vatican. During his 1976 presidential campaign, Jimmy Carter revealed to a reporter from Rolling Stone magazine that he had twice seen UFOs when he was in the Navy and vowed to find out what the government knew about them if he was elected to office. Once President, Carter asked his inherited CIA chief, George Herbert Walker Bush, for the intelligence files on UFO
phenomena. Bush declined, referring the new President to an obscure Select House subcommittee. A report was compiled and given to Carter by a woman working for that committee who had also attempted to obtain documents from the Vatican Archives in Rome concerning UFOs and extraterrestrial encounters going back hundreds of years. The Vatican declined to make this information available.
A senior counsel to the Jesuits who had been the White House’s unsuccessful go-between with the Vatican has since publicly acknowledged his effort and the subject matter.
7. Space Weapons Technology. During the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan publicly offered Mikhail Gorbachev the U.S. research and technology for the Space Defense Initiative, a.k.a. Star Wars, as a gift to the Russian people, and made public remarks about the future need for planetary defense. The Soviets declined the offer, proceeding to develop a photon laser cannon capable of striking targets in space. This work continues under various names in both countries, along with the development of so-called scalar weapons and other microwave beams adapted for military purposes and capable of intercepting targets at high altitude.
In a speech at the University of Georgia in 1997, Secretary of Defense William Cohen expressed concerns about terrorists having access to newly developed electromagnetic scalar beams capable of weaponizing weather and causing earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and even hurricanes.
In 1998, the Russians offered to put out a raging forest fire in Indonesia by creating an artificial hurricane, which they announced could be done from space. The Indonesians declined. Though this was reported in such major newspapers as the Los Angeles Times, there was no comment offered by the U.S.
government.
8. The Great Pyramid at Giza. The Great Pyramid is aligned with Sirius, the brightest star in the Southern Hemisphere, and with the constellation Orion in a way that makes it a “planetary clock,” capable of measuring the precessional movement of the Earth. The three oldest Pyramids at Giza are geometrically aligned on the ground in the same precise relationship to one another as the three stars that make up the “belt” in the constellation we call Orion. These pyramids are no more than five thousand years old, but their orientation and alignments appear to reference an earlier time: 10,500 B.C.E.
9. The Sphinx. In 1995, American and British university scientists studied water damage on the monument that had been previously assumed to be caused by wind and sand. Their confirmation that the damage had been caused by water places the building of the Sphinx at approximately 10,500 B.C.E., thousands of years before the existence of any known civilization considered capable of such a feat. This break with the theories of classical Egyptology has created an ongoing controversy. The Sphinx is oriented to the rising of the planet Mars and the word Cairo does mean “Mars” in ancient Sumerian.
10. The Billion-Dollar Mars Observer Mission, 1991–1993. From the moment it was launched, the Mars Observer mission was dogged by controversy over the issue of reimaging the Cydonia region. It carried cameras with a fifty-times greater resolution capability than those of the Viking mission in 1976
and would easily have been able to settle the question of whether the Face or the so-called pyramids in the Cydonia region were natural rock formations or products of intelligence. NASA promised that the pictures would be taken. The entire imaging contract, however, had been taken away from the famous Jet Propulsion Lab, in Pasadena, and subbed out for the first time in NASA history to a private contractor. NASA was then no longer responsible for imaging priorities, no longer committed to any live broadcast of images from Mars, and the private contractor could delay the release of any photographs for up to eighteen months.
Mars Observer performed flawlessly until forty-eight hours before it arrived at Mars, at which point it inexplicably “went dark” before any images could be transmitted back to Earth. It was officially declared lost. For years, NASA offered no explanation, and only recently confirmed rumors that the crucial radio link to the satellite had, against all established protocols, been accidentally turned off.
11. The Red Planet. The Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Odyssey satellites have confirmed that Mars did at one time have abundant water, a dense atmosphere, and a much warmer overall temperature, similar to Earth’s. According to NASA, the fossils present in the Martian asteroid ALH 84000 strongly suggest microbial life on the planet appeared 3.5 billion years ago: 1 billion years before life is known to have appeared on Earth. This presents a potential time frame for the development of life, possibly intelligent life, on Mars that would give it a considerable head start on the Earth.
