In the chairs ahead of him, Tommy yawned, audibly and to quite a few grins.
“Not the most interesting at times, I know,” Ellis said from the side of the room, “but it just might save your life.”
“I find it fascinating,” Paul said, and was immediately met with a round of chuckles from the more ‘macho’ men of the team.
“The Reticulum constellation is relatively close to us, celestially-speaking,” Stan continued, pointing at the star map on the wall, “just 40 light years away… or 175,000 years if we were travelling in a regular space craft like we take to the moon.”
From the back, someone whistled.
Stan nodded to that. “Of course, that’s not practical, so we’d most likely take a craft that could get us there in a fraction of a fraction of the time. But then that’s something which we don’t have and probably won’t for some time.”
“At least not publicly,” Stu said from the back of the room.
“And that goes with Zeta 2 Reticuli as well,” Stan continued, “the name given to the Gray’s home world upon its discovery in 1944. Almost immediately it was taken from the list of known and discovered planets, the truth of what it held just too dangerous for the general public to know.”
“Despite the Betty and Barney Hill incident in ’61,” Ellis said from the side of the room.
Tommy again gave an audible yawn.
“So what do we know about these things, sir?” Turn asked, his eyes open and looking on quizzically.
“The Grays function in a mode that’s apparently military in nature with a rigidly defined social structure that holds science and ‘conquering worlds’ to be the prime movers,” Stan went on. “Physically, they stand 3 to 31/2 feet in height, have a small, thin build and heads much larger than a human’s. There are no auditory lobes, no hair, just limited facial features, a slit mouth and no nose to speak of. Their arms resemble those of a praying mantis in its normal position, and they reach to the creatures’ knees, the long hands with the small palm and claw-like fingers of a various number of digits — often two short digits and two long, but some species have three or four fingers. They have small feet with four small claw-like toes, organs that are similar to human organs but which have obviously developed according to a different mutational process. Each has two separate brains, movement that’s deliberate, slow and precise. The two separate brains are held apart from one another by a mid-cranial lateral bone, meaning they have an anterior and posterior brain, though there’s no apparent connection between the two. Some autopsies have revealed a crystalline network which is thought to have a function in telepathic functions, probably to help maintain the group-consciousness between them. Functions of group consciousness does have a disadvantage in that decisions within the larger Gray collective come rather slowly as the matter at hand filters through the group awareness to those who must make a decision. To top it all off, they’ve also evolved beyond the need for reproductive systems or digestive systems and now only reproduce by cloning.”
“So no kickin’ ‘em in the balls,” Tommy laughed, and a few of the other men joined in, mostly the young and less-educated, like Tommy himself, and Bobbie. They were the two constant jokers of the team, but two they had to put up with — they were super soldiers. Turn couldn’t help but think the men’s opinion of he and the others was diminished because of the silly antics of those two. But then he knew they were just blowing off steam, getting ready for what lay ahead of them.
“How ‘bout kickin’ ‘em in those big, stupid eyes of theirs instead?” Jerry piped-up next, eliciting another round of laughter.
“Ah, yes… the eyes,” Stan said, his voice rising over the rowdy men. “They have large tear-shaped eyes — slanted approximately 35 degrees — which are opaque black with vertical slit-pupils.”
Stand paused, as if he were waiting for something, but when it never came, he continued with the lecture.
“These cloning techniques have been given to our government in exchange for ‘favors,” Stan continued with only a slight frown, like a tired high school teacher that’d heard and seen it all before. “Their genetics are partly based on insectoidal genetics, close relative to the insect family. The larger Grays — known as Type B, or Bellatrax, Grays — apparently have some vestigial reproductive capability, and some of the hybrid species that have been cross-bred with the taller Reptilian species have full reproductive capability.”
“Ahem,” Ellis coughed from the side of the room, “why don’t we get into their minds… if you will.”
Stan nodded. “The brain capacity of a Gray is estimated to be between 2500 and 3500 cc, compared to 1300 cc for the average human. Due to the cloning process, the neural matter is artificially-grown brain matter, and the Grays have technology that enables them to insert memory patterns and consciousness into clones in any manner or pattern that they wish.”
“Clones?” Charlie echoed.
“Their science deals largely with the study of other life forms and genetic engineering,” Stu took up from the back, drawing the men’s attention. “They’ve supposedly had a part to play in the alteration of human genetics over thousands of years. It seems that they may be trying to cross breed with humans in order to create a ‘mixture race’ that would be better than either. It’s commonly believed that they’re a dying species, one that’s cloned so much that now, with each successive cloning, the species grows weaker. They’re trying to infuse new life into their species by creating the mixed breed.”
“There seem to be two main social classes,” Stan picked up. “One is the more hawkish, more abrupt, crude and blunt. The more dove-like ones are more refined and capable of a business-like behavior towards humans, and prefer to use more ‘diplomatic’ behavior to gain control over humans. This type of Gray is what I believe is being referred to as the ‘Orange’ class of Grays.”
“So how do we kill the bastards?”
Stan smiled as the men chuckled to Jerry’s remark.
“The Grays are photosensitive, meaning any bright light hurts their eyes.” Stan paused and waited for the men to get themselves together. “They avoid sunlight, and primarily travel at night for this reason. Camera flashes cause them to back up. That could be used as a weapon against them, but they recover quickly. Still,” he continued, giving the men a hard look, “that could buy enough time for an average person to escape. Use commands, or nonsensical words in the form of commands and they will back up. Their brain is more logical than ours and they do not create ’fun’. They don’t understand poetry either, so start spouting gibberish if you’ve got nothing else. What really confuses the hell out of ‘em, however, is saying things in Pig Latin. We learned that in a hurry upon our initial infiltrations after the base was lost in ’75, and used it against them quite well.”
“But not well enough to win,” Ellis reminded both Stan and the men.
Stan nodded before continuing. “The Grays read your intent, because they use your body’s frequency. The human race broadcasts a frequency, one that they recognize as an electromagnetic impulse. Each person has a slightly different frequency, and that difference is what we call ’personality’. When a human thinks, they broadcast strong impulses, in the case of ’fear’ the frequency is ’loud’ and easy to recognize.”
“And by the same right, a calm and composed mindset should be far more difficult to ’recognize,’” Carl pointed out.