Adam advanced the video, stopping at a witness — a Caucasian man in his early seventies, his long hair thick and white.
“Good morning. My name is Harland Bentley. Between 1957 and 1959 I was a PFC in the United States Army, stationed north of Washington, D.C., on a Nike-Ajax missile base, close to Olney, Maryland. In May of 1958 at about 6 a.m., I heard a noise outside that sounded like a pulsating transformer. I sat up in my bunk, looked out the window, and saw a craft heading for the ground. It crashed; pieces broke off and it immediately took off again.
“The next night I was on radar duty. I get a call from the Gaithersburg missile base. He says, ‘Hey, I got twelve to fifteen UFOs outside, fifty to one hundred feet above me.’ So I asked him, ‘What does it sound like?’ He took his head mike off, held it out the van window, and said, ‘Here!’ It was the same sound I heard the previous morning, except there were a lot more of them. My radar was on stand-by, so I immediately turned it on and got the blip just outside of the ground clutter. I marked it on my radar screen; all of a sudden they took off as the sweep came around, hitting the blip. When it came around and hit it again, that blip was two-thirds of the way off my radar scope. In order to get that far, at a constant velocity, that’s 17,000 miles an hour. I will testify before Congress if necessary and explain exactly what happened. Thank you.”
Adam fast-forwarded to a female eyewitness, her blonde hair and features somehow familiar. I’ve seen her before…
“Good morning everyone. My name is Donna Hare and I worked at Philco-Ford Aerospace from 1967 to 1981. During that time, I was a design illustrator draftsman. I did the launch slides and moon landing slides, and also projection plotting boards — lunar maps for NASA. We were a contractor, but most of the time I worked on site in Building 8. I had a secret clearance, which was not that high, but I was able to go into the restricted areas.
“One day during down time, which was between missions, I entered a NASA photo lab across the hallway. I was talking to one of the techs in there, and he drew my attention to a photograph — a NASA photograph. It had a dot on it and I said, ‘Is that a dot on the emulsion?’ He smiled and said, ‘Round dots on the emulsion don’t leave round shadows on the ground.’ This was an aerial photograph of the Earth; it had pine trees on it, and the shadows of the craft or whatever it was were in the same angle as the trees.
“By its very nature it was a UFO — and I wanted to clarify that to the gentleman who was talking to me. At that point I realized it was being kept secret because I asked him, ‘What are you going to do with this piece of information?’ And he said, ‘We always airbrush these out before we sell them to the public.’
“After that, I decided I would ask questions of other people that worked there. And I found that I had to ask them away from the site, never on site. A guard told me that he was asked to burn some photographs and not to look at them. There was another guard guarding him, watching him burn the photographs. He said he was too tempted; he looked at one and it was a picture of a UFO. And he was very descriptive — I can go into that later with anyone. He told me that he was immediately hit in the head and knocked out. He had a big gash on his forehead and was terrified.
“Another incident: I knew someone in quarantine with the Apollo astronauts. He told me that the Apollo astronauts saw craft on the moon when we landed. He too was afraid; he said that the astronauts were told to keep this quiet; they’re not allowed to talk about it. My boss didn’t know about it, some people who sat right next to me didn’t know about it. It’s very strange, because I don’t know how they can do it, but they can let some people know about it but not others. I am willing to testify before Congress that what I’m saying is true. Thank you very much.”
Adam looked up as another hotel guest attempted to enter the business center using his room key. Caucasian and in his early seventies, he wore a black suit and tie and a striped dress shirt. White eyebrows and sideburns stood out against pink flesh tones, his short-cropped greasy gray hair fashioned by a barber on a military base.
Unable to align the passkey’s magnetic strip, he gave up. Tapping the glass door with his wedding ring, the guest motioned to the lock, his piggish ice-blue eyes stared unblinkingly at Adam, bearing the hardened gaze of a sociopath.
“Can you let me in? My key doesn’t seem to be working.”
Manipulating the mouse, Adam clicked off the YouTube link, the cubicle’s partition shielding the computer’s monitor from the stranger’s glare. “Ask the front desk.”
The man’s face flushed red. A telltale jiggle of the handle revealed the spark of anger, then he forced a smile and left, heading for the front desk.
Adam quickly located the Chrome menu in the top right corner of his screen and opened a tab displaying the computer’s browsing history. Opening the drop-down menu on the History tab, he selected the Beginning of Time tab as the time range, and deleted the computer’s browser history as the guest returned with the night manager.
The man with the white eyebrows and soulless eyes entered, allowing the door to close on the manager’s apology. “You could have let me in.”
“Sorry, I was watching porn.” He winked. “Didn’t want to use the company laptop. You never know when Big Brother is watching.”
Collecting his empty ginger ale can, Adam pushed past the older man and limped out of the business center, heading for the elevators.
9
Located on Sewell’s Point peninsula, the U.S. Naval Station in Norfolk, Virginia is the largest military base of its kind, supporting ships and submarines operating in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans as well as the Mediterranean Sea.
Admiral Mark Hintzman, Commander-in-Chief of U.S. Fleet Forces, had been in a deep sleep when the call had come in. Groggy, he checked the text.
“Christ… is this really necessary?”
His wife, Jayne sat up in bed. “Is what necessary? Who is it?”
“I’m needed on the base.”
“At three in the morning?”
“It’s nothing. Go back to sleep.”
“You’d better not have a mistress, Hintzman.”
“I’m sixty-two years old with two bulging discs and a swollen prostate — what the hell am I going to do with a mistress?”
Limping to the walk-in closet, he located a pair of jeans, a wool sweater and sneakers, and carried them into the bathroom to dress. By the time he exited his wife was already snoring.
Entering the kitchen, he debated whether he had time to brew a cup of coffee when the military limo pulled up outside his home. Putting on his windbreaker jacket, he yanked open the laundry room door and stepped out into the brisk night air.
Admiral Hintzman acknowledged his driver and climbed in the back seat. He nodded off before they had pulled out of the residential complex.
Ten minutes later he was awakened. “Sir, we’re at the gate.”
Rolling down his window, the Admiral flashed his Zebra security badge, the cold penetrating the vehicle’s cocoon of warmth. Satisfied, the armed marine raised the steel barrier, allowing the vehicle access inside the perimeter fencing.
A poorly-lit asphalt driveway led to an innocuous steel-framed, one-story prefabricated building that looked more like a supply shack than anything which would warrant the presence of a high-ranking officer.
The driver parked before a solitary entrance guarded by two marines armed with M-16s. Exiting the limo, the admiral offered his badge to one of the men’s flashlight beams, the other guard holding open the reinforced steel door.