Adam nodded politely, wondering how they had gone from UFOs to judging wine.
“Next is the smell test. Once the wine is poured you want to swirl it around in the glass to release its natural aroma. Immature wines carry little or no bouquet, while a mature wine carries a robust fruity aroma.”
She inhaled, Adam following her lead. “Smells good.”
“Can you detect a hint of oak? That comes from the barrel where the wine was aged. Older bottles may only exude an aroma for a few moments after uncorking, so it’s best not to let an older wine breathe too long before drinking it.”
“Older wine, short breaths… got it.”
“Finally we get to the taste test. Taste is totally subjective, but we’re looking for two things — a rich flavor and an aftertaste. A good wine made from ripe grapes will linger in your mouth; an unpleasant bitter aftertaste means the wine is high in acidity. Go on, drink up.”
Adam drained the glass, the burgundy carrying a fruity taste with a bit of a kick.
“Do you like it?”
He didn’t, but he nodded anyway. “To be honest, I’m not much of a drinker.”
She filled his glass. “Keep chasing after zero-point-energy, and trust me, that will change.”
“Wait… what?”
“Let’s sit down.” The retired engineer led him to a small sitting area composed of a loveseat, two wooden rocking chairs and a leather recliner. She settled in on the loveseat and filled her wine glass to the brim, Adam opting for one of the rockers.
“My husband and I bought this property twelve years ago. When we added the wine cellar, we had electromagnetic sound dampeners installed within the walls of the foundation… too many eyes watching and ears listening.” She paused to drain her glass. “I assume you have a Q-clearance?”
“Yes.”
“Q-Clearance is nuclear, and nuclear is bubkus. I have a Cosmic Clearance. It’s about forty clearances above Q-Clearance… it’s at the top, there’s nothing higher. Ninety-nine percent of the politicians on Capitol Hill and ninety percent of the assholes in the Pentagon have no idea it even exists. Only about twenty-five people in the world at any given time carry a Cosmic Clearance, and none of them are presidents or heads of state. But some of them are quite nasty. I’m telling you this because if I get too buzzed and reveal certain things to you that I shouldn’t, your ability to keep your mouth shut may very well determine if I’ll be around to attend your wedding in September… which would really be a nice thing considering we’re footing the bill.”
Adam felt his heart racing. “What’s said down here stays down here.”
“Good. Now ask your questions.”
“How long has all this been going on?”
“You mean, how long have other intelligent species been visiting Earth? Who knows? Archaeologists have discovered cave paintings and Egyptian hieroglyphics which suggest extraterrestrial-human contact might trace back thousands of years. The more recent documented interactions with UFOs began in the 1940s during World War II. Allied pilots and crewmen reported seeing strange orb-like objects of light buzzing our bombers during combat sorties. The Nazis apparently saw them as well, and before too long, everyone started referring to them as ‘foo fighters,’ which translates as ‘fire’ in French and German. These orbs, which could be described as energy drones, often disrupted electronics aboard our warplanes while affecting gravity. Occasionally one would pass transdimensionally right through one of our bombers, freaking out the crew.
“FDR was very concerned and he dispatched General Jimmy Doolittle to the Allied theater of operations in Europe to find out if this was some kind of new high-tech Nazi secret weapon. Doolittle reported back that the objects were interplanetary in nature.
“Sightings increased after we dropped A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. New Mexico became a UFO traffic magnet, and for good reason. The first nukes were created in Los Alamos and tested in Alamagordo and Whites Sands.
“Then two years later, everything changed. On June 24, 1947 there was a UFO sighting that made the international news. Eight nights later, three saucer-shaped ETVs, each fifty-feet-in-diameter, began buzzing Roswell Air Force Base, home of the 509th bomber squadron, the only wing in the world equipped with atomic weapons. Two of the UFOs crashed. One went down southwest of Corona, New Mexico. The second crash site was discovered in Horse Mesa, west of Magdalena, New Mexico. The ‘official story’ is that Roswell had been using a high-powered radar system that was set on a certain frequency which disrupted two of the ET crafts’ propulsion and navigation systems, causing them to collide. Having spent time with Colonel Phillip Corso three decades later, I can tell you what really happened.
“Roswell had secretly developed a pulsed scalar longitudinal electromagnetic weapon, the beam of which struck two of the three ETVs at supra-light speed as the crafts were phasing out of transdimensional space-time. The pair collided and one was completely destroyed, the second was salvaged… along with its dead thirty-six-inch-tall hominids. They were classified as Greys, after their gray skin tone.
“Between June of 1947 and December of 1952, the military’s EMS weapon brought down thirteen extraterrestrial spacecraft; eleven of them in New Mexico, one each in Nevada and Arizona. Two other crashes occurred in Mexico and one in Norway. Sixty-five bodies were recovered, including one ET that was kept alive for three years.”
“A live alien?”
“From the Roswell crash. By the way, the whole ‘alien’ thing… they find that term a bit derogatory. They prefer extraterrestrial.”
“What happened to it… the surviving ET?”
“It was a Grey. They called it EBEN, short for Extraterrestrial Biological Entity. It was hairless, with a bulb-shaped head and big black eyes that had no exterior lids. From the autopsy reports I’ve read, the ET’s internal anatomy was chlorophyll-based, and it processed food into energy and waste material in the same manner as plants. The EBEN had a solitary organ that did the job of both a heart and lungs, but they had multiple stomachs which performed different digestive processes. They also had an organ that would take every single bit of moisture out of whatever they ate and fed the body; so they had no need to drink a lot of fluids.
“The EBEN brain has eleven different lobes, and where the spinal cord met the brain, there were two little bulbs on each side. The eyes were very sophisticated with optic nerves that went into different anatomical parts of the brain than human optic nerves…
“These beings are thin and wiry, but their muscles are fibrous and quite strong, especially the legs. The hands are thin and double-jointed, and each of its four long fingers possesses a suction-tip. Its sexual organs are internalized, but the scientists assigned to the EBEN were pretty sure it was a male. According to the ET, there were female EBEN, just none on any of these ships.
“They didn’t have any ears, but they had a canal with an organ or gland — a little bulb that they could hear out of. They didn’t have vocal cords like we have. I read a briefing that indicated a procedure was performed on the EBEN which allowed it to talk or make sounds. None of that was necessary since they communicated telepathically.”
“Where did they keep it?”
“The live one? At first, Fort Dietrick, Maryland, then at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, and later at the Huntsville Redstone Arsenal.
“Our scientists learned a lot from EBEN, all of which was compiled into what became known as the Yellow Book. Unfortunately, the ET became ill in late-1951. Several medical specialists were brought in to treat it, the team headed by a botanist. Realizing it was dying, the United States began broadcasting radio signals into deep space in an attempt to demonstrate peaceful intentions to what was obviously a superior entity. The group tasked with overseeing this project — code named SIGMA — was the National Security Agency, created by secret Executive Order on November 4, 1952. The NSA was assigned to monitor all communications, both human and extraterrestrial, while maintaining secrecy regarding the UFOs’ presence.”