Major General Sebastian J. Appleton identified himself as the Director of U.S. Army Intelligence. A project under his command had run into technical challenges and he wanted Scott to join their team. An interview was arranged, the candidate flown first-class into Salt Lake City, where a limousine drove him south to the city of Provo.
A generic tour of the military base led to dinner at Scott’s hotel where Appleton made the engineer a lucrative offer. It was far more money than what NASA had on the table, but there were also red flags. Scott and his wife would have to move to Utah, and the project was strictly top-secret — no doubt funded by the Pentagon. In the end, the choice came down to science versus the military, and Muse passed.
But Appleton had one more card to play.
At four in the morning, Scott was awakened in his hotel room by two MPs who loaded him into the backseat of an awaiting car. After being forced at gunpoint to sign a national security oath, he was blindfolded and driven to an unknown destination. Forty minutes later, he found himself standing besides the Major General on a barren plateau beneath a pre-dawn gray sky.
Towering before them, floating ten feet off the ground was a flying saucer.
“This is what we call an ARV, an Alien Reproduction Vehicle. We built it by reverse-engineering the extraterrestrial crafts that were downed over the last three decades by our scalar weapon system. Although the ARV is not nearly as advanced as the real thing, it’s fully capable of accessing any star system in the Milky Way. As you can see, it uses anti-gravitics, similar to what you wrote about.
“Join us, and you’ll find yourself working on cutting-edge technologies you never dreamed of.”
“And if I don’t?”
“Then you’re free to go. Of course, if you ever discuss any of this we’ll bring you back and let you pick out a burial plot.”
Forty years…
Appleton was not exaggerating, the projects involving ET technologies were so far above the latest developments in physics they essentially reduced his degrees to toilet paper. But while the work was exhilarating, MJ-12’s autocratic rules and the paranoia their military force instilled on a daily basis took its toll on his nerves.
And why couldn’t they share these incredible technologies with the rest of the world? Zero-point-energy alone could eliminate hunger and poverty, not to mention the benefits to the environment that would come from replacing fossil fuels.
Dr. Muse knew he wasn’t the only one who felt this way. As the years passed, he grew bolder, openly discussing the matter with colleagues as he attempted to push the envelope of tolerance.
Appleton responded by transferring him into another USAP — a covert intelligence program overseen by the man known and feared within the subterranean communities as “Dr. Death.”
Colonel Alexander Johnston had developed a psychotronic device which used scalar waves to alter a subject’s consciousness, behavior, and decisions. Add some stage craft, and suddenly the “evil aliens” were abducting good-hearted, blue-collared suburban folk whose stories held up to lie-detector tests.
Set high enough, a scalar wave could literally separate the spark of consciousness that was the soul from the physical body, killing the subject.
It was the ultimate mind-control device, free of any congressional oversight, and as Scott Muse soon learned, the subjects were not always random civilians.
The engineer’s first VIP was the brother of a Crown Prince whose family ran a powerful banking empire in Europe. Coordinates to the man’s sleep chamber inside his castle were provided by members of a covert paramilitary group operating in conjunction with the CIA.
Using a reverse-engineered Alien Reproduction Vehicle and man-made extraterrestrials cloned in a lab, the brother of Prince Hans-Adams of Liechtenstein awoke in bed, only to find his body paralyzed as it was atomized and whisked on board a flying saucer. For the next several hours, four-foot gray-skinned extraterrestrials probed and prodded the terrified human, all the while communicating through mental telepathy that aliens were responsible for every conflict on Earth since man first fell from the trees.
Their final message before he was released dealt with a plan to enslave humankind.
Scott Muse later learned why the man had been targeted. An ally of Dr. Steven Greer, the prince was contemplating funding his project for disclosure. Following his brother’s abduction, the Prince changed his mind, donating a large amount of money instead to fund a black budget weapons program designed to thwart an alien invasion.
Scott Muse answered his iPhone on the first ring. “Yes, Colonel?”
“Has the subject’s coordinates been obtained?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then let’s put the fear of the Almighty in him.”
Muse entered the vault where two of his crew were seated at their electronic surveillance stations. “Is he asleep?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Take him.”
Having locked onto the subject using his iPhone, the EMS operator powered up the scalar device.
Richard “Dickie” Gatenby awoke to discover his voice box was frozen, his body completely paralyzed. To his utter horror, he was no longer in his bedroom — instead, he was lying naked on a cold metal table, staring up at strange floating colored lights.
He choked on his breath — his airway constricting as the extraterrestrial leaned over him, revealing bulging lidless black eyes, its skin gray and hairless. Using a probe, the four-foot biped pried open his mouth and set to work on his upper gum line.
The throttle of noise coming out of Gatenby’s throat was more of a high-pitched grunt than a scream — he had not felt the sharp stab, only a slight pressure and the momentary sensation of warm blood drizzling down his chin.
A second Grey appeared, its four-digit hand cold and clammy as it probed Gatenby’s lifeless right arm. A pinch was followed by the sensation of more blood being drawn.
The talk show host passed out.
He awoke to feel himself floating. A wave of pins and needles passed through him and suddenly he was outside, staring at a cloudy night sky until his atomized body passed through his home’s second story window, his astral mind returning to his physical body with an electrical zap!
“Ahh! Ahhh!”
“Dickie? Dickie, wake up!”
He felt Claire’s hands on his shoulders, her grip shaking the paralysis from his body. Sitting up, he rolled out of bed and staggered to the window, his fingers separating the slats of the Venetian blinds so he could see outside.
Gone…
“Dickie, what is it?”
Staggering into the bathroom, he fumbled with the light switch as he examined his upper gums in the mirror.
Nothing there… wait!
Feeling a tender spot with his tongue, he pulled back his upper lip—
— revealing a white mouth sore.
“Dickie, are you all right? You look as pale as a ghost. And you’re trembling.”
“That bloody colonel… he did something.”
“It was just a bad dream.”
“No, Claire… this was real!”
“What was real?”
The English talk show host contemplated a response. He knew what he had experienced was real; he also realized how it would sound to his wife.
You’ll lose her. She’ll insist on having me see a psychiatrist and when I stick to my story and insist I’m right, she’ll assume I took too many shots to the head playing rugby and she’ll leave me… right after she has me committed.