First Contact

I was going to wait 'til tomorrow to post this, but I figure if I can't use this thing to tell stories, good or bad, it has no purpose.

There are two versions of the same Short Story called First Contact, one of them is the result of peer suggestions, the original is more minimalist. I don't know which I like better, so I'll put them both here.

FIRST CONTACT

-------------------

ORIGINAL

“I was a Colonel in the Air Force, everyone called me Boggs, Colonel Bobby Boggs that crazy son of a you-know-what who shot Hell into your soul with a glance.”
“Yeah, I read your record. But I have a feeling you called me here to tell me something off-the-books.”
The old man nodded, the plastic hoses in his nose restricted his head movement.
“I read an article by you once in the Times, real profession stuff about the end of the war and the Germans they’d brought over, used to make rockets for NASA.”
“Is that what impressed you enough to invite me here for this?”
“Yeah, the dark little print at the bottom,” He paused to cough, “It said: Tim Willis, Journalist and Historian from Harvard University. That really impressed me, Harvard, writing the truth about the U.S. military and their deals with the most infamous political group of the decade.”
“Maybe the most infamous in all of history,” he said.
“What are you a Jew?”
“No, just saying.”
“Well, what I’m going to tell you might make you rethink that.”
“Really?” Tim said. He moved his chair closer to the hospital bed.
“What you may not know, is I was also O.S.S. during the war. That’s the Office of Strategic Services. We helped do C.I. work and psyops during the war, that’s counter intelligence and psychological warfare. Dropping leaflets and spreading rumors by radio.”
“Hmmn, yeah I’ve heard most of the stories,” Tim said.
“Most of my wartime record is in the big offices in D.C., but what I did for the O.S.S. after the war and the fact that I’m not listed as ever belonging to them, is what you won’t find.”
“Why aren’t you listed among official personnel?”
“Because what I did for America, for this planet, cannot be documented officially.”
“Well, you’ve certainly got my attention. You mind if I record this?” Tim pulled out the tape recorder and set it on the nearby table.
“No, go ahead. Anyways, it was about 78, long after Roswell.”
Tim hit record and looked at the old man quizzically.
“Roswell?”
“Yeah the crash of the spaceship, I was brought in afterwards, we handled some of the moving of parts and the bodies…”
“So, Mr. Boggs, you’re saying you were at Roswell and the stories are true about an Alien spaceship landing?”
“Yeah, but Hell, that’s not what I’m trying to talk about, everyone knows that story. That’s the one they put on TV and talk about on History programs. Hah, weather balloon, like Hell!”
“What do the aliens look like?”
“Little green men of course…actually they are more of a grey color.”
The old Colonel paused for another cough and clearing of phlegm from his throat. The respiratory equipment hissed nearby.
“Anyway, what I have to say is after the fact. The U.S. government knew they were real, so like we do with any foreign government, we had to meet them.”
“You’re saying the U.S. Government had a sit down with alien beings? Like a diplomatic session?”
“Yeah, on U.S. soil and I was one of the many people present, including the President of the United States. It wasn’t until 1978, after we’d had more than two decades to study their technology and physiology that a cryptographer broke the code of a signal that had been picked up the world over since the 1947 crash. After he broke the code, we were able to establish communication with the aliens and arrange a meeting face-to-face. Good Heavens!
It was then we began to discuss the meaning of such a meeting and what it would mean for not only the United States, but the human race. We had finally contacted what was believed to be only science fiction before then: intelligent alien life forms. This fact alone conjectured the authenticity of our known history, our mythology, everything that is mankind.
How did we know they hadn’t come before, perhaps even visited us frequently in the past? There was certainly enough indication that it could be truth. The aliens of course, denied it, they said they had just arrived and that they wished to establish peaceful contact with man, to share technology and culture.
The meeting was at the place the media knows as Area 51 and it was pretty startling for everyone involved I think. That moment was perhaps the most historical event of our species, yet it won’t ever get recorded if the men who participated in it have their way. That’s why I called you here.”
Tim sat back, taking it all in. He didn’t know if he could believe what the old Colonel was saying. The man stared at him intensely, as if he could force Tim to believe merely with the harsh glare of his eyes.
“Continue please, I want to hear the rest of the story, what became of this meeting?”
“Hell Mr. Willis, I’ll tell you what became of it by telling you this story. It’s the same story I presented to men during a meeting we had prior to contact with the alien beings. It involved a fishing trip I had down in Tennessee. You see, before we went out on the boat, we picked up a bucket of guppies from the bait shop where they had them swimming around in a big tank. We got a whole bucket chock full of them and then headed out for a good afternoon of fishing.
It got me to thinking from the guppy’s perspective, what do they see of man? To them we’re benevolent gods giving them food and letting them grow up in a warm tank with all their guppy friends. Only now and again we take a few of them away, putting them in a bucket and taking them off. I might need to remind you, we knew about the abductions at this point, there had been plenty of them going on, more than what the public knew about at that time.”
“You’re saying the Alien Abductions are also real events and that the government had prior knowledge of them?”
“Yeah, they were well documented by the Air Force and particularly my division where all the memos stopped. We considered them to be a threat to American sovereignty along with the capabilities of their technology and their spacecraft, which repeatedly violated our airspace. Hell the existence of aliens was enough to challenge governmental authority itself and those were turbulent times.”
He paused for a fit of coughing before he continued, “We certainly feared the aliens’ intention, which is why I told this story, because I had to convince the Joint Chiefs of Staff that our plan of action was solid. This was a game you could only play once, and its result could change all of history. What if it turned out the aliens had altered our history? Had been Gods in the ancient times? What if Jesus was just an extraterrestrial? This is why I brought into the analogy of the guppies to the Joint Chiefs.
When I told the story I brought up the time when I spilled the bucket, the guppies and water were all over the bottom of the boat and as it moved forward across the lake with the motor, the water sloshed to the back of the boat with the momentum. The guppies were suddenly in peril as a life preserver kept them from moving with the fleeing water from the bucket. As the tiny fish flapped in protest I reached down, plucking as many as I could. One by one, dropping them back into the bucket I’d quickly refilled with water from the lake. Finally I had almost all the fish in the bucket except for the few guppies that still flapped their fins dying. I would have saved them too, but as it is, guppies are cheap and my back was sore from stooping over in the boat, so I just let them die. It wasn’t anything personal.”
Tim watched the energetic old man quietly, lost in his story and slightly bemused.
“But to those guppies, imagine, a divine-like being saving their friends one by one, but leaving them there to die? If guppies were like men, they would try to rationalize their fate, what tenet of God didn’t I follow that he would let me suffer and die so? You see what I’m saying, mankind rationalizes the unknown. But yet what would be perceived by the guppy as punishment for some unknown sin, was really just that I had a sore back and was tired from picking up his friends.”
Tim sighed and nodded.
“Hope I’m not boring you, I’m getting to the point, I can go into all the details that will validate my claim, but I haven’t even gotten to the punch line yet, the punch-line of human history and the morality of your government.”
“What is that punch line? Is that the whole of the fishing story you told the Joint Chiefs?” the journalist asked.
“The moral of the fishing story is that the Guppies who were viewed as ‘saved’ by the dying guppies weren’t really saved. You know what we did to those guppies we saved? We hooked them and used them as bait to catch bigger fish. How would the Guppy comprehend that their benevolent Gods were only using them to catch some tasty dinner?”
Mr. Willis shrugged and Boggs paused to cough again.
“How do we begin to comprehend the goals of another species? Why were they abducting humans from Earth? We didn’t know and we couldn’t comprehend the aliens reasoning. That’s why we did what we did.”
“What is it that you did?”
“As I told you earlier, we’d known about their physiology since the late 40s, since Roswell. What you may not know, is that one of the occupants survived. He lived in our custody for nearly a year or more, with limited contact with humans. I actually met this alien more than a few times, but communication was strained at best. Eventually he died, you know what of?”
“You mean the government didn’t kill the alien?”
“No we thought he could be used like an interstellar hostage or prisoner of war, give us some sort of bargaining chips with the E.T.s, but have you ever seen War of the Worlds?”
“Yeah, I have, you’re saying he died of an Earthly disease?”
“The Hepatitis virus to be exact, apparently their alien organics had no resistance to the virus. It was kept in a backroom by the Air Force on ice for many years.
So when the meeting was close at hand, it was my job to convince the President and the Joint Chiefs that we had no way of knowing if the aliens are hostile or not, but knowledge of them alone would be enough to change mankind forever.”
“Why do you think it would change the public if they knew?”
“The aliens had advanced technology from us to such a degree that it appeared as magic to us. Humanity has a tendency to rationalize the unknown, to mythologize that which it doesn’t understand, assign it human values. The Greeks rationalized Volcanoes as their angry Gods punishing them cruelly with fire. We feared that a similar reaction would occur if their existence became assured. You can see that simply as a myth they have raised cults and religions, but to have living Gods is a far more terrifying possibility. It would make irrelevant everything mankind has ever done in one instant, our technological achievements, humanitarian efforts, philosophy, art, and landing on the moon, all trivialized by beings from another world. Hell, beings, I must mention again, that could be devils in disguise.”
“I can understand your reasoning, although I think the public could have handled it, we would have much to learn from them. They might have brought world peace.”
“They would have brought world peace, humanity does unite against what it sees as foreign, we were confident we could build an army sophisticated enough to fight the aliens and had plans in the works to ally with the Russians who had their own version of Roswell, but the losses would have been catastrophic because of their technological advantage. Their ships had infiltrated many of our military bases’ air space and even caused black outs on nuclear missile silos, there was a real fear that this was a precursor to invasion of our planet.”
“You really don’t trust them do you?”
“How could you? It would be naïve to expect anything but a potential predator from a species never encountered before. Mankind became the prey by their mere existence. That was something none of us could tolerate. Some of the more petty members of government were only interested in maintaining U.S. superpower status and were conflicted by the possibility of the aliens creating a world government with more authority. That’s why we planned for their extinction.”
“Are you saying you are responsible for killing an entire alien race?”
“Now you understand the importance of this information.”
“How? How could you kill a whole race of alien beings?”
“I mentioned before we had studied their physiology and that we still had the body of the dead E.T. incubating hepatitis in its body. We had our weapon. We knew it worked, just not how effectively.”
“You’re kidding me! You used biological warfare to exterminate a peaceful starfaring race?”
“The potential danger posed by their existence outweighed the chance they were sincere. After all, they were abducting our citizens. It was decided and the event wasn’t much different than the early Settlers contact with Indians in the Western United States. Only instead of a smallpox blanket, we simply returned their dead comrade to them, to take aboard their spaceship. Soon afterwards, they started falling out of the sky.”
Tim sat still for a while, not saying anything, the man seemed sincere about his whole story, no matter how implausible it was. Colonel Boggs coughed and had spasms in his bed, having a fit of pain while the pharmaceutical drip worked overtime. Tim waited until the man calmed down and cleared his throat again.
“The only thing this doesn’t clear up is, why do people still witness flying saucers? You couldn’t have killed all of them.”
“Oh, the ones we didn’t get with the virus, we shot out of the sky. They had a ‘city’ ship on the Moon, but that was quick to go from the disease. Roswell gave us enough time to reverse engineer some of their technology and make comparable craft, although the pressures and G-Force of the turns at that speed were enough to kill many of our test pilots over time.
After the E.T. threat was neutralized it was decided shortly before my retirement as a specialist in the field, a specialist of xenocide, that the flying saucer craft our government and other governments developed would continue to function and operate on sorties. We killed the intruders, but they already had their mythology. A God in the flesh is intolerable, but the myth of a God is a necessary part of the human psychology. We couldn’t simply have them disappear out of the skies now that we had eliminated them. We needed to maintain the presence in order to cover up our crimes.
I had some friends in the Air Force who flew the craft. They talked about how they performed abductions where ordinary citizens were drugged with LSD and techniques the CIA learned during their MK-ULTRA experiments back in the 60s. Those people came out really believing they were kidnapped by Aliens. It fuels these cults and groups of UFO crazies to this day. But the threat is long gone.”
“So you’re a mass murderer and the Government made this decision without the voice of the American people?”
“That’s about the jist of it, now you see why I called you here. I couldn’t live with this guilt on my conscience anymore. I know I’m going to die soon, but before I do, someone has to know, that the U.S. Government killed an entire alien species to protect the people of Earth. A crime not even the Nazis can compare up to.”
“So you feel remorse for it?”
“Absolutely,”
“Would you still tell that story and convince the Joint Chiefs if you had the chance to change things?”
“Yes, I would. My crime is a horrible one, but I still feel it was necessary. Man needs to believe in the potential of man, not be servants to Alien Gods,” said Colonel Robert Boggs. Tim shut off the tape recorder.
Thirty minutes later Bobby Boggs died in his hospital bed. Tim Willis asked the Doctor what he died of, “It was Hepatitis induced liver failure.”

-------------------

REVISED

Tim picked up the newspaper; the obituary picture seemed to stare him in the face and brought a sinking feeling to his gut. It reminded him of the interview just a week ago at the old man’s home, it was hard seeing him smiling on the page and in a healthy condition. The memories refused to come back and justify the emotion he felt. Tim looked through the drawer of his office until he found the tape recorder from the interview. Setting it on the table, he turned it on. The recorded voice began with a distinct tone the old man had,
“I was a Colonel in the Air Force, everyone called me Boggs, Colonel Bobby Boggs that crazy son of a you-know-what who shot Hell into your soul with a glance.”
The man had been excited, adjusting his hospital bed with the electronic dial to force himself to sit up for the interview.
“Yeah, I read your record. But I have a feeling you called me here to tell me something off-the-books,” he recognized his own voice.
Tim’s memory recalled the old man nodding awkwardly. The plastic hoses in his nose had restricted his head movement.
“I read an article by you once in the Times, real profession stuff about the end of the war and the Germans they’d brought over, used to make rockets for NASA.”
“Is that what impressed you enough to invite me here for this interview?”
“Yeah, the dark little print at the bottom,” there was a cough on the tape, “It said: Tim Willis, Journalist and Historian from Harvard University. That really impressed me, Harvard, writing the truth about the U.S. military and their deals with the most infamous political group of the decade.”
“Maybe the most infamous in all of history,” his words reminded him how naïve he was to think of the old man’s story as something mundane.
“Well, what I’m going to tell you might make you rethink that,” Boggs’ voice was distinct in its grimness.
“Really?” Tim had said. He heard his chair scraping on the floor as it moved closer to the hospital bed.
“What you may not know, is I was also O.S.S. during the war. That’s the Office of Strategic Services. We helped do C.I. work and psyops during the war, that’s counter intelligence and psychological warfare. Dropping leaflets and spreading rumors by radio.”
“Hmmn, yeah I’ve heard most of the stories,” Tim said.
“Most of my wartime record is in the big offices in D.C., but what I did for the O.S.S. after the war and the fact that I’m not listed as ever belonging to them, is what you won’t find.”
“Why aren’t you listed among official personnel?” He had asked him this.
“Because what I did for America, for this planet, cannot be documented officially.”
Tim remembered his fierce eyes, but still felt a churning sensation of doubt.
“Anyways, it was about 78, long after Roswell.”
Tim had looked at the old man quizzically. This was the first time the man brought up Roswell.
“Roswell?”
“Yeah the crash of the spaceship, I was brought in afterwards, we handled some of the moving of parts and the bodies…” the man’s voice faded on the tape.
“So, Mr. Boggs, you’re saying you were at Roswell and the stories are true about an Alien spaceship landing?”
“Yeah, but Hell, that’s not what I’m trying to talk about, everyone knows that story. That’s the one they put on TV and talk about on History programs. Hah, weather balloon, like Hell!”
“What do the aliens look like?” Tim’s voice sounded sarcastic at the time.
“Little green men of course…actually they are more of a grey color.” Tim had laughed at that, hearing it again, he realized it wasn’t meant as a joke.
He heard the old Colonel pause for another cough and clear the phlegm from his throat. The respiratory equipment’s hissing could be heard.
“Anyway, what I have to say is after the fact. The U.S. government knew they were real, so like we do with any foreign government, we had to meet them.”
“You’re saying the U.S. Government had a sit down with alien beings? Like a diplomatic session?” Tim was amazed at his own ability to ask focused questions, even though he didn’t fully believe the story then. Maybe he had been indulging him.
“Yeah, on U.S. soil and I was one of the many people present, including the President of the United States. It wasn’t until 1978, after we’d had more than two decades to study their technology and physiology that a cryptographer broke the code of a signal that had been picked up the world over since the 1947 crash. After he broke the code, we were able to establish communication with the aliens and arrange a meeting face-to-face. Goddamn!” Tim remembered the old man’s face, still wondering if he was hiding a smile as he said this.
“It was then we began to discuss the meaning of such a meeting and what it would mean for not only the United States, but the human race. We had finally contacted what was believed to be only science fiction before then: intelligent alien life forms. This fact alone conjectured the authenticity of our known history, our mythology, everything that is mankind.
How did we know they hadn’t come before, perhaps even visited us frequently in the past? There was certainly enough indication that it could be truth. The aliens of course, denied it, they said they had just arrived and that they wished to establish peaceful contact with man, to share technology and culture.” The vision of the man in his mind seemed somehow wrong, the words of Boggs sawed at his memory.
“The meeting was at the place the media knows as Area 51 and it was pretty startling for everyone involved I think. That moment was perhaps the most historical event of our species, yet it won’t ever get recorded if the men who participated in it have their way. That’s why I called you here.”
Tim sat back, listening. He still didn’t know if he could believe what the old Colonel had said. His eyes had stared at him intensely, as if he could force Tim to believe merely with will alone.
“Continue please, I want to hear the rest of the story, what became of this meeting?”
“Hell! Mr. Willis, I’ll tell you what became of it by telling you this story. It’s the same story I presented to men during a meeting we had prior to contact with the alien beings. It involved a fishing trip I had down in Tennessee. You see, before we went out on the boat, we picked up a bucket of guppies from the bait shop where they had them swimming around in a big tank. We got a whole bucket chock full of them and then headed out for a good afternoon.”
Tim remembered his impatience at the rambling of the old man, now hearing it again, he listened more carefully.
“It got me to thinking from the guppy’s perspective, what do they see of man? To them we’re benevolent gods giving them food and letting them grow up in a warm tank with all their guppy friends. Only now and again we take a few of them away, putting them in a bucket and taking them off. I might need to remind you, we knew about the abductions at this point, there had been plenty of them going on, more than what the public knew about at that time.”
“You’re saying the Alien Abductions are also real events and that the government had prior knowledge of them?”
Tim’s voice had changed on tape, drawn in by the man’s story, as he was now.
“Yeah, they were well documented by the Air Force and particularly my division where all the memos stopped. We considered them to be a threat to American sovereignty along with the capabilities of their technology and their spacecraft, which repeatedly violated our airspace. Hell! The existence of aliens was enough to challenge governmental authority itself and those were turbulent times.”
More coughing could be heard on the tape. Tim remembered the image on the man’s hospital table, a framed picture of himself in Air Force uniform, shaking hands with Eisenhower.
“We certainly feared the aliens’ intention, which is why I told this story, because I had to convince the Joint Chiefs of Staff that our plan of action was solid. This was a game you could only play once, and its result could change all of history. What if it turned out the aliens had altered our history? Had been Gods in the ancient times? What if Jesus was just an extraterrestrial? This is why I brought into the analogy of the guppies to the Joint Chiefs.”
Tim thought about why guppies would be likened to man.
“When I told the story I brought up the time when I spilled the bucket, the guppies and water were all over the bottom of the boat and as it moved forward across the lake with the motor, the water sloshed to the back of the boat with the momentum. The guppies were suddenly in peril as a life preserver kept them from moving with the fleeing water from the bucket. As the tiny fish flapped in protest I reached down, plucking as many as I could. One by one, dropping them back into the bucket I’d quickly refilled with water from the lake. Finally I had almost all the fish in the bucket except for the few guppies that still flapped their fins, dying. I would have saved them too, but as it is, guppies are cheap and my back was sore from stooping over in the boat, so I just let them die. It wasn’t anything personal.”
Tim had become silent on tape. He remembered being focused on the man’s features, looking for that crack in the mask that revealed the liars he’d spoken with before.
“But to those guppies, imagine, a divine-like being saving their friends one by one, but leaving them there to die? If guppies were like men, they would try to rationalize their fate, what tenet of God didn’t I follow that he would let me suffer and die so? You see what I’m saying, mankind rationalizes the unknown. But yet what would be perceived by the guppy as punishment for some unknown sin was really just that I had a sore back and was tired from picking up his friends.”
He had sighed on tape.
“Hope I’m not boring you, I’m getting to the point, I can go into all the details that will validate my claim, but I haven’t even gotten to the punch line yet, the punch-line of human history and the morality of your government.”
“What is that punch line? Is that the whole of the fishing story you told the Joint Chiefs?” Tim had asked.
“The moral of the fishing story is that the Guppies who were viewed as ‘saved’ by the dying guppies weren’t really saved. You know what we did to those guppies we saved? We hooked them and used them as bait to catch bigger fish. How would the Guppy comprehend that their benevolent Gods were only using them to catch some tasty dinner?”
He remembered, he had shrugged, Boggs paused to cough again.
“How do we begin to comprehend the goals of another species? Why were they abducting humans from Earth? We didn’t know and we couldn’t comprehend the aliens reasoning. That’s why we did what we did.”
The old man had compared these creatures to gods, Tim thought.
“What is it that you did?”
“As I told you earlier, we’d known about their physiology since the late 40s, since Roswell. What you may not know, is that one of the occupants survived. He lived in our custody for nearly a year or more, with limited contact with humans. I actually met this alien more than a few times, but communication was strained at best. Eventually he died, you know what of?”
“You mean the government didn’t kill the alien?”
“No we thought he could be used like an interstellar hostage or prisoner of war, give us some sort of bargaining chips with the E.T.s, but have you ever seen War of the Worlds?”
“Yeah, I have, you’re saying he died of an Earthly disease?” Tim was surprised by his own voice, he felt more objective listening now, without the man’s eyes upon his face.
“The Hepatitis virus to be exact, apparently their alien organics had no resistance to the virus. It was kept in a backroom by the Air Force on ice for many years.
So when the meeting was close at hand, it was my job to convince the President and the Joint Chiefs that we had no way of knowing if the aliens are hostile or not. Knowledge of them alone would be enough to change mankind forever.”
“Why do you think it would change the public if they knew?” Tim thought his question foolish now, but it had pleased Colonel Boggs.
“The aliens had advanced technology from us to such a degree that it appeared as magic to us. Humanity has a tendency to rationalize the unknown, to mythologize that which it doesn’t understand, assign it human values. The Greeks rationalized Volcanoes as their angry Gods punishing them cruelly with fire. We feared that a similar reaction would occur if their existence became assured. You can see that simply as a myth they have raised cults and religions, but to have living Gods is a far more terrifying possibility. It would make irrelevant everything mankind has ever done in one instant, our technological achievements, humanitarian efforts, philosophy, art, and landing on the moon, all trivialized by beings from another world. Hell. Beings, I must mention again, that could be devils in disguise.”
“I can understand your reasoning, although I think the public could have handled it, we would have much to learn from them. They might have brought world peace.”
“They would have brought world peace, humanity does unite against what it sees as foreign, we were confident we could build an army sophisticated enough to fight the aliens and had plans in the works to ally with the Russians who had their own version of Roswell, but the losses would have been catastrophic because of their technological advantage. Their ships had infiltrated many of our military bases’ air space and even caused black outs on nuclear missile silos, there was a real fear that this was a precursor to invasion of our planet.” Boggs’ voice was intense and almost angry.
“You really don’t trust them do you?” he had said to the Colonel.
“How could you? It would be naïve to expect anything but a potential predator from a species never encountered before. Mankind became the prey by their mere existence. That was something none of us could tolerate. Some of the more petty members of government were only interested in maintaining U.S. superpower status and were conflicted by the possibility of the aliens creating a world government with more authority. That’s why we planned for their extinction.”
“Are you saying you are responsible for killing an entire alien race?”
Tim had jumped out of his chair at the time, his voice was erratic.
“Now you understand the importance of this information.” Boggs’ response seemed coy now.
“How? How could you kill a whole race of alien beings?” Tim really sounded upset.
“I mentioned before we had studied their physiology and that we still had the body of the dead E.T. incubating hepatitis in its body. We had our weapon. We knew it worked, just not how effectively.”
“You’re kidding me! You used biological warfare to exterminate an alien race?”
“The potential danger posed by their existence outweighed the chance they were sincere. After all, they were abducting our citizens. It was decided and the event wasn’t much different than the early Settlers contact with Indians in the Western United States. Only instead of a smallpox blanket, we simply returned their dead comrade to them, to take aboard their spaceship. Soon afterwards, they started falling out of the sky.”
Tim was quiet again on tape. Colonel Boggs’ voice had sounded so sincere. More coughing filled the tape. He remembered the man’s spasms and fit of pain while the pharmaceutical drip had worked overtime. Tim cleared his throat.
“The only thing this doesn’t clear up is, why do people still witness flying saucers? You couldn’t have killed all of them.”
“Oh, the ones we didn’t get with the virus, we shot out of the sky. They had a ‘city’ ship on the Moon, but that was quick to go from the disease we think. Roswell gave us enough time to reverse engineer some of their technology and make comparable craft, although the pressures and G-Force of the turns at that speed were enough to kill many of our test pilots over time.
After the E.T. threat was neutralized it was decided shortly before my retirement as a specialist in the field, a specialist of xenocide, that the flying saucer craft our government and other governments developed would continue to function and operate on sorties. We killed the intruders, but they already had their mythology. A God in the flesh is intolerable, but the myth of a God is a necessary part of the human psychology. We couldn’t simply have them disappear out of the skies now that we had eliminated them. We needed to maintain the presence in order to cover up our crimes.”
“I find that hard to believe,” Tim had said it then and felt it now.
“I had some friends in the Air Force who flew the craft. They talked about how they performed abductions where ordinary citizens were drugged with LSD and techniques the CIA learned during their MK-ULTRA experiments back in the 60s. We had developed them in order to ensure our control on the population, should something like this happen again. Those people came out really believing they were kidnapped by Aliens. It fuels these cults and groups of UFO crazies to this day. But the threat is long gone.”
“So you’re a mass murderer and the Government made this decision without the voice of the American people?”
“That’s about the jist of it, now you see why I called you here. I couldn’t live with this guilt on my conscience anymore. I know I’m going to die soon, but before I do, someone has to know, that the U.S. Government killed an entire alien species to protect the people of Earth. A crime not even the Nazis can compare up to.” The man’s voice seemed sincere.
“Would you still tell that story and convince the Joint Chiefs if you had the chance to change things?” Tim’s voice had been judgmental.
“Yes, I would. My crime is a horrible one, but I still feel it was necessary. Man needs to believe in the potential of man, not be servants to Alien Gods,” said Colonel Robert Boggs.
Tim shut off the tape. The man’s obituary listed the cause of death as, “Hepatitis induced liver failure.”