Chapter 3: Recognize me as a god or I'll die
Upon arrival in Denver, Rutra showered, ate, and contacted Hent via encrypted video link. It was morning in Russia, and Hent was fresh and dressed. The admiral's uniform looked great on him.
– Good morning," Ruthra greeted.
– Good evening," Hent replied with a smile. – How are you?
– It's mind-boggling, especially these ones from the 'zone'.
– Don't listen to them too much, they're all aliens. Don't trust them. They can be so brainwashed, but the goal will be completely different; there are many people there who are from Russia, – Hent smiled in his manner, with a serious face. – You must have met the daughter of that scientist, Alikhanov's friend?
– Yeah. (chuckles)
– What did she tell you?
– Told Lazarus about it.
– Oh, that obsessed man who didn't know anything and spread such nonsense all over the world.
– Is this all bullshit?
– Look, if you're not tired, I've got some time. I worked my youth, interned at this facility with Lazar. Just like you did at the firing range.
Ruthra raised his eyebrows upward in amazement.
– Surprised?
– I don't know what to be surprised about or how to react anymore. I wouldn't be surprised if alien contact is real, or at least has been.
– Look, I need you to be factual. I was in the process of transitioning from Echelon 1 to Echelon 2, so I was doing assignments for two organizations at once. I had to be in close contact with the entire scientific community, especially the young ones, for future endeavors. It was my duty to keep an eye on the cases, to follow their activities, to plant information from time to time and to control the development of events. That's why I know a lot of things from Bob's own mouth, he told me a lot of things, shared his impressions. He was a fantasist by nature, and we needed one. If you know what I mean, that's the kind of guy we have in our closed F Division. They're the only ones who can do what they imagine. You get the idea?
– Yeah. (chuckles)
– Before the zone, the young physicist Robert Lazar, whom we called Bob, worked at the world-famous Los Alamos National Laboratory. Once Edward Teller, the "father of the hydrogen bomb," came there for a seminar. On Teller's recommendation, he was invited for his first interview. In December 1988, Robert Lazar was hired at Site S4, which was under the jurisdiction of Navy Intelligence. In service documents, the area is referred to as Area 51, unofficially it was called Dreamland, or Wonderland. When we visited the site, we were shown the "flying saucer" in real life, just like you. Then, when we parted ways, I went back to Zero, and Bob talked a lot, trying to get more money for his knowledge and silence, so he was left out of the loop. In March 1989, George Knapp, an NSA secret agent and at the same time an FBI investigator, officially working under the legend of a journalist, first introduced this man to TV viewers who claimed to have worked at the secret S4 facility. You probably already know that he was intimidated by the court?
– I already know. His home phone was tapped, his car was shot at.
– And what did he want, we wouldn't have been so ceremonious with him, but there, since there was a leak, they decided to present everything as fiction. Naturally, such experiments were carried out in secret laboratories, it is impossible to admit it, so it was a rule, following our example, not to release the scientist leading the project, until he has not completed the work. Many politicians began to wonder where Bob Lazar got such ideas. For Lazar, his stay at the S4 facility ended not so tragically, but suddenly and through his own fault: he decided to show his friends the "flying disks".
– Lev Khristoforovich, I think this whole thing is some kind of dark game.
– I didn't understand everything at the time, especially since we still had the USSR, but I immediately recognized that there was a tricky game going on. I accompanied him to various meetings and realized that he was running a show, but I didn't know for whom. According to Echelon 1, I had to find out, and according to Echelon 2, I had to promote the show.
– What if Lazar was shown all these things on purpose, perhaps to divert his attention from other things?
– Traditionally, all those who make sensational statements about aliens and "flying saucers", ufological organizations offer to pass a lie detector test. Lazar sat in the polygraph chair six times, and only once the test produced a questionable result.
– Have you ever encountered "little men" in hangars?
– No. But we got the information about the "little people" on the first day from the blue folder.
– I know that, I heard it from Gabo.
– That's the kind of thing. Afterwards, when I became a person with a higher rank and clearance, I asked my colleagues what was really there. Everyone had a different answer. They all said different things. I can't go and check it out for curiosity's sake, because it's not a passageway, and besides, I would show them my distrust. There's state-of-the-art technology, you know that, there's probably no aliens, otherwise we'd have recorded them. Everything my colleagues from the collegium tell me in a friendly conversation – behind all this show they hide experiments on personality change, the consequences of changing the genetic code and the results of the process of "brain pumping". Therefore, it is not for nothing that Zhidkov constantly asserted that the strongest mafia is the mafia of scientists.
Hent said the last seriously, thoughtfully, then laughed and added:
– Maybe the aliens have already inhabited the scientists and changed the whole process of the world development? Maybe we are in such a global virtual reality created by them? And we are wondering whether they are there or not. After all, by all laws of logic, they must be somewhere.
Hent finished his story with a joke, with his hands spread apart as if he were copying Neznaika. Then he changed to a serious tone.
– Get some rest, go to Livermore tomorrow, find out what's possible, and come back. Events are escalating, and the battle for Baikonur will begin. Good night.
– Goodbye.
Although Ruthra wanted to sleep, he still decided to think about the subject a bit. Perhaps there was something in all this that he couldn't see.
He contacted the center, Christina replied. In order not to load up on nonsense, he asked her to make an urgent and brief analysis of the main provisions concerning this topic. While he went through the latest news, emails, and inquired about the children's activities, Christina responded with a report. A special tablet was equipped with a system that wirelessly downloaded information into Rutra's brain. That's what he was using. He couldn't tell Zero about his new abilities, it was forbidden. At the same time, Christine sent a report on the main job, the most important one. Rutra determined that Iran was actively preparing to test a nuclear device, Israel had received components for new missiles from the United States, the European Union was completing a secret project to build 500 floating nuclear power plants, and there was a strange unspoken decision by the Mormon Church to move its headquarters from the United States to Australia. Rutra decided to deal with these things on the way tomorrow, but for now, a quick look at everything on the subject of UFOs and the like.
Since the late 1940s, first in the United States and then around the world, following the example of the United States, numerous groups have sprung up to collect and study reports of sightings of unidentified flying objects. In addition to countless amateur ufological organizations, individual UFO research projects were organized by the governments of various powers. In 1947, after the UFO phenomenon began to be investigated, it became clear that "flying saucers" did not suddenly appear in the second half of the twentieth century.
There were reports of strange flying lights and objects during World War II and the Victorian era. Celestial signs are also mentioned in medieval church chronicles and the annals of antiquity. One of the most famous cases that brought the existence of unidentified flying objects to the public's attention is the 1947 sighting over the Cascade Mountains, Washington State. News of these "flying saucers" quickly traveled across America, resulting in UFO sightings almost every day. Soon they accumulated so many that the U.S. Air Force raised the alarm, suggesting that they are launched by the USSR. December 2, 1952 came out a memorandum from the CIA, where Marshall Chadwell wrote that "reports of such incidents convince us that something is happening that requires immediate action.
Several projects have been organized on this issue. 1. Project Sein ("The Sign"). On September 23, 1947, at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Lieutenant General Nathan Toining wrote a secret letter to the Commander of the Armed Forces, in which he pointed out the necessity, by order of the Armed Forces Headquarters, to create a priority secret project under the code name for a thorough study of the phenomenon in order to summarize all available and relevant data, with their subsequent transfer to various centers of the Army and Navy, the Atomic Energy Commission, the Experimental Research Committee, the Scientific Advisory Board of the Armed Forces and NASA.
2. "Majestic-12" was a secret organization, apart from the study of unidentified flying objects, that dealt with the Roswell Incident. The "Magnificent Dozen," reporting directly to Truman, was described in a 9-page report dated September 18, 1947 and marked TOP SECRET // EYES ONLY. This group consisted of 12 politicians and scientists, including: a nuclear physicist at MIT, a former Secretary of Defense, the director of the CIA, professors and other scientists. All in all, extraterrestrial beings are pretty firmly in the heads of Americans, and at the highest levels.
Indeed, as the saying goes, whether there is a God or not is not known, but people talking about it means they want there to be one.
Initiative study of UFOs in the USSR began in 1946, when science fiction writer Kazantsev hypothesized that the cause of the Tunguska explosion in 1908 could be the accident of an alien flying machine.
Among these mysterious cases, there was even one that did not add to the disbelief in these incredible phenomena. Donald Kehoe, an American ufologist and retired Navy major, was once speaking on television; when he uttered: "Now I'm going to say something that hasn't been reported before!" – the program was interrupted. Authorities subsequently justified the act on the grounds of national security. Kehoe served as acting director of the National Research Committee on Aerial Phenomena until 1969.
The information received was enough to "believe" in the existence of UFOs, at least – definitely enough to doubt the absence. So, among other things, Rutra decided to analyze the mysterious events surrounding all this. Those that had a purely earthly basis, quite provable. He was interested in the suicides of people involved in such matters, under mysterious circumstances. He identified a number of suspicious facts:
– in October 1986, astronomer Professor Sharif left London for Bristol and hanged himself from a tree there, a distance of 100 kilometers;
– a few days later the same Professor Dazibai of London threw himself from Bristol Bridge, etc.
Very many people involved in this topic were haunted by an evil fate, a certain fatality: missing in action; run over by his car; crushed to death by driving at high speed into a cafe building; hanged; killed; fallen off a bridge, drowned; killed in a car accident. And even – committed suicide by locking himself in the interior of his car and hanging a hose from the exhaust pipe. Even the expert's contrary opinion, if listened to, was dangerous. For example such – considers the extraterrestrial origin of UFOs "extremely unlikely": this man died under mysterious circumstances.
There was also a great deal of classified information, including very "fresh" information concerning the present day, both about UFOs themselves and about those who studied them. To these, as Rutra noted to himself, could be attributed the mysterious death of Alikhanov. However, he was mostly interested in the events and cases preceding the idea of creating an autonomous, intelligent system "Perimeter". Few people, even from the special services and military, knew that one of the first secret agreements between the so-called U.S. group and the USSR group was a treaty on a joint act of mutual assistance to each other and resistance to extraterrestrial aggression.
Rutra's conclusion was unambiguous: the range of specialists interested in unusual UFO-related phenomena is very wide, and the nature of this interest is heterogeneous: from strict scientific research to paranoid ideas and outright charlatanism. Hent was right; it was not worth cluttering his head with it, for the search for answers was like a drug addiction. Though Ruthra already felt the uncertainty and what he had heard in S4 urging him to find some sort of calming answer. To this end, he decided to contact specialists in Russia.
Public criticism of the "problems" of ufology in Russia is handled by the Commission for Combating Pseudoscience and Falsification of Scientific Research at the Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Rutra fell asleep with the thoughts that now kept him awake (whether there were aliens or not). He slept restlessly, the emotional excitement of the previous days having taken its toll. In the morning he awoke abruptly from a nightmare. He dreamt that someone was calling him and saying:
– Just don't hang up, I've already called everyone on earth, you're the last one.
– What happened? – Ruthra asked.
The caller answered in an excited and begging voice:
– Listen to me, please.
– What's the big deal?
– I need help, you have to believe me. You have to recognize me.
– Recognize? Recognize what?
– You must recognize that I am your God, or I will die. I've called every person on earth, and no one recognizes me. They don't believe I'm their God. If you don't believe me, I'll die. How will I exist if you don't recognize me, you don't know exactly what I am? This is who I am, I've decided to show myself as I am. Just believe me, or I'll die.
– Yes, I do, of course I do, of course I do. And if I don't, it's okay, because gods can't die. Energy doesn't go anywhere, it goes from one state to another.
The interlocutor changed his voice and stated solemnly:
– Thank you, God save you. You have given me a new life, I will be as you imagined me to be.
With those words, the fiery mushroom of the atomic explosion flashed before Rutra's eyes, growing enormously, appearing before him as a vast mystical, awe-inspiring wonder.
Ruthra jumped out of bed. It was one of those kinds of dreams he often had, the kind where he thought it was real, and when he woke up, he was glad it was a dream. "What a dream," Rutra thought as he took a shower. He then went with his staff to breakfast, after which all three of them flew to Los Alamos. "What a treat not to be sent in a capsule," thought Rutra.
Los Alamos translates from Spanish as "poplar trees." It is a township and county in the state of New Mexico and has no city or township status. An hour and a half later, they were there. They were tacitly escorted, and very heavily. They were met formally by several Ph.D.'s and one professor. After the meeting, they were taken to the laboratory complex, which itself seemed outlandish among the surrounding area.