Outside Context Problem: Book 01 - Outside Context Problem Read online

  Abigail couldn’t help herself. She burst out laughing. Even as smaller alien craft raced overhead, searching for the humans who had been so impudent as to hurt their carrier ship, she laughed. The explosions and fires that might devastate the city no longer mattered. All that mattered was that the aliens had taken one hell of a bloody nose.

  ***

  “Take that, you bastards,” Santini was shouting. The light of the alien craft’s death was still visible, even at their distance. “We fucked you up good!”

  Nicolas laughed. “Get everyone out of here,” he said, keying his radio one final time. The aliens would take a careful look at their sensor records and probably deduce what had happened…and where the RPV had come from. Even if they didn’t, there was no point in remaining at the airfield any longer. “Prime the destruct charges and get out of here.”

  He took one last look towards Washington, where flames were towering into the sky and smaller alien craft buzzed around, confused and uncertain what to do, unable even to see an enemy to hit back at…

  And then he started to run.

  The War Will Continue In

  Under Foot

  Coming Soon.

  Afterword

  I don’t believe in a UFO Conspiracy.

  Let me step backwards a moment and explain myself. I started reading UFO books when I was around seven and one image, in particular, stuck in my young mind. A massive flying saucer stuck in a canyon, recovered by American soldiers and taken away to Hangar 18 (or wherever). It wasn't until I was a bit older that I heard about Roswell for the first time, yet it fascinated me – until I started to think about it. If Roswell had been a genuine UFO crash (genuine in the sense that it was an alien spacecraft, as opposed to a top secret weather balloon) it would have changed the world, yet the world was not changed. UFO Researchers believe that the world wasn't changed because the US Military covered up the crash – but, if that were the case, it was a remarkably incompetent job. Roswell’s very notoriety comes from the fact that no one knows for sure what happened, or do they?

  But then, the military’s position on UFOs has always been a little odd. The USAF made several attempts to bury the whole issue (the name Project Grudge is quite indicative) and tended to treat UFO reports as hoaxes. The British Ministry of Defence classed all UFO reports as being ‘of no defence significance,’ an odd choice of words when UFO reports include UFOs flying over British military bases and buzzing British military aircraft. How could such incidents not be of defence significance? The KGB and various other intelligence agencies looked into the whole issue and several concluded that the US knew more than it was telling, yet they found nothing significant – or so they said. Just what is going on in our skies?

  One of the problems with doing a detailed study of UFOs is that the field is vast. It starts with the Great Airship Scare of 1896-97, touches upon Nazi secret weapons and ‘Foo Fighters’ in World War Two, ‘ghost rockets’ over Sweden, sightings of alien occupants after 1945, reports of benevolent alien contact merging into the far more sinister and hostile abduction phenomenon…if any of them could be proven to have some real explanation, it would change the face of the world, yet there is so much nonsense written in the field that sorting out ‘truth’ from ‘fiction’ would be the work of a lifetime. Which events are real? Which are not?

  I believe that the vast majority of UFO reports are not alien spacecraft.

  The odd reluctance of the military to investigate what seems like a clear and present danger to their respective nations, I believe, supports my view. Why this reluctance? There are only a handful of possible answers. We can probably dismiss most of the conspiracy theories out of hand. I believe that the most likely explanation is that the ‘unexplained’ UFOs are really classified military craft and that the military’s reluctance to expose them is why they rarely comment on such reports. (Although it is common in the UFO Community to disregard any governmental denials.) The F-117 would have looked very odd to anyone who caught a glimpse of it before it was officially acknowledged. They might even have filed a UFO report! Bear in mind that the vast majority of any air force would not be involved with the development and testing of new aircraft. It is quite likely that a military pilot would file a UFO report and his superiors realise, without telling him, that he actually saw a new experimental aircraft.

  Does this explain why the military prefers not to investigate UFO reports?

  There are other explanations, of course. One is that the UFOs are actually Russian or Chinese aircraft. Another says that they actually are alien spacecraft and the military is unable to stop them, or has made an agreement with them to allow them to operate in our airspace without interference, perhaps in exchange for technology. I find some of those explanations unbelievable. The aliens, assuming that they exist, possess command of technology well beyond ours. They must. Even if they come from Mars, they have a technology capable of crossing the interplanetary gulfs that separate us from our nearest neighbours. Their technology becomes all the more formidable if we assume they come from the nearest star, or further away…why would they need to make a deal with the military? All they’d have to do is drop a few rocks and the human problem goes away.

  Independence Day, although a bad movie as far as plot and character goes, actually illustrates my point quite nicely. The UFO crashed at Roswell in 1947. If we assume that ID4 took place in 2000, the US Military wasted 53 years it could have been using to prepare for the aliens. Sure, we couldn’t make head or tail of their technology – even though we had Data to help – yet it doesn’t matter. The mere presence of the alien craft should have alerted the entire world that there was a potential threat out there. Think about how the movie would have turned out if the aliens had launched their first strike against Area 51 and destroyed or recaptured their missing craft. Could even Will Smith have saved us then? Given a priceless opportunity to prepare for war against the most implacable foe humanity would ever face, the opportunity was squandered so badly that they brought humanity to the brink of destruction instead.

  What would we do if we faced an alien threat?

  I like to think we’d do better.

  Let us suppose, as put forward in this novel, that a UFO does crash – in America, Britain, France, China, darkest Africa…or anywhere. What next? Most UFO crashes seem to take place in isolation, yet that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. The F-22 Raptor didn’t appear out of nowhere. It came from a production line, which produced hundreds of other Raptors, in America. The presence of an F-22 implies the existence of a country capable of creating them. Why, then, do UFO researchers so often dismiss the fact that a crashed alien ship automatically confirms the existence of an alien society? If alien ships have crashed on Earth, why haven’t the aliens demanded them back, or recovered them by force? And, for that matter, why are we not going on planetary alert?

  I think that the answer is obvious.

  In this book, I have blended ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ from UFO lore. Roswell, as most people know, was a reported crash in 1947. It was debunked by Karl T. Pflock in his Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe. He also provides an excellent debunking of Philip Corso’s The Day After Roswell. (A copy of The Day After Roswell is online.) The Manhattan Abduction, in which Linda (Cortile) Napolitano was allegedly abducted by little grey aliens, was supposedly witnessed by Javier Perez de Cuellar, then Secretary-General of the United Nations. I find the report largely unbelievable. There were simply too many witnesses. People interested in UFO Abductions may wish to consult The Uninvited (Nick Pope) and Alien Encounters (David Jacobs). It’s hard to say how seriously one should take them. The introduction of the Greys to popular culture through mediums such as The X-Files and Dark Skies means that many people could ‘construct’ an alien abduction report under hypnosis without intending to mislead the researcher.

  I guess the best advice I can give is keep watching the skies.

  Or, as HG Wells put it…

  “At any
rate, whether we expect another invasion or not, our views of the human future must be greatly modified by [The Martian Invasion.] We have learned now that we cannot regard this planet as being fenced in and a secure abiding place for Man; we can never anticipate the unseen good or evil that may come upon us suddenly out of space. It may be that in the larger design of the universe this invasion from Mars is not without its ultimate benefit for men; it has robbed us of that serene confidence in the future which is the most fruitful source of decadence…”

  Christopher G. Nuttall

  New Years Day, 2010

  Cast of Characters

  The US Government

  President Andrew Chalk, President of the United States

  Vice President Jacob Thornton, Vice President

  General Gary Wachter, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

  Janine Reynolds, NSA Director

  Hubert Dotson, Secretary of State

  Tom Cook, Secretary of Defence

  Dahlia King, Secretary of the Treasury

  Tom Pearson, CIA Director

  Richard Darby, Director of Homeland Security

  Pepper Reid, Secret Service Protective Agent

  The Tiger Team, Area 52

  Tony Jones, Chair, Special Advisor to the President

  Ben Santini, Military Adviser, Former SF

  Alex Midgard, Foreign Technology Division

  Jane Hatchery, MD. Medical researcher

  Neil Frandsen, advanced propulsion specialist

  Gayle Madison, communications and cultural specialist

  Steve Taylor, Intelligence Analyst

  Colonel William Fields, Base Commander, Area 52

  The Military

  Colonel Mikkel Ellertson, CO The Tomb, Washington

  Colonel Brent Roeder, Base Commander, Area 53

  Sergeant Arun Prabhu, Green Beret, Washington

  Lieutenant-Commander Nicolas Little, SEAL, CO Operation Wilson

  Airman First Class Robin Lance, Radar Specialist, Schriever Air Force Base

  Technical Sergeant Dave Heidecker, Radar Specialist, Schriever Air Force Base

  Master Sergeant George Grosskopf, Base Security Team, Schriever Air Force Base

  Captain Will Jacob, USAF F-22 pilot, Dark Shadow Squadron

  General Sandra Dyson, CO United States Strategic Command, NORAD

  NASA

  Director Jack Buckmaster, NASA

  Colonel Irving Harrows, ISS Commander

  Isabel Paterson, ISS Officer

  Doctor Melvyn Heights, ISS scientist

  Captain Philip Carlson, Atlantis Captain

  Felicity Hogan, Atlantis co-pilot

  SETI

  Karen Lawton, Radio Specialist

  Daisy Fairchild, Director

  The UN

  Secretary-General Abdul Al-Hasid

  Ambassador George Hutchmeyer, US Ambassador

  The Media

  Abigail Walker

  The Other Governments

  Evgeny Vikenti, President of the Russian Federation

  Mu Chun, President of China

  Prime Minister Arthur Hamilton, Prime Minister of Britain

  President Vincent Pelletier, President of France

  The Aliens

  Ethos (Leader)