Descent (10 page)

Had I just encountered a Man in Black? Or was Reverend James Baxter merely an eager and socially awkward young minister, who had mentioned by sheer coincidence the very verses from Revelation that had been on my mind since Monday? I didn’t know, but I knew how to find out. I opened out my phone on the table and selected the footprint of the minister’s ID card. It was there all right, but inert, with no trace of the authentication I’d seen earlier, and no warning either. A hasty visit to the local Church of Scotland site, the local
Yellow Pages
, and then a wider trawl, found no minister of that name. Nor was there any such project as the parochial pastoral ecumenical outreach initiative.

Holy shit
, it seemed, had been the right response in the first place.

Naturally, I said nothing about the strange visit when my parents came home. My mother didn’t notice the cigarette smell, having no doubt been desensitised by her stint at the relief centre, but my father did.

‘Don’t add smoking to your liabilities, Ryan,’ he told me, and said no more about it.

‘That’s funny,’ Calum said, when I told him about the visit at first break the following morning. ‘My old man was up tae high doh last night, poking about on his phone and checking his taxes and VAT and payroll and all sorts. Said a wee nyaff in a black suit and waving a Cooncil card had been nosing around the garage, asking aw kinds ae questions about use ae unauthorised machinery. Da was sure it was some kind ae fishing expedition tae find some excuse tae shut him down. Yi ken what the fucking Cooncil’s like, aw Reds and Nats and Greens, nae friends ae the car driver or the sma’ business man. Or woman,’ Calum added, politically correcting himself. ‘So he was dead chuffed like when I suggested checking the cunt out, yi ken, by seeing if the Cooncil card was real by tapping it on my phone. And guess what? It wisnae! Nae fucking trace ae the fucker anywhere.’

‘Must have been quite a relief.’

‘Well, no exactly – after he’s convinced the guy’s no fae the Cooncil, he decides tae dae some work in the garden, even though it’s getting dark and there’s a bit ae a smirr on. Asks me to gie him a hand wi’ some tomato frames he wants tae shift. So out I go, and he tells me very quiet like that after seeing one ae they strange lights in the sky it’s no unusual tae get a visit like that, best thing is tae say nothing and they stop hassling you.’

‘Come on,’ I said. ‘We haven’t said anything anyway.’

‘We talked on the phone. You telt yir father. He talked on the phone tae my da. That could be enough.’

I shivered. ‘You mean we’re being watched?’

‘Aye, and our calls and our web searches monitored. How the fuck else wid yir phony minister guy ken yi were thinking about yon verse in Revelation? And we’ll only stop being watched if yi shut the fuck up about it fae now on.’

‘Who’s doing the watching? The Fine? The MoD?’

‘Both, my da reckons. Think the MoD disnae know about things like what we saw? They track everything that moves in British airspace. Somebody behind a screen in a bunker somewhere knows what happened tae us on Saturday, and they send someone around tae check what we’re saying about it.’

‘That’s stupid,’ I said. ‘Why send someone around with a strange manner and a cover story and ID that anyone can see through afterwards, instead of, say, an RAF officer or someone from the Ministry with proper ID, to have a quiet word?’

‘Ah,’ said Calum. He tapped the side of his nose. ‘Deniability. Name ae the game. They dinnae want tae admit they’re interested, see? So they stick tae the tried and tested MiB routine. Bit ae bizarre behaviour, hint ae menace, black suit, transparent cover story. That way, nae fucker will believe yi if yi tell them about it. Nae doubt they have a good laugh about it back at the office.’

‘Well, speaking of the office,’ I said, ‘we’ve both got his picture on our phones, right? We can search on his name, and on his face—’

Calum frowned. ‘And get loads ae false positives, nae doubt.’

For a moment I wondered if he really did have a Council ID card on his phone.

‘All the same, it’ll narrow it down.’

Excited, I took my phone out and retrieved the ID that Reverend Baxter had given me. Calum laid a hand on my arm.

‘Gonnae naw dae that,’ he said.

I looked up, surprised. ‘Why not?’

‘They—’ He stopped, shrugged, went on. ‘The MoD, GCHQ, NSA, whitever … they can aw track our searches. And even if we found who the guy wis, whit the fuck wid that accomplish except show the fuckers we’re still curious? Leave it be, man. Dinnae gie them a reason tae try something heavier next time.’

I was still not sure I believed anything that Calum had told me – about how he’d got the picture, about what his father had told him, and even about the visit the previous day. Just because he was my best friend, I knew him too well not to suspect him of an elaborate prank, or at least of opportunistic exaggeration. And the explanation he’d just given was, in its free-wheeling circular logic, a small but perfect example of the paranoid style into which thinking about UFOs seemed to lock so many people. But my encounter with the bogus minister had shaken my confidence.

So, to spite Calum and to spike his ploy, I did exactly what he’d suggested.

I shut the fuck up about the whole thing.

Of course, I didn’t stop thinking about the whole UFO thing. For at least two weeks afterwards I was obsessed with the topic, in a different way from my younger naïve fascination and the (as I’d naïvely thought) hard-nosed, seen-through-all-that scepticism that had hitherto replaced it. This wasn’t just because of my own two (or three, if you count the dream) direct experiences of aspects of the phenomenon, but because – in the three or four years since the last time I’d got lost in that wilderness of mirrors – one particular explanation had gone from a minority to a majority view among the less dogmatic believers and sceptics alike. This was known in the jargon as the Defence Technology Hypothesis, abbreviated to DTH by way of deliberate contrast with the conventional Extra-Terrestrial Hypothesis, or ETH.

According to the DTH, the tiny fraction of UFO reports that remained genuinely inexplicable after you’d ruled out hoaxes, camera glitches and misidentifications of the Moon, Venus, Jupiter, satellites, meteors, spacecraft re-entries, balloons, birds, conventional aircraft, lighthouses, etc., were quite likely to be of encounters with top-secret, advanced aircraft (including drones), sometimes combined with radar jamming and spoofing. Furthermore, the stories that the US and other governments were covering up their knowledge of UFOs, and that secretly these governments were in contact with the aliens already, and had a stash of crashed saucers that they were reverse-engineering, and/or alien bodies or captives that they were extracting information from, and all the rest of the UFO mythos, had originated from or been cunningly reinforced (through planted rumours and faked documents) by various government agencies and armed forces, or at least by specific groups and individuals within them. The evidence for this included detailed, documented confessions by former insiders.

In short, the canonical
X-files
-type government cover-up story was
itself
a government cover-up story, and what it covered up was advanced aviation technology. Far better that any civilians who happened to glimpse the latest black-budget breakthrough should attribute it to aliens rather than to the USAF. And as sheer disinformation, having your enemies unable to entirely shake off the suspicion that you were in a secret concord with immensely powerful aliens was quite a coup, if you could pull it off. Even more neatly, when the other side – the Russians or the Chinese, say – had figured it out, seen through it, and themselves become convinced of the DTH … it meant they had to keep taking all UFO reports seriously, because any of them could be an indication of a genuine unknown, but earthly – specifically, American – threat.

A good example of how the myth was kept rolling along is a story that had roiled the believers around about the time I’d first become interested – in fact, if I remember right it was an echo of that very commotion that had drawn me in. The website of a long-standing UFO investigation group in Alberta had received some tantalising emails, swiftly followed by a mysteriously delivered stash of documents that showed every sign of being authentic to the last molecule, from the age of the paper to the font and ink of the typewriter to the remaining faint but detectable traces of the typist’s perfume, all of which dated the first tranche to the mid-1950s. A second tranche, from the mid-1970s, was just as minutely authenticable in every way.

The documents told a remarkable story, one that turned several aspects of the traditional UFO mythos on its head. In this version, there was indeed a long-standing ET presence in the solar system, and in the late 1940s one of their craft had crashed in the United States. Two of the entities within (Greys, naturally) had survived. An ultra-secret, top-level committee of various agencies and armed forces of the US government had held the luckless occupants hostage until regular communication was established a couple of years later, and the aliens had fessed up in exchange for the captives’ safe return.

They were scientists. They had a base under a crater on the far side of the Moon. They had come from a solar system twenty-seven light years away, about a million years ago, and (rather as Calum’s father had allegedly told him) they’d been observing us ever since, out of the pure scientific interest that was the main motivation of their unthinkably long lives. They had travelled between the stars in a vessel that had a speed of, oh, about 1 per cent of the speed of light. Their short-haul craft, the classic flying saucers, had been seen and interpreted in various ways, throughout history. In the twentieth century, and particularly during and after World War Two, their observation sorties had been stepped up in response to humanity’s increasing mastery of rocketry and nuclear energy.

They were no threat, really, and they’d always expected that we’d discover them some day.

Pressed to give details of exactly how they’d been observing humanity, they’d explained their technique of capturing random individuals, implanting tracking and monitoring devices in their bodies, wiping or muddling their memories of the encounter, and releasing them back into the wild.

At this point the representatives of the secret intelligence agencies had pricked up their ears.

Was there any chance, the spooks had asked, that you could do some of this for us? To, uh, some not so random individuals? Ones we select for you?

Well, said the aliens, that’s a big ask. It would disrupt our careful, controlled, scientific observation programme, and we’re not quite finished with it yet. Besides, we have ethics. We have guidelines. The folks back home check up on us. There are committees and everything.

The spooks, shocked by such scruples, had been left at a loss. At this point, the man from the US Navy had leaned forward.

Suppose we could give you an incentive, he said. Suppose we could make you an offer of something so worth having that your supervisors would forgive you a little, teensy-weensy deviation from the guidelines?

Well, replied the aliens, it’d have to be one heck of an incentive.

How about, said the Navy man, anti-gravity, space warps, and faster-than-light travel?

That puts rather a different complexion on things, said the aliens. Tell us more.

At this point the USAF, the Army, the Government, and the CIA representatives had requested a brief adjournment. The aliens had duly trooped out, back to their cells or pods or whatever, and everyone had turned on the Navy man.

What, they wanted to know, the fuck was he on about?

Oh yes, he’d said. The US Naval Laboratory had stumbled on space warps in 1943, while working on some crackpot scheme for making ships invisible by bending light around them. The Navy’s scientists had taken the experimental results to Einstein, he’d done the math, and it had all checked out.

So why, everyone demanded, the fuck don’t we know about this?

That’s above my pay grade, said the Navy man, but my guess it’s all about security. I mean, you don’t want the Reds to know we have bases around Alpha Centauri, do you?

Alpha Centauri?
yelled everyone who knew what Alpha Centauri was.

Sure, said the Navy man. Sending a ship to Mars or the Moon would be hard to hide from the Russkis, whereas no telescope on Earth could see planets around other stars. And anyway, with faster-than-light travel and all, why the heck not?

Wonderful, said the USAF guy. With anti-gravity aircraft, we could really sock it to the Russkis!

Nu-uh, said the Navy man. Who said anything about aircraft? What we have are
ships
!

What about the flying saucers? They’re aircraft!

Yes –
naval
aircraft, because they take off from ships.

What! This is—

Let’s leave that till later, gentlemen, said the man from the Government. We can sort that out when we’ve made our arrangement with the aliens. Our most pressing need isn’t better aircraft than the commies’. We already
have
better aircraft. What we don’t have is reliable intelligence about what the commies are up to. If the little grey guys can give us that …

So the deal was struck. The aliens carried out abductions, implants and tracking for the CIA, in exchange for advanced space technology from the US Navy. They were pathetically grateful to have regular, rapid travel between the solar system and their planet around Zeta Reticuli. They were happy to have teams of scientists and military personnel accompany them, and more than happy to show them around the home world (physically largely desert, socially boringly communist, overall as exciting as a kibbutz in Utah). By now, there were US and allied colonies – officially, naval bases – dotted all over the sky, to about a hundred light-years out.

The USAF, meanwhile, had to be content with getting the aliens’ obsolete, pre-anti-gravity flying saucers to reverse engineer from, out at Groom Lake. They’d fumed about this, but the Navy had been adamant that starships were
ships
, dammit, and therefore their own flying saucers were carrier-based aircraft. Anyway, the USAF had got the Stealth bomber and God knows what else out of the deal, so in the end they’d accepted the situation, albeit with ill grace.