Michael walked toward the back of the room and signaled to Blake to bring his tools to open the larger crates. This Blake did and when the first wooden lid was pried off, the four looked down into the dark container. There was a pile of narrow metallic pieces which were thicker and longer than the foil sheet they had seen earlier. As Michael reached in and took one of the broken sections out of the crate and held it up to the light, he tied to flex it but with all his strength he could not.
"You see the slight arc to this and the other pieces," he asked, pointing out the curved shape of the object. These are obliterated sections of the craft's framework. The interior structural ribbing."
"You mean from the . . ." Russel asked.
"Yeah, the alien ship," he clarified.
"Jesus," Blake could be heard saying under his breath."
"Nothing we have in the way of metal is this light and this strong," Michael shared. "And yet, from the high velocity impact with the desert surface the vehicle was destroyed, as were the beings inside it."
All were silent as he carefully put the object back.
"These craft over the years have been clocked at four to six thousand miles an hour on radar and with immediate acceleration and directional change up to eight thousand," Michael continued. He looked inside and asked Blake for the flashlight.
"Hmm. Thought so," he said pulling another cross beam out. "You see these peculiar markings on the edge of the metal here?" He shone the light directly on the flat side of the narrow piece, about the double length of ruler. There were clearly unusual symbols embossed onto the surface as if they were spelling out a name or phrase. The symbols were indecipherable.
Blake reached out curiously to touch the piece.
"Either of you two college boys checked out in cryptology?" Dan asked, smiling.
"If you can, you've got a great job at the Pentagon," Michael laughed.
Russel was not smiling. "So . . . you mean it's never been . . ."
"Nope," Michael answered. "And yet these symbols are consistent with others I've seen embossed on the Roswell debris and a few pieces at the San Antonio crash."
"Roswell? The actual . . ."
"Yeah. Classified photos of the stuff. And that's definitely the symbology. I've slaved myself over a few of those symbols. It's also consistent with the ancient Minoan disc with spiral lettering predating Geek . . . Linear A, they've called it. And never have cracked it."
"Holy shit," Blake whispered."
"Those same symbols also show up on other anomalous artifacts in Mesoamerican temples and on the walls of a few caves in China."
"Jesus! But, how did you get pictures of Roswell," Russel asked. "And how did you know all this?"
"I told you guys . . . I'm at Yale, right?"
"Yeah," Blake said, still perplexed.
"Yale's a pretty special place, guys. And I'm not just talking Ivy League stuff. That's all I can really say. You do know it's the foremost breeding ground for our governments' intelligence community, right?"
"Yeah, come on, Blake," Russel butt in. "CIA, FBI . . . all those spooky cats come out of Yale. There's a culture for it. Plus . . . they've got the Skull and Bones guys learning to run the world from there . . . right Michael?"
"No comment," he said seriously. "Let's open this next box."
As the crate was opened, Michael reached in and brought up to the light a very different looking material. From the discoloration and burned marks it was obviously another piece of what was ostensibly more UFO wreckage. The sections in the crate were a combination of the thin foil they had seen before, melded onto a thick under section of softer inner material looking to be of a textile substance. The stiff, sponge-like material seemed to be a heavy nylon-type of fabric with thousands of honeycombs running vertically inside it. The thickness of the whole metal and fabric configuration, most likely from the outer wall of the craft, was approximately the width of Michaels upper arm as he held it out to them for observation.
"This is where their science gets interesting," Michael offered, running his fingers over the material with the honeycombed hollow spaces. "This has to do with the antigravity property these craft have. Some kind of supercharged energy runs though these channels and neutralizes the gravitational properties within and around the whole vehicle. And of course, that makes also weightless the small beings inside controlling it."
"God. That's creepy!"
"Yeah, but it gets even weirder," Michael went on. "There's apparently some unexplained organic relationship between these flying devices and the bodies of the beings inside, which control it. Something quasi-biological. This was all determined years ago by the process of dissecting, studying and reconfiguring these things."
"Jesus, Really?"
"Yeah. And that research was begun immediately after the collection and breaking down of the wreckage and alien bodies taken from the Roswell incident in 1947. Something like 1950 a lot was already known. The rest of this reverse engineering process gave us over the years a few little developments like . . . fiber optics, integrated circuitry, laser technology, and get this . . . bullet-proof Kevlar."
Dan ran his finger over the stiff sponge-like, honeycombed material beneath the layer of impenetrable foil.
"You have to know, my college friends," Michael said, touching one of the cryptic symbols before laying the fragment back into the crate, "All this was pulled together to form much of our present superior weaponry under government black budgets. And with some of the smartest humans on this planet."
"Jesus. And right under everyone's noses," Russel said. "But how did they manage to keep this stuff secret for so long?"
The people's duty. A sense of fear. Real threats. And more than a few disappearances of those who attempted to talk. Most of the people who worked on these projects are retired or deceased today. A few old-timers are finally coming forward about what their part was. Either with the actual work . . . or the coverup. Most of these guys worked quietly within the system for many years."
"They were stationed at top-secret facilities like "Dreamland" over in Nevada," Dan said. "Wright Paterson Air force Base, and White Sands missile range, here in New Mexico."
"And then, for the past decades they kept their heads down out of fear of humiliation . . . or worse for them or their families," Michael added.
"So, it's all true . . ." Blake spoke out. "This stuff they're saying about government cover-ups . . ."
"True and extremely expensive, "Michael added. "And still going on. Just this year something like . . . seventeen billion dollars cannot be accounted for in the US budget by the government and military. Another story you don't hear much about. It's all black budget projects, and most are going on today in underground military facilities. Miles under the Earth. And those projects don't come cheap."
Another, smaller box, next to the large crates with wreckage caught Michael's eye. "Let's open this one next," he said, lifting it up onto the flat surface of a another wooden box. As Blake opened it the men looked inside anxiously. It contained several books which, upon closer examination, were actually photo albums. As Blake took one out and began leafing through the 8x10 photographs, it became obvious that the entire collection of pictures were taken at night of lightening strikes hitting the desert floor. Forty to fifty pictures of just lightening. They were taken out in Monument Valley, from the looks of the mammoth rock spires, so unique and recognizable.
"What the hell is that all about?" Russel asked, peering over the shoulder of Dan, standing next to Jasper, also eagerly looking on. They were all silent as more pictures were perused—again all of lighting, and again, all taken of a stormy night sky at what appeared to be different times and from different locations amid the monolithic desert formations.
It was Jasper who finally spoke.
"The same spot," he said cryptically. "Most of those pictures show lighting hitting the same place. There, look . . ."
They all huddled close together and observed what Jasper had pointed out. A good nine out of ten of all the nighttime shots captured brilliant bolts of lightning striking the desert floor from the heavens at, remarkably, the same place. It was a location consistently relative to the three iconic spires. As if the photographer was aware of this and presented the album as evidence to record this unusual phenomenon.
"What do you make of that, Jas?" Michael whispered to the older shaman under his breath.
"Damned if I know," he surprisingly answered. "But this is something we're going to have to find out. Lightning is usually random. We see lots of it out here in storms. Something is happening there. At that one place over in Monument Valley."
"It's some kind of . . . a sign," Michael offered. "Some sort of marking the Earth."
The last page of the album was a series of numbers and drawings, superimposed over an aerial photo of the exact area encompassing the towering bluffs. It seemed to be a nexus of coordinates and measurements delineating the very strike point on the ground, which Jasper had alluded to. The lines and GPS coordinates located precisely the place on the Earth's surface where, uncannily, so many strikes of lighting had been recorded, hitting in the same location.
Michael closed the photo album and placed it safely under his arm. It was a definitive sign to all that this mystery was to be further investigated—certainly before he would make his trek back to Yale at the end of the Spring Break.
* * *