Steve Alten - Vostok

“Dad hurried inside to check with the radar techs on duty, who confirmed seven UFOs were flying back and forth through the radar beam, with an eighth vessel hovering at about eighty thousand feet. Everyone was watching it onscreen. It remained stationary for a good ten minutes, and then slowly descended until it dropped off the radar. It disappeared for another five minutes, then instantly re-appeared at eighty thousand feet, again just sitting in the sky, completely stationary. On the next radar sweep it showed up again, only now it was two hundred miles away. It hovered there for another ten minutes before repeating the pattern two more times.”

We were down to our last fifty-two minutes of air, yet I was on the edge of my seat, buzzed and listening. There was nothing to question here. Ben was repeating classified information on his deathbed before all three of us suffocated.

Ming was listening too. “What happened over Pakistan?”

Ben turned to her, close to drunk. “Give me a kiss and I’ll tell you everything.”

She leaned over his seat, and I became the third wheel as they made out in the darkness.

I stared at the air gauge: forty-three minutes.

After a minute Ben continued his story. “Pakistan. In the fall of 1998, I was assigned to an air division in the Persian Gulf. I had all the top security clearances and was one of the control officers who had access to the nuclear launch authenticators. One night our radar detected a UFO hovering over a Pakistani nuclear site, and yours truly was sent to be our eye-in-the-sky.

“This wasn’t our first close encounter with E.T.s over nuclear facilities. Many insiders shared the belief that it was our nuclear tests, combined with the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that summoned them to Earth in the first place. Over the years I’d seen top secret SAT photos taken of both U.S. and Soviet nuclear sites. Sometimes in the process of verifying a SALT Treaty we’d find objects in those pictures that shouldn’t have been there. In fact, on my first tour in the Middle East I was briefed about a 1976 UFO incident over Tehran. Two F-4s from the Iranian Air Force had tried to intercept the E.T. vessel. When the Iranian pilots turned on their fire control systems, their electrical systems went out, and they had to return to base.

“Anyway, I was in my jet approaching Pakistani airspace when I received word that the UFO was hovering a thousand feet over their nuclear facilities and everything had gone black — no power. Since the Pakistani radar was dead, my supervisor decided it was politically safe to take a closer look. I executed a steep dive and leaped down from forty thousand feet. I had the UFO painted on my radar; I could see his lights in the distance. Then I saw it — a saucer as big as a city block with a four-story-high dorsal-fin-shaped conning tower. At least that’s what it looked like to me. The vessel was hovering over the nuclear weapons facility while four Pakistani JF-17 interceptors bore down on us from the southeast. Without warning, the UFO took off like a speeding bullet and disappeared into orbit, leaving yours truly in Pakistani air space on Pakistani radar over their powerless nuclear weapons facility.

“The Pakistan government blamed the United States, and I took the fall. A falsified psychiatric evaluation all but sealed my doom. Six months after I received my walking papers, a guy named Steven Greer contacted me.

“Dr. Greer had left his career as an ER physician to dedicate his life to persuading military and government officials to come clean about UFO sightings — not just to convince the public they were real and meant us no harm, but to release extraterrestrial technologies, which the military industrial complex had been suppressing, that could supply society with an endless supply of free, clean energy. In 1993, Greer had met with a group of military advisors to find a way to poke holes in the dam of secrecy and disinformation that had obscured the truth about extraterrestrial contacts since 1947.

“Greer had been selected to carry the disclosure baton for multiple reasons, not the least of which was the access he gained to military and political leaders. He and his lawyer used the Constitution to create a legal loophole in the Classified Information Nondisclosure Agreement signed by all military and civilian personnel with top-security clearances. Greer was able to convince hundreds of individuals with top secret clearances who’d had encounters with UFOs to come forward to testify on May 8, 2001, at the National Press Club Meeting in Washington, D.C., at an event called The Disclosure Project .

“Armed with classified photos and testimonials from hundreds of seasoned Intel and military commanders, pilots, and NASA and FAA officials, Greer put together the briefing materials requested by President Clinton. He personally briefed James Woolsey, Clinton’s first CIA director, along with the heads of the Defense Intelligence Agency, members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and a select number of congressmen. To his shock, Clinton was denied access to MAJESTIC-12, which was operating on an annual multi-billion-dollar black budget, free of congressional oversight. Greer learned that there is a shadow group — a cabal — made up of the four largest banks, which also own and operate the four largest oil companies. These cartels work hand-in-hand with the defense industry and orchestrate the wars that finance their entities. They own every major newspaper, magazine, radio, and television network, which allows them to black out news stories that run counter to their enterprises. When inquiries are made, people turn up dead, and no rank is too high to be assassinated. CIA Director William Colby agreed to support Greer’s investigation — until his body turned up in the Potomac River.

“That was a warning to Clinton and other members of the cabal who might think of defecting. President Obama received his warning while in Norway to receive his Nobel Prize. On December 9, 2009, MJ-12 fired off a scalar burst over Oslo from one of their satellite weapons. A scalar weapon uses gravitic waves to vaporize targets, and the Norway blast left behind a blue spiral in the night sky that was witnessed by thousands. Obama was put on notice that he may be President, but the cabal is still in charge. This group has one singular objective — to acquire E.T. technologies for weapons applications while keeping a tight lid on clean, unlimited power-generating systems that would essentially solve the planet’s energy crisis and put the fossil-fuel industry out of business. The powers-that-be don’t want that… do they, Ming?”

“No.”

My eyes widened. “This is true? This conspiracy stuff is real?”

She nodded. “I was sent to East Antarctica to determine the feasibility of accessing Lake Vostok from Prydz Bay. The Loose Tooth Rift is opening above a subglacial river that runs west beneath the Avery Ice Shelf before forging south to connect with Vostok’s northern basin. As for your involvement, Ben is right; we used the discovery of the Miocene fossils as an excuse to mount an exploratory mission into the lake. And your presence legitimized the ruse.”

“I don’t get it. What ruse? What mission?”

Ben took another swig of whiskey and passed the near-empty bottle back to Ming as another swath of sand rained down upon our sub. “A few years ago SOAR, the Support Office for Aero-physical Research, sent a reconnaissance flight to conduct magnetic resonance imaging over Antarctica. When they flew over Lake Vostok, their magnetometers went nuts. Scientists from Japan and Germany later confirmed the presence of a magnetic anomaly in the subglacial lake along a rise located in its eastern sector. The affected area spans a sixty-five-mile radius. Whatever’s responsible for throwing us off-course probably packs enough juice to power every city in the world for the next hundred years.”