Steve Alten - Vostok

At the Capitol building a stage had been set up facing the mall. Jim Clancy grabbed one arm and Susan the other as our security team surrounded me and pushed their way through the parting masses toward the podium. It was as loud as a college football bowl game, and I heard Jim shouting instructions about a bulletproof shield.

The shield was an eight-foot-high, three-sided Lexan enclosure that surrounded the podium. Jim opened the back panel and I ducked inside. There were no air vents other than a few slits atop the slanted ceiling, and the effect created a stifling silence.

“Good afternoon.” My greeting repeated across dozens of speakers in a staggered delay throughout the mall.

Muffled by the bulletproof plastic, the crowd’s response returned to me in waves, concluding with the distant din from the masses gathered around the Washington Monument almost a mile away.

“Imagine your home powered by an infinite supply of free, clean electricity. Imagine never having to fuel your car again. Imagine free public transportation, reduced manufacturing costs, urban areas with clean air, and oceans with reduced levels of carbon dioxide. The threat of global warming addressed, the threat of a war in the Middle East defused. Energy is the life-blood of civilization, the key to our survival as a species. For most of the last century, our fossil-fuel masters have used energy to maintain control of the masses. I say, enough is enough.”

Staggered cheers moved across the multitudes, the sound reverberating off the surrounding buildings.

“The powers that be refuse to go quietly in the night. When we demonstrated the Vostok prototype, they offered me five billion dollars to buy the company. When I refused to sell out the people of this planet for a few trinkets of silver, they stole it. When we received funding to begin manufacturing our line of generators, they burned our factory to the ground. They play by their own set of rules, and—”

I paused. In the distance, the crowds gathered around the Reflecting Pool and Washington Monument were gesturing to something in the eastern sky. Like a stadium crowd doing the wave, section by section looked up and pointed.

I turned to see for myself, only my view was obscured by the Capitol building.

And then I saw it.

The vessel was imposing, as dark and wide as a B-2 Bomber, only saucer-shaped. It descended majestically and then hovered, motionless over the mall, as if it were going to perch on the tip of the Washington Monument. The teardrop belly was flashing lights and emitting a magnetic field that I knew all too well, and those people caught in its gravitational vortex found themselves levitating fifteen to twenty feet in the air.

The crowd went wild as hundreds pushed and climbed over one another to experience zero gravity within the UFO’s shadow.

I stared at the scene, dumbfounded. Everything about this felt wrong. Through my own experience in Lake Vostok, I knew these vehicles were organic in nature, flown telepathically by beings whose aura of sharing could be detected by humans involved in the close encounter. This was corroborated by the testimonials from military personnel who had been the first boots on the ground when a UFO had crash-landed.

This experience felt cold and calculated, and the way in which the E.T. moved seemed too mechanical.

It’s not an E.T. It’s an ARV — an Alien Reproduction Vehicle — designed by MJ-12 to fool the public!

I grabbed the microphone. “Run! It’s not a real—”

What happened next occurred so quickly that only super-slow-motion replays of the historical event could reveal the truth, which is why they were subsequently banned and removed from both the television networks and the Internet.

That alone should have been enough to redirect the public’s rage.

First, there was a loud humming noise. That was followed by a brilliant flash of light originating from the vessel’s power source, immediately followed by an explosion at the base of the Washington Monument.

In the six seconds that followed, the world changed. That was how long it took the 555-foot tower to collapse, crushing and instantly killing more than one hundred people.

Flying rubble wounded hundreds more, and the panicked crowd increased that number into the thousands as people trampled one another to flee the area.

Concrete gravel struck the outside of my plastic enclosure as I watched the fake alien craft fly off. It did not slingshot into the atmosphere like the real thing. Instead it gained altitude like a helicopter before racing to the west.

Then the soldiers in black camouflage fighting gear arrived. I saw Jim Clancy go down. Susan was carried off as smoke grenades closed the curtain on the scene seconds before I was dragged away.

“True, don’t do this!” I followed my best friend across the dilapidated harbor dock to the parking lot of the Clansman. Once the crown jewel of Loch Ness, the hotel and its waterside restaurant, had been bashed into a barely recognizable pile of brick rubble .

The sun had dipped below the Monadhliath Mountains. With darkness approaching fast, the crowd had swelled to several hundred men and women, many villagers openly carrying shotguns. They stood solemnly, watching as True and his deckhand, Jim Clancy, unloaded a two-hundred-pound cow carcass from the back of the former U.S. Army Ranger’s pick-up truck .

“True, listen to me. There are better ways to kill this monster. Stuffing a dead cow with C-4 explosives and dragging it around Loch Ness — it’s crazy. The croc’s bigger than your boat.”

“Nessie was bigger than my boat, too, but it didnae stop ye from diving the loch in a Newtsuit. Unlike ye, Zach, I brought this nightmare to the Highlands, and now I’m goin’ tae end it.”

True tightened a steel cable around the dead animal’s neck while Jim slit open its belly, anchoring a plastic thermos packed with C-4 inside the ribcage .

“Secure the udder wit’ those clamps, Jimmy, but let the entrails leak oot a bit. We’ll need a good stench tae lure tha’ bitch up from the bottom.”

Turning to my right, I saw a BBC camera crew filming a female news reporter from behind a police barricade. Keeping my back to them, I eavesdropped on her while she read from a teleprompter:

“Its name was Purussaurus, and it was a gigantic caiman, a prehistoric ancestor to the modern-day crocodile. Reaching lengths of more than fifteen meters, it lived in what is today the Amazonian rainforest but was eight million years agoa vast inland sea teeming with freshwater whales, giant turtles, and enormous rodents. How one of these monster predators survived to inhabit Loch Ness remains a mystery .

“It’s a mystery that became public seven years ago when Highland resident Finlay McDonald found an ancient egg frozen in the bowels of Aldourie Castle, a three-century-old chateau that looms over the eastern shoreline of Loch Ness. An ancient aquifer connects the Moray Firth and the North Sea with Loch Ness beneath the castle grounds, and so it’s not unusual to find sea creatures venturing inland. Still, no one had ever seen an egg quite like this .

“Footage of the egg’s discovery went viral after scientists were astonished to discover a life-form still alive inside. Three months later the egg actually hatched, producing a living, breathing, four-legged, gilled reptile roughly the size of a Bassett Hound .

“The animal, dubbed Plessie by locals, was kept in the swimming pool at Nessie’s Retreat, a luxury hotel located in the shadow of Urquhart Castle. Experts debated over the identity of the species, conducting daily examinations, while over four million visitors flocked to the Highlands that first summer to see the creature, which the hotel owner insisted was a Plesiosaurus.