ScienceDirect - Technol Rep Tohoku Univ ... - Garryck Osborne

150 The Hunt for Zero Point
encouraged reports of flying saucers in the 1950s and 1960s to obscure
the flight trials of its then top secret U-2 and A-12 spyplanes. The
implication was that if you saw one of these things overflying the highway
and reported it, there was something wrong with your reasoning. It was
a tactic that worked well.
Add this to the highly compartmentalized, watertight environment in
which black program engineers and scientists worked, and the fear they
were reportedly subjected to, and here, as with the Philadelphia
Experiment, was a cheap, but highly effective means of maintaining
program secrecy. By the cusp of the millennium, there was so much bad
information mixed in with the good about black programs that it was
often impossible to tell them apart.
Was Astra another case in point?
On my return from California I'd left a message on Marckus'
answering machine. Maybe, I'd conceded, talking to the machine like it
was a confessional, I had been expressly meant to see that chart. Maybe
Astra was a subtle piece of disinformation; a misleading fragment planted
ahead of my visit. Then again, maybe it wasn't. Maybe it was genuine.
Faced as I was with the official denial, Astra was every bit as effective
as a hit team equipped with Colt Commandos and a platinum hard-key.
Less messy, too.
This time, Marckus had called me back. I told him then what I thought
of his wild-goose chase. He never attempted to deny it. I got the
impression he truly believed it was good for me, like it was an extension
of my education or something.
In the small hours of a particularly hot night, three days after I'd sat in
Muellner's office, I watched from my mountaintop lookout as a ball of
shining golden light rose above the hills that separated Groom Lake from
Tikaboo Valley. The light appeared to hang in the air for a few moments
before drifting lazily downrange and disappearing behind a mountain
peak 50 miles to the south.
It left me strangely unmoved.
In the kind of silence that you can shred with a razor when you're a
hundred miles from anywhere, I found myself thinking again about the
memo from Lt. Gen. Nathan Twining, head of the U.S. Army Air
Forces' Air Materiel Command, to Brig. Gen. George Schulgen, chief of
USAAF intelligence in September 1947. The memo I'd spilled coffee
over in my basement back in London.
Twining's observation—that objects "approximating the shape of a
disc, of such appreciable size as to appear to be as large as a man-made
aircraft" were neither "visionary nor fictitious"—was written just three