LITMIR.BIZ

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21 February 1954

       PRESIDENT DWIGHT D. Eisenhower stood on the deck outside the control tower, looking out into the night across the endless salt flats and hard-packed sands of Muroc Air Force Base in California. He’d been on vacation at nearby Palm Springs when his aides had arrived that evening to usher him off to this godforsaken stretch of emptiness. Not that it didn’t have its own austere beauty. The sky in particular was brilliantly clear, strewn with stars.

       It might have been nice if several searchlights hadn’t been switched on, their beams aiming up into the sky.

       “I don’t see a damned thing,” Eisenhower said, testily. “Did they stand us up?”

       An aide checked his watch. “It’s only a little past midnight, Mr. President. Let’s wait a few minutes yet and see.”

       Other people in the select group stood in a huddle nearby: Edwin Nourse, who’d been Truman’s chief economic advisor; Cardinal James Francis McIntyre, current head of the Los Angeles Catholic Church; Franklin Allen, an eighty-year-old former reporter with the Hearst Group, leaning heavily on his cane; and perhaps fifteen others. Eisenhower’s aides had rounded them up that evening and driven them up to Muroc as “community leaders,” asking them to witness what promised to be a spectacular event—the dawn, perhaps, of a new era for Humanity.

       “We’ve got incoming,” a voice inside the tower called over a loudspeaker. “From the north-northwest, range fifty miles.” Eisenhower turned to face that direction and raised his binoculars to his eyes. He had not, he decided, been this nervous since he’d waited out D-day in his command post, code-named “Sharpener,” in a Hampshire woods.

       A star just above the horizon grew steadily brighter. “There it is, sir!” an aide called.

       “I see it.”

       The star swelled rapidly to a brilliant light, like an aircraft’s landing lights, and it was accompanied now by four other objects traveling behind it. Through the binoculars, Eisenhower could see that the craft was flat and circular, perhaps sixty yards across. Windows across the leading edge were the source of the light, too bright for him to see inside.

       Utterly silent, the craft came to a stop, hovering two hundred yards out from the control tower, extended four landing legs, then gently settled onto the hard-packed desert floor. Light spilled onto the ground as a garage-sized hatch slid open, and a ramp extended in apparent welcome.

       “Well,” the President said, “I guess it’s showtime.”

       “I still don’t like this, Mr. President,” Sherman Adams said. Adams was Eisenhower’s chief of staff, the first man ever to hold that title. “Not one bit. We can’t help you in there if they’re hostile—”

       “I’ll be fine, Sherman.”

       “Sir, if this is an invasion, what’s the first thing they would do? Take down the target’s leadership! They could kidnap you, hold you hostage. Or—”

       “Enough, Sherman! I am going to do this.” Eisenhower gave Adams a hard glare. His senior advisor already had a nickname among his opponents in Washington: The Abominable No Man. He was outspoken and direct, and not afraid to tell the President exactly what he thought.

       Which was why the former Army five-star general appreciated him as much as he did.

      But right now, Sherman was wrong. Still, Eisenhower relaxed the glare into a wry grin. “Let Dick know what happened if things go south.” Vice President Richard Nixon was back in DC, having been deliberately kept out of the loop. “But don’t worry. If they wanted me dead, they wouldn’t go to all of this trouble to arrange a meeting. They’d just vaporize the White House.

       “It’s what I’d do, at least.”

       Eisenhower handed Adams his binoculars, turned, and descended the metal steps from the control tower deck. A couple of Marine honor guards fell into step behind him.

      It will be all right.

      The meeting had been arranged by Project Sigma, a classified program signed into existence by Eisenhower when he took office. It worked under the direction of Truman’s shadowy MJ-12, the committee tasked with overseeing contact with the aliens, and the recovery of their spacecraft. Just last month, Sigma had detected large alien spacecraft in orbit around Earth, and soon established radio contact with them—in English, which suggested that these creatures had been observing Earth for some time. The aliens had asked to talk with Earth’s leadership; Sigma had suggested in return an initial meeting with the President of the United States, and specified a place for the encounter, far out in the desert away from reporters and an already anxious public. Just two years ago, large numbers of UFOs had overflown Washington DC, and while that had been hushed up, the country, already nervous about the global march of Communism and a Soviet hydrogen bomb, needed to be kept calm.

       America had tested its first thermonuclear device on November 1, 1952. Less than a year later, just six months ago, the Russians had exploded their own weapon, known to US Intelligence as Joe-4 because it was the fourth known nuclear test carried out at the behest of Joseph Stalin. The iron curtain predicted by Churchill in 1946 had just become terrifyingly deadly. The so-called Cold War, emerging from the Truman Doctrine of 1947 which called for the containment of the Soviet Union, was on the point of turning hot.

       One reason Eisenhower had agreed to this meeting was the chance that the extraterrestrials might be able to provide the United States with technologies, possibly weapons, that would help America stay secure in the face of Communist aggression. That, Eisenhower was the first to admit, was the longest of long shots, but any chance at all made the risk worthwhile.

       He reached the bottom of the ramp. “Stay here, fellows,” he told the Marine bodyguards. “I’ll be back soon.”

       “Sir—” one of the Marines began.

       “It’s okay, son. They want just me.”

      As if on cue, a figure was waiting for him, silhouetted against the light at the top of the ramp. Strange. The figure looked human: six feet tall, with long hair, and a raised hand with five fingers. Eisenhower had been expecting one of the short aliens, the “Extraterrestrial Biological Entities,” recovered from several crashed saucers. Those things gave him the creeps. So to see this new kind of being?

      What the hell?

       A long and anxious hour later, Eisenhower returned to the tower, looking white and shaken. “My God, Sherman,” he whispered. “My God in heaven.”

       “What was it, Mr. President? What happened?”

       “They offered … a trade,” Eisenhower told his aide. “A negotiated exchange. They offered to begin giving us technology. No weapons, but free energy and antigravity and …” He stopped, then shook his head. “Jesus Christ.”

       “And what did they want in return, sir?”

       “Nothing much. Unilateral nuclear disarmament. We get rid of our nukes, and they give us toys … trinkets, really. I felt like a South Seas island native being offered beads and baubles by the Europeans!”

       “What did you tell them?”

       “I told them ‘no,’ and then I told them ‘hell no!’ of course.”

       Adams

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