WATCH THE SKIES by David Dudley.

(Baltimore) City Paper
October 9-15, 1992
Vol. 16 No. 41.


"On a cold morning just before dawn in the winter of 1991, Steve
Tobias saw a UFO. He wasn't impressed. It was over Baltimore-Washington
International Airport, for one thing, where the airspace is typically
abuzz with flying objects, identified and otherwise. But Tobias says he
saw something. He was working maintenance for a major airline - he'd
rather not say which one - cleaning the idle planes during the night
shift, when he saw 'a hurtling object, almost perfectly circular,
brilliant greenish-yellow, streaking across the lower blackened portion
of the morning sky,' according to his own written account. The light
skittered over the BWI control tower and disappeared into the distant
clouds in a few brief seconds. 'It seemed to have been moving at great
speed,' Tobias wrote, 'at which I could not begin to estimate.'

But he didn't think a great deal of it at the time. This was before
Tobias thought a lot about UFOs. He went in his office to get a cup of
coffee and warm up a little. One of the guys from the morning shift was
just showing up, and he was talking about the darndest things he had
heard on his CB radio driving into work a few minutes earlier. A couple
of truckers out on I-95 were saying they saw something up in the sky,
some kind of UFO or something.

'Don't tell me,' Tobias said, half-joking. 'It was green.'

It was green, of course, according to the truckers.

Tobias unwittingly had stumbled upon some independent corroborating
evidence for his early-morning fireball. And with that, Steve Tobias
decided that he had joined the ever-growing ranks of the human race
that have seen, or think they have seen, an unidentified flying object.

Since 1947, when a reporter named Bill Bequette added the term flying
saucer to our increasingly scary postwar lexicon after a pilot named
Kenneth Arnold spotted nine wingless craft scooting past Mt. Rainier,
in Washington State, at what he thought was 1,700 mph, hundred of
thousands of people from around the world claim to have seen them as
well. Elvis Presley saw one in the desert outside of Vegas. More
convincingly, my mom saw one in the skies over Adelphi, Greece, in
1952. Maybe you have seen one too.

If you have, welcome to the other side, that uncounted segment of the
human populace that believes We Are Not Alone, and has the visual goods
to prove it. You have plenty of company. Here in the U.S., in the land
where atom bombs and flying saucers appeared at more or less the same
time, the UFO has become a familiar tabloid totem, a hip 60's TV show,
a kitschy symbol of American cold-war paranoia, a British heavy-metal
band, and one of the most instantly recognizable government acronyms
around. Jung thought UFOs were collective psychic manifestations --
flying mandalas. The Air Force always seemed to think that they were
weather balloons -- or 'swamp gas,' whatever that is.

But through it all, or those of you who lost interest some time after
"Chariots of the Gods" but before the "Weekly World News" space alien
met with Ross Perot, the sightings never have stopped. By 1969, 22
years and hundreds of unresolved cases after the Mt. Rainier sighting,
the U.S. Air Force's Project Blue Book, the government's only official
UFO investigative unit, was under pressure to put up or shut up.
Earlier that same year, the Condon Committee, an Air Force-sponsored
civilian scientific study made by the University of Colorado and
chaired by astrophysicist Dr. Edward Condon, issued its infamous
report. This group - roughly equivalent to the Warren Commission in the
eyes of indignant UFOlogists - stated that there was still no
verifiable evidence that UFOs were either hostile or real, and
recommended that the Air Force stop fooling around with Blue Book.

Life in 1969 was deemed weird enough without flying saucers. On
December 17, on the anniversary of the Wright Brothers' first powered
flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Project Blue Book was official
canceled. Nine years later, "Dragnet's" Jack Webb produced "Project
U.F.O.", a short-lived television series based on Project Blue Book -
it was also canceled.

This Monday, on another, slightly more famous anniversary, the
quincentennial of Christopher Columbus' discovery (or invasion,
depending on which side of the ocean you were on) of the Americas, NASA
will throw the switch on another project that will obliquely try to
answer that same nagging, terrifying question: Are We Alone? Or to put
in Age of Discovery terms, What's Over There?

The project is - or was - called SETI, the Search for Extra-
Terrestrial Intelligence, and if you get a chance to ask anyone in
charge, they'll be quick to say that it has nothing to do with UFOs. It
has so little to do with UFOs, in fact, that a few weeks ago they
changed the name of the whole program, because "Extra-Terrestrial"
tended to make people think about UFOs. It is now called the High
Resolution Microwave Survey, or HRMS, a more technically descriptive
but altogether less funky name. The ultimate goal and rationale behind
the program remains the same, however - to listen for positive evidence
of life beyond Earth.

After a glitzy LIFE magazine cover story in August and a bitter
funding fight in Congress, SETI (or HRMS) will be deployed (i.e.,
turned on) on schedule this Columbus Day and begin its high-tech sweep
of the cosmic radio dial, searching for a faint radio wave from the
distant light years that could indicate, finally, whether intelligent
life here is as lonely as it seems.

Steve Tobias, for one, doesn't need to be told by any big PR
government research study whether there's something out there or not.
He saw one of the damn things. And since that cold morning in 1991, he
has become convinced that not only is extraterrestrial life possible,
or likely - even NASA says that now - but it is going to show up en
masse any day now. And these discoverers are going to teach the third
planet from the sun a lesson in interstellar imperialism that will put
Columbus to shame.

On the phone, Tobias sounds worried.

'I haven't been in a good mood since I found out about these things,'
he says.

It sounds as if he means it. Even in the midst of a breathless bout
of doom-laden alien speculation, his voice has the desperate edge of a
man who has a very serious job to do, a man who must be heard, even if
it frequently is difficult to follow the thread of what he's trying to
say. Right now he is talking alternately about tidal waves, hurricane
Andrew, AIDS, and a passage in Virgil's "Aeneid," all of which may be
linked to extraterrestrial intervention. It may be a stretch for the
layman, but Steve Tobias has been doing his homework.


After his brief encounter at BWI, Tobias took a trip to his local
library and perused a few books on UFOs. Even after doing that, he
still wasn't all that convinced that they existed, but it seemed worth
following up on. Previously, he says, he was a typical skeptic,
uninterested in either the UFOs or even in the science-fiction
literature and films in which they figure so prominently. But one of
the books he picked up, David C. Knight's UFOs - A Pictorial History
From Antiquity to the Present, mentioned reports of glowing 'fireballs'
from the distant past - these sounded similar to what he had seen at
BWI. Other books told of crashed saucers in the New Mexico desert,
alien bodies in cold storage at Ohio's Wright-Patterson AFB, Air Force
pilots killed chasing flying discs in 1948, massive government cover-
ups, official disinformation campaigns, and scads of mysterious above-
top-secret evidence that Uncle Sam knew what UFOs were and where they
were coming from.

'I was flabbergasted,' Tobias says. 'Why in the hell was the
government sitting on this? Why wasn't this on MPT?' [Maryland Public
TV.]

The incidents that he stumbled upon are, of course, all familiar
pieces of the vast body of popular UFOlogy, the subjects of numerous
books and films and tabloid headlines. But for Tobias it was a
revelation, a call to action. And it was only the beginning. 'I was
shaken out of my dull-witted complacency and began to tie many other
events and trends together,' he writes in his account of the fateful
moment.

Since then, Tobias has tied a lot together. He also has formed his
own UFO investigation and research group, which he calls Citizens
Investigation of Phenomena Psychic, Astral, and Celestial (CIPPAC).

At this stage, he admits, CIPPAC is still pretty much just himself.
But he has great ambitions and a deadly serious mission. 'I decided
that the government made a grave mistake in trying to cover this up,'
he says. 'There is a possibility that we are all in a lot of danger.'

Before personally subjecting myself to CIPPAC's stockpile of alarming
new evidence, I figured it was time to apprise myself of some of the
latest in UFO literature. Since 1951, when Frank Scully's "Behind the
Flying Saucers" - a clumsily hoaxed account of a saucer that crashed in
New Mexico with its crew of 16 tiny, human-looking alien crewmen on
board - was published, the UFO phenomenon has perpetuated itself,
supported itself, and, arguably, scientifically crippled itself with a
thriving industry of freelance investigations, pseudoacademic
theorizing, and various starling firsthand accounts.

My favorite always has been "God Drives a Flying Saucer," an
amazingly wacky 1973 paperback by one R.L. Dione, which insists that
UFOs were merely the 'angels' of a distant supertechnological alien God
who accomplished the various miracles of Biblical renown (i.e., Jesus'
walking on the water, the revelation of Saul, the Immaculate
Conception) through force fields, hypno-beams, antigravity devices, and
other common saucer gizmos.

Couldn't find that one at the Pratt [Enoch Pratt Library, Baltimore],
but there were plenty of other new developments. The most dramatic and
well-documented recent incident is definitely the series of sightings
that occurred over a period of several months to a couple, Ed and
Frances Walters, in Gulf Breeze, Florida, in 1987-88. Compared to the
usual fuzzy black-and-white blurs that filled the UFO exposes of my
youth, the Walters' slick, full-color account, "The Gulf Breeze
Sightings," was almost absurdly well documented. These poor guys
couldn't get rid of their UFOs. Ed Walters claimed 20 separate
sightings and took 39 color photos, mostly Polaroids, of the various
saucers that buzzed his house, spoke to him telepathically, shot
immobilizing blue beams at him and his wife, deposited hostile little
big-eyed aliens on his porch, and woke up his dog, Crystal. The
pictures are amazing, almost too good. You can count the windows on the
saucers, which look kind of like Chinese lanterns or Christmas
ornaments. If it is a hoax, they certainly chose the corniest-looking
flying saucers imaginable.

I have yet to see a UFO of any kind, although I always have kept my
eyes open for them. I'm certain that anyone who grew up watching enough
television does too. Hollywood in the 70s painted a fairly sunny
picture of our alien visitors, compared with the lurking paranoia that
informed their 50's/atomic-age counterparts. (Ever seen the creepy 1953
film "Invaders From Mars?) In the 70s, however, wondrous, childlike ETs
descended from the heavens in glittering chandeliers to save petty,
grumpy humanity from our own miserable selves and treat us to eye-
popping special effects. Sounds good. Come on down. Sign me up.

My mother now says that she and a friend observed what could only
have been a UFO while on vacation in Greece in 1952, a huge year for
sightings, incidentally, according to Project Blue Book: 1,500 reports,
303 of them unexplained. Luckily, she did not volunteer this
information during my childhood, lest my imagination suffer a permanent
and debilitating overdose. And unlike Steve Tobias, my mom was not
transformed by her encounter into a crusader for UFO truth and justice.
She did, however, take it seriously enough to report the incident to
the U.S. consulate in Athens, where it was no doubt chuckled at and
thrown away.

Nevertheless, it was a fairly dramatic experience. For one thing,
Adelphi, Greece, is a fairly dramatic place to see a UFO. It was, after
all, the location of the Oracle of Apollo, a place the ancients called
'the navel of the world.' It was a stunningly clear day in pre-smog
Greece, not a soul around, and 'the most awful quiet,' Mom says. She
heard it before she saw it, 'a sort of whiny sound,' not a prop or a
helicopter, and certainly not a jet, which would have been exceedingly
rare in 1952 anyway. Then she and her friend saw it.

'It was shaped like and upside-down clamshell,' she says, 'and it
moved around jerkily. We must have watched it for ten minutes, but it
never occurred to me to take a picture.'

After hovering around and casing the place for a while, it 'shot
straight up like a helicopter,' she says, then vanished into the
cloudless sky at enormous speed. 'It was up and gone in about three
seconds.'

And that was Mom's UFO. It may not be quite as spectacular as Ed
Walters' pesky talking UFOs, but it struck me as being more remarkable,
for two reasons. One: even though '52 was a big UFO hysteria year, my
mom knew nothing of the existing body of evidence regarding sightings.
For that matter, she still doesn't. They're just not her thing. Yet her
account is completely consistent with most of the accepted recurring
elements in UFO behavior: the jerky hovering, the unearthly whine, the
last-second zip straight up and out of sight.... This is classic UFO
stuff. Ed's UFOs were doing that all the time.

Two: my mom wouldn't make this up.

'If you don't know what's going on,' Steve Tobias tells me, 'you're
sheep going to the slaughter. And the cruel thing is, it doesn't have
to be that way.'

He's running through his visual evidence, some of which is just clips
from infotainment shows such as Hard Copy and this season's new
Sightings. But he's also got NASA footage from some of the Apollo
flights - scenes of an astronaut's jerky spacewalk that Tobias believed
was closely monitored by small UFOs whizzing by periodically. He runs
the VCR back and forth in slow motion.

'There it is! Did you see it? I'll run it by again. If you're not
looking for something, you're not gonna see it.'

Sure enough, something - little more than a bright speck - keeps
flitting across the screen behind the astronaut's shoulder. Tobias says
that he has watched the scene countless times, has analyzed the
object's trajectory and the way the sunlight reflects off of it, and he
is convinced that the speck is a small round craft of some kind, under
intelligent control.

'They are out there and they have been seen,' he says. '[The
astronauts] notified mission control and it was covered up.'

Tobias is not the first to claim that the Apollo astronauts were
continually dogged by UFOs and that NASA scrupulously covered up the
reports. That has been a mainstay of UFO conspiracy literature for
decades. But he thinks that he may be the first to have picked them out
of NASA's own file footage.

This kind of low-budget home investigation now has become the guiding
passion of Tobias' life. Since an on-the-job injury put him out of work
in April 1991 (not long after his UFO sighting), he has used his free
time to immerse himself in the collective evidence of UFOlogy, filing
his Dundalk rowhome with dog-eared copies of 70s paperbacks such as
Timothy Goode's conspiracy tome "Above Top Secret", videos, xeroxed
documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, weird
newsletters from fringe UFO groups, and his own notebooks.

Now 40 years old, Tobias was a member of the Maryland Air National
Guard from 1972 to 1988, where he rose to the rank of technical
sergeant. It was his military experience, he says, that led him to take
on the thankless task of spreading the word.

'This whole thing points to a threat to the public,' he says. 'I'm
working on the assumption of imminent conflict. But not conflict as we
know it.'

Tobias has taken the old axiom of cosmologist Martin Rees and turned
it into a sort of manifesto of sorts. Rees said, in reference to
extraterrestrial life, that 'absence of evidence if not evidence of
absence.' For Tobias, absence of evidence is evidence of hostility.

'There's no reason to assume that the aliens have friendly
intentions,' he says. 'In the military, if you're using stealth, you
are in an aggressive posture.' He figures the reasons that UFOs, having
journeyed here for hundreds of thousands of light- years from a distant
galaxy, are being so coy with us is that they're scouting out the
battlefield. 'Reconnaissance is the staging for the final onslaught,'
he explains. For Tobias, this sneakiness is tantamount to an act of
war, and if the government refuses to fess up and tell the people what
the hell is going on, he will do it himself.

'I guess it's akin to Paul Revere saying the Redcoats are coming,' he
tells me.

Sipping iced tea in his living room, Tobias speculates grimly on the
final onslaught as his two young kids tromp in and out on a hot late-
summer afternoon. A kitten periodically clambers around and falls off
the sofa.

'This would not be a war of conquest,' he says. 'This would be
obliteration. This would be ... special genocide.'

Things are falling into frightening patterns here in Dundalk. Tobias
connects chains of seemingly random events and links them back to an
unseen alien hand. He sees world events and phenomena as diverse as the
fall of communism and the weather as sinister manifestations of an
intricate master plan to unbalance this hapless planet. Such as: Why
did hurricanes Andrew and Iniki lay waste only to American territory?
And finally: What was that seven-foot-tall reptilian creature those two
guys in South Carolina saw?

'What does that look like to you?'

Tobias shows me one of his CIPPAC documents, a Xerox of a strange
black silhouette, supposedly an infrared computer scan beamed to Earth
from the Soviet Phobos II satellite in 1989. He says that it is a vast
cylindrical object 15.5 miles long, lurking undetected in space behind
the Martian moon Phobos. With a bit of imagination, it looks sort of
like the ship in "Battlestar Galactica."

'I don't know,' I say. 'It's hard to tell.'

According to NASA (according to Tobias), it is a computer flaw. he
thinks it might be the invasion vessel itself, all 15 miles of it.

'I'm assuming the worst,' he says. 'There could be a thousand ships
behind that moon.... It's nice to see a movie called "Star Wars," but
from a military perspective, it boggles the mind.'

The kids are playing upstairs, too loudly. Tobias' wife marches
upstairs to settle them down. Tobias admits his wife would 'rather not
get dragged into this' and that most friends and family have been less
than receptive to his campaign.

'Most of them don't believe in UFOs,' he says. 'They're like
everybody else. They see the whole subject as entertainment.'

The fault for this, he believes, lies with the media. Because the
government is keeping all the hard evidence bottled up, no one can take
these things seriously anymore. 'Television and the movies trivialize
UFO phenomena,' he rails. 'It has made the public completely culturally
desensitized. It's lobotomizing the public consciousness. It's taking
away the right to wonder.'

One wonders, then, what to make of NASA's SETI program, the high-tech
search for just the kind of alien civilizations that the UFO community
has been insisting are visiting us regularly. The official NASA party
line, of course, has always been that UFOs are impossible, for all
practical purposes, because of the vast distances involved between star
systems and the colossal time and energy required to attempt a
crossing. The best hope for detection lies not in a physical visit from
a neighboring life form but rather in the radio waves that such a
civilization might conceivably be beaming our way.

For Steve Tobias, as well for many other freelance UFOlogists who
make a point not to trust NASA or any other arm of the government, the
hope and hype of the impending SETI program is an empty diversion.

'It's still the Big Lie,' Tobias says, 'but it's a different part of
the Big Lie.'

Tobias' theory is that SETI is just an elaborate gimmick, a PR trick
to further desensitize the public.

'NASA is trying to save their own integrity [with the SETI program],'
he says. 'It's an excuse. It would just tell us what has been slowly
massaged into the American consciousness.'

Similar rumbles are being heard throughout the UFO community,
according to the folks at the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies, or
CUFOS, as it's known, in Chicago. CUFOS is probably the closest thing
UFOlogists have to a serious scientific research center. It was founded
in 1973 by the late Dr. J. Allen Hynek, the chairman of the astronomy
department at Northwestern University, an Air Force consultant
throughout the Blue Book era and a sort of scientific guru to the UFO
community. CUFOS is basically an information clearinghouse and archive,
supported by subscriptions to its monthly "International UFO Reporter"
and its biannual "Journal of UFO Studies," an academic journal.

CUFOS also tried to crank out two books a year, with much of the
recent material focused on the Roswell Case -- the 1947 New Mexico
saucer crash and cover-up of Hangar 18 fame. David Boras, the assistant
to CUFOS director Mark Rodeghier, says that he's heard plenty of rumors
about the SETI program.

'For the most part,' he says, 'people in SETI have a negative or
indifferent attitude towards UFOs.... They honestly don't believe in
the phenomenon. But there is that rumor in the UFO community that the
SETI people are going to release information [about a contact] as a way
to condition people into accepting the existence of UFOs.'

Boras stresses, however that there is 'no real evidence for this,'
adding it's just part of the fringe group of UFOlogy. Some people
believe that [the government] knows everything, that they have been in
contact for years... there have been treaties... all sorts of stuff.
And everyone believes that this year they're gonna tell.'

Boras sounds vaguely sad. Disheartened. As if maybe he's given up
hope. As if maybe the government is never going to tell.

'It just sorta messes things up, dealing with the fringe groups,' he
intones, sadly. 'It's keeping the brains in the scientific community
from wanting to pursue the field. It's certainly keeping the funding
away...' he says, trailing off. It sounds as if maybe he's had enough
of life on the UFO trail.

'It just gets kinda irritating.'

Michael Mewhinney, who's handling public relations for NASA's SETI
program from his office at Ames Research Center, in Moffett Field,
California, not far from San Francisco, is kind of irritated too. First
of all, the powers that be just changed the name of his project last
week, long after all the press material and general hoopla were sent
out, so now he has to make sure all reporters who call use 'HRMS' in
their stories instead of 'SETI.' Second of all, I just mentioned UFOs.

'NASA has nothing to do with UFOs!' he says, bristling. 'We are not
wasting taxpayer money.'

It sounds as if he's been through this before.

'This is not a frivolous enterprise -- this is serious science!'

Traditionally, folks at NASA are touchy about the UFO thing,
especially with all the trouble they have had trying to convince
Congress to fund a search for distant alien civilizations in the middle
of a recession. Dr. Gary Coulter, the program manager for the newly
titled HRMS, knows all about that. Coulter has been at NASA
headquarters, in Washington, D.C., throughout the funding fray, setting
records straight and nudging the $10-million-per-year program past
Congressional critics. He says that the new moniker has been in the
works for a while.

'It's a matter of semantics,' he says. 'It's been obvious that when
we've been criticized, it's not for the science. Most of what draws
criticism is the connotation that if you are searching for ETI
[extraterrestrial intelligence], it must be frivolous.'

According to Coulter, there's an official NASA name for this
phenomenon: 'SETI has what we call a Giggle Factor.'

The Giggle Factor apparently was the final straw for the project
acronym. 'The name had this lightning rod stuck in the middle of it,'
he says.

Mike Mewhinney back at Ames agrees. 'We're looking for intelligent
life, not ETs,' he complains indignantly. 'ET is that cute little guy
in the movies.'

In NASAspeak, ETI tends to lead inexorably to LGM (Little Green Men)
in the minds of the public. 'It's like putting a red flag in front of a
charging bull,' Coulter says.

Whenever NASA functionaries are faced with UFO-related questions,
these Little Green Men always show up somehow. They even have their own
acronym now. It is the ultimate shorthand put-down for nosy reporters,
instantly defusing the most loaded of questions and making the
unfortunate inquirer look and feel like a four-year-old in the process.
'Oh! You're talking about the Little Green Men,' they always say. It's
very effective.

Coulter manages to invoke the LGM only once, but he throws in a few
popular film allusions for good measure.

'This is not a Bug Hunt,' he says, recalling a line from the film
"Aliens." 'We are not a search-and-rescue team for UFOs. And I've never
felt a burning desire to climb the Devil's Tower, either.'

And as for those rumors about SETI/HRMS being a cover for an eventual
UFO disinformation campaign? Or a PR stunt?

'Well, I've never heard that one before,' he says in a tone of voice
that indicates he has heard plenty of others. 'Look, I've been program
manager for four years. There is not one shred of truth to that. I have
never heard, felt, seen, smelled, tasted, or used any other organs to
sense anything to that effect.'

Seemed convincing enough to me. But despite all the breathless
denials, SETI remains a ripe target for conspiracy theorists simply
because many just don't trust the government to tell the word if and
when the massive radio telescopes manage to pick up and verify and ETI
signal. To rectify this perception, NASA's SETI Institute called on the
International Academy of Astronautics, one of several international
space organizations composed of astronomers and scientific
professionals from around the world that had expressed support for the
project, to define the specific terms of this theoretical announcement.
They put their heads together and came up with a singularly remarkable
document.

It is called the Declaration of Principles Concerning Activities
Following the Detection of Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and it
states, in brief, that any verified ETI signal picked out of the
heavens by SETI/HRMS is the property of all the people of the planet,
not just the U.S. or NASA. In two pages of densely worded legalese, it
calls for the swift dissemination ('promptly, openly, and widely') of
the discovery to the United Nations, various academic institutions and
scientific channels, and then to the world media. 'The discoverer
should have the privilege of making the first public announcement,'
Article 4 of the declaration states.

'It's the ultimate freedom of information act,' Coulter says proudly.

But the declaration doesn't make any provisions for a potential
response to the signal, except to say that no response should be sent
'until appropriate international consultations have taken place.' This,
of course, would require another declaration.

Coulter thinks we may be getting a bit ahead of things. For one
things, he says 'we do not presume that the message is answerable
necessarily.'

Though numerous forward-thinking astrophysicists such as Carl Sagan
have speculated on coded beams of radio waves carrying the secrets of a
distant advanced technology through the stars for the benefit of less-
adept neighboring civilizations, the message may merely be 'Hello.' Or,
for that matter, 'Why did you cancel F Troop?'

Or as Coulter says, it may be just like a lighthouse beacon. 'No
matter how closely you analyze a lighthouse beacon, you're not gonna
get the Encyclopedia Britannica,' he says. 'Besides, those things are
so far off, it's not worth thinking about.'

And for those people working on the project, the detection alone, of
anything, would be plenty earthshaking in itself. Occasionally, Coulter
gets so caught up in trying to define what SETI is and isn't that he
loses the true magnitude of its stated goal. 'It's an attempt to answer
one of the most profound questions facing the human race,' he says,
sounding a bit stunned himself. 'It would be the most important non-
religious event in the history of the world, I guess.'

At this point even the canniest of NASA project managers must
struggle with the poetry of the moment. For some things there are yet
no acronyms.

'Philosophically, I see old Mother Earth spinning around as she has
for millions of years,' Coulter says slowly, silently constructing the
image in his mind. 'And I almost see old Mother Earth pausing for a
moment. And when she spins again, everything will be different.'

Meanwhile, back in Dundalk, Steve Tobias keeps up his lonely vigil,
playing old NASA footage over and over again on his beatup VCR, which
keeps breaking down, in search of those elusive white specks.

'I'd be making a fool of myself if I was pursuing something that
wasn't provable,' he says from beneath the brim of his Maryland Air
National Guard cap. 'I know that people with different forms of mental
delusions or dementia will grasp onto things. But that doesn't take
anything away from the phenomena.'

'This is a struggle between perceptions of what is and what could
be,' he says firmly. 'And I am going all the way.'

He keeps hearing rumors of mysterious 'government' operatives who
periodically appear on the doorsteps of intrepid investigators such as
himself to silence them forever - the 'Men in Black,' they are called.
Tobias is ready for them, whoever or whatever they are. 'No one can
intimidate me,' he says. 'If they showed up at my door, they would be
apprehended. One of us would die.'

Until then, he will keep compiling his odd fragments of information
and scraps of evidence, keep typing his densely worded, single-spaced
CIPPAC reports. 'Make copies,' he writes on the back of one in an
urgent red pen. 'Spread the word!'

But it's getting on toward evening now. Tobias has more evidence.
More books. A radio interview. A sketch of a possible alien footprint
in his notebook. And, before I go, that passage from Virgil's "Aeneid."

A sudden crash of thunder, and a shooting star slid down.

The sky's dark face, drawing a trail of light behind it.

He leaves me with a copy of his group's logo -- a picture of the
Greek discus thrower hurling an outsized flying saucer - and its motto:

'Seek after the truth.'

'I fear Tomorrow these days,' he writes in the first lines of his
first CIPPAC report. 'I fear for Your Tomorrows as well. All of you,
Humanity.'

For all his wild speculation and conspiracy bluster, Tobias really
means it. And if the world chooses not to stop to listen to his one-man
call to arms, it will not be for lack of his trying or for the weakness
of his convictions. Right or wrong, Steve Tobias has discovered
something.

'I don't consider myself a social martyr,' he says. 'I really wish I
had never found this out. I wish I could be like everyone else.'


Eddie,
telnet://ricksbbs.synchro.net:23
http://ricksbbs.synchro.net:8080
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