‘I don’t get it,’ Lopez admitted.

  ‘Time is an illusion,’ Freeman explained. ‘If you were to walk outside and look at the sun right now, you’re not seeing it as it is. You’re seeing it as it was eight minutes ago, because that’s how long it takes the sun’s light to cross the space between itself and the earth. Likewise, we see the planets such as Saturn and Jupiter as they were a few hours ago for the same reason – they’re just further away. But when you look at the stars, you’re seeing them where they were and as they were thousands, if not millions, of years ago. The whole universe is an illusion of what we call the present, but in fact we can only see the present within our own frame of reference. Even distant hills appear as they were a tiny fraction of a second ago. Just by looking at me, you’re looking into the past. It’s just by such a small amount that we don’t notice it.’

  ‘That doesn’t explain how they’re able to do it,’ Ethan pointed out.

  ‘No,’ Freeman again agreed, ‘but there are several key points about UFOs that are noted again and again. They have no visible means of propulsion, they emit no exhaust, they manoeuvre often erratically and they seem only partially able or willing to respond to the human presence. Those factors, along with their apparent ability to vanish into thin air leaving only a smoking ring behind them, are consistent with an object that is present in much the same way as a hologram can said to be present. It is not a physical object but a transmission, something that reaches us from afar and can vanish just as easily.’

  Ethan leaned back on the sofa. Freeman’s concepts were flying way over his head, but he could see something of what the old man was getting at. If time travel were possible, perhaps it was not something that was done physically but merely through observation. Perhaps the humans of the future were able somehow to observe the past and be seen doing so.

  ‘That doesn’t explain the physical abductions,’ Ethan pointed out.

  Freeman inclined his head.

  ‘No, but are these abductions what we think they are? Apparently about five per cent of the population of the United States believes they have been abducted by aliens. That’s around fifteen million people. For that to be true, abductions would have to be taking place in vast numbers every single day and I don’t believe for a moment that our skies are filled with UFOs racing this way and that with terrified human passengers locked aboard.’

  ‘Sophie’s suffering is real enough,’ Lopez remined him.

  ‘Because it might be real,’ Freeman nodded, ‘just not in the way we think that it is. I worked on a number of cases of supposed hauntings before I really got into the UFO thing, and one factor that always kept cropping up was that people were reporting seeing historical figures, people from the past, but never from the future. I started to think about time, and how we only ever see things from the past. Why not from the future? Why should hauntings of any kind only present historical persons or events? And these things are not just witnessed by individuals, but often large groups. Sceptics of course consider these events to be mass-hallucinations, but that to me is too easy an explanation.’

  ‘So, you think that some abduction events have only happened once?’ Lopez asked.

  ‘I think that it is possible, however bizarre that it may seem, that our minds have the capacity to occasionally witness past events. Time is not linear. Ask any physicist and they will tell you that time can bend and warp and even turn back on itself. It is entirely a part of the fabric of our universe and is malliable. Time and space are different aspects of the same thing, and so it stands to reason that sometimes time can be displaced by powerful events; the merging of black holes, supernovae, all manner of powerful cosmic events produce ripples in space and thus time that have been measured by scientists here on earth. If a person happens to be in the right place at the right time, or their brain perhaps is susceptible in some way to such events, then they may witness things that others cannot see.’

  Ethan frowned thoughtfully.

  ‘A recent case occurred in Scotland in the United Kingdom, where a UFO sighting that Kyle here witnessed coincided with the arrest of a man who, according to CIA reports, appeared to be from the Middle Ages.’

  Now, Freeman leaned forward, his expression in earnest. ‘A medieval man? Where is he now?’

  ‘That’s the thing,’ Lopez said, ‘the UFO returned, and this guy vanished from a locked jail cell. He hasn’t been seen since and the UK Army and police are up in arms about it, as their suspect vanished after stabbing a local youth.’

  Freeman stared at them in amazement, then leaned back in his seat and stroked his beard.

  ‘Interesting,’ he murmured.

  ‘Interesting?’ Kyle uttered. ‘You’re talking about the event of the decade, perhaps the century, and all you can call it is interesting?’

  Freeman appeared to have barely heard Kyle.

  ‘Intersting in the sense that if they’re truly abducting people, regardless of how often, it appears that UFOs can make mistakes.’

  ***

  XXXVI

  ‘Mistakes?’

  Freeman nodded, glancing at images in frames on his walls of some of the most famous UFO photographs ever taken.

  ‘Why else would they drop a medieval man in modern day Scotland?’ he asked. ‘Unless they got the time wrong?’

  To Ethan, it seemed like the perfect explanation and a complete abandonment of common sense at the same time.

  ‘So, they’re sufficiently intelligent and advanced to have the technology to abduct someone from the past, but they’re dumb enough to forget to set their watches correctly?’

  ‘You’re talking about the technology required to traverse spacetime,’ Freeman pointed out. ‘Maybe they haven’t quite perfected it yet? Maybe they do later and they’re visiting us without us knowing anything about it, so all we’re seeing is the screw-ups that came before? It’s not like our own technology works perfectly first time: ask Microsoft. What I’m trying to say is that although UFOs have been reported for thousands of years in our history, maybe they haven’t been able to do it for very long from where they come from. Their ability to visit the past might be somewhat limited, or dangerous even. They might not be able to maintain their presence very long or interact well with us.’

  ‘That sounds as far fetched as governments saying that multiple sightings of huge, metallic, flying objects are in fact emissions of swamp gas or the planet Venus shining a bit brighter than usual,’ Kyle scoffed.

  ‘It’s speculation,’ Freeman acknowledged, ‘but let’s face it, these things may from time to time operate in a fashion that suggests intelligent control, but they also often act erratically and even dangerously, as though they’re only half aware that we’re here at all.’

  Ethan sat for a moment in silence, and then he looked at Lopez as a realisation hit him.

  ‘The video of Sophie’s abduction event,’ he gasped. ‘I know what was wrong with it now. There was missing time in the video.’

  ‘The video clock recorded without a hitch,’ Kyle countered. ‘We saw it, there was no time error.’

  ‘Not the clock on the video,’ Ethan said.

  Lopez got her cell phone out and accessed their copy of the video. She forwarded it to the moment where the creature appeared and then vanished from sight.

  ‘There,’ Ethan said. ‘Sophie’s clock on her wall. I didn’t spot it at the time, but it moves by an hour in a split second.’

  ‘Damn,’ Lopez said. ‘You’re right, it does. But how can that be possible?’

  ‘Sophie’s parents said that she could be taken from their own room and they still wouldn’t notice it,’ Kyle speculated. ‘But if the abduction happens within a distortion of time itself, then there wouldn’t be anything for them to notice.’

  ‘None of this is gonna help us find whatever’s behind these abductions,’ Ethan said. ‘We need to refine the technique and we need some guidance. We can travel anywhere, within reason, so what would you suggest is the best way to try to do something about catching one of these things?’

  Ben Freeman got out of his seat and took a deep breath as he moved to past a row of images of a supposed spacecraft captured in California in 1952, images that Ethan knew were impeccable in that it had been tested many times using the latest in photographic technology and found to be genuine. Rex Heflin, an Orange County Highway Inspector, snapped four images of a metallic, saucer shaped craft that flew over a lonely stretch of highway in front of his truck. The last of the images was of a ring of smoke hanging in the sky where the object simply disappeared, leaving the smoke ring behind.

  ‘They have a weakness,’ Freeman said as he looked at the images. ‘They can sometimes be seen, they sometimes crash, and they have been recovered. One of the things that ties in many crash reports is extreme weather, specifically storm cells and lightning.’

  Freeman grabbed another document and held it open for them.

  ‘One of the little-known facts about the Roswell event is that there were particularly savage storms ravaging the area on the night of the crash. What seems to be a common theme among UFO sightings is that the objects appear to have no means of propulsion and no means of staying aloft, at least as far as the technology we’re familiar with suggests. That means that these objects, and we know that they’re objects of solid materials because they frequently return radar reflections, must traverse our skies and perhaps interstellar space using some other means. Given that we cannot see them producing any form of thrust of their own, it is reasonable to assume that they may be utilising some force that we’re either unaware of or have not considered as a potential form of energy.’

  Lopez frowned.

  ‘I don’t know how that would be possible. We’ve had scientists studying our planet for decades, they would have found something like that by now.’

  ‘Would they?’ Freeman challenged her. ‘The existence of radiation is as old as the universe itself but it was only at the turn of the last century that mankind, or more specifically a woman, discovered it. We didn’t know anything about black holes other than theoretical physics until they were finally detected in the 1960s. The presence of an energy field that is used by advanced technologies is really only new in the sense that they might be using something we already know about in a way that we haven’t even thought of. My guess, and it is a guess, is that they use electromagnetic propulsion by effectively riding waves generated by the planet itself, a bit like a surfer riding a roller into the beach.’

  ‘What evidence do you have for that?’ Kyle asked with some interest, as though he too agreed with the concept.

  ‘Multiple witness reports that describe the same phenomena when UFOs are sighted,’ Freeman explained. ‘The first is that vehicle engines and other electrical equipment tends to malfunction in the presence of UFOs. This has been recounted in literally hundreds of cases but the most spectacular are those witnessed by military teams at US ballistic missile silos in Montana who were present when the entire launch facility was shut down in the presence of a UFO. Others, well documented by police and other trained personnel, confirm that car engines don’t like UFOs. Although the combustion cycle itself is unlikely to be affected, the ignition systems and electrical systems would be disrupted quite easily by powerful electromagnetic fields.’

  ‘The second is that UFOs seem to be adversely affected by bad weather, lighting in particular, as evidenced by the Roswell event and other crashes. Most occur when storm cells are active in the area. Several people who have worked on this and developed patents for flying discs have discovered the same limitations.’

  ‘People have patents for fying discs?’ Lopez asked in amazement.

  ‘There are lots of them,’ Kyle explained, apparently knowing as much if not more about the subject than Freeman himself. ‘Nikola Tesla famously worked on it in search of a means of propulsion that was free, clean and powerful. He ran a high-voltage, high-frequency alternating current between two metal plates. He found that the space between the plates became a solid-state area, one in which a mechanical push could be exerted. The implication was that an engine for propulsion could, in theory, be produced anywhere in space. The result was a drive principal called the Magnetohydrodynamic Effect, or MHD.’

  ‘It sounds like science fiction,’ Freeman went on, ‘but it’s all perfectly within the bounds of currently understood physics. The solid-state condition within the plates caused by the high-frequency electromagnetic pulsing is hugely more efficient than a jet engine, and the thrust increases with the fourth power of the frequency, so if you double the frequency the thrust is sixteen times greater. This, of course, all works best in the vacuum of space where a small amount of input power could create dramatic accelerations, but it would work well within a planet’s atmosphere and gravitational field as long as energy was being produced within the craft to power the electromagnetic frequencies, which leads neatly on to UFOs’ habit of appearing over military and nuclear installations.’

  ‘Tesla developed his Dynamic Theory of Gravity around this principal in 1897, and it still stands today,’ Kyle said. ‘In 2005, Boris Volfson was granted a US Patent based on this very technology. While the patent did not, sadly, detail a mechanism for a spaceship, it was granted. This is real science at work and work it does. The earth’s electromagnetic field is immense – suitably trapped and amplified within a small device, enough energy could be produced to power a large craft because the force is 2.2 to the power of 1039 greater than that of gravity. It’s far too big a number to visualise, but if the amount of energy required to lift a vehicle one hundredth of an inch off the ground were applied as an electromagnetic lifting force, then that same vehicle would be propelled literally trillions of miles off the ground and into space.’

  Ethan nodded.

  ‘Okay, so maybe they can fly in the way we see them and maybe, somehow, they can travel through time itself. So, you think that we should factor the weather into the equations too and see if something shows up?’

  ‘The weather,’ Freeman nodded, ‘electromagnetic waves, the earth’s magnetic field, literally anything that an advanced race might be able to use as a power source that we might not know about or have rejected in the past as un-workable. We have to think like a species that has achieved the things that we have so far failed to understand. They would have worked out how to generate energy on large scales without affecting their environment, at least in terms of pollution. To them such things would presumably be child’s play, like making fire from twigs. It’s a cliché, but to catch the alien you’ve really got to start thinking like an alien.’

  ‘Be the alien,’ Kyle enthused, already using his laptop to collect more data to run through the Hydra. ‘I can have this data analysed within the hour. There’s more than enough out there to use, it’s all public domain stuff. And if we run it alongside the 37th parallel, we should get a pretty good prediction.’

  ‘Plenty of summer storms along the 37th too,’ Freeman pointed out, apparently already aware of the phenomenon. ‘You could get a hit at any time of the year, but right now would be one of the best times.’

  Ethan nodded, just as his cell phone rang in his pocket. He pulled it out and saw a number he didn’t recognise on it. Cautiously, he decided to answer it.

  ‘Hello?’ he asked as he answered the call.

  ‘Ethan Warner?’

  ‘Who is this?’ Ethan asked.

  ‘My name is McCain, I’m the Deputy Director, CIA. Mackenzie asked me to call you. Do you have a camera on that phone?’

  Ethan glanced at Lopez in surprise, and as she was sitting right alongside him she had heard the caller’s identity. Ethan hit the camera button as he replied, and was shocked to see Deputy Director McCain looking back at him as the cell connected.

  ‘Where’s Mackenzie?’

  ‘In a safe house,’ McCain replied. ‘Right now, you need to keep moving. There are other forces at play here and we don’t know for sure who to trust. Is Kyle Trent with you?’

  ‘No,’ Ethan lied. ‘We figured it too big a risk to stay together.’

  ‘Smart move,’ McCain said. ‘We know that the folks at Dugway didn’t kill Greg.’

  ‘So do we,’ Lopez replied. ‘We think that the Russians might be involved.’

  ‘Mat Zemlya,’ McCain confirmed. ‘We’re trying to track them down now. You need to get Kyle into custody as soon as possible, before the Russians can locate him.’

  Ethan glanced at Lopez, who was out of McCain’s sight, and she shook her head slightly.

  ‘Kyle’s off the grid and he’s staying that way for now,’ Ethan replied. ‘The safest place for him is one where nobody knows where he is, even us.’

  ‘There may not be time for that,’ McCain replied. ‘You need to bring him in now.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘The family of the girl you visited, Sophie? They’ve just contacted local law enforcement. Their daughter went missing last night.’

  Ethan felt his blood run cold in his veins. ‘Did they have the video evidence this time, enough to go public with this?’

  ‘They got video evidence all right,’ McCain said, ‘but it’s not the ETs that grabbed her Ethan. Four armed men, masks, everything. They took her right out of her bed, and we think that they may be the same players who tried to kill General Mackenzie. This is about more than just Kyle Trent now. We need you to come in as soon as you can. Where are you?’

  Ethan sat for a moment in silence, staring into the distance as he thought of Sophie’s parents, and of his promise to them that they would do everything that they could to protect the child. He shut off the line to McCain.

 

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