Nebula (5 page)

Yevgenie Seduro’s face appeared on the screen again, and he continued. “At this point, the US formed a small, highly secret organization that was split away from the CIA and Air Force intelligence agencies and that took possession of the wreckage and dead aliens. The organization was given the name Nebula, the name that we keep to this day, and the wreckage and dead aliens were relocated again, this time to Nebula’s headquarters, a secret, underground facility in the desert, still in Nevada, but further from Las Vegas. We don’t recall why the name Nebula was chosen, but it fits us well. A nebula is a cloud, something that is wispy, hard to define in terms of precise boundaries, size, or shape. It’s also a name that astronomers give to things that appear like stellar clouds, things like galaxies or the remnants of supernovas.

“Just as Nebula was getting started, two other UFO encounters, real ones, occurred. One was in the Soviet Union in 1949. It happened in a very desolate region in Siberia and was kept highly secret by the KGB and the small military unit that was in the area at the time and was first to arrive at the scene. The CIA and MI-6 were able to get a bit of information that the event occurred but nothing of substance other than that fact.

“The other real UFO event was in the United Kingdom, two years later. The UFO crashed at a restricted military area, so the government was able to control all access to it and managed to keep news of it suppressed, mainly as rumors that some local people had seen a strange light descend from the sky. The Brits explained it as a fireball from a meteor that disintegrated several thousand meters in the air.

“These were the only actual UFO events. All others are either figments of deranged minds or of overactive imaginations, or they are the result of our own manipulations to bury the real facts within a web of fantasy that is so unbelievable and unsupportable that the entire area of UFO research is turned into a laughable pursuit by people who are too foolish to be taken seriously. We even caused the US Air Force to create an activity called Blue Book, to document UFO sighting reports and to show that they had no basis in fact. We started rumors about government conspiracy theories and encouraged all sorts of activities, from television shows to movies that turned UFOs into the stuff of fiction. You’ll have to admit that it worked beautifully. In fact, I expect that when you were briefed to Level-1, you ridiculed the briefer and thought that everything was just a pack of lies. That was our intent.”

Seduro smiled and took a sip of water, giving Harry a few seconds to absorb what he’d just been told. Then he continued with the briefing.

“The occurrence of UFO contacts in the Soviet Union and UK required that we expand the small circle of people who knew about Nebula and to bring others into the active project to understand and exploit the discoveries. This was necessary both to be able to combine all the information and physical objects that had been acquired and to eliminate any motivation for each nation to try to capitalize on the discoveries to be used against one another. There was a realization that cooperation was needed here, and that we couldn’t afford to let our parochial interests overcome the need to treat this as a global issue of importance to the human race and not just one nation.

“Once this expansion occurred, Nebula began to detach itself from formal relationships with each of the three governments. Senior leaders knew about it and did keep informed to some degree, but as they left government service, the connections remained only to the few senior civil servants who had the day-to-day job of overseeing the project and making sure that funds flowed covertly to support it. New political figures were not briefed in. It was at this time that connections were made to several non-government enterprises, mainly some corporations that did classified work for the Soviet (later Russian) military and intelligence organizations and their counterparts in the US and UK. These companies were able to supplement the government funds and eventually provided a bulk of the funding.

“Some not-so-legitimate enterprises were also brought into the sponsors’ group, mainly because they had very deep pockets filled with untraceable money. The ones in my country had chief executives, myself included, who had been former high officials in our military and intelligence agencies. We knew of Nebula and recognized that some of our ill-gotten gains could help in a very important way. After all, we aren’t totally evil and blind to the larger needs of mankind. Similar industrial and semi-legal connections were made in the US and UK, providing an extremely strong base of financial support, independent of government meddling. It also provided Nebula with an extra-legal mechanism for enforcing secrecy. You may already have seen some of this in action.”

Harry could relate to that only too well. The picture was becoming clearer, yet still more confusing.

Seduro continued. “By the 1980s, all the government officials who knew of Nebula had either died or left government service, and everything became so covert that not even the national leaders in the US, Russia, and the UK knew of it any longer. The full purpose of Nebula also changed as we learned more about the technology and the aliens themselves, but we’ll save that for the higher level briefings. I now turn the remainder of your Level-2 in-brief back to your local host.” And with this, the screen went blank.

Giovanis took over again and called to Myron to display the next set of charts. “Now let’s give you a summary of what we’ve found so far and why we are so obsessed with security. You need to understand the risks both to the project and to yourself.”

He proceeded to present a summary of the science and technology discovered in the UFOs and reconstructed to provide the spacecraft that Yuri, Ludmila, and others had used to travel throughout the solar system.

First of all was a general description of the alien spacecraft, complete with on-screen pictures and diagrams of the craft as they were when they were found and later on, when they were reconstructed. They didn’t look like the popularized view of flying saucers. They were more like oblate spheroids with smooth surfaces and no protrusions. They didn’t have any of the lights or other features that UFO enthusiasts often pictured. They were just very plain and rounded.

“Only the UFO that crashed in Roswell had aliens onboard,” he explained. “The other two were totally robot-crewed spacecraft. It seems that the aliens make extensive use of robots, probably due to the difficulty of being able to sustain living beings for long duration space flights. As you know, two difficult problems for manned space travel are providing life support to sustain the occupants and providing a way to shield them from long term exposure to cosmic radiation. The Roswell craft had an elaborate magnetic shield system that worked in a way similar to the Earth’s magnetic field and a gravitational repulsion shield. Both of them helped deflect the charged particles so that they didn’t strike the ship, and the gravitational shield also protected against other things that could damage the ship. It also had an ingenious device to produce a layer of gas inside the ship’s double hull, and that seemed to be able to absorb other cosmic radiation. Our scientists were able to repair those devices and even adapted them to better suit the needs of human beings. As a result, it’s possible for people to travel in the repaired craft for a very long time.”

The screen now showed pictures of the alien bodies. They looked almost human, but much smaller, about one and a quarter meters tall, with bulging eyes, small ears, and small noses, and with a bit of a coppery tint to their skin. They appeared totally hairless, and they had six fingers on each hand. Harry could see that each of the hands had what looked like two thumbs with four normal fingers in between. But aside from those small differences, the aliens did look a lot like humans. Anatomically, they could almost have passed for human, a bit small and strange looking but still almost within the wide range of variations among ordinary humans.

“We did a lot of measurements on their bones, muscles, internal organs, blood chemistry, DNA, and all the other things that we could measure. We concluded that they come from a planet much like ours. They clearly are built to exist in a gravity field about as strong as Earth’s, and our work on their gravitational systems showed that the artificial gravity and inertial control systems are designed to make beings like us fairly comfortable, even when the spacecraft undergoes extreme acceleration. That convinced us that they do come from an Earthlike planet. Their atmosphere and soil may be a bit different, accounting for the small pigmentation difference, but all in all, they seem pretty much like us. The only big difference is in their DNA. They have twenty four chromosome pairs instead of our twenty three. Each chromosome contains DNA based on the same organic chemistry as ours, but the sequences are very different from ours. We were surprised that the end result is so similar to us, but you can see for yourself that they do look almost human.”

Next, Giovanis explained the robotic craft. “You can see in these pictures that the robotic spacecraft are much simpler and smaller than the Roswell UFO. They don’t need life support or protective devices since the crew consists only of robots that can withstand the bombardment of cosmic rays. The technology used to create the robots is a marvel of science and engineering. The robots appear to be able to link directly to alien brains over significant distances and they have advanced artificial intelligence that allows them to act autonomously most of the time. These two crews apparently ran out of specific instructions several years after they lost contact with their alien masters, and we think that they just got confused and went into some sort of chaotic state. We never did find the cause for those two crashes.

“Our researchers concluded that an alien exploratory group would probably consist of a single manned craft with up to a dozen robotic craft. That seemed pretty clear since the Roswell ship had two positions that looked like they were pilot stations and six others for technical specialists. At four of those positions, the computer stations had monitors for twelve offboard navigation and status readouts, three at each station. They also had what looked like controls for interacting with other spacecraft and that these seemed to be intended to direct and control twelve semi-autonomous robotic spacecraft. The other two positions appeared to be for control of onboard systems, including sensors, weapons, and communications. Subsequent studies of the spacecraft and other things that we found verified these initial assumptions. But this group seems to have had only the three ships. We verified that in the records stored on the computers that survived the crashes.

“Propulsion is also an amazing feat of science and engineering. It’s totally gravitational and includes a means to make the rest mass appear to be nearly zero. It also provides artificial gravity, as I mentioned before, so the travelers would be able to remain in space indefinitely without losing muscle tone or bone mass.

“We worked for more than fifty years, from the 1950s to the early 21
st
century before we finally worked out all the details behind the gravity and inertial devices. We recruited some of the best brains in the world to help us, most of them remaining in their jobs at universities and companies and working with us on the side, but we also recruited some of them to work full time and disappear from view to the outside world. Our discoveries were a great leap beyond Einstein’s initial thoughts on general relativity and a departure from most of the subsequent scientific developments that tried to extend Einstein’s theories. By 2010, we were able to reconstruct the gravitational and inertial devices and integrate them into the reconstructed spacecraft.”

A series of pictures showed the machinery that he was talking about. It all looked deceptively small and simple, but Harry assumed that the internal components were more complex than anything he’d seen before. He’d have to try to get a good look at those and read up on how they worked. He began to realize that he was getting hooked on the project. He resented this, since he was still really pissed off at the way that they roped him in. But he did admit that this was becoming very interesting.

That train of thought was broken by Giovanis’ continuing lecture. “Communications and weapons on the three UFOs that crashed on Earth are also based on very novel approaches. Both use directed energy devices, but they’re different from the ones that we developed on Earth. We concluded fairly early in the study of the spacecraft that these aliens are definitely oriented not only on space exploration but also have significant interest in space warfare. It isn’t clear whether they simply fight with one another, as we humans do, or if there are other aliens out there that are in a war with them. The only clear fact is that they are definitely prepared to fight.”

As Giovanis explained it, the communications were primarily narrowband x-ray transmitters and receivers, very much like lasers, but they also used relatively standard electromagnetic signaling, ranging from vhf through very high microwave. Throughput for the x-ray signals was extremely broadband, well beyond petabits per second, and the estimated range was at least twenty or thirty light years. It also seemed that the data rate could be decreased and the beam spread tightened so that ranges of hundreds of light years were probably achievable. The thought of this blew Harry’s mind. It seemed almost impossible to comprehend a technology that could support such long range, broadband communications.

The weapons were also narrow beam energy transmitters. There were two types. The most impressive one was a plasma gun that could project bursts of energy sufficient to easily burn through one meter of steel at several thousand kilometers. The remarkable design used a focused gravity wave to fire the plasma burst at nearly the speed of light. Giovanis explained that this was probably the smaller of the plasma guns, the types found on the ships that crashed. He assumed that they had larger warships, probably with larger plasma guns.