MJ-12, Majestic Twelve, Majic. It had started during that golden Cold War summer of 1947. It had staged the first sighting of unidentified flying objects over Mount Rainier on June 24 and followed that debut two weeks later with the Roswell "crash" of alien spacecraft. The idea was simple enough: convince Stalin that UFO's existed and that the United States was in possession of their technology. That would keep Uncle Joe on his toes.
Then, as with so many other government programs, the original plan gave way to bigger things. Majestic consisted of a top-secret twelve-man directorate (hence the name) that included CIA Director Roscoe Hillenkoetter, Defense Secretary James Forrestal, and other top members of the nation's scientific, aerospace, and military communities. They decided that as long as they were at it, MJ-12 could serve another, even higher purpose: keeping the taxpaying U.S. citizenry alarmed about the possibility of invasion from outer space, and therefore happy to fund expansion of the military-aerospace complex. A country convinced that little green men were hovering over the rooftops was inclined to vote yea for big weapons and space programs.
So what began a half century ago with the towing of some pie-shaped reflective disks behind a camouflaged aircraft over Washington St
ate soon evolved into a "black"*
program with a yearly budget running into the tens of millions of dollars. But Americans are easily bored. The problem quickly became how do we keep them interested? After a while, mere sightings of flying saucers just weren't enough. MJ-12 had to devise more elaborate entertainments: physical evidence, scorch marks in the grass, traumatized animals (easy enough), cars whose batteries had inexplicably gone dead while their occupants were staring google-eyed at the funny lights. When the
*
That is. covert.
thrill of disabled vehicles and freaked-out pets wore off, MJ-12 had no choice but to start providing glimpses of the alien darlings themselves. This was trickier. For one thing, it meant finding dwarfs with security clearances. For this reason, aliens have gotten considerably bigger over the years.
The public was content with these diversions for a while, even quite delighted. But soon alien visitations became a Hollywood movie cliche. Again, MJ-12 had to raise the ante. Policy and Planning (MJ-3) went to work and came back with fresh delights like crop circles, those enormous graffiti nocturnally mown into remote wheat fields, and the more crude abovementioned cattle mutilations. (Yucko.) These did the trick for a while, but before long the public was jaded again. So MJ-12 decided that something more
interactive
was called for. So began the era of alien abductions. Well, sooner or later sex enters into everything.
The odd part was that it was the abductees. not MJ-12, who initiated the business about sexual probings and egg harvesting and all that. Soon after the first abductions - simple snatching, scaring, and dropping off a few miles away - the snatchees began making extravagant claims of having been poked and prodded
down there.
It was only then that the Policy and Planning boys decided, okay, if this is what the people want, let's give it to them. Why argue with vox pop? There was this, too: it made perfect sense, from a strictly anthropological point of view. These were more than aliens - gods, come from above to provide salvation (usually from rather dreary lives here on tired old planet earth). It made the people happy to feel that the gods wanted to sleep with them, or at least have a grope. In time, of course, it led to claims of alien conception and babies, but by then there was really no stopping it.
The old-timers within MJ-12 were appalled at the sex stuff. Scrubbs used to converse with some of them, anonymously, in the MJ-12 secure cyberchat rooms that the organization provided in lieu of community. You were not permitted to discuss details of missions, but you learned to read between the lines. One old-timer, who used the code name
ulysses
. would rant on and on:
WE HAD TO M
AKE DO WITH BALING WIRE, ALUMINUM FOIL, AND OUR IMAGINATIONS. NOW IT'S All COMPUTER SPECIAL EFFECTS AND SEX AND BODY CAVITY PROBES. DISGUSTING! WHAT'S NEXT I WANT TO KNOW? ALIEN BABIES?
The chat rooms helped, but working at MJ-12 was the loneliest job in the government. It made working for the CIA or even the tighter-lipped National Security Agency seem almost normal by comparison. MJ-12 was the only kept secret in the United States government. Scrubbs did not know the real name of a single other person in the organization. This was how it had managed to remain secret all these years: most people in the organization did not know the name of a single other person in the organization. Except for MJ-1. the director, whoever he or she was. All communications were via MajestNet, MJ-12's own Internet. There were some voice communications, but these were rare. It was a monkish life he led, down here in the basement of the Social Security Administration. His office was located here on the theory that no congressional investigator ever dared look into Social Security.
The hours were long. It did not make for a dazzling social life.
Hi. What do you do? I work for the Social Security Administration.
Really? That's cool. Excuse me, I have to go repark the car.
At times Scrubbs posed the question: how had he landed here, in the basement of a drab building in Washington, D.C., an invisible man, orchestrating faux alien abductions? His college yearbook had not listed him as Most Likely to be doing this sort of thing.
No, his dream, long nourished by James Bond fantasies, had been to join the CIA* and engage in foreign derring-do, helping to topple troublesome governments, parachuting into jungles, falling in love with beautiful women with foreign accents, a cyanide pill sewn into the lining of his clothing, a pistol tucked into the waistband or under the pillow, able to order a perfect martini in eight languages.
None of this, with the exception of the ability to order a martini (in one language), had come to fruition. His application, marked
no action,
was forwarded to a post office box in Rosslyn, Virginia, across the river from Washington, and thence to another, and still another, until, via the mysterious but bureaucratically efficient circuitry of MJ-12, he received a call from a "Mr. Smith, with the government." Scrubbs was thrilled, being at the time despondent over the form letter he had recently received from the CIA thanking him for his interest and telling him to go away. They met at a Vietnamese restaurant in suburban Virginia. Mr. Smith told him that there was another government agency, even more elite than the CIA - and certainly more effective! -
which was tasked with the most important national security work. Was Scrubbs interested? Was he ever! Dreams of intrigue and beautiful women danced anew.
Mr. Smith did warn him that he was signing on for deep, deep duty in the most silent service of the United States.
How glorious and cool it sounded! Where was the dotted line on which to sign?
*
U.S. intelligence agency formerly tasked with overthrows of insignificant Central American countries, inept invasions of Caribbean dictatorships, and disastrous meddlings in Southeast Asia. Its main focus, in the post-Cold War era, has been to employ people who will sell vital classified information about it to foreign governments. Its current budget is estimated at S27 billion per year, which may seem like a lot but is still not enough to enable it to find out if countries like India and Pakistan have nuclear weapons.
He had dozed off in the middle of a Clancy ode to some new heat-see
king missile when he heard Mike’
s voice coming at him over the computer's speakers. Mike was his chief bagger.
Scrubbs blinked himself awake and entered his password for perhaps the twentieth time that day. MJ-12 was crazy for passwords. You couldn't go to the bathroom without entering your password. He held his hand on the PalmiTron scanner and simultaneously pronounced aloud the voice password so that the computer could assure itself that it really was he, Nathan Scrubbs. and not Bob Woodward, sitting at the console.
In the background he heard other voices. Jimmy, and Jake. Jake was the low man on the totem pole, the one who had to do the actual probing. Definite entry-level job, that.
They sounded more or less normal for a post
-
abduction briefing: tired, pissed off, badly in need of a beer or something stronger. He remembered his own days on a bagger team operating out of Houston, Texas, snatching Vietnamese immigrant shrimp fishermen. Where
they
fit into the grand scheme of UFO promulgation, God only knew, but at least they were thin and you could lift them without herniating yourself.
"How'd it go?" Scrubbs asked. "It
went,
" said a grumbling voice.
Scrubbs heard a stretching and snapping of latex. They were taking off their bug suits. This particular mission profile called for Tall Nordics, the Aryans of alien ethnology. Tall Nordics were the most humanoid of aliens. They were less frightening than the Short Ugly Grays, who looked like the winged monkeys in
The Wizard o
f
Oz.
One (admittedly overweight) Nebraska farm wife had a heart attack when she woke up to find herself strapped to a table and surrounded by a half dozen Short Uglies. What a mess that was. They'd had to defibrillate her and get her to the hospital. Ever since, every bagger team had to have someone certified in
CPR. They'd cut down heavily on the Short Uglies, which was just as well, since that also eliminated the dwarf security clearance problem.
"Did you return her home" - Scrubbs yawned - "or is she wandering the highway wondering what the fuck?"
"Dropped her off in a soybean field a mile from her house. She's probably doing crop circles."
"She could flatten that whole field in ten minutes," said another voice.
"Damn
she was big."
"Hadda
winch
her up into the ship. Man, my back."
"How much sevo did she take?" Scrubbs typed away, making notes.
"Not too much."
"Mike."
"Twelve, maybe fifteen ounces."
Scrubbs whistled. "Jesus." Mike tended to go heavy on the sevoflurane - a state-of-the-art anesthetic they called happy gas -ever since Sandusky. They'd been doing some policeman's wife. They had her on the table and were getting ready to probe when suddenly she pulled out a bottle of Mace - the real stuff, not that pepper gas -and started spraying like a spooked skunk. During the debrief, Mike admitted to Scrubbs that he and the others had made some pretty human-sounding noises of distress, along the lines of "Shit!" and "Fuck!" - words perhaps unusual in your typical alien's vocabulary. For weeks afterwards, Scrubbs held his breath, waiting for some reference to this in the press. But she never went to the press. Some of the abductees were like that - afraid to say a word, for fear of ridicule. Most, however, went screaming to the neares
t microphone. Wouldn't you
?
"Nah." said Mike. "She took it on the chin. Real trooper." "Was she conscious?" "Yeah yeah."
"Mike, there's no
point
if they don't remember anything."
"She'll know she was probed. Don't worry about it. You want details?"
"No." Scrubbs's fingers clicked across the keyboard. "Can 1 ask something?" Sounded like Larry. "How come we never get to harvest Claudia Schiffer's eggs?"* "Yeah!"
"Yeah, how come all we get is these two-hunnerd-pound mamas?"
"I don't pick them," said Scrubbs. "The computer picks them."
When MJ-12 had decided to get into the abduction business, back in 1961, staff mathematicians devised a credibility algorithm for determining whom to abduct. The idea was that alien abductees should be just credible enough to spread the word but not so respectable that their testimony would precipitate an urgent search for the truth. They would not, for instance, want to snatch someone as prominent as, say, the chairman of the Federal Reserve. That would, in all likelihood, lead to trouble. No, MJ-l's policy
directive on abductions sounded
like a prospectus from a conservative financial brokerage house: "We seek slow, steady growth in abductionology rather than dramatic incrementing, with a view toward gradual accretion of phenomenological credence." (MJ-12's language, it must be said, had grown as bureaucratic over the years as the rest of it.) What this gobbledygook meant was, they were looking to make ripples, not waves.
It worked. Fifty years and more after the first UFO sightings, the vote was in: a full 80 percent of Americans believed that the government knew more about aliens than it was letting on. Better still, one-third believed that aliens crash-landed at Roswell, New Mexico. This was real growth. But this was also the result of a lot of hard, quiet,
*
Highly desirable German model.
unglamorous work over the years by thousands of dedicated men and women.
Scrubbs sympathized with Mike and Larry and Jake. For some reason, the credibility algorithm seemed to have a bias toward overweight women. It would be nice if just every once in a while it picked, well, Claudia would be nice.
"Then reprogram the computer. Enter: 'tall, blonde, thirty-eight-D cup, great ass,
beautiful.'"