Alien Secrets. Ian Douglas

sapiens. The stock market might collapse, people might riot in the streets, or succumb to mass hysteria, people would lose faith in government. Basically, civilization itself might fall.”

      “Orson Welles,” Hunter said. “War of the Worlds.”

      “Precisely. So the panel suggested that the public not be told more, that the government push educational programs aimed at defusing the situation: discrediting people who claimed they saw them, trotting out skeptical experts to debunk sightings, that sort of thing. The whole issue was put under a very tight lid of not just secrecy, but compartmentalized secrecy. Even if you knew all about ‘A,’ if you didn’t have a serious need to know about ‘B,’ you didn’t hear about ‘B.’ Period.”

      “Ha!” Nielson said. “I knew there was something fishy about all the official denials.”

      “Weather balloons and swamp gas,” Taylor added. “Ri-i-i-i-ight …”

      “I still don’t see why things are still classified, though,” Hunter insisted. “I mean … in the 1950s, sure. We didn’t know if the Russians might be snooping with some sort of high-tech aircraft, or whatever. Better to keep stuff like that under wraps. But today? People are used to the idea of aliens and spaceships, and they’re mostly cool with it! Star Trek, and all of that …”

      “The Robertson Panel did recommend a slow process toward eventual disclosure. Certain government agencies were tasked with making certain that only pieces, only safe pieces, were released, a little at a time. There were some movies that came out in the ’80s designed to accustom the public to benevolent, odd-looking aliens, for instance. That was actually quite deliberate. More recently, you have documentary-style programs talking about ancient aliens possibly tinkering with the human genome …”

      “The guy with the hair,” Minkowski said.

      “Among others. The point was to gradually acclimate the public to the idea of aliens. In any case, it wasn’t just the notion that there were space-traveling aliens to worry about that was being suppressed. It was something far more deadly.”

      “What would that be?” Hunter asked.

      “The knowledge that many of those aliens—many, but not all—weren’t aliens at all.”

      “Come again?”

      “They are humans—time-traveling humans—humans from our own remote future.”