PART 1
Excerpt from a 60 Minutes broadcast (CBS News, May 16, 2021)
Bill Whitaker (voice-over) . . . [But that began to change after an incident off Southern California in 2004, which was documented by radar, by camera, and four naval aviators. We spoke to two of them: David Fravor, a graduate of the Top Gun naval flight school and commander of the F-18 squadron on the USS Nimitz; and flying at his wing, Lieutenant Alex Dietrich.
It was November 2004 and the USS Nimitz carrier strike group was training about a hundred miles southwest of San Diego. For a week, the advanced new radar on a nearby ship, the USS Princeton, had detected what operators called “multiple anomalous aerial vehicles,” over the horizon, descending eighty thousand feet in less than a second. Fravor and Dietrich, each with a weapons systems officer in the backseat, were diverted to investigate. They found an area of roiling whitewater the size of a 737 in an otherwise calm, blue sea.]
Dave Fravor: “. . . and we saw this little white Tic Tac-looking object. And it’s just kind of moving above the whitewater area.”
Voice-over: [As Deitrich circled above—Fravor went in for a closer look.]
Dave Fravor: “The Tic Tac . . . just turns abruptly. And starts mirroring me. So as I’m coming down, it starts coming up.”
Bill Whitaker: “So it’s mimicking your moves?”
Dave Fravor: “Yeah, it was aware we were there . . . I want to see how close I can get . . . and when it gets right in front of me, it just disappears.”
Bill Whitaker: “Disappears?”
Dave Fravor: “Disappears. Like, gone.”
Bill Whitaker: “Did your back-seaters see this too?”
Dave Fravor: “Oh yeah. There were four of us in the airplanes literally watching this thing for roughly about five minutes.”
Voice-over: [Seconds later the Princeton reacquired the target. Sixty miles away.]
1
I sank into my luxurious black office chair in San Diego, in front of an oversized computer monitor, and adjusted the camera angle until I liked what I saw on the screen. Not too bad, I thought, as I considered my own face staring back at me.
I had been fairly fortunate in the genetic lottery department, having been given wavy black hair that was in no danger of leaving my head, straight teeth, courtesy of years of braces, a symmetric face, and a wrestler’s build, although at the moment I was at least ten pounds over what should have been my proper weight class. And the camera supposedly added another ten.
Why hadn’t inventors come up with cameras that would subtract ten pounds? Now that would be a huge hit.
On the negative side of the genetic lottery, I had terrible seasonal allergies, learned at lightning speed but forgot most of it just as quickly, and was only five eight, short for a man.
I looked down at my own lap and smiled. I was wearing running shorts, the sort of comfortable attire almost expected nowadays for teleconferences and podcasts. As a bonus, since the camera showed nothing below my navel, I could well have been six-foot-two for all anyone on the other side of my monitor would know.
Behind me, at the perfect height for the camera to capture, were three long shelves filled with eighteen science-fiction thrillers I had written, along with many of these translated into multiple other languages, each on small stands to display their covers.
These had been moved here just a few weeks before by a full-service moving company, along with the rest of the contents of my office, helping me to settle into a second home I had just started renting. All eighteen volumes were thrillers set in the near future, and all of them explored epic advances in science and technology and the mind-blowing implications of these advances. And each contained backbreaking amounts of research on my part.
An obnoxious shrine to my work, no doubt, but I felt that I had earned it through blood, sweat, and tears. I had been a full-time author for twelve of my thirty-eight years, and I wasn’t a natural. For me it was often brutally hard work, especially the plotting and research. And even the writing came more easily to most than it did to me. I had scores of author friends who could write novel after novel as effortlessly as a politician could lie, never issuing primal screams at the top of their lungs, or tearing out their hair, or barely restraining themselves from throwing their monitors through windows.
I envied them their bliss.
I cleared my throat, preparing to utter my first words to countless streaming viewers, and tried to forget how disgusted I was with myself for lying to the host of the show, getting booked by promising to deliver the ultimate “what are UFOs really about?” reveal. Disgusted that I’d be addressing the entire audience, enough people to fill a hundred football stadiums, under false pretenses, blithely using them all for my own ends, utterly obsessed with achieving my goal.
Still, I insisted to myself, desperate to salve my tortured conscience, I did plan to deliver a comprehensive overview of the state of UFOs, along with information never before disclosed. This didn’t entirely justify my actions, but it did make me feel a little better.
I tensed as the countdown on the lower left corner of my monitor reached three seconds. Then two. Then one.
Pyrotechnics exploded onto my screen, the standard opening for the Mark Russell Podcast, consisting of futuristic music and dozens of images, each flashing across the screen for fractions of a second. Images of computers, DNA molecules, supercolliders, star fields, spacecraft, drones, holograms, and anything else that connoted science, technology, and futurism.
Given how our culture had become obsessed with these subjects, Dr. Mark Russell had been at the right place at the right time, and had a following numbering in the millions. Russell frequently interviewed Nobel-prize-winning scientists and tech industry titans alike.
And today a science-fiction author who hadn’t written a single word in over seven months, but who had convinced the host that he had found the Holy Grail of UFO answers.
Well, UAP answers, if one wanted to keep up with the current vernacular.
When the government had finally decided to take the subject seriously they had changed Unidentified Flying Object to Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, or UAP, to avoid the negative stigma of the original term.
This was the name the cool kids in the government and military now used, but I didn’t like it. Too fancy. Besides, when you saw an alien craft in the sky you said, “look at that strange object.” You didn’t say, “look at that strange phenomena.”
If I had to use a term other than UFO, I preferred another new term, UAV, which stood for Unidentified Aerial Vehicle.
In my book, though, they should have changed Unidentified Flying Objects to Mysterious Otherworldly Flying Objects—or MOFOs. This name was more accurate after all. And I’d give my last dollar to hear TV reporters using the new acronym.
“A fighter pilot today reported having an encounter with an aggressive little MoFo just outside of Nellis Air Force Base. According to the pilot ‘That crazy MoFo was coming at me like a bat out of hell.’”
I took a deep breath as the podcast’s signature opening video concluded, to be replaced by a bearded man in his forties, wearing eyeglasses and beaming enthusiastically. “Welcome, everyone, to the Mark Russell Science, Technology, and Futurism podcast,” he said. “I’m Dr. Mark Russell, of course, and I have quite a show for you today.
“My special guest for this edition of the podcast is Jason Ramsey, a bestselling novelist, speaker, and futurist well known to many of you. Jason’s science-fiction thrillers are packed with accurate science and technology and tackle such topics as artificial superintelligence, nanotechnology, super-soldier enhancements, time travel, quantum mechanics, cosmology, and more.”
Dr. Russell raised his eyebrows suggestively. “And this is the episode that just might make the history books, folks. Jason asked me not to promote this beforehand, but he isn’t here in his capacity as a writer. In fact, he’s spent the past seven months investigating what’s really going on with the UAVs that are cluttering our skies, using primary and secondary sources both. Today, he plans to share his blockbuster findings for the first time with this program.
“Jason, welcome to the podcast.”
I took a deep breath and stared at the host’s image on my screen, trying to forget the millions of people hanging on my every word. There would be no take-backs. This was live, and I already planned to leave them all hanging, which was bad enough. But if I said something stupid, or tripped over my own feet, I was stuck with it forever.
“Thanks, Mark,” I said, trying not to swallow hard. “Thanks for having me.”
“Before we begin, Jason, why don’t you tell the audience a little about your background and how you came to be a full-time writer.”
“Sure,” I said, feeling awkward, and realizing that I probably should be smiling. “Science fiction was my first love,” I began. “And for a long time as a kid, my only love.”
I stopped there, not wanting to elaborate further. The truth was that I had been a voracious reader of hard science fiction since I could remember, vacuuming up countless pages of the genre like a blue whale inhaling krill. Not fantasy. Hard science fiction. Mind-blowing, breathtaking, hard science fiction.
When I walked the corridors of my grade school, or waited in line in the cafeteria for my ration of pizza and tater tots, I had my nose deep in a book, oblivious to the rest of the world. At that time, this behavior was considered odd, but in retrospect I was just ahead of my time. Who knew that just a few years later an entire generation would be unable to tear their eyes from their smartphones, and nearly everyone would become expert at walking and reading at the same time (except for the small percentage who became so engrossed by their screens they walked off of cliffs, allowing Darwinism to thin them from our ranks).
Basically, that was my childhood. While I excelled in baseball and racquet sports, and had one close friend, I had no interest in socializing. When I wasn’t at school or playing a sport, I was locked inside my tiny room reading science fiction.
I’d still be there today if not for puberty. Girls, whom I hadn’t really cared about previously, had suddenly become irresistibly appealing. So much so that they finally eclipsed science fiction in my imagination. I began to realize that if I didn’t change my trajectory, I would never meet any, let alone lose my virginity (an ambitious long-range goal for a boy who wouldn’t even kiss a girl until he was fourteen).
So at thirteen, I marched into the room of my older sister, Ashley, with whom I had never gotten along, and an epic friendship was born. In essence, I told her I wanted to find a way out of the pages of a book and the confines of my room, to eventually go out on a date with an actual girl, and asked for her help.
Ashley hated science fiction and thought I was the ultimate nerd—which I was if you didn’t count athletic ability—but she did have the social thing down pat and agreed to help me by giving me a social makeover and taking me to parties.
And it worked. Astonishingly, people liked me. Even female people.
Turned out I was harmless. A sweet, awkward kid. Kind of like a cute pet. Nice. Safe. Unsure of myself.
Which is how I remained, even now, at thirty-eight. Unsure.
Not outwardly, by any means, but deep down inside. Which explained the Mothra-sized butterflies I felt in my gut.
“Because of science fiction,” I continued, hoping my nerves weren’t showing, “I became fascinated by the mind-blowing absurdities of quantum physics. Ultimately, I entered a PhD program in this field at Stanford.”
“What area did you work on?” asked the host.
I had hoped to skip ahead to the punchline, but apparently that wasn’t going to be possible. “Something called retrocausality,” I answered. “Which basically means cause and effect in reverse. In the quantum realm at least, it’s becoming increasingly likely that future events can affect the present.”
“Can you give us an example?” asked Mark Russell.
I sighed. I was hoping to just get on with it, but it was his show. “It turns out that the laws of physics work perfectly well in either time direction,” I said. “Forward or backward. It’s also true that if you take two radioactive atoms, absolutely identical in every conceivable way, they will decay randomly. The first might decay immediately, while the second doesn’t do the same for an hour or more. Why the difference? After all, they’re identical.
“Scientists have never found any way to explain it or predict when this decay will occur. But there are theories that posit the information that controls the fate of these particles doesn’t come from the past or present.” I raised my eyebrows to build the drama. “It comes from the future. Cause and effect in reverse.”
“Very cool,” said Russell enthusiastically. “So how did you go from there to becoming a writer?”
“In my third year of graduate school I wrote a science-fiction story with retrocausality as the central theme. Basically, it was an exercise to see if I could present my thoughts on the topic in a fun, interesting way that even those untrained in physics could understand.
“Anyway, I posted it online—and it went viral. So I expanded it to novel length, and this went viral also. It didn’t take long before I decided that I was better at telling stories than in making physics breakthroughs. So I left Stanford to pursue writing full time.”
“Fascinating,” said the host. “And I know your many fans are happy things turned out the way they did.”
So was I, but I remained silent. The truth was that I was no Albert Einstein. In fact, I would have been a mediocre quantum physicist. My lack of a PhD was no loss to the world, and in my current capacity, I was able to provide millions with food for thought and a better understanding of scientific principles.
All in all, I was lucky I had found this calling, even if I wasn’t a natural. Even if coming up with new ideas and characters had become ever more of a struggle since that very first effort. For each of my novels I had used every good idea I’d ever had, and was then faced with the terrifying prospect of having to come up with an entirely new set of ideas from thin air.
Still, I had won the lottery and was well aware of it. The last thing I would ever do was complain, or get a big head. I had gotten lucky, and I still remained my own harshest critic.
But even though writing could at times be a torture, not too many people would feel sorry for a man who worked from home, answered only to himself, and earned millions by simply typing words into a computer. Besides, a little suffering was good for the soul.
At least that’s what I told myself.
“So let’s move into the central topic of this episode,” said Mark Russell. “Because, as I mentioned, you aren’t here to tell us about a new novel, or discuss science and futurism. You aren’t here to discuss writing at all.
“In fact, Jason, you asked to be booked on the show to explain what you’ve been doing with the past seven months of your life. You’re here to enlighten us all about what is undeniably the most important, and most fascinating, topic of our age. You’re here to give us a comprehensive final answer to a question that has tortured so many for so long. So I’ll give you the floor.”
Mark Russell raised his eyebrows. “Tell us what you’ve learned about UAP and extraterrestrials. Are they real? Are they here? And if so, why?”
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