THE MEN IN BLACK EXPOSED,

     IOWA'S UFO CONNECTION: PART II

Lucas: I was still unable to move as Gregory Wilhelm checked my vitals. My body still ached, but the pain was slowly subsiding.

     "Don't worry, Mr. Posey," Wilhelm said, smiling. "You are going to be just fine. Within a few minutes you should be able to move normally."

     "I've got two questions," I said. "How do you know my name, and what did I get hit with?"

     "The name's easy. You told me yourself---I'll explain in a minute. And I'm not unfamiliar with the organization you work for, either. As for what hit you, it was your first real introduction to alien technology. It's more like a taser than a gun, although it has other effects, too, as you may have noticed. The drowsiness and all that. Actually, you never passed out. You're just lucky I was in those woods and was able to pull you out of harm's way. If that black-suited bastard had had night-vision goggles, we wouldn't be having this conversation right now.

     "Like I said, you never really passed out. Eventually, your body went limp and my associates and I had to carry you to our truck, but you could still communicate a little. That's how I knew your name and what you were doing at the quarry. You may have heard of what happened to you before. Some call it 'missing time,' such as that experienced by UFO abductees."

     Wilhelm wouldn't tell me much more, but promised to explain more when we got to Limbo. He explained the blacked-out windows here in the back of the pickup due to the high level of secrecy of the organization, and that they couldn't let any visitors to their headquarters know the exact location.

     After perhaps an hour, the truck finally came to a stop. "Is this it?" I asked. Wilhelm shook his head and then I felt the truck start up again. A few minutes later, we stopped again. This time Wilhelm opened the back hatch and we climbed out of the truck.

     "Here it is, Posey. Limbo." We were in a brightly lit cave, some fifty yards in diameter, with a ceiling at about thirty feet. Electric generators hummed, powering rows of computers and other electronic devices. Where there weren't scientific gadgets, folders filled with paper were stacked, sometimes in ten-foot piles.

     A crowd formed around us. "Everybody, this is William Posey," said Wilhelm. "His interests coincide with ours, and, as he is a journalist, he may be able to help us in the outside world." He turned to me. "I don't have time to introduce you to everyone, but I'd like you to meet our 'board of directors,' if you will." He ushered me to a table cluttered with coffee mugs, books and empty cans of pork and beans. Three others joined us.

     The first that Wilhelm introduced me to was a spindly man with Coke-bottle glasses. "This is Chester Geier, electrical engineer extraordinaire." Next was Valerie DuChamps, a computer programmer who had graduated with her Masters in Computer Science from Georg von Podebrad at the age of twenty-one. The last was a Mr. David Lang, whom Wilhelm referred to as their "logician." He was an ex-corporate man and financial strategist.

     "What is going on here?" I asked flatly.

     "Limbo is many things, Mr. Posey," Wilhelm responded. "Limbo collects information on extraterrestrial contact and technologies, mainly here in Iowa." He gave me a brief rundown of their research, gleaned through personal experience, extensive contacts from private, public, and governmental sources and through the efforts of their hacking virtuoso, Valerie DuChamps.

     He purposely disclosed this to whet my appetite. As an experienced angler sets a hook in a trout, he watched me squirm. Then he made his offer: if I promised to supply Limbo with any information I might come across during my work as a Third Eye Reporter, he would tell me what I wanted to know about the Men in Black.

     I readily agreed.

     "The device I retrieved from Tesla Research Labs," he explained in a quite voice, "had been sent there by mistake from Aerodyne Propulsion Laboratories. I identified it as either alien in origin or patterned after alien technology and stole the object from Tesla. This is why the Men in Black are looking for it and why I had to join Limbo full-time. My colleagues have analyzed the strange cylindrical device and although they've not yet determined its exact nature, it exhibits a faint radioactive presence, indicating that it may have been used to store nuclear materials. I believe it may be a tiny Brenstraluungh device."

     "You mean like the one pulled out of the ground at the University of Emmetsburg?" I asked (see: Conspiracy in Emmetsburg?, November, 1997, vol.4, Issue #11).

     He nodded. "What has yet to be determined is the molecular makeup of the device, for although it appears to be composed of ferrous material, it also contains some as-yet unidentified compounds. In addition, the object is coated with a microscopic layer of ceramic. The whole thing appears not to affect or be affected by electrical or magnetic forces. It is very unlikely that this object could be of purely human design."

     "The Men in Black are removing another bit of alien technology from the abandoned quarry near Irish Grove. You know a man named Sam Gunderson who encountered something in the pond. We believe an automated medical repair system aboard an ancient crashed alien saucer altered him. Perhaps the machine scanned Gunderson, diagnosed his normal neural structure as belonging to an injured alien and rebuild it. Unfortunately, these alien modifications overwhelmed Gunderson's all-too human frame, and this landed him in Massaraty Asylum."

     "But we're not certain. Lang, for one, thinks the Men in Black may be closely allied with an alien race, but not with the one whose technologies lie submerged at the quarry."

     "If they were," Lang interjected, "then they would surely have known of the crash site and neutralized what was there decades ago."

     Wilhelm continued, "In 1947, an alien craft crashed in Palo Alto County the same day one crashed in Roswell, New Mexico"

     I burst out laughing at this, but Wilhelm's intense serious demeanor made me stop.

     "Documentation exists," he said and then continued. "The group believes either the military, Aerodyne Propulsion or both still possess the wreckage of that crash, as well as a few recovered bodies. The Men in Black, they feel, aid a variety of institutions, including Aerodyne and the government.

     Chester Geier spoke up, "My hunch is that the MiB are not human, judging by their pale skin, odd and stiff mannerisms, and peculiar fishy odor. They may be human-alien hybrids or possibly completely genetically engineered beings. At any rate, they could not exist without alien or alien-inspired technologies."

     I asked if the group felt that aliens were in direct cooperation with the government, the military or Aerodyne. Wilhelm hesitated, then said no one in the group had witnessed an alien life form and that DuChamps' investigative hacking had lead nowhere near the sort of classified files that would contain such information.

     "You've got to remember," she interrupted, "the deeper you dig, the more likely someone passing by will notice the hole. If anyone out there has contracted with alien life and is now co-operating with those beings, finding that information will be about as easy as sneaking doughnuts out of a Police Academy."

     A young man with shaggy hair bounded to the table.

     "The Men are gone, folks. They're done."

     Wilhelm introduced me to the young man, whose name was Roger Scarberry. "Did you get any photos?" he asked.

     Scarberry shook his head. "I doubt it. They had some sort of electromagnetic disruption field set up; when I got close enough to start shooting, neither my Walkman and my watch worked."

     I thought of the many UFO witnesses who claimed car engine and battery failure when in the presence of UFOs.

     "But cameras are physical processes," I noted. "How could an EM field disrupt that?"

     "Whatever they've got, I'll bet dollars to doughnuts it ruined my film right though the camera."

     He took the film to the group's darkroom. It wasn't long before he was back. Sure enough, the negatives he showed us were all over-exposed. Scarberry then explained what he had seen. About an hour after I'd been discovered by the Men in Black, the hoses and wires that had extended from three large machines on flatbed trucks and into the pond were retracted. Next, three MiB took huge metallic divining rods in their hands and pointed them at the water. The men in military uniforms readied their weapons. Soon the surface of the water rippled, and a dull gray sphere some ten feet in diameter rose up about three feet. Scarberry reported that the military personnel appeared nervous, and exchanged worried glances.

     The MiB used their divining-rod devices to guide the sphere to one of the flatbed trucks, where they nestled it amongst other machinery. They anchored it securely and covered it with a tarpaulin. They left the quarry, leaving nothing behind.

     Suddenly, I heard a whistling sound, then another, followed by thuds and hissing. I noticed DuChamps's eyes go wide. She said one word before the room exploded into chaos: "Shit."

     I wheeled around to see yellow-white clouds billowing near the mouth of this chamber. Tear gas, I thought. Sure enough, appearing through the mist like phantoms were ranks of armed, gas mask-wearing soldiers. I vaulted over the table and made a break for the back of the chamber. A deafening thud shook the room and knocked me over. Paper floated through the air and furniture went flying. I scrambled to get away from the acrid fumes, but the cave was rapidly filling.

     Half-blinded, I glimpsed a soldier throw Wilhelm to the floor and handcuff him. Someone grabbed my shoulder, and I wheeled to throw a punch. But instead of a masked soldier, I saw Valerie DuChamps.

     "Get down behind this desk," she urged, her voice muffled by torn piece of cloth. "We're going to get out of here."

     We huddled behind the desk, my eyes pressed into the crook of my arm. For a what felt an eternity, we waited as I fought the urge to rip my burning eyes from their sockets. My sleeve grew soaked with my tears. Finally, Valerie tugged my elbow for me to follow. The soldiers had overtaken us and were now rounding their prisoners up against the cave wall opposite the entrance. The lingering cloud provided us just enough cover as we made our way to the tunnel leading out of the cavern. Soon we emerged outside, and ran past a half-dozen Hummers and Jeeps into the surrounding woods. Eventually, we heard no sounds of being followed, were able to slow to a walk.

     "Well, that's the end of Limbo. They'll have erased that place in a few hours," said DuChamps, calmly. "I wonder what they'll do to the others?"

     I had no idea. She informed me she had a few of Limbo's files at her home on disk, and that she had to risk retrieving them, but she needed another place to hide out. I offered her a job at the Alternate Reality Project, and assured her the location was a well-guarded secret. She accepted, but assured me that her work on alien contact in Iowa was far from over, and that it would always be her first priority.

     I've made it a priority, too. Mrs. Marjorie Wilhelm needs some answers.