A Letter From Dr. Immelman Stahl,

     Director of Aerodyne Proplusion Labs

     "What are you talking about?" I asked in surprise.

     "Don't lie to me, Docotor," he emphatically groweled, taking off his cap. "My orders come directly from S-4."

     I cleared my throat and nodded at his cap. Inside lay his gray and white dappled hairpiece.

     "Mr. Campbell, why do you persist in this excercise?" I asked.

     Security soon collected him. They then took a polaroid of his most recent incarnation, and escorted him off the Aeordyne campus.

     Harrison Campbell's talent for amateur theatrics is only upstaged by his monomania for uprooting conspiracies. For nearly three years, the man has repeatedly penetrated Aerodyne Propulsion Labs under the pretense of interviewing myself or in the guise of an United States Military Officer (an offense that I am assured should carry a twenty year sentence). His normal entry method is to join one of the public tours of the facility, which he then leaves ostensibly to visit the WC. There he transforms himself into a hook-nosed National Security Agency Officer named "Walker" or a mustached U. S. Navy Captain named "Perkins" or a one-eyed U.S. Airforce Colonel named "Wilcox" or some such other security credentialed individual and then invades the work of highly trained technicians and engineers---many involved in extremely delicate, precision work that may soon affect the safety of this nation's passenger aircraft---all to feed his deluded appetite for flying saucers and flying dinosaurs.

     Why hasn't he been arrested? The plain facts are that he has been arrested seven times. Yet each time he was fined and given a suspended sentence. Even the ersatz protection of a restraining order has largely been ignored by the local police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation as the two cannot agree on jurisdiction. Until he does damage something at Aerodyne, we shan't waste our scant resources prosecuting him. Mr. Campbell, meanwhile, persists in expecting me to play Blowfeld to his Bond.

     His visits have supplied me with no end of encounters with this very unique individual. Many facets of his personality are endearing; his inability to whistle any other tune except Ravel's Bolero leaps readily to mind. So too, does his gaunt, ruddy face which Czeslaw Milosz would have remarked as having "spent much time with guns and dogs." A cursurory glance at his service record as a psy-ops officer in Vietnam will indicate no less than 17 reprimands, one stemming from a tantrum following his failure to win a jingle-writing contest for a cigarette commercial. That the tantrum involved a machinegun, wounded three US servicemen, and destroyed a jeep are facts best overlooked---in the same manner that one looks away from a drunken derelict urinating all over himself.

     Mr. Campbell by no means restricts his prying to the office interview or the unauthorized facility tour. In no less than a dozen recent instances has Aerodyne security personnel detained him for trespass in the dead of night. Each time, I have been forced from my bed to patiently endure to his Captain Queeg-like rantings about the peril facing mankind because of Aerodyne's research projects. True, I am awed by the novel conclusions he draws from his vespertine rootings amidst the grimy contents of Aerodyne's dumpsters. Who could conceive that 24 pizza boxes discarded after Aerodyne's annual Christmas party provided conclusive material evidence that a secret Luftwaffe base exists in northwest Iowa? Or that 622 crusty used kleenex indicated the existence of flying dinosaurs still alive in our time? Or that a mildewed box of 25 blank US Army Air Corps Requistion Forms dated 1946 proved that an alien saucer crash landed near Emmetsburg in 1947 while foraging for office supplies.

     And what am I to say to a man who blithely rends history and misquotes his sources to fit his own twisted agenda? His exposé on the presence of a U-Boat in Five Island Lake was at it's best, the ramblings of a sick man who lingered too long in Saigon's brothels. Before my very eyes, the U-3036 sank during operation TANNHAUSER in Kiel harbor; Jurgen Wassergott and his crew only just managed to escape with their lives. In 1948, a fearsome winter storm beached the submarine across the mouth of the Nord-Ostsee Kanal and was subsequently re-floated by the U.S. Navy. In 1949, she was towed to the Philadelphia Naval Yards for anti-radar detection research---a project in which I was involved. By late 1950, she was earmarked for scrap, but a Lieutentant Commander Martin Riordan---the same Riordan who rescued the U.S.S. Borealis---arranged for her to be freighted to Emmetburg and become part of the Borealis park. When she arrived, the U-3036's funding became muddied in buerracracy and nearly sunk her in Five Island Lake. Only the timely intervention of her old skipper kept her afloat.

     Did Mr. Campbell write these facts? Were the remarks made by Werner Dorfmann, Bruno von Kleist-Schulenhorst, myself and others scrupulously maintained in their correct context? No. Modern society no longer subscribes to Truth at the news stand and considers facts to be incontinent senile grandparents in need of warehousing. But what do I know? I am a scientist who has only served on the review board of the Nobel Prize Commitee for 15 years, has been honored by the National Academy of Sciences, lectured at the Royal Society, chaired several Presidential commitees, and holds 247 patents on civilian and military aerospace systems.

     Assuredly, Mr. Campbell is not the Emmetsburg Village Idiot. He is just another parasitic scribbler whose insidious raison d'etre is to sell their book. We are all familiar with such vermin who profit by shouting "Fire" in a theatre. "Create the scandal, and they (publishers) will come"; those are their watch words. Like Linda Tripp, Kathleen Willey, Monica Lewinsky and a host of other dubious tattle-tale hacks, Mr. Campbell seeks to cultivate a vicious fantasy, substantiated only through the flimsiest rumor and inuendo, and parley the package into a book deal with a handsome cash advance and appearance on Oprah. Such self-styled "Investigative Reporters" are also reveered by such terms as "libelist" and "liar"; their fans and admirers esteemed as "dupes" and "cretins"; their publishers praised as "pond scum".

     Because Mr. Campbell's stories in this magazine show this sort of irresponsible behavior to be the case, my family are kept under round-the-clock guard by security professionals at tax-payers' expense. Not because I am being stalked by alien hunter-killer robots nor because Jurassic Pteranodons have had their nests disturbed by dimension-hopping U-boats. I am forced to live in a cage of precautions for fear that the "tantalizing and unsubstantiated reports" typical of his brand of incendiary journalism might launch kooks and fanatics into deadly action. Even my youngest grandchild has been deprived of her childhood for she can not venture onto a playground without a plainclothes officer near at hand for fear of being snatched away by one of Mr. Campbell's lunatic disciples.

     God alone knows what sort of malicious slanders the man will soon spew while couching himself in Cataline protestations of innocense! I expect him to bend current events to his own purposes, casting me in the role of President Clinton and himself as Ms. Willy.

     To be certain, there is nothing I put beneath Mr. Campbell. Not even dirt.