I LATER CAME UPON other second hand stories of UFO sightings, but only one other bubbles to the surface with tremendous credibility.

I was a recent graduate from business school. With an MBA in hand and as a new recruit in an accelerated training program at a large Los Angeles bank, I thought I knew more about business than the many other recruits on my team who weren’t MBAs.

At that time, little did I understand the meaning of social castes. Of the nominal value of college degrees themselves. Of inherited status. Of kids from wealthy families. Kids whose parents made sure they attended the best elementary and high schools, guaranteed they entered the elite universities, and finagled as required so their children got into the best large corporate training programs.

Guys mostly. Guys, usually without MBAs, but with undergrad accounting or even sociology degrees from the best schools. Their parents had influential friends, high level connections, or some other aspect of their history to cheat a little on the jobs chessboard. Their children possessed an air of confidence that comes with wealth, the clothing, the arrogant voices, the snub-nosed haughtiness of superiority appropriate for the societal territory in which they traveled.

My training program was filled with such types. Their paths for the next five years were paved with gold, irrespective of their inherent capabilities. As a poor, middle-class-at-best kid from Hicksville, Arizona, I didn’t like them much and hung around instead with the rejects, the recruits who got into the program independent of social status or influential relatives.

One of those rejects was Thomas, the oldest in our newbie class of wannabe bankers. Mid-thirties. Thin, but physically ripped. Crew cut with blond hair. Friendly face but rarely smiled. Courteous to a fault. He let us all know in subtle ways that he did time in a special unit of the Air Force.

One Friday evening after work, seven of us met for dinner with no intent other than to have a good time and burn off the tensions and lessons from the week. This was the first and only time I saw Thomas drink any alcohol. He never told us why he rarely drank, and most assumed it was part of a health regimen he picked up in the military.

By the time we had just finished our meals, Thomas had downed three full tumblers of whiskey sours, and his usual walls of tight-lipped courtesy and deferential discipline were melting away. For whatever reason, our conversation turned to the topic of UFOs. In hopes of outdoing anyone else’s stories, I recounted that day in Tempe with Carlos and Jimmie, a vivid accounting of that highly believable tale.

I noticed halfway through my monologue that Thomas had physically pulled away from the table and was silent as if the discussion was making him uncomfortable. His lips were pursed and white like an inflating balloon ready to burst. The others at the table noticed this as well, and an awkward moment of silence occurred at the conclusion of my tale as the rest assessed its veracity.

“Thomas,” Luna inquired, “are you okay? Do you want us to let you out?”

Thomas was in an uncomfortable spot. The booth was half round. I was at one edge, Luna at the other, and he was wedged dead in the middle. Still very tense, he managed to spit out a ‘no’ between his clenched teeth.

Luna, a dark-haired, petite Latina, was the polar opposite of the haughty trainees. Raised in a poor East Los Angeles family, she got where she was through hard work and discipline. And unlike many others in the program, she was extremely amiable and attentive. And fearless.

“You usually aren’t so quiet, my friend,” she continued. “Did we say something that offended you?”

Thomas shrugged his shoulders and pulled forward to the table. “No,” he replied, grasping his glass for a long drink of water.

The table was silent. We waited for him to continue.

“It’s the topic. The topic. I don’t like the topic, or maybe I don’t want to remember it,” he confided as he carefully set the glass down.

“Remember? Remember what?” Luna queried. “You’re just out of the armed services, right? Did you encounter something while there?”

He shook his head slowly from side to side, a signal to us that we simply could not understand the demons of recollection hidden within.

Staring at his now empty water glass and rocking it back and forth on the table, he began, “Some things in life you wish you had never seen. Unnatural. Unexplainable. Experiences that make your skin crawl and question your existence on Earth.” Head down toward the glass, his eyes lifted upward to peer at us. “I’ve seen these things.”

“Like?” I inquired, certain that nobody could one-up my story.

“Like, you don’t want to know, or maybe you shouldn’t know. That incident you just recalled. That’s the kind that goes into military archives in secure storage rooms, never intended to see the light of day again. But eventually, stories leak out. Somebody chugs one too many beers or whiskey sours one night and can’t help but divulge what they saw, even if it was classified. Even if they were briefed or threatened to never say a word. Or they confess on their deathbed to close family. But you can’t keep shit like that bottled up in you. Time goes by. It gnaws at your soul. You can’t help but recall it every single day of your life afterward. With time, the consequences of divulging it to others seem less clear, and you wonder how keeping it an everlasting secret can be to the benefit of anything or anyone.”

Luna was bug-eyed with interest and concern. She was a facilitator, a broker of conversations. We stared at each other, both dumbfounded, and she knew it was her turn for gentle persuasion. A little workmate psychiatry over after-dinner spirits.

“Are you suggesting an event happened while in the military, like something unnatural, and you were asked to never mention it?” She slowly placed her arm outward towards him and rested her hand carefully on the table as if she was grasping his hand in warm understanding.

“Oh, it wasn’t just me,” he confided. “I was one of dozens, even hundreds, in those days. Maybe. I don’t see how you keep chatter like this a secret among hundreds of enlisted men and officers, then never have it get out. You can’t shut us up or kill us all. You can’t brainwash us. You can’t even threaten us, because, like in my case, the threats are less personally threatening as the years pass once you leave the service. I mean, what would they do to me now? How could they prove I was the only one who divulged this top secret info? And who’s going to believe me if I tell you anyway? You’d just say ‘he was drunk and told us a crazy-shit UFO story’ and that would be that. No harm, no foul. No buff dudes in dark suits and sunglasses will arrive at midnight to take you away because you happened to be sitting at the same table when some ex-special ops military guy spilled the ultra-classified beans.”

“Something you want to tell us, then?” Luna smiled. “I think we can all agree to put our memories of this evening in that category of ‘Hey, Thomas had a few drinks and told a story to scare the poop out of us, and he did a good job of it.’ This is no different than what we just heard of Greg’s Yuma incident or somebody’s ghost story or anything else people say or recount what happened. Memories grow a life of their own over time, and we’ll just chalk it up to that. Okay?”

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Thomas was seriously pondering her invitation. He still hadn’t given more than a momentary glance at us, as if he was too busy weighing the benefit of getting the story off his chest at that table or letting it continue to haunt him, never to be repeated to others beyond himself.

“Okay,” he began reluctantly, his body unconsciously wavering from side to side. “I’ll tell you, but don’t think less of me for what I’m about to say, because I respect all of you, and I want you to respect me. I don’t lie unless honor-bound to do so, and I feel no pressure to divulge anything to you. I’m not under any duress, except maybe the duress of what haunts me to this very day.”

“We’re all ears,” Luna confided, glancing around to ensure that others in the restaurant were paying no attention to our table. “I think it’s noisy enough that nobody else will hear, and there’s a wall behind you. The sides of the booth extend way above our heads. It’s safe. Please, talk.”

“It was in Alabama.”

“You were stationed there?” I interjected.

“Yeah,” he nodded. “I guess you could call it ‘being stationed.’ It’s not like we were at a fort or base. No, I was there as a junior officer to a crew of a dozen others. A few were juniors like me, and some were Air Force Specialists. Enlisted men.”

“So where was this, if not a fort or base? Where would you sleep and all?” I queried.

By leading him with questions, Luna and I were trying to subtly comfort him.

“It was a missile launch site. I can’t tell you where, obviously. But it was our underground operations center for the missiles and silos in that area. Spent two years at that place, holed up mostly fifty-plus feet underground in what you might term a bomb shelter, a very big bomb shelter that could house a good number of officers and airmen for a long time if a nuclear war should occur, God forbid.”

“Why were you all there?” Luna asked.

“It was a control center, the place where all information came in about the various missile sites in our region. Major electronics. Just think about it. You’ve got, say, thirty launch sites in a radius of seven hundred square miles. Each has at least one, if not multiple, multi-megaton missiles in it. On the ready. You know, a bit like you’d see in the movies. Everyone carries a holstered firearm in case anyone goes crazy or takes sides with the wrong country, even the guys who maintain the electronics. Everyone. Multiple levels of security, yes, since the guy you’ve known for the last year could well be a foreign agent, or even part of Air Force security there to test your own loyalty. You never knew who was who, and you’d always keep an arm’s length relationship with anyone you’d meet or hang around with.”

“Underground,” I observed. “You had to stay underground for two years?”

He shrugged uncomfortably. “No, not all the time. You’d go bat-shit crazy if you were forced to do that. And some guys went bat-shit anyway. But part of the job was to get out in a vehicle, sometimes obviously as Air Force, other times civilian, to check on the various sites.”

Luna’s head tilted. “Why did you have check on the sites? I mean, couldn’t you just check on them remotely?”

Thomas rapped the table nervously with the edge of his glass. The waitress took notice. “More water for you all?” she asked.

Some of us nodded, and she topped us up.

“What did you say, Luna?” he countered.

“The sites. Why did you need to check on them?”

“Oh, shit, we loved to check on them. It was our way of getting out into the sunshine and away from the dank air of twenty or thirty sweaty guys in close quarters. Those were usually great little excursions.”

“Why do you say ‘usually?’” she wondered.

“There was once . . . ,” he wandered off. “No, I’m not giving you an adequate picture. Let me try this.”

He pushed aside a few taller items on the table and spread his hands out, his sleeve cuffs just clipping the top of the full water glasses. “I want you to all imagine what it was like, so consider this. You can’t tolerate a damn thing coming close to those missile sites. They’re underground, and you’ve got this nuclear device twenty or more feet below designed to launch at any second. Shit to hell, it’s hard for me to believe such a thing hasn’t happened already by accident, given the thousands of missiles we’ve deployed all over this poor, little rock in space. But that’s another issue entirely.”

“Twenty feet?” someone else asked.

“Depends on the terrain, but the top of the missile might be that close to the surface. Sometimes more.”

“What covers the missile up, then?” I queried. “I mean, could a hunter be walking in the woods and accidentally fall down the hole, impaling himself on the missile as he fell?”

“Nothing like that,” Thomas replied, a little miffed at such a ridiculous hypothetical. “First of all, it isn’t like these sites are out on Farmer John’s land that any hunter can access. They’re usually very well cordoned off. Barbed wire, warning signs, and other things I can’t tell you about to prevent curiosity seekers from getting dangerously close. So imagine a few thousand of these sites laid out over all America. Imagine that. Sure, some are out in Montana or Utah no-man’s lands, but some are also closer to population centers, and it’s hard as hell to keep people away. A lot of the local yokels either can’t read or the warning signs and barbed wire become an irresistible invitation to do some idiot sleuthing. ‘Billy, let’s see if we can break in and take a picture of us next to one’ kind of shit.”

“Was that your job, then?” Luna wondered. “Did you have to go out with a broom to bat away the idiots?”

“Sure,” he confided in all seriousness. “But I wasn’t carrying a broom. We’d have standard issue automatics and a variety of other weapons. Look, I’m not saying someone could easily take out a recon crew like mine then break into the missile and cart it off or detonate it in some way. Too many fail-safe things they couldn’t get past. But don’t think it hasn’t been tried. Trust me. You name the fringe idiots. Left-wing hippies mad at the world. Radical right-wingers mad at the hippies. Takes all kinds. Sometimes these idiots live through the ordeal, and sometimes they die trying to show how powerful they are with their puny shotguns and camouflage gear.”

“You had to kill people?” Luna said, her eyes widening.

“Can’t tell you that,” he replied, his eyes dropping back to the empty glass as he kept tapping it lightly on the table. “You do what you’re ordered to do. Better to cauterize and euthanize someone threatening to steal a warhead than having them cart a pound of fissile material home in the bed of their Chevy pickup.”

“What was the purpose of your command center? Was that where the button would be pushed in some God-forbid-it-never-happens event?” I wondered.

“Exactly,” he nodded. “Under the right circumstances, or maybe wrong, depending on your viewpoint. That’s what it’s made for.”

Luna was enthralled as the tension filled the air. “So the entire purpose of this team was to keep the riff-raff from stealing a missile, and to fire one off toward Moscow if the President said to?”

“Partially so, partially not. You have to understand. These places are more secure, or at least as secure, as the White House. I can’t tell you what’s there, but consider this. A squirrel drops a nut from a tree. We capture the nut hitting the top of the silo. The squirrel scampers down to pick the nut up, and alarms start blaring at us to pay attention. I wish I could mention what we have there, but I can’t. Just assume we know or will know everything going on at and around the site, down to the nut and squirrel. Now, maybe a bug could cross into the zone without issue, but I’ve even seen where a bug set off an alarm.”

“And once there’s an alarm,” I wondered, “what do you guys do?”

“Most of the time, I’d grab a few of my men and we’d take a fast and fun ride out to the site. It might be a nice, sunny day. It might be a mid-summer, swampy midnight. It could be in the middle of a landed hurricane or tornado. People talk about the mail getting through, but nothing ever stopped us. Nothing.”

Luna couldn’t peel her dark brown eyes away from him. “Amazing, just amazing. I can’t imagine how thrilling and scary it was, never knowing if you were going to shoosh away a raccoon or take fire from Russian spies.”

“All that actually happens and more. You don’t hear about it because it’s not supposed to make the news. We did something wrong if it makes the news. Look, there’s more devious horse shit than you can imagine going on constantly, especially when it comes to nukes and international relations. Devious people, devious countries, right out of a James Bond movie.”

“My God,” Luna observed, “all of this talk, and I just remembered we were discussing UFOs and aliens before this. Was there something about them that has to do with your time in the Air Force? I mean, I’ve heard of pilots seeing them, even back, I think, to World War II and the like. Did you see one when you were flying?”

“Not when I was flying,” he abruptly admitted. Tired of playing with his empty glass, he placed both of his hands on the table with fingers eagle-spread, as if he was holding the table down so it wouldn’t spring into the ceiling.

“Then you saw one at your control center?” Luna concluded. “You must have.”

Thomas sighed loudly. “Again, I’m not sure why I’m telling you this. Shit, I’ve never even told my wife this story. Maybe it’s the alcohol. This is why I hardly ever drink. Too much can be divulged that shouldn’t be. Loose lips and all. But, yeah, Luna, you’re getting closer.”

“Please tell us!” she insisted. “Get it off your chest."