Freakin' in the Fun House - Part 1

Back in the mid-1990s, I was (briefly) the exclusive European correspondent for a news story about the capture of an extraterritorial alien. More precisely, I had (very briefly) the inside track for interviews with various people who claimed to have been directly and/or indirectly connected with a videotape purportedly smuggled out of the alleged Area 51.

And if you think I just used a lot of qualifiers, just wait till you hear the rest of the story. All names have been dropped to protect both the guilty and the chumps.

At the time, I had been writing free lance film articles for a British science fiction magazine. Technicality, I was considered a foreign correspondent, even though my old trench coat was the only British item involved in the job. Everything else was an easy telecommunicate from Ohio (though keeping up with the time differential was often a bear).

At the time, the editor for the magazine's American office was routinely in contact with a woman who was the agent for an actor who had a major recurring role on a popular science fiction series (a lot of this story does indeed have a friend-of-a-friend quality). Their relationship was just chatty enough that the agent felt comfortable asking the editor for help with a problem. The agent had just agreed to help coordinate PR for the impending release of an odd videotape and did we know anyone who knew anything about UFOs?

I got nominated primarily because no one else wanted to deal with the issue. I had a passing interest in the subject but was way out of date with the information. However, the magazine was preparing for the premiere of the series Dark Skies and I was already having to do some basic research....So I accepted the nomination.

Besides, I figured that it would be good for laughs. Kind of like a carny show.

Admittedly, one of the first problems was the provenance of the video. The story was that the provider of the tape had worked at Area 51 (a claim never substantiated) who had smuggled the tape (by means never described) out of the Dreamland facility. For security reasons, the man was only known to the people preparing the tape's release by a code name and even the code name was not to be provided to me or any other member of the press.

When the agent told me all of this, I took a guess and asked her if the code name was Victor. There was a moment's silence on the phone.

"How did you know that?"

"Just an educated hunch."

Victor had been the name of a captured alien in the John Lear hoax a few years earlier. I was wondering if there might have been a connection.

At the time I only had a passing familiarity with the John Lear/Bill Cooper material, but everything was already feeling like some sort of half baked cross between that warped tale and the alien autopsy hoax a few years earlier on Fox.

Which was OK. I was definitely looking for a side show and I was pretty convinced that I just found the way to the freaks tent....

TO BE CONTINUED