The tape that Victor was peddling was the alleged interrogation of a supposed captured extraterritorial at Areas 51. Victor's claim was that he had smuggled it out of the facility and wanted to make it public because he was appalled at the government's treatment of the ET. Due to the top secret nature of the material, he had to maintain a high level of secrecy concerning himself and the background to the tape. He also was hoping to cut a deal for world wide release via a major video distributor with lots of moola for a tape that, if real, would actually be federal property and not legally usable for commercial purposes (a point that no body, including the distributor, ever raised).
Since a super-secret security organization working for a hyper-secret wing of the utterly secret invisible government was searching for both him and the tape, Victor was unwilling to give the press his name and could only be interviewed by a phone connected to an encryption system. Due to the alleged dangerous nature of his predicament, the encryption was the finest piece of technology that was available at Radio Shack (for approximately $20). He also had a fondness for using pay phones located in Nevada.
Maybe I'm just a cynic, but I kind of suspected that these security precautions would in no way misled the NSA. Nor the CIA. Maybe, just maybe, it would stall the FBI. I have heard that some G-Men still have trouble accessing e-mails.
I did suspect that the whole smoke-and-mirror show was designed to set the stage for the press. Unfortunately, I was the only press at this point and the magazine I worked for wasn't offering money for the story. For the publicist, this wasn't a problem. But we were not so sure about the boys on the other end of the arrangements.
A strange group of people had gathered around the tape even though they appeared to have no actual contractual connections to the material. One was the host of a national late night radio show. The other was a UFO investigator who kept insisting that they had named a mountain peak after him near Area 51. Behind the scene, they were increasingly dictating terms to the pr person though no one seemed too clear about what authority they actually had in the matter.
Negotiations for the video release was going on with an established movie company. As part of the deal, they were hoping to get a special effects artist lined up to swear that the production could not have been the result of make up or FX work. It was becoming obvious why they wanted the person I was dealing with to be the publicist She had began her career as an assistant to one of the most acclaimed special effect/make up artists in the business. They wanted him to be in the program. She was their contact to woe him.
There was, perhaps, one slight problem. Neither the publicist nor the make up master were sold on the tape's authenticity. Instead, they were privately guessing that it was a puppet (an opinion that I shared).
While the negotiations for the video wore on, I began researching both the material and the people. I figured I better find out a little more about what I had just gotten myself into.
TO BE CONTINUED
