1.17pm. Thirteen minutes until the canteen opens.

Something to look forward to! With a bit of luck, Dave will be down there. We share an addiction for a certain TV series, and we can talk about the latest episode shown last night. Anyway, it’ll be a break in my mundane routine. Wake up, go down within the Complex to my office, make a coffee, check the newspapers and the internet for any credible UFO reports and prepare reports suggesting appropriate responses… etcetera, etcetera, et bloody cetera.

I thought it would be exciting when I was first approached to work for the Twelve, but I was sadly mistaken.

I used to work as a mid-level civil servant dealing with pile after pile of paper. I was quite good at that job, even if I say myself. Not many people are prepared to keep paying attention to the smaller details of the job day after day after day when the job is so tedious. So I was obviously very interested when I was approached The Boss. I mean, first of all it was flattering that he came in person to my office. I didn’t tend to get many visitors – certainly not from Very Important Persons like The Boss.

Secondly, The Boss gave a speech that would have had anyone volunteering. “Work for the Twelve”, he said. “Help change the world”, he said, “make it a better place for all of us”. Then he talked about the opportunities for travel. He talked about exciting work, shaping the public’s perception of the Universe they live in. Prevent a devastating war, he said. Be a hero.

Oh, he talked and talked and talked. He explained the necessity of our campaign to hide the truth from the public. Can’t have them knowing that UFOs are flying saucers from other planets, he said. They’d panic. They’d demand that billons were spent on weapons to defend against alien invasion. With all that money spent on weapons, someone would want to use them. There’d be a war. Millions would die.

By the time he finished, I’d have paid The Boss to do the job in Planning he was offering.

He’s a smooth one, is The Boss. A complete and utter toe-rag, it goes without saying - but a very smooth talking one.

Of course, The Boss was bright enough to leave out a few details. He didn’t mention that once I travelled to the Complex, I wouldn’t be doing any travelling for a while. No-one leaves here until they retire (or die), and if they retire before they’ve done 40 years service then they don’t get a pension or receive any of the pay that they’s accumulated (since we can’t spend much in the Complex). Zip. Nada. Basically, they have us over the barrel of a gun.

Nor did The Boss mention how boring the job in Twelve’s Planning section would become.

I’ve been here 38 years now, but I don’t think I can last my final 2 years. I’ve been distorting other people’s perception of reality for so long, it’s probably only fitting that I think I’m losing my own grip on reality.

I mean, there are only so many times that you can do prepare reports suggesting the same old tricks before you feel like blowing your brains out. The media reports a credible pilot sees a flying disc above an airport, so I follow Standard Operating Procedure 12 (getting some 24 stone piece of trailer trash to report little grey men taking her away for the night – as if…).

Or when the New York Times does a piece on policemen chasing a UFO for an hour, I simply slavishly follow Standard Operating Procedure 14 (getting the editor of the National Enquirer to publish a front-page story on an “Attack by Space Robots” or asking “Did Space Aliens Teach the Chinese Acupuncture?”).

Sure, it was entertaining the first few times, but year after of this stuff makes it incredibly routine.

And the forms … God, the forms… Blue forms, yellow forms, pink forms… Forms in duplicate, forms in triplicate… One after another after another after another…

Just the other day, Accounting put a hold on one of my expenses claims because I’d filled in one of their precise forms using, *gasp*, blue ink. Some one had fairly high-quality video of a UFO over Haiti which was causing a lot of chatter on the Internet, and I needed a few thousand dollars in a hurry to bribe a CGI expert to get him to claim that he produced the video. The delay by those form-worshipping idiots in Accounting held up the disinformation response by several days. They didn’t care that the video was gaining publicity. Another day and the discussion on the Internet would have prompted a serious investigate journalist to look into the video – and that would have been an end to The Twelve’s plans. Fortunately, I managed to find my black pen and resubmitted the expenses claim just in time.

You might think that The Boss would have complimented me on getting the job done before any real harm was done. You might think that. But you’d be wrong. Instead, he called me in to his office to reprimand me. “Miller”, he said. (He always sticks to my surname of my cover identity). “Miller, you’ve been with us long enough to know that forms for Accounting should be completed in BLACK ink only”. Patronising little bugger. I’m brighter than him, and he knows it, so he’s always looking for an excuse to criticise my work. As if the tedious nature of my work was not enough of a burden…

Okay, okay, occasionally the job has its lighter moments. Very occasionally. Extremely occasionally. Every now and again, to maximise the “giggle factor” we get to create really silly stories. Like when credible alien abduction witnesses started coming forward in the 1960s, we were allowed to coerce a farmer called Villas-Boas into claiming that he had sex with a stunning looking female alien that barked like a dog while they did the evil deed. The Planning Section veritably shook with laughter they day that one was dreamt up. I’ve heard that a fair bit of alcohol had been drunk before they came up with that one…

Back in the fifties and sixties, The Twelve generally ran a tight, efficient and imaginative organisation. The Twelve even got some of our people into key positions within the CIA and other intelligence organisations. One of them, Robertson, issued a report recommending that UFO sighting get debunked. Not only did that report steer the CIA away from investigating the truth, it meant that some of our work in ridiculing witnesses was done by the CIA on their own budget.

But ever since the big budget cuts in the 70s, we’ve had less creative talent working for The Twelve. Instead of teams of imaginative graduates, I’ve had to work with idiots and thugs. The new guys don’t even understand the word “subtle”. They were allowed to get away with their “cattle mutilations” distraction campaign for far too long in my opinion – the boss should have put his foot down much earlier about that cruelty.

Some of these guys are a bit, um, kinky too. I mean, what normal person would have thought up the “anal probing” stories? Weird. Really weird.

It’s because of those new guys that we all have to go along to monthly “motivation seminars” given by The Boss. Having done this job for twenty years, I don’t really need to hear The Boss talk yet again about the public fear that would result if people ever found out the truth about the things flying around in their skies. I mean, most of us haven’t believed in that speech for years. Most of us accept that our gradual acclimatisation program has meant that the public is just about ready for the truth to be revealed without there being any real fear or panic.

Ever since The Twelve jointly produced “ET” with Spielberg, the public climate has completely changed. If there was a re-run now of the Orson Welles “War of the Worlds” broadcast then, instead of people running away from the sites of the supposed UFO crashes as happened in 1938, today people would be running TOWARDS those sites to greet the “Space Brothers”.

I wish I’d come up with the idea for that joint venture with Spielberg. The lucky blighter that suggested it got a promotion, was allowed to take early retirement AND got a share of the royalties…

Since “ET”, “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and other movies that we inspired, The Twelve’s job has been almost too easy. Why worry about a panic and a call to arms if people discovered the truth about UFOs, when they’d probably be GLAD to hear that “we are not alone”? There’s hardly any risk anymore, so why bother doing the job that we do? No-one seems too clear about the answer to these questions. The Boss just avoids the issue and carries on as if the public still had the same paranoid notions about invasion that they had back in the 1950s.

That’s why we’ve had so many leaks in the last few years. The Twelve’s internal security is no longer taken seriously, even by those in the Cleaning Section. Security has become so lax that it’s a joke. Low-level flunkies like Corso would never have gotten away with writing a book until recently. But nobody cares now, since our job is basically done. Perhaps The Twelve should be wound up now. Why bother any more? Is the operation really worth the cost? Can’t they just let me retire with my pension a little bit early? Not according to The Boss. I think The Boss just wants to keep his job as head of the Twelve, rather than gracefully enter retirement. He just likes his job title.

Between the gullible ufologists prepared to publicise any nonsense we feed them, and the apparently respectable debunkers that accept our money in return for making statements “explaining” the real events, a monkey could run The Twelve today and the job would still get done. Any mistakes or disclosures made by our staff just add to the confusion.

Of course, getting this little article published in the Washington Post would probably still get me reprimanded as being a step too far, even in the new climate. But posting it on an Internet forum as a supposed work of fiction should not be a problem. Just in case, for the benefit of anyone from the office that is reading this article, I should stress that THIS IS A SHORT STORY. There, that should cover my backside.


1.19pm. Eleven minutes until the canteen opens. I suppose I could take another cigarette break with the regular smokers near the side entrance to the Complex. But since I don’t smoke, they tend to look at me a bit oddly. Anyway, it’s too hot around here to enjoy standing outside for long and everything looks like it has a yellow tinge. (Even inside the Complex, everything seems that little bit yellow to my eyes).

Dealing with the routine stuff and cleaning up the messes caused by the new guys means that it’s only once in every few years that I get to sit down and plan something new like the Serpo saga. My idea of mixing some facts in with really bad physics and basic errors was a brainwave, even if I do say so myself. I had dozens of “researchers” running around in circles for months. But do I get any credit? No bloody way. Just because Doty was the guy in operations that put my plan into action, he comes up smelling of roses when the plan works. No one seems to care about the research and work that went into drawing up the plan in the first place. Sometimes I could wish I could strangle that guy…

I’m the only one that seems to realise that the job done by Doty and the other guys in Operations is really quite easy. I mean, as a result of Planning’s work, so many of the leading “ufological researchers” are our own people (and so many of the others are in our pay or simply so gullible that they believe anything we spoon-feed them with), Operations get to have ufologists endorse any nonsense they feed them. Then, of course, no-one will take ufology seriously. That nuclear physicist which Operations use every other month to make some ludicrous statement about “them” is particularly effective in keeping any serious research into UFOs.

I suppose that I should be thankful that at least I’m not in the Audio-Visual Section. At least I have a tiny bit of variety in the material I have to deal with. Those poor buggers have to generate new videos of “UFOs” every day, to add to the mass of material inundating UFO researchers – just to help mask the real things. There’s no real artistry involved and in a matter of minutes they can turn out videos of vague lights floating in the sky or deliberately unconvincing CGI flying saucers, but given the volume of material they have to produce they are always busy. Doing the same thing over and over again (or deliberately doing it badly) is no job for an artist. I’m surprised that none of them has ever gone to the Complex’s Library and used any of the close-up footage of a Saucer in one of their videos. Or perhaps they tried, but were stopped by one of The Twelve’s Cleaners.

I’ve previously considering joining the Cleaners Section myself. When I was a bit younger, I thought that indulging in a bit of “wet-work” to kill off the most credible witnesses, or any researchers that happened to be getting too close to the truth, would be very glamorous. But when I looked into the possibility of becoming a “Cleaner”, I found out that there are always vacancies popping up in that Section because of the high fatality rate. It seems that quite a few Cleaners lose it after too long in the job and tend to “Clean” within the Section. A bit risky for my tastes.

Basically, the only job within The Twelve that appears to be worth having is that of The Boss. And he’s not about to step aside and let me have his job.


1.24pm. Six minutes until lunch. I wonder what they’ll be serving today. Whatever it is, it’ll be a bit stale of course. The Complex is so remote that by the time anything is shipped to us, it’s no longer fresh. Every meal is more of a necessity than a real pleasure, but at least we get time to chat with one another and stop the tedious work for a while. The last time I had really fresh food was over 5 years ago.

Someone really should have started a garden or hydroponics facility here. We could easily grow our own vegetables. Possibly even raise a few animals. I even suggested a small farm to The Boss soon after I started work here, but he said that there were “higher priorities”.

He’s big on “high priorities” is The Boss. At least every week, he adds another task to our list of “high priorities”. The list is over 50 pages long now. Since we haven’t been instructed that reading the list is itself a high priority, no-one can be bothered reading the entire thing. I’d like to use a copy of that list as toilet paper, but The Boss would probably find out. He has eyes everywhere. One of chaps in Logistics got so bored last year that he broke the rules about downloading pornography from the Internet – and The Boss walked in at a very embarrassing moment. A coincidence? Unlikely. The Boss is always pulling that sort of stunt. So, it’s probably best for me to leave my copy of the list on my shelf.


1.27pm. Three minutes to lunch. Walking that clock is simply too much. It’s little hands move so slowly. The thought of watching them for another 2 years is too much. I need a change of scenery. I can’t take it anymore. I’m going to see the Boss and tell him where he can stick this job. Bugger the pension and accumulated pay. I’d rather starve than take another minute of this.

Finally, I can tell The Boss what I think of him. Even for a Reptilian, he’s a stuck-up pompous wind-bag. It’s about time that someone revealed that truth to him at last.

After my little speech, I’ll be on the first transport home.

Oh, I can’t wait to get back to the cool, purple skies of Zeta Reticuli. If I happen to miss the humans, I can always visit after the invasion.

I'm afraid I'm going to have to revoke your security clearance, lol!

Great story, IsaacKoi.

I know there are a lot of wrong ideas out there, in order to confuse people who are seeking answers.

Do you actually believe this story will make people take what you say to be the facts? I would like to believe what you say. It has a ring of truth.

How do we know you are not still at work? To claim giving up 38 years of service into what you claim to have done, in order to get it off your shoulders, is another bait and hook technique.

You have disgraced yourself and discredited your testimony. Is this under oath? Could we even trust anything you say?

Why do you make these statements anonomously? Why not bring this to MSNBC?

Originally posted by win 52
You have disgraced yourself

I'm sorry you feel that way.

I've had positive feedback from others for the above posts. Perhaps you'll find my other posts in other forums more to your taste.

Originally posted by Flatwoods
Great story, IsaacKoi.

Thanks Flatwood. I'm glad you enjoyed it.