The Beginning
I grew up in a small town with a single large industrial installation called a smelter, (its purpose was to extract precious metals from the ore that had been mined in the area). My siblings and I all lay claim to witnessing strange lights at night, hovering over the central plant as well as power lines past the end of town where there was no development of any kind. Perhaps these were no more than the musings of young overactive imaginations searching for excitement or, could we possibly have witnessed aliens investigating the smelting operation and power grid system of our community?
How do you know that you’ve never been abducted by aliens? After all, any extraterrestrials would have to be extremely advanced; you’d think that evading Earth’s monitoring systems and covering up their activities would be a simple matter. Not to mention how easy it should be to wipe out your memories.
Dr. Josef Allen Hynek was an astronomer and professor who acted as scientific advisor to the U.S. Airforce over a twenty year period starting in the late 1940’s. His area of expertise: UFO studies. In fact, it was Dr. Hynek who developed the Close Encounter classification system. If you see strange, inexplicable lights in the distance (typically red, blue orange or white), this would be a ‘close encounter of the first kind.’ The ‘fourth kind’ would be when a person is taken without his or her consent and experimented upon in an alien craft, commonly referred to as an alien abduction.
For our purposes, the catalyst for the story that unfolds in Gaia is a Close Encounter of the fourth kind. How unlikely is this proposition when a respected branch of government saw the need to retain the services of a renowned ufologist to research claims of unidentified flying objects and interactions with alien beings? The U.S. Department of Defense also funded (to the tune of $22 million a year between 2007 and 2012) a secret program to investigate UFO sightings and assess threat levels. Perhaps these are just more examples of government waste of taxpayer dollars. If not, then what happens in Gaia is more than plausible – at least, that’s what I’d like you to believe for the better enjoyment of the story it tells.