"Whitley Strieber - Majestic" - читать интересную книгу автора (Strieber Whitley)

terrifying, both for their contents and for their ominous-looking secrecy stamps. I was seeing levels of
classification I hadn't known existed.
His possession of these documents was clearly illegal. If I assisted him in any way I was headed for jail.
This was when good sense and good luck came into conflict. This story had things like joblessness and jail
and disgrace written all over it.
"People have a right to know. They had a right to know forty years ago."
He sat there, the slightest of smiles on his face. Was he trying to look pleasant, to win me over? Will does
not smile well. This time words like "snake" came to mind.
But, dammit, I couldn't take my eyes off the stuff he was showing me! The most incredible story in history.
And it was literally lying in my lap.
The truth was in the hands of a sick, helpless old man.
And he was putting himself in mine.
Overnight I thought about what was obviously an offer.
To publish this story would be mad.
And yet .... At about four in the morning I decided the hell with it and finally went to sleep.
When I got up I grabbed the phone and called an old friend of mine, Jeb Strode. We'd roomed together two
years at American University. He went on to law. I bought a cheap Sony tape recorder and became a
reporter.
Now he pulled down a couple of hundred thousand a year keeping lobbyists out of jail. I figured he could afford
the ten minutes it would take to answer my question.
"I'm crazy," I said. "I slept on this and decided to forget all about it."
"So you called a lawyer while he was still under a pile of housecats with his eyes closed."
"How could I reveal highly classified information and stay out of Danbury?"
"Danbury is the nice federal jail. That isn't where they would put you. I see lots of steel doors and guards with
Gila monster eyes."
"What's a Gila monster?"
"Something unpleasant. Don't even think about it, Nicky."
"I have to."
"We never had this conversation. But if you really want to do this, your only hope is to publish your book as
fiction. They'll figure if they hit you, it'll tell the world it's all true. You might make it."
So this is fiction. Everything in it - all the documents, the briefing papers, the interviews - is fiction. The story
is fiction. Will is fiction and so am I.
Only the newspaper stories and Admiral Hillenkoetter's statement are real. You can easily check them, so
what's the point?
Even if I don't go to jail, I have become a martyr to my issue. My career is dead.
But it's worth it, because the issue is enormous: what is at stake is the whole future of mankind. The coming
of the visitors is as pivotal an event as the original spawning of the human race.
It is incredible that this event has been kept secret.
As director of the Majestic Agency for nearly forty years, Wilfred Stone is the man most responsible for that
secrecy.
Let him try to explain himself. I cannot. And I thank God that I don't have to face his conscience in the night,
or when he goes to his dying.
- Nicholas A. Duke March 15, 1989

Foreword by Wilfred Stone

I was among the architects of one of the worst mistakes that has ever been made, and this is my final throw,
my magic bullet, my effort to make it right.
In the end it is going to be up to you; my generation has already cast itself upon the rocks. We who fought
World War Two and the Communist menace have only one legacy beyond the armed and furious world we