posted on Aug, 29 2007 @ 12:03 PM
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.