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base. THE One evening in mid-1990 a freelance radio journalist called me at my home in San Francisco. Breathlessly, he announced that a man had come forward with sensational new revelations. He had approached Stanton Friedman to tell him he sought to speak confidentially to a member of the media. The journalist who called me had responded to 209 THE MYSTERY LINGERS That night, after being sighted by the guards at the Nellis Air Force Base perimeter, as I have described in the prologue, we had dinner at the Rachel Cafe. A man was going from table to table, carrying a strange object, a boot-shaped tangle of dried grass and bits of little branches with a hole at one end. "It's an alien bird's nest," he said. "Comes from another planet." That statement was as likely to be true as anything we had heard that day about the nine flying saucers in the secret hangars of the Nevada I had given my private address to Lazar's associates. Within days I started receiving strange letters from a colonel in Las Vegas who invited me to spend one month—all expenses paid—with a group of twelve people who were preparing a major belief change in America. My background, he wrote, would be "a definite advantage." The incentive for joining the group was to establish contact with the aliens. When I ignored the first letter—it included the logo of the group, a neo-Nazi design with an eagle clutching the SS symbol and a bunch of thunder- bolts—the colonel sent me a second letter, even more specific. "If you are sincere about contact with them, we can discuss it, but only if there is no government involvement." To show it meant business, my correspondent included detailed information: longitude and latitude of a certain UFO sighting dated May 1943. I had the feeling that the problem was entering a new and dangerous phase, and that feeling would soon be strengthened by the bewildering series of new revelations that came to light after Lazar had been discredited. PUPPET SHOW