Journal of a UFO Investigator Read Free Page B

IN BLACK typed at the top of the first page. I’d worked long and hard on that chapter; good thing I’d made a carbon copy, kept it separate from the original.
    â€œJeff, I told you. It wasn’t the three men who broke into our house.”
    â€œSays you.”
    â€œSays the police.”
    Eight days had passed since the robbery. It was the last Saturday in January—sun just up, sky a flawless blue, yet windy and cold enough to freeze my fingers inside my gloves. Jeff and I were at the Kellerfield shopping center, on the bus about to leave for Philadelphia. The police investigators had come to our house, dusted in vain for fingerprints, filled in their forms, and gone. My mother could again sleep most of the way through the night. “If it isn’t the Bobbsey twins back again,” the bus driver said as we climbed aboard, our dollar bills extended for change. “We’re not twins,” Jeff said. “Not even brothers.” The two of us do kind of look alike—same thick horn-rimmed glasses, same quiet, reserved air. But Jeff is a few months older and more sturdily built. His eyes are pale blue; mine are brown. My hair is darker than his too. He’s always made a lot of these differences.
    â€œThe police told you it wasn’t the three men?” he said. “You asked them that, in so many words?”
    â€œNo, of course not—”
    The driver put the bus in gear, and we were on our way. One more research trip to the microfilm archives in the Philadelphia library, just like its predecessors, only today with a difference I didn’t think I was very comfortable with. Or rather, that I knew I was damned un comfortable with.
    â€œJeff, you sure this stops in Braxton? It didn’t two weeks ago.”
    â€œThey’ve added a stop. Improved service. Look, you can ask him”—he gestured toward the driver—“if you don’t believe me.” But the driver was bending over the wheel, swinging the bus onto the Philadelphia highway. I opened my new leather briefcase, replacement for the one they’d stolen, and slipped the Three Men in Black chapter into it.
    Jeff sat in front of me. We each had a full seat; hardly anyone else was on the bus. Soon, when we reached Braxton, he wouldn’t be alone in his seat. I, unfortunately, would. “I’m through with this too,” he said, passing me a slim gray book with Flying Saucers and the Three Men—Albert K. Bender printed on the cover. “Didn’t believe a word.”
    â€œNeither did I.”
    â€œYes, I gathered,” he said, and grinned, as if I’d done something funny. I flipped through the pages, filled with my marginal notes. This was Albert Bender’s tell-all book, just published. Only what it told was mostly nonsense. As far as I was concerned, the book was itself part of the cover-up.
    For there really had been three men in black suits; that much was documented. They’d first appeared in 1953, in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Bender, an internationally known UFO researcher, had stumbled on the secret of the flying disks and was about to reveal it. The three men came knocking at his door. They left him too sick to eat, too scared to speak.
    â€œAnd now they’ve come for you,” said Jeff.
    â€œIt wasn’t them. The police told us. They think it was teenagers, probably from Braxton”—because Braxton was an older town, a poorer town, that had been here sixty years before anyone thought of putting up a suburban development called Kellerfield. Yet Rosa Pagliano, lovely and smart, like the rose in Spanish Harlem in the song, was from there. “That coed didn’t have anything to do with it either. She probably was a Temple University student, just like she said.”
    â€œA likely story.”
    Jeff wasn’t serious. He didn’t really believe Bender’s three men had burgled our house, any more than he believed a UFO had