The Roswell Conspiracy

AFTERWORD

In a thriller like this one that explores the boundaries of technological possibilities and posits alternative explanations for ancient mysteries, it’s often difficult to know where the real world ends and the fiction begins. It might surprise you to find out how little I had to make up in this story.

The strange 1908 blast in Tunguska, Siberia, continues to be an enduring enigma. According to The Mystery of the Tunguska Fireball by Surendra Verma, a goldsmith named Suzdalev was the first Western explorer to visit the disaster area, but there were only vague rumors about what he found there. The fallen trees can still be seen in an area the size of London, and the flies are still nasty. A similar mysterious explosion occurred in Western Australia in 1993, and no one has yet determined the cause.

I’ve had the thrill of taking a ride on the Shotover River jet boats in Queenstown. The river isn’t far from the Southern Proving Grounds, which does winter testing of cars during the Northern Hemisphere’s summer.

The ultra-secret Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap is located just outside Alice Springs, Australia. I wouldn’t suggest driving down their private road, but you can get a good view of the facility on Google Maps.

Though Project Caelus is a fantasy, the Air Force did study the feasibility of building nuclear-powered aircraft, even going so far as to install a nuclear reactor on a B-36 bomber. To my knowledge, it was never attempted on the wing-shaped B-49, a jet-powered Air Force prototype built in 1947.

Four-trailer road trains are the longest street-legal trucks in the world and range across the vast Australian outback.

The Sydney Harbour BridgeClimb is another adventure I’ve been privileged to experience. The bridge is designed as I’ve described, including the maintenance cranes and catwalks.

The US military has poured millions of dollars into developing tracking dust, also called smart dust or ID dust, to be used for identifying and following enemies coated with the material.

Drug-smuggling tunnels burrowed under the border between Tijuana and San Diego continue to be discovered on a regular basis. The tunnel I feature in this book is cruder than some of the more sophisticated operations that have been constructed with concrete linings and elevators.

Privately built spaceplanes are already a reality with the launch of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo and will soon carry paying passengers into space seventy miles above the Earth. Airbus is exploring the feasibility of developing a plane with a bird-bone frame like I used in the Skyward. The multitude of windows would provide a great view, but you better have a strong stomach if you tend toward motion sickness.

Joseph Kittinger’s real exploits on the Project Excelsior high-altitude skydiving program are even more incredible when you consider that he undertook his mission over fifty years ago and no one has duplicated the feat since.

I had a great time at the AirVenture show in Oshkosh last year, and the vast rows of airplanes lined up as far as the eye can see are truly overwhelming. If you love aircraft, for one week in July Oshkosh is your mecca.

The theories for how to move Easter Island Moai are even more varied than the few I list in the novel. However, rocking the statues back and forth to walk them forward does work. Lava tube caves and the colorful paintings on their walls abound on the island.

Although xenobium is fictional, hafnium-3 is an actual isomer of the element hafnium. Its explosive potential is vast, as is its cost to manufacture. Isomer bombs and induced gamma emission weapons are theoretically possible and could produce effects scarily similar to the ones produced by the Killswitch.

Electromagnetic pulse from a nuclear explosion is a very real threat. In fact war-game planners always assumed a Soviet first strike would consist of a massive hydrogen bomb detonated over the central US to disable its electronic infrastructure and hinder the military’s ability to retaliate. Now the same threat comes from terrorists and rogue nations. The target in this book was the United States, but the weapon would work equally well at setting the technological clock of any industrialized nation back by a hundred years.

The Nazca lines and symbols, the Mandala geometric pattern, and the ancient city of Cahuachi in Peru have all become popular tourist destinations, yet no one has deciphered their true meaning as of this writing.

The Roswell incident continues to fascinate me as it does the rest of the world. What really crashed there? Why did the Air Force’s explanation of the event change? What happened to the wreckage that was found? An explanation as prosaic as a stray weather balloon would be a disappointing answer to say the least. But do I think it was an alien spacecraft? I’m a skeptic, though it sure would be cool to think so. However, I’d like to think an alien race that had traveled light-years to get here using technology we can barely imagine could make a better landing. If you’d like to give me a tour of Area 51 and prove me wrong, I will take you up on it.