[Author's Note]

This is a continuation of sections deleted from an earlier version of Falling Star. These sections
detailed the investigation in 1967-1970 to determine what was the anomalous signal detected by
the Navy geo-magnetic survey.

The sections were deleted by me after agents, with whom I spoke, said that the differing time
periods were confusing.

Thanks for reading my effort.

Phil
Discovery 1967

Blip...Blip...Blip.... the sound of the side scan sonar filled the darkened instrumentation
room onboard the U.S.S. Marysville as she maintained a straight heading under the skillful watch
of Captain George Vander, U.S.N.

Up on the bridge behind Captain Vander, Fred Evans poured over the charts with Captain
Vander's navigator, Lieutenant Bo Smithers. Using dividers and rulers to plot their current
position, Evans satisfied himself that their course was exactly the same as the transect, the
Lockheed P-3B Orion had flown months before. The task was not that easy.

Consider trying to remotely tow a car using a cable deployed from an airplane over three
miles up and several miles ahead. A rather formidable job that challenged even the time-tried
skills of George Vander, cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth and a steaming cup of
hot black coffee in his weathered left hand.

In the instrumentation room, several levels below decks, designed to be at the center of
gravity of the vessel, Ensign Mike Liu, Lt. Commander Bob McHugh and Tom Sevson crowded
behind the Western Light sonar technician; the greenish cathode ray tubes displayed a line by
line return of the side scan sonar. Mike thought to himself, "How unlike the Lloyd Bridges
movies or all the submarine movies he had ever seen. The sonar should sound like a ping, ping,
ping sound in a gurgling background. Not blip, blip, blip.

The only other sounds in the darkened room were the scratchy noises made by the pen
registers as they recorded the images now being laid out on the CRTs. If it weren't for the soft
rolling of the Marysville, there would have been no indication that Mike was even at sea.

On another cathode ray tube, an oscilloscope plotted the readings from the metastable-
helium magnetometer many miles below. A pen register also recorded the magnetometer
readings on a continuous strip of chart paper. Despite Tom Sevson's concerns, the spun
fiberglass housing of the magnetometer stood up to the tremendous pressures of the depths.

The trace on the oscilloscope held steady, a faint greenish line followed the brighter
green dot that ran left to right across the circular screen. Except for occasional jiggles of the
trace, which could be accounted for by changes in the local magnetic background of the ocean
bottom, nothing unusual had occurred.

"Any more theories on the magnetic anomaly, Bob?" asked Tom Sevson.

The ever present half smoked cigar dangling from the corner of his mouth, Bob McHugh
was adsorbed in thought. Absentmindedly, McHugh said, "Nothing radical, Tom, if it is
Russian, then we are in deep trouble. We aren't able to deploy a sizeable station at that depth for
any period of time. Based on the magnetometer readings this thing, whatever it is, is substantial.
If your Nematode, or whatever you call it, can help us locate the source of this anomaly, we can
get down there with the Trieste for a view."
 "Don't we have sonar arrays deployed at those depths?"

"No, our SOSUS nets are generally deployed at much shallower depths. No submarines
are known to be able to dive to the depths associated with the anomaly. If the Russians have a
submarine capable of that depth, they could lie in the submarine canyons off of Santa Catalina
Island and be within thirty miles of Los Angeles and not be detected by our SOSUS nets."

"Holy shit!" said Tom Sevson, sinking into a green leather chair. "God, it's Cuba all over
again!"

"Let's not jump to conclusions, Tom. We have no knowledge that the Russians have that
kind of technology. If they did, I think we would have heard by now."

"Bob, I think you'd better see this," interrupted Mike Liu, who had been looking over the
shoulder of the Western Light technician. Both McHugh and Sevson quickly clustered behind
the technician monitoring the oscilloscope. The green trace was rising steadily, not dramatic
jumps, but steadily. Blip..Blip..Blip... as each trace ran across the face of the oscilloscope, the
tension in the instrumentation room grew.

"Commander, we have a reading on the sonar," called out Sonar Technician First Class
Jeff Smartt. Bob McHugh walked across the small room to stand behind Smartt. On the CRT,
the greenish lines were definitely displaying something. Mike Liu and Tom Sevson joined
McHugh. More lines were painted vertically on the screen. Each new line gave a better
indication of the shape and size of whatever the side scan sonar saw.

As the object began filling the screen of the CRT, McHugh asked the operator to turn on a
backup plotter. McHugh went to the plotters and what he saw was something big, as big as a
football field, and oval in cross section. This was not a natural feature like a rock outcropping or
fault line.

What McHugh saw would forever change history.

Over the Nares Plain, 1967

"What do you make of it?" inquired Bob McHugh.

"From the sonar record, it appears that the object is quite large, perhaps over a football
field long. By triangulation we're pretty certain that the centroid of this thing, whatever it is, is
also the peak of our magnetometer trace within a statistical accuracy of one standard deviation,"
replied Tom Sevson.

"You're not writing a scientific paper, Tom. How about some plain speak for the troops,"
chided Bob.

"What it means that we have found whatever was causing the magnetic anomaly on your
Orion over flights, it's just that we don't know what it is."

"What if we drop the Trieste on this thing," queried McHugh.

"You could be here for years. All that the Trieste will be able to see will be an
infinitesimal part of whatever it is. In order to get a definitive idea of this object, or whatever it
is, we need to have mobility. The explanation of this could be perfectly normal. We could be
merely seeing the tip of a massive seamount, magma, or a salt dome.

"It's just that the regularity of the shape bugs the hell outa me. I've never seen anything
like it before, just doesn't make sense, especially given the fact that the benthic topography is so
uniform for hundreds of miles around. If the geology of the region were such that we could
predict a seamount or a salt dome, then I'd feel better, but it doesn't."

"You don't normally associate a salt dome with anomalous magnetometer readings, do
you?" questioned Mike Liu.

"Not normally, and certainly not at the levels we have found here. A magma outflow
could explain the magnetometer readings, but the area is not known for volcanic activity. Also,
magma flows would never be so regular in shape. It's almost like someone lobbed a gigantic
football on to the ocean floor." explained Fred Evans.

"We've got to get down there and have a look, any suggestions gentlemen?" inquired Bob
McHugh.

"We could attach television cameras and strobes to the Nematode, but we would be
basically seeing only small portions of the object at one time." offered Tom Sevson.

"Doesn't anyone have a free swimmer that could get to those depths?" asked an
exasperated Bob McHugh.

Both Tom Sevson and Mike Liu's face lit up simultaneously. Mike spoke first,
"MacAlear Aviation has been developing a free swimming submersible that is allegedly capable
of 20,000 foot depths. Some guy from MacAlear gave a talk at Stanford about their
oceanographic programs and I remember being impressed with the depth."

"Yeah, I've read about it as well. For some reason, there hasn't been much press about
the submersible in the trade journals; I think everyone presumes that MacAlear had abandoned
the program. With the drop off of Navy funding a lot of programs have bit the dust in the last
year or two. I guess that the MacAlear submersible is a victim of some government cutback."

"How can we find out more about this submersible?" asked an intrigued Robert McHugh.

"A good friend of mine works for McAlear, I think you know him, Ed Robison," replied
Tom Sevson.

"Wasn't he the one who ran the R/V Wayward Wind aground off of Baja in '59?"

"Yup! that's the guy."

"I guess he thinks if he stays in deep water, he'll be okay."

"Let me give him a call when we get back to Annapolis," offered Tom Sevson.
Palo Alto, California 1967

"Know of any quick places to eat?" asked Tom Sevson.

"We could go down to the Oasis on Embarcadero," offered Mike Liu. "It's not the
fanciest place in the world but the hamburgers are good. It's sort of a graduate engineering
student hangout. Believe me, you'll love it."

Pulling into the parking lot of the Oasis, Tom Sevson wasn't sure what Mike Liu was
getting him into. The rather plain looking facade of the bar/restaurant wasn't quite what he
expected. As Tom and Mike entered the dimly lit dining area, Tom was not terribly impressed
by the peanut shells on the floor, the long hard wooden benches, and the heavy wood tables.

Mike, on the other hand, seemed to be oblivious to the dingy surroundings, he went right
to the counter and ordered two cheeseburgers, fries and Cokes.

Tom found two places on a bench, having to stare down a couple of shallow, pasty
looking students who were hogging the entire table without any food in sight.

After what seemed to be an eternity, Mike Liu came over with a tray holding two red
plastic baskets, made to look like woven straw baskets, two mugs of some brownish solution -
the glasses already frosting over. In the baskets were cheeseburgers in sesame rolls, French fries,
and a slice of tomato sitting a leaf of lettuce. The food was laying on a white paper napkin.

"Didn't I tell you that you would like this place?" enthused Mike. Tom grunted, as he
brushed some peanut shells and food scraps off the wooden table. Mike handed Tom's red
plastic basket to him and sat down across the table. The two former squatters at the table looked
darkly at the older man in a white, short sleeve shirt and tan trousers with white socks inside
brown penny loafers and the young Chinese dressed in the summer tan uniform of the United
States Navy.

"Child killer," muttered one of the long-haired graduate students in a loud stage whisper
to no one in particular.

Despite his reservations about the ambience of the Oasis, Tom bit down on his
cheeseburger and found out that Mike was right, this place did have some social redeeming
value. Mike said, "I used to come here once or twice a week, don't you agree it's great?"

"I guess so," grunted Tom Sevson, biting down on his cheeseburger.

After completing his first gastronomical experience at the Oasis, Tom washed it down
with another Anchor Steam Beer.

As Tom and Mike got up from the bench and started out the door, a young Asian coed
dressed in dungarees and a red Stanford University sweatshirt intentionally brushed against Mike
as he walked toward the front door and whispered loudly, "Banana."
 Tom noticed that with that remark, Mike's face stiffened, his jaw became set and his eyes
narrowed and focused on some distant point.

"What was that about?" asked a perplexed Tom Sevson.

"Apparently, the young lady didn't like my uniform," said Mike, shaking his head as if to
throw off the stinging caused by the remark. "A 'Banana' is an Asian who wants to be
Caucasian: Yellow on the outside, white on the inside."

"Oh."

After the meal, Tom and Mike walked out into the cool summer evening, got into the
rented Ford Falcon and backed out of the parking lot. On the radio were Simon & Garfunkel
singing "Cloudy." After a short drive, the two reached their motel and checked in for the night.