I appreciate you taking my call. I've been listening to your program for about six months now, and I keep hearing people call in about UFO sightings, close encounters, all of that. And I sit here thinking, if they only knew. If they only knew what I know. My name is Dennis. I'm 51 years old. I live in Reno now, but that's not where I'm from originally. I grew up in Ohio. Small town outside of Cleveland. After high school, I joined the Air Force. This was 1972. I was good with my hands, always had been. My father was a mechanic, and I grew up helping him in his shop. So naturally, the Air Force put me in aircraft maintenance. I worked on C-130s mostly. Transport planes. I did four years, got out in '76, and I figured I'd go work for an airline or something. But things didn't work out that way. About six months after my discharge, I got a phone call. Guy said his name was Mr. Richardson. Said he was with a private aerospace contractor. Said they'd reviewed my service record and wanted to talk to me about a position. Now, I wasn't naive. I knew that call wasn't random. Someone had flagged my file. Someone had been watching. But I needed work, and the pay he was talking about, well, it was three times what I'd make anywhere else. So I said yes. I said I'd meet with him.
The interview was in a hotel in Columbus. Not in the hotel, exactly, in a conference room they'd rented. Just Mr. Richardson and one other man who never gave his name. They asked me technical questions for about two hours. Detailed stuff about hydraulics, electrical systems, structural repair. They showed me diagrams of components I didn't recognize and asked me how I'd approach fixing them. Theoretical scenarios, they called it. At the end, Mr. Richardson said they wanted to offer me a position, but there were conditions. I'd have to sign a non-disclosure agreement. I'd have to undergo a security clearance process. I'd have to relocate, and I couldn't tell anyone where I was going, not friends, not family. They'd provide a cover story. As far as anyone would know, I'd be working as a contractor at various military installations. Routine stuff. I asked what the actual work was. Mr. Richardson smiled, I remember that smile, like he'd been waiting for me to ask, and he said, 'Maintaining vehicles that don't officially exist.' I should have walked away. I know that now. But I was 24 years old, and that sounded like the most exciting thing I'd ever heard. So I signed the papers. Three weeks later, I was on a plane to Nevada.
The facility was underground. I mean completely underground. We flew into a small airstrip, I couldn't tell you where, they had us on a plane with no windows, and then we drove for about forty minutes. We went through three separate checkpoints, each one more serious than the last. Finally, we drove into what looked like a maintenance building, but once you were inside, there was an elevator. And that elevator went down. Way down. I'm talking maybe fifteen, twenty floors. When the doors opened, I was in this massive complex. Hallways, labs, workshops, living quarters. Everything was white and sterile and fluorescent. There were maybe sixty people working there at any given time, but we didn't interact much. Everyone kept to themselves. You learned quickly not to ask questions about what other people were doing. My first day, they showed me to my workshop. It was huge, maybe the size of an airplane hangar, but underground. And in the center of it was a craft. I'd never seen anything like it. It was disc-shaped, maybe 40 feet in diameter. Metallic, but not like any metal I'd ever worked with. It seemed to shift in the light, almost like it was alive. There were no visible seams, no rivets, no bolts. Just this smooth, seamless surface. My supervisor, we just called him 'Chief', he told me this was a recovered vehicle. He didn't say recovered from where. He said my job was to learn its systems and keep it operational. He said there were twelve others like it in various facilities around the country, and teams like mine maintained all of them.
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