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men were waiting at the base of the mountain, where they had a very large trailer with large tires and high clearance. The mules pulled the disc up the ramp, where the white men constructed a large crate around it and strapped it down to the trailer. They hooked up a large tow truck to the trailer, likewise built high off the ground with huge tires. The NTP closed the roads in front of the procession and they hauled it north to the Utah border.

    THE REAL SPACE RACE
    AP news release—Oct. 17, 1959
    Both Soviet and American scientists are investigating a meteor shower off of Alaska’s coast which covers an area from Alaska’s Seward Peninsula to Poluostrov, USSR. No details are known at this time, but the material is thought to be a man-made alloy.

PASSING THE TORCH
    Washington D.C.—June 12, 1961
    This was GEN Colson’s first trip to Washington since Ike had left office. He was unsure of his mission now. The disc they’d been studying for almost two years had yielded many technological secrets, but there was no material to construct a new engine core. The hull and engine core were made of an alloy of unknown composition. The alloy had an element not in their elemental charts, something they referred to as
element x
. The computers revealed a wealth of information, including the construction plans for a new engine core, but they had none of the alloy with which to build it. Ike was gone, and supposedly the test center had been a secret.
    The young new president from Massachusetts had summoned him. He was picked up at the airport by presidential limousine and driven straight to the White House. Upon arrival, the president’s aide escorted him to the Oval Office. The young president greeted the older general and warmly shook his hand, motioning to the general to sit down and to his aide to close the door. After the formalities were over, the general spoke.
    “Mr. President, how may I be of service to you?”
    “Good, straight to the point. I like it,” he said, smiling the broad, warm smile that got him elected. “GEN Colson, recent events have unfolded that the
cold war
with the Soviets may be heating up soon. Vice-President Johnson just returned from his fact-finding tour to Vietnam. His findings were clear. If we do not intervene in Vietnam, communism will spread throughout Southeast Asia and then the nations of the earth will fall one by one, like dominoes. But, that’s not why I’ve called you here today. After I was sworn in, Ike came to my office. He handed over to me a top-secret file of an alien disc his people had recovered, but had kept secret from congress and the intelligence communities. It was code-named Desert Jewel. Ike advised me to contact you.”
    The president showed GEN Colson the file marked DESERT JEWEL, proving the secret was also his. The general glanced at the file and waited for the young president to speak. The president continued. “A recent meteor shower in 1958 that fell on Alaskan and Soviet soils revealed a treasure beyond our wildest dreams. At first we didn’t pay it much attention. The material from meteor showers have always been studied by our scientists, but have never before been of any military importance—until now. Our scientists, as well as Soviet scientists, collected a few tons of meteorites and took them to study. Ike’s notes in this file indicated the composition of the disc. This appears to be the same material we’re studying from the meteor shower. It is now hoped that we may finally repair the alien spacecraft at your facility.
    As you know, I’m not particularly popular with the CIA since the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Ike had already kept your program from the intelligence communities, and so have I. This was assumed to be a routine collection of rocks anyway, so neither agency should be suspicious. Since this was assumed to be a routine collection of rocks, no intelligence agency was alerted.
    The reports from the scientific team confirmed that the metal was of