Elaine Investigates, Five: The UFO

©1 January 2025 Levite
http://themediadesk

1.
      It had been over a month since my last case had closed with the perpetrator taking a plea deal and his accomplice finding his conditional release on some other charges extended.
      I had been back to the routine stuff that our office was supposed to specialize in. Somebody had been using a county computer to run a private business. There were some questionable charges on a county credit card, that were not made by somebody investigating a strange case and had to get some information from a talent scout website, I should add. And things like that.

      Then one afternoon the Sheriff stopped by my desk and asked me to come to his office.
      What got my attention most about it was the way he looked when he spoke to me. Something was seriously bothering him, and I suspected it wasn't because when the company sent my new badges, with two 'f's in the county name, that they had put the wrong job title below it.

      We walked into his office and he shut the door behind us. Which was also unusual.

      "Ahhh, Elaine. I don't know how to say this."
      Yes, something was seriously troubling him, he seldom used my first name. "Just take a deep breath and say it."
      "I don't know where to start. You know I don't believe in about half the things you've got out and looked into. But... I don't even know where to start with this one."
      "Is it personal or professional?"
      "Kind of both. It just happened. Half an hour ago now."
      "You didn't act like this when you shot that guy out on the Expressway."
      "He had it coming. No, this is worse, and I still don't believe it. And I don't believe I'm telling you, but I've got to tell somebody, and, it's kind of right up your alley."
      "You saw a ghost."
      "No." He came to a full stop, then said, "A UFO. Clearly, less than a hundred yards away, on the ground, with three of its crew walking toward it, then it went.... up."

2.
      The Sheriff and the director from the visitor's bureau were at a park near Middle Island called Cathedral Pines, which is part of Long Island Pine Barrens, looking over an area near the campground as a possible site for a festival she was calling "Folk, Food, and Fun". She had just left when he drove back up from the camping area to just loop around the clearing....
      "And there it was. We had been up there not fifteen, maybe twenty, minutes ago and it wasn't there then."
      He described an elongated saucer shaped craft, probably forty to fifty feet long, and maybe twenty feet thick in the middle. There were no blinking lights or anything like you see in movies. It was sitting on the ground on maybe a dozen legs.
      "And then, as I slowed down and stopped I saw three, people, walking out of the trees on my left. All three of them looked at me. But they didn't do anything, they just kept walking toward the ship. One of them looked at me three or four times, then they went up a ramp into the ship. And it took off. Straight up. No sound or flames or anything, it just left."

      "What did the crew look like?" I asked him.
      "Two of them were wearing what had to be some sort of uniform, the other one was wearing what really looked like a bathrobe. The tallest of them was maybe five ten or so. They were all kinda thin. And their skin was a light blue, not gray or anything like that. Oh, and one of the ones in uniform was wearing a sort of hat."
      I nodded at the description, "OK, were they carrying anything?"
      "Just one of them had what looked like a small box. I didn't see any weapons or anything."
      "You said you were driving, was it your department car?"
      "Yes. OH, Yes. The dash cam!"

      We went out and retrieved the card out of the dashboard camera and I put it in the slot on my laptop.
      He had a lot of footage of his drive out to the park. And there was a nice shot of a deer walking across the road in the campground. Then it continued along the road to the other part of the park.
      There it was. The picture wasn't as clear as I'd want, they never are, but you could see something like the infamous candy shaped vehicle from the on board camera of a Navy jet a few years ago. Then as the car followed the road most of the craft slipped out of the picture.
      And then the kicker. As his car stopped, three people were walking out and crossing the road.
      Then the edge of the craft that was in the picture moved up and out of frame.

      "That's excellent evidence of the encounter." I said as we watched it again. "I want to go out there and see if they left any other evidence."
      "You're not going to recommend me for a psych evaluation?"
      "This time? No."
      "Thanks."

      We drove out to the site and he parked right where he said he'd stopped when the ship's crew came out of the woods.
      It was at the very northwestern corner of the clearing, just before the perimeter road made a hard right. It was probably the loneliest most out of the way spot in the entire park. There were a few single trees here and there, but nothing major to stop anybody that wanted to from landing anything of reasonable size.
      First I walked out into the field with my camera and trusty plastic foot ruler like you used in school.
      I have found that for evidence photos of any sort, there's nothing better. You know how big it is, you can easily see the numbers on the thing, and it doesn't change. And if I lose it, I've got three more in my desk in the office, and the store out on the highway will have another shelf full of them just before school starts in the fall.
      Now I laid my ruler on the grass where there was a clear and rather deep round impression where something a little larger than a soda can had sat and pushed well into the soil.
      There were several of those impressions along an oblong pattern in the ground.
      "Elaine, look at this," he said from near the center of the shape. "The grass is dead, or dying."
      I took several pictures where the grass had been toasted by something. "I wish we had brought a radiation meter."
      "Yeah, maybe we shouldn't stay around here any longer."
      "That's probably a good idea."

      Then I wanted to go over to where he said they came out of the woods. "You know tourists, they leave candy wrappers and cigarette packs all over the place." I said.
      He chuckled and told a story, "You know I started over at the County Police, and the Sergeant that did my training said he didn't smoke, he had never smoked. But back then you got points for turning in the side panel off packs of cigarettes. He collected the empty packs he found in parking lots and stuff, and turned them in and got all sorts of stuff off those points."
      "The good old days," I said looking at the ground. "Something, or some body, walked through here."
      "Yeah, this is the spot." He went over to one of the trees you could see in the video, "They were about this tall." He held his hand out next to the tree.
      "Five eight, five ten, something like that." I guessed, then I tried to follow the trail back into the woods.

      We back tracked them as far as we could, but the area is high use by both locals and wildlife, and, evidently, out of town tourists.
      And we didn't find any litter that wasn't from a store on the Island.

      And then as we were following what appeared to be their trail back out I saw something on the ground.
      "That box the one was carrying. It was about...." I tried to judge the size from my memory of the item in the dash cam video. "About...." I held my hands something like six or seven inches apart. "So big?"
      "Something like that."
      "Maybe about that size?" I pointed down to a place where the pine needles and other leaves had been brushed away and a small square bit of soil had been removed down to a depth of several inches. You could even sort of tell where they'd been standing when they did it.
      "They took a soil sample?" The Sheriff said the obvious.
      I was busy taking pictures of the hole and the cleared area, with and without my ruler in the frame. "It looks like that is exactly what they did. But why is another mystery."

      Then we walked back out to the car.
      "So, you believe me." He asked.
      "The only time you've ever lied to me was when you said my corrected Detective badges had come in."
      "We could just made you an Inspector."
      "That position isn't in the budget. You'd have to take it to the County Board to get it changed."
      "Good point. But. You still didn't answer my question, 'do you believe me?'"
      I stopped next to the car and took another series of shots of the open area inside the road loop. "I believed you from the minute you came into my office with that look on your face."
      He seemed relieved. "So what are you going to do? I mean, I want you to look into it. Just see if it really did happen and I didn't wander into a movie set or something. You know. Has anybody else seen something like this. Even with the soil sample. Just to put my mind at ease."
      "I can run through some leads. I know somebody that at least used to know somebody who was into it. I can make some calls."
      "You've got to keep it quiet. They could fire me for even claiming I saw one. Take my badge and all."
      "I'll keep it quiet. And I'll let you know what I find out."
      "OK. It's all yours, and if I remember anything else I'll let you know."

3.
      The first thing I did was to sign out the department's aging Geiger Counter, I had to find my equally aging metal detector that I used to use out on the beaches after tourist season and still hadn't gotten around to replacing, a handful of evidence bags, and some other equipment and went back out to Cathedral Pines and gave the spot a thorough going over.
      First off, there was radiation in the ground around the area of dead grass that was above background levels, but not enough to do serious damage unless you spent the weekend camped in a tent over the center of it.
      Then I dug down into the soil a little and took some soil samples of my own. The ground in the area of the dead grass wasn't just radioactive, it had been baked at a high enough temperature to turn it into something like the terracotta bricks some people put in their gardens. It took some effort with what I had with me to break pieces of it off to put in my sample bags.
      There was a clear border between the cooked ground and the normal ground just outside of the landing area.
      The ground under where the landing strut impressions had been compressed, but not baked. And the grass there was even starting to spring back.

      I took at least three samples of every sample I took. The baked earth, the dead grass, the dirt from the hole where they had taken their sample, the pressed dirt under the landing feet, everything. Marked and labeled as evidence.
      Sample one went to the crime lab that most departments on the Island used to analyze whatever needed analyzed.
      Sample two I kept in a cardboard box on my desk.
      Sample three went into a locked file drawer in the locked evidence room that I used for investigations. It had held everything from a cash register receipt from a store where an employee made an extremely questionable charge and tried to write off some quite exotic and very sexy lingerie as duty uniform accessories (she blushed about seven different shades of red from her ears to her chest and said it was an honest mistake, then she repaid the county), to some of the noisemakers and lights from my last unusual investigation in a house that turned out to actually be haunted.
      Some of the other 'spare' samples went into a white paper sack and disappeared into the office "Junque" drawer behind a set of beta-max surveillance tapes from before I started here, and a newspaper special edition about September Eleventh.

      Then I went through all the complaints and notices for the day from the area. Everything from a dead deer on the highway to somebody dumping bags of trash behind a school. But, at least so far, nobody had reported a UFO over this part of the island. But, given the size and color of the craft, and how fast it had departed from the area, which, while populated isn't all that active, it wasn't surprising.
      I called the local air traffic control office and asked for uncorrelated contacts for the day and time, going about half an hour on each side of the time on the dash cam.

      Then I started digging through my old contacts.
      And yes, I'm one of those that keep names, and numbers, and email addresses, and what you do or know, forever. And it pays off.

      Years ago, I knew somebody that had dated a guy from the mainland that had been part of an amateur UFO investigative team. She'd talked me into going with her to a couple of their meetings just so she wouldn't be awkwardly uncomfortable because while she liked the guy, she thought the whole idea of somebody from "Out There" coming here was not only unlikely, it was pretty much impossible.
      Until about two days ago I mostly agreed with her. Now, rewatching the dash cam video while I looked at the preliminary report from the baked soil test, I wasn't so sure.
      I knew that there were places on Long Island that were naturally radioactively hot from ancient sand deposits that included higher than average concentrations of things like uranium and thorium. Most of that was along the north shore, but there were spots here and there all over the island where it occurred in greater quantity. To the point that some real estate developers tested for it.
      My samples from the clearing showed only minimal amounts of those known minerals, but the baked earth sample showed very high levels of several types of radiation to where the tech that had examined it attached a note recommending limiting exposure to what was absolutely necessary.
      I moved the box of my samples from my desk to over on my bookcase.
      The far side of the bookcase.

      They also had judged that to transform the normal soil into what was in the sample that it had to have been heated to at least 980 degrees Celsius for several minutes, or a significantly higher temperature for a shorter period of time.
      I had to look it up, my metric conversion skills weren't up to much of anything beyond body temperature, which is about 37C. 980C is about 1800F. Which is really hot, to say the least.
      But that raised the issue about how had the soil been heated to that level without burning the grass, only drying it out and browning it? Which was something I was in no way qualified to answer.

      Then the report from air traffic control came in. There had been several poor quality contacts over the area in question in the time window I'd given them. Some were possible drones, others were birds. One was a better quality contact with no telemetry that was too brief for them to identify, and it may have been in the area of Middle Island, but it was only a couple of seconds and never recurred.
      In short, that was a dead end.

      I eventually found my friend's ex-boyfriend's email address and sent him a message asking if he still knew somebody in the UFO group because I needed some advice on an investigation, and included my office phone number.
      In about ten minutes he was calling me.

      I went through that this was an official police investigation into an incident that occurred with a county official in a county car in a county park and that absolute discretion and non-disclosure was required during the investigation, and that the evidence I had recovered was property of....
      "Evidence?" Charles interrupted me, "what evidence did you recover?"
      I told him about my baked soil samples, then I sent him a photo from where they had taken a soil sample. Then I mentioned the dash cam video that I was not going to let out of my possession but he could watch if he came here.
      "When can we come down and see that?"
      "Who is 'we'?" I asked.
      "Me, my investigative partner Ben and his wife Shelly. And if he can get away, our group's founder, George Simmons."
      "That'll be fine, but they all have to agree to the non-disclosure until the investigation is finished."
      "He might not like it, but I'll tell him if he won't agree to it you won't show us the video and stuff."
      "That's the way it is. And we'll be in the conference room in the Sheriff's Office."
      "That might get his attention."
      "Talk to them and let me know and we'll set it up."

      It was only about fifteen minutes later when the main desk receptionist transferred a call to me.
      "Detective Elaine," I answered.
      "Thank you, ma'am. This is George Simmons from the UAP group. You had talked to Charles."
      "UAP? Is that the same as UFO?"
      "Yes, ma'am. We changed our name awhile back to keep up with the times. We're affiliated with the Mutual network, but we are independent otherwise."
      "Oh, OK, I gave Charles my direct number, yet you called in through the switchboard."
      "Please understand. We get a lot of what we call schmucks. People who make false reports just for the attention, or trying to make a buck. When he said you were with the Sheriff's Office and this was an official investigation, I almost didn't believe it. I even checked the department's website. You are the prettiest Detective I've ever seen."
      "Thank you for the compliment, but this is a serious investigation."
      "I understand Detective. And I will cooperate and assist in every way that I can." Then he added, "And I may have access to a few resources you are not aware of."
      "Which would be very appreciated as well."

4.
      Charles looked just like he did ten years ago or more when he was dating my friend. He introduced me to the others and I shook hands with George Simmons who was just as complimentary as he was on the phone.
      "An absolute delight to meet you in person," he said, "Your official picture doesn't do you justice."
      "Thank you, again, but they use the image from my ID so people will know I'm really a cop." I looked at the others. "I've got the conference room reserved if you'd like to come in and get started."
      "We talked about the non-disclosure agreement on the way down. You said it is only until the investigation is complete, correct?" Mr Simmons said.
      "Yes, and we may agree to a limited release afterward. You know, remove names and the exact location, things like that."
      "Good, good."

      The first thing I had them do was get a cup of coffee and a slice of the new glazed sweetbread with nuts that the office baking lady had brought in.
      She stood and smiled and nodded as they appraised it as "almost so sweet I expect my dentist to be calling me any time now," as Charles put it.
      Shelly, the wife of Charles's partner asked if she could have the recipe. "It might get more members to come out to meetings if we had something like this every month."

      Then we went into the conference room and I fired up the full wall TV monitor which came on with the Department's seal.
      "Paperwork," I said. Then I passed out two copies of the document to each person. Once they all had it I clicked on my laptop which put the terms on the screen as I read it to them. It was dull, it was somewhat repetitive, and it was a bit tedious, but it had to be done. "Does everybody agree?"
      Charles and Mr Simmons had already signed theirs. Ben and Shelly took turns with a pen to sign theirs. They got a copy, and I got a copy, and then we were ready. I reached over and brought out my box of samples, then I clicked the laptop to show the pictures where the samples came from.

      "This has been fired," Shelly said looking as a small piece of the cooked earth from the center of the landing area. "You'd need an actual kiln if you wanted to make this. Your home oven won't do it."
      Mr Simmons was digging in his old leather satchel, "ahh, there it is. And there's the other one." He brought out a small meter and a compass. "Can I see the larger sample, you can leave it in the bag."
      "These are the ones that were radioactive?" Ben said as he handed the larger piece in its bag to Mr Simmons.
      "Yes, I have a copy of the report from the lab if you want it."
      "I'm OK." He quickly handed it off and leaned back and wiped off his hand, as if it would do any good.
      "This is what I want to try out in the field as well," Mr Simmons said as he first passed the small hiking compass back and forth across the sample. The needle moved with every pass, then he turned the sample under the compass and the needle moved with it. "This was just dirt like that." He said and tried it with the other sample of soil that had simply been compressed by the landing pad. The needle didn't react at all.
      "Yes."
      "Now, the magnetic field..." he fiddled with the meter by pushing a couple of buttons, it dutifully beeped and the readout changed to mG, "and here we go. Background," he held the detector well up away from the table and everything else, "and now," he brought it slowly closer to the sample in the bag and the numbers started climbing. "The other," then he moved it over the uncooked sample and the numbers went back to near background. Then back to the heated one. "No doubt about it."
      "Do you know what caused that?"
      "It was subjected to an absolutely intense magnetic field. Probably their main drive."
      "It wasn't heated?" I asked.
      "No, see your picture. The grass and even those pieces of paper that were there weren't burned, just scorched. There's not enough reactive compounds in them to make them come out like this. This soil has been crystallized by being subjected, just for a few moments, to an artificial magnetic field that would rival that of, say Saturn or maybe even Jupiter."
      "Like those magnetic induction stoves that heat what your cooking without the cooktop getting hot." Shelly explained.
      "I see."

      Then I changed the screen to the area where they'd taken the soil sample and showed them the pictures with my trusty foot ruler next to the hole.
      "Why would they want a soil sample from out there?" Charles asked.
      "That puzzled me as well, so I went digging around. And I found this." I clicked and brought up a research paper."
      "'Isolation of microorganisms from the Long Island Pine Barrens Forests with resistance to high doses of gamma radiation.'" Charles read off the screen. "Really?"
      "Really. From twenty twelve, which means the research was probably done in twenty eleven. One of the sponsors was the Brookhaven Lab, which is right across the Expressway from the main section of Pine Barrens, and is about three miles from where this spot is as the crow flies over a nature preserve and another highway."
      "Or as the UFO flies." Ben laughed.
      "Either will do." I scrolled down to the good part of the report. "That's exactly what Brookhaven and the universities were looking for with this project. They found two kinds of soil bacteria and some fungi that were resistant to direct exposure to radioactive sources. They took their samples from just west of our site, which was in the federal tract of land. But it is all the same pine forest."
      Mr Simmons was reading the report on the screen, then he blinked and nodded. "And that's where your official was when they saw some of our old friends from out yonder stop by to get their own sample."

      The conference room door opened and the Sheriff walked in, except he didn't have on his badge or ID and held his hand up to stop me from introducing him, although I suspected Mr Simmons might recognize him from the web site.
      "I'm the county official that saw the craft and the three individuals from it on the ground."
      "Three?" Ben asked.
      "We haven't seen the video yet, sir. We were just wrapping up the physical evidence. But I can play it now and if they have any questions maybe you can answer them."
      "That'd be good."
      "Ready for the main attraction?" I asked the group of UAP researchers. They all said yes.

      For them I had the car ID and other identifiers removed. But otherwise, the video was unedited from the point were he had left the campground until the craft lifted vertically out of frame.
      "What time of day was that?"
      "About ten in the morning."
      "OK, that explains the lighting, thank you. Can we see it again?"
      "Certainly."

      After the second showing the group discussed several aspects with our anonymous official. Including things I didn't have to ask him, like had he been drinking or smoking funny cigarettes, things like that.
      Then they asked about how did he react to them, did seeing them give him a headache, did he feel they were trying to influence him telepathically, did the car react in any way.
      In the end, he told them what he told me. He saw the ship, they walked out of the woods and went up the ramp, and the craft left.
      All told, the twenty-seven second video was what it was.
      "At first I thought it was some costumed performers or a dance group or something. Then when they looked at me you could just tell that they weren't in costume. And once they got to that ramp, they went up it, fast, and then it was gone."

      Mr Simmons confirmed my suspicion that he had recognized the witness. "In most cases I would ask for a polygraph session, but in this case, I will vouch for the integrity of the witness, as I am sure Detective Elaine will, and we'll leave it at that."
      "Thank you." The Sheriff said. "Are you going out to the site now?"
      "Yes."
      "Would you mind if I came along, I can ride with the Detective."
      "That'd be very good, sir." Mr Simmons said, "That way we can get some clarification on some of the points."

      I explained where we were going to the group and they agreed to follow me instead of their GPS map voice which always seemed to want to take visitors to the Pine Barrens trail office in Manorville, which was some distance further east on the edge of the larger area of the pine forest, instead of to the county parcel.

      When we got there I took them the long way around the campground and then up into the larger clearing on the northern end of the county park. We drove across part of the clearing and then through the next clump of trees back toward where the cleared area came all the way to the road.
      "It's kind of eerie," the Sheriff said as the trees stopped and we could almost see where we were going, "in one way I hope the thing is back, in another way, I hope I never see it again."
      "We've got a call full of experts right behind us. I think it's part of Murphy's Law that it won't be there now."
      "You're probably right."
      It wasn't there.
      But some of the evidence still was, including the dead grass over the baked earth.

      Mr Simmons ran his sensor over the ground here and there and measured out how far the introduced magnetic field extended. Ben was using a very complicated looking metal detector while his wife Shelly photographed every indentation and patch of scorched dandelions she could find.
      Meanwhile Charles was using a laser to measure how far everything was from everything else, and while he was doing that he noticed something that the rest of us had missed.
      "Hey, everybody, come here and look at this!" He said pointing up.
      We did. We went there and looked at that.

      One of the trees on the 'backside' of where the craft had been had a couple of branches that were perhaps a little too close to the ship. They were as dead and dry as the grass in the center of the landing area.
      Every other branch on that tree was as full of life as every other branch on every other tree in the park. Except for the very ends of the three or four that extended just out away from the rest of the crown of the tree. The tree's neighbors in the small clump of three with a handful of some bushes and a few wild flowers were fine as well.
      "OK, how do we get a sample of them?" Charles asked reaching up to discover that he was at least four feet too short to do that.
      I looked up at thought about what was around, "I'll be right back."

      I drove down to the campground host, showed him my badge, and asked if he had a stepladder I could borrow. He did, and even helped me put it in the back of my car. I promised him I'd bring it back in a few minutes and he said there was no hurry.
      With the stepladder, they took all the measurements and samples they wanted of the tree, and I added some sticks to my samples as well. Then I took the ladder back to the gentleman and thanked him. It took a few minutes of listening to him tell me about the life of a campground host in a nearly forgotten county park in the middle of Long Island, but then I drove back to the others.

      When I got back to the clearing they were all over looking at where the visitors had taken their soil sample.
      Now Ben and Shelly were under a big black tarp with an ultraviolet light and a camera looking for more evidence.
      "Oh, you're back," Ben said when he peeked out from under the tarp, "everybody else has crawled under here and seen this, now you can too."
      "Crawl under and see what?"
      "Hand prints."

      I looked at everybody there because they were all looking at me.

      "You heard right," the Sheriff said. "And I know you're going to ask, and we tried it. Human hands don't do that, and they wouldn't look like that if they did."
      "OK. I'll go look."
      I got on my hands and knees and as a couple of the others held the tarp up I followed Ben and Shelly under and watched as he used a flashlight to get us close, but not too close, to the soil sample hole.
      "OK, UV light on, real light off," Shelly said from the far side, "give your eyes a second to adjust." She turned the purple light on, and then Ben turned the flashlight off.
      I closed my eyes for a second and then looked.

      On the far side of the hole was where we had thought whoever, or what ever, it was that had come here to take a soil sample had knelt on the ground to do it. And right there next to where they had to have knelt based on the bent grass and smashed pine needles, was a hand print.
      And it didn't look human. There was a thumb where you'd expect a thumb to be, but then there were only two fingers, long thin ones.
      I stared at it and tried to remember what the hands of the beings in the video looked like.
      "That's the best one, look at this one." Ben said and Shelly pointed the UV light at the ground on the side of the hole to my right.
      "One of them reached down and poked at the side of the hole they'd just made," I said trying to figure out what the light was showing me. "It kind of looks like they picked something up out of there."
      "That's what we thought." Shelly moved the special light all around the hole, "And their shoes didn't leave a trace like that."
      "But why do their hands leave prints that glow?" I asked.
      "Because their body chemistry is totally different than ours. Like some insects and amphibians glow under different wavelengths of light, and many will leave a trail that can be seen."
      "Like slugs."
      "Yeah," Shelly laughed, "these were slugs that fly spaceships."
      "Well, really advanced slugs." I said then backed out from under the tarp.

      We took a break and discussed the remaining measurements and testing they wanted to do.
      "And at some point we'll need to break for lunch," I reminded them.
      They reluctantly agreed.

5
      We were a bit late getting to lunch. But they had done everything they had wanted to do, including flying a drone back and forth over the area with high resolution and full spectrum cameras in case we'd missed something.
      We'd even formed a search line and walked through the woods looking for other indications that they had done something besides dug a single hole. But we didn't find anything.
      "Lunch?" Mr Simmons asked everybody as we gathered back by the cars. "We've got a lot of evidence to review and, I'm hungry."
      "I know a good place not far from here, and since you all have done all this, I'll buy," the Sheriff said.
      "Thank you, sir. That's very generous of you."

      After lunch, we went back to the office for awhile. Then they left for home and I stopped by my place to pick up a few things.
      Then I spent the next two days up in Connecticut with them reviewing the evidence they'd gathered in the park. And going over other similar cases that hadn't left as much physical evidence, but had left a hole in the ground.

      "And in this one, we have reason to believe they took a water sample from Lake Michigan." Charles said as we sat around a huge monitor and watched a video of another group investigating the case from Wisconsin.
      I almost laughed as the group looked at the lake with serious expressions on their faces. "That wouldn't leave a hole in the lake."
      "No, but they did leave the foil wrap that had been over their vial." He nodded to the screen, "They find it in a minute."
      Mr Simmons added something that then made sense. "They had it tested at the university. It's not a gum wrapper. Unless you wrap your gum in a titanium alloy."
      In a moment the screen cut to them finding the small round foil object under a nearby bush. They moved it with the end of a pen, then brushed it into a plastic bag.
      "There was no hand print. If they'd touched the water it simply went away." Shelly added.

      By the end of my visit I was convinced that the Sheriff had seen something, and that what he had seen was real. I was also convinced that whoever had dug the hole, and whatever had killed the tree, weren't some of our regular weekenders from the City.

      Then I had to go through what parts of our evidence they could show to others, like the group with the foil in Wisconsin as they and the others in the mutual group tried to figure all of this out.
      "Just remove the specific identifiers. Like they did with the lake. That could be any beach in Wisconsin, which is what? A couple of hundred miles of shoreline. There's a lot of pine trees and gravel roads on Long Island, and our park is all but forgotten."
      "Let some sight seers go over and try to get into Brookhaven." Mr. Simmons said with a grin.
      "Yeah, exactly." I nodded.
      "So the investigation is closed?" He asked me.
      "All but my final report back to.... the witness. Yes."
      "Then will you allow me to buy you dinner before you head back?"
      "Yes, I would be delighted."

      Dinner wasn't a 'delight', it was very nearly a disaster.
      He had made a reservation for us, and they had it. Except they didn't have a table. Another reservation had arrived before us and requested two additional tables, which the hostess had given them without checking her bookings.
      So us and another couple were left standing there looking stupid while the hostess, who was also the manager, apologized.
      "Look, we don't have all night." The other couple said, "we know a place not far from here that's pretty good, and cheaper. Wanna go?"
      We looked at each other and said "why not?"

      They were good company, the food wasn't bad, and at the end of the night I invited Mr. Simmons to stop by if he was ever out on the Island and we'd try a place I knew where they didn't screw up your reservation, because they didn't take them.

      I found myself actually enjoying the late ferry ride back home.

      My report to the witness was short and concise.

      We sat in his office and I showed him the other evidence from the group had come up with on his encounter. Then I went through what others had experienced world wide.

      "I would never have thought of doing that," I said as we looked at the photo of the hand-print under UV light. "Now I know."
      "And you bought a light like that."
      "I had one, but now I've got a better one that will work in several different wavelengths, from IR to UV."
      "You're going to need a bigger bag." He said referring to my kit bag that had different things in it.
      "I've been looking for one, with different compartments."

      Finally the conversation turned back to the encounter.
      "Well," I said seriously, "You did see something. Something that wasn't from here. I'm not going to say it was a UFO, or what they now call a UAP, but you did see something that wasn't supposed to be there. The encounter is supported some considerable evidence, even though some of it is circumstantial, which, when taken all together, it is sufficient to support your statement."
      He nodded and seemed relieved, "That's good to know."
      "So are they still going to have the Folk Festival out there?"
      He shook his head, "No. they want someplace with a little better parking and public facilities."
      "Maybe over at the college."
      "That's on their list."
      "Good."

-end UFO-

The Elaine Investigates index page.

[NOTE: The above story were written as adventure fiction, and is to be taken as such. While most of the geographical features of Suffolk County exist, including the Cathedral Pines Park, as well as the microorganism study, see: https://www.bnl.gov/esd/wildlife/files/research/pdf/2012loffredopaper.pdf for more, the rest of the setting is fictional.
      Thank you, Dr. Leftover, TheMediaDesk.com]

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