News You Can't Use: US Air Force Threatens to Destroy Property Next Door to Area 51 After Owners Refuse to Sell

It's not easy living next to Area 51, what with the alien autopsies, families of dangerous mutants, air planes flying over your house occasionally and all the other crazy ideas about this forbidden zone I've cobbled together from heavy metal music videos, late night radio broadcasts and awful remakes of classic movies. It appears this "not easy" is about to be upgraded to "impossible" (I already have a copyright on "Pimping is Impossible" so don't get any ideas) thanks to the latest attempt by our government to dislodge a family, presumably of the non-mutant variety, from this national blind-spot.

They've been bombed, shot at, and intimidated for 60 years. But the Sheahans don’t want to give up their land to the “neighbours from hell.” 

"Yup, Air Force done dropped this hee-ah bomb on our house. We ain't movin' and we ain't taken no charity, no suh." You would think a very brief carpet bombing campaign would be enough to defeat a residential neighborhood and you'd be correct, but please, accept these tall tales from the citizen rebels that aren't about to see their home become a storage building for dead space invaders.

Located in the Nevada Desert, the military base officially known as “The Nevada Test and Training Range” borders on the Sheahan’s property, which has been in the family since 1889.

Military prototypes and other high tech devices related to national security? Yeah, right. We all know you're holding Big Foot and possibly the original non-Coca Cola Santa Claus in there, just admit it.

The family’s allegations range from illegal government searches and checkpoints to military jet attacks on the mine and a devastating cancer cluster that has seen the premature deaths of several members. 

Great, now when I'm playing my video game on a plane the guy next to me will be yelling for me to shoot the "cancer cluster" instead of the hell-fire missiles.

But the final straw — and the one that drove the Sheahans to end an extraordinary six decades of silence — came last month when the US Air Force (USAF) gave them an ultimatum: sell up for $5.2m or watch it seized and destroyed for free.

"We finally figured out that, because we're the government and own everything under the Removal of Freedoms Act, we could just demand the property instead of beaming in cancer or using the experimental weather control device to drive them out."

The family turned them down, claiming the offer was less than half the true value of the land and didn’t come close to compensating for Area 51’s legacy of disease and lost livelihood.

This property contains a valuable mineral pyrite mine, lots of blasted wasteland and several different shrubs. 10 million, minimum.

Last week, USAF filed a lawsuit seeking to have the property condemned to speed up acquisition. If successful, the Sheahans will be left with nothing.

Lawyers: worse than disease rays or air force strafing runs.

“We want them to know what they have done over the last 60 years to our family is not acceptable.”

"I blam mah Eee Dee on dem foo fat-er tacks."

The USAF says it wants the land because, after decades of escorting family members in and out of the highly-restricted space, it can no longer ensure their safety.

Yeah, a likely story. We know you're pure evil, nice try though.

But Joe Sheahan told CNN that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Let's have a nice, rational and unbiased discussion of how germ warfare killed your cattle and Soviet ghosts are keeping you up at night.


“What they really want to buy is our property, our access rights and our view."

We must close the "view gap" with our Russian "friends" before it's too late.

Deploy the eminent domain lawyers.

The family’s Facebook page describes them as “ardent patriots” who have tried to be “flexible to the requirements of Area 51”. 

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Aaron Zehner is the author of "The Foolchild Invention" available in paperback and e-book format. Read free excerpts here and here.

Choose Your Own Adventure #46: The Deadly Shadow

Last time the magical powers of hallucinogens solved the problem of the world's oil supply vanishing, as you'd probably expect. Today we're going to jump ahead to a 1985 entry by Richard Brightfield, who I've come to know as a diet version of R.A. Montgomery. Maybe he can shake this label with a book that promises cold war spy games and a human time bomb. If it's even half as good as Your Codename is Jonah I'm totally in.

This cover could be used by Space Shuttle explosion "truthers" as "proof" it was planned.

I'm an agent in the Special Security Agency, your typical shadow group of Super Patriots that performs the usual tasks: destabilizing governments, creating new street drugs, disappearing undesirable elements, etc. After a successful mission in East Asia (messing with North Korea in some fashion, I would imagine) I'm hoping for some vacation, but that's not how these invisible wars work. I'm called in to Washington to meet with "T," your typical open and transparent government employee.

It's off to one of those secret underground compounds to hash out the details. It turns out our web of trouble shooters is searching for a man named Dimitrius. He's a result of some typical Eastern Bloc foul-up, being involved in a psychic research lab in Moscow and a particle physics deal in Noginsk. And here I thought all Noginsk had to offer was its ceramics industry. It's also a science hot spot, too. Anyway, this person of interest has gone rogue and may explode at any time. With the force of an atomic bomb. 

  Somehow "feeding people" and "staying sober" didn't make the cut.

The Reds were trying to develop invisibility technology, but because communism is by its very nature a failed system it didn't work. Now this human nuclear device is on the loose, and no one has any clue where. Oh, one more little thing. He might be able to travel forward and backward in time. Yeah, I know. Hardly worth noting, I doubt that will make him hard to catch. 

My assignment, just like all the others already looking, is to find this dangerous Soviet mistake and then try to reason with him, using my words. Well, that plan is certainly due to work one of these times. I'm offered a choice of cover identities and decide to become a gambler, knowing full well I'm going to lose and it's for fools. But that's the way I like it.

Inherently contradictory motto! Rock!

My boss tells me not to get carried away with my new persona; only a certain amount of money can be lost while I somehow use gaming to catch a time-traveling, explosive Russian lunatic who could be anywhere. But what if I win? That goes into the fat pocket. Yes, your tax dollars allotted for games of chance and I'm even naive enough to think I can beat the house. This whole book is a Libertarian's worst nightmare. If we had small government and a gold standard there wouldn't be any atomic Slavics bouncing around in time and you know this is true, man. 

I'm off to Rio De Janeiro to try my luck and maybe save millions of lives. It's all beaches, hotels, and exciting chances to test probability theory, but a woman approaches at the betting windows with the prearranged codes, so I guess the "action" of betting on a tiny ball or dice is off for now. Her name is Isabel and she's already heard of me, being somewhat of a rising star in the black ops business. Apparently Dimitrius is in Rio all the time, which makes me wonder why all the agents are scattered everywhere, but fine. He bets on soccer of all things and somehow always wins.

I think the trick is to just always take the "under" for goals scored.

I got beaten up by hooligans for this?

Actually it's that time travel ability. Yup, that's how he uses it. I guess there could have been a lamer payoff to an amazing ability that was already presented as the most mundane and boring thing possible, but I'm not sure how. He's betting on grass hockey. Yeah.

The syndicate got sick of all that winning and tried to violently censor it, but our man turned into a shadow, set one of them on fire and disappeared. Good thing I'm just here to talk. I could go looking for the survivors of this incident, but the lure of the soccer stadium is too much to resist. Chants, lots of passing in the middle of a giant field, horns going off in your ears constantly, offensive impotence...it's going to be great.

Unfortunately there's one other soccer as viewed by an American ignoramus stereotype I forgot: the rioting. The crowd has gone wild, possibly angered by the lack of scoring. I'm caught in a crush of bodies, can't get free and get trampled to death. Hopefully the agency can gin up a more heroic version of my last moments for the benefit of my loved ones.

I came to see number 26. He has three goals in the last five seasons!

This one was pretty good, minor failings and goofiness aside. It seemed like a decent spy story was unfolding until my abrupt and inglorious ending. Other routes take you all over the globe, although I'm told this book is one of the hardest to "win." For some people that matters, but I'm just here for the journey and what I got wasn't bad. Soccer games are more dangerous than violence gangs, right? 

Improbable judo throw!!!

Aaron Zehner is the author of "The Foolchild Invention" available in paperback and e-book format. Read free excerpts here and here.

Choose Your Own Adventure #6: Your Code Name is Jonah

Last time out my promising, if small time, ghostbusting career was severely derailed by a series of plot elements that could charitably be called "hot garbage." Still smarting from that bad experience, I wanted to try a book I remembered from my childhood and knew would be a can't miss good time.

Actually, I wanted to do "Jonah" from the very beginning, but there was just one small problem that I'll illustrate below.

The government gets better deals on pens and pencils.

It's even more a rip-off when you consider there's a chance you'll get the lame reprint "Spy Trap," the copy you'll get in "acceptable" condition will resemble half a shoebox worth of confetti and every other CYOA book sells for a penny used. I honestly have no idea why the price on this one is so inflated, although it is one of the better and more memorable early entries. Are people really paying several hundred dollars for a battered mass market paperback? I can't get over this.

Anyway, after months of regular checking I finally found a copy for less than a dollar. It turned out to be the original version and in pretty good condition, so suck on that 80s children's book profiteers.

Seventy dollars. One star vendor rating. Lowest possible condition. What. The. Fudge.

I almost feel I should seal this bad boy in a vault or buy special insurance for it rather than read it, but I've got an uncompensated job to do and I take that very seriously. Like I hinted at earlier, this one is very different. You play an adult, for one, which might be the only time in this series that happens. And no, I don't want some crank to e-mail me a correction if that's wrong. You're a spy, there's cold war goodness and plenty of bad endings where you die horribly or get told you're a failure because you have a conscience. All right, the former isn't that unusual, but the latter is. Sort of.

None of this "pistol in each hand" silliness. Try a pistol and an AK. 

I'm in a sub-basement beneath the White House, a few doors down from the department that reads all your e-mails and the one that selects any right of center group for severe I.R.S. audits. My boss is "glaring" at me, which seems a bit much considering this is nothing more than a mission briefing. He wants to know what I know about whale songs and I humor him in the most patronizing way possible. I'm here to disarm bombs, seduce women with ridiculous sexually-themed names and fire off one-liners. Learning about aquatic mammals isn't even on the radar.

Despite my obvious lack of interest we plow forward with a story about a whale researcher who is trying to figure out why these excellent sources of lamp oil are vanishing. It appears a new whale song might unlock the mystery, but then Captain Science pulled his own disappearing act and we have reason to believe that the Reds might be involved, including KGB all-star "Double-Eye," who is presumably a young Vladimir Putin. I've got to find the missing egg-head, give fist imprints and lead injections to the Bolsheviks and solve the mystery of the new song. It's no "They might be stealing Bolivia's water!" but it will have to do.

The plot, more or less.

I decide to start with an interrogation and possible water-boarding of the last person to see the wayward scientist before his disappearance, a "Dr. Klein." He says they were using an "omputer" to analyze the song, but with the team head gone, the project has stalled out. Maybe you could go on the "ternet" and see if you can find any help there. I'm guessing I somehow obtained the extremely rare "typo on page four" version, so I'll be adding a few hundred dollars to the resale price. 

Fortunately this riveting discussion of the sounds emitted by Moby Dick is cut short by The Agency calling to alert me to a "Anton Roudnitska" a Soviet Agent planning to make his escape from a seaside farmhouse by boat to a waiting submarine. There's reason to believe this guy knows where the missing researcher is. I politely tell Klein that listening to his mix tape of cetacean vocal melodies will just have to wait. It's time to tackle the evil empire's shadow soldiers.

This is a real image that has not been altered in any way.

I take the next flight to Halifax, walking right on board with multiple guns in my hands because it's 1980 and that's how the world was back then if the evidence I've pieced together from discarded cans of "Billy Beer" is at all reliable. At the airport I'm met by a car. A young woman claims she's from the "Canadian Intelligence Office" and that I should get in the car. Already working on horrible "Canadian beaver" wordplay after I inevitably seduce her I get in and am promptly sandwiched between two armed thugs, both pressing the heat in my guts. Then I get clubbed over the head, which seems somewhat excessive at this point.

"We fight shadow wars, eh."

Now begins the obligatory "I expect you to die, Mr. Bond!" scene as I wake up in a farm house, chained to a bed. Yeah, apparently living in a closed society with rigid restrictions on free expression leads to kinkiness. Well, at least it does in 2013 America. The reference to "rubbing my throbbing head" certainly does little to remove my thoughts from the gutter. 

Anyway, Stalin's Secret Fun Club wants me to answer a call from the missing scientist and then encourage "Russian cooperation" as the only viable solution to the whale crisis. Yes, kids, there was a time when getting someone to sell out America required this sort of violent, convoluted set-up. They're all "do it or die" so I go along, hoping the researcher will realize I'm just trolling. 

The real "save the whales" heroes, right here.

I have a short conversation with the Big Brain, hoping he'll pick up on my sarcastic tone of voice, unlike everyone else I talk to. The KGB goons are appeased by my performance and announce it's time to "chain me back to the bed." Someone, somewhere on the internet, has probably used this scene as inspiration to write "Your Code Name is Jonah" gay bondage erotica. 

While getting frog-marched the other red operative yells "Hey Vladimir!" Man, did I call that or what. I use this distraction to break free of the Kung Fu grip of the future President of Russia and escape through a window under a "hail of bullets." Ok, that kicked ass. 

Everything is quickly wrapped up. The enemy spies have fled with false intel, the researcher is rescued and it turns out Anton Roudnitska, that guy I was hunting before my ignominious capture, is actually one of our people in deep cover. Nice try Boris, you almost had us, but freedom and democracy are victorious. Oh, and about the whale song and the missing whales? Not important any more, I guess.

This was as good as I remembered. Not three hundred dollars worth of good, of course, but worth checking out in the unlikely event you find a semi-reasonable price. The spy story is generally solid and original. There's lots of classic illustrations, gun play and a tone that while perhaps not mature is at least serious and consistent.

 

Aaron Zehner's first novel The Foolchild Invention is available in paperback and e-book format. Read free excerpts here and here.