Alien Diaries Anthology- Episode 1

I started another project over at Kickstarter for an anthology titled "The Alien Diaries," which I'll soon put up over at White Cat.  This might lead you to think I'm going nuts, but I'm having fun!

They'll let me know if it goes through in a day or so.  Here's the project description:

*****

As a paranormal investigator, writer and amateur UFO-ologist, I receive a lot of strange calls.  But none as strange as the one I received early last year from an elderly woman I'll call only "Emily."

She'd read a copy of my alien werewolf book "Tainted Blood," heard that I lectured on Ghost Hunting Technology, and told me she thought I was just the person to solve the mystery of two alien artifacts that were left behind the night her husband was "taken."

If it weren't for the tone in her voice, I would have thought she was a crackpot.  Ninety nine times out of a hundred, when a total stranger tells you they have alien artifacts, they are in fact crackpots.  But Emily sounded different.  So I said yes. At the very least, I could come away with an interesting story.  

She lived on a small farm in the middle of nowhere, five hours driving time due south and east, according to my GPS.  The last twenty five miles or so were dirt roads twisting through fields, dense woods and a brutal thunderstorm.   By the time I reached her house, her long driveway was was more like a seldom used cattle trail and so muddy my car slid onto her lawn and stopped four feet short of crashing into her front porch.

I'll tell you more about that night with Emily in the weeks to come, but for now I'll tell you that Emily was telling the truth.  In her living room, in the light of a lamp that dimmed in and flared with each thunderous gust of wind, she sat across from me in a faded upholstered wing back chair and said, "If you can't keep a secret, you'd best leave now."

I assured her I could.

"Not a word of this until I'm dead and gone," she said.

I agreed.

She looked me over carefully, saw that I was sincere, and picked up an old, latched wooden box from next to her chair.  With a flick of her yellowed fingers, she flipped the latch and then lifted the lid.  Carefully, almost reverently, she withdrew a swatch of folded black velvet.  She held her breath for a second, then shook her head once as though she'd made up her mind.   A warning blast of air shook  the windows, but she ignored it as she unwrapped two iridescent purple-red metal plates the size of playing cards and laid them in front of me on the coffee table.

"What are they?"  I asked.

"I think they're record books.  If you look at them close, under a reading glass, you can see the markings and patterns."

"What do you want me to do with them?"

"Figure them out," she said.

"I'm going to need some help," I said.

And I would.  Lots of it.

"Same thing goes for them," she said.  "Not a word of this gets out until I'm gone."

"I'll put a team together," I said.

"Just don't any of you look at them too long in one sitting.  You'll start to hear voices and see things that aren't there."

                                                    *****

Like I said, I'll tell you more about Emily and what she told me that night in the coming weeks, but for now I'll tell you that my team and I have made significant progress in decoding the information contained in the Alien Diaries. But we need your help.

Using the latest in computer analytics and technology that's too complicated for anyone but our scientists to understand, we believe we've been able to decipher scattered words and phrases.  Problem is, we need imaginatively gifted people to help us string together the stories that will make the content come alive.

So we're asking your help to fund and participate in this project.  We'll make the fragments available (three to five words) each week, give you what geographical links and time coordinates if they're available, and ask the writing community to construct plausible scenarios to explain what they could mean.  We'll solicit artists of all ages and backgrounds to submit drawings to supplement the stories.

When we've accumulated and sorted through the stories and drawings, we'll collate them into an anthology which we hope will reveal for the first time the records of our Alien visitors and perhaps explain why they keep coming to our planet.  We want to answer important questions such as those raised by great thinkers throughout the centuries such as whether they are planning an invasion or just hanging out, whether their itineraries coincide with concert schedules and/or whether or not they are responsible for the evolution of our species. 

Those are just some of our thoughts.

And we'll need to pay the story contributors.  That's where your financial support will be available.

For too long we've been in the dark as to why they keep coming to our planet. We know they're here.  We've seen the lights in the sky, heard the abduction stories and watched world governments scramble to suppress the facts.

The truth isn't "out there," it's in the Alien Diaries.  Help us decode them, will you?  Who knows what we'll discover?