Area 51 by Robert Doherty Page B

these craft, which seemed simply to have been abandoned in various places some time in the past. From the conditions of the locations they were found in, the best guess had been about ten thousand years ago.
    The craft themselves seemed not to have aged at all.
    There had been very few answers about the origin or purpose or original owners of the craft in the briefing papers. Something that didn't seem to concern the people out here very much. That bothered Duncan, because she liked thinking in analogies and she wondered how she would feel if she had left her car parked somewhere and came back later to find that it had been appropriated and someone was taking the engine apart. Even though the bouncers had been abandoned long ago, centuries might be just a day or two in the relative time scale of the original owners.
    "Why does everyone out here call them 'bouncers'?" she asked. "In the briefing papers they were called 'magnetic-drive atmospheric craft' or 'MDAC' or simply
    'disks'.
    Underbill laughed. "We use the 'MDAC for scientific people who need a fancy title. We all call them 'disks' or 'bouncers.' The reason for the latter, well, wait till you see one in flight. They can change directions on a dime. Most people who watch them think we call them 'bouncers' because they do seem to suddenly bounce off an invisible wall when they change direction--that's how quick they can do it. But if you talk to the original test pilots who flew them, they called them 'bouncers' because of the way they got thrown around on the inside during those abrupt maneuvers. It took us quite a while to come up with the technology and flight parameters so that the pilots wouldn't be injured when they had the aircraft at speed."

    Underbill pointed at a metal door along the back wall.
    "This way, please."
    The door slid open as they approached, and inside was an eight-passenger train on an electric monorail. Duncan stepped into the car along with Underbill, Von Seeckt, Slayden, Ferrel, and Cruise. The car immediately started up and they were whisked into a brightly lit tunnel.
    Underbill continued to play tour guide. "It's a little over four miles to Hangar Two, where we found the mothership.
    In fact, that's the reason this base is here. Most people think we picked this site because of the isolation, but that was simply an added benefit.

    "This part of Nevada was originally being looked over to be the site of the first atomic tests early in World War II, when the surveyors found that the readings on some of their instruments were being affected by a large metallic object. They pinpointed the location, dug, and found what we now call the mothership in Hangar Two. Whoever left the ship here had the technology to blast out a place big enough to leave it and then cover it over."
    Duncan let out an involuntary gasp as the train exited the tunnel and entered a large cavern, a mile and a half long. The ceiling was over a half mile above her head and made of perfectly smooth stone. It was dotted with bright stadium lights. What caught her attention, though, was the cylindrical black object that took up most of the space. The mothership was just over a mile long and a quarter mile in beam at the center. What made the scale so strange was that the skin of the ship was totally smooth, made up of a black, shiny metal that had defied analysis for decades.
    "It took us forty-five years before we were able to break down the composition of the skin," Ferrel, the physicist said, as they exited the tram. "We still can't replicate it, but we finally knew enough about it to at least be able to cut through it."

    Duncan could now see scaffolding near the front--if it was the front and not the rear--of the mothership. The ship itself rested on a complex platform of struts made of the same black material as the skin. The rock sides of the cavern were also smooth, and the floor totally flat.
    They walked alongside the struts, dwarfed by the sheer mass of the ship above