The following is based on recently unearthed documents, with names changed to protect the innocent...
June 2025.
Hugh Tyler had sworn off the psychic games. Tall, broad-shouldered, with prematurely graying temples, he looked built for physical wars, not psychic ones—but his mind had once been one of the CIA's sharpest weapons. He hadn’t used remote viewing since the Stargate Project collapsed in the mid-90s, leaving him fractured and forgotten. But when a decrypted Cold War document crossed his path—referencing “Base H-7, interior Mount Hayes, neural harvesting ongoing”—something inside him stirred.
“Jesus,” he muttered, thumbing through brittle pages in his frostbitten cabin. “They weren’t kidding.”
The file included sketches: humanoid figures at glowing, circular consoles with thought-maps projected above their heads. Coordinates pointed to the Alaskan Triangle—a vast, bleak swath of wilderness where compasses spun and entire planes vanished without trace.
Enter Jared Augustin. Barrel-chested, mid-forties, with a permanent five o’clock shadow, the former security officer still bore the clipped speech and cautious gait of someone who’d seen too much. Hugh found him near Delta Junction, holed up with three German shepherds and a rusting radar array aimed squarely at Mount Hayes.
“You’re looking for ghosts,” Jared said flatly when Hugh arrived. “They’re real. Don’t think they’re dead.”
“You saw it?”
“Ten years back. Ball of green light split into three. Didn’t glide, didn’t float—snapped across the sky like it was cutting through spacetime. Then it was gone. Took my buddy with it.”
The two men—reluctant allies bound by trauma and suspicion—trekked toward Mount Hayes, snow crunching beneath their boots, radios crackling with interference. The deeper they pushed into the wilderness, the stranger things became. Time warped. Watches froze. Jared swore he saw a version of himself, older and thinner, watching from across a ridge. Hugh’s visions intensified—silver-skinned humanoids communicating soundlessly, hands on biometric orbs, scanning memories like files.
Inside the mountain, they found it—not tunnels, but angled hallways, shaped by non-Euclidean geometry, pulsing with violet light. The air buzzed—not with electricity, but thought. Jared touched a wall and recoiled.
“Feels alive,” he whispered.
Then came the truth.
The base wasn’t alien in any familiar sense. It was a neural farm—a repository of consciousness pulled from abductees and explorers, fed into a collective intelligence older than human civilization. Hugh, once drawn into its frequency through the Stargate Project, had never fully left.
A voice echoed in his mind. "Return complete."
As he stepped forward, consoles lit up in recognition. His mind flooded with foreign memories—starscapes, dying worlds, warnings lost to time. Jared pulled his sidearm, but Hugh smiled, eyes shimmering silver.
“I didn’t come to infiltrate it,” he said. “I came to wake it up.”