Free The Bird Cage by Kate Wilhelm

3.
    —For a number of years I was assigned to Tier 2, but in recent years I have worked in Tier 3. The sealed reports our group receive are eye witness accounts of UFOs landing, and occupants emerging. In each and every account in this group the space travelers are described as “looking just like us, like normal people.” See addenda 1-5—
    He saved the work, pocketed his X drive and went to the workroom to spend a little time on the bird house he was making. He had found to his surprise that he enjoyed doing it and that he even recalled some of what he had learned in his ninth grade shop class. The shop proved to be a good place to think of his next move. Codes, he thought, sanding a piece of cedar. He would code each letter so that he would know who to follow up with if any of his recipients responded. A classified ad in the New York Times would do. A response on a Sunday in the Times would bring the lucky one more material.
    He invented observers for the landings he had chosen from the vast number of references he had found on the Internet under UFOs. His observers were from 1946, 1953, 1961, 1988, 2000 in widely separated areas of the United States. Two college boys camping, a housewife in her back yard, a doctor, three hunters, a retired pilot, good sober, law abiding citizens with no agenda of their own. He had thought of trying to duplicate newspaper accounts of their reports, gave it up, and decided to simply summarize the reports and the follow-up accounts of the deaths and or disappearances of each and every one of them within days of going public with what they had seen.
    Writing as Cyrus Corning, he summarized the sightings.
    —Dr. Jerome Henderson, vacationing on the shore of Lake Ontario with his family, stepped outside late at night and saw a UFO land a short distance from his cabin. A bright moonlit night permitted him to see clearly when a hatch opened and people appeared, descended, and walked to a waiting bus that looked like a tour bus. He estimated that forty to fifty people left the space craft. He stated, “They were just ordinary people, a mixture of types one might see on any street in any city, and probably all were under forty years old. The bus departed when they were loaded, and the space craft rose silently, made a sharp turn and vanished.” Three days later, one day after Dr. Henderson made his report, he was killed in a one-car traffic accident—
    The summaries were similar in most respects, sometimes a bus was reported, or several large vans, once a closed truck. All the observers died or disappeared within a day or two of reporting the landing. Mel knew his accounts were too amateurish, too non-specific to be taken seriously. But wasn’t that the point? he argued with himself. Crackpot stuff, crazy talk, unverified and unverifiable was exactly his point.
    Many of the memos he worked on were from Major (redacted) to Colonel (redacted), and in one instance to General (redacted.)
    One was so heavily redacted that the only legible words left in the memo were urgent, immediate action, highest classified priority, seizing such visitors alive, deniability, Project Skylight, FOIA.
    He bought a ream of paper and envelopes in Middletown where he was unknown, thirty miles from Port Jervis, where he and Ruth had bought their house years before and he was well known. When he printed out his material, he made eight copies, and he wore surgical gloves. He used a moist sponge to seal the envelopes, the stamps were self sealing. He was careful not to leave a fingerprint on anything, not to leave any DNA on anything.
    In mid September he was ready to mail eight messages, each coded in such a way that he would know who, if anyone, responded. He took the train to Manhattan, an hour and ten minutes away, to mail them. While there, he bought some deli salami and corned beef, the kind he couldn’t find in Port Jervis. That night, to Ruth’s delight, he prepared Reuben sandwiches for dinner.
    It took