Free Last Call For Caviar by Melissa Roen

Mayan, Aztec, Hopi, Pueblo, Anasazi Indians, among others, spoke of visitors from the stars and their influence on the fate of mankind.
    Though I admit I’m also a bit of a science nerd. I often start my day checking out blogs dedicated to astronomy, physics and the question of alien life forms on other planets. (My favorite is “I Love Fucking Science.”)
    So after my first sighting of what might be the Blue Star Kachina from Hopi legend, I scoured the internet, reading anything I could find about this extraordinary astronomical event. Scientists worldwide studied this comet, and speculation was rampant on the consequences for earth and mankind.
    NASA scientists say that Sawaka Sahur had sailed forth from a dwarf galaxy located between the southern constellations of Dorado and Mensa in the Large Magellanic Cloud. The light, when the blue supergiant went supernova, left the galaxy about 160,000 years ago and finally reached Earth last summer.
    Some “experts” made mind-boggling claims, such as that the radiation from the intense blast of neutrinos was estimated at one hundred times the intensity of what our sun will radiate during its entire ten-billion-year existence. Other scientists upped the ante and speculated that the radiation released was as much as the combined radiation from all the stars and galaxies in the visible universe.
    The more esoteric articles I read argued that the staggering bombardment of cosmic energy released by the explosion of Sawaka Sahur—immense shockwaves of cosmic particles, infrared and ultraviolet radiation, gamma rays and x-rays—was affecting both the physical and metaphysical world, altering the electromagnetic matrix of our planetary grid, disturbing the delicate balance of earth’s vibratory center and vortexes and mutating on our DNA.
    Whether you believed there was any truth in the old legends of indigenous American tribes and their prediction of a giant, punishing celestial object in the sky—or that the appearance of the Blue Star confirmed the Hopi revelation—something was destabilizing our planet, and maybe it was, as the prophecies foretold, coming from the stars.
    I was first drawn to the mystery of the stars the summer when I was nineteen, two years before I came to France to study. I was going to the university in California, and I went over summer break to visit my big sis in Las Vegas.
    About ninety miles north of downtown Las Vegas is Dreamland, though no road signs indicate its location or its presence, shimmering like a mirage behind a veil of mystery and rumors atop the salt flats of Groom Lake.
    You may know Dreamland by its other names: Paradise Ranch, The Box, The Extraterrestrial Highway or simply—Area 51. Officially, it’s the test site for experimental aircraft and weapons systems developed by the highly classified military and defense program, innocuously called Special Access Program. Shrouded by such intense secrecy, the U.S. government did not even acknowledge its existence until July 2003, though they had been running research projects and developing military aircraft out of there since the fifties. The CIA considered no place on earth as sensitive as the area around Groom Lake.
    Lots of hinky stuff was said to happen here: disappearing landing strips, which appear only when chemicals are sprayed on their camouflaged surfaces; crashed and stranded alien space craft, whose survivors were probed and studied in underground laboratories; whispers of weird science and research into weather control, time-walking and worm holes. Star Wars weaponry and visitors from distant galaxies were said to be housed here. Indeed, Area 51 is purportedly the hub of a subterranean transcontinental railroad that connects a vast network of top-secret facilities devoted to reverse-engineering alien technologies.
    Stories of weird lights moving at unheard-of velocities, maneuvering at angles that defy the aerodynamics of conventional aircraft, only nourish the stories of