The Hoax of Artemis

By Celso Possas Junior

A secret kept for almost fifty years. A huge operation, which thousands of civilians and military didn't even know they had worked in. They had played unimportant roles, performed specific tasks, and carried common orders without really seeing the whole picture. Only a few men knew all the details, all the facts about the most hidden project in History.
While several people thought nothing else could risk the information sensitive enough to alter the political balance in the planet, the terrorist attack to an American military helicopter triggered the sequence of events many agents and officers had avoided for so many years.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Editora Itapuca
• Release date: Jun 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9786550390099

Book preview

Celso Possas Junior

The HOAX

of

Artemis

2019

Itapuca

Niterói - Brasil

Copyright 2017 by Celso Possas Junior

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or distributed in any printed or electronic form without the prior written permission of Editora Itapuca.

Published by Editora Itapuca

Niterói - RJ - Brasil

www.editoraitapuca.com.br

[e-mail]

[e-mail]

facebook.com/editoraitapuca

ISBN

Translated by Luciana Amorim

Cover designed by Victor Gerhardt

Chapter 1

"A lie gets halfway around the world

before the truth has a chance

to get its pants on."

Winston Churchill

2018

A secret kept for almost fifty years. A huge operation, which thousands of civilians and military didn’t even know they had worked in. They had played unimportant roles, performed specific tasks, and carried common orders without really seeing the whole picture. Only a few men knew all the details, all the facts about the most hidden project in History.

While several people thought nothing else could risk the information sensitive enough to alter the political balance in the planet, the terrorist attack to an American military helicopter triggered the sequence of events many agents and officers had avoided for so many years.

The CH-47 Boeing Chinook was flying from Balad to Bagdad carrying a group of fifteen soldiers and three civilians. The pilot suddenly saw a small flash two hundred yards down on the Afghan hill and heard a strange noise, as a champagne bottle popping. The chopper was hit by an ISIS surface-air missile. One of the officers radioed the air control in Bagdad requesting backup. Two Black Hawks at once took off from the capital airport, but it was too late.

Right after crashing near some huts in a small village outside Bagdad, the soldiers quickly jumped out of the plane and set up a safe perimeter, to protect the chopper and the injured people still inside it. Seconds before the American Hawks arrived at the site, four men stood up on the roof of a house, wearing muslin robes and turbans covering their heads and part of their faces.

Three of them had AK-47s and started shooting at the soldiers near the helicopter. The fourth man lifted a Russian LGF-7 grenade launcher over his shoulder. He took aim at the Chinook and fired, while some of the American soldiers fired back at the group of terrorists. The grenade hit the helicopter with the impact of a hundred and thirty yards per second and the machine exploded in a ball of fire that almost got one of the approaching Hawks.

All ISIS men were killed. The attack also caused the death of Major Phil Doherty and eight other soldiers.

The old man was walking slowly, contrasting to the busy street, full of Brazilian students and workers at lunchtime. Dressed in khakis, light blue shirt, round golden glasses and worn sneakers, he wasn’t noticed among thousands of retired elderlies who lived in Icaraí. His white hair was thinning, and his fair skin had gotten tanned by the tropical sun.

Since he had come to the Brazilian city in 1974, he was Ricardo Fuentes, from Panama. Richard M. Kramer was a name forgotten in past. With a fake passport, he ended up getting permission to live in Brazil and work as an English teacher at a language school for children and teenagers.

He opened the LAN gaming center door, feeling the crispy cold from the air conditioner hit him. He nodded to the manager, who at once turned on the computer on the far corner, normally used by the nice and quiet old man. Teenagers, who played Counter Strike and other violent games day after day at the store, were already used to his presence and sometimes made jokes about him – it was already 2018 and the man didn’t have a computer or a cellphone.

The boy next him, with spiky hair and smart looks, looked curious at the gray stone the old man played with in his hand, while looking at the screen.

The old man smiled. You like it?, he asked in good Portuguese.

Can I see it? The boy was already reaching out for the stone with his skinny hand.

Yes. What’s your name?

Matheus, and you?

I’m Ricardo Fuentes.

The boy analyzed the small stone. Is it volcanic? he questioned Ricardo.

No, it is a regolith. Would you believe it is four billion years old? Almost as old as the Earth.

Wow, where did you get it?

Fuentes smiled, as he could not answer that. It was a gift from a friend.

Another boy, Lucas, started shouting at Matheus as he was losing the game against some boys from Ingá. The skinny boy thanked Fuentes, gave him the stone, and turned back to the computer. He shouted at this wingman that he was going to kick some asses with a knife.

The old man was lost in thought, back on the day he played with the stone for the first time, in 1973, the day Richard Kramer’s life started to fall apart, and he had to run away and get a new identity.

Kramer stopped in the scorching desert sun, and cleaned his glasses, which were hit a minute before by a cloud of dust lifted by another military helicopter. He swiped the lenses with his shirt, satisfied with the result, and turned his back to the sun.

Some dark dots on the horizon called his attention – a swarm of helicopters was approaching the lab and lodging area. Usually, there were few landings there, near the lake, the most secret part of the base. He noticed they were big plane, probably for troops’ transportation and evacuation. Maybe something different was going on.

He continued walking toward the lodging building, wondering if he needed an appointment with his ophthalmologist, as the myopia seemed to be getting worse. The pain in his lower back too. If the military didn’t spend so much time stalking researchers and base employees and did less polygraph tests and more health checkups, Richard could request back massages or even acupuncture

This reminded him of the next polygraph session in two days – and the same questions always: whether he was a Soviet spy, had any contact with soviet citizens, disagreed with the United States government. The number of questions had been increasing over time, always asked in a gentle and calm way by the blue-eyed woman called Rachel, who applied the test and analyzed the graphic made by the needle.

On his first day with the polygraph, five years before, Kramer told her about the neurosis that affected him since childhood, his ordeal with psychologists and psychiatrists, the incredible amount of medication tried by his parents and doctors since the nightmares, fears, and headaches started when Richard was seven. It had been funny when Rachel asked if astrophysicist was on drugs and he nonchalantly confirmed smoking a joint, as people used to say in California.

Cannabis was the first thing he had found that could easy his panic attacks. The military board had considered the situation and concluded it was more a medical case than an addiction. Kramer himself was radically against drugs – he loathed young druggies. His case was completely different – no other medication had produced the result he needed. Franklin Groves, the General Director of the project, had agreed and allowed him to ‘smoke his medicine,’ if nobody saw or found out about it. Kramer was too smart and too important to be ruled out just for the panic or the pot. They needed him in this project.

The physicist’s thoughts were once again interrupted, this time by a loud and frightening siren coming from four loudspeakers on top of a lamppost. Only ten steps separated him from the lodging, but he didn’t even consider overcoming the distance.

The rules were truly clear at Area 51: upon hearing the siren, all civilian and military employees should immediately get a black hood they all carried in their belt, put it over the head and lie down on the ground. Moreover, under no circumstances should they try to see what was going on. The last one to disobey the order was a Missouri sergeant, called Warren. The curious officer tried to peek during one of the first siren episodes, in April 1968. The result was a rubber bullet on his head, two days at the hospital, and extra tests with the polygraph, once a week, for two years.

It was Sunday and the base was almost empty. Most of the employees, researchers and military would come from Las Vegas and other cities on Monday.

However, even on weekends the operation never stopped, especially when soviet satellites were about to fly over the area. The CIA and Air Force men hurried to cover planes and confidential materials with big canvases or push everything into the huge hangars.

Kramer put the rough cotton hood on his head and tried his best to keep calm. It wasn’t easy, with his panic history, to try and breathe under the scorching sun with a black hood down to his neck and only very tiny holes to let in the air.

The siren sounded again five minutes later. Kramer stood up and cleaned his clothes with shaking hands. He walked quickly toward the building, across the reception area and down the long corridor that led to the small room shared with Kevin O. Doherty.

The bedroom was the last on the hallway, with a wide window. All the rooms on the corridor were occupied by scientists and researchers. Other employees stayed at farther buildings, even less comfortable. The military had their own barracks, everywhere around the secret American base.

Area 51, built by the US Intelligence in 1955, was an enormous place, with more than fifteen hundred square miles, inside an even larger complex in the Nevada desert, near Lake Groom and another secret American place, ‘The Nuclear Tests Site’.

Its existence had been constantly denied for many years by the CIA, NASA, and Air Force. The military didn’t confirm the complex existed or that everybody there was under the CIA control. No employee was authorized to reveal their workplace to their wives, husbands, or children. During decades, all civilians informed their families they were working at other bases and cities. Their obedience to the rule was monthly checked with the polygraph.

Richard Kramer was fully aware the military paranoia about security was worse than employees imagined. Nobody knew ten percent of the facilities and projects, not even some officers, following the CIA orders in an intricate hierarchy and projects network. Three thousand people worked at the complex, but less than fifteen had permission to walk around all structures, surface and, especially, a wide system of underground tunnels made with steel and concrete, a huge chain of secret areas.

There were many urban legends about what happened underground, some of them created by the CIA itself, as the existence of Roswell aliens or a time machine. NASA liked to fuel these rumors, in a way they could deny them, but keep the discussions about ridiculous theories far from the actual reason for so many security procedures. In fact, the only secret project there had always been Artemis.

Kramer was one of the few men in the country to know the motive for such paranoid security measures and one of the only ones in the country to know it wasn’t only from soviets they were hiding the enormous operation.

Kevin wasn’t at the base that Sunday. Kramer locked the door and went straight to his drawer. He got the plastic bag with his ‘material’, and quickly looked through the window placed between the two single beds. He saw two military trucks carrying armed soldiers. Never had he seen so many of them at the base – there was definitely something strange going on.

Another siren sounded on the other side of the complex, but this time he would not need the black hood - he only had to follow the protocol and lower down the blackout blinds. He climbed on Kevin’s bed and removed the first screw that kept a steel plate on the wall, while holding the plastic bag with his teeth.

Sometimes Kramer smoked his medicine in the room, when Kevin was out or at the labs. But, when a panic crisis was about to hit, he needed a special place. He took off the last screw and unlogged the plate.

He lifted himself up through the opening, climbing to the air circulation system, the metallic structure common to all American buildings in the mid-20th century. The ‘tube’, as Kramer called it, started right there above Kevin’s bed, and went on, dark and silent, passing over all the bedrooms until the beginning of the corridor.

Already inside the ‘tube’, he put the plate and the four screws back in place. He noticed his hands were shaking and sweat soaked the blue shirt. Kramer crawled quickly to the end of the structure, the last vent over the guardroom where some soldiers were in charge of the surveillance and security.

He took out the thin and smooth paper out of the bag in a hurry – if the shivers got worse, he would not be able to roll the cigarette. Kramer put some pot on the paper and folded it a couple of times. He needed three matches to light up the joint, his hands trembling more and more. Finally, he inhaled and held the smoke, so the hallucinogenic substance would reach his brain faster.

Some embers fell from the cigarette, flew in the air, and landed on the black hood in his belt. Kramer waved them away – if the embers made a hole on the hood, he would have to walk up to the storage to get a new one.

Little by little, the cannabis calmed him down and Kramer felt much more relaxed. For some reason, his privileged mind – as his mother liked to define his condition –felt good in dark and silent places, like closets, the small attic at his grandparents’, or there in the ‘tube’. That weed was stronger than others he had smoked. He felt sleepy.

Kramer’s body slowly slid down, while the cigarette finished. He wished he didn’t have nightmares that time, but could dream with a sunny beach, where he could look at girls and have a Bloody Mary.

Kramer came back to 2018 when the boy near him shouted and swore. He had died after a blast from the enemy - an Afro-descendant boy with a black power punching the air two computers away, as though he had scored at the end of the soccer championship at school. The manager looked at the boys with a stern face and signaled the combatants in school uniform to be quiet.

Kramer checked two websites with global news. There were some articles about earthquakes in Europe and Asia, and a new offensive in Turkey, where Americans and Russians were arguing on who bombed a Red Cross medical camping.

He accessed his Yahoo email account. First, the official one, in which Ricardo Fuentes received several messages, subscribed to bookstore sites, and got information from the English course. Moments later, he checked the other account: [e-mail].

A couple of years before, he was surprised when browsing a NASA-discussions forum and saw a short post: "Russian movie, if you are out there, contact me. Greetings from your eternal Boulanger". Finally, Kevin Doherty had found a way to contact him.

When they worked together at Area 51, Kramer confided to his roommate he had lost his virginity with a chubby girl called Ivana, a Russian couple’s daughter. She was constantly bullied at school during Cold War, and the shy Richard was the only student who helped her with English and chemistry assignments. They ended up having sex behind a movie studio, where people were filming Flash Gordon’s adventures. Kevin