The Ufo Theory

By Alan W. Staves

Alf Spanner is a mild mannered scientist who makes a living making robots and designing computer systems. One day he is approached by Major Tom Parker from the ESRA Corporation and is asked if he can build a craft that can move faster than the speed of light. Alf has been working on such a theory for six years and is happy to accept the task, until he discovers that the Major has hidden agendas. Alf is not a hero and enlists the help of his friend Liam Mail to stop the Major, but this puts Liams girlfriend in danger. In a race against time they must save the girl and stop the Major, whilst being pursued by a deadly assassin. Will they succeed? Only time will tell.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Apr 30, 2015
• ISBN: 9781504941815

Alan W. Staves

Alan W. Staves is now in his fifties. He is married, with two grown-up children. Alan has lived all his life in Sheffield, England. He is a passionate follower of his local football team, Sheffield Wednesday. He likes loud rock music and has been a fan of the Rolling Stones for more than forty years. He is a lifelong friend of the former Geddes Axe and Baby Tuckoo guitarist Andy Barrott. The UFO Theory is his first novel.

Book preview

Chapter 1

The end of the world

Neil Armstrong was the first man on the moon. One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind, but three years later the NASA space project came to an end.

There were no more trips to the moon. Apollo11 was the first moon landing, on July 20th 1969. Apollo 17 was the last to land on the moon. On December 11th 1972 with only Apollo13 failing to land in-between.

Roll on fifty years to 2022. US president Calvin Herrett re-started the US space program. Herrett declared that the US intended to build a permanent base on the moon. The US government spent the next fifteen years developing re-usable space craft that could make multiple trips to the moon carrying large cargos. The moon base project started on June 6th 2036. A forty strong crew of mainly American and British engineers, were based in permanent residence on the moon, during the construction of the moon base. With contractors coming and going with the construction materials as and when required. It took seven years to build Moon base Alpha.

Alpha was made as an octagonal shape. It was ten miles across from one side to the other side and two stories high. The base had the capacity to land ten ships, at any one time, on the giant landing pads.

After phase one was completed the workers returned to Earth for one year, whilst contractors came in to prepare the work for phase two. The contractors built four covered monorails, travelling five miles in each direction. North, east, south and west, at the end of these, they built an airlock. When all four were completed, this team returned to Earth and the original team came back, to start work on phase two.

At the end of the north line, they built moon base Beta. Moon base Beta was only one quarter the size of Alpha. Beta was set up as the food store. Beta had four giant machines that would freeze the air and make ice. Then the ice is melted to create water. There were also three giant hangers. The first was split in two growing potatoes at one end and rice at the other end. They used water from one of the giant machines for irrigation. The second hanger was used to grow vegetables and herbs. The third hangar was used to grow fruit. There was no live stock on the moon although plans had been drawn up to incorporate a farm in future years. This would mean building another giant hanger on Beta, but this was not a priority. There was also living quarters on Beta, for the people who would be in control of growing the food and looking after the giant ice machines. Moon base Beta was locally known as the Garden of Eden.

The line to the west went to moon base Delta. This was the science block with several laboratories and living quarters for the scientists. There were also four giant airlocks pointing out to the west. This was so that the scientists could take the exploration vehicles out on to the moon’s surface. This base was still incomplete.

The south line went to what was to be moon base Gamma. This was going to be two stories of living quarters for visitors (tourists) to the moon, but this was not built and the line ended at the air lock.

The east line also ended at the airlock. No base had been built, although plans were drawn up for moon base Omega, a retail and leisure complex for visitors. The only way onto the moon bases was through the docking area on Alpha. This had been nicknamed Ellis Island by the Americans in the team.

Sunday was the day of rest on the moon base with no craft coming in or out of the base. The contractors had all returned to Earth and no more were due until late next week. Which was when the next supply ship, would be due in. Base commander Jack Barrowman had insisted that the control room is to be manned at all times, by at least two people, even if nothing is coming in. This is where the communications centre is today. George McGregor and Peter Marshall were in the control room.

Bliss, said George McGregor.

McGregor was a forty-seven year old, construction worker. McGregor was a big burly man with granite features that looked like he had been chiselled out of solid rock. McGregor stroked his shaven head with huge hands. He stared at the big screen in the control room. There was nothing on the landing pads and nothing due in again until next week.

George McGregor looked at his watch. He had just two hours to go until the end of his shift. The rest of the day was his, to do as he pleased. He turned to Peter Marshall. A young engineer, who was for the first time sharing his duties, with McGregor. Peter Marshall was today looking after the control desk. Fancy a game of golf later? George asked.

What? Peter replied.

George looked at the young engineer. Peter was just turned twenty-eight. He was six foot two inches tall. He was lean and athletic with short spiky hair. Peter was not on the original project team for phase one. He had replaced Paul Rideout on phase two. When Paul had decided to stay on Earth and not return to the moon.

Go out there, said George, walking over to the window and staring out into the darkness. Hit a dozen or so balls. Then we get into the lunar ranger and drive four miles or so to Drakes Ridge, collect the balls and have a leisurely drive back.

We can go out? asked Peter, turning to George at the window.

Not officially, George replied, as he came back to the monitor. It’s like being in another land, there’s nothing more therapeutic than a drive across the moon’s surface.

What if we get caught?

What can they do to us? said George with a smirk. Send us back to Earth, hardly a punishment is that.

What’s that? said Peter, pointing behind George.

George looked round. Shiza, he said, alarmed.

What’s up? asked Peter…

The uplinks to Earth have gone down, said George, as he furiously pressed the buttons on the console. Not a dickie bird, he said. I’ll have to inform Captain Jack now. This would happen on my shift.

George called Jack Barrowman on the coms link. Jack was a fifty-nine year old civil engineer and was in charge of operations on the moon base. Jack was due to retire next year, but had agreed to stay on for another five years or until the moon base projected had been completed, whichever came first.

Jack Barrowman, answered the voice over the coms link.

Jack its George in the control room. The uplinks to Earth have gone down, said George urgently.

What do you mean gone down? responded Jack.

All the screens have gone down, and I cannot contact anyone on Earth.

Hang fire a minute, said Jack. There was then silence at the other end of the line.

George looked nervously at the screens, whilst he waited for Jack to come back. After a couple of minutes, Jack’s voice came back on line. I’ve tried my personal communicator and I can’t get any replies either. I will send Sullivan out to check the communications aerials.

George and Peter watched out of the window of the control room. Neil Sullivan bounded over the roof of the lunar base towards the communication tower.

Sullivan bounded across the roof of the moon base in giant leaps to the far side. He could see the aerial’s of the communications systems which he himself had designed. He approached the aerials cautiously. He opened a box at the base of the communications tower. The lights inside the box flashed, as they should. The wires were all attached. There seemed to be nothing wrong out here. He pinged, the line to the communications room. The line pinged back there was nothing wrong with the line at this end. The communication systems on the moon were fine. The problem must be at the other end.

An hour or so later Neil Sullivan returned to the base. Neil was the electrical engineer and the communications set up was his baby. He stepped through the airlock and removed his helmet then proclaimed. There’s nothing wrong with the antenna. The problem must be at their end.

We’ll just have to wait until someone comes in, on the next flight to find out what has happened, said Peter. We’ll just have to wait a couple of days, for the next crew to arrive.

Meanwhile back on Earth, General Min Ho of Korea had got trigger happy. He had pressed the little red button by his hand. This launched a nuclear missile heading for the USA. America retaliated by firing six back at Korea. The Russians then sent ten at America, who fired back on Russia. Then China, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Israel and Pakistan got involved. In all 425 warheads were fired in fifteen minutes and they wiped out 90% of the Earth’s population in one moment of madness.

This may not have been a bad thing for the Earth; in the past Mother Nature had always controlled the population growth with plague, pestilence, drought, famine and floods. Now the population growth was spiralling out of control, by 2047 the population of the planet had reached ten billion, far too much to be sustainable. By wiping out 90% of the population this still left one billion survivors. This was the same as the world’s population in the middle-ages. Man had now done what Mother Nature had failed to do. He had brought the population down to a sustainable level.

The Americans and the Western Europeans were prepared for this event. They had been expecting something like this to happen. They had spent many years building shelters ready for just such an occasion.

In the city of Sheffield in the UK, the city council had built a giant fallout shelter. The shelter was designed to hold two thousand people. The underground shelter was built on three levels the upper floor was the recreational area and also the control centre, where the four stewards of the shelter worked monitoring the radiation levels outside and the conditions inside. The second level of the shelter was the living quarters for the people who were lucky enough to get inside. This was designed to accommodate two thousand people. The shelter then had a third level down here were the store rooms, Which contained thousands of tons of grain, seeds and bulbs for replanting after the shelter re-opened letting people out, into the world beyond the disaster. This level also had a stable at the back, and this had in permanent residence two cows, two pigs, two sheep, two dogs, two cats and two dozen chickens. Because of this the shelter had been nicknamed Noah’s Ark.

The Ark had twelve stewards, who manned the Ark twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The teams were divided into three teams of four men in each team. The teams did an eight hour shift at the Ark. This was to make sure that it would be ready in case of attack. The animals were changed every year.

When the four minute warning came John and Marie Spanner were the last into the Ark, before the doors were closed. They were given numbers 469 and 470. John looked around at the cramped compartments. He looked at Marie then at the ticket numbers they had just been given. This place is supposed to hold two thousand people, he said gloomily. I can’t see how they could possibly get another fifteen hundred people in here, he continued.

Marie squeezed his hand. At least we’re inside, she said.

They were inside for fifteen months. Because there was only 25% capacity in the Ark, there was four times the food available for everyone, but there was no fresh fruit and vegetables or perishable foods. Everything was in tins and jars or was dried food. John described this as a beggar’s banquet.

By the sixth month, John was getting fed up. He didn’t like the confinement in the Ark. He didn’t like the tinned food and he detested the tedium of being in the Ark. He was aching to get out again. John was a tall man and as thin as a rake. He was an asthmatic and had suffered health problems all his life. He didn’t like to be cooped up in small or confined places.

They are treating us like the animals. We’ve got to get out of this place.

Marie had told him, to treat it like a holiday and to think of the camping trips that he went on as a boy.

I never liked those trips either, he had retorted.

John Sheridan was in charge of the Ark. He monitored remotely the radiation levels, eventually the levels began to fall and hope inside the Ark was that they would soon be allowed to go out into the open world, to re-begin their lives.

Well before the end of their stay in the Ark, John was getting on Marie’s nerves. After ten months in the Ark, Marie had some good news for John. I’m pregnant we are going to have a little baby.

John felt a shudder of trepidation. He was happy that he was to become a father, but worried for his son. They knew nothing about the world they would be living in. John didn’t want his son to be born in the Ark.

It was a relief on the fifteenth day of the fifteenth month since the Ark was sealed, that the doors were finally opened. No-one had expected to see the sky fall. John and Marie Spanner stepped out into the daylight. Nothing stirred. No birds in the trees. No dogs on the streets. No cars or planes in the sky. The world was now a soulless place. The sky was dark and foreboding. The air reeked with the stench of death. John gently placed his hand on Marie’s bump and sighed. I hope this grave new world will be better for Junior, than the one we have just left behind. Sheffield had not taken a direct hit. The buildings, still stood tall and proud, cars were still parked on the streets, were they had been left. Bodies had rotted where they lay.

Now the people started to pour out of the Ark. For the first time the true horror of what had happened hit home to the people as they re-emerged for the Ark. There was a big rebuilding job that needed to be done.

Chapter 2

Sowing the seeds of recovery

It took more than thirty years, to put the world to rights. The children of the children of the war were the first to feel the benefit of the rebuilding program. The first thing the English did was to restore imperial weights and measures. The only concession that they made to the rest of the world, was to adopt the dollar as a single unit of currency, so that all the world traded with the same monetary unit.

Many countries were now desolate wastelands. In England only sixteen major cities survived, of which Sheffield was the third largest, behind Birmingham and London. Sheffield had become the centre for technological research. The university had been untouched by the devastation of the rest of the country. Manchester was left in ruins for many years and was only rebuilt after the announcement of the space program in 2090.

When John and Marie Spanner left the Ark, they could see first-hand the devastation of the planet, but among the doom and gloom, one ray of hope survived in the corner of a square near to the town centre. A small oak tree had survived and was starting to grow. This led the survivors to believe, that they could rebuild the planet and start again. The day after they came out of the Ark, John Spanner assembled all the important people from the council who had been in the Ark with him and declared that it was his intention to rebuild this country.

At the formal hearing in the former town hall, the council created the Earth Research Centre.

John Spanner was offered a role at the research centre, but declined the invitation. Instead citing John Sheridan would make a better candidate to take on the responsibility of running the Earth Research Centre.

England had eight Arks, as well as the one in Sheffield there was another in Birmingham and four in London, one in Bristol and one in Liverpool. Many affluent families also had personal shelters.

John Sheridan monitored the radiation Levels every day. He only opened the doors when he deemed it was safe to do so. Some of the people who had personal fall-out shelters had died, because they did not store enough food and some died because they came out too early, before the radiation levels had died down. The Sheffield Ark was the first in Britain to open its doors.

Jacob Spanner was born on December 12th 2048. He was named Jacob after Marie’s brother who had died when she was a young child. John Spanner suffered from ill health, ever since he came out of the Ark. He died five years later, just before Jacob’s fifth birthday. Jacob was brought up by Marie all by herself. She did her best to make sure he had not grown up wrong. Jacob studied hard and became a journalist at the age of twenty-one.

The first task for the ERC was to purify the water, which was now brown and murky. Like a pint of stale ale. This was a priority although they had many gallons of bottled water from the Ark this would not last forever. Also work needed to be done on replanting grass shrubs and trees. Fortunately there were many seeds and bulbs stored in the Ark for just this occasion.

The low solar minimum meant that the temperatures were going to fall anyway, even before all the missiles went off. The temperatures had dropped on average between ten and fifteen per cent. The clouds covered the sky most of the time and a steady rain fell most days. ESRA drained all the dams around Sheffield and refilled them with new water.

The early successes of the ERC were the planting of the Yorkshire meadows. Lush green lands between Leeds and Harrogate and the Lancashire New Forrest. In which was planted nearly 12,000 trees in forty mile area in the north west of England close to the town of Fleetwood. The LNF is still managed by ESRA.

The next phase of the re-generation project was to make sure that the animals from the Arks survived. The London arks contained twelve pairs of animals. The Sheffield and Birmingham Arks were smaller in size and only had eight pairs of animals.

By gathering the Animals from the Six Arks they started a breeding program to repopulate the animal kingdoms. These were carried out in Sheffield’s Heeley City Farm and at Leicester’s De Montfort Hall Park farm.

Manchester had been abandoned after the devastation of the country and was not re-built until after the announcement of the space project by the president. Manchester would become a space age city with all modern buildings and state of the art space centre, which the president said would be the envy of the world.

Jacob Spanner had been conceived inside the Ark and was the first child to be born in the new world. His father John died shortly before his fifth birthday and he was brought up by his mother. She tried to teach him all she could. Jacob could read and write before he started school. He was a bright boy and showed an aptitude for creative writing. It was no surprise then that after he left college that his first job was as a reporter for the local paper.

Fifty years after the missiles were launched. Man again went back to the moon this time it was not the Americans but the British that went to the moon. Britain launched the Galaxy 1 space explorer from the British space control centre, at Salford Quays in Manchester. By now Jacob was the head reporter with the Sheffield Star newspaper. He was sent over the Pennines from Sheffield to Manchester to cover the story. Jacob was in Manchester for the Launch of the Galaxy 1and remained there until after it landed, two and a half days later.

The Galaxy 1 landed at moon base Alfa, to tremendous applause from the control centre. Everyone at mission control was in total uproar when commander, James O’ Donnell reported back that they had found life on the base.

Say again, responded ground control.

There is still life on the moon base. We have a sole survivor from the original construction team.

Seventy-eight year old Peter Marshall was the last surviving member of the construction team that had been abandoned on the moon when the war kicked off on Earth. No-one on Earth had given a second thought to the moon base when the Arks opened. They just assumed that everyone on the moon had perished as well.

Peter had been on the moon for fifty-three years. The last six years he had been on his own.

Peter Marshall refused to come back to Earth and lived out the last five years of his life, on Moon base Beta. When he died he was buried at Drakes Ridge with the rest of the construction crew. Ten years after his death, a memorial service was held at Drakes Ridge.

There a memorial monument had been erected in their honour. A black stone wall with all the names inscribed in gold paint at Drakes Ridge commemorating the lives of the forty construction engineers who had died on the moon. Jack Barrowman had been the base commander in charge of the construction of the moon base, but it was Peter Marshall the last surviving member of the team that had pride of place on the memorial.

Jacob’s article on Peter Marshall went global. Everyone wanted to meet Peter Marshall, but Peter refused to return to the Earth. Which meant all the local dignitaries and politicians who wanted to meet him, were forced into going to the Moon to meet Peter. The British President Jason Brookes went to the moon to see Peter Marshall.

Brookes had read Jacob’s report, on the British crew finding Peter Marshall on the moon and had insisted that Jacob went with him to meet Peter Marshall. So six weeks after the story broke, Jacob went to the moon with the president and did an article on Peter Marshall’s life story. Jacob was photographed with Peter Marshall and the President on the re-named moon base Alfa.

Jacob met Peter Marshall and was astounded, when Marshall told him it was good to see him again. Jacob had told Marshall, that he must be mistaken. He had never been to the moon before and Peter had been on the moon since before his birth.

In the evening of the first night on the moon after President Brooks had gone to bed. Peter Marshall told Jacob a fascinating story which surprised and astounded him.

Jacob wrote two stories about Peter Marshall’s life on the moon. One of which recorded the true events which had taken place after they had been abandoned by the Earth. This version would be kept with Peter on the moon and would be given to Liam Mail many years later.

The second report was the official report which would be printed in the papers and would then be reproduced worldwide, spreading the fame of not only Peter Marshall but also of Jacob Spanner.

The Earth Research Centre started work on purifying water. They also planted many trees and plants sowing the seeds of recovery for the dying planet. Whilst England was putting its house in order, things were different in mainland Europe, where France and Germany emerged as super powers of the world. Both countries spent several years squabbling with their neighbours increasing their borders by taking large chunks of land from the other counties