The last public place in Giddings remaining open after dark is Zack’s Pizzeria, and Zack locks the doors at nine o’clock sharp. When the sun sets behind the hills and the last light of day fades upon the Civil War memorial, photosensitive timers bring to life hundreds of sodium-vapor streetlights which bathe the square and all the town roads in a bright yellowish glare. All night long, Ford Explorers from the mill prowl the streets and back roads, stopping occasionally at lonely houses in the woods where the lights stay on until dawn. When this town goes to sleep, it does so with both eyes open.

  According to the 1990 federal census, Giddings has a permanent population of 157. At least two-thirds of these people claim to have been abducted by aliens from outer space.

  “The last time anyone tallied how many people in this country said they were UFO abductees, it was in the mid-80s, about the time Whitley Strieber’s book was on the New York Times bestseller list. Back then, it was around fifty or so . . . maybe a couple of hundred, if you count the obvious fruitcakes.”

  Paul Rucker coughs in his fist as he hands me a thick black pagebinder. Within it are 97 pages of single-spaced computer printout, row after row of names, addresses, and phone numbers. “That’s the list of possible abductees we’ve compiled in the last three years,” he says in his soft, Virginia-accented voice. “There’re two thousand, four hundred and thirty-seven names in that book . . . and I haven’t gotten around to adding the two hundred or so others who have contacted us in the last couple of months.”

  Paul Rucker doesn’t look like a stereotypical UFO nut. Mid-40s, round-figured, balding, wearing horn-rimmed glasses and a navy-blue sweater over khaki trousers, he appears to be an insurance agent or a CPA rather than a former Air Force intelligence analyst. Yet as he squats on the seat of a backless isometric chair in his red-brick office in the Giddings mill, he calmly talks of things you and I would consider impossible, absurd, and unbelievable.

  “Look at the first name on the list,” he says. I flip back to the first page; the top name has been carefully blacked out with Magic Marker, along with the address and phone number. “That’s Number One,” he says. “I can’t tell you his name or where he lives, but he’s the one who bought Giddings and made it possible for many of these people to live here.”

  He smiles in answer to the unspoken yet obvious next question. “If I told you his name, you’d recognize it immediately.” He nods toward the list. “Besides, too many people have found out already. Why do you think the list is so long?”

  Number One doesn’t live in Giddings, but it’s because of his wealth and influence that the town has become a sanctuary for UFO abductees. What little is known of him is that he is a millionaire who, during his salad days as a traveling salesman, was kidnapped by aliens while driving alone through Texas. After several years of experiencing the same recurrent nightmares which are symptomatic of other abductees, Number One sought psychiatric help, only to discover that there was an eight-hour gap in his memory, dating back to that roadtrip through Texas when he thought he had simply fallen asleep behind the wheel.

  His quest for an explanation brought him into the small circle of people who had also experienced the “missing time” phenomena. Like Number One, most of them had repressed memories of being taken aboard flying saucers and subjected to humiliating physical examinations by extraterrestrials, horrifying memories which were later unlocked by hypnosis. They lived in constant fear of being kidnapped again, but unlike the former salesman—who, by this time, had amassed a considerable fortune and thus could afford to protect himself—they were virtually powerless against future intrusions.

  Altruistic by nature, Number One decided to take matters into his own hands. Cloaking his identity behind a complex network of banks, holding companies, and real estate agencies, he searched for a town that he could transform into a fortress for his fellow abductees. When he found Giddings, it had been bankrupt for several years, rendered penniless by the demise of the local paper mill during the 70s and the wipeout of the state’s economy during the recession of the 90s. Most of the houses had been foreclosed and were up for sale, and the town was inhabited by only a few farmers and die-hard oldtimers.

  Number One purchased all the available private property in Giddings, including the paper mill, and turned it over to The Astra Trust, the nonprofit foundation of which Paul Rucker is the chief executive. There are precious few clues to Number One’s identity; all of the Astra Trusts’s property in Giddings is owned by a bank in Dallas, Texas, and the annual stipend checks are issued from the same bank. Although the leading suspect is H. Ross Perot, Perot’s spokesmen have denied that he is the man behind the Astra Trust.

  The Astra Trust is the McArthur Foundation for the UFO set: ninety UFO abductees and their immediate families can live in Giddings, rent-free and with a modest annual stipend, for as long as they feel the need to hide from the aliens. No strings attached; some people stay only for a year or two, others intend to remain in Giddings for the rest of their lives.

  “We interview applicants, study their case histories, put them through polygraph tests and have them undergo medical examinations, including a session with our staff psychologist,” Rucker says. “Obviously, with something like this, you’re going to get a lot of people who are shamming, not to mention a few outright crackpots, but we’ve gotten pretty good at weeding out the con artists and fruitcakes. If they’re let in, they’re part of the community. They’ll be protected for as long they want to be here.”

  Why doesn’t Number One himself live in Giddings? Rucker shrugs. “He doesn’t really need to,” he says calmly. “I’m not at liberty to discuss his arrangements, but. . . well, let’s just say, where he lives now, the aliens are never going to get him.”

  “Smile,” says Dorothy Taylor. “You’re on candid camera.”

  Dorothy—like others in this story, this is not her real name—lives with her six-year-old daughter Nancy and her two attack-trained German shepherds, Rex and Arnie, in a small cottage about a half-mile from the center of town. She is a quiet woman in her early thirties who works as a freelance artist; before she moved to Giddings, she lived in Bowling Green, Kentucky, where she had been an art instructor in the city’s public school system.

  We’re sitting in the living room, drinking coffee as I conduct the interview. She raises her eyes toward the ceiling; I look up, and for the first time notice the fisheye camera lens positioned in the center of the ceiling, a red LED lamp glowing next to the lens. “It’s on all the time,” she says, “and there’s one in each room except the bath. Plus the two cameras outside . . . one out front by the driveway, one in the backyard near Nancy’s swingset.”

  Dorothy has been divorced for the past three years; like many of Giddings’ abductees, her spouse wrote her off as hopelessly deranged when she began talking about aliens from space kidnapping her. She now has a boyfriend, an art student from Boston who visits her on the weekends. “When we want a little privacy,” she says, smiling and blushing a little. “I tape over the lens in the bedroom. No sense in giving the guys at the mill a free show, after all.”

  The smile fades. “But the tape comes off after nightfall, and I don’t care how Alec feels about it.” She raises the front of her cotton-print smock; just below her sternum is a small vertical scar. “This is what they left behind after they took me,” she says quietly. “I don’t want that to happen again.”

  The near-total lack of privacy in her own home doesn’t bother her, no more than the plastic bracelets she and her daughter wear around their wrists. The bracelets contain microtransmitters which relay, via the town’s cellular radio network, their whereabouts in Giddings. When Dorothy goes shopping at the grocery, the watchers at the mill know she’s there. If Nancy takes the dogs for a walk in the woods, the mill is constantly tracking her. The signals extend only as far as the town limits, but this doesn’t bother Dorothy; she seldom leaves Giddings, and even then only for a few hours . . . and never overnight.

  “I spent at least six hours in an alien spaceship in orbit above Earth,” she says, quite seriously and without the slightest trace of dementia. “Those were the most terrifying hours of my life. They stripped me naked, took my blood, put. . . things into me.” She looks away, falling silent for a few moments. “They raped me,” she continues, more quietly now. “I never want to go through that again, and I want to keep my daughter safe from them. That’s why we’re here. Compared to what could happen . . . well, who cares about a few TV cameras?”

  In a spare bedroom is her studio. Most of the incomplete paintings on easels or stacked against the walls are of New England landscapes; she sells them through an agent to hotel chains, for display in lobbies and guest rooms. Several of her oil paintings, though, depict her memories of her ordeal from her point of view. A flying saucer landing in a Kentucky farmfield. An indistinct group of bulbous-headed, wasp-waisted ETs marching down a gangway. A similar alien looming over her examination couch, a sharp surgical probe in its six-fingered hand. A view of Earth as seen through the windows of a spacecraft in high orbit above the planet.

  Are these her private paintings? “No,” she says. “At first they were, but when my agent saw them, she insisted that I publish them.”

  UFO publications? The covers of books about alien abductions? “Oh, no,” Dorothy says. “Most of them are sent overseas. We’ve got a steady market in England for the covers of science fiction magazines.” She smiles proudly. “And they love my stuff in France. I’ve had two gallery showings in Paris. I’m almost as big as Mickey Rourke over there.”

  Hidden behind the mill, encircled by a ten foot chain-mesh fence topped with rolls of razorwire, is a large geodesic dome. The dome contains Giddings’ SHF 15-GHz anti-aircraft radar system which constantly scans the airspace above the town; the system was procured from the U.S. Navy by the Astra Trust through Number One’s defense contacts.

  Not far from the edge of town is a small helicopter pad, where a French Aerospatiale SA 642 Gazelle is kept for use by the mill’s security force. Two pilots and an observer live in a small house near the helipad. The mill’s watchers are always watching the skies over Giddings; they’ve got the schedules for the commercial airliners that regularly fly over the town, so they’ve learned to ignore certain high-altitude blips on their screens. When they spot something on radar—particularly any erratic motion from an object that is larger than a duck or doesn’t have the V-shaped profile of a flight of migrating Canadian geese—the pilots are called and whoever is on duty quickly takes the Gazelle up for a look.

  “I never see anything,” says Juan Torres, the former Brazilian Air Force captain who is one of the pilots for “Air Astra.” He stands next to his aircraft, looking suave with his aviator shades and bandito mustache. “Small planes most times. Lots of stray goose . . . ah, geese. One time an ultralight. Scared the sheet out of him, never come back. But never any flying saucer. Not once. Si?”

  What would he do if he ever spotted one? Juan crooks his finger toward me, then leads me to the open side door of the Gazelle. He pulls aside a canvas tarp, revealing a pintle-mounted 7.62 mm machine gun. Two outriggers on either side of the fuselage carry four SA-7 air-to-air missiles.

  “Hey, you meet any leetle green hombres, you tell ’em to come this way,” he says, patting the top of the gun fondly. “Me and Pedro here, we’ll really fok ’em up.”

  Ray Bonette greets me at the door of his log cabin with a loaded Smith & Wesson .357 revolver in his hand. He stares at me with undisguised suspicion as I identify myself, then he demands that I present my credentials. Even after I do so, Ray is still wary and hostile. Before he allows me into his house, he demands that I remove my coat, shirt, and tie.

  I reluctantly strip on his front porch. It’s straight-up noon; songbirds warble in the dense pines surrounding his cabin, a passenger jet moans across the blue sky. When my shirt is off, Ray tells me to raise my arms above my head and slowly turn around. As I do so, he carefully studies my back and chest; he glares at the appendectomy scar near my stomach but says nothing.

  “Okay, you’re clean,” he mutters. “Get dressed.”

  Ray Bonette is a heavyset man in his mid-fifties. His hair is crew-cut and is as white as his beard; he wears baggy trousers that haven’t been washed in weeks and a mottled white T-shirt. He refused to tell me much about his past. He used to live in California. He was once a master electrician. He has a wife—present tense—but she’s “gone now.” Ditto for two kids. That’s it; the only thing he wants to publically disclose is the size of his arsenal.

  The cabin has four rooms, and in each room are loaded weapons. There’s an Ingram MAC-10 on the coffee table in the den, a Beretta 87BB on one of the end tables next to the couch, a Colt King Cobra on the kitchen table and a Heckler and Koch HK-93 assault rifle on the counter next to the stove. Colt revolvers are on the bedside tables in both master bedroom and the guest room, each with spare rounds at ready. There’s a night-sighted crossbow next to the back door, a Glock 20 beneath the pillow of his bed, and an AR-15 rifle resting in the comer next to the toilet in the bathroom.

  If that’s not enough, he also hints that the property line has been booby-trapped with explosives. “I got Claymores out in the bushes,” he says, “so don’t let me catch you out here in the middle of the night.” He doesn’t go into detail.

  Having quickly shown me around the house, he shows me the door, still refusing to be interviewed. After he shoves me out onto the porch, though, he gives me one last pearl of wisdom.

  “Tell that bitch Marilyn I’m ready for her and her little friends,” he snarls at me. “Tell her that I still love God and America and Joe DiMaggio.”

  Then he slams the door in my face.

  Charlie DuPont has been a New Hampshire resident for the past twenty-four years and has lived in Giddings for the past three. A native of South Carolina, he first came to New England as a student at Dartmouth in the 60s, but dropped out after his sophomore year to bum around the state before finally settling in Giddings, where he opened MovieMania, the latest of a long string of self-employed enterprises.

  Charlie wears his hair long and lives the vegetarian, easy-vibes lifestyle of an unreformed hippie entrepreneur, yet he is one of the minority in Giddings who haven’t yet been kidnapped by a UFO. “Lemme put it to you this way,” he says, sipping a bottle of Evian water as he files away the videotapes which were returned to his store’s overnight drop box. “I believe in Jesus. I believe in karma. I believe that Jack and Bobby Kennedy were killed by the CIA and that James Earl Ray didn’t act alone. I believe that marijuana should be legalized. I believe that women are superior to men and are better in bed besides.”

  He sighs and shakes his head. “But I don’t believe in flying saucers, and I think all these people are up to their eyeballs in donkey flop.”

  Charlie had opened his video shop in Giddings less than a month before he gradually became aware that most of his regular customers were heavily into UFOs He first discovered this when he began to get requests for obscure documentaries about the UFO phenomena, often for purchase despite the hefty prices such tapes commanded. It wasn’t long before Charlie realized, through small talk with of the customers, that they believed that they had once gone cruising for burgers in UFOs.

  “I guess, because the way I look and act, these people think I’m into all that shit,” Charlie says. “What they don’t know is that I’ve heard it all before. Yeah, when I used to drop acid, I sorta thought all that stuff was real, too, but I’ve been straight for a long time now, and since I got off drugs, none of that Eric von Daneken shit makes sense to me.”

  He cocks his thumb over his shoulder, toward the town square beyond the windows of his store. ‘This place, man . . . it’s Weird Central Station. These people look straight, act straight. Most of ’em wouldn’t know an acid tab if you put it in their hand. Y’know, half of them are Republicans. They helped keep Reagan in the White House for eight years and voted for Bush twice. Twice, for Chrissakes!”

  His eyes roll up. “And they think they went for rides in flying saucers. They come in here, show me their funny-looking scars and tell me long stories about big-headed guys lurking outside the bedroom windows. Hey, I voted for Jerry Brown in the last primary and I don’t believe that shit.”

  He pauses to open a cardboard carton of videotapes he has just received via UPS from his distributor. Not surprisingly, it contains five more copies of Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, all special orders from his customers. Now that the video has been marked down, everyone in Giddings wants their own copy. Meanwhile, he has copies of Europa, Europa and The Player he can’t rent or sell for love or money.

  “I like these people, y’know,” he grumbles as he unpacks the tapes. “They’re nice and polite, they always rewind their tapes and pony up the late fees . . . but, shit, if I ever meet Steven Spielberg, I’m gonna rip out his lungs for making this goddamn movie.”

  “Tonight’s quiet, least so far,” Libby Reynolds says as she slowly cruises along the deserted back roads behind the wheel of one of the security trucks. “But we’ve got a full moon, the fog is up . . . you never know.”

  Libby is wearing the light blue uniform of the Astra Trust’s six-person private security squad. A former New York City cop, she left the city in search of a more quiet job in the country, never dreaming that she would be handling graveyard shift on what her team calls the “Spock Patrol”: handling nocturnal sightings—or perhaps more accurately, “hearings”—from Giddings residents.