The Fellowship for Alien Detection (4 page)

And it was this inadvertently photographed girl that caught Haley's attention. Unlike Mia, who wore a flower-printed dress, this girl was in jeans and a maroon T-shirt. She had lots of jelly bracelets on her wrists, and her bangs were held back with thick black barrettes.
Kind of a weird look for a wedding
, Haley had thought.

She'd then noticed the writing on the T-shirt. It read, “We Are the Missing.”

Haley maybe thought it was a band. So this was some typical emo chick whose parents were lazy and let her get away with too much, like going to a wedding without dressing up.

But . . . there was something more, and now, it was hard to remember exactly what. Had it just been the T-shirt? Or had it also been the look in the girl's eyes, which seemed more tragic than just pouty. . . .

Maybe it had been that look. Haley ran her cursor over the girl, saw she'd been tagged, and clicked on her name: Stephanie Raines.

And that was just about the end of the line. Stephanie's profile was locked off for friends only, so you couldn't see anything.

However, there was one photo on her wall that had been made visible to everyone. It showed a smiling girl, leaning on her bike in a driveway. She wore oval glasses, and her face was covered with freckles. She looked maybe a little younger than Haley.

And the caption below it read: “Please help find my sister.”

And then there was a link:
www.wearethemissing.net

It wasn't a band name.

Haley slid over the photo. The girl leaning on the bike was tagged Suza Raines. Her profile was locked off, too. She was a happy-looking girl, someone who seemed down-to-earth and fun. She didn't look like a runaway, not that Haley really knew what that would look like. And she wondered: What had happened to this girl?

And even at that point, it may still have been mostly about procrastination, but as Haley had opened a new browser tab to search for “We Are the Missing,” she'd felt the tingle growing. There was something here—she just knew it. And the feeling almost seemed dangerous. A voice in her head told her not to look any further, to go back to her schoolwork.

Maybe that voice knew how Haley could fixate on something that interested her, and that there was no time for this, not with homework and after-school newspaper club and flute lessons and, at the time, those unfortunate Irish-step-classes-that-shall-not-be-talked-about, and of course that essay Haley wanted to get a head start on for the JCF application. But Haley had not been able to fight her Sixth Sense.

The search results for We Are the Missing came up. It was a network of people claiming to have experienced alien visits. Their blogs and sites were full of wild claims, everything from having been taken aboard spaceships and turned briefly into animals, to accounts of being forced by near-maniacal extraterrestrials to go to drive-through windows and order hundreds of hamburgers, which they apparently had insatiable cravings for, and so on, but whatever these people claimed, the constant was that everyone reported experiencing missing time events—situations in which periods of time had passed that no one could account for—and some of them also claimed to have lost people: friends, family members, sisters . . . like Suza.

And from there, Haley was gone. Homework, flute lessons, even that JCF essay, none of it stood a chance. Night after night, all winter and into spring, Haley had spent endless hours reading accounts of missing time and missing people, and all that research had led her to discover a pattern. Then, the advertisements on various websites led her to the Fellowship for Alien Detection, and finally, the theory she described in her application, based on the pattern she'd found, won her that fellowship, and . . .

And . . .
it had done more than that. Because if Haley were really honest with herself, she would have to admit that the story of Suza Raines had consumed her so much so that she had totally rushed her applications to the JCF and Thorny Mountain and had barely gotten them in at all.

It was this story, this mystery that her Sixth Sense had been powerless to ignore, that had not only led to her winning the FAD, but also to missing out on those other opportunities.

Of course Haley had wanted to win them all, but, when compared to her discoveries about Suza Raines, those other opportunities felt . . . safe. They were official, known, whereas the FAD was risky, wild. Its mysteries were uncharted, and it felt like it had the most potential for something Haley could only describe as “new map.” Worlds unseen, horizons unexplored . . . the FAD had the potential to change the topography of her whole life. Getting that story assignment from Garrett Conrad-Wayne when she was in college? How about getting a huge story next week? And then who knew what the future might hold after that, what undiscovered worlds Haley might be able to get to. New map. That was the thing. And even if her theory ended up being bunk, there was still the road trip and its promise of sights, sounds, and country that she'd never seen. Everything about the FAD was literally over the horizon from the life she knew. And that was what Haley wanted more than anything.

But the price had been losing out on those other opportunities . . . and having to stand in front of class and defend the FAD's oddities, now.

“You didn't write anything?” asked Ms. DeNetto, sounding perplexed.

“No.”

“Well, can you tell us what you'll be doing anyway?”

Someone snickered. It was Kaz. She and Dawn and Carl were grinning at Haley now like hungry hyenas.

“Little green men,” Haley heard Dawn mumble to Kaz.

“Little green boyfriend,” Kaz replied. They both cracked up.

Haley wondered yet again at her classmates' ability to think they were so old, and yet act so completely juvenile at the same time.

The doubt demon seized control again.
They might be right
, it said.
How can there really be aliens out there? And if there are, how is some thirteen-year-old from Connecticut going to find them?

This was a good point. One that had tripped up Haley more than once. Generations of scientists, not to mention crazy RV-driving, ham radio–operating, aluminum-foil-helmet–wearing freaks, had come up empty in the search for evidence of extraterrestrials and UFOs.

But no. . . .
No
, she told the doubt demon. None of them had what she had: an actual story. And so, no, she was not going to stand up here and be a joke. She was not going to give in to doubting herself, because she knew what she had. And in fact, she remembered now that she had her keys in her pocket, and on her key chain she had something that was better than a notebook essay.
Oh yeah
, she thought to herself,
that's what a real journalist would do
. And so after one last check-in with Abby's encouraging eyes, Haley went for it.

“Okay,” she said brightly. “So, I won something called the Fellowship for Alien Detection, and while most of you might think that sounds silly, you won't after you hear my winning theory.”

She dug into her pocket, pulled out her keys, and held her thumb drive out toward Ms. DeNetto. “May I?” she asked.

“Oh, um, sure,” said Ms. DeNetto.

Haley slid the drive into a port on the computer at the front of the room. It was connected to the projector. She scrolled through and clicked on her files, stopping on a slide-show presentation called
INTRODUCTION
. She'd made it for when she was on her research trip, for introducing herself to interviewees, and on the off chance that she ended up being interviewed herself by any town officials or local media. This was actually the perfect opportunity to try it out and see if it worked.

On the white screen at the front of the room, a photo appeared. The mere presence of an image immediately quieted the class, and Haley felt a serious tone settle over the room. She wished she'd been able to squash the nerves and doubt demon earlier to think of this; it would have saved her so much anxious energy, but better late than never.

She paced in front of the photo. Her shadow was thrown at a high angle behind her.

“This is Suza Raines,” said Haley, sweeping a hand toward the girl on her bike. “Originally from Amber, Pennsylvania. Reported missing six months ago. She remains missing to this day, and there have been no leads in the case.” Haley let a beat pass. A paragraph change. She looked around. Even Kaz was suddenly staring forward.

“On the night of her disappearance,” said Haley, “fourteen people in Amber reported experiencing the effects of Missing Time, meaning they believed they had skipped over a period of time that they could not at all remember. Their accounts varied wildly, and none could be confirmed, but what matters is that they all had one answer in common. When asked how long they'd been missing, they all said the same thing: sixteen minutes. Well, all except for Suza, because she didn't come back.”

Haley clicked to the next slide.

This one showed a map of the United States. Red dots were drawn all over it.

“Now, people report alien abductions all the time. With the internet, there are thousands of reported cases, many of them by weirdos with stories that make no sense. But here and there, as the red dots indicate, large groups of people within a town have reported this phenomenon of having lost sixteen minutes of time.”

Haley cued the next slide. Same map. Fewer dots.

“And in many of those same towns, at least one person has been reported missing at right around the same time, if not the same night, as the missing time event.”

Haley stopped and faced her class. Even the gum chewing had ceased. “So you might ask, how did these people know about this missing time, and why don't they have any proof?” She clicked again, and the next slide showed a bulleted list that read:

• Disorientation

• EMP Loss

• Network Reconnect

“There are three reasons,” said Haley. “First, the people didn't really understand what had happened at first. It took at least a minute or two for people to snap out of their trance and suspect what had happened. For some, they never even knew until they heard about it from someone else. Many people thought they'd just dozed off for a minute, as the event happened late at night, and so they just got on with their lives.

“Second, there is another interesting coincidence among these towns: They all experienced computer malfunctions and electric problems similar to an EMP burst—that's an electromagnetic pulse. The power went out briefly and many hard drives, appliances, anything with a microchip were either damaged or wiped clean. Internet service was down until power was restored, and servers were reset.

“Third, cell phones, if they weren't wiped out completely by the EMP effect, would have reset, and when they connected to the network, the time would have immediately updated.

“As a result, the only people with any actual evidence of this sixteen-minute time loss were the ones who happened to have an analog watch, or clock, anything mechanical that was frozen for the same amount of time that the people themselves were. And some of those people just shook their heads and reset their watches before they knew any better. Add that to the disorientation, the data loss, and”—Haley finished—“there's very little proof that these things even happen. And, let's be honest, reports of alien abduction and missing time sound a little crazy.”

“Then how do you know it's even true?” asked Madison, with her best skeptic's sneer.

Haley felt a little jolt. Time for the big reveal . . . “Well, one thought I had was to look at town webcams for the abduction nights, since lots of towns have cameras to keep track of live weather and traffic and stuff. I wanted to see if, you know, UFOs showed up or something. The thing was, the data for those nights had been messed up by the EMP effect. But then it was while I was looking at
this
photo that I noticed something.”

Haley clicked to the next slide. It showed a photo of an old brick building with a tower in the center. On the tower was a clock.

“Here's a webcam of the town hall in Gable, New Hampshire. Gable had wide reports of a missing time event back in March. This screenshot of the webcam is from two days after the reported incident, once they got things back up and running. But there's something wrong with this picture. Anybody see what it is?”

Her classmates squinted. Abby raised her hand with wild enthusiasm.

“Yes, Ms. Warren?” Haley asked with a grin.

“The time is wrong!” said Abby.

“Right.” Haley stepped up to the photo and pointed. “The webcam is live. Here's the time next to the date. See it? Six-forty p.m. But the town hall clock says . . .”

“Six-twenty-four?” Carl asked as if telling time was new to him.

“Exactly,” said Haley. “Sixteen minutes off. That clock has since been corrected, but it got me thinking. Lots of town clocks are antiques, big, old, analog. And someone has to manually fix the time when it's wrong. So I checked and found that Amber, the town where Suza went missing, had a webcam on its town green, too, and you could see the clock on the town hall. I called the town offices in Amber and asked to see their webcam footage. I said I was doing a story on the number of people using public spaces, and so I was going to count the number of people on their town green by the hour each day.”