Preface to The Red Scorpion

I met Dustin Greene at a trade show in Las Vegas. He works for one of the tech firms that has become so intertwined with the auto industry these days. We'd gone to one of those parties where the invitations are twenty to thirty times more interesting than the party itself, which usually boils down to too many drinks, not enough food and a lot of foolish talk.

I'd been sitting alone at a small round table with four empty chairs, trying to decide how to spend the rest of the evening. This young guy comes over, tilts a nod my way and lifts a glass with some kind of mixed drink in it. "I see your from Wisconsin," he says, getting it wrong because my badge reads "Superior, Wisconsin" and I live outside Duluth in rural Minnesota. The company I work for is across the bridge.

I proceed to set the record straight and he says, "Cool. I'm originally from Minnesota, too," his eyes brightening. Just as swiftly a cloud hid that inner sun and he looked down at the table.

He joined me anyways and we engaged in small talk about our careers, getting to know one another in the banter that gives you a chance to decide how much energy you want to invest in this new relationship. When I mentioned that I was a writer, he tilted his head to the side and studied me a minute. "I have some friends who say I should write a book.... well, supposedly everyone has a book inside them. Mine's pretty --"

I've been writing for almost thirty years and at least once a year someone says, "Your're a writer? People tell me my story should be made into a book." A couple of times they may have been right, but usually, well, even if it were made into a book, I'm not sure anyone would read it, care about it. (I'm just trying to say I've become pretty jaded about these things, though in my case, about 15 years ago I did meet a man from Estonia whose story was indeed remarkable and ought to become a book.)

All this to say that when someone introduces himself in this manner you have to at least pay out a little line and see what bites. Dustin (not his real name) was about twenty years my junior, a tech manager for one of the Silicon Valley firms. He said that it's really hard to talk about it, not because he's afraid of being laughed at, but rather because he has career aspirations and he knows top management would see him as a kook if he wrote a book about what happened and said he believed it. These are the kinds of statements I've heard from people who claim to have seen UFOs. I understand where they are coming from.

This is how we met. The more I listened, the more I wanted to hear. And when he said that some of the facts could be verified, I knew I couldn’t just dismiss him. What’s more, he still had the journal he’d found, the one that details how Professor Comstock came into possession of the red scorpion, along with the trouble it spawned.