Diverso

Free Electrons
by John Walker
September 13th, 1987
On the morning of July 18th, Liberty, New Hampshire became the first town to vanish. Many residents of New Providence, over a wooded ridge fromLiberty, were awakened at about 3:30 A.M. by a clap of thunder. Those who looked outside saw clear sky and a glow in the direction of Liberty. Volunteer firemen called friends in Liberty to ask whathad happened, but none of the calls were answered. Most people went back to sleep.
By midday, all the world knew what had happened, but nobody knew how or why. The town of Liberty was gone. Gone to ameter below the ground. Gone right to the town limits, where some branches had fallen on undisturbed grass after their trees had vanished.
The president appointed an investigating panel chaired by thesecretary of defense and made up of the secretary of the interior, the chairman of the National Academy of Sciences, and the president of M.I.T. On the 20th, the group held a press conference inManchester and announced that no probable cause had yet been found. The defense secretary said that hostile action had been ruled out “for the time being”, since no aircraft were in the area at the time,nor were any satellites tracked by NORAD overhead. “In any case”, the secretary concluded, “we possess no technology which could do this, and we don't believe our adversaries do either”.
Over thenext week ten more towns vanished: two in Massachusetts, another in New Hampshire, three in California (including one suburb of San Francisco), one in New Mexico, two in England, and one in theNetherlands. Data began to accumulate about the phenomenon. One of the California towns vanished during a Landsat pass; the multispectral camera recorded only the glow of ionized air molecules recombining. Thenuclear test detectors on the remaining Vela satellite and the monitors on the Navstar constellation observed four light flashes coincident with disappearances. Nothing like the double flash of a...