IntroductionIt was the weirdest alien held in secret in the Nevada desert and the only one that lived. All the others, and there were some fabulously unique creatures among them, had died, usually when their spacecraft malfunctioned or was shot down or sometimes afterward by overly cautious and often horrified U.S. soldiers always acting on command. But never on command of the President, who was carefully kept in the dark by the Defense Interoperability Joint Agency (DIJA). Not the Loosey Goosey. The Loosey Goosey survived its crash and captivity at the hands of bewildered, bemused, and often repulsed American soldiers.There were two main reasons it was allowed to live. One was entirely practical. It could assume the liquid configuration almost instantly, in which phase a bullet would have had as much effect as a shot into a puddle of water. The other was that in both the liquid and pseudo-solid configurations, it seemed utterly unintelligent, indeed barely sentient apart from its unerring sense of when to "go liquid". An alien science project sent into space for unknown reasons. Obviously a harmless if outlandish oddity. Or so thought DIJA.When you first started your DIJA tour the last thing you got to see was the Loosey Goosey. It was the highlight for all the newbies. It was held in reserve, as it were. You'd see the various alien spacecraft first, and if there had been any life on board, the corpses of the aliens carefully preserved in formaldehyde in glass caskets. Finally you'd be walked down a long green hallway into a room with a circular catwalk surrounding a chamber. Door opens, you walk in with the lead glass windows between you and the chamber in which the Loosey Goosey had been locked for decades.And there it is, a puddle of water. You wonder if the guide is pulling your leg. But if you appear with a face covering out of an abundance of caution – even though the chamber is sealed, you never know - the microphones in the room pick up the sucking sound and the special cameras output images that show the most amazing, impossible thing you ever saw. The puddle of water with nothing in it except two huge eyes and a mouth frozen forever in a rictus grin virtually instantly morphs into a humanoid form. It has no skeleton because it has no bones. DIJA did not discover just what held the liquid in a pseudo-solid phase with two long skinny legs on splayed feet with six toes supporting a slender torso and perpetually waving unjointed arms terminating in enormous hands, each with eight fingers always splayed. The hands never clenched. They just kept waving ridiculously in mid-air. The torso was topped by the disk-shaped head, round in front to form a face with the eyes and grinning mouth, round in back to match the front, and a circular rim between, basically a huge silver dollar. The thing had a perpetual grin as the tubular arms waved their enormous hands unceasingly, and the silver dollar swayed as if in a breeze, tilting left and right and rotating back and forth on the shoulderless arms.It made no sound. DIJA had held it in captivity for over sixty years and no one had ever heard it make a sound. Not so much as a breath.It had a scent though. You might say a mix of lavender and peach, not at all unpleasant, but you'd be about as descriptive as an oenophile trying to describe the taste of a wine. You cannot really know until you smell it for yourself.But it did nothing, except wave its arms, sway and rotate its head, and once in a while walk around the room aimlessly, perpetual grin splitting its face. It ate almost anything and seemed content and so it was fed insects, since it is the cheapest stuff the government can find. And yes, it produced waste in the form of an oily liquid effluent that was carefully evacuated from its room through a small drain in the floor and maintained in sealed casks to prevent contact with the environment. The insects were left in the room, the lights go off, the Loosey Goosey assumed the liquid configuration, and next thing that would be detected was a total absence of insects and the oily effluent flowing toward the drain the middle of the room.Like I said. Weird.It was my job to get inside the disc. When I first got the call, I thought maybe DIJA was getting bored. Maybe after countless secret years its funding source deep in the bowels of the shadow government system was losing interest and threatened to cut off the dough unless DIJA made something hop and happen. I soon learned otherwise.DIJA had wasted its time with the Loosey Goosey on pointlessness. But now, after all the futile attempts to elicit any kind of an intelligent response, DIJA suddenly got interested – one might say frantic - in using the Loosey Goosey as more than a novelty for newbies and fodder for joking. I was the lucky guy who got picked, an Army medical corps colonel at the end of a long and undistinguished career who the Army could afford to risk contaminating with an alien.Hi! This is a draft post. Did you know that there are a bunch of nice formatting options in this editor? For example: Block quotes are a nice way to put a quote or excerpt from a source. They make it clear that it is a quote. Of course, you can also do
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IntroductionIt was the weirdest alien held in secret in the Nevada desert and the only one that lived. All the others, and there were some fabulously unique creatures among them, had died, usually when their spacecraft malfunctioned or was shot down or sometimes afterward by overly cautious and often horrified U.S. soldiers always acting on command. But never on command of the President, who was carefully kept in the dark by the Defense Interoperability Joint Agency (DIJA). Not the Loosey Goosey. The Loosey Goosey survived its crash and captivity at the hands of bewildered, bemused, and often repulsed American soldiers.There were two main reasons it was allowed to live. One was entirely practical. It could assume the liquid configuration almost instantly, in which phase a bullet would have had as much effect as a shot into a puddle of water. The other was that in both the liquid and pseudo-solid configurations, it seemed utterly unintelligent, indeed barely sentient apart from its unerring sense of when to "go liquid". An alien science project sent into space for unknown reasons. Obviously a harmless if outlandish oddity. Or so thought DIJA.When you first started your DIJA tour the last thing you got to see was the Loosey Goosey. It was the highlight for all the newbies. It was held in reserve, as it were. You'd see the various alien spacecraft first, and if there had been any life on board, the corpses of the aliens carefully preserved in formaldehyde in glass caskets. Finally you'd be walked down a long green hallway into a room with a circular catwalk surrounding a chamber. Door opens, you walk in with the lead glass windows between you and the chamber in which the Loosey Goosey had been locked for decades.And there it is, a puddle of water. You wonder if the guide is pulling your leg. But if you appear with a face covering out of an abundance of caution – even though the chamber is sealed, you never know - the microphones in the room pick up the sucking sound and the special cameras output images that show the most amazing, impossible thing you ever saw. The puddle of water with nothing in it except two huge eyes and a mouth frozen forever in a rictus grin virtually instantly morphs into a humanoid form. It has no skeleton because it has no bones. DIJA did not discover just what held the liquid in a pseudo-solid phase with two long skinny legs on splayed feet with six toes supporting a slender torso and perpetually waving unjointed arms terminating in enormous hands, each with eight fingers always splayed. The hands never clenched. They just kept waving ridiculously in mid-air. The torso was topped by the disk-shaped head, round in front to form a face with the eyes and grinning mouth, round in back to match the front, and a circular rim between, basically a huge silver dollar. The thing had a perpetual grin as the tubular arms waved their enormous hands unceasingly, and the silver dollar swayed as if in a breeze, tilting left and right and rotating back and forth on the shoulderless arms.It made no sound. DIJA had held it in captivity for over sixty years and no one had ever heard it make a sound. Not so much as a breath.It had a scent though. You might say a mix of lavender and peach, not at all unpleasant, but you'd be about as descriptive as an oenophile trying to describe the taste of a wine. You cannot really know until you smell it for yourself.But it did nothing, except wave its arms, sway and rotate its head, and once in a while walk around the room aimlessly, perpetual grin splitting its face. It ate almost anything and seemed content and so it was fed insects, since it is the cheapest stuff the government can find. And yes, it produced waste in the form of an oily liquid effluent that was carefully evacuated from its room through a small drain in the floor and maintained in sealed casks to prevent contact with the environment. The insects were left in the room, the lights go off, the Loosey Goosey assumed the liquid configuration, and next thing that would be detected was a total absence of insects and the oily effluent flowing toward the drain the middle of the room.Like I said. Weird.It was my job to get inside the disc. When I first got the call, I thought maybe DIJA was getting bored. Maybe after countless secret years its funding source deep in the bowels of the shadow government system was losing interest and threatened to cut off the dough unless DIJA made something hop and happen. I soon learned otherwise.DIJA had wasted its time with the Loosey Goosey on pointlessness. But now, after all the futile attempts to elicit any kind of an intelligent response, DIJA suddenly got interested – one might say frantic - in using the Loosey Goosey as more than a novelty for newbies and fodder for joking. I was the lucky guy who got picked, an Army medical corps colonel at the end of a long and undistinguished career who the Army could afford to risk contaminating with an alien.Hi! This is a draft post. Did you know that there are a bunch of nice formatting options in this editor? For example: Block quotes are a nice way to put a quote or excerpt from a source. They make it clear that it is a quote. Of course, you can also do