Dossier 02: The Pine Gap pipeline

LEAKEDENHANCED ×212

Every cow that goes up a beam has to come down somewhere. That is physics, or it is at least a strong feeling, and the Collective has spent nineteen years asking where.

The answer, assembled from the leaks of our anonymous source Pine Gap Pete, is the Joint Defence Facility outside Alice Springs. The Area 51 of the Southern Hemisphere. Two thousand kilometres from the Top Paddock as the saucer flies, which Dr Faraday calculates at “about eleven minutes, or less if they’re keen”.

This dossier sets out the pipeline, stage by stage, with the source material reproduced where legible.

1. About the source

Pine Gap Pete describes himself as “a senior facilities contractor at a facility near Alice Springs”. His communications reach the Collective on the back of Keno slips left under the salt at the Royal Hotel on Friday nights, by a method he has asked us not to describe, which is fine, because we don’t know what it is. We find the slip. We read the slip. Noreen says we should check the numbers before we file them.

Pete has never been wrong, according to me. Pete has never been right, according to Noreen. Pete may be my cousin Peter, who mows lawns in Alice Springs, and I have put this to Pete on a slip of my own and received no answer, which Dr Faraday says is “consistent with either”.

2. The pipeline

Stage 1: Selection (the paddock)

Not every cow. The good ones. Beryl was Reserve Champion. The Hennessys lost a Brahman cross in 1998 that had placed at Roma. Macca the truck driver reports that the ones that go missing off road trains are “always from the front pen, never the tail-enders”. They are choosing. They know what they’re looking at. Noreen says this is also true of cattle thieves and I say cattle thieves don’t come straight down.

Stage 2: Extraction (the beam)

Covered in detail in the founding file. A column of light the width of a cattle grid. Legs down. No sound but the dogs. Dr Faraday has calculated the lift rate from the tape at 0.8 metres per second, “about the speed of a slow lift in a department store, which tells you they are not in a hurry and have done this before”.

Stage 3: Holding (the craft)

This is consistent with the testimony of experiencers who report cattle aboard. Cheryl, on her nineteenth, “heard something shift its weight in the next room, and it wasn’t a person”. A man from Charleville, now a regular at the Tuesday group, reports waking on a bench “next to what I’d put money on was a Santa Gertrudis”.

Stage 4: Transit

Eleven minutes. Due west-south-west. Several of the sightings on the Collective’s hotspot map lie along this line, which Dr Faraday calls “the corridor” and Noreen calls “the highway, Warren, they’re along the highway because that’s where people are”.

Stage 5: The domes

The photograph at the top of this dossier was taken from that car park. Pete says the stationary object is a craft “waiting its turn”. Dr Faraday measures it at 12 Fu. Noreen says it’s a star and Pete should be careful taking photos of a defence facility car park, which is, I will point out, the first time she has ever expressed concern for Pete’s wellbeing and therefore the first time she has admitted he exists.

Stage 6: ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇

We do not know what happens at Stage 6. The slip was redacted at source, by which I mean Pete had already used that corner for his numbers. Theories at the Royal include study, breeding, “something to do with the Americans”, and, from Shane, “a very long queue”.

What we know is this. No cow taken off Boolaroo Downs has ever been returned. No cow taken off the Hennessys’ has ever been returned. The ones that are found, in paddocks, inside circles, with no tracks and no blood and no receipt, are not the ones that were taken. Dr Faraday believes they are “rejects”. Cheryl believes they are “the ones that asked too many questions”. I don’t know. I know Beryl asked nothing of anyone her whole life and she still went.

3. What the facility says

Nothing. The facility does not have a complaints line. I have written to the Department of Defence four times. Three replies said the facility “does not comment on operational matters”. One, in 2011, said “there are no cattle at the facility”, which is the first and only time in nineteen years any government body has used the word cattle in a letter to me, and I regard it as the most significant document in the Tupperware container after the “Coping With Change” pamphlet, which I still have not opened.

4. Assessment

The pipeline is real. The stages are consistent. The source is reliable except where he is my cousin, and even then he has lived in Alice Springs since 1989 and mows a lot of lawns, some of them, presumably, near the facility.

The Collective’s official position is that Australian cattle are being taken from the best paddocks in Queensland, held in low light, flown west-south-west along the corridor, and processed through the third dome from the left for a purpose nobody will put on a Keno slip.

The Collective’s official request is: send one back. Any one. We’ll know.

Appendix: the napkin

Document ends. Keep watching the paddock. Keep watching the west.

— Warren

Document U8MC-DOS-02. Status: LEAKED. This file is retained indefinitely, or until the Men in Beige ask for it, whichever is never.

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