iForeword"What if all of us in the world discovered that we were threatened byan outer -- power from outer space -- from another planet."-- The Honorable Ronald Reagan,President of the United States of America(from a speech given in 1988).Nature abhors a vacuum; particularly a political vacuum. The collapse of the Sovietempire has provoked such a vacuum.The Russian nuclear missile threat has diminished. Sunken Soviet submarines lay on theocean floor, slowly bleeding their radioactivity into the sea. The hastily contrived tomb of whatwas once Chernobyl crumbles away, creating homes for vermin and winged predators.With the demise of the Russian nuclear missile force, the attention of American defensescientists and engineers suddenly turned away from Earth to the stars. We're now told thatasteroids and comets crashing through the heavens will wreak havoc on Earth, ending life as weknow it.Nemesis. Is the impending terrestrial collision with a five-mile wide asteroid calledNemesis real, imagined, or a handy means of disguising something else? Something so horrificthat even the ones standing watch would rather not comprehend. Why else would the defenseestablishment continue to pump the nation's increasingly scarce financial resources into Star

iiWars technology ostensibly meant to counter a Soviet missile onslaught, now believed to behave been forever abated.The juxtaposition of Nemesis and the demise of the Soviet empire must be placed in itsproper context. Certain disparate events from the last several decades need to be analyzed.The United States Navy suddenly intensified its series of geomagnetic profiling flights inthe late sixties. Using specially equipped Lockheed P-3B Orions, these flights paid specialattention to the Caribbean Sea and the persistent rumors of magnetic anomalies in this region.Aviators reported that their compasses could not be depended upon when flying routes throughthis area. Some actually became disoriented, crashing into the sea.About the same time, the United States government launched an extraordinary effort toprobe the hydrosphere, the Earth's vast and unforgiving oceans. It was called the "last frontier."These studies were also concentrated in an area located off the coast of the United States in theCaribbean, just south of Bermuda.Research funds poured forth as though someone had opened King Midas' vaults. Then, just as quickly, the funding dried to a meager trickle. There continued to be rumors from time totime of secret projects. Occasionally, a scientific paper would disclose an event that suggestedmassive oceanographic research was still underway.In the early seventies the public was surprised by the accidental unveiling of the

Glomar Challenger

. The

Glomar Challenger

was a mysterious ship, ostensibly designed to conduct deepocean drilling. Its cover as a deep sea drilling platform was blown when newspapers publishedaccounts of non-drilling equipment on its decks. When confronted, the American governmentretorted that the

Glomar Challenger

had a simple mission: retrieve sunken Russian submarines.It seemed that the borders of the last frontier had shut for all time, but not without thenews of the so-called "Morrow Affair," news that was quickly disavowed. Even today theofficial word is that there was no Morrow Affair, that no anomalous magnetic signature was everrecorded in the Caribbean or anywhere else, for that matter, and that the

Glomar Challenger

wasbuilt only to salvage sunken Soviet submarines.