CHAPTER 21: THE ULTIMATE INTERCEPTOR STATION

CHAPTER 21: THE ULTIMATE INTERCEPTOR STATION 

As fun and fascinating as all of this was, reality has a way of overriding everything. I got married, raised a child, and then got divorced. I loved working as a freelance writer and photographer, and although the work paid well, it could be feast or famine.

Then, twelve years ago, I was offered a dream job—as a news gatherer and photographer for a local television station. I jumped at the opportunity. Not only did it offer a steady paycheck with medical insurance, but it put me back in a newsroom with professional journalists again. That was my niche.

The black world had to recede, overshadowed by the demands of making a living and planning for the future. Mark and I remained in quiet contact, and I never lost sight of that hidden realm. From the shadows, I started several Facebook groups and a blog called Deep Black Horizon, keeping a watchful eye on a world that thrived just out of plain view.

Always writing in my spare time, I focused on turning some of my experiences into an adventure novel for young teens: The Interceptors Club and the Black Manta. It was reality, thinly veiled—you either got it or you didn’t. Despite its flaws, it received great reviews and sold well. Hopefully, one day, I’ll get the chance to release a revised edition.

With more money at my disposal, my monitoring gear finally reached the level I had always dreamed of. I had assembled a cutting-edge interception station that could operate with minimal human intervention. I built custom antennas for military satellite monitoring and experimented with everything radio-related. My knowledge deepened—and so did my contacts. Deep Black Horizon began attracting insiders from the black world, expanding my understanding of it even further. It was this network that allowed me to break one of my earliest major stories: I reported the raid that killed Osama bin Laden a full day before any other media outlet.

I delved deeper into military monitoring, drawn to signals most people never noticed. One of my favorite obsessions was the Global High Frequency (HF) Network—a vast, invisible web of radio communications that linked militaries across continents and oceans. Its signals could leap over mountains, deserts, and seas, carrying orders to remote outposts, coordinating fleets at sea, or transmitting the elusive go‑codes that could trigger nuclear war.

Tuning in required patience and a trained ear. Frequencies would shift, signals would fade or bounce unexpectedly, and coded bursts would appear and vanish like ghosts. Each unusual call sign, each ripple in the static, was a clue, a fragment of a hidden rhythm most would never perceive. Late at night, headphones clamped on, I followed those signals like secret threads weaving through the world, tracing movements, patterns, and intentions that lay buried beneath the surface of ordinary life. It was as if I had a window into a hidden heartbeat—an invisible pulse of power, danger, and secrets, running silently across the globe.

UHF SATCOM monitoring demanded a deeper level of technical knowledge, but the rewards were worth the effort. At first, I immersed myself in open‑source technical manuals, studying how the systems worked and experimenting with antennas of my own design. Later, I began combing online forums and eBay for surplus military hardware. Every so often, I’d get lucky—stumbling across exactly the technology I needed at pennies on the dollar.

I’m sure my neighbors wondered about the antennas that kept appearing in my backyard, sprouting like strange metallic weeds. When they asked, I simply told them I was a ham radio operator. It was close enough to the truth—and far easier to explain.

My obsession with the airwaves only sharpened my edge at work. I was always in the know, consistently beating every station in town when it came to breaking news. I was the first to arrive and the last to leave. I built relationships—with police, undercover officers, and emergency responders—earning trust that other stations never quite managed. While they were kept at arm’s length, I was allowed beyond the yellow tape, bringing back the inside story.

Law enforcement officers were quick to recognize that news wasn’t just a job for me—it was a calling. I cared enough to get it right, and they knew it. Over the years, I broke hundreds of exclusive stories—not just by networking with the right people, but because I genuinely believed in the public’s right to know. I wanted people to understand how difficult and dangerous the work of first responders truly was. I cared—and it showed in every story I told.

Working in television opened doors I never expected. I met politicians, Hollywood figures, experts, and insiders from every imaginable world. Many were taken aback when they discovered my history with the black world. And once that veil was lifted, they began confiding in me—sharing stories they’d never tell the press, glimpses of a hidden side of life that rarely saw the light of day. It was as if, in understanding my past, they trusted me to hold their secrets, if only for a moment.

All of this obsession sharpened my edge at work. I recorded every radio feed twenty-four hours a day, downloading the recordings each morning and playing them at ten times speed, searching for hidden nuggets in the chatter. Thousands of hours honed my ear to subtle shifts in tone and cadence. Sometimes it was just two people having a conversation—but it wasn’t the words that mattered; it was the tension beneath them, the unspoken signals that revealed more than anyone realized. Late at night, headphones on, I felt as though I was eavesdropping on the heartbeat of a hidden world, invisible and alive, moving silently beneath everyday life.

The war in Ukraine became a gold mine for monitoring. Russian UHF satellite transmissions revealed cracks in their operations long before the mainstream media caught on. Among the most revealing were the voice dumps from Putin’s personal mercenary force, the Wagner Group. Their leader would rant endlessly about being ill-supplied, underpaid, and treated like cannon fodder—complaints that exposed more about the chaos behind the lines than any official report ever could.

I would download these audio feeds, feed them into Google Translate, and analyze them carefully. Patterns emerged: the timing of deployments, the locations of skirmishes, the morale of troops. Sometimes it was as subtle as a pause, a sharpness in the voice, or a repeated phrase hinting at desperation. Other times, the rants were blatant, almost absurd—but the insight they offered was invaluable. I would sit back, shaking my head, sometimes laughing, sometimes scribbling notes, aware that I was seeing the war from a perspective no one else had access to—a secret vantage point in the chaos. It wasn’t just entertainment; it was intelligence, and it gave me an edge few could imagine.

At one point, it appeared that Wagner was rebelling against Putin, even threatening to march on Moscow and stage a coup. Putin eventually appeased the group by giving them more of what they needed, luring Wagner into a temporary state of complacency—but it wouldn’t last. On August 23, 2023, the leader of Russia’s Wagner Group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, was killed in a plane crash northwest of Moscow, along with his top commanders, including Dmitry Utkin. Russian investigators confirmed the identities through genetic testing. All ten people aboard the private jet died. Speculation ran rampant, with U.S. officials suggesting the Kremlin likely ordered the crash, though Russia denied involvement. Watching it unfold from my monitoring station, it was another stark reminder of how volatile and dangerous the hidden world of military operations—and the people who run it—can be.

It was 2018 when I learned that Mark was battling cancer, and a new sense of urgency settled over me. He told me I needed to educate myself more on physics, warning that what he was about to reveal might not make any sense otherwise. It was time to go back to school.

I dove into the mysteries of the universe. I wrestled with the Fermi Paradox—the question of why, given the vast number of stars and potentially habitable planets, we’ve seen no evidence of other intelligent life. I explored the Drake Equation, calculating the probabilities of civilizations arising elsewhere, each variable revealing how rare—or fleeting—intelligent life might be. I read about the limits imposed by traveling close to the speed of light: time dilation, energy requirements, and the cruel reality that interstellar journeys would take generations even at near-light speed.

Then there was AI—the potential savior or destroyer of intelligent species. I considered how artificial intelligence could accelerate our understanding, extend our reach, or even replace biological intelligence entirely. What would become of a species that could no longer compete with its own creations? Mark’s urgency was palpable: the survival, progress, and future of any intelligent species, human or otherwise, hung in a delicate balance. Every revelation he hinted at would force me to rethink what I knew about life, the universe, and our place within it.

He also urged me to examine the reported correlation between UAPs—unidentified aerial phenomena—and nuclear missile sites. Not as proof, he cautioned, but as a pattern worth questioning. I found accounts from multiple countries describing strange objects appearing near missile silos, nuclear weapons facilities, and test sites—sometimes coinciding with unexplained system failures or shutdowns, other times simply observing, hovering, and vanishing without explanation.

What unsettled me wasn’t any single incident, but the consistency of the reports across decades and borders. If intelligent life existed elsewhere, Mark asked, why might it take an interest in our most destructive technology? Was it coincidence, misinterpretation, or something more deliberate? Combined with the limits of interstellar travel, the rise of artificial intelligence, and the fragility of technological civilizations, the question became unavoidable: what does a young species look like when viewed from the outside—especially one capable of ending itself?

By then, I understood why Mark had insisted I study the science first. These weren’t fringe ideas floating in isolation. They sat at the intersection of physics, probability, technology, and survival. Whatever he was preparing to share with me, it was rooted not in belief, but in patterns—patterns that suggested intelligence, whether human or otherwise, rarely follows a simple or comforting path.

Still, I had a lot to learn. 

UP NEXT: AREA 51 AND THE ROAD APPLE TO ROSWELL